Tags: Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Hallucinations, Dissociation, Psychological Horror, Jayce-centric, Character Study, Slow Build, Ghosts, Haunted Houses, Post-Canon, Unreliable Narrator, Inspired by House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski, Explicit Sexual Content, Introspection, Suicidal Thoughts, Depression, Isolation
Words: 5k
Summary:
Jayce wakes up after the arcane explosion, except- he is alone. Determined to find Viktor, he seeks shelter in what appears to be an abandoned house in the middle of a meadow. As the days and weeks go by, Jayce realizes, the house might be bigger than it seems.
AO3
Pain has been something that Jayce has gotten intimately acquainted with in the past months. It is not like he hadn’t met it before, he did, but those encounters had been more in passing. Like a guest at a gala coming to greet him in a detached and cold manner. A small conversation that did not need to be prolonged in any way shape or form, and that ended in a polite exchange in which the threat to meet again would linger freely in the air.
The pain that he now knew was severely different from that. More akin to someone moving into his chambers, making a home of his bed, eating from his pantry, and refusing to leave even when pleaded with. This one was present at all times, either loud and screeching for attention, and cruel in ways that could be considered intelligent. Or quiet and festering in a corner. Mocking him at his attempts to ignore it, always reminding him of its residence in the most innocuous ways, and would leave him exhausted by the end of the day.
This pain was something else altogether. It was bright, harsh, and thunderous. It flayed on his skin, his nerve endings crying out as they turned into miasma. It was clawing its way through him with no trepidation, fast in how it worked. Chewing away his viscera, ripping entrails from muscle. Not even leaving bones behind.
Agony pierces under his flesh. Unyielding, ebbing in waves, one stronger than the last.
Jayce wails.
It stops as jarringly as it came, and he feels as his body shuts down on him. His mind goes blank, and his consciousness flakes into nothing.
When he comes back to himself, it’s violent. He lurches awake, gasping for air as if he had been drowning. The coughs that rattle through him are wet, and he has trouble getting air into his lungs.
He turns sideways in an attempt to get whatever is blocking his airways to relent, but as he does so, he feels the world start to spin on its axis. His stomach turns, and his mouth fills with saliva. His hands push from under him and up- and before he knows it, he is vomiting into the ground below him, his gut churning up all of its contents. It doesn’t take long before the only thing coming out of his mouth is pure vile, his throat burning at its acidity. He still gags and heaves for the next few minutes, his body refusing to calm down.
By the time he is done he is hyperventilating, wheezing uncontrollably, his eyes red from the effort and cheeks stained with tears. He collapses onto his elbows, groaning as his head screams at him.
As his breathing slows down, he starts trying to get his bearings.
At his first attempt at opening his eyes, he flinches, the light too bright for his unaccustomed sight. He shields himself with his hand, and slowly turns his body away from the vomit. His eyes take a moment to adjust and he is met with a cloudy sky.
His hand falls away, and he balks as he makes contact with grass. He looks down, and sees greenery surrounding him. It feels a bit dry, and it's a dull green color. He continues his investigation, and realizes he is sitting in a sparse forest.
He feels himself frowning, blinking and twitching, the headache that had started never truly receding, now making home behind his forehead. There is a small ringing in his ears growing louder, as he becomes more confused by the second, as he tries to understand where he is. How he is here.
Something splits in his skull, and Jayce moans as he doubles over, his hands coming to hold his head.
A million different images start projecting in his mind. The hexcore. The puppets. The black sky shining with yellow stars. The wave of his blue blanket.Two golden eyes, as they stare at him in awe. The feeling of a hand caressing his arm. The sensation of molding, separating, and coming together with-
Viktor.
Jayce stands up fast. So fast, the edges of his sight turn white. A familiar pain shoots up his leg, but he pushes past it with nothing but a grunt. He starts scanning the area around him more thoroughly. He sees some shrubs. He sees tall trees with white trunks. Sticks on the ground. Scattered leaves. Dry stones that decorate the grass.
And no sign of him.
