Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s Thursday afternoon and Jayce is currently discovering that Shazam is not an app that does well at recognising classical music. The enamelled music box in front of him with its tiny ballerina finishes the loop of its tinny waltz and starts again, so Jayce turns off the recording device but leaves the box open and playing. It’s been a different piece every time he opens the music box, twenty-three times now, always ballet music. It’s the sort of small miracle that could very easily be technological but Jayce has also, very carefully, disassembled and reassembled the box. There’s nothing in there more advanced than clockwork and the pattern of pins on the cylinder mean it should play Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy every time. The silver-plated ballerina, the size of his thumb, continues to turn and Jayce rests his chin on his hands watching her, listening to a piece that she will likely never play again, before closing the lid and cutting it off.

Comparing Shazam’s suggestions to the recording is tedious work and Jayce wonders vaguely whether he could get Mel to help with this. Yes, she’s funding him and definitely not his assistant, but she also goes to a lot more concerts than he does and he’s sure she has a better ear for music. He thinks this is Waltz of the Dolls from Coppelia but the tinkly sound of the music box is throwing him off compared to the full orchestra recording.

His phone rings and he quickly pauses YouTube to pick it up.

“Hi, this is June at reception,” says the voice on the other end. “You’ve got someone here who wants to make a donation.”

“A donation?” Jayce perks up at once. Mel is his only source of funding and her interests lie in specific areas. The bread and butter of his research into magical items comes from the fact that some people find them unnerving and are happy to feel like they’ve done something good while getting rid of them. “I’ll be right down.”

When Jayce sees the man standing in reception his first impression is that he could be a professor himself, dressed in old-fashioned semi-formal clothes in shades of cream and brown with a cane at his side and a raincoat draped over one arm. His second impression, when he gets close enough to see the patches and seams that make the clothes the closest thing Jayce has ever seen to wearing rags, is that ‘donation’ in this case is likely a euphemism and he’s going to have to buy whatever it is.

“Hi,” Jayce says, smiling and trying not to let either curiosity or nervousness show. “You asked for the Department of Magical Artifacts?”

“Yes.” The accent is Eastern European, and that’s as close as Jayce can get to identifying it. “You are from that department?” The man turns towards Jayce, graceful with his cane but still clearly struggling to keep his weight off his leg. There’s also something wrong with his spine, it sags as he moves. His gaze is sharp, curious, given weight by heavy eyebrows over large eyes that shine golden in the electric light.

“Jayce Talis.” Jayce holds out his hand to shake, catching the sour smell of mildew and rot as he does. The hand placed into his is clean, though, and very pale and smooth, skin not roughened by however this man has been living. Jayce’s grin turns self-deprecating. “I am that department. The whole of it. The University found it a lot cheaper to give me a department name than an assistant.”

“Hmm.” The heavy stare turns unimpressed. “You do have somewhere safe and dry to store your artifacts? I was thinking of making a donation.”

“I do, yes,” Jayce says, nettled. “Where have you been storing it?”

Golden eyes narrow at him. “Why do you think I’m donating? It is a valuable artifact. I want it taken care of.”

Valuable. Jayce doesn’t doubt that the man has an artifact, one of the reasons magic is so frustrating to study is that it happens anywhere, to anyone, without rhyme or reason. Far more likely to happen with rhyme than with reason, in fact. Most of them aren’t really valuable, though. A top from a Christmas cracker that can spin forever, a coin that always lands on heads. Tiny, everyday miracles. ‘Valuable’ either means a valuable object that has become magical or serious magic and this does not look like someone who owns valuable items.

“Thanks to a generous donor we have a temperature controlled storage room,” Jayce says. “I promise you I take the utmost care with every artifact. How many people can say their work lets them hold miracles in the palms of their hands? Even the smallest are absolutely unique.”

“I appreciate that.” Jayce’s sincerity seems to have softened his interlocutor but the man still looks doubtful. Jayce wonders what the artifact means to him; magic might be common but Jayce is not the only person for whom it has been salvation. If there had been an artifact and not just a spell, here and gone leaving only the memory of wonder, Jayce does not think he could let go of it.

“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” he offers.

The doubtful expression intensifies when they pass through Jayce’s lab with papers, books, equipment and Jayce’s forgotten lunch all lying wherever he last used them, but Jayce was telling the truth about caring for his artifacts. The storage room looks like a junk shop, but a very clean and well-organised one. Every artifact is either in a box or set in its own clear area of shelf — in case touching another magic item causes interactions although Jayce’s attempts to cause interactions on purpose in controlled conditions have yielded nothing — and labelled with a number tied on neatly. There’s a filing cabinet by the door with the information on each, donation forms if relevant and the experiments Jayce has run, and one wall is taken up by half a dozen wrapped canvases.

“And those are?” asks the visitor.

“Haunted paintings,” Jayce says, and does not add that they are painted by the person funding him who would very much like to find out why she produces them. Monsters lurking in the shadows of her work does not fit Mel’s image. “The really old and valuable stuff is in the boxes,” he adds, feeling defensive about how many of the things around him are plastic toys or cheap trinkets.“A lot of it is fragile so it’s best for it to have that extra layer of protection.”

“You really do keep your artifacts well. I congratulate you.” The visitor looks sad and the expression makes his features look far more delicate than curiosity and doubt had. Maybe that lost look is him preparing to say goodbye to something that means the world to him.

“You don’t have to donate for me to study it,” Jayce blurts out. “Or for me to store it. Mel… the artist still owns those paintings. They just live here because I’m working with them.”

Jayce finds himself offered a crooked, tentative smile. “Thank you. But under the circumstances…”

“What kind of artifact is it?” Jayce asks. “Do you have it with you?”

“Ah.” The man wrings his hands around the top of his cane. “I’m afraid ‘it’ would be me.”

Jayce stares. Statues being magical items is far from unknown, but they change pose when no one is looking, or they live in manor gardens and bow if a member of the family approaches them, sometimes they weep or laugh for reasons no one can fathom. They do not walk and talk or, if they do, they do not reason, they do not check that a place is safe and dry before attempting to donate themselves. Nor do they look embarrassed to be pinned under someone’s gaze and catalogued — the fair, smooth skin, the little dot of a mole by the mouth, the odd colour of the eyes, the slightly thick texture of the hair, the thin, graceful fingers. It could be a lie. It could be a delusion. It could be real.

Shaking himself out of it, Jayce says, “I can’t tell.”

The visitor snorts a laugh, amused and miserable, before unbuttoning the top three buttons of his shirt. When he pulls it down there’s cotton beneath it, starting at the neck, speckled with mildew and slimier spots of what might be mold. The cotton cinched tight to the head high up on the neck is a design that Jayce has seen a thousand times, every time he’s passed a doll in a junk shop searching for magic items that might have been missed.

“God,” Jayce says. The cotton could have been a costume, but there’s no outline of human muscles beneath it. No collar bones, just lumpy, soggy stuffing. Has he been living on the streets? Soaking in the rain, a wonder rotting away unnoticed? “Why hasn’t anyone been taking care of you?”

That lost, sad look appears for a moment before vanishing beneath a burning determination. “There isn’t anyone. This,” the man’s cane knocks the filing cabinet for emphasis, “is me taking care of myself.”

“I’m not leaving you in a cupboard,” Jayce says.

“Very well. I’m sure my dignity will be much better served mouldering out in the rain.”

“That’s not what I meant. My guest bedroom is also dry and you can sleep in an actual bed instead of being labelled and put on a shelf.” The thought of it is entirely wrong, this vivid personality reduced to an object, shelved for later study. “Do you sleep?”

“I sleep,” the doll hunches over, stifling a cough, back sagging in as he does. “I don’t require a bed.”

“Come through to the lab and sit down,” Jayce says, watching him catch his weight on the cane. “We can look at the donation paperwork… although I don’t know how we’re going to fill that in. You can’t be both the object donated and the donor.”

“Then you found me,” Viktor says, with the air of one solving a problem. “Unclaimed by anyone else. Surely you would be allowed to bring something like that in to study?”

“You are a person though,” Jayce insists.

The man looks at him with sharp, ironic eyes. “Let’s not complicate matters. You do want to study me, yes?”

“Of course. I’ve never even heard of anything like you, not outside of fairy tales.” Jayce offers his arm and is surprised when it’s taken. He finds himself supporting a weight that is surprisingly light until he remembers most of it is cotton stuffing, or maybe polyfil. “Studying you is going to be pretty awkward, though. I’ve never had a live subject before, asking you to strip and get up on a lab bench just feels wrong.”

“Paperwork first,” suggests the visitor.

“Okay,” Jayce says, settling him into a chair. “Very first thing, I need to know your name.”

“It’s Viktor.”

A name, good. Jayce feels much better having a name for Viktor, it didn’t matter nearly as much that he hadn’t introduced himself when Jayce had thought he was human. Now he needs to know that Viktor has one, that he’s not an identification number or a description in Jayce’s head or on his paperwork. Except, on the paperwork an identification number is the easiest thing for Viktor to be. An artifact found by Jayce. Property of the university.

“You’re, uh. You’re not legally a person, right?” Jayce asks.

“It has never come up,” Viktor says. “I am quite eager for it not to come up. Especially when I would not have a voice in the debate.”

“If it ever does come up and you’re ruled a person — which you really should be — I’m going to get in so much trouble if I’ve implicated the university in slavery.” Heimerdinger would flip his lid. “Uh. I’d better at least put you down as mine and not belonging to the department.”

“You mentioned earlier that sometimes people retain ownership of artifacts being studied, yes?” Viktor says, thoughtfully. “And as an artifact I will not be identified by name.”

“Okay, yes, perfect,” Jayce says. “Do you have a surname?’

“Orrison. When I need one.”

Jayce fills in the form, ignoring the boxes that require more information about the donor than just a name. He’s ignored them plenty of times before, although never for anyone retaining ownership.“Can I ask about materials?”

“Bisque porcelain and cotton, both fabric and stuffing,” Viktor says. “And glass eyes.”

“What about hair?”

“Ah. Mohair.” Viktor reaches up to touch his unruly hair reflexively.

“I normally ask for a history of the artifact,” Jayce says. “In as much detail as possible.”

Viktor shakes his head. “The, eh, details are private. I can give you a summary.” When Jayce nods and looks encouraging he continues. “I was owned by a young girl who was sick with leukaemia her whole life. When I came into existence she was three, when she died she was ten. In between I was her companion and grew in tandem with her.

“After she died I expected… eh, well, I expected to die too. It seemed logical. If not I would have expected to stop ageing now that I was no longer doing so to remain a suitable companion for her. Instead within the next couple of years I aged rapidly to adulthood.”

“You’re younger than you look?”

“No. After that I stopped ageing and it was years ago. I am a little younger than I appear, but not by so much as you think.”

Jayce writes that down, another little mystery in the way magic behaves. Why did Viktor age suddenly and then stop? But that’s why Jayce gets no funding, he’s studying something illogical and frequently unreplicable.

“Were you staying with her parents?” Jayce asks. “After…?”

“Her father,” Viktor corrects. “He didn’t, eh, kick me out. But neither did he want me there when I was no longer a memento of her.”

“I’m sorry,” Jayce says.

Viktor flicks a hand impatiently, “I was the one who left.”

“I’m sorry she died,” Jayce clarifies softly. “It must have been hard on you.”

For a moment Viktor’s golden eyes meet his and the look in them is pure, devastating grief, something old and hollow, then Viktor closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Maybe it was meant to settle him but instead he doubles over coughing violently, hand coming up to cover his mouth while his shoulders heave. Jayce puts a hand on Viktor’s back, rubbing circles over lumpy cotton, until Viktor draws in a shuddering breath.

“You okay?” Jayce asks.

“It’s psychosomatic,” Viktor says. “It has to be. It’s a reaction to the mold but I don’t have lungs.”

“Uh. Talking of that,” Jayce says. “Next step would be inspecting, cleaning and stabilising the artifact.”

“Do you have any experience with dolls?”

“No, but there are a couple of stuffed animals in those boxes.”

Viktor raises his eyebrows. “I’m surprised those would be donated.”

“I think one was donated against the owner’s will,” Jayce admits sheepishly. “The parents were freaked out. The other is unsettling enough that even the kid was glad to get rid of it.”

There’s a long awkward silence and then Viktor sighs, stifles a cough at the end of it, and says, “Very well.”

Jayce expected to feel more embarrassed at having Viktor naked on a lab bench. After all, Jayce is not a doctor, he is in no way used to this. It feels less like Viktor is naked, though, than like he’s wearing an old-fashioned bathing costume, cotton fabric stopping just above the knees and elbows. There’s really nothing to see. Viktor, staring furiously at his own knees, does not seem to share this opinion. His fabric is as patched and stitched as his clothes and Jayce has to remind himself that this is Viktor’s body, that Viktor probably feels the same way about it as he would if he were forced to reveal bruises and scars. What is unsettling is the hole in Viktor’s leg. No, hole feels like too small a word for it. The missing patch in the calf of Viktor’s leg, where something has smashed the porcelain away leaving jagged edges and crazed lines, hairline cracks that extend into the shin

Jayce drops to his knees and picks up the damaged leg. It feels like flesh in his hands, like skin moving over muscle, even as he can look through the hole in it to see the clay texture on the inside. “Would it hurt having something inside here?” he asks. “Can you feel pain?”

“Yes, I can feel pain. Not exactly as you would, but my body objects strongly to being further damaged. No, it would not hurt to have something inside my leg unless it put pressure on the cracks.”

“I was thinking of taking pressure off the cracks,” Jayce says. If pressure on them hurts then walking must be agony. “Bracing it. From the inside is probably more effective, although we’d want something wrapped around the outside to protect the edges too.” Plastic, probably, not metal, although that’s what Jayce prefers to work in. Viktor doesn’t weigh very much, putting metal in and around his leg could throw his balance off badly.

“Hmm,” Viktor says. “It could work.”

“I’ll take some measurements.”

Jayce wonders if it would be possible to fix the damaged leg if he hired a sculptor, but what if the clay didn’t change into whatever magic has made of Viktor? If it was just a heavy lump stuck into and pulling at an open wound?

The rest of Viktor’s bisque parts seem to be in good condition, although his feet are chipped. The cotton body has been patched with, if Jayce is any guess, discarded bedsheets, but as a result it’s still pretty sturdy despite the water damage. “Did sewing these on hurt?” he asks.

“No, no, I can barely feel a needle. It just slips between the threads, there’s no damage.”

Jayce gets up and goes over to the lab sink. “I do have mold and mildew remover,” he says. He’s had soft items donated in bad condition before. “But it’s probably not going to get all of it.”

“I know. The mold spores are inside my stuffing. Most videos on doll repair suggest replacing the stuffing completely, but that does hurt.” Jayce, in the process of wetting a cloth, whirls around to stare at Viktor, who taps a four-inch seam over where his heart would be.

“Jesus,” Jayce says, because doing surgery on yourself might not be quite the same for a doll, but even so. He walks over, intending to sit on the lab bench and start wiping Viktor down, only for Viktor to hold his hand out for the cloth. “I’ll have to scrub your back,” Jayce says.

“In a minute.” Viktor is frowning, swiping fiercely at his chest and stomach. “Look away while I do this part. It’s hardly dignified.”

Jayce does as he’s told, tidying up the lab for something to do with his hands, although he’s doing more pacing around and moving paper between piles than actually putting anything in its proper place. “We should contact someone who repairs dolls for a living,” he says. “Do they remove the stuffing even with antique dolls?”

“If it’s moldy, yes,” Viktor answers. “At least the ones on YouTube.”

“What about upholstery, people who deal in antiques?” Jayce rambles. “Or will the mold killer work if we just soak you properly? That would get it through all of you, right?”

“Leaving me soaking wet might encourage the mold rather than discourage it,” Viktor answers, distantly. “And my bisque parts are mostly waterproof but still shouldn’t be soaked.” He goes over to the sink to rinse his cloth out and apply more mold killer, Jayce shuffling round to keep his back to him as he does.

It’s a while later before Viktor says, “Jayce, you will have to do the rest.”

Viktor’s body still has splotches of mildew on it, not yet killed by the application of chemicals, but there’s less of it and more yellowed cotton. Jayce scrubs tentatively at the centre of Viktor’s back, where there’s still a grey, powdery area, and winces when the stuffing gives under his touch. “Did that…”

“You will not hurt me by re-arranging my stuffing,” Viktor answers, exasperated. “It is merely difficult to hold steady.”

“Lie down,” Jayce suggests. “On your front.”

Viktor does, face buried in his arms. Tension runs through him, Jayce can even feel it through the cotton, like pressing on a drum skin and it makes him more tentative, more afraid he’s going to tear something or hurt Viktor, especially when he can still feel stuffing being pushed around under his fingers. Then Viktor groans and Jayce jumps back. “Sorry! Sorry, are you all right?”

“Yes.” Viktor buries his face more firmly in his arms. “You did not hurt me. You were breaking up the, eh, lumps. In my stuffing.”

“Wait,” Jayce says. “It helped? I could —”

“No. Just the cleaning, please.”

So Jayce sticks to where he needs to scrub although he pushes a little harder than he had before.

Viktor is left raw and smarting from the scrubbing, although mentally rather than physically. He’s been stripped, all his broken and rotting parts on display to someone else, and now pulling his clothes back on isn’t enough to stop him feeling exposed.

Jayce is messing with his phone and he says, “There’s a dolls’ hospital pretty near here. I wonder whether they’d see you if I made an appointment.”

“No,” Viktor says, sharp. He doesn’t want more people to see him like this. He doesn’t want experts to tell him all the things that are wrong with him, to tell him with perfect knowledge just how bad the damage is. He doesn’t like the sound of a hospital, not when he remembers his best friend/sister/owner Orianna in one, being told how broken her small body was, a body more fragile still than Viktor’s porcelain. She’d held onto him then, arms locked tight around his cotton torso while they did yet another round of blood tests, like any child holding onto a toy, sobbed into his shoulder later when she was sick and exhausted from the chemo. Every second of it he had gone through with her, he won’t go through it again on his own account.

“Why not?” Jayce asks.

“Experts are used to toys they can take apart to repair,” Viktor says. He’s seen the videos.

“Didn’t you try to remove your own stuffing?” Jayce asks.

“I stopped when it hurt.”

“They wouldn’t keep going if you’re suffering. No one’s going to take you apart.” Jayce runs a hand over his face. “But maybe it’s not fair to ask them to see a patient they can hurt. They didn’t go into medicine.”

“Agreed,” Viktor says. Exhaustion is pulling on his limbs and yet things have gone so much better than he could have reasonably expected.

Jayce puts his phone aside and starts sketching into a notepad, drawing a hinged device that might fit inside Viktor’s damaged leg, and there’s a sweet horror to that, a feeling like someone has drawn a piano wire through Viktor’s body and attached the end to Jayce’s hand. It plucks at his insides, at the deepest, least human parts of him, as if scientific interest and good intentions might be something like the feeling a child has when they pick up a lost toy at the park and decide to keep it. Not love, not companionship, not yet, but the faint potential of it is still enough to keep that wire taut and trembling between them.

A girl bursts through the door, blue hair whipping around her, a maelstrom of smudged eyeshadow and torn clothes. She moves more like a child than like the teenager she is, all thin limbs and large eyes and unselfconscious motion. “Heeey, Jaybird,” she carols.

“Jinx,” Jayce says. “This is Viktor. Viktor, Jinx.”

Suddenly she’s in Viktor’s space, face so close he can see the faint freckles over her nose. Trying to lean away from her upsets his already precarious balance and he has to grab the lab bench to stay upright. “Hello, Miss Jinx,” he says. “May I assume you are a student here?”

“Coooool,” she says, leaning sideways to inspect his ear. “None of my dolls can do that.”

How can she tell?

“That’s because Viktor’s magical not mechanical,” Jayce says. He walks over and blocks off Jinx just enough that Viktor has space to retreat. “Did you need me for something?”

“You already know what I’m here for,” she says. “I want to play cards.”

Jayce sighs. “You’re not giving me useable data.”

“I’m giving you the best data. You’ve learned all sorts of things, Jaybird.”

“You change too many variables when I’m still trying to establish the baseline. If you’ll just play, normally, for an hour I’d be happy to play cards. If you keep trying to cheat against the lucky charm you’re wasting both our time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she grabs Jayce’s hand between both of hers and swings it. “You’re just as curious as me to know if I can beat it.”

“Fine,” Jayce says. “Guess I don’t have another volunteer right now. Let me fetch it.”

Jinx drops into a swivel chair and starts to spin. Viktor takes a seat himself and says, “You often come here for this?”

“Yeah, gotta come fight my nemesis.”

Viktor raises an eyebrow. “Jayce?”

“Nah, that fuzzy little bastard dice. We could’ve been friends, I’d have stolen it by now, if it cared about anything but money.”

Jayce re-enters with a pack of cards, a stopwatch, a fuzzy dice keychain, and a few hundred pounds in cash.

“Jayce,” Viktor says. “I thought Miss Jinx was a volunteer.”

“Right,” says Jayce, taking a seat opposite Jinx and setting everything on the table between them. “This thing,” he holds up the dice, “means I’m really consistent in winning all my funding back. But it doesn’t trigger unless there’s real money really on the line, and it doesn’t trigger reliably for low amounts of money. If Jinx wins she gets to keep the money. But she won’t win.”

“One day I will,” Jinx says, cheerfully. She takes the cards and starts to riffle-shuffle them, clever hands moving like a magician’s.

“One hour of poker,” Jayce says. “Winner at the end of that hour keeps their winnings. Experiment will not be entered into the experiment log due to unnecessary amounts of sleight of hand.” He presses the stopwatch. “Go.”

Poker faces are not much in evidence during the game, and yet you could hardly say either player had a bad one. Jayce’s thoughts show on his face like they’ve been projected there but he bluffs anyway, his confidence seeming as sincere and genuine with a pair of twos as with three queens. Jinx’s emotions are sharp and vivid but barely related to her cards and not all of them are real. One moment she seems on the verge of tears only to throw her cards down with a cackle when called. Despite Jayce’s insistence this isn’t usable data he still stops at the end of every hand to write down the cards and the play. There are ups and downs. At one point Jayce loses nearly all of his hundred pounds, but as the hour draws to its end he wins more and more consistently despite Jinx’s flashing hands becoming less and less subtle as they shift cards to where she wants them. When the stopwatch goes Jayce has just won the whole pot.

“Fascinating,” Viktor says, picking up Jayce’s notes on the play. “It does not simply win from the start. I suppose for the sake of not making it obvious to the opponent that magic is in play?”

“Who knows why magic does the things it does? I’m still trying to figure out what it does do,” Jayce says, stroking the dice reverently with one thumb. “Jinx, could you fill in where you tried to cheat?”

“Okay, gimme,” she snatches the notes out of Viktor’s hands and pulls a neon pink gel pen out of her pocket.

