Commune!Silco for @sigilmint <3
notes about design choice: I think his hair would be grown out at this point in the story, + I think the herald comforted Silco before he healed him, which explains the fingerprints on the shoulder. His eye looks the same and functions; however, it no longer affects his health.
its Wip Wednesday again! i haven’t participated in a while so i figured i’d throw y’all some jayvik angst from my ongoing commune AU for BottomJayceWeek, “Fate, Forged in Failure”
alt text + 4 additional pages under the readmore. you can read chapter 1 here 💚
aaaaaand an alt text version cause bsky’s alt text wordcount limit is virgil-phobic lol:
“Do the gods light this fire in our hearts,
or does each man's mad desire become his god?”
― Virgil, The Aeneid
There is an odd, unfamiliar emotion in the incandescent eyes that turn to meet Jayce's words. A look of something he nearly recognizes behind the otherwise collected and calculatedly still expression that Jayce has come to recognize as The Herald's mask. The new name which the people of the commune have adorned Viktor with is fitting in a way Jayce finds himself despising, the taste of it acidic and heady in his mouth.
He hates that he finds himself thinking of Viktor as that, too—as not Viktor, not his partner, but The Herald. Some otherworldly bringer of death who's meant to be his mission, his mark, despite the fact that he that still adorns the spitting-mirrored mask of his beloved ex-partner. So what if Jayce knew that Viktor's heart had stopped beating on that table before he threw the Hexcore into his chest? So what if Viktor had been revived by something beyond their understanding, if his limbs had stretched like branches and his flesh was more akin to the smooth, weaving bark of a tree then that of a man? The Herald still also looked like Viktor.
Still sounds like him. Still smelled like him. Still felt like him; a presence that hung thick in the air like the way the presence of a rainstorm forming on the horizon feels—a latent heat from rising warm air that destabilizes the very molecules of oxygen both inside and outside of one's lungs.
He still acts and argues just like my stubborn asshole of a partner, too…
For as well as Jayce felt he still knew Viktor, the expression he wears now is something unknown. Or, at the very least, it is unfamiliar to witness on Viktor's face. There is the flicker of a different kind of pain than that which Jayce is accustomed to see painted on him: a response to something based less in the physical, something far more emotional than he's used to seeing on his estranged partner. It teeters on outright vulnerable, if only for a fraction of a second. Something halfway between annoyance and apologetic; a bit lost, even—like he can't place whether he wants to confess to something or charge Jayce with another crime. Jayce couldn't really blame him if he did choose to throw out accusations. There are countless offenses he has committed and yet to be acquitted with, even aside from the one he made the moment he stepped into the commune. The expression plastered on Viktor's face is a fractured sort of frustration, rather than the focused sort that Jayce had come to associate with him. It leaves Jayce feeling unnerved, antsy and restlessly unprepared for whatever is meant to come from this conversation.
Viktor picks the prior choice of confessing; perhaps as an olive branch.
"I do regret… how I left," Viktor treads carefully with a soft sigh. The hand he examines slowly closes into a fist before curling open again, fingers stretching in a repetitive, fluid motion, over and over until he continues with the condemnation that Jayce's subconscious predicted.
"But—I do not regret leaving. I needed space, from all of it. From our collective and individual follies, our failures. And yes, admittedly: from you. Us. It just was not as inherently personal of a decision as it may have seemed in the moment. By the time I sent someone to find you to speak, well… I was told that you had left?"
Jayce feels the olive branch snap then; though, he knows it's not really Viktor's fault that the words fall on tender wounds. His eyes are pleading as they gauge Jayce, words teetering between cold and compassionate before clearly waiting for a response—an explanation for where he had been before the commune. It only makes Jayce feel all the more pathetic for how any words he could find to describe his however-long-it-was absence end up getting choked on the bile-flavored spit that pools in his pursed mouth.
The taste reminds him of the sickness that had settled into his marrow and sinew over the course of time he spent in the fissure. The too-fresh fractures in his leg pound out in pain, the numbness he used to shield himself chipping away in light of the reminder. The mere thought of attempting such a feat as explaining what happened, where he was, what he saw, makes his head pang and throb as it had during the fever. His tongue becomes heavy, slicked with a pool of too much saliva that feels like it's swimming with scales. Viktor either senses or sees the apprehension and chooses to relent, looking away with a small, singular nod of nondiscriminatory defeat. It is a somewhat sad motion of understanding , one that fails to conceal his displeasure over the blatant-and-barely suppressed desire to press Jayce on the matter. His words continue to sting as he fills the silence for Jayce, moving the conversation along in spite of Jayce's reluctance to participate.