“Viktor?” He calls for him, voice clearer than he thought it could be.
He walks aimlessly, one unstable step in front of the other. His vision swims, stabilizes, and then starts to shake. He continues to search for any hint of the man.
After everything they’ve been through, he can’t disappear. It wouldn’t make sense. They were supposed to be intertwined, two souls connected beyond time and space. Jayce had felt how the boundaries between himself and Viktor had melted together. How, for what felt an eternity, there was no way to distinguish one another, let alone separate them.
So, why would he not be here?
The forest is oddly quiet against his screaming thoughts. The only sound is the uneven crunching of leaves as he trudged on, his head snapping around in a desperate manner. The pain in his leg heats up, but he doesn’t falter.
He has to find him.
Jayce has so much to say, so much to tell him. There are so many things he wants to do. There was so much wasted time to compensate for. All those years stuck in a lab together, non-wiser of what they felt for one another, both too cowardly to act about it- too afraid to lose what they had. Viktor, who is the kindest person Jayce knows. Viktor, who would stay awake for days if stuck on a specific problem. Viktor, who prefers his tea with honey instead of sugar. Viktor, whose eyes always shined beautifully when he had a breakthrough. Viktor, and the way his hair fell forward when he worked. Viktor and the mole above his lips. His smile. His voice. His hands. Viktor, Viktor-
“Viktor!” Jayce is shouting, and his voice wavers at the end, his eyes stinging. “Please… “
He doesn’t know who he is begging to, but he can’t stop once he starts.
“Please, please.” He pleads.
He can’t be alone, not again. The cruelty of the world cannot be this endless.
Jayce continues forward. He walks, runs, Viktor’s name drying his throat, his voice turning hoarse from overuse as he continues to scream for him. He doesn’t know how much time it has been since he woke up, not sure how long he has been going for.
He only stops when the pain on his leg turns from bad to worse abruptly, making him buckle. Jayce grunts, moaning as he falls to his knees. He clutches at his leg, his fingers digging hard into the muscle.
“Fuck.” He hisses, and as the word leaves his mouth, he finds himself getting more agitated.
“Fuck!”
His hands find the dirt below him as he lets himself fall forward. He thrashes, yanking and destroying anything around. His fingers claw at the ground, his nails breaking as he keeps striking hard patches. Before he realizes, he is screaming, a roar of frustration tearing through the emptiness of the forest. His throat feels raw with the strength behind it.
The vivid image of himself crying in a ravine splinters behind his eyes. He flinches, hard, and pushes himself away from his position, attempting to escape the memory. The gasp that escapes him feels ragged and like it’s not coming from him. He closes his eyes, willing himself to calm down, his fists tight. Wills himself into thinking rationally.
If he survived the explosion, then Viktor did too.
Jayce can’t understand why they wouldn’t land in the same area, but the more he thinks about it, the more it makes sense that they didn’t. Infact, going by how volatile the arcane is, the chance of that happening is very low. So it’s likely that Viktor is alive and well, stranded somewhere else.
Alone.
That idea settles in his mind like poison.
He sits there, unsure of what to do, festering in his own self-pity, eyes open but gaze far away.
Once he convinces himself that staying like that won’t achieve anything, his sight sharpens, and lands in a curious pattern. There is a sort of path weaving through the trees. Jayce gulps, feeling a little uneasy as he stares at it.
He stands slow, making sure his leg is no longer screaming at him, his hand coming down to tighten his brace.
The path is made of dirt and dead leaves, probably caused by the recurrent steps of people going in the same direction. Unintentional and natural.
A small string of uncertainty shoots through his core, and he stands there, jaw clenching, as he attempts to figure out why. Is as if he is frozen. He wants to take a step forward, but something deep in his instincts is warning him not too.
Usually, Jayce would be against ignoring something as primal as fear. But, this time, he knows he has to push it aside. He knows that paths like this usually lead to civilization. A place where Jayce can ask for help, seek shelter, get nourishment. Even better, he would be able to know where in Runeterra he is.