“So, if the luck charm doesn’t make your wins obviously suspicious and your department lacks funding, could you not go out for an evening to attend a casino and gain all the funding you require?” Viktor asks.

Jayce grins at him. “Tempting, but Jinx’s dad owns all the casinos around here. She’d rat me out.”

“Damn straight,” Jinx says, dropping the notes and throwing her head as far over the back of the chair as it will go. Then she flings herself forward, out of the chair and onto her feet. “See you, Jaybird. Vikki.”

She’s gone as fast as she arrived.

Jayce rolls his shoulders and looks at his phone. “I’ve got one more experiment to run in about half an hour and then we can head home and get you settled in,” he says. “Do you need us to stop off anywhere to pick your stuff up?”

Viktor shakes his head and tries not to look embarrassed. “I’m afraid I have no, uh, stuff. I have very few needs.”

“We could stop off at a supermarket then,” Jayce says, no longer casual but attempting to be. “Get you some more clothes.”

“I like these clothes.” Despite their tattered state it’s true. Orianna didn’t pick these clothes for him, the ones she picked no longer fit, but they were bought by her father and regardless of everything between him and Viktor that matters.

“They’re nice,” Jayce says. “But couldn’t you do with at least one other set and some pyjamas?”

“Perhaps.” Viktor feels caught between shame and desire, confused by the idea of how nice it would feel to have someone buy him clothes again after so long. He shakes his head. “What kind of experiment do you have running?”

Jayce opens something on his phone and hands it to Viktor, showing a webcam image of a glazed pottery bowl, decorated in red and black triangles, sitting in a rough mechanical claw. “It’s always filled with fresh rice,” Jayce says.

“No, it isn’t,” says Viktor, looking at the empty bowl.

“It always is if someone is near it,” Jayce says. “Figuring out it could be empty if no one was in the room was the first discovery. Now I’m charting how quickly it fills up as I approach against how long it’s been since I’ve last eaten. There’s a definite correlation.”

“That sounds like a remarkably useful magic item,” Viktor says.

“Miraculous,” Jayce says, softly. “It fed a whole family during the Great Depression. If I could harness and reproduce that think how many families could be fed then.”

Viktor meets Jayce’s eyes and sees the fervour there, the look of a man with the light of a dream reflected in his eyes. Behind Viktor’s own eyes unfurl memories of homeless people, those he’s lived among, starving when he couldn’t. Teenagers, old men and women, the lost and vulnerable, what it could mean to any of them to have food in abundance. “Can I see it?” he asks. “I cannot feel hunger, nor am I human, I doubt I will affect the experiment.”

“You can see it,” Jayce says. “If it fills up I can use my phone to tip it out so it’s empty when I approach. If it doesn’t, you could be really useful for studying it. An observer that doesn’t affect the thing observed. I mean, if you wanted to study it.”

“I’d like to help,” Viktor says, soft.

From close up Viktor can see that the bowl has been broken before and carefully mended. A pottery thing touched by magic but not preserved by it. Like him. Far more like him than he is like Jayce or any other human.

He touches the edge of the bowl gently, almost guiltily. It has not filled up in response to him. Hunger activates it as the desire for money activates the dice. As the desire for companionship activates Viktor. A bowl is made to feed others. A doll is made to be loved.

Scientific interest had been meant to fill in for that, a pale imitation of the interest Viktor wants, but Jayce is friendly, quick to like others, far too eager for them to like him, and, in this department full of tiny wonders chasing a dream no one else believes in, at least a little lonely. Already Viktor is filling with the desire to support and befriend him as helplessly as the bowl will fill with rice at his approach.

Chapter Text

There’s a light drizzle hitting the roof of the car when Jayce pulls up outside his apartment building. Viktor, huddled in his raincoat in the passenger seat, is giving it the sort of look a cat would: extremely put out but with anxiety behind it.

“I feel that way about snow,” Jayce says. Around them the car is a little bubble of warmth and safety, completely separate from the rest of the world. “I got lost in a blizzard with my mother once when I was a child. So even when I’m in the middle of town and the snow’s turning to slush before it hits the ground, I don’t like it. It’s not rational, but it’s not completely irrational either, not when I’ve been hurt by it before.”

“I suppose not,” says Viktor, still looking out the window, still frowning.

Jayce puts a hand on his shoulder. “Stay here while I take the shopping in and I’ll come back with an umbrella.”

Viktor shakes himself. “There’s no need for that,” he says briskly, and starts undoing his seatbelt.

Jayce finds himself rushing to get the shopping from the boot so that he isn’t leaving Viktor standing in the rain while he fetches it.

Once indoors Jayce puts the meal he grabbed in the microwave — he did eat some magical rice earlier but he’s still really hungry — and then finds himself at a loss. “Uh,” he gestures Viktor towards the kitchen table. “Take a seat? It’s going to feel really wrong to eat without offering you anything.”

“My owner used to share her food onto two plates and then eat both portions, but you’re a little old to be playing dolls’ tea party,” Viktor says with a half-smile.

“Is there anything I can offer you?” Jayce asks.

“Your notes,” Viktor says. He’s completely serious, eyes gleaming with anticipation, and Jayce is delighted to set up the laptop so he can peruse research while Jayce eats.

“You have case studies on spells in here?” Viktor says.

“Yeah,” Jayce answers around a mouthful of curry. “No one’s funding me for that, but they can’t stop me asking on my own time.”

“Hm.” A few minutes pass. “Why do you have this many files on ‘Mel’?”

“Uh. Don’t read those.” Jayce feels bad as soon as he says it because there are a lot of files and they’re some of the most enlightening. “I mean. They’re really confidential, she’s given me a lot of personal information.”

“Who am I going to tell?” Viktor leans forward, reading the screen. “Ah, she’s your donor. And she painted those paintings.”

“Yeah,” Jayce says, letting the fact that Viktor ignored ‘don’t read those’ slide. “I mean, she’s still painting them. That’s what’s so fascinating about her file, she’s been willing to keep a journal for me and if one of her paintings turns out haunted I can corrolate them — magic nearly always seems to be responding to emotion, but it can be hard to get a clear picture of what the emotion was.” Mel’s journal still isn’t very forthcoming about the reason why she’s feeling things, a dry account of events with emotions on the side, but it’s still a level of trust it had taken years to earn. Jayce has the uneasy feeling he’s betraying it now.

Viktor looks up at him, lips pursed. “I didn’t read her journal.”

“Okay.”

“I was only reading your observations.” He clicks on the screen a few times. “There, I’ll read something else.”

“Thanks,” Jayce can’t keep the relief out of his voice, even though he worries it’s offending Viktor.

He eats more of his curry and Viktor says, “Do you think the maths helps?”

“I don’t know.” Jayce presses a hand against his forehead. “I started in physics, I guess part of me thinks that if maths can describe quantum mechanics it ought to be able to describe magic too.”

“A mathematical basis for emotions? As you say, that’s what magic seems to respond to when it happens for any reason we can fathom.” Viktor looks away from the screen and towards Jayce. “But of course there is. If you place someone in an ECG you can see the neurons light up.” His hand traces lines in the air. “Not mine of course. But yours, certainly. Has anyone done that? Placed someone into an ECG while they do magic. I imagine they’d have to wait a while for it to happen, but I know for some people it happens more often than others, like your Ms Mel.”

“It’s been done,” says Jayce. “By someone with more funding than I have. I’ve got the papers, I can show you, but no one’s worked out the math behind emotions yet let alone how they intersect with magic.”

“Show me. Are they on here?”

Jayce pulls the laptop over and opens the papers for Viktor. The rest of his dinner passes in an increasingly mathematical discussion where Viktor impresses him repeatedly with how much he understands. Where did he get that kind of education? Jayce doesn’t want to interrupt the flow of ideas to ask.

Finally, Jayce puts their speculative equations to one side and finishes his now cold curry, putting the plate by the sink and yawning. “I think we’re going to have to stop there until I’ve had some sleep. You want coffee?”

“You know I can’t,” Viktor answers, impatient.

“Yeah, but coffee smells nice and maybe you’d like to feel included.” Jayce shoots Viktor a rueful smile. “I know, I’m too old for dolls’ tea parties.”

“No, that’s…” Viktor turns away, one hand fidgetting with his hair. Uncomfortable, but perhaps touched. “Thank you. I would like that.”

They sit in the living room, on a sofa Jayce has just cleared of ironing, and Jayce watches Viktor cradle the coffee between thin fingers. At rest he looks more delicate, lines of pain and determination easing out of his face leaving it austere and remote, eyes for once unfocused, and Jayce can see him as a doll like this in a way he couldn’t before.

“Have you ever done magic?” Viktor asks, resting his cheek against the back of the sofa. Jayce wonders how close he is to falling asleep.

“I’m not sure doing magic is the right word. It happens around people and maybe in response to them, but no one has ever claimed to control it,” Jayce says.

Viktor blinks some light back into his eyes and says, “Jayce.”

“Maybe.” Jayce leans his own cheek against the sofa, eye to eye with Viktor like kids at a sleepover. “Me or my mother. It was in that blizzard I told you about. We were on holiday in the alps and our rental car broke down. We had no phone signal, so we couldn’t call for help and without google maps or GPS we had no idea where we were. The heating was gone, though, so we couldn’t stay put. We just started walking.”

It had been a nightmare, whirling snow a blinding whiteness, his mother stumbling and still trying to support him. She’d put her gloves on his hands because his gloves were back at the hotel. Jayce had been struggling not to cry, the tears that forced their way out freezing on his eyelashes, every inch of exposes skin stinging like fire.

“After a while my mother… she collapsed. I was yelling for help, knowing no one was there, and then, suddenly, people were there. They picked us up and took us indoors and I realised we were in the hotel lobby.”

“There’s no way you simply walked back through the town without realising it?” Viktor asks.

Jayce shakes his head. “The car was twenty miles away.” He smiles, remembering the sudden warmth, the sudden reassurance of other people, the soft human animal of his body delivered from the elements and back into a place where he was safe. “It was a miracle.”

“And one miracle wasn’t enough for you?” Viktor’s question is wry, teasing not disapproving, but Jayce’s answer is fervent.

“No, it wasn’t. Because why did I get that miracle? My mother survived because magic happened for me, but other kids have seen their parents die in front of them and got nothing. Someone was hungry a century ago and they got a rice bowl that always fed them, but how many people have starved to death? Magic can save people so why can’t it save everyone? Why should anyone go hungry when food can be created out of nothing?”

“I know,” Viktor says, voice devoid of mockery now. “You’re going to change the world.”

Jayce puts a hand on his shoulder. “We’re going to change the world.”

Viktor wakes up drowning, terrified, choking on air he doesn’t need, every violent cough feeling more like it will pull his insides out through his mouth. Rolling onto his front sends lines of fire racing along every crack in his leg but the knot in his chest eases and his coughs trail off into harsh gasps. It takes a moment to come back to himself, to register the feel of crisp, clean cotton bed clothes around him, the striped pyjamas he’s dressed in. For a moment he can’t understand where he is, who this pleasant impersonal room belongs to.

Jayce. It comes back to him. Jayce’s guest room. He rolls over and presses his forehead to the wall. Jayce is on the other side, asleep in his own bed, the silvery thread of his affection like a trickle of cold clear water. Viktor doesn’t like to think of what he does as feeding, even though the need inside him feels like a black hole. Nothing is taken by his reaching out, he just needs the feelings to be there.

Curling up with a grimace he rubs at the ache in his chest. There’s probably a solid lump of mold in there by now, the result of stupidity as much as bad luck. Accepting drinks in bars, slid to him across polished wood with a hesitant smile or a confident grin. Knowing the juice and sugar is far more dangerous to him than the alcohol, but drinking them anyway because someone wants him, even if it’s not the way he wants to be wanted, even if it’s in a way he can’t fulfil and is unnerved and a little disgusted at the thought of trying. It’s the way people seem to want a pretty stranger most easily, and as long as he’s sipping the drink he can stretch out the moment where he is wanted before he has to tell them ‘no’.

It hurts and he is so so tired of hurting.

Maybe Jayce can do something about the pain. Soak Viktor through with chemicals and kill off the thing eating him from the inside. Maybe Viktor should let him. Didn’t he donate himself to science hoping to be fixed?

Over breakfast, cradling a cup of tea for the warmth and for something to do with his hands, Viktor asks with all the nonchalence he can manage, “Are we going into the lab today, or did you want to finish cleaning and stabilising me?”

Jayce looks at him quickly, sharp in a way that makes him feel pounced on, makes his fingers clench around the mug. “Are you up for being soaked?” Jayce asks.

“I think,” Viktor admits. “I’m going to have to be.”

Viktor is on his back in Jayce’s bathtub, lying in a few inches of water while Jayce scoops up jugs of it to pour over his chest. A bath pillow supports his head and his arms and legs are draped over the sides of the tub to keep the bisque from being soaked. The cotton inside him is bloated, swollen like over-ripe fruit, far too heavy for him to be able to lift himself and deeply uncomfortable, an endless pressure that keeps drawing his attention back to it every time he lets his mind wander.

“You doing okay in there?” Jayce asks.

“I feel like an overturned beetle,” Viktor says, truthfully, relieved that his voice doesn’t express the panic behind that thought, just how readily he feels like he could be crushed.

Jayce chuckles. “Yeah, you kind of look like one too.

“Flattering.” Viktor closes his eyes and shivers as another jug pours over his chest. The water feels like it’s moving around in him, maybe finding a last few corners to seep into, and he lifts a hand to rub at his front before remembering he shouldn’t get his bisque wet and putting it back on the rim of the bathtub with a grimace.

“Does it hurt?” Jayce asks.

“It’s fine.” It should be fine. Viktor’s body usually only hurts when something might damage it, which is all the time with his cracked leg, yes, but being wet doesn’t damage fabric. Still, his body seems to know that it’s not good for him without knowing that this water is medicinal. “…A little uncomfortable.”

“I think we’re good to start drying you off if you want to get out,” Jayce tells him, putting the jug down.

“Please.”

Jayce pulls the plug and reaches down, large hands resting under Viktor’s arms. Like so many of Jayce’s movements there’s an edge of awkwardness to it, almost clumsiness, as if Jayce might never have figured out quite how to fit his body into the world around him, and yet his hands come to rest sure and gentle and exactly where he intended. He lifts Viktor into a sitting position in one smooth motion.

Viktor immediately curls forwards, resting his head on his knees, the only remotely comfortable position he can find right now. Orianna had curled shivering on Corin’s lap while he read her fairytales, Viktor either pulled tight into her arms, part of the little ball she made herself into while chemo wrecked her, or resting his hand on her back, not knowing how to comfort her when she didn’t grab him. For the first time he thinks he knows how she felt. The water inside him is definitely moving now, pulled through him by gravity in a horrible trickling motion, and he pulls his thighs up tighter against his belly trying to settle himself.

“Hey.” Jayce rubs his back, where his shoulder blades would be if he had them, while Viktor bites back a moan from the sudden dizziness and increasing pressure.

The spew of water he vomits is painful the way coughing is painful, the sense of his body trying to expel itself, and he can feel the cold wetness up the inside of his throat as it forces its way out of his mouth. He swallows down the next surge desperately as the grimy water washes over his legs and starts soaking back into his fabric.

Jayce loops an arm under Viktor’s legs and wraps the other around his back, lifting him to sit on the rim of the tub. Leaning forward, Viktor manages to aim the next surge of water away from himself. It’s only the same dirty water he’s already full of, the same leaching out of him all over Jayce’s shirt, he tells himself. This isn’t as disgusting as it feels.

“Just let it out,” Jayce says. “If anything it should get you dry quicker.”

“Couldn’t you just. Wring me out,” Viktor gasps. “It would hurt less.”

“I can’t imagine that would be good for your stuffing,” Jayce says, sympathetic but amused.

Viktor snaps. “I’m serious. Don’t make me beg.” His voice trembles on the last sentence, giving away how close to begging he actually is. Anything to make this stop. If Jayce does make him beg while he’s like this, helpless and hurting, hanging from Jayce’s arms unable to even move, Viktor is never, never going to forgive him.

“Okay,” Jayce says, doubtful but very gentle. “Let me turn you around, okay? Get your legs over this side of the tub.”

Viktor is manouvered so that he’s perched on the edge of the tub facing Jayce, who holds him leaning back over the tub. Then he does squeeze, not roughly but very thoroughly, warm arms closing around Viktor like iron bars. The feeling of pressure inside Viktor increases abruptly, along with the cold trickling feeling of water running through his skin. It’s even more uncomfortable than the vomiting but over far more quickly. It’s also the closest thing to a hug Viktor has had in years and the fact that it hurts doesn’t stop him wanting it to continue.

Jayce relaxes, going from squeezing Viktor to supporting him again. “Is that better?”

“Much.” Viktor has buried his face in Jayce’s shoulder at some point, which is humiliating but still better than letting Jayce see whatever his expression is doing. He sighs. “What an impression to make on my new co-worker.”

“Not the first time I’ve held a friend while they threw up,” Jayce says. “I helped Cait through her first hangover and believe me that was much worse.”

The set up for drying Viktor should really have been on the balcony where sunlight and fresh air could do most of the drying. Since Viktor had refused completely to be outside where anyone looking up could see him it is instead in the living room in front of Jayce’s balcony, french windows wide open to let the sunlight and fresh air in. In case it helps there’s also a space heater, an electric fan, and a dehumidifier all humming at different pitches. In the centre is Jayce’s sunbed, dragged in from his balcony. It’s a cheap one, moulded plastic with gaps between its slats, perfect for getting airflow to as much of Viktor as possible, and underneath it is a tarpaulin to protect his carpet.

Viktor is a cold, wet weight in Jayce’s arms and Jayce hates the way it strips him of humanity, makes him feel like an object Jayce is hauling. When set carefully on the sunbed Viktor sighs and stretches out in the warmth. He’s gone pale, even more than usual, which is fascinating considering he doesn’t have any blood. The throwing up is fascinating too, now that it’s over and Viktor seems to be feeling better. If his body does try to expel foreign objects maybe the coughing is a physical response to mold despite the lack of lungs.

Now that Viktor’s settled and seems more than halfway to sleep, Jayce slips away to change out of his soaking wet clothes and mop the bathroom floor. When he comes back Viktor’s curled slightly into himself, looking damp and miserable in a way that has Jayce putting a hand on his forehead to check for fever before he registers that as stupid. Viktor’s skin is warm beneath his hand but only from the sun.

Golden eyes blink up at him, squinting slightly. “What are you doing?”

“Just checking on you. Go back to sleep.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Viktor says. “Can’t.”

“Want to watch something?” Jayce wonders what sort of shows Viktor would even like. He seems too sophisticated to share Jayce’s love of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Documentaries, maybe. Adaptations of novels?

“Read me your case files on spells.”

Or, of course, there’s work. Well. Jayce can’t say he isn’t excited to get Viktor’s insight on that. “Why spells?” he asks, fetching his laptop from the coffee table.

“You have numbers on the artifacts and I’m in no state to be doing maths. That will have to wait until tomorrow,” Viktor says.

Jayce sits down next to the sunbed with the files open in front of him and they make it through two case studies, one about a child entering a chalk drawing for a few hours and one about a rain of coins, before Viktor finally falls asleep. It should be a relief, considering how uncomfortable Viktor still evidently is sleeping off his waterlogged state is the best thing for him. Instead looking at him lying there, pale and still, makes Jayce feel vaguely panicky. It takes just a little too long for him to realise that it’s because Viktor’s not breathing.

God, like this he looks almost more like a mummy than a doll. Layered cotton in the vague shape of a body and that sharp, gaunt death mask of a face. The tenderness it wakes in Jayce is more like grief, like he’s looking at someone who died young. Like the few days of knowing Viktor were a dream or a brief encounter with a ghost.

No, he’s letting his imagination run wild and scaring himself. Viktor is a fantastical creature but a perfectly solid one and now that they’ve dealt with the mold he’s going to be fine. Cotton toys can last for decades if they’re well taken care of and maybe Viktor hasn’t been but he will be now. Jayce will make sure of it.

Viktor wakes after dark, the sun gone and the french windows closed, but the fan, space heater and dehumidifier all still humming away. Sitting up is awkward but he’s relieved to find his body is no longer too heavy to move by himself. Not that he needs to move, he’s not like a human invalid who might need help going to the bathroom, or a drink of water. There’s nothing wrong with leaving him out here alone even if he was immobile.

A soft snuffle from behind him makes him turn and he realises Jayce is asleep on the sofa, a pillow, duvet and Jayce himself all overflowing the sofa’s edges and dangling precariously. Jayce snuffles again and shifts, pulling the pillow into his arms with a look of satisfaction and mashing his cheek into the arm of the sofa. The temptation surges in Viktor to go over there and pull the pillow away, crawl into Jayce’s arms instead. It’s ridiculous. How would he even begin to explain? Besides, he’s still unpleasantly damp. Instead he lies back down and listens to Jayce breathing until he falls asleep again.

Chapter Text

Viktor’s presence in Jayce’s lab passes unquestioned for two weeks simply because a soft-spoken man in semi-formal cream and brown clothes fits into academia seamlessly. Jinx knows, of course, but if she’s told anyone else they haven’t believed her. Viktor is doing a great deal more studying with Jayce than being studied by Jayce and he’s enjoying himself. It’s a half-enchanted feeling to work with Jayce, except ‘enchanted’ is the wrong word because any magic in the equation comes from Viktor and this feeling comes from Jayce, who chases after answers like a child galloping after butterflies and plays with maths like a favourite toy.

This morning Viktor comes downstairs to find that Jayce is not only up but has clearly been out, a half-eaten croissant in his hand. The paper bag from the bakery lies on the table next to two boxes, one an Amazon box and the other a battered wine box that probably doesn’t contain wine.

“Good morning, Jayce,” Viktor says.

Jayce beams at him. “Morning! I finished your brace.”

“You did?” Viktor looks at the battered wine box.

“Yep, it’s in there. I printed it yesterday and I was just at the workshop putting the metal cores in.” Jayce finishes his croissant in two large bites and washes his hands with his cheeks still bulging. “The bedroom’s probably the easiest place to get it fitted. It shouldn’t take long.”

The brace is more like a skeleton, although Viktor admits that’s a rather fanciful description of two rods which will snap together at an articulated joint in the middle. It is off-white, however, and he can’t help being faintly amused at the idea a doll with bones. He lies down on his back for Jayce to feed it in, nervous more at the thought of Jayce’s soft skin near his sharp edges than at any possibility Jayce might knock something against that shattered edge and damage him further. The fingers inside him feel strange but move with assurance as Jayce feeds in the parts.

There’s an audible snap as the pieces fit together and then Jayce says, “There! Now I just need to get the shell on.”