"The initial drive to be so far away stemmed not from despising you, Jayce: but rather from the startling and suffocating reality of all the ways we had failed each other as well as ourselves. Though, your choices across various contexts—but especially regarding Hextech, the Hexcore, me—"
Viktor inhales deeply as though to center himself—the exhale that follows causes an unnatural clicking and buzzing noise, something not-quite but almost like a whirring. It vaguely reminds Jayce of the same kind of crackle that had formed over the years of Viktor's natural life, when illness had sunk in underneath his ribs right underneath Jayce's nose, eating away at the man he'd so admired, loved, and worshiped. The rough and harsh sound of pained inhales and exhales that made Jayce want to rip into the mans' chest with his bare hands and resolve the issue himself, if only he knew how to even begin placing what the issue was. Not even the best doctor's in Piltover had an answer for what exact factor in the complex equation of Viktor's health was causing his decline. They had only known enough to confirm the worst: that with all the parts added together, his case was undeniably terminal.
⟢
It had always seemed something selfish and shameful to Jayce—how he'd loved Viktor so much that he was a blind fool to it even happening. How he couldn't recognize the true density of the emotions that had been right in front of him for so long until he was left alone at the bottom of a decaying world with nothing to do but face it. How he'd never let himself fully acknowledge what Viktor's presence in his life really meant until it began to dissolve away, day by day. Jayce hadn't had given himself the spare time to piece together exactly how much he loved Viktor, how much Viktor had become the core of his world—at least, not right up until the center of his very world crumbled in on itself. The grief that rippled through Jayce when he found Viktor in the lab, passed out and bloody-nosed, only to be given the news he was dying was unlike anything he'd ever known. He'd encountered death before: his father, among others. Yet grieving wasn't something he felt himself particularly accustomed with in a traditional sense.
Even as a child, Jayce had found it easier to work his way through the pain by simply focusing on things that the living still needed done. Though he had only been 12 when his father passed, there was much to do in the aftermath and far too little time to process. He'd found himself easily falling into the role of holding everyone else together post mortem: making arrangements, running errands, tying up legal affairs even when they went well beyond his expertise, making sure that Ximena did not wither away from starvation. Not to mention supplying a steady space for all the other's emotional processing while wading off the sharks that swam to the bloodied waters in hopes of devouring what remained of the Talis' Hammer Industry. In these ways, Jayce found that grief more often than not made the world spin by faster. Time didn't slow down how others had described it would with his sadness, it sped up in cruel spite of it.
To Jayce, healing was synonymous with running, racing to keep up with that ticking clock that counted down to his own time for demise.
It was different with Viktor. Perhaps it was because there was warning, a looming sense of anticipation, whereas every other loss he'd endured seemed to sneak up from behind Jayce or be caused by his own sinning hands. While the news of his partner's diagnosis did still motivate Jayce to work harder, to press on full-steam ahead—this time, it felt as though his world had stopped. Time became slow and sluggish, almost frozen. Life was lived in limbo. Jayce's days wasted away to the incessant hum of Hextech and Coucil work; any free time was spent researching medical documents in desperate search for answers until he collapsed. He had remained stuck in that terrible moment at the lab, at the hospital, where his great fear was confirmed: he was losing Viktor, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The unhelpfully true phrase 'He's dying' played on loop within his mind through every passing millisecond. It hit him with ten times the weight in the small moments of normalcy, when they were lost in work and it was almost easy to forget what was happening until a coughing fit or almost-fainting spell or the general sickly pallor of his partner brought him back down to reality. Then, shame would fill his veins.
How could you forget that you're losing him? You're watching him fade away in front of you but you keep going on like it's normal. You won't even do him the justice of acknowledging it's inevitability. Are you that ungrateful? That selfish? Does all this time mean so little to you that you fail to cherish how precious the time you have left is?
His mind replayed the scenes that led to the discovery like a coil of film unspooling: finding Viktor bloodied and collapsed on the cold tile of the lab, the doctor's pitiful face and detached tone when relaying the news that he had not years but months—if he's lucky, they'd said. The hours he spent waiting by his bedside before Viktor woke up when he was certain it was already too late, that he was watching him pass away right in that very moment. How he knew immediately, in that moment, that he would never and could never love someone else like this again. That he could never admit to Viktor now what he felt. How cruel it was to even think that, let alone say it to his partner, when he'd waited until it was too late to do a goddamn thing about it.
How could he ever confess to all of that—to the fact that while Viktor literally bled out on the floor from the effort of carrying the brunt of their work, he had been wrapped in someone else's naked embrace, obsessing on Viktor and their work in the back of his mind the whole time? How the only reason he found Viktor on the floor like that at all was because he'd rushed back after having some grand Hexcore related "break-through" that occurred post-coital—combined with an incessant need to see him, even though he had the most beautiful and brilliant woman in Piltover wrapping him around her silken sheets and shins that night?
Jayce ended up not even remembering what the break-through was that had led him to the lab in the first place, the thought ejected the moment he saw the crime scene before him. In hindsight, it hadn't mattered anyways; it was only ever an excuse to return to the lab and see Viktor. Any excitement Jayce had over either notion immediately dissolved in the dread of finding Viktor unconscious in a pool of his own blood, crumpled on the lab floor like a discarded paper doll.
It was a heavy guilt and a gripping vice of hurt blooming from vines of remorse and regret that grew tendrils through his veins, clinging against his bones with the sharpness of rose thorns. All of it based from a selfish desire, formed from only realizing how badly he wanted something when it was already slipping through his fingers like sand.