And most important of all, it’s something that he knows Viktor would do. And that leads him to the conclusion, that, if this is a path to civilization, then it would be a path to Viktor too.
Left with no other option but to follow the trail, he stills himself, and walks with it.
It doesn’t take long before he sees a clearing from between the trees. He must have walked a mile, maybe less. When he finally reaches the end of the trail, he is presented with a meadow. It’s large, but small enough that Jayce can see how the forest wraps around it. The grass that covers it is low and uninteresting. Jayce gets a proper look at the sky, which is cloudy, completely white and a little hard to stare at as it’s very bright.
His sight settles in the middle of the meadow, where a house sits. Jayce blinks, feeling like his eyes should’ve honed in on that first, instead of the common view that is the meadow. But somehow, his eyes had slipped past it.
Unnerved by his clearly faulty attention, he steps into the clearing, walking carefully towards the building. The house looks mundane, as any other cottage that you might find in an area like this. It’s white, made of wood, the paint coat has chipped away in a lot of places from age. It’s two stories high, and blocky, with a triangular roof at the top. It’s slightly elevated, steps coming into a small porch. There are some potted and overgrown plants sitting next to the railing, and the house is surrounded by an unattended garden. Jayce can recognize some herbs and some vegetable crops.
Even with all the signs of unuse, Jayce can’t really deduce whether it's abandoned or not.
He stands in front of the steps, the house suddenly seeming bigger as it looms over him. The uneasy feeling he had in the forest never really left him, but now it’s present and sharp. Again, he finds himself hesitant, his feet rooted to the ground.
Jayce goes back to attempting and subdue this odd feeling of fear that seems to plague him by using logic. Logically, it’s just a house. Logically, there could be people inside, people who could offer help. Logically, if it’s abandoned, it’s a good place to settle for the time being.
He takes a deep breath, trying to calm his anxiety, and finally goes up the stairs.
The door is as dull as the rest of the house, wooden and bare. Its handle seems to be made of stainless steel, as most of them are. This time he doesn’t hesitate before knocking on the door.
He takes a few steps back, trying to look as small as possible, in case the people in this house look at him and think he is dangerous. He waits for a response, for the door handle to jiggle and the door open. But nothing comes.
Jayce tries again, louder this time. When nothing happens again, he goes for the side windows.
Peeking inside proves itself difficult, as the curtains seem to be drawn. There is a small gap, and if he puts himself in the right angle, he can see a little. He can only manage to make out the joint space that seems to be a living room and a kitchen, and a hallway that cuts in the middle of the farther wall. Jayce tries to crank his neck to try and see beyond that hallway, but it’s futile.
Jayce straightens up, and looks around.
He is back at the front door, unsure of what to do. More accurately, unsure if he should do what he knows he could. The wind had picked up since he stepped out of the forest, the meadow taking away the shelter that the trees provided, making him shiver where he stands. What he is wearing will not protect him from the temperature drop that will happen at night.
Making up his mind, he decides to try the door before he does something more drastic.
To his astonishment, the handle gives easily at Jayce’s push. It clicks mechanically, and when he lets go in surprise, the door creaks as it opens slightly inwards.
He doesn’t let the uneasiness creeping up on him make him stall this time, instead he pushes the door with his fingers, and steps in without thinking too much about it.
“Hello?”
The open space is separated in two. To his left, there is a living space, with a couple of couches, a reclining chair, and a coffee table in the middle. There are some non-descriptive pictures on the walls of scenery, and a half empty bookshelf stands at the opposite wall of the front door. In between two large windows, a brick fireplace sits, with some logs stashed on the side. To his right, there is a kitchen. It appears to have all of its essentials, a fridge, a stove with an oven, a sink with a window right on top, and some cupboards and drawers. There is also a small table with three chairs standing in front of the counters.
Across from where Jayce is standing, a hallway opens up. It’s as long as the room he is in, with two doors, one on each side, and a set of stairs that goes to the second floor.
No sound reaches his ears besides that of his own breathing.