The shell is the result of a day with a 3D scanner, scanning both Viktor’s broken leg and his unbroken one for comparison. It’s shaped plastic, a little like a shin guard, running from just below Viktor’s knee to just above his ankle. Jayce does up the latches and says, excited and nervous, “You can test it out.”

Viktor rolls over and sits up, then immediately freezes, reaching out to touch the plastic shell around his leg in a sort of wonder.

“Is it too tight?” Jayce asks.

Viktor shakes his head. “It didn’t hurt,” he says. He’d been careful, the way he always moves carefully, but normally that’s not enough to stop his leg protesting the tugging at its cracks. This time, cradled in plastic, there had been barely a twinge.

“Good. That’s good.” The look Jayce is giving him is both meltingly happy and desperately hopeful. Glad that Viktor is feeling less pain and hopeful that walking will be the same, of course, but also Viktor knows him well enough now to recognise that Jayce is hoping for praise.

“Thank you,” Viktor says inadequately. He shuffles forwards, still careful, still surprised when it doesn’t hurt, and stands up. That does hurt, and he can’t suppress a wince, but he’s standing without his cane and without racing fire outlining every crack, warning him of all the places his leg could snap if he tries to put his full weight on it. Now when he takes a step forward it takes his weight. There’s still discomfort, enough to force a limp as he hurriedly puts his weight back on his good leg, but he walked. When he snatches up his cane from where it leans against the bed and falls back into his normal gait it barely hurts at all. “Thank you,” he says again. “I… Jayce.”

“It’s good?” Jayce says, like that wasn’t obvious.

“Very good. You did an excellent job.”

Jayce is preening when Viktor looks up to meet his eyes. Then he says, “Oh, I got something else for you to try. Just a sec,” and ducks out of the room before returning with the Amazon parcel.

The dark grey thing he pulls out of the parcel is a brace, one shaped a bit like a waistcoat although with far more straps. “It’s a medical corset,” Jayce explains. “It’s meant to help with posture and spinal support, but I thought for you… um…”

“Yes,” Viktor agrees, because his soggy stuffing suddenly deciding not to support him isn’t painful but it is incredibly frustrating. He takes the corset and pulls the instructions out of the box but Jayce lingers. “Go,” he says. “Let me figure this out and get dressed. Finish your breakfast.”

“I could help,” Jayce says, reluctant to give up the chance to be useful and making puppy-dog eyes about it.

“You have helped. Let me figure this out on my own.”

It only occurs to Viktor after Jayce leaves that his tone was too sharp after all the things Jayce has done for him. He’s never been very good at gratitude.

The corset needs to be cinched as tightly as possible to compress his stuffing into a useful density but once it’s on Viktor feels a good deal less flimsy and battered. He puts on the suit Jayce bought him, taking less care with the trousers than usual now that he doesn’t have to worry about fabric catching an edge that will pull a crack wider, and stands up in front of the mirror.

Viktor has never been vain. Aware, yes, that his features are handsome and his eyes are striking no matter what state the rest of him is in, but he’s always found himself unnatural. A baby doll grown up, body tall and thin instead of a soft armful, face sharp rather than sweet and solemn. Like this, though, with the corset making him thinner still but giving him an elegant posture, with new clothes and his cane clean and polished at his side, he could almost be a different kind of doll. One of those pretty ball-jointed ones perhaps. Something that was meant to be this way.

Viktor is happy, humming along softly to the music box recordings he’s identifying, and Jayce is trying not to be smug about it. Watching Viktor walk in from the car in quick, limping steps, without having to fight his sagging body had filled Jayce with pride and an almost bruising tenderness that’s still swelling in his chest. Viktor looks up, sensing Jayce watching him, and raises an eyebrow in query.

“You’re much more musical than I am,” Jayce says.

“Ah, my owner was musical.” It’s weird when Viktor refers to her like that, to himself as her possession, even as he looks nostalgic and fond about it. “She would have liked to be a dancer. We uses to play the piano together.” A crooked smile. “I don’t want you to imagine anything too impressive. She usually played the right hand part while I played the left instead of either of us doing it properly. But our hands were very small.”

Jayce looks at Viktor’s hands with their long fingers and prominent knuckles. “You should try playing the piano again now,” he suggests.

“No, no. I have other things to do now. Besides, neither of us has a piano.”

“My Mum has a piano,” Jayce says, grinning.

“Mm. I can just see you asking, ‘can my co-worker come over and play the piano extremely badly? Maybe buy earplugs’.”

Jayce laughs. “I bet you’re not as bad as you say. You should come visit her, you know. Not to play the piano if you don’t want to but she’d love to meet you. We might have to explain some things, though, or she’ll try to feed you.”

Viktor looks at his hand contemplatively as if he can see through the illusion of flesh. “I’ll think about it,” he says, in a tone that probably means ‘no’.

Jayce sighs and wanders over to the whiteboard, feeling restless. The experiments with the rice bowl are pretty much done, there’s a limit to how long he can starve himself. He could start again and see if he can replicate the results, almost certainly should in fact, but that’s something to be done over months, the only useful thing he could do right now would be to resolve to skip lunch. He could get some more tunes out of the music box — Viktor is better at identifying them, but for him it only plays Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. In terms of getting a response from magic artifacts Viktor is an absolute null, which is fascinating. It makes perfect sense that the rice bowl doesn’t respond to him when he doesn’t feel hunger, or the luck charm when he doesn’t seem to desire money, but even the mood ring doesn’t respond and he definitely feels emotions. It means Jayce has a control for testing what things would do if they weren’t magic and going through the various items in the store room to establish that is another thing to work on, but that’s something for Viktor to do not Jayce. Fixing Viktor up had been a simple, satisfying and incredibly worthwhile task and now it’s hard to go back to chewing on the intractible edges of magic no matter how much he loves it.

Heimerdinger bustles into the room before he’s figured out what to do with himself. The Dean of the university is a short man with a huge moustache and right now his nose is buried in a sheaf of papers. This is far from unusual since no matter what Heimerdinger is doing he always seems to be distracted by something else.

“Jayce, my boy, I know this is short notice but Dimitri is out today. Could you take his class this afternoon?”

“I’d be happy to, professor,” Jayce says, meaning it more than he usually might. Maybe teaching will settle him, at least it will give him something useful to do.

“Good lad!” Heimerdinger finally looks up from his papers and spots Viktor looking at him from his place at the desk. He wipes his hand on his jacket and trots over to hold it out. “I don’t believe we’ve met. Cecil Heimerdinger, Dean of the Academy.”

Viktor shoots Jayce a wide-eyed look but shakes Heimerdinger’s hand with gravitas. “Viktor Orrison.”

“You’re not staff, at least if this old man’s memory can be trusted, and you look too much at home to be a visitor. A student? Are you in one of Professor Talis’ classes?”

“Yes,” Viktor says, startling Jayce considerably by lying to Heimerdinger for no reason whatsoever. “I’m —”

“He’s an artifact,” Jayce interrupts, before this can get worse. ““Number one-four-one. I filed the paperwork for him a few weeks ago.”

Heimerdinger frowns, the look of someone who doesn’t necessarily read Jayce’s paperwork and thinks he might be the victim of a prank.

“Viktor?’ Jayce says.

There’s a long pause, Viktor looking firmly away, flustered, stubborn. Jayce wonders whether he’s going to insist that he’s not an artifact and turn this into a very strange arguement in front of Heimerdinger. It’s not as if Jayce can prove that he is, he’s hardly going to grab and strip him. Instead Viktor sighs and undoes the top buttons of his shirt to show the cotton underneath. It’s almost covered by dark grey straps and Viktor snorts a laugh. “This was more convincing without the, eh, corset. The hole in my leg is covered up, too. Jayce fixed me too well.” He tugs at his hair in thought. “Look into my mouth.”

Heimerdinger does so rather tentatively and then jumps. “Holy sprockets! I can see the inside of your head. Astonishing.”

Viktor closes his mouth quickly and looks away. Heimerdinger pats his leg. “It’s all right, my boy, I won’t spread it around. But I see I’m going to need to keep an eye on Jayce’s paperwork in future, I’m sure he didn’t make it clear how remarkable you were. Number one-four-one was it?” Then he turns and advances briskly on Jayce. “Jayce, what is the situation here? Does the university own him?”

“No, professor. I managed the paperwork so that he owns himself. Technically we’re studying him.”

“And in actuality he’s helping you with your work. For no pay?”

“Paying me would require proof of identity I can’t provide and don’t want to draw attention to myself by seeking,” Viktor says. “Jayce is taking care of my needs.”

“All the same!” Heimerdinger says. “I think we should be seeking to get some kind of acknowledgement of your personhood. I fear we’re taking advantage of you.” He wanders over to the whiteboard. “Yes, two hands writing in two different colours, quite distinct and doing, it seems, an equal amount of the work.”

“Very much so, professor,” Jayce says. “Viktor’s brilliant.”

“Which is why we should certainly be paying him,” Heimerdinger says.

“No,” Viktor answers. “This is… I am content with things as they are. Call it, ah, volunteer work.”

Heimerdinger’s bushy eyebrows pull so far together they almost meet his moustache and his entire face becomes a fuzzy expression of anxiety. “Pay aside, then, you’re existing as it stands with no legal protections at all. If you were robbed or hurt, what recourse would you have?”

“So I am to stand in front of a jury to ask them to recognise my personhood?” Viktor demands, face cracked open by something too raw for anger. “What if they decide I am not a person? And still that Jayce does not own me? Would I be sent back to my previous owner’s next of kin? Or co-opted by a more established researcher for study?”

Jayce reaches out for Viktor on instinct, surprised when Viktor steps away from him and walks over to the whiteboard in a sudden flurry before staring blankly at its equations as if the answer to his fears might be behind them.

“Oh dear,” Heimerdinger says, helpless, blue eyes filled with sympathy.

“Pretend you didn’t notice me,” Viktor says. “Things were fine until you did.”

Jayce crosses the room to Viktor, not reaching out this time, but simply hovering. Casting a pleading look at Heimerdinger on Viktor’s behalf.

“I do see your point,” Heimerdinger admits. “I suppose I must let things stand as you and Jayce have arranged them and hope it works out. Do come to me if you have anything you need. Please believe that I consider you my staff and will do my best to look out for you.”

“Thank you,” Viktor says, subdued.

Jayce echoes him more strongly, “Thank you, professor.”

“Do take care of yourselves. And remember that Dmitri’s class is at three,” Heimerdinger says and walks out shaking his head.

“Did you have to tell him?” Viktor says, shooting a tired glare at Jayce. “He cannot possibly know all the students. I could have escaped his notice for months.”

“He had to find out eventually, it would have been worse if we’d been lying to him,” Jayce protests.

“But eventually. And in the meantime, things could continue.”

“Well, now they can continue forever,” Jayce says blithely. “Heimerdinger likes you, he wants to keep you here. Everything’s worked out for the best.”

“Forever,” Viktor says, turning the word over in his mouth. “Yes. Perhaps it has.”

Jayce comes back from his lesson to find Viktor in the storeroom, sitting on the floor beside the filing cabinet with paper spread out in a starburst around him.

“Jayce,” he says, almost glowing with excitement. “You have fixed several of these magical artifacts when you acquired them. To the point of replacing worn or broken parts. Which did not prevent the magic from working through them.”

“Uh, yes?” Jayce says, feeling a step behind and off balance. He can’t help glancing at Viktor’s damaged leg with its shell hidden under his trousers. Technically having someone sculpt a whole new leg and simply attaching it in place of the current one would be an option, but Jayce has a hard time picturing that working. Taking Viktor apart is also something he’d rather not picture and he thinks Viktor would rather not picture it either.

“You’ve never had to replace more than half of anything,” Viktor gestures to the papers he’s been reading. “What would happen if you did? If you replaced, say, the entire mechanism of the music box? Or if you replaced exactly half of something?”

Jayce feels understanding dawn on him like a sunrise. “I don’t… we should find out.”

“Exactly.” Viktor reaches for the filing cabinet to pull himself up and Jayce quickly extends a hand instead, Viktor continuing to talk as he takes it. “I think the easiest would either be the music box —- which is not unique, we can easily buy another identical one and switch out as much or as little of the mechanism as we please — or the rice bowl. I have no idea whether we could find a replica of the rice bowl, but it would be far easier to cut exactly in half since it contains no parts at all. Also it has clearly been broken in the past and glued back together, I noticed the cracks near the edge, so if our experiment fails we could glue the two halves back together with no harm done.”

“We could try the bowl today,” Jayce says, talking as quickly as Viktor. “We couldn’t get an identical bowl, but we could find one with the same dimensions at any supermarket. The music box might take a bit longer…”

“The rice bowl then,” Viktor says. “Suppose,” he adds, as they make their way to the elevator, “You made two music boxes from the one, distributed the parts evenly between them, would one immediately stop working if you then replaced another part? Or, since you had taken a working magic artifact and only replaced one part, would it continue?”

“You’re thinking we can Ship of Theseus magic artifacts?” Jayce asks.

Viktor tilts his head. “Explain.”

“It’s a thought experiment,” Jayce says. “Suppose a guy called Theseus has a ship and gradually, plank by plank, he replaces it completely. Then someone else collects all the discarded planks and builds a new ship out of them. Which is the Ship of Theseus?”

Viktor looks not so much enlightened as delighted. “Yes. I am thinking we can ‘Ship of Theseus’ magic artifacts. Perhaps.”

Jayce laughs as the elevator opens at the ground floor, a hectic laugh bubbling out of the excitement swelling within him until his feet barely seem to touch the ground, steps bouncing him forward instead of pushing him. “Time to find out.”

The workshop is busy when they return to the university, the engineering students have all the stations. Viktor thinks he and Jayce are going to have to wait, or perhaps come back once the students have gone home, but Jayce rubs the back of his neck, takes a deep breath, and walks in. “Who’s willing to let me borrow their station to do magic?” he asks, ignoring the scattered laughter as if the nerves he’d shown outside the door never existed.

“Here, you can use ours,” Jinx calls, gesturing at it like she’s presenting a magic trick.

“No, he can’t,” says the boy next to her, pushing back his bleached dreads and already looking resigned.

Jinx pushes his shoulder. “C’mon Ekko, either it will be good or we can laugh at Mr Magic Man.”

Jayce crosses the room slowly enough for Viktor to keep up. The crowd is making Viktor nervous, fears of being knocked into, knocked down, broken, overblown in his head. The brace means his leg is no longer in danger of cracking from an ill-timed jostle. Even if he is knocked down he’s not likely to be more than chipped. Still, he sticks close to Jayce’s side, sheltering in the lee of the island he creates.

Jayce puts the two bowls down and goes to grab a tungsten-carbide hacksaw. Cutting through ceramic with a hacksaw is a slow process and should be boring, but Viktor pushes in close anyway watching each stroke of the blade. Dust falls from the bowl onto the table and this is the ordinary bowl but Viktor says, “For the magic one we should put down paper. Save the dust.”

“Right,” Jayce says. “I wonder what would happen if you saved scraps of different magic items? Made something with them?”

“Difficult,” Viktor says. “We’d need a wide variety of ceramic items to collect enough dust from them. I suppose we could, eh. Make a very tiny bowl. Combine the dust here with new clay at a fifty-fifty ratio and see whether we could summon a single grain of rice.”

Jayce looks at the rice bowl and its mound of gently steaming rice, then at the students around them, some watching Jayce as an excuse to pause their work and chat while others still bend over their own projects. “It’s just rice, but if anyone’s hungry you can take some,” he announces to the room. “Before we cut it up.”

Viktor isn’t sure whether it’s hunger or curiosity but Jinx starts folding bowls from scrap paper and soon much fo the class is eating rice either with their fingers or, in a few cases, pencils used as chopsticks. The bowl obligingly refills.

It continues to refill while Jayce cuts it so that Viktor’s attempt to gather the dust is thwarted by the amount of rice mixed with it. Jayce gives him a sympathetic grin. “It was a good thought,” he says, watching Viktor try to brush clay dust off freshly-cooked rice. Only once the cut is completed does it stop, the halves as ordinary as any other clay bowl. There’s a feeling of tension, almost alarm, running through Viktor and it’s communicating itself to him from Jayce. What if they’ve destroyed the magic trying to replicate it? What if it’s just gone?

Jayce takes a deep breath and lifts half of the rice bowl and half of their blue supermarket substitute. He runs ceramic glue along an edge with fingers that are just barely not shaking and presses the two halves together.

Rice wells up instantly.

Jayce, still awkwardly holding the frankenbowl, not sure how to put it down to dry now it’s full of rice, beams at Viktor with a wild, incredulous happiness, a smile that seems to lay all that happiness at Viktor’s feet like it’s a gift Jayce can never be grateful enough for. Viktor, startled, awkward, excited himself, smiles back and reaches for the other two halves, taking his turn to glue them together.

Rice wells up in his hands too. He raises his bowl like a toast and Jayce tips his forward to clink against it. Around them students head back to their own demonstrations, mildly impressed but not understanding at all why this trick means so much to its instigators. To control magic, even just for a moment, even just by a sort of trickery. To want something to be and make it so.

“Hey,” Jinx’s lab partner, Ekko, says, “Can I borrow one of those?”

“What for?” Jayce asks, blinking as he comes back down to earth. “If you want to help study it then you can come by the lab anytime.”

Ekko shakes his head, and then looks thoughtful. “I’ll think about it. But, nah, I help out at a soup kitchen. That thing just fed a whole class. Now you’ve got two of them, figured maybe you could spare one.”

Studying this is important, figuring out how to make it work, how to make more of them, whether they can make more of them or whether doubling is as far as it goes. One rice bowl will make far less difference than their studies in the end. Yet Ekko is right, people are hungry now when they don’t have to be, when a meal could make all the difference. When Jayce glances uncertainly at Viktor for his opinion, Viktor nods firmly, feeling oddly grateful for the reminder.

“Sure,” Jayce says, still sounding as if he isn’t. It’s hard for him to let this out of his hands. Then he brightens. “Would they keep records for me? How many people it feeds, whether there’s a limit?”

Ekko gives him a look, but he’s a scientist or an engineer himself and Viktor thinks he means it when he says, “Yeah, I’ll see to it.”

“In the meantime,” says Jinx, inserting herself in the narrow space between Jayce and the bench, forcing him to step back . “Since we didn’t get to laugh at you you’ve gotta give us our space back.”

Since they’ve got everything they wanted, Jayce and Viktor do. In the lab they write everything down, make plans, look up the music box online and order three. That night Jayce celebrates with champagne and Viktor celebrates with Jayce’s bubbly adoration, just as intoxicating.

It’s some time later that they publish their first paper on dividing and recombining magic artifacts. Jayce asks, tentative but hopeful, whether Viktor would like his name on the paper. It’s a risk, being noticed will always be a risk, but with Jayce’s partnership and Heimerdinger’s more distant support, with the certainty that no one will really wonder about a name on a paper, and most of all with the knowledge of his own hard work and how much it would hurt to have his contributions forgotten, Viktor agrees.

Chapter Text

Yellows, browns and reds, shading into soft purple shadows are not quite the colours Jayce would expect in a picture of a summer garden. Until he’d started mixing up his own colours to match, looking at parts instead of the whole, he’d really thought there was more green. Still, he’s doing a good job with the colours. Mel’s technique… less so.

“Were you planning to cut Ms Medarda’s picture and swap half out with your copy?” Viktor asks, leaning over him. “Because no self-respecting ghost is going to haunt that.”

“I know,” Jayce admits. Painting with a palette knife when he’s not particularly talented with a brush had been a bad idea. It’s blobby and scratchy by turns and not even in an interesting dynamic way. You can see where the fussy engineer tried to keep the paint inside the lines and just added anxious wobbly edges to every stroke of this disaster. “I’m meeting Mel later today, I wanted to be able to say I was working on something she’d care about. We’ve been neglecting her stuff lately.” For months really. Nearly a year. Ever since he and Viktor cut a rice bowl in half and started chasing the possibilities of that.

“You could hire someone who knows how to paint,” Viktor says.

Jayce grimaces at this comment on his hard work and says, “There’s no money left for it. I don’t want to tell her that, either.”

Viktor snorts, which turns into a cough, and Jayce looks up sharply. “Did you take your medicine?”

“Yes, I took it. You know it doesn’t work immediately.”

“Maybe if you took it on a regular schedule instead of whenever you start coughing…”

“You try drinking weedkiller on a regular schedule,” Viktor tells him.

“It’s not weedkiller and you don’t even have a sense of taste,” Jayce mutters, not really wanting to carry on the argument but not wanting to let Viktor get the last word. He picks up his pallette knife and takes some pale yellow on the tip, dispiritedly poking it at a tree in hopes of copying Mel’s dappled shifting light.

“It’s still not a pleasant sensation,”Viktor says. “Leave that, you’re not going to make it any better. Here, open this.”

The pocket watch he hands Jayce was made with the music box’s parts and is one of their most successful experiements. It doesn’t work as a watch, but has made certain things about the music box a lot more obvious. This time, when Jayce opens it, it starts playing an upbeat tune that he’s almost sure he knows. Definitely not one of its classical ballet or opera references, which means for once Shazam returns an answer quickly.

“When Will I See You Again by Owl City,” Jayce reads.

“Lyrics?” Viktor says. Jayce finds them and then passes the phone over to Viktor, his own hand still hovering in case Viktor needs him to scroll down. Touchscreens don’t work for someone whose hands are made of clay.

“Hmm,” Viktor says after reading them. “A parting or a journey. A mood of exploration and discovery. And it reads three o’clock.”

“That’s my meeting with Mel,” Jayce confirms. “And you sound like a tarot reader.”

Viktor sighs, put upon. “I’ll take that over ‘fortune cookie’”

That comes from Jinx, who either doesn’t share their belief that the music box can foretell the future or doesn’t particularly like that it does. Jayce is pretty sure prognostication is what it’s doing, he remembers the Waltz of the Dolls the morning he met Viktor and, now that the pocket watch can give a time for its predictions, it’s hard to ignore if still frustratingly vague. Usually Jayce waits until the event comes to pass — never longer than twelve hours — and logs the results. It’s Viktor who always tries to guess in advance.

“Perhaps it will be a long time before you see Ms Medarda again,” Viktor says.

“I could have predicted that,” Jayce says. “She’s a busy woman. We’re a side-project.”

“All the better, really,” Viktor says, and closes the watch.

Jayce puts away his painting and gets his phone out to research stick insects. There’s a vase they’ve been working with that keeps cut flowers alive forever, or at least for the two years Jayce had it in the store room holding a bunch of daffodils. Plans are to set it up as a terrarium (or at least as the equivalent of a large jar with airholes) and put stick insects in it to see whether its life preserving properties extend beyond flowers. Since Viktor is adamant that they are going to feed the stick insects (despite the floweres surviving on only water) Jayce is researching ones that are short-lived in hopes that this experiment won’t take another few years before they know whether it’s worked. The Unarmed Stick, which usually only lives a few months over the summer, looks promising.

“Where’s Ms Young?” Viktor asks, looking up from his laptop. Their assistant is relatively new, the result of both their modest success with their studies and Viktor arguing that if Heimerdinger wanted to pay him he could afford to pay somebody else to help them, and Viktor is still getting used to having her around.

“She wanted a turn with the Adventure Yo-yo,” Jayce says.

“And you let her?”

Jayce holds up his hands in supplication. “Sky’s an adult and it’s never led us into real danger. Besides, Jinx went with her.”

“No… no, that’s worse. Much worse.”

“You don’t think Jinx can handle herself?” Jayce asks.

“I don’t think Jinx has ever made a situation less interesting in her life,” Viktor retorts.

Interesting situations are what the Adventure Yo-yo does. It was donated in order to get it away from its nine-year old owner whom it led through holes in fences and unlocked back doors into rubbish tips, movie theatres, fairgrounds, chalkpits and old houses with helpful abandon. To use it you put it to sleep, touch it to the ground to ‘walk the dog’ and then follow it as it walks you towards ‘something interesting’.

The last time Jayce had used it he and Viktor had been led to an unlocked warehouse which turned out to house things the police had marked for destruction, including both a lot of old evidence and some magic items, which had indeed been very, very interesting. The belt which had been used in a suicide and taken in as evidence only for a police officer to be found hanging from it the next day was horrifying. It had been nailed to a block of wood as if it might escape, with a note that incinerating it had not worked. The mask which made anyone wearing it completely unrecognisable to the point of witnesses not even being able to estimate height or weight was there because it had been used in bank robberies. Jayce had firmly resisted the urge to steal it, and even talked Viktor out of his attempt, despite the temptation. Sometimes he regrets that.

“I wasn’t going to tell her she’s not allowed when we’ve used it half-a-dozen times. She’ll be fine.” Then, quickly. “What are you working on?”

“The Ship of Theseus again,” Viktor says. The amount of a magic item needed for it to express its function had turned out to be irregular, sometimes almost exactly half, sometimes barely more than a third, but never a third or less. Which means that despite their attempts to massage the numbers into telling them something different the best they’ve done is duplicate magic items. Infinite rice bowls had been a nice idea but in practice they’re nowhere close.

“If time’s a factor we won’t know until some has passed. Whether that thing,” Jayce nods to the pocket watch, “will start to recognise the watch casing as part of the magic after a few years. If you ever let it stay in one shape long enough.”

“Clockwork is one of the easiest things to rebuild. We haven’t taken the dice charm apart since we made two of them.”

“No, although I do wonder whether it would become a charm for something else if it wasn’t dice-shaped,” Jayce says. “Some less gambling related form of luck.”

“We could test that with one of them and leave the other for Ship of Theseus purposes,” Viktor answers. “Assuming we’re done pitting them against one another. I think we have consistent data on what they do there.”

Pitting the luck charms against one another lead to the lowest possible hands in poker, always perfectly equal and always terrible. Betting on a flipped coin led to the coin falling on its edge, falling down the radiator halfway across the room and, in a possibly desperate attempt at escape after Jayce and Sky bet on it in the middle of an empy gymnasium with nothing to fall behind, down Jayce’s shirt. Betting odds and evens on a dice in a jar had led to the dice landing cocked against the side every time. Finally they’d outsmarted the charms by betting on coloured stones drawn from a bag. No stones had changed colour or vanished and Sky had finally won. After enough games they’d determined it was now running on pure chance.

“Yeah, I think we do.” Jayce tips back in his chair. “I could make a rabbit’s foot for more general luck.”

“Morbid,” says Viktor, wrinkling his nose. “At least make a whole rabbit.”

“I don’t think that has the same symbolism.”

“Why not? It has feet.”

Sky enters, windblown and happy, with a smudge of dirt on her cheek. She’s holding two sunflowers, both radiating golden light from their petals, both still with dirt and root balls attached at the base. Jayce steps forward immediately, reaching out to touch the petals very gently with the pads of his fingers. “Where did you get those?” he asks.

“Um. I stole them.” Sky glances sheepishly at Viktor, as if he would be likely to object. “But there were dozens, all growing along the back of a chicken shed, I don’t think they’ll miss two.”

“Wow,” Jayce says, wishing he’d gone with her. The idea of a whole row of sunflowers bathed in light is a gorgeous image.

Viktor gets up and comes over himself. “I’m glad your adventure was productive, Ms Young,” he says.

“Jinx was disappointed,” Sky says. “I think her idea of interesting is a bit louder.”

“Well,” says Viktor. “Thankfully she wasn’t the one using the yo-yo.”

“Those need to be potted up, don’t they?” Jayce says.

Sky nods immediately. “I was thinking of taking them home, with your permission.” It’s Viktor she looks to, not Jayce. Of necessity she’s been let in on Viktor’s secret and it seems to have left her a little awestruck, to be working with someone who stepped out of a fairytale. “I have big enough flowerpots and I’m good at gardening. I’d make sure they got water and nutrients.”

“Yeah, good idea,” Jayce says, sheepishly accepting the implication that he wouldn’t. “Do you want to go now?”

“It’s not a good idea to keep them like this for too long,” Sky says.

“I’m out at three to meet Mel, so if Viktor doesn’t need you you can take the rest of the day off,” Jayce tells her. “I mean, work from home. Since you’re busy with these beauties.”

“I’ve got something to work on in the machine shop,” Viktor says. “I’ll be fine.”

To Jayce, Mel seems far more like a doll than Viktor does with her quiet, knowing expression and tailored white dress. Every detail of Mel is chosen deliberately to create a beautiful, untouchable work of art. By contrast she makes Jayce feel clumsy and obvious, a warm, friendly animal, impulsive and a little annoying. But loveable anyway, if he’s lucky, because Mel smiles at him with real fondness even though he’s been off chasing the Ship of Theseus and ignoring the reason she funds him.

“Mel, I hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” he says, shaking her hand.

“Not at all, I would have gone inside if you had,” she answers.

The coffee shop Mel picked for this meeting is nice, really nice, and Jayce regrets that this isn’t one of their rare meetings over dinner. Both because he likes Mel and the chance to spend time with her and because it’s not every day he gets to dine on steak or lobster. Mel does let him order eclairs with his cappucino.

“A dignified choice,” she says, teasing.

“My dignity always suffers when I’m with you, if only by comparison, so I may as well enjoy it,” Jayce answers licking cream off his fingers. “How are things with you?”

“As they usually are,” Mel says. “I doubt you want to hear about the cut-throat world of investment banking.”

“I want to hear about you,” Jayce answers.

Mel goes quiet for a moment. “My mother’s been back in touch. One of the companies I backed did unexpectedly well.”

“She wants you to come back to work for her?” Jayce asks.

“And now that she does I’m no longer sure whether I want to. Whether I want this job, this life, at all.”

“You’re good at what you do,” Jayce says earnestly. “But you’d be good at anything. You don’t have to stick with finance now you’ve made your point.”

“Made my point.” Mel shakes her head. “It’s all been about her in the end, hasn’t it?”

“Mostly I think it’s been about you,” Jayce answers.

“Painting is the one thing in my life that has never been about her,” Mel says. “Painting and you.”

“I’m honoured to be part of your hobby.” He doesn’t think he’d survive being part of her job.

Mel draws herself up, suddenly regal. “Talking of painting,” she begins, and Jayce winces, anticipating being brought to task for his lack of results, but she continues, “I wanted to offer you an opportunity. Have you heard of Pañamarca?”

“I’m afraid not.” Jayce feels sheepish admitting he doesn’t know anything in front of Mel, maybe because she always seems to know everything herself.

“It’s an archeological site in Peru. It was inhabited in the past by both the Inca and the Moche people. Archeologists uncovered some murals there, recently, which have provided them with interesting insights into Moche culture.”

“So where does magic come in?”

“So single-minded.” Mel draws an envelope out of her handbag and speads the photographs from it on the table in front of Jayce. The murals are faded by time but still vividly expressive, colourful birds, dogs, monsters and, of course, people as well as any number of snakes, a few with human legs and all with pointed ears making them look both cheerful and fierce.

Jayce does a double take and then picks out three photos. The murals of people holding goblets are identical down to the fading and the crack running across one’s arm. It’s the same stretch of wall. One has no snakes, one has a single snake curled along the edge, and one has a snake in the foreground along with a smaller one popping out of a goblet.

“The snakes move,” he says, awed. “This is… how old is this?”

“They were painted between five hundred and nine hundred CE,” Mel tells him. “More than a thousand years ago.”

“You want me to go and look at them,” Jayce says, looking up at her. What else could she want? He’d have to be very unlucky for her to dangle this in front of him and not allow him to see it in person. “Because they’re a bit like your art.”

“A bit. It’s best not to make assumptions, but I suspect this would have been seen as a blessing more than a haunting. Or maybe just a curiosity.”

“But you do want me to look at them?”

“I do. And soon. Once the murals are documented, both photographed and painted in watercolour for reference, they will be covered over to protect them from damage. The earliest ones excavated faded badly once exposed.”

“But they can’t possibly document them if parts of them are moving,” Jayce protests. They’ll still need to be covered, he understands that, magic won’t stop them from fading. It just seems such a shame to lose a part of them like that. Something that can’t be replicated or recorded.

“Which is why I want you to see them before they’re covered. If possible I’d like you to leave on Saturday. Is that enough time?”

“Yes,” Jayce says, knowing it might not be really, he’s going to have to grovel to Heimerdinger to get his classes rearranged. “How long would I be staying?”

“A few weeks.” Mell tells him. “Will your new co-worker want to accompany you?”

“Ah, no. He’s kind of frail, I don’t think the journey or the climate would agree with him.” Which may well be true, considering Viktor has problems with humidity a semi-tropical climate is probably not the best thing for him. More to the point he definitely doesn’t have a passport and Jayce can’t tell her why he can’t get one without breaking Viktor’s confidence. “I’d be happy to go, though. More than happy.”

“I will accompany you,” Viktor tells Jayce that evening. Jayce spent the afternoon frantically arranging coverage for his classes and talking Heimerdinger around, so it wasn’t until after dinner that he’d sat Viktor down and told him the amazing news.

“What? No.” Jayce blinks at Viktor’s determined expression. “I know this is exciting — God, I know — but that’s not wise. Or even possible.”

“I know a passport is a concern, but I can travel in the hold with the luggage.”

Jayce scrubs a hand over his face. “And then you just turn up at the other end? With no explanation for how you got there?”

“No one at Pañamarca is going to know whether I was on the aeroplane. It won’t be a problem.”

“Being in a foreign country with no identification, no identity, is going to be a problem. Not to mention spending an eighteen hour flight in a suitcase.”

“I can get out of the suitcase once it’s in the hold.”

“Oh, wonderful, another way for you to be caught or lost.” Jayce gestures sharply, agitated. “And no, you can’t, even if we make sure you can open the suitcase from the inside those things are wedged in.”

“Then I can stay inside the suitcase. I could fit if I curl up, it’s not as if I need to be folded. Physically it wouldn’t be uncomfortable. My limbs don’t, eh, cramp.”

“Yeah, and mentally? I’m pretty sure shoving someone in a small dark space for eighteen hours counts as torture.” Jayce hesitates. “Have you ever been… stored like that before?”

Viktor flicks a glance at him out of the corner of his eyes and Jayce can see him think about lying, realise that Jayce can see him thinking it, and give up. “No. No, I’ve never been stored at all.”

“Then this really isn’t the time to experiment with it.” The thought of Viktor buried in the dark, unable to move or call out to anyone, is making Jayce panic.

Viktor’s eyes gleam. “It may be exactly the time to experiment with it. We have a few days before you go.”

“No!” Jayce snaps, nearly yelling, and Viktor just stares him down. Offended and disappointed that Jayce would shout at him. Jayce rubs his face again, runs his hand through his hair. Viktor is stubborn enough to force himself to remain in a suitcase for eighteen hours to prove his point. Jayce doesn’t think he could make it through two without opening the case and pulling him out. “There’s no point. This isn’t like wandering around the university with Heimerdinger’s blessing. Even at Pañamarca they’re not going to just let anybody in. They’ll want to see identification and credentials.”

“Then I will stay in the hotel room,” Viktor says, like that makes sense.

”Why the Hell would you put yourself through that to not even see the murals?” Jayce does yell that and he would have expected Viktor to amp up the disapproval, instead he ducks away from Jayce’s gaze.

“I’m going to my room,” he says and disappears.

It does not take long before Jayce is pacing up to Viktor’s door and retreating, regular as the tide. Disturbing Viktor when he wants to be alone will only make him more upset and while Viktor’s anger is never loud it is chilly and persistent as fog. Jayce is resisting the urge to sit outside his door and mope like a scolded dog.

When Viktor emerges Jayce blurts out an apology before he’s really taken him in and realised that Viktor seems not so much angry as genuinely sad. Which is worse, even though Jayce hates having Viktor mad at him, because if he’d been angry it would have been about the yelling but if he’s sad it’s about the trip and Jayce still can’t take him to Peru.

“You are forgiven,” Viktor says. “And you may have had a point about the eh, practicalities. Still, I would have liked to go on a trip with you.”

“We can go somewhere when I get back if you like,” Jayce offers. “Somewhere in the UK. We could visit Stonehenge.” Stonehenge is not magic in the sense that these Moche murals are, but a disproportionately large amount of magic happens near it.

“Would we have time if we weren’t going for work?” Viktor asks.

“Or we could take a day trip to London. The British Museum has a few magic pieces.” Viktor pulls a sour face and Jayce adds. “Yeah, I know. But they’re in this country even if you don’t think they should be. You could see them. We could take the Adventure Yo-yo with us and see if it gets us into a back room.”

“I’m sure we’ll find all sorts of things to do once you’re back,” Viktor says. “In the meantime, I will miss you.”

If taking Viktor wasn’t such a risk Jayce would be trying to think of ways to sneak him past security himself. It’s not going to be at all the same seeing the murals without Viktor there beside him, flitting about them with quick, bird-like steps as if he needs to see them from every possible angle, all his thoughts tumbling out in a stream of words matched to quick gestures if Jayce is the only one present. In front of the archeologists he would be silenced and still, picking his words with care and holding his shoulders tense but with excitement flashing across his face instead. Without Viktor’s ideas winding around his own and tugging them higher, constantly working on a foundation they build for one another, Jayce will feel like he has only half the potential he should, only half the ability.

“Yeah,” Jayce agrees, and maybe he would have said some of that if he hadn’t been afraid to give Viktor any encouragement to start trying to shove himself into a suitcase again. “I’m going to miss you too.”

Everything in the airport is gleaming and white and minimalistic in the way of a place where no one is expected to stay long enough for it to be worth putting in details. The crowds are swallowed up by the halls but still manage to be overwhelming, there’s no possible place to stand that isn’t in the way of someone in a hurry to get somewhere. Jayce makes his way through by being big enough that he’s difficult to miss and people part for him like salmon around a rock. Viktor makes his way through by dint of Jayce’s hand on the small of his back and Jayce’s body always angling to make a path for him.

“Are you going to be okay going back through this alone?” Jayce asks as a wheeled suitcase comes particularly close to taking out Viktor’s cane.

“Probably not. You should abandon your trip to Peru and take me home instead,” Viktor answers.

“I could take you back to the entrance now. You don’t have to wait with me,” Jayce says.

Viktor shakes his head and resists the urge to fist his hand in Jayce’s sweater, to cling on against both the crowd and their parting.

They wait at a bank of chairs, two rows facing each other. Jayce buys himself an overpriced coffee and sips it while they chat about the experiments Viktor will be running in his absence.

“It’s a good thing you have Sky to activate the magic,” Jayce says. He laughs. “You barely need me for anything now.”

It’s an invitation to banter and Viktor doesn’t take it. He looks away sharply at the pain in his chest, knowing he can’t cry and still fearing what his eyes might give away. Across from them his eyes land on a family, young parents and a four-year-old girl playing a game on her mother’s phone to keep her occupied. Her tiny pink backpack is abandoned on the chair beside her, a plush dog stuffed in the mesh pocket. What Viktor feels in that moment is a stab of pure, unadulterated envy for a piece of cloth with a dopey smiling face. Forgotten for now but still kept close, ready to be a comfort and companion on its owner’s journey. Doubtless there would have been tantrums if anyone had attempted to leave it behind.

“Hey.” Jayce puts a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“Working with Sky is really not going to be the same,” Viktor mutters.

“Working without you isn’t going to be great, either,” Jayce says, as if he isn’t the one who chose to go alone. “But it’s just a few weeks. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Once Jayce is gone, once Viktor is home and curled on his bed with his forehead on his knees and his hands in his hair, Viktor feels cursed. A haunted doll, filled with nothing but resentment for having been loved and cast aside.

Ridiculous. It’s only going to be a couple of weeks.

And yet, and yet, part of him cries that it’s unfair. How could Jayce let Viktor love him and then leave him so easily?

Chapter Text

Viktor, absorbed in his latest rebuild of the music box/pocket watch, ignores Sky taking a call on the lab phone in the background until she calls his name. When he looks up she adds, “There’s someone in reception asking for you.”

“Jayce is away,” Viktor says, as if that isn’t plainly obvious.

“He’s asking for you,” she repeats. “By name.”

“But I am not…” Viktor is not on the staff, not officially, or connected with the department in any way. The only thing his name is on are the papers he writes with Jayce and there are many papers written between people who are not lab partners. Perhaps this person has merely jumped to a conclusion that happens to be correct. “It would make more sense for you to go.”

“I guess I could. If you want.” Sky does not sound happy about it, she is less wary of people than Viktor is but far more genuinely shy. Anything Viktor wants her to do will be done, though, whether she likes it or not. Not because she’s his assistant, which she isn’t, technically, she’s Jayce’s, but because of her crush on him which Viktor, who can taste affection in all its forms, has no choice but to be aware of and no real idea how to handle.

“No,” he says, quickly. “This mysterious person would only ask you to fetch me if he has managed to notice my existence enough to ask for me by name. I may as well get it over with.”

Sky picks the phone back up and says, “Thanks, June. He’s coming down.”

The person waiting for him in reception causes Viktor to freeze the moment he gets the door open. A tall, thin man draped in a dark coat that makes him look even thinner, with deep-set eyes and sunken cheeks. Time and grief have made him cadaverous but there’s no mistaking him.

“Corin Reveck,” Viktor says.

When Corin looks at him Viktor can feel the thread of his affection too, more nostalgic than present, the knowledge that Viktor had meant a great deal to him a long time ago. “Viktor,” he says. His eyes take in the cane, ponder the hidden break in Viktor’s leg, brush over the body held stiff by the corset underneath. “You look well.”

Does he? “You do not,” Viktor replies.

Corin nods as if the assessment was expected. “We must talk,” he says. “Come.”

Viktor should refuse to go anywhere with this man who raised and ruined him but instead he follows without question, walking alongside Corin in silence until they reach a cafe a few streets away. Corin is, or was, wealthy, but the cafe is the saddest little place Viktor has ever seen. Long and thin, with windows only at one short end and its lights off during the day, leaving it with a cave-like aspect. The tables are chipped formica and the floor is peeling lino, the walls a dingy yellow that is either stained with grease smoke or a poor choice made for hiding stains. Corin orders a single black coffee and sits opposite Viktor who wraps his hands around his cane and wishes he had a coffee just for something less obvious to hold.

“The cryonics facility is closing,” Corin says. “I no longer have the money to move Orianna to another.”

“Why come to me?” Viktor asks. “I have no money at all.”

“Because you care about her,” Corin answers.

“I cared about her,” Viktor says, carefully, nearly choking on grief brought suddenly to the surface. “When she was alive. But she is dead. She is not Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, to be awoken if she is loved enough. I felt her ending, the thread between us cut, and she is gone.”

“I am not disputing her death.” Corin sounds so dry, so clinical. It is not that he feels less grief than Viktor, but that grief has never been anywhere but the surface for him. He functions through it the way Viktor had functioned through the pain in his leg, it makes no different to his tone to talk about Orianna because everything he feels for her is always there. “But she was preserved so soon after death that the patterns which made her are still there. Love by itself cannot bring her back, but the research it motivates still may.”

“Cryonics has never yet saved anyone’s life. The preservation is not as perfect as you claim, the cold itself causes damage, or the chemicals to prevent that cause damage of a different sort. I read the articles.”

“You are stubborn,” Corin says. “Unwilling to consider that your perspective may be flawed.”

Viktor spits with sudden venom, “I get that from you.”

It shocks both of them and they retreat back into themselves. Corin drinks his coffee.

“It was never my intention to replace Orianna as your owner,” he says mildly.

“Because if I had remained hers it would have proven she wasn’t gone,” Viktor answers, wearily. “What do you want from me now?”

“Tell me about your studies,” Corin says.

“Since when were you interested in magic?” Viktor asks.

“I gave up on magic,” Corin tells him. “It gives, but it does not take requests. It could have given Orianna her health, her life.”

“Instead it gave her me,” Viktor says, bitterly. “I will not apologise for my existence.”

“I don’t expect it. You are more innocent in this than anyone.”

Anger with Corin is like the sea flinging itself against a beach, the sand simply absorbs it. Viktor is left feeling unfair, irrational, that he’s blaming Corin for things that were merely a part of their own natures or the nature of magic.

“You have found ways to harness magic,” Corin continues. “Ways to bend it to a task. If that can be done it could still save her.”

Viktor wants to put his face in his hands, hide himself and give himself some time to think. Yet he does not dare to take his eyes off Corin, the grieving father whose presence feels like a dangerous predator.

“I do not want to consider what you would do with magic,” Viktor says, realising with a jolt that this man has already read his and Jayce’s papers. “What you did with science… I remember the mice.”

“My attempt to study and reverse the freezing process,” Corin answers.

“No,” Viktor says, feeling his hands shaking on his cane. “That one cannot have been frozen, it was still alive while you cut…”

“Perhaps that is another thing you got from me,” Corin says, musingly. “That we take apart simpler versions of creatures like ourselves to discover how they work.”

“That… no. No.” Viktor’s head is suddenly spinning as he thinks about the half-disassembled pocket watch, the dice he sewed into the shape of a rabbit yesterday following a pattern Jayce had left. “They do not… they cannot feel pain.”

“How would either of us know? There is only one magic item that can communicate whether it is suffering.”

And Viktor does feel pain but surely that’s only because he’s a mimic, a facsimile of humanity? Surely the rice bowl didn’t feel it when he and Jayce sawed through it in front of a crowd of interested onlookers, surely it wasn’t suffering when it continued to hand out rice as long as it physically could?

“Your experiments have led to wonderful discoveries,” Corin adds.