He approaches the table slowly and drags a finger on top of its surface. A trail is left behind as dust collects on it. Wanting to prove something, he turns and looks down at the floor, and sees how his steps have left footprints.
Jayce exhales through his nose, and with the new found knowledge that the likelihood that someone lives here is close to zero, he ventures deeper into the house.
Walking past the kitchen, he opens the first door in the hallway. It’s a small bathroom, with only a toilet and a sink cramped inside a quiet tight space. The second door, the one in front of the staircase, is an office of sorts.
Quite an ample room, with a couple of large bookcases and storage areas against the walls. A wooden workbench is pushed right below the window, and Jayce takes a note of the toolboxes underneath it. It’s cluttered, with many boxes stacked in corners, or pushed into shelves. But his eyes settle to the almost empty space next to the table, where a shotgun is propped against it.
Jayce knows he is gonna spend a lot of time in this room trying to figure out what is useful and what isn’t.
He is closing the door behind him and is about to take a step towards the staircase when he hears a clicking noise coming from behind him.
He pauses, a hand still on the door. He feels the hair on his nape raise, and he holds his breath.
It had been small, faint enough that he could’ve imagined it.
He can hear his heartbeat pumping deep in his ears as he waits for another sound.
When nothing comes, he snaps his head back to the room. He inspects it, his fist gripping the handle for support. Unease settles under his skin as his eyes roam.
Nothing is amiss.
He closes the door behind him for good measure.
*
The rest of the house is unassuming. There are two bedrooms on the second floor that come with a twin bed each and wardrobes filled with clothes. Additionally, another bathroom sits right next to the top of the stairs, with a tub that still feels a tad too small to fit Jayce completely.
The plumbing surprisingly works. The faucet rattles when Jayce opens the tap, water coming out brown with oxidation and gunk stuck there for what could be years- clearing into what looks like clean water after a couple of minutes. All taps in the house go through the same process.
Even a better find is the food that is in the cupboards and the fridge. Mostly cans of preserved food, old sacks of flour and sugar, as well as dried meat. He even finds some tea in one of the jars, hidden behind other herbs that Jayce doesn’t care to inspect yet.
The lights also work well enough. They blink a couple of times before settling with a low hum, illuminating the rooms in a yellow color. It’s a little confusing trying to understand where the electricity comes from, but Jayce will not look into something that seems to be working.
The floors creak every now and then when Jayce walks, and the air seems stale even when he opens the windows. The anxiety he had when he entered the house has not gone away, but shelter is shelter.
The temperature drops when the night falls, as he had predicted, and Jayce spends some time lighting up a fire with the miraculously dry wood next to the fireplace.
He sits on the floor, the billowing flames lighting up the room in an orange color. If he stares at it for long enough, he can trick himself into believing he is in the forge. It pulls him into a sort of trance, wasting time as he basks in the heat it provides.
The bed feels cold when he goes to sleep.
He doesn’t dream.
*
Jayce spends the next few days exploring the area he is in.
He usually leaves the house in the mornings, and walks in a straight direction, marking the trunks of trees so as to not get lost. His expeditions last hours, his leg aching by the time he gets to go back. It doesn't stop him from getting back out the next day.
He looks for any sign of human activity- footprints, trash, disturbed areas, or the leftovers of a camp. But frustratingly, he finds nothing. Jayce knows deep down that he is not only looking for indications that people are around. No- he knows he is looking for something more specific. For someone.
But, the more he looks, the less he tries to hone into that thought. Thinking about him, and the possibility that he may not find him, makes his chest ache in ways that Jayce is not ready to go through. He avoids the topic in his head, occupying his mind with other tasks. Like remembering that he saw that the wood next to the fireplace is dwindling down, and he needs to cut more logs, or the fact that he still hasn’t explored the office space in the house, or making mental maps while he is out, so when he gets back he is ready to start to draw a real one.