Viktor stands up, one hand on the table, looming over Corin as best he can. “It this is true it is just another way you have ruined me,” he hisses. “From Orianna I gained compassion, curiosity, the desire to live.” He chokes on the word, on how much it meant, how much more she had wanted than her short life ever allowed. “The things I could reflect that would make me a suitable companion for her needs. And what sort of companion was suitable for you? Obsessive, cold, ruthless, incapable of ever letting anything go. I lived on the streets, I broke and rotted, there is mould still in my chest, and yet it damaged me less than it would have damaged me to stay a single day more bonded to someone like you.” He coughs then, turning away and shoving his face into his elbow as it turns into a fit, his body trying to bring up everything toxic inside it. When he turns back Corin is holding out a number written on a napkin.

“If you ever reconsider,” he says. “For her sake.”

Viktor sits at his desk in front of the half-disassembled clockwork of the music box and the printed plate he divised for it. The little rabbit charm is in his hands. It had seemed funny yesterday, that Jayce had taken his half-joking suggestion seriously enough to make a pattern, so he had gone ahead and sewn it. The pattern preserved the strip of fabric that had originally formed three sides of the dice, shaping it into the head and most of the body without cutting into it with only side panels and limbs added in new fabric, so if a rabbit was too vague to create an effect there would be no harm done when they remade it. Now Viktor wonders whether it felt itself being taken apart. Whether the stuffing being pulled out of it — a mix of old and new — to be put back in later had hurt the way it hurt when he tried to remove his own. Or what if giving it the shape of an animal has made it able to feel pain when it couldn’t before?

“Are you trying to figure out ways to test that?” Sky asks as she enters the lab, thinking of her attempt to gamble with Jinx the day before which the charm had not affected at all. “If it’s a more general luck charm now maybe I should carry it with me for the day and see if things go well.”

“That is asking for confirmation bias and the placebo effect,” Viktor snaps.

Sky blinks and moves away from him, continuing with whatever task she interrupted. Viktor buries his face in one hand. Throwing himself into work has been a comfort in the absence of Jayce, now it feels contaminated. What has he done?

The clink of a mug at his elbow jolts him out of his spiralling thoughts. Sky smiles at him gently as she sets it down. The coffee has had cinnamon sugar stirred into it because Viktor enjoys the scent and he latches onto that, onto the sharp, sparkling thread of Sky’s affection, as quickly as he grasps at the mug. Sky’s crush unsettles him, like Franz’s love for Coppélia it is aimed at a being who can never satisfy it but only be a distraction from more suitable targets. Further, its nature seems to demand things of Viktor he does not want to give, but compared to Corin’s combination of nostalgia and complicity it feels very pure and gentle.

“You doing okay?” Sky asks. “Should I have told your visitor you weren’t here?”

“It might have helped.” Viktor forces a smile. “He was someone I had not seen in a long time and never expected to see again. I suppose I gave him the means to find me, but I never imagined he was looking.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Viktor does not want to talk about it. The confusing horror of knowing Orianna is caught forever in the moment of her death, never let go or laid to rest. The nature of being a doll, the way he acted against that nature in abandoning an owner who still wanted him and does not regret it when it meant not following Corin into a madness of mingled hope and grief. The way the brief conversation has contaminated the passion he shared with Jayce, left him both desperately wanting Jayce’s opinion and afraid to sully his dream to his face. But there is one thing he wants, no, needs to talk about when he and Sky are sharing a lab.

“He suggested that since I feel pain other magic items may be the same,” Viktor says. “He has no way of knowing if it is true and he said it to upset me. But I fear my only reason for doubting him is that I do not wish it to be true.”

Sky pulls over a chair and sits down next to him. With her chin proped in her hand she frowns at the clockwork. “You haven’t damaged any of the pieces of this,” she says.

“No, but,” Viktor recalls both his attempt to remove his own stuffing and Jayce’s horror at being told. “Removing parts from the, ah, whole can hurt. Even parts that could be reattached later.”

Sky’s frown deepens and Viktor feels a rush of gratitude that she’s taking this seriously. “You know, there are debates on whether plants can feel pain,” she says. “They definitely don’t feel it the way we — the way humans do but they can give off chemical distress signals and even audio ones in ultrasonic frequencies. Um. It doesn’t stop me pruning them.”

“I wouldn’t have suspected you so merciless, Miss Young,” Viktor teases. Even though he does feel shaken by the thought of plants screaming as Sky cuts them at the same time he feels a little better to think the magic items might be more like vegetables than they are like mice.

Sky smiles at him uncertainly. “Even plants can react to distress, that’s why they can feel it. Maybe they can’t run away, but they can ready a chemical defense or even call on insects for help. You can feel pain because it stops you…” She waves her hands. “But if they feel pain they don’t do anything we’ve ever noticed in response to it. Not even communicated it.”

“They have very limited means of communication.” Viktor picks up the now rabbit-shaped luck charm. “What could this do but fulfil its purpose or refuse to?”

“That though,” Sky points at the disassembled pocket watch again. “It could have played different songs. ’Help.’ ’S.O.S.’ ’Baby, don’t hurt me.’”

Viktor huffs a laugh.”It did offer more information when given the means. That’s why I was working on this.” He holds up the dial he made it, a ring of letters forming the alphabet. “Since I know it can move its hands to point to things. But it doesn’t answer questions. It’s not as if I could ask whether I’ve tortured it. If anything it would only give me more information about a random future event.” Is that evidence that he has not hurt it, that its functions are so limited? Pain would serve no purpose but when is magic ever logical?

“How recently were plant distress signals discovered?” he asks.

“…pretty recently,” Sky says.

“Then something like that can be missed, even for a long time.” If the magic artifacts are showing distress, or reacting to it, would he even know? Yet, as Sky says, she still prunes plants now it has been discovered. Farmers still farm. The world of living things is a savage one.

“You could work on other things for now,” Sky says, sounding definitely worried about him. “Test the null state of our backlog. Or, talking of plants, you could come over to my place and help with the sunflowers.” Sky blushes after saying it, apparently deciding it sounds forward in light of her crush. But Viktor needs something to do and the lab feels both empty and oppressive.

“Yes,” he says. “Let’s do that.”

When Viktor was younger he, Orianna and Corin had a garden full of roses, arbours and bowers of them, climbing roses and rose bushes, small open roses and large double-crowned ones, white, deep crimson, magenta, pink, the palest blush, yellow, a charming orange that darkened towards the petal tips, even lavender roses advertised as “blue” that had been a disappointment to all of them. The roses were for Orianna who, lover of fairytales, Disney movies and ballet, was obsessed with them and so she and Viktor had a garden fit for a fairytale princess and her enchanted doll attendent. Among the roses were scattered bird baths and bird tables, on which Corin made sure to place food daily, and Orianna and Viktor delighted in watching their feathery visitors, sitting quiet and still with binoculars and a book laid out in front of them to identify robins, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, wrens, goldfinches and many more. Even the magpies who would knock food from the feeders and the clumsy pigeons who waddled around looking for the dropped seeds were beloved.

Sky’s garden has a bird table too, but that is where the resemblance ends. In Sky’s garden there are neat beds of broad leaved vegetables interspersed with flowers. Sweet peas climb trellises among the runner beans, both of them behind a cabbage bed planted with cheerful orange and red blooms among its cabbages. There are marigolds among nearly full grown courgettes and many more flowers and vegetables that Viktor can’t hazard a guess at. Along one wall grow a cheerful array at sunflowers with the ones giving out light planted in large pots at the end.

“Is planting flowers and vegetables together a way to make the most of the space?” Viktor asks, charmed by the mixture of usefulness and beauty.

“Partly. But they’re companion crops, the marigolds attract polinators for the courgettes. The nasturtiums,” she points to the flowers blooming among the cabbages, “are sacrificial. Aphids and caterpillars like them so much they leave the cabbages alone.”

“So gardening really is a ruthless business.” Viktor awkwardly lowers himself to one knee to get a closer look at the nasturtiums. He can see the aphids now, startlingly thick on the leaves while the plants go on growing apparently unconcerned. “They seem to bear it well.”

“It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think it can be too horrible for them,” Sky says. “Plants spend most of their lives being eaten by something.”

So does Viktor thanks to the rot inside him, but then he was not a product of evolution like these. His body is not made to bear up under the circumstances most likely to happen to it, his body was never made to be inhabited at all.

“Tell me more about companion plants,” Viktor says and, when Sky hesitates and glances at the sunflowers shining like suns, he adds, “It might be relevant. For instance, is it true sunlight those shed? Could they grow other plants in the dark? Even beyond that, magic items nearly always exist in, eh. In tandem with humans.”

“You think it’s mutualistic symbiosis?” she asks.

“Something like it, perhaps. I do not know all that much biology and what I do know was more based in medicine.” Corin, a doctor whose degree in medicine had not been enough to save his daughter, had passed on that knowledge to him. But Corin had hired gardeners for the roses.

Sky looks away from him as she begins to talk, shy to let her own passions out despite how much she’s seen of Jayce and Viktor’s, but she relaxes when she sees how genuinely interested Viktor is. They talk about Sky’s garden, about nitrogen fixing such as the sweet peas are doing for the beans and cabbages, about the Three Sisters of Native American plantings, maize, beans and squash, how variations of that were grown all over North America. Sky says she’s heard beans can be planted with sunflowers and use them to climb instead of canes, but she hasn’t tried that yet. Talk turns to the symbiosis of trees and fungi, the mycchorhizal network that may allow trees to communicate and seems to facilitate sharing nutrients. “Sometimes the fungi are parasitic, though. Or they can switch between being parasitic and being beneficial at different times. It’s a very complicated relationship,” Sky says.

“So is humanity’s relationship to magic,” Viktor says. “I forgot you studied biology before joining us.”

“It’s looking like I can do both at once now,” Sky says, looking fondly at the sunflowers. “Let me show you the data I’ve gathered?”

At some point, after the sunflowers, Sky realises how late it has become and goes inside to cook dinner. “Do you want to stay?” she asks, so, so shyly with the feelings inside her swelling and choking her. “I know you don’t eat, but I’d like to have you.”

Viktor stumbles to his feet from where he’d been sitting in front of the sunflowers, using the excuse to look at his cane instead of her. Is it kinder to refuse when he knows this is… what is this? Jayce invited him… Jayce took him home the first time they met… is it only friendly to stay? Or is he encouraging feelings he cannot return? He wants to stay, in this little oasis of greenery where plants are cared for with both science and love.

“Thank you. I will stay.”

Viktor rebuilds the music box into its new form with the larger alphabet dial the next day. Even if he has hurt it already, it cannot feel better for being left in pieces, and he wants to know if it will communicate. He calls Sky over to test it and and she rushes over, pleased. Normally, even though being a pair of human hands for Viktor is part of her job, he would have called Jayce.

It’s too large for a pocket watch now, as big around as a saucer, but it still has a lid since that’s always been its trigger to play. Sky lifts it and the music that greets her makes Viktor smile. “Golden Afternoon.”

Sky listens intently for another minute and then she smiles too. “Alice in Wonderland. The one the flowers sing. I would have thought that would be yesterday’s song.” There’s a nostalgia to her smile, as if yesterday has already become a precious memory tucked away.

They both look at what the dial is doing, waving wildly between the first seven letters of the alphabet and none of the others, and then Viktor groans. “Musical notation. It’s giving us less information than it did as a pocket watch.”

“It was worth a try,” Sky says and Viktor knows that but he still wants her to go away so he can feel his frustration in peace.

The lab phone ringing gets his attention just as much as Sky’s for once. She picks it up and says, “No, Jayce isn’t here,” and then “If you told him that what does he think I can do?” then “Wait, it is? Then why does he want Jayce this time?” then, timidly, “Okay. I’ll come down.”

“Corin asked for you?” Viktor says, standing up and holding out an arm to forestall her.

“For Jayce, and then for any member of the Department of Magical Artifacts,” Sky says. “Assuming Corin is your visitor from yesterday?”

“I’ll go and talk to him. Stay here,” Viktor tells her.

Downstairs, Corin is waiting in the lobby and raises an eyebrow when he sees Viktor. “I was under the impression you didn’t want to talk to me,” he says.

“I don’t. But Sky is only an assistant, you can leave her out of this. And Jayce is away, as you have been told, nor would he tell you anything if he were here.” This is untrue, almost certainly, unless Viktor has a chance to warn him off first. Jayce will almost always tell anyone interested far too much about everything.

“I will find out for myself when he is back,” Corin says. “I don’t suppose you have reconsidered?”

“No.”

“No,” Corin agrees. “You have built a new life for yourself without her in it. With this Jayce.”

Viktor meets Corin’s eyes and thinks I will not be blamed for surviving her death, I had no more choice in that than in anything else and then no, I chose, I chose to live and I chose to accept her death, I can feel her absence like homesickness for her and for the person I was when I was with her, but I made my own decisions and I will not be blamed for that either. He says, “Yes. I have.” Then he turns and walks back towards the elevator.

Upstairs Sky is turning the lab upside-down until it looks as if Jayce has been there all week after all. “Viktor,” she says, on her knees under a table. “I can’t find the rabbit luck charm.”

Viktor slams his cane down too hard and say, “Of course you can’t.” It’s only when Sky turns hurt eyes on him that he finds himself fumbling for the right words to say that it’s not her who would of course lose a magical artifact they were working on, it’s just today, of course it would happen when everything is going wrong. “Today is not going well,” he tells her. He wants to be out of here, it feels as if the building itself has let him down. “Come and have lunch with me?”

The surge of affection and relief, tempered with a giddy nervousness of a different kind, is enough to make Viktor regret his impulsive offer. But Sky has already agreed and no matter how unsettled he now feels at his own behaviour he still wants both company and to be somewhere else.

Over lunch, soup for Sky and a peppermint tea for Viktor, Sky asks about Corin.

She asks, “Is he stalking you?”

“Two calls in one week after not seeing me for years hardly meets the definition,” Viktor says. “Especially when he was looking for Jayce the second time.”

Sky frowns. “You just seem… worried. Who is he?”

“Someone who has never known how to let go.” Viktor shakes his head. “No, I am not the one he is obsessed with. I am merely denying him something he wants.”

“Are you in danger?”

“No.” Viktor turns to her and wonders how to convey sincerity, how Jayce would do it. “What he wants is knowledge, not something he can force from me. Ah, that is, he has not even threatened me or done anything but ask. I apologise for worrying you, I know I was… shaken, but the past suddenly reappearing… Think of him as a relative with whom I have a troubled history, nothing more.”

“Some histories are more troubled than others.”

“It is nothing like that.” Viktor does not know what it was like. “You have almost certainly guessed I was his daughter’s, how else would I have a relative? He was both my father and not and after she died I left him. But he has never harmed me nor forced me against my will save when I was a toddler and might have broken ornaments or myself without his intervention.”

Sky’s desire to comfort him is palpable but she is at a loss as to what to say, what he needs to hear.

“Forget him,” Viktor says. Forget him, forget the missing charm and the useless alphabet dial he made, forget the lab echoing with the Jayce’s absence and the flat echoing worse. “Come shopping with me. I need your advice.”

There’s a hesitation, Sky not ready to let go of the previous subject even though she has no idea how to address it, but then she says, “Shopping for what?”

“Flowers. For the balcony. Jayce doesn’t have any because he would forget to water them but I will remember. And a bird feeder.”

“It’s not like you to play hooky,” Sky says, half laughing.

“I don’t have a job. I’m a doll. You are the one playing, ah, hooky, Miss Young.”

She does laugh then and says, “I’ll tell Jayce it was your fault.”

“Mm,” says Viktor. “Good.”

In the evening, at what would be dinner time if Jayce was there, Viktor sits on the balcony between the newly bought pots of moss rose, leadwort and verbena with birdseed cupped in his hands. It has been a long time since he has done this and he finds he can no longer comfortably kneel, but he sits with one leg out straight and one slightly bent, still as a garden statue.

This is not Orianna’s garden, nor Sky’s, and the birds that come are not tits and finches. They are sweet, messy pigeons, perching on his arm because they are too large and clumsy to use his fingers, oily iridescent starlings in a noisy crowd like Viktor is the bar at a club, a few sparrows, too few for the wild chirping he associates with a hedge full of them, and one pert wagtail in his neat black and white. They flit and squabble in front of Viktor’s eyes, letting him take in every delicate feather and every detail of their markings. The dark lovely eyes of the smaller birds like oildrops. The amber ringed glassy eyes of the pigeons, like his own.

Then night falls and they fly away.

Chapter Text

Knowing Jayce is coming back that evening is like waking from a dream. Not a wholly unpleasant dream, but still one that has been fogging Viktor’s senses, blunting the sharp edges of his emotions, until now when he can let himself emerge. The morning is spent working on contained environments for a sunflowers, so that they can determine whether a magical sunflower uses more carbon dioxide, or water or any nutrient, than the one of Sky’s sunflowers they’ve decided to use as a control.

“Viktor,” Sky says, softly. “Are we going to lunch today?”

“I want to get this finished, but there’s no need for you to wait for me,” Viktor says, eyes on the wiring diagram. “It’s not a problem if I skip lunch.”

“Viktor,” Sky’s voice is even softer, but insistent. Maybe a little exasperated. Has she forgotten he doesn’t need to eat? Does she think he needs a break anyway? “I wanted to talk to you.”

“Did it need to be over food?” Viktor looks up at her, still hunched over his desk. “If it’s about the luck charm being missing, Jayce will understand.”

“It’s not about Jayce. It’s about us,” Sky says. “Or, I suppose, it’s about me.”

Viktor stands up, suddenly wary and wanting to be at eye level with her. She falters under his full attention and he looks away again quickly. The gushing sparkle of her crush is there but held back, like a fountain with hands cupped over it, a sense of building pressure.

“You know I,” she breaks off, “Working with you has been an inspiration, is an inspiration. No, not just your work, you. It’s easy to believe magic can make the world a better place when the world is a better place for having you in it.” She takes a breath, adjusts her glasses. “I have feelings for you and…”

“I’m sorry,” Viktor chokes out, not wanting to hear the rest. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

Sky takes a step forward. “If this is because you’re not human then that doesn’t matter to me.”

“Yes,” says Viktor. “And no. It is your choice if you wish to date an artifact, but you are asking for feelings I am not even capable of.”

Sky looks at him sadly. “You don’t have to return my feelings but I know you can care about people. I know you do care about people.”

“There are different kinds of love and there are some kinds I was not made for. Or is that the attraction? Do you not mind me being a doll, or do you like the idea of loving me enough that I suddenly devolop the capacity to love you back the way you want?”

“That’s completely unfair.” There are tears in Sky’s eyes behind her glasses but her expression is angry. “I had no idea what you could and couldn’t feel. Did you know? How I felt?”

Viktor rests his palm on the desk, pressing down, stabilising himself. “Yes. I knew.”

Sky looks away, blinking hard. “I didn’t expect that,” she says, voice soft again. “I thought you might know and… and maybe we’d already started dating, maybe neither of us knew how to say it. I hoped, I guess. Or I thought maybe you didn’t know and it was going to be awkward and I’d get rejected. I even wondered if maybe you were just using me as a placeholder. You and Jayce are so close, maybe you were just lonely, with him gone. But I didn’t think you’d know and still take me out to lunch without saying anything, that you’d use me as a placeholder if you knew.”

It cuts to the heart of the matter and leaves Viktor speechless. There are things he could blame: that he had been awkward, not known where the lines were; that he is a magic artifact activated by affection; that over years alone he had become used to leaning into every scrap of affection that came his way whether it came in a form he liked or not, anything to ease the yawning emptiness inside him. None of it changes the fact that Sky was a colleague, maybe something like a friend, and did not deserve to have her heart broken so that Viktor could feel less alone for two weeks.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pressing his hand over his eyes. “I should have said something much sooner.”

Sky sighs. “So should I. If only for my own sake.”

When she walks out she closes the door very, very pointedly quietly behind her.

Jayce is waiting by the luggage carousel keeping half an eye out for his luggage while he goes through photographs of the murals on his phone again. The base state, represented by photos taken when no one was in the room, then the wide variety of places snakes had appeared while someone was present. There are sketches done by the archeologists too, sometimes easier to decipher than the faded paint in the photographs. Jayce’s own sketches are in his luggage, he needs to compare them to the similar photos and sketches he’d made of Mel’s paintings in the early days, the many places clawed shadows and bright eyes had found to peer from. Is it in the pigment or the wall, he wonders? Or both perhaps. Are invisible snakes, the idea them still in places there was once paint, slithering across walls that look empty to human eyes? He should ask permission first but maybe he can experiment with one of Mel’s pictures. Gradually abrade the paint, see if it makes a difference to the hauntings when the image becomes less clear. With Sky working for them the necessity of having a human present at all times to get a reaction isn’t prohibitive. Not a very interesting task for her, Jayce acknowledges, but she can handle their accounts while glancing up now and then. He feels like there’s a joke in there about watching paint dry but it’s not coming to him.

“Jayce Talis?” asks someone beside him. A tall, gaunt man is holding his suitcase out to him, when he raises an eyebrow the man adds, “You already missed it once so I thought I’d step in.”

“Oh, thanks,” Jayce smiles at the man and lowers his phone. “I don’t think we’ve met?”

“Dr Corin Reveck. I read your papers.” Which absolutely does not explain how he recognised Jayce. Okay, probably he looked up Jayce’s staff bio, but that’s effort. That’s not just someone who happened to bump into you at the airport after taking an interest in your ideas. “I was hoping to talk about medical applications.”

“That would be great,” Jayce says, enthusiasm only slightly tempered by suspicion. “You could come by the lab to talk about it, tomorrow if you can make it.”

“I was hoping we could talk now,” says Dr Reveck.

“Now?” Jayce looks at the time on his phone. The first thing he does after arriving in the country should not be calling to tell Viktor he will be late. Anyway, he doesn’t want to be late, he wants to see Viktor, to tell him all about Pañamarca and ask his opinion on all of it. Also to check that he’s okay. Jayce left him money in cash and Sky and Heimerdinger would look out for him, but if something went wrong in the flat he’s not on the lease. “If you come by the lab tomorrow — or whenever you’re next free — we could show you a lot more of what we’re working on. One of our team members has a background in biology so she’d probably understand a lot more than I will, especially with none of my notes handy.”

“Only one of your team?” Dr Reveck asks. “Viktor also has a background in medicine.”

“What?” The interjection is so unexpected it’s almost surreal. The idea of Viktor having a background in medicine, the picture of him in doctor’s scrubs that comes into Jayce’s mind. When? How? That’s not even possible. “I think you’re mistaking him for someone else.”

“No. Viktor is definitely one of a kind.” Dr Revek’s pale eyes meet Jayce’s meaningfully as a family comes up to the carousel chattering with one another. “I was hoping to talk to you about him, as well.”

“Okay,” Jayce says. “Okay. Where did you want to talk?”