It’s something he is used to doing, shying away from a hurtful truth. People had called him an optimist most of his life, given that he always chose to view the positive sides in situations, or expertly side-stepped discussions of dire circumstances by offering solutions or the option of focusing on other, more tangible problems. The truth lies in the simple fact that not thinking about the dreadful aspects of reality came to Jayce naturally. Even if those thoughts came tenfold to him later. He preferred the comfortable dissociation of refusing to see things as they were in the present.
Viktor had called him out on it once. Over something incredibly irrelevant as well. Jayce had slipped with a mug of tea in his hand, and it had shattered on the floor into a million pieces. It had been a cup that he had had since he was 10- maybe less, of a comic character he didn’t even care about anymore. Viktor had offered his condolences, knowing that it was a part of his childhood, and Jayce had immediately started spewing about how he would fix it, or if he couldn’t he would find a new one. Viktor, of course, had seen right through it. Despite his bad leg, he had kneeled next to Jayce, and slowly helped him pick up the pieces.
“ Denying that something hurts doesn’t make the pain disappear.” Viktor had told him, “ It just diminishes the importance the source of it had for you.”
The memory of Viktor’s voice takes a hold of his ribcage, and Jayce focuses on the way he’d pronounce his words, on the soft smile he had given him. Of the comfortable silence that had sat between them as he let Jayce mull over what he had said.
Jayce still refuses to think about the hole growing in his chest the longer he goes without him.
Whenever he is not outside, he is either tinkering with his brace, or tending to tasks that require him to do physical labour. It numbs him, and knocks him out when his head hits the pillow. He avoids spending idle time in the house. When he has nothing to do with his hands, he feels like he can easily fade, become a ghost inside the oppressive walls of this odd placr.
The day is somehow worse than the night. The light streaming through the windows choke him with the clarity of what he is missing, of the unusual mute stillness that he is welcomed with every morning.
Every time he wakes up, there is at least 20 seconds where he will not hear anything. Not the sound of birds, nor the wind. Not the sound of his own breath, not even the thumping of his own heartbeats. Not even ringing in his ears. It’s only when he moves from where he is laying, that noise comes back fully. As if the house wakes up with him.
Sometimes he thinks he sees something out of the corner of his eyes. Usually movement, fast, and so, so small that it can be easily confused by a trick of the light.
The first time it happened, he had been deep cleaning the sink in the kitchen, trying to get rid of the oxidation that plagued the mouth of the drain. He had moved his eyes away for a second, and when they passed the expansion of the living room, he saw what looked to be a head that had been peeking behind the wall, quickly retreating into the hallway.
He had jumped at the sight, his eyes immediately correcting themselves and freezing on that opening. He thinks he stood frozen on that counter for minutes, before he had snapped out of his stupor and had turned to the hallway to find nothing.
After that, he starts seeing them often. Always in dark nooks, or behind furniture, shadows that would hide away at the possibility of being noticed.
On worse times, he sees the corruption of the arcane. It happens when holding something and he turns away from it, only to see it for a split second when his attention goes back to the object. Most of the time he drops it and it takes him a while to calm himself down, a while before he can pick it back up. Sometimes he can’t do it, and he has to move onto the next thing, the object remaining on the floor for the rest of the day.
Jayce is self-aware enough to know that his mind has been fractured beyond repair, that these sightings are nothing more than the ricochet of his splintered psyche. It, however, is not enough to dissipate the primal fear that lashes through him whenever he sees them. And certainly not enough to convince himself that they are just that, an echo of what he is most scared of.
On the fifth day, he stumbles upon a river.
It’s approximately 3 hours away from the house, and isn’t wide, or deep enough that he wouldn’t be able to cross it if needed. He can see fish swimming about in the clear water, and he mourns the fact that he didn’t bring anything that might aid him to catch them.
The river gives Jayce some hope. Most civilizations are near bodies of water, so the next trip out, he’ll just have to follow it down stream.
His map grows, and somehow he doesn’t go back to the river.
*
Jayce always grows restless with the need to keep himself busy. And he does, most of the time. Except, he had woken up and immediately he knew that his leg was not gonna be kind today, so unfortunately, he couldn’t escape into the wilderness. He can’t find anything to fix, so he spends the morning cleaning the room he doesn’t sleep in, and for good measure, the bathroom on the second floor too.