A booth in a diner is no more private than the airport, really, in both places any privacy comes mostly from everyone around them being intent on their own business. It does feel more secure, though, with the high backs of the benches secluding them from their nearest neighbours and, importantly after a day in the air, there is food. Jayce is trying to treat this as a business meeting and eat at a measured pace rather than actually inhaling his burger and chips. Dr Reveck has ordered nothing but coffee, despite Jayce’s offer to pay.

“How do you know Viktor?” Jayce asks, the question feeling extremely mundane but much better than How do you know what Viktor is? Do you know what Viktor is?.

“He was my daughter’s doll,” Dr Revecks says bluntly.

Jayce catches his breath. “He said you didn’t want him after she died.”

“It was a complicated situation. I would have sheltered him and I did care for him. In many ways that was the problem.” Dr Reveck wraps his long fingers around his mug and leans forward. “How much do you know about the way Viktor works? Have you experimented on him at all?”

“He’s my co-worker,” Jayce says. “I’ve observed him but I’m not going to start… I’m not going to risk hurting him.”

“What have you observed?” Dr Reveck asks.

It feels wrong to talk about Viktor clinically, especially with the man who raised him, who claims to care about him. It is fascinating, though, and it’s information Jayce perforce keeps to himself rather than discussing. “The materials behave mostly like cotton and bisque with altered behaviour only where it’s necessary to create the illusion of a human. The bisque looks entirely like flesh but chips neither bleed nor heal and the cotton —”

“Not physically,” Dr Reveck interrupts.

“Then what? Mentally he’s a person.” A slightly eccentric person, sure, but it’s not like Jayce can talk. “We’ve got a lot in common.”

“I imagine you have,” Dr Reveck says. “Viktor is a mirror. Not a perfect mirror but a mixture of traits taken from his owner and those traits that they would want in a companion.”

“That’s not true,” Jayce says. Yet it makes sense, doesn’t it? No one else ever understood Jayce’s interests, Jayce’s dreams, let alone so perfectly. No one else slotted so easily and completely into his life that he could spend eighteen hours a day with them and still regret going to bed when it ended a discussion. Jayce has a handful of close friends and gets on well with his students but even his friends usually only want the parts of him that align with their interests. Viktor is different, has always been different, but is it really because he’s an imaginary friend made real?

“The nature of magical artifacts is to be responsive,” Dr Reveck says. “In a sense they feed off the emotions directed at them. Those emotions are necessary for them to continue being more than the objects they started as.”

“It’s not really feeding,” Jayce interrupts.

“Or like a plant photosynthesising. Viktor takes in love like sunlight and like a plant he bends towards any place he can find it.” Jayce shakes his head, but Dr Reveck continutes relentlessly. “For my daughter he was a perfect companion. Gentle and empathetic, because she needed a friend who would understand and try to mitigate her pain instead of becoming frustrated when she couldn’t keep up. Curious about the world because she was curious herself and it meant he could share her interests. But after her death it was natural for him to move on instead of grieving. When she could no longer provide the emotions he needed then he turned to me.”

It’s like being dunked in ice water, the feeling of shock, of Jayce’s body and mind lagging behind the experience leaving a blank confusion of this feels bad, but why does it feel so bad? Viktor had said, right at the beginning, that he’d come into existence as a companion for a girl and been surprised to outlive her. There should have been follow up questions, except Viktor had said it was private and Jayce had wanted him to stay more than he wanted to understand him. More fool Jayce.

No, no, this is Viktor. Jayce’s friend who loves cinnamon, ginger, aniseed and cloves, because they give strong scents to things he can’t eat or drink but can still hold. Who gets teased by Jinx about his obsession with that pocket watch, an obsession driven by wanting to know the future far more than Jayce does. Who works through mealtimes because he doesn’t need to eat, unless Jayce can convince him he’d like company, and tries to work through the night even though he does need to sleep. Who makes jokes that don’t quite land right and says things too bluntly and cares so much more than people realise.

…But how much of that is real?

“There’s no proof any of this is true,” Jayce says firmly.

Dr Reveck smiles. “Did he truly work on the paper you published? Not just add his name?”

“What? Of course he worked on it, you have no idea how smart he is!”

“There was maths in there I didn’t understand,” says Dr Reveck. “And if he didn’t learn it from me then he learned it from you.”

“No, I didn’t need to teach him…”

“I found the same thing,” Dr Reveck continues as Jayce tails off. “With medicine in my case. It was important to me, it was the main thing I needed someone else to understand when I had always been isolated in my pursuits, and suddenly Viktor could keep up with me.”

“A mirror.” Half of Jayce’s burger remains uneaten. He doesn’t want it now. “Why tell me this?”

“It is germane to your research, is it not?”

“Is it? To tell me the person who’s been responsible for every breakthrough I’ve had is some kind of… of parasite?”

“Whether or not you see him as a parasite depends on how highly you value what he gives you in return. Would you prefer to have continued in ignorance?”

“I would have preferred…” Jayce would have preferred to hear it from Viktor. Except that was never going to happen. How could he spend a year with Jayce hiding something like this? It’s not as if Jayce didn’t know that he had opened up a lot more to Viktor than the reverse, that Viktor talked around his emotions and only let Jayce see the shape of them in the gaps between words. That he’d let Jayce guess the shape of those emotions so wrongly, though, that he’d sat up with Jayce on the sofa chatting late into the evening and been soaking in friendship like nourishment, Jayce’s confidences just another proof of something he needed. “It’s late. I should get home.”

“Where have you been?” Viktor demands before Jayce is even through the door.

“I met a guy at the airport.” Jayce toes his shoes off and pads through to the kitchen. “Someone interested in medical applications of what we’re doing.”

Viktor perks up. “Did they have any kind of line to us being able to study healing artifacts?” Those are usually found in hospitals, where the need for them makes carving out time for them to be studied very difficult, or in churches, where the same thing is true and everyone is a lot less inclined to try carving out that time.

“I doubt it.” Jayce is hungry but he doesn’t want to eat, still feels vaguely nauseous. Toast, maybe. He finds some sliced bread.

“What did he say then?” Viktor is standing by the kitchen table in the corner of Jayce’s eye and Jayce realises that’s how he’s been looking at Viktor since he came in. Out of the corner of his eye, like Viktor is a trick of the light that might vanish if Jayce looks at him straight on.

“Later,” Jayce says. “It’s been a long day.”

“All the longer, I’m sure, for engaging happenstance acquantances in long conversations instead of telling them to make an appointment at the lab.” Viktor pushes a hand through his hair and Jayce forces himself to look. Just Viktor. Annoyed because Jayce is late, because Jayce is scatter-brained and impulsive and Viktor is a person with opinions — lots of opinions — not some perfect, blank-slate companion. “The murals then, at least tell me your trip was worth it.”

“Right, the murals. I’ve got to show you…” Jayce fumbles his phone out and goes about making toast with one hand while scrolling through photographs for Viktor with the other. Viktor leans on him for balance, cool fingers laying on Jayce’s arm, and Jayce feels the familiar surge of protective anxiety at the lightness of Viktor’s weight, the realisation of the fragile body his sharp mind resides in. “… So I thought maybe I could abrade the surface of one of Mel’s paintings and get Sky to watch it. Or put it in the lab, so we can both look up when we’re between tasks. If we’ve got a camera on it we don’t need to be watching closely,” Jayce finishes.

“Ah.” Viktor peels his hand from Jayce’s arm and shifts backwards, shoulders hunched. “It might be kinder to give Sky tasks outside the lab for a few days.”

“What happened?” Jayce asks, train of thought screeching to a halt in alarm. “Did someone upset her? Wait, was it me? Did I do something?”

“No. I did.” Viktor is picking at a splinter on the edge of the kitchen table, eyes intent on the task. “She… she had feelings for me and I handled it badly. What she wanted was impossible but I encouraged her for too long without thinking.”

Jayce’s heart thumps. “Were you feeding on her?”

Viktor’s head comes up like a startled deer, eyes wide and round, lips slightly parted. The hand he’d been picking at the table with skitters along its edge and then he lifts it in a meaningless gesture, trying to pretend his guilty start was something else. “What do you mean, Jayce?”

Jayce huffs. He’s always thought Viktor a poor liar and it’s holding true. Apparently he’s much, much better at lying by omission. “You know what I mean. Dolls need to be loved, right? When did you turn her down? Today? Because you knew I’d be back and you only need one person at a time?”

Viktor is pale now, eyes glazed. “Who?” he mouths. Then he grimaces, coming back to life, muttering rapidly. “‘Someone interested in the medical applications of what we do’, of course. He went after you at the airport, has probably been spending every day there for the last week — utterly obsessed — he didn’t even give me a chance to warn you.”

“Warn me not to listen to him?” The toast pops up and makes them both jump. Jayce ignores it. “But it’s true, or you would have had no idea what I was talking about.”

“It’s somewhat true. I don’t feed on people, Jayce. It doesn’t take anything. I haven’t hurt anyone.” Viktor’s eyes are shadowed, pleading.

“Not even Sky?”

“I hurt her feelings, you know that’s not the same thing.”

“Do you even care that you hurt my feelings?”

“Yours?”

“Yes, mine. How do you think it feels, to learn the only person who understands you is just reflecting what you want to see so they can, can use you? Would it have bothered you if I’d taken you in and invited you to stay, if I’d acted like we were friends, but really I just wanted to study you? Would that have hurt or would you just have been disappointed I wasn’t giving you what you need to do whatever it is you do?”

“I’m a person, Jayce. I do have feelings.”

“I know that.” Jayce scrubs his hands over his face like he can wipe everything away. “I know you’re a person, Viktor, I’m just not sure what kind of person you are anymore.”

“I understand.”

Viktor walks away and Jayce thinks he’s going to his bedroom, giving Jayce a chance to cool off, until he hears the front door close. He runs, everything else forgotten, flinging himself into the corridor in his socks. Viktor is standing in front of the elevator with his hand flat on the wall beside the call button, leaning his weight against it with his head hanging.

“Viktor!”

He looks up when Jayce calls but doesn’t move his arm, instead peering out from behind it.

“Where are you going?” Jayce demands, feeling as if a hand is wrenching at his heart.

“I don’t know.” Viktor’s voice is dull.

“Are — when are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t do this,” Jayce says. “Look, come, come back inside. I didn’t mean, I don’t want to get rid of you!”

“No?”

“No!” Jayce takes a step forward and Viktor shrinks back, eyes darting to the call light. “You’re my best friend, I don’t want you to leave. I was just upset! Aren’t I allowed to be upset without you immediately walking out on me?”

“Not when it’s over something I cannot change.”

“It’s about being lied to —”

The ding of the elevator door opening cuts Jayce off and he gasps, trying to catch his breath in the sudden silence. Viktor walks into the elevator, looking small framed by its doors, alone in the bright box of its interior. Jayce makes an aborted lunge for the door but Viktor turns and looks at him with such decision that he’s brought up short, feet skidding on the carpet and hand still reaching.

The door closes.

There is a multi-storey carpark overlooking the river, not particularly hard to get into at night but inconvenient enough the local teenagers don’t bother. Viktor, pressed up against the long, thin bars of the safety-railings right at the top, is barely more than a shadow. His bad leg is pulled in against his chest tight enough that he can rest his cheek against his shin, not out of pain, although it aches from the walk up, but so that he can feel the shell of the plastic cast Jayce made him. Little heaving motions run through his chest, not sobs, not even breaths, but enough to lift his shoulders with each one. Below the river runs oily in the dark, this area, on the edge of being abandoned, barely able to muster a street lamp to make it gleam. There was a pay-phone at the bottom, though, near a shopping mall that mostly sells second hand china and haircuts now, a pay-phone that will not be fixed next time it is broken. For now it allowed Viktor to make a call.

Corin walks through the dusty, echoing shadows of the carpark as though he belongs to them. Viktor lifts his head to watch him come, too weary to get up or even to pretend he isn’t grieving.

When Corin comes to a halt in front of him Viktor says, small and childish, “I want to go home.” The stupidity of the words makes him wince but Corin only nods, he understands better than anyone that home is a time.

“You called me,” he says. He sits down next to Viktor, folding himself into the space beside the railing.

“I should be angry with you. You deliberately ruined things for me.” Viktor turns his head away, fixing his gaze on the river, on the tall shadows of cranes on the other side of it in the city’s industrial district.

“But you aren’t.”

“I’m furious. But.” Jayce is lost to him. Sky he treated badly. Corin never wanted him at all. And through all the dusty, empty years, has there ever been anyone else? In the end there is only one person he was made for, one person who might still find him worth keeping in spite of it all. “‘For her sake’ you said. Do you really believe you can bring her back?”

“With your help, yes.” Corin pulls out his phone, shows the PDF of one of Jayce and Viktor’s papers already on the screen. “Take me through this.”

The two of them hunch over the light of the phone, Corin’s gaunt face becoming a skull in its blue-white glow, eyes so sunken there’s nothing but black and nose lost in its own shadow. Viktor taps at words on the screen as he talks, knowing he won’t activate the touch screen because even a phone can tell that he isn’t a person. Orianna is gone, he knows, but still he needs to hope because if she can come back then she will understand. Orianna won’t look at him the way Jayce did, as if he’d suddenly caught the lack of reflection in a mirror and realised he’d been living with a vampire.

“It will work,” Corin says decisively, putting the phone away. He stands up and holds one hand out to Viktor. “Do you want to see her?”

Viktor, blinking in the sudden dark, reaches out towards Corin’s triumphant shadow. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

Being taken to across the river to a storage unit painted in fading yellow only surprises Viktor because it is not a cryonics facility. Has Corin really managed to set up that kind of equipment ad hoc?

The yellowed electric light reveals a room full of medical equipment, needles and threads, scalpels and forceps, on a variety of surfaces. Clean, but not sterile, although there is an autoclave in the corner. In the centre, below the single bare bulb, is a bed, an ordinary little girl’s bed, the bedcover embroidered with butterflies. Orianna is tucked into it, eyes closed, head settled into the pillow and hands folded neatly on top of the covers. Something about her is wrong beyond even the impression of a corpse on a bier. The set of her shoulders is sunken, her tiny body seems to form no lump beneath the covers.

“No cryonics,” Viktor whispers, unable to look away from her, from the round softness of her pale cheek. In a way she looks healthier dead than she ever had alive. Golden hair forms a halo around her face.

“No,” Corin says, also hushed in her presence. “Reading your papers told me what was needed so I went ahead and made preparations.”

Viktor steps forward, one trembling hand reaching out to stroke a lock of hair back from her face, and sees that her shoulders are gone. The face, the lower arms and hands, are filled out with something but the shoulders and upper arms, the chest disappearing below the covers, are nothing but skin, empty and preserved, a taxidermy half-done. The world seems to slow as Viktor pulls his hand back, cradling it in the other as though it had been burned, and pulls it to his chest.

Corin steps up behind Viktor and places a hand on his shoulder. Shuddering under that touch Viktor moves to shrug it off, but Corin moves faster, sliding his hand beneath Viktor’s shirt and the straps of his brace to the knot holding his head in place. Viktor gasps, turns, hands coming up in order to fight as if he wasn’t just a doll, and then those thin, strong fingers tug and he feels himself come apart.

Chapter Text

When Orianna was six they had gone to the beach. It was not their first time, nor their last, Orianna was fascinated by day trips anywhere. Steam trains, museums, circuses, theme parks, zoos — her world was a small one and she fought ferociously to expand it. It was a good year for her that year, she was full of unaccustomed energy and frustrated with the care she normally submitted to. She danced through the house, demanded dresses that swished and then tore them trying to climb trees in the garden. Viktor, quieter but no less fierce in his curiosity, let her demand days out for the both of them.

So they had gone, Viktor in bundled in waterproofs from head to toe, Orianna in a child-sized wet suit so she could enjoy the water without being chilled, and Corin in board shorts and an oversized t-shirt which only made him look more like a nocturnal creature winkled out into daylight. Orianna wiggled while she was suncreamed, bare feet tapping and twisting in the sand.

“Volley ball first,” she said, running to draw a line in the sand with her toe. “Me and Viktor against Papa, because Papa has the longest arms.”

Viktor nodded in happy agreement because while Orianna struggled to run around the court once she had her hand on the ball it would go wherever she sent it and even Corin’s long arms wouldn’t be enough to save him. So Viktor ran for her, the soft sand beneath his feet both impeding him and making it okay to risk a fall, passing the ball to her whenever he got it. Until the match ended with her sinking to her knees, panting softly when she had been laughing a moment ago, and Viktor and Corin both ran guiltily to check on her. Corin gave her orange juice while she said, “What shall we do next? Paddling?”

Viktor pulled a face because no amount of waterproofs made paddling in anything but very shallow water a good idea for him and even then Corin didn’t want to be far from him. So either he stayed on the beach or he limited how deep Orianna could go.

“You should sit under the umbrella for a bit,” Corin said. “Rest.”

“I’m fine now,” she argued.

“Build a sandcastle with me,” Viktor said.

“A castle for sea fairies,” Orianna said decisively. “Okay.”

Viktor fetched buckets of sand for her and dug the moat, while Orianna sat on her heels and built up the square base. Then they both built the towers, arguing over the design, seriously discussing whether another tower would make it fall down.

“It’s done,” Orianna finally declared, sticking a lolly stick she’d found in the top as a flag. “And I’m rested! Paddling now.”

“Very well. Paddling.” Corin agreed. He looked down at Viktor, sitting on the sand. “Are you coming?”

Viktor shook his head. “I’ll decorate the castle.”

He watched as they walked off hand in hand, silhouettes against the bright sun and the sparkle of the sea so that he had to squint to see them at all.

Coming apart hurts like a dislocation, whatever makes Viktor into one being stretching across the impossible gap between his neck and shoulders, tearing and bruising more with every inch, and under the pain lies the intense, terrifying wrongness of this displacement. His body collapses at Corin’s feet, his head swinging from Corin’s fist in his hair. Viktor’s mouth opens in a scream that comes out soundless, he can feel blank air drawn in through the gaping hole of his neck by the force with which he expels it, throat tight and straining.

Corin drops him and Viktor shuts his eyes before he hits the floor. The thud of him doing so echoes, his hollow spaces resonating, and sharp pain runs from the top of his ear down, somehow, into his body, pooling cold terror into his belly and making his limbs spasm. Some mad, habitual part of him thinks that at least it’s the top of the ear, he’ll be able to hide the chip beneath his hair. The thought draws him back into something approaching lucidity. In front of him is dusty concrete floor, the metal leg of a bench, stains of damp and mould running up the wall from where it meets the floor. Beneath his cheek the concrete is cold and rough and the smell of dust and mould is in his nose, this orients him, the sensory input from his head matching what he sees, and he tries to stay in that bubble for a moment, let this one piece of him be enough while he calms.

If Viktor strains his eyes back as far as they will go he can make out the blurry shape of Corin moving his body, removing its corset. The fingers quick and clinical against his cotton, neither gentle nor rough, is something he can feel too and being able to feel it three feet away is so wrong it nearly makes him panic again. Clenching his eyes shut he fights it back, ignoring the dizziness it leaves in its wake. If he can feel his body he can move it.

Attempting to move his right arm makes it twitch, spasm, palm scraping against the concrete. Something is wrong, the signals tangled by space and pain. Or more than that, some necessary illusion has been broken. His body is a sack of mouldy cotton with pottery tied to its ends. Viktor tries to roll his right shoulder and there is no shoulder, no shape of a shoulder underneath the cotton, tries to wiggle his fingers and there is no muscle, no tendon. When he needs to think about each motion what can he think about? The structured poem of a body dissolves into nonsense verse. In desperation he simply tries to flail and his arm finally moves, hand open and fingers curled like petals, the unco-ordinated motion of a newborn, hand plapping gently against Corin’s shoulder. Ignoring it, Corin sets the corset aside and sticks his hand down the stump of Viktor’s neck.

After lunch, after Orianna had tired of paddling while Viktor decorated their castle in twisting abstract designs of shells and pebbles, they had gone to the rock pools. There they had found anemones and shrimp, starfish plastered to the rock, seaweed in long green ribbons and purple bobbly ones, tiny alien gardens.

“The algae makes the rocks slippery so be careful,” Corin told them, hands under Viktor’s armpits as he helped him find a place to crouch. “Neither of you should try to move unless I help you. Just watch the animals.”

Of course they didn’t listen, clambering on hands and feet like monkeys and protesting that they weren’t standing up while Corin turned back and forth between the two of them, exhausting himself trying to support them every time they reached a little too far. Viktor was the one who fell in the end, chasing after a shoal of tiny, bright fish that flashed silver in the sun while Corin was trying to prevent Orianna from poking a crab. He landed, fortunately, with sharp rock hitting his middle not his limbs, cotton simply absorbing the blow.

“It doesn’t hurt,” he said, quickly, when Corin reached for him, not wanting to make anyone worry.

“Let me see your arms and legs.” Corin rolled up Viktor’s sleeves and the legs of his waterproof trousers and sighed in relief when the bisque was unmarred. On turning he found Orianna was already leaning out over a larger rockpool, trying to see a jellyfish, and he hurried to catch her before a worse accident happened.

“What now?” Orianna asked happily when they had returned to the beach.

“Ice cream,” Corin said, decisively. “I fear I need one after that.”

Viktor shed his waterproofs and Orianna swapped her wetsuit for a dress before they went to walk along the promenade. Orianna kept twirling to make her skirt flare out and the diamante buckled on her sandals flash while Viktor watched the boats out at sea, thinking about getting a toy one. With a piece of string he could let it go much further out into the water than he could paddle, even as deep as Orianna.

While they waited in the queue at the ice cream shop Orianna nudged him, nodding her head at some children a few years younger than them chasing seagulls, sending the whole flock up into the air in panic no matter how imperious the seagulls looked once they land again with their golden eyes and hooked beaks. The children’s parents called them away and Orianna sighed, her little sandals tap-tap-tapping on the concrete.

“Do you want to?” Viktor asked. He wanted to, suddenly. The air was fresh and salty, the ocean was wide, the tame beach with its ice cream cones and gentle slope of sand into the sea still carrying an edge of wildness in the wind.

Orianna looked furtively up at her father and then grinned and whispered, “Now.”

Viktor was a step behind her as they ran, wind whipping through his hair, racing the distant ships. Orianna was the one to throw herself into the midst of the seagulls, twirling as they took off around her, dress billowing out as if she might take off herself, and then she was running again and Viktor was beside her, laughing and free, ignoring Corin’s shout behind them.

Hands on their shoulders drew them to a stop and Corin pulled them around, kneeling between them. He was breathing hard, gripping just a little hard and fighting not to grip harder.

“The other kids were doing it,” Orianna protested at once.

Corin sighed, eyes distant, and said, “You two are both a little fragile. So we must take care of you, hmmm?”

“I can’t do anything,” Orianna said, too world-weary to quite be whining, directed too widely to be a temper tantrum. It wasn’t Corin she was upset with, it was the world, it was her own little body. Viktor had tugged on her hand, tried to offer solidarity in the thin slice of a smile, because he couldn’t either.

Corin had knelt down on the promenade , brushed back a lock of Orianna’s hair, and put an arm around each of them. “You can do many things, you have done many things just today, but you have to make choices most people do not. A fall for you could mean days in hospital, could mean not being able to leave your bed. For Viktor damage will not heal at all. Is it worth risking that for a moment chasing seagulls?”

Orianna pouted and looked away before reluctantly saying, “…No. But it’s not fair.”

“It’s not,” Corin agreed. “I would fix it if I could.”

Viktor is crouched in a dark place, curled into a ball, knowing this is not real because he can curl, can hide his face in his knees even as he feels the wrench of every handful of stuffing Corin removes. Anguish hits him like waves, each one eroding a little more of his sanity.

Did every magical artifact Viktor took apart feel this, did it seem to go on forever as he disconnected piece after piece after piece, did they scream soundlessly (like plants, like him), did they fear for what would be left of them afterwards? Peeled like a mango, shelled like a pea, discarded husk left empty once the flesh is taken.

Orianna takes hold of his wrists, squeezes gently. “Be brave. It will be over soon.”

“No,” Viktor gasps. She’s echoing words he said to her once, a long time ago, but that had been… not this. Chemotherapy. Medicine. An attempt to save her, not to use her as raw material “Nonono.”

The wrenching stops and Viktor should go back, should make himself wake to reality. Attention will be off him now, perhaps he can move his hands and feet enough to crawl, to drag the limp cotton binding his limbs together. Crawl where, to a closed door? Without his head?

The sound of a door opening rings loud in the silence, serendipity, nonsensical though it is to think Corin would leave the warehouse door open. The sound of a vacuum pump starting up quells his hope, it was the door of the autoclave that was opened. Corin must be sterilising Viktor’s stuffing. Heat has never affected Viktor before so when burning rushes through him like a fever he questions whether it is real or only what he expects. This is a nightmare.

“I’ll find you,” Jayce whispers beside his ear.

“You won’t,” Viktor answers, and he can hear his own voice which is how he knows he’s hallucinating again.

There’s a hand stroking Viktor’s hair, cool against the fever. “Why not?”

“You have no idea I need finding.”

“Do you believe I’d find you if I did?”

“Yes.” Viktor closes his eyes, lets everything fade except Jayce’s touch. “Even if you wanted nothing to do with me afterwards, even if you wanted to be rid of me, you would put me back together before you left.” That’s why he’s dreaming of Jayce now, because Jayce had done it before, picked him up and mended his broken pieces.

Jayce’s voice is a breath. “You’re the one that left.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I think I know why you were angry now.” To believe someone cared about you and then find out you simply had something they wanted, something they’d taken. To see yourself made into raw material. “I didn’t mean…”

Viktor can feel empty fabric flapping together as he shudders, fibres catching staticky where they touch. Then his head is lightly kicked towards his body and something falls over both at once, heavy and muffling. Curiosity is enough to make him open his eyes where courage failed him. The duvet from the bed lies over him, light filtering in only around the very edges, like lying under the covers with Orianna, awake in the middle of the night, a fantasy novel and a torch hidden away with them. There is no torch here but the darkness is kind, under the weight of the duvet Viktor can pretend he is in one piece.

Corin is humming, a soft song, familiar from the start of every Disney movie, TV light reflecting in Orianna’s pale, eager face as she reached for that little bit of magic. The lyrics are less all-consumingly familiar but Viktor knows them. When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires with come to you.

The sick, bubbling desire to laugh and cry and scream floats through the empty shell of Viktor.

When your heart is in your dreams, no request is too extreme…

Viktor will not go mad, he will not let himself go mad, if he is to be left here broken on the floor at least his mind will not be broken too. There will be something left of him that is his. With that resolution, with the wrestling down of his emotions, the pain seems to abate too. No, it is abating, but not because of anything he has done. He feels the dig of Corin’s fingers through each handful of cotton, the press of Orianna’s skin around it an intimacy too horrifying to be borne, then…. relief. Numbness. He can no longer feel the pain of having it apart from him because it is no longer a part of him.

What Corin is doing here is going to work.

Orianna lies beside him under the duvet, as if this is another one of their reading sessions. “It’s nearly over now,” she says. “It’s going to be okay.”

“No,” Viktor whispers. “It’s not. I wouldn’t choose this… not even to get you back… not even then. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be his sacrifice. I don’t want… I knew he loved you most, how could he not, but I thought he cared about me more than this.”

She curls up against him, sympathetic, more sympathetic than she should be. “Don’t you want to see me, though? Now it’s done.”

Viktor blinks and she’s gone. But he does want to see her. Escape is impossible, pointless even, now there’s so little of him left. Straining for something so far beyond his limits has got him nowhere. But now he wants to see and that is enough for him to move one twitching, flailing hand forward, fingers clawing at the floor to drag itself along. It feels like the effort will kill him, like what little is left of his magic is spilling out of him in the attempt, but he will see her and so his hand edges forward enough to prop up the edge of the duvet and let him peer out.

Before him is a chiaroscuro image, limned in gold by the light over the bed, Singed remote and reverent as a saint and Orianna glowing even as cotton is stuffed through the incision in her chest. They loom over him, larger than life, characters in a drama while he is a small thing in the shadows watching as the last of the cotton is placed and Corin sews her shut. Then the last stitch is drawn through, the thread is cut, and the universe holds its breath.

Orianna sits up, her movements fluid and easy, her body slender as a dancer’s not the emaciated frame of her days spent dying. There in the light, holding her hands up to gaze in wonder at her fingers, she is beautiful. A resurrection. A miracle on demand, the culmination of everything Jayce and Viktor had attempted.

She lowers her hands and smiles at Corin. “Good morning, Papa,” she says

Corin reaches out, brushes her hair back from her face and says with a tremor running through his voice, “Good morning, sweetheart.”

Orianna looks around herself and then down at the seam on her chest which she touches softly. “Did I die?” she asks with mild curiosity that sends a chill through Viktor. Something is wrong with this.

“I brought you back,” Corin says.

“Thank you,” she says. Then she lunges forward, hugging him, and he scoops her into his arms. What is that like? To hold his daughter and feel cotton stuffing under skin tanned to leather? “There’s so much I want to to do,” she says, like it’s the beginning of summer and she’s on an upswing, foreseeing picnics and day trips stretching ahead of her.

“We’ll do all of it,” Corin promises. Then he swings her down to stand by the table, holds her hands until she finds her feet. “Wait here a moment, I have clothes for you.”

While he fetches her clothes from a drawer she dances a few steps, her feet restless as they have always been. Then she pirouettes, en pointe in bare feet when she’s never even worn pointe shoes before, the white lines of her ten-year-old body stretched with too fine a poise.

“Where’s Viktor?” she asks, as Corin sets the pile of clothes down on the edge of the bed.

It jolts Viktor, almost frightens him, to be brought so suddenly into the scene. Remembered, he remembers himself, his fear and loneliness and longing, and reaches softly for the love of his first owner. There is nothing. The bond with Corin he can still feel, an insult in itself when his residual affection has meant as little as this, but Orianna feels nothing for him at all. No. No, no, think rationally, think like a scientist. Orianna is a magical artifact, like Viktor himself she is null to all other artifacts. But if Orianna is a magical artifact is she still herself? Is this why the strange calm, the unnatural poise?

“He left,” Corin says, gently, a parent breaking bad news. “While you were gone.”

“Viktor wouldn’t,” Orianna says, confident, and Viktor quails because he did.

“It was difficult for both of us,” Corin says, “and Viktor did not believe there was a way to get you back.”

“But he should have stayed with you,” Orianna says, reaching up to touch his gaunt cheek.

“I’m fine now,” Corin says. “I have you.”

Orianna quickly puts on her underwear and then pauses at the dress, taking a moment to admire its blue satin and white gauze before she eagerly puts it on and twirls, that graceful pirouette not her normal girlish spinning, and yet this is exactly how Orianna behaves with a new dress.

Is it her? Does Viktor want it to be her? The music box had, as a pocket watch, still played music. So what happens if you put Viktor’s stuffing into something shaped like someone else? There is no brain, he thinks, in that head, or if there is it has no connection to the body. Yet she remembers. Her own memories, her voice, her mannerisms, so is it her? Or is it Corin’s memories of her, the perfect companion for him his lost daughter? Would Viktor prefer to think it is not her, since she blames him for leaving, is his doubt only cowering from the possibility that even Orianna would no longer want the person he is now? Or is it not her and, if so, what horror has he been party to? Agreeing in a moment of weakness to come here because he wanted her back, has he allowed her corpse to be desecrated and inhabited by something alien?

Orianna is putting on her shoes. Whoever she is, soon she will be gone. There is one last chance to flail even a finger free of this duvet, to slap the floor, to do anything to draw her attention. Whoever she is, if she remembers being herself, she will not leave him here. Yet either horror or exhaustion weakens him and he cannot find the strength.

Corin and his daughter walk out hand in hand, Corin’s other hand reaching back to turn out the light. The duvet slips from Viktor’s hand, falling over him like a curtain now the scene is over.

Chapter Text

Jayce sleeps badly and then oversleeps, wakes late and annoyed and heads into the lab hoping to find Viktor there. If Viktor has thought better of heading out into the city at the tail end of summer he might well turn up at work, pretending he’d never left but still prickly while he waits for Jayce to apologise.

He’s not there. Jayce checks through Sky’s notes, asks her about why she and Viktor have accomplished so much less during his absence than he expected, then leaves to find someone more deserving than Sky to take his bad mood out on.

“Jinx,” Jayce calls and she stops, lets him herd her to the side of the corridor. He waits until she’s cornered before adding, “I want the luck charm back.”

She tips her head back to look him in the eyes, smirks defiantly. “I don’t have it.”

“Come on. You’ve been obsessed with that thing since I got it and you hated that it only worked for gambling. Now it’s in a new form and it immediately disappears? I know Sky and Viktor didn’t misplace it.” Jayce watches her for any signs of surrender, but she just blows the fringe out of her eyes and keeps on staring. He sighs. “I really don’t want to get Heimerdinger involved.”

Invoking Heimerdinger works better than Jayce thought it would, but Jinx values her place at the academy. Her nose wrinkles and she slumps a little. “I don’t have it. I gave it to my little sister.”

“You have a little sister?” He’s met Vi and he’s heard of Mylo and Claggor, who attend univeristy elsewhere, but she’s never mentioned a sister.

“She’s new. Vander’s fostering her but I’ve been going over to visit and she really likes me. Even got me to dye her hair blue.” Jinx tugs on her own blue braid, her eyes are large and dark. “But she’s been having a rough time at school and I wanted to give her something that would help. Never been able to give someone luck before.”

Jayce suppresses a groan. Is Jinx, of all people, making him feel like the bad guy for not letting her steal his stuff? “At least get it back until we find out what it does. I know the stuff we work with is pretty safe, and we haven’t had a conversion change that yet, but magic can be really dangerous.” He thinks of the belt in the police station, convincted of strangling people and impossible to burn.

Jinx laughs. “You think I don’t know that? You think my experience of magic has been pretty?”

“Your experience of magic?” Jayce can’t help the interrogative note in his voice, the way it’s obvious he wants to start taking notes, and Jinx glares at him for it.

“Yeah, that’s why I didn’t tell you. Not up for discussion. Though I always kinda figured if something suddenly blew up while I was hanging around your lab at least you’d be interested and not scared.”

Jayce holds his hands up in placation. Yes, he does want to know, especially since it sounds like this is one of those cases where a human attracts a certain kind of magic. Like Mel’s paintings, only not leaving artifacts behind. Even so he’s not going to bully a student into revealing personal information — and anyway, he couldn’t bully Jinx, she’s more likely to bully him. “Okay, I’m dropping it. But if you know how dangerous magic can be then please get the charm back.”

“It’s not dangerous,” Jinx says, with absolute certainty. “It’s been helping. She’s a lot happier since I gave it to her.”

“Or maybe she’s just happier because her sister who she really likes gave her a toy?” Jinx’s smile goes soft and Jayce tries to hold onto his bad mood. “I’ll give you a few days to decide and if it’s not back by then I really am going to Heimerdinger.”

“Okay,” she says. “We done here?”

“One more thing,” Jayce says, and he knows he’s being hypocritical with this one after how badly he upset Viktor last night but it has to be said. “Telling Viktor magic items could feel pain wasn’t funny, Jinx. I know you like to tease him but that crossed a line.”

Jinx cackles, bending over with it. “That’s hilarious. Wasn’t me, though.”

“Jinx…”

“For real this time. Not me.” She straightens up, tosses a braid over her shoulder. “I bet that got under his paint, though. Poor little doll, all soft and fluffy inside.”

“So who was it?” Jayce asks.

“Beats me,” Jinx tells him and darts off to class, waving at him over her shoulder.

Poor little doll echoes in Jayce’s head. Poor little doll, alone in the city with autumn creeping in. He doesn’t need to be, there’s a warm home waiting for him and Jayce had asked him to stay, but Jayce had been angry with him, too, about immutable facets of his nature. Dr Reveck had made him sound like a vampire but Jayce knows that’s not right, had believed Viktor when he said he didn’t take anything from those he fed on. Under all the strangeness, under the magic, it’s a much older, sillier hurt. It’s the hurt of being befriended by people who wanted him to do their homework, or dated by girls who thought they’d look nice on his arm. Even Mel, although Mel is completely honest in what she wants and what she pays him, looks at him and sees the part of him that is most useful to her. So Viktor had seen his clumsy emotions, someone who loves too much too fast, and seen a feast when Jayce had thought Viktor was different. He could at least have been honest, the way Mel is.

Sky is busy arranging the notes on the sunflowers — the main thing she and Viktor have been working on, it seems — when Jayce returns to the lab. “Sky, you said someone told Viktor magic artifacts could feel pain. Do you know who it was?” he asks.

“Uh.” She’s reluctant to just tell him without Viktor present, he knows, and she takes her time squaring up the papers in her hands to cover for her hesitation. “Someone he knew outside the university.”

Which is not impossible, even though Viktor seldom goes anywhere except the university or Jayce’s flat, certainly not in order to socialise — whether because he’s nervous about being found out, even more absorbed in his work than Jayce is, or, given new information, because he processes social interactions in an entirely non-human way and is connected only to Jayce. Viktor had lived on the streets before, he must have spoken to people then. Or it could be the person from Viktor’s past that Jayce knows is nearby. “Dr Corin Reveck?” he asks.

Sky nods, relieved that Viktor must have told him after all. “He turned up here looking for Viktor a couple of times. Viktor said he wasn’t dangerous but seemed really unsettled by him in general. He was trying to bully Viktor into giving him information, I think, but of course it didn’t work.”

Of course he couldn’t convince Viktor if Viktor had decided it was a matter of principle. No one can be as stubborn. Nothing they do is confidential, though, and when he’d tried to get information out of Jayce he could have easily got it by agreeing to an appointment at the lab. No, Jayce would have spoken to Viktor by then, wouldn’t he? He would have been warned off this person Viktor doesn’t trust. Only Dr Reveck had warned him off Viktor first and Jayce is an idiot.

“He might come back looking for information from me now,” Jayce says, starting to pace. He can handle that, if it happens, if the idea was for Jayce to no longer trust Viktor’s judgement and give Dr Reveck the interview he wanted. “Do you think he’d given up on Viktor?”

Sky fidgets with her glasses, catching Jayce’s anxiety, or only taking it as permission to display her own. “I don’t know. Where is Viktor?”

“We had a fight last night,” Jayce says. “He walked out. I figured” hoped “he’d come back once he’d calmed down. But if someone out there has been hassling him… If this guy was going to hurt Viktor he could have done it any time while I was away, right?”

“Maybe,” Sky says. “Or maybe he decided it would be easier with no one looking for Viktor.”

Yeah, and Sky doesn’t even know Dr Reveck orchestrated that fight, might have actively set up a situation where Jayce would assume Viktor staying away just meant he was angry. “God,” Jayce says, he sits down at Viktor’s desk, slumps over and stares at the massively overgrown pocket watch that’s been left there. “He’s probably just mad at me. He’s probably fine.” On impulse he flips the tea plate sized lid open. The tune it plays is sharp and a bit spooky, matched poorly to the tinkling tone.

When he looks up Sky is clutching her hands to her mouth, eyes huge. “I think it’s Petrushka,” she says. “His ghost…” She’s already fumbling for her phone, brisk decision overtaking horror. “I can check the score against the notes it points to, hold on.”

“What’s Petrushka? A ballet?” Jayce asks. Sky had listened to the scores for several as part of her job interpreting the music box, especially since Viktor took such an interest in it.

“It’s, uh…” She holds up her phone and leans over the music box then nods, jerkily. The music is becoming grating, it seems to just be a short section repeated again and again, insistent and dramatic. “Petrushka is a living puppet.”

Jayce feels the chill run down his spine. “And his ghost?”

“He gets killed by another puppet. The person who created him shakes his body to show that he’s just a puppet, that no one… no one died. There’s no crime. But then Petrushka’s ghost appears because he was…”

Jayce slams the music box shut and the silence that falls is worse than the grating music. “No crime,” Jayce says, almost laughing, almost sobbing on the word. “Right. Dr Reveck’s probably his legal owner. Maybe. Who do we even go to? A magic artifact that wandered off by itself might be in danger.”

Sky looks at him. “You’re bigger than Dr Reveck.”

Jayce nods, the world crystalising around him. “I am. But how do we even find him?”

“I should come with you,” Jayce is still insisting as they head down to the staff car park. “What if he’s there? What if they just take you straight to him?”

“Then Dr Reveck has no idea who I am. He might even believe I’m his student, I’m someone that can easily be overlooked in class.” She looks sternly at Jayce. “And if he’s not there then convincing reception I’m a poor, harried student who needs his home address to drop off my paper before the deadline is going to be way harder with you there.”

“I just don’t like it,” Jayce says, weakly. “And what am I meant to do?”

“Drive around? We don’t even know if Dr Reveck has found Viktor yet, if Viktor’s just wandering around the area you could find him first. We don’t even really know it’s Dr Reveck he’s in danger from.”

Jayce takes a deep breath. Right. The music box tells the future. They’re working on the assumption that Viktor is, at least, not dead. That the ‘ghost appearance’ either means something else or hasn’t happened yet. So he might be fine. Upset with Jayce, but unhurt and unaware of the danger he’s in. “Okay, but don’t go anywhere with Dr Reveck without calling me. Stay around other people.”

Sky rolls her eyes. “You think I need you to teach me about personal safety? Go drive around.”

Jayce does. There’s a pulsing shame to really looking at the homeless people he passes, not many but still more than he’d realised going about the city with his mind on other things, looking them in the face long enough to be sure it’s not Viktor and having to see them all as individuals. He’s glad Ekko still has one of the rice bowls for his soup kitchen, it doesn’t feel like enough but it feels like something. Below that shame his heart is hammering sharp and hard with fear each moment he doesn’t find Viktor.

His phone ringing makes him jump and his front wheel bumps up onto the pavement as he pulls over to take the call.

“I’ve got an address,” Sky says. She recites it, it’s much nearer to Jayce than to where she must be.

“I’ll go ahead. Meet you there,” he says, terse, already pulling back onto the road.

“Goodbye, uh, see you,” Sky says quickly and hangs up.

Dr Reveck owns a basement flat. There’s a set of stairs down into a tiny paved area well below street level and down there is the door. There aren’t any windows to look through. Jayce crouches and pushes up the letterbox to peer at an ordinary hall, magnolia walls and beige carpet. There’s mail on the floor, but only what looks like today’s delivery. Jayce stands back up and knocks.

No one answers.

Jayce starts pounding and then, in a moment of frustrated rage and terror, kicks it. To his complete surprise it breaks. Oh. Oh shit, he’s committed a crime now, based on vague suspicions and a magic music box.

It’s a normal flat. Either it was bought pre-furnished or Dr Reveck really likes Ikea, and there’s a decided lack of any personal touch, but it really does just look a place someone is living. Except there’s something off that Jayce can’t put his finger on. Or maybe the eerie feeling is just the fact that he’s creeping through someone else’s home uninvited.

Jayce looks back at the innocuous hall and frowns. No shoes. Maybe Dr Reveck just doesn’t like keeping them in the hall. But there are none in the bedroom, either, and none in the living room with its tiny kitchenette. Steeling himself, Jayce opens a wardrobe and finds it empty. After that he starts flinging open draws, frantic. No clothes, anywhere. Books on the shelves are mostly mystery novels, there are spaces where other books have been removed. No cutlery in the kitchen the larger pans remain. All signs point to a hurried but methodical abandonment. There’s no evidence Dr Reveck intends to return, no indication of where he’s gone.

It’s evidence that he’s done something or why would he disappear? Most likely he’s done it to Viktor. And he has left Jayce no leads at all.

Jayce presses his palms over his eyes, trying to hold back useless tears. He needs to get it together before Sky arrives, think of something they can still do. Maybe he can call Mel? Although he doesn’t know what any of her high society contacts could do here. Call Heimerdinger? No, that would just bring in another worried person with no idea what to do.

The darkness behind Jayce’s hands is suddenly too complete and no longer tinged red. Did the electricity go out in the flat? Jayce rubs his face and lowers his hands to find himself in almost complete darkess, only a grey sourceless light filtering in to make it clear he’s not at the bottom of a mine. The air smells of concrete dust and damp, there’s the sense of space around him, and Jayce remembers a long ago miracle in a snowstorm that came when he wasn’t looking and left no sign.

With his heart leaping in mingled hope and fear he steps forward cautiously, blinking hard in an attempt to adjust enough to find the outline of a door. He trips over a table and catches himself, swearing, moving forward even more carefully than before. Reaching the door he slaps at the wall beside it until he finds a lightswitch and then closes his eyes against the sudden glare. The room is silent, except for the soft buzz of the light. If Viktor is here he’s so still there’s not even a rustle or scrape. Jayce doesn’t want to turn around.

Swallowing hard he pushes off the wall and spins himself to survey the warehouse he finds himself in. Concrete. Benches. Scalpels which are… are ominous, but not the right kind of ominous. You wouldn’t need a scalpel for cotton cloth. The child’s bed in the centre of the room with its pure white sheets and a butterfly embroidered on its pillow is wildly out of place but Viktor is not lying on it. Its duvet lies on the floor some distance away, spread out as if thrown over something not tangled as if it had been cast aside. Is it big enough to hide a body? Are there lumps where it doesn’t lay naturally? Jayce approaches it, shivering, then bends down and flings it back all at once.