When he is done, and he carries the supplies back to the kitchen, where they belong, his eyes land on the bookcase in the living room. It has some interesting books. Most of them are fiction- authors that Jayce remembers he had to read in school for literature class. There are a couple academic ones, maybe a quarter of the whole selection.
He gravitates to the only physics book he can see, and spends the day submerged in its pages. It’s not particularly advanced- it’s an academic review on modern theories of quantum mechanics, but does revise some theories that Jayce used to be interested in.
At one point he notices that light is no longer streaming through the window, and he isn’t sure how long it's been since the sun set. It’s reminiscent of the times he would lose himself in his work, either at the lab, or even further back, when he was a student at the academy. The feeling, although a little disorienting, feels familiar and comfortable. So, he stands from where he was sitting and decides to get some reading done in bed.
With book in hand, he climbs up the stairs, eyes still reading, mind still enraptured in a chapter about relativistic quantum mechanics. It delves into how a particle might experience time dilation in multiple states simultaneously. How, if said quantum particle is in superposition, one state being still, and the other moving close to the speed of light, then part of the particle is experiencing slowed-down time while the other part experiences normal time. It’s oddly relatable, oddly fitting, and Jayce is so concentrated in the text, he doesn’t notice his breath growing shorter.
His leg flares up, and he hisses, stalling his movement, putting his leg down before he can reach the next step, except- Jayce attention snaps back into his surroundings, and he feels blood draining from his face once he realizes he has been going up the stairs for more than 2 minutes.
He looks around, eyes wide and confused. His breath is coming in faster, for a completely different reason than physical exertion, and he feels dizzy and unbalanced. He stands at the center of the stairs, with eight steps to go down, and eight steps to go up.
Jayce doesn’t panic. This is not the first time he has lost time, and although this seems extremely different, he decides to stick to that. Even when the pain in his leg from the effort of moving begs to argue. Even when something in his guts tells him that there is something wrong.
He grips the railing, and for some reason, he looks at the door to the office.
Even when he didn’t have anything else to do all day, he hadn’t gone through that room. He hadn’t even thought about it. Almost like he had completely forgotten it existed, like his mind had skipped it on purpose. He suddenly feels the urge to do that task now.
A strange sensation passes over him then. And over-ridden with the uneasiness that now grips his throat, Jayce feels like he is in two places at once.
He blinks, a headache making itself known behind his eyes. He massages his temples with the pads of his fingers, groaning at the dissipating pain.
In the end, he stares at the rest of the steps up the staircase, and resolves to go and take care of the office tomorrow. He heads to bed, unwilling to think about the incident any longer.
The book lays discarded and forgotten on the side-table.
*
Sometimes Jayce hears him.
It’s always muffled, and never happening close enough that he can make out what he is saying. Always somewhere far away in the house, leaving Jayce reeling and feeling lost within its cramped walls.
But he recognizes the tilt of the voice, the way it curls around the end of the sentences. Sometimes Jayce thinks he can make out his own name.
It’s a spectre he tightly holds close. Even if it unravels other parts of him.
"...to even mention the word "hope" seems like a sick joke to the millions and millions of young people who face a lifetime of unemployment, or sometimes worse: employment"
Understand that relationships are not just love. People fight, people argue. That's a normal part of being in a partnership. If your person leaves you after an argument instead of working it out, then that's not your person. One argument shouldn't kill the love you have for eachother. If it does, that's how you know their intention was never to stay for the long haul.
stop humiliating fat children/fat teens/fat young adults/fat adults/fat folks in general. stop questioning/speculating on our food intake, our energy out put, how our individual bodies must feel, what our health is,etc.
does anyone else get insanely romantically frustrated, like i know sexual frustration is a thing but sometimes i get super intense cravings for soft kisses or make out sessions or cuddling naps or things like that and it’s way more frustrating to me than sexual cravings
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