What lies beneath is like some horrific cubist portrait. Viktor, deconstructed. His clothes have been removed and lie underneath him, but his socks and shoes are still on his legs where they lie across one another almost at right angles. One arm is outstretched, as if pleading, while the other is dropped as carelessly as the clothes with Viktor’s cane beneath it. Viktor’s corset lies behind him, too stiff to meld into the pile of clothes, providing a deep grey background to the browns and creams and flesh tones that make up Viktor. In contrast the cotton of his body meshes with the clothes so well it takes Jayce a moment to realise it’s there, that he isn’t looking at a pile of Viktor’s torn off limbs but at Viktor emptied of stuffing. The head though. The head has been ripped off. It lies with eyes closed next to the rest of the corpse. Jayce kneels and lifts it, hands cupping the back of Viktor’s head tenderly. The top of one ear is missing and below it there is a spiderweb crack running onto the cheek.

Viktor’s eyes snap open, wide with terror, and his mouth opens soundlessly.

“God.” Jayce, crouched on the concrete floor, almost topples over with shock. He instinctively swings Viktor’s head higher as he regains his balance, determined to keep him away from the floor. Then he’s no longer falling and is instead bent over Viktor’s head, wheezing fast breaths while Viktor’s eyes dart around frenetic and unseeing. “It’s okay,” he forces himself to say, tremulous. He draws Viktor’s head against his chest, shifting to hold it with one hand so he can run the other through its hair. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re still here. We can fix you. It won’t even be difficult, we just need cotton stuffing and it needs to be inside you. No crafting parts.”

His eyes go back to the mess of Viktor’s body. Just stuffing, no real damage, nothing else removed. And for that Viktor has been terrified, abandoned, violated. He’s so small, Jayce thinks. And you let this happen to him. How could you let this happen to Viktor?

Jayce lifts Viktor’s head back to a place where he can meet its eyes and finds them still terrified but more lucid now. Focused on him. Easing himself to sit cross-legged Jayce places Viktor’s head in his lap. Putting it back on the floor feels like it would be the act of a monster. Then he pulls out his phone, checks google maps and what3words, and calls Sky.

“Jayce!” she says, immediately. “Where are you? I went to Dr Reveck’s place and it’s ransacked, it looks like someone broke in.”

“That was me,” Jayce says.

“What?”

“It was me and then I… I found Viktor. But, Sky, he’s in rough shape.” Jayce strokes Viktor’s hair as he says this, feels Viktor shivering. “I have the address but I don’t have my car with me,” he quickly talks over her attempt to ask how he managed that, “I need you to come here and bring a lot of cotton stuffing.”

The sound Sky makes is broken.

“Yeah, it’s, it’s what you’re thinking now. Enough cotton to fill Viktor. Please..”

At some point before Sky arrives Jayce lies down on the ground, curled around Viktor’s empty body so that it’s sheltered between him and the corset. Viktor’s head rests between his hands, held to face him so that he can see the spark of life in Viktor’s eyes. He’s whispering reassurances but they don’t amount to anything more than, “You’ll be okay, I’m here, you’re going to be okay,” over and over again until even to Jayce they’re nothing but sounds. Sometimes Jayce presses their foreheads together as if that could express everything he can’t find words for, even in his own head. Maybe it can. Maybe Viktor knows exactly how Jayce feels and isn’t that a miracle? Why had he ever thought it was anything else?

It’s only when Sky opens the door that Jayce even thinks to wonder whether it might have been locked. He rolls to his feet and sets Viktor’s head down gently on a bench, balancing it with its eyes facing the room. The huge carrier bag Sky is carrying slips out of her hand when she sees Viktor and smaller plastic bags stamped with ‘NATURAL COTTON’ slip out of it. Jayce rushes over to help her scoop them back in, both of them clumsy with shock and bumping into one another.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t faster, I was looking for cotton and the first craft shop… I could have got polyfil, but I know we’ve always got better results replacing parts with similar materials so I…”

“No, no, that’s fine, I asked for cotton, we’ve got to do this right. We can’t do it twice,” Jayce answers, speaking feverishly over the top of her apologies.

Jayce is the one who stuffs Viktor’s body. Somehow he couldn’t let Sky do it. Instead she swings up to sit on the bench beside Viktor’s head, resting her hand close enough to his cheek for him to feel the warmth without touching him, while Jayce kneels on the floor and pushes cotton into the empty sack of Viktor’s body. It feels awful. Shoving himself in there, pushing his whole arm down into Viktor’s thigh to check he’s packing the stuffing tight enough around the end of the bisque leg feels violating. As if Viktor hasn’t suffered enough indignities. But he’s seen the issues soggy stuffing causes Viktor and he needs to do this right. He’s sweating by the time it’s done, rubbing his hands on his trousers constantly in an attempt not to get sweat in the stuffing.

“What do you think?” he asks Sky.

She slides off the bench and tentatively puts an arm under each of Viktor’s arms to squeeze the body. “Maybe a little more?” her voice is high but she’s trying for the tone in which she’d comment on an experiment. “It settles over time.”

Jayce nods and pushes in another handful.

Sky lifts the head and holds it in place while Jayce fits the neck string into its groove and pulls. It’s almost too easy for the action which makes Viktor whole again. Certainly too easy a way to take him apart. Jayce yanks the string as tight as he can and ties the strongest knots he knows.

Viktor groans, low and miserable, back arching and hands clenching. He gets one arm under his stomach, starts pushing himself up. Jayce reaches out to help him to his knees and he sags, bending in half with one arm wrapped around himself and his forehead almost touching Jayce’s knees. He’s making sharp airless sounds that should perhaps be words and shaking so hard he’s rustling with it. Jayce pulls off his coat and draps it over Viktor, bending over to tuck it around him, surrounding Viktor’s body with his own.

“It’s okay,” Jayce says. “Try to breathe slowly and deeply… no, you don’t breathe. I don’t know what you need.” His own breath is speeding up, along with his heart. “I want to give you a blanket and a hot, sweet drink but your body doesn’t need warmth the same way and you can’t drink things.”

“You are a hot sweet drink,” Viktor murmurs, then he flinches. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no. That’s good. Anything that helps you right now.” Jayce gives in to temptation and gathers Viktor onto his lap. The trembling slows down and Viktor’s head comes to rest against his shoulder. “I’m the one that should be apologising. You didn’t deserve to be yelled at.”

Viktor shakes his head and his voice comes out surprisingly firm when he says, “Jayce. I am sorry.”

Viktor stripped of his pride, caught up in shock and inexplicable guilt, is a ragged little thing indeed. “Listen,” Jayce says. “I’d forgive you anything. But I think you’re going to want to take this apology back once you’ve calmed down a little, so it might be less awkward for both of us if you don’t make it yet. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I’ve done everything wrong. I should never have come here and the artifacts… you have no idea how much it hurts, and no part of me was broken only, only moved. Have I been doing this to them every time?”

“I doubt it,” Jayce says. “You’ve taken that music box apart more than anything else and if it has any sentience at all then it used it to tell us you were in trouble and needed to be found. Probably it doesn’t, probably we just got lucky, but if it does it’s not holding anything against you.”

“Oh,” Viktor whispers. “Thank you.” He brings his arms up to hold onto Jayce and Jayce squeezes him in return. It’s been a long time since Jayce used his full strength when hugging someone, but Viktor, fragile in some ways, is sturdy in others and he was made to be hugged. Gradually Viktor stops trembling.

Jayce looks up at Sky, who has turned away from them and started fidgeting with tools on one of the benches. “I think we’re ready to go home,” Jayce says. “Sky, will you drive us?”

She quickly wipes her cheeks with the back of her hands and turns to them. “Of course.”

Chapter Text

Jayce’s flat is flooded with sunlight which gleams off the sturdy old furniture and glimmers over the eclectic layer of ornaments and action figures and interesting rocks, leaving it all as warm and golden as its owner. It helps. Viktor is not lying abandoned in the dark and dust and maybe the sun can bleach the fear out of him, given time.

“You look exhausted,” Jayce is saying, fussing around removing his coat from Viktor and replacing it with a blanket. His care and concern are a silver thread that pierces like a needle, binding Viktor and mending him with the same delicate stitching. The binding is as welcome as the mending, is inextricable from it, to be tied to Jayce is to be whole. “Do you want to sleep?”

Viktor shakes his head quickly. He’s spent too long trapped in his own mind, he doesn’t want to go back there.

“Is there anything you do need?” Jayce asks. He’s finished wrapping the blanket around Viktor now and he goes to stand up, to put the coat away, but Viktor grabs his hand before he can stop himself. If Jayce moves away now he fears that thread will snap and everything inside him will fall apart.

“Don’t leave.”

“I won’t.” Jayce kneels down in front of him, letting the coat slide to the floor, and takes Viktor’s hands in his own. He’s looking up to meet Viktor’s gaze, his eyes honeyed and earnest. “I wouldn’t. You were the one who walked away, you know.”

“You left for two weeks and then came back angry.” Oh, maybe Jayce is right that he didn’t want to apologise earlier. Shame is starting to fade along with the helplessness and horror that engendered it and he’s no longer so convinced everything was his fault. Yet he’s clinging to Jayce’s fingers even as he picks a fight.

Jayce stares at him, processing, and then says, “I thought you were upset because you wanted to come with me not because you wanted me to stay. Why didn’t you ask?”

Viktor shakes his head, deflated by Jayce’s calm reaction. “And tell you what? That you could never leave the country again?”

“If that’s what you need then yes!” Jayce squeezes his hands. “Were you… hungry? With me gone?”

Viktor stares at him. Affronted, furious, hurt. “Hungry?”

“Or not hungry, if that’s not how you want to put it. Did you miss…” He lets go of Viktor’s hands to gesture, as if winding an invisible rope, and the cold shock of distance combined with what he’s saying is almost too much to bear.

“I was lonely!” The words burst out of him and Viktor hides his face behind his hands immediately, as if he can catch them back into his mouth. Even so he keeps going. “My feelings are inhuman, yes, but not in the way you think, not in the way he made it sound. I wanted to keep them from you not because I feel too little but because I feel too much. Too much, always, and in all the wrong directions. A human can be independent, a toy can be set aside, but I will always, always want the whole of your attention.”

Jayce takes Viktor’s hands again, squeezing lightly. “You have it.”

“For how long?” Viktor asks.

Jayce shakes his head, laughing slightly, and rests his forehead against their joint hands. “Forever, I think. I feel too much as well. No, it’s not the same, I know, but even so that’s what hurt. Thinking someone who finally seemed okay with that, with me being… being a lot… was putting up with it because my feelings were something they could eat. Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered. Knowing you needed my love, in any way at all, should have been enough.”

Viktor is in the perfect position to flatten his hand over Jayce’s mouth and quiet him. “Of course it mattered,” he says. “But it’s not like that at all. I wanted to be with you, to work with you, to spend meals with you even though I couldn’t eat. It’s not a price I pay to get what I need, it is what I need.” A strange thought occurs to him, a desire deeply ironic when he’s been hiding so much for so long. “I wish you could sense my affection the way I sense yours.”

Jayce tugs Viktor’s hand away from his mouth and Viktor lets him. “It’s okay,” Jayce says. “I know it’s there.”

They sit entangled on the sofa, Viktor almost in Jayce’s lap.

“He said,” Jayce tells him, slowly. “That you were just a mirror, just a reflection of who I was and what I wanted.”

“Maybe,” Viktor answers, exhausted. It’s easier to talk like this, with his face against Jayce’s shoulder so Jayce can’t look him in the eye. “I never existed without Orianna, so how could I know who I would have been without her? Maybe there’s a core of me that was never a reflection. Maybe I’m just made up of the people who owned me. Her and him and you.”

“Just the three of us?”

“Yes. I may be a mirror but I’m not willing to reflect just anybody.”

Jayce laughs, soft and fond. “I’m flattered. Although maybe more so if Dr Reveck wasn’t one of those people.”

“That happened before I really understood and led to my being selective in the future,” Viktor answers with a grimace.

Jayce hesitates for a long time and then says, “He said you didn’t grieve for Orianna. That you just moved on to him.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah, I thought it wasn’t.”

Viktor sighs. He feels languid, almost liquid, between exhaustion and dazzling sunlight and Jayce’s tenderness. Dr Reveck is the last person he wants to be fair to, but everything is a long way away and he feels drained of spite. “It may have looked that way to him. I’m not like a normal magic item, that stops working without emotion to activate it, but I was completely unprepared to survive Orianna’s death. In the wake of it I had no will to do anything and no physical needs to force action on me. It was only when I realised that Dr Reveck was also lost in grief and that he did have physical needs that I pulled myself out of it to take care of him.”

“And then he assumed the worst of you,” Jayce says, furious.

“Mm,” Viktor says, packing all the irony he can into the sound.

“Fuck. I assumed the worst of you too.” Jayce pulls him closer. “You deserved better. Maybe I’m not who you should have chosen.”

“I enjoy sharing your passions,” Viktor says, serious. “You live in a beautiful world.” Jayce surrounds himself with things he loves, whether it’s magic items, scientific papers, ornaments, DVDs, or people, and loves them with all his heart.

Some time later, time that has passed without Viktor being aware of it, Jayce whispers, “Can I ask what happened?”

Viktor purses his lips and shakes his head, not because he can’t talk about it but because he won’t. If a crime was committed at all it was the desecration of Orianna’s corpse and he is not sure what the law would demand. Burial? Cremation? What would they think of her, sweet revenant child, who may or may not be Orianna but is, regardless, innocent? Would she count for anything at all in the eyes of the law? It is a judgement Viktor is not willing to let anyone make and no one human, not even Jayce, will ever learn of her existence from him.

“What about what happened on your end?” he whispers in turn, when Jayce has given up on prying. “How did you find me?”

“A miracle,” Jayce says. “The same one that saved my mother. One moment I was looking for you, the next I was in the warehouse.”

“It’s yours then. Your magic.”

“Yes,” Jayce breathes, reverent and shaken at once. He clears his throat. “I won’t be trying to study this though.”

“Won’t you?” Viktor asks. “Isn’t it what you’ve been chasing from the start?” Jayce’s miracle, always ahead of him like a guiding star as he looks for pieces of it in everything he touches.

“If someone I love has to be dying for it to activate I never want it to happen again,” Jayce says, words so deep with certainty they resonate through Viktor where he’s curled against Jayce’s chest.

“I don’t think I was dying,” Viktor says and then he remembers the pain and darkness, imagines lying there for days or weeks, not dying. Nothing changing at all.

Jayce holds him tighter as he starts to shake. “Don’t think about it. I won’t ask any more.”

Eventually Jayce gets hungry, so he makes ham sandwiches for dinner while Viktor sits at the kitchen table with his blanket wrapped around him like a robe. Viktor has been been asleep, on and off, through the afternoon, talking to Jayce in between dozes and not seeming fully aware that he’s been unconscious. Perhaps as a result Viktor still seems tired, soft with it in the orange-red of sunset as he watches the light die with something almost like grief.

Jayce taps out a message to Sky on his phone while he eats, passing on that Viktor seems to be doing okay. He hopes she’s okay. That she’d had someone to be with her, even if she couldn’t explain what she’d been through.

“We should get some sleep,” Jayce says, putting the plate and knife he’s used into the dishwasher.

“Let me sleep with you,” Viktor says and Jayce looks up just in time to catch the blush spreading across his cheeks. “Not, eh, euphemistically.”

“Like a child sleeping with a toy,” Jayce fills in. “Or the other way around.”

“The other way around, yes.”

There’s a flash of insight that comes to Jayce in that phrase. The logic of a toy is the logic of a child inverted. You take them to bed with you because they’re comforting to hold and imagine that they’re pleased to be chosen. You take them everywhere you go and imagine that they desperately want to come. Confide in them and imagine they’re hanging off every word. Dress them and imagine they love having clothes picked out by someone who wants them to look nice. (And doesn’t Viktor refuse to choose his own clothes, claiming it doesn’t matter what he wears?)

“Of course,” Jayce says. Then he adds, tentative, not sure at all that he’s not overstepping when Viktor is entirely capable of taking offence if Jayce assumes him to be helpless. “Want some help getting ready for bed? You’ve had a rough day.”

Viktor looks at him, eyes sharp, not hazy and glassy as they’ve been all afternoon. He smiles, soft and crooked. “I’d appreciate it.”

Helping Viktor into pyjamas is experimental for both of them. Viktor can’t bring himself to go limp and let Jayce handle him like a doll, but neither does he want to do too much himself and push Jayce away. Jayce, also uncertain and too determined to let Viktor take the lead, lets himself be pushed away too many times only to realise the push was never intentional and then bump into Viktor when he resumes just as Viktor gives up on him. Even so, there’s a tenderness to it that mends something in Jayce. Viktor, here and whole and his to care for.

Jayce runs a hand over the plastic shell on Viktor’s leg as he pulls down the rucked up leg of his pyjama pants. “I’m glad this held,” he murmurs.

“Yes,” Viktor says. “Fine engineering work, Mr Talis.” He tips his chin up for Jayce to fasten the buttons of his pyjama shirt.

When Jayce sits Viktor down in front of the dressing table mirror to brush the dust out of his hair, Viktor takes a moment to push his hair back from his ear and survey the chipped top with a grimace. Then he touches the spider-web crack below it. “That one’s going to show,” he says. “Possibly make-up? Although working foundation into cracks may not be the best thing for the bisque.”

“You could hide it if you had longer hair,” Jayce suggests.

“Unfortunately my hair doesn’t grow.”

“Extensions, then. I mean, the kind humans get, I don’t want to mess with how your hair is rooted.” He starts brushing, not thoroughly the way he would brush his own, but gently getting the dust off and then running his fingers through to style it.

Viktor hums and regards his reflection with half-closed eyes. “I’ve never had a different hairstyle. I wouldn’t mind something new.” His eyes open and lift, meeting Jayce’s in the mirror, laughing at both of them. “If I get long hair, are you going to brush it for me?”

Jayce grins. “As often as you want.”

When it comes to actually getting into bed with Viktor, Jayce is nervous, although not for the reason Viktor suspects. Seeing Viktor asleep has never stopped causing that thrum of anxiety in him, that instinct that a person who lies still without breathing is a corpse. Comfort isn’t something Jayce is willing to deny Viktor tonight of all nights, but he wonders whether he’ll get any sleep at all.

Viktor slips into bed first, curling up as near the edge as he can get, as if afraid he might take up too much space, his back to the expanse of the mattress and all of him tense as a stray cat. Jayce lies down next to him and then, deciding against delicacy, simply wraps an arm around him and hauls him back into the middle of the bed.

Viktor flails for a moment and then abruptly relaxes. “That was uncalled for,” he says.

Jayce nuzzles into his fluffy hair. “You were too far away.”

He’s expecting an answer but whatever it is it comes out a mumble. Viktor has been fighting sleep all day and tucked up in Jayce’s arms he’s succumbing rapidly. The moment when Viktor stops moving, when he’s limp and lifeless in Jayce’s arms, is something Jayce has been bracing for. To his surprise it’s… different, like this. To his eyes Viktor unmoving might be corpselike, but in his arms Viktor is nothing like a human, so how could he be anything like a corpse? He is soft and pillowy, comforting to squeeze, and Jayce has always liked having something to hold. When Jayce looks at Viktor’s face he is smiling in his sleep, that little crooked smile that Jayce had always thought of as a fleeting thing, a joy to coax out of Viktor but impossible to keep.

Safe, Jayce thinks, muzzily. Right here and safe and found.

He curls up tighter around Viktor, warding off the night with his body, and lets sleep take him too.

“You should let me bleach the front a little,” Jinx says, tilting her head as she peers at Viktor’s hair.

“Why?” Viktor asks.

“Because it will be cute,” Jinx says, exasperated. “Really go with that whole ethereal twink thing you’ve got going on.”

“Ethereal twink?” Viktor demands.

Jayce is trying very hard not to laugh. “I don’t think you’re selling him on his new hairstyle, Jinx,” he says.

“He’s a doll, he’s meant to want to be cute,” Jinx argues.

Viktor touches the hair that now brushes his shoulders, Jinx’s hard work in both finding matching mohair and making the extensions paying off in how natural it looks. “Can I get an opinion from someone who uses real words?”

Sky, sitting on a table and watching the hairdressing session says, reservedly, “It looks very nice.”

“It is,” Jayce agrees. “It’s pretty.” It softens the sharp angles of Viktor’s face and brings out the delicacy of his features.

Viktor looks at himself in the mirror they’ve propped up on the bench again, wrinkling his nose uncertainly. “No bleaching. I’ll get used to it like this, first.”

“Okay, then. Job done, I want payment.” She holds out her hand to Jayce who sighs and drops the rabbit charm, with its worn fabric and dice-mark dots up its stomach and back, into her hand.

“Be careful with it,” he says.

Viktor shakes his head. “I really doubt it’s dangerous, Jayce. People use charms all the time without testing them first and we know this one wasn’t dangerous before we changed it.”

“Yeah, but we still don’t know what it does.” Jayce knows he sounds petulant but he hates letting the charm go again without even having been able to activate it in a lab setting.

“I told you what it does,” Jinx says. “It gives Isha a better time at school.”

Jayce snorts. “It can’t possibly work only for your sister.”

“Maybe not,” says Viktor. “But it’s doubtful you or Sky would be able to activate it. When you think about it we made it into a toy, and even though it’s not like me…”

“We’d have to love it to activate it,” Jayce finishes. He knows that’s not true of all toys, one of the plushies he’s got sealed in a box acts more like it’s in a horror movie and is probably activated by fear. It makes sense for this one, though. Of course Isha loves it when Jinx gave it to her. “Okay,” he says to Jinx. “It’s all yours.”

Jinx runs off at once, leaving her hairdressing kit scattered all over the bench. Sky starts clearing it up without complaint.

Viktor stands up and walks across the room to retrieve his notes. With his new stuffing he’s walking better these days, moving easier and no longer needing his corset. It doesn’t make up for what he went through, but it’s good to see him healthy.

“Jayce, Sky,” he says. “I think I figured out the sunflowers.”

That’s been their latest mystery; the flowers that glow like the sun even when no humans are around lose their radiance immediately when put into the terrariums developed to measure their nutrient intake.

Sky puts down a pair of scissors and hurries over, while Jayce leans over Viktor’s shoulder to see his notes. Viktor angles them away, unwilling to let Jayce read ahead of his announcement. “It’s the insects,” he says. “Why should flowers care about human attention? You don’t pollinate them.”

Jayce catches Viktor’s hand to tilt the notes back to where he can read them. “That might be it. No insects in the terrariums. Do you think they only respond to pollinators?”

“A lot more insects can pollinate than most people think,” Sky puts in.

Viktor nods at her. “But it’s probably best if we start by catching a bee,” he says.

“Right,” Jayce says. Knowing them catching a bee is going to be much harder than solving the equations relating to why they need one. It’s the sort of thing that could take all afternoon, but the sky is that shade of denim blue only seen on fine autumn days and he doesn’t mind an excuse to go outside. “Let’s catch a bee.”

In front of the academy there are neatly ordered flowerbeds, bedding plants arranged by gardeners. The scientists head out to add a little chaos to the mix.