⟢
And Jayce still can't do it now, either—confess to the weight of all his sins: his lust, his confusion, his greed. His throat closes the same way it had when he saw that sight of Viktor in the lab, in the hospital bed, each time he so much as forms the thought. He can't bring himself to admit to all the ways he'd wanted Viktor after failing him so deeply, nor all the reasons he been willing to kill him just two weeks ago despite that. He couldn't begin to unravel the complex web of thoughts or feelings he had now held about Viktor. Or the Herald. Or what—whoever—the person before him is. He can barely even handle the relentless racing of his own thoughts about everything that he's done and encountered himself; all the death he's seen or caused , all the ways it's changed him.
So instead, he just swallows it all, listening on and feeling something far less than half-there as Viktor continues filling the space his own words cannot.
"I could not understand it, Jayce. Truthfully, I am still not sure if I do. What you chose to do… it has changed everything, for both of us. I felt myself filled with an unfounded form of rage the day I awakened that left me detached. Different, even beyond how I had already been altered physically. And ever since then, I have continued to feel distanced in a way that I never considered myself particularly acquainted with before… My body and mind were not just reborn but remade, entirely new; there is only a resonant charge of what or who I was before. I can remember who I was before, but I do not recognize it as myself. I don't expect you to understand that—and I understand now that you had your own reasons, for your choices. Your own context and story. You have every right to that, but so do I. Perhaps what pulled us apart was beyond our control; or maybe I shut you out too quickly in my initial reaction—but I need you to understand. It wasn't out of hatred. It was simply too much upon both my revival and immediate review. In my defense, Jayce—you do not always wait to see all the sides of a situation; and at the time you were too determined to fix something I already knew was irreparable. I felt that, eh… well, one cannot continue to live where they have already died, I suppose?"
Viktor laughs with a tone that is not quite derisive, but still humorless. The feigned attempt at any lightheartedness and the symbolism in his sermon does nothing to salve the way his words burn through Jayce like molten lava. He feels his face begin to heat with a boiling anger at the way Viktor's words leave him once more feeling utterly outcast and discarded. He feels foolish for being here; embarrassed for assuming Viktor still cared just because he was tolerating Jayce haunting his community. It stings and scorches through him in a way that he tells himself has absolutely nothing to do with the other forms of tension in him regarding Viktor.
"So what are you saying—we're just doomed, then?" Jayce retorts, his voice bitter before falling to a choked sort of betrayed and broken. "If you believe that, then why let me stay at all? If-if we can't fix this—whatever this is, that broke us—why let me stay? Why not tell me to leave? You should want me to leave. And if you do believe that we can fix it, then—" his voice cracks in a way that makes him wince, but he forces the words out bitterly despite it. "Why didn't you find me, Viktor?"
"No—" Vitkors eyes close as he shakes his head firmly, calm and resolved. "I'm not saying we're doomed, Jayce. But we had reached a point of discord at the time that required our paths to divulge—did we not? Something irreplaceable in us both, and thus between us, had fractured. Neither of us were equipped to repair it. There were too many external variables. I have had much time to think and change, now. It looks as though you have as well. I could not see it this way then, but I understand now that being unable to go back does not mean we cannot move forward… Still, that does not mean I understand exactly how to move forward with you, any better than you do with I." Viktor replies softly. His sad and vulnerable eyes shift through colors, cast in a film of somber sympathy as they turn to search for something in the scarred face before him.
Jayce can't help but wonder if he looks as unfamiliar to Viktor as Viktor does now to him. He hadn't really taken any time to look in his reflection, though he caught glimpses of it throughout the last two weeks. Enough to know he looked nothing like the last time Viktor had seen him. Was it even time that changed them? Or something beyond that, more powerful and infallible? Whatever it was—Jayce despises it still. He fails to relate to Viktor's acceptance of the circumstances. If anything, it only reminds him of the Mage's cold warning just before he opened the anomaly:
"Remember, Jayce. Whatever happens, whatever he says, whatever he looks like—whatever feeling you are consumed by or what you see when you face him: it is not your Viktor. Not anymore. He isn't the person you love. He isn't a person at all. It's only the Hexcore using him to survive. You have to destroy it."
His expression sours suddenly; a sarcastic scoff leaving his split lips, frame hardening, hazel eyes filling with fire. Even though he no longer believed the Mage, the fear that his belief is once more founded in something faulty is enough for him to reject The Herald's sentimentality. It's clear from the twitch of response in The Herald's brow that he does not find what he's looking for from that response, nor the verbal one that follows.
"I've seen the end of what your current projection forward looks like," Jayce spits, more venom behind the words than he intended inherently towards the being they fall on. The Herald flinches as though burned by the sparks of Jayce's spite, visibly biting his own mouth: but he remains quiet otherwise. Jayce's voice drops an octave when he forces it through the feeling of glass in his throat, cracking with the failed effort of holding back his bitterness. "It isn't any prettier than our past. Just—just emptier. Barren. Decayed."
The Herald says nothing at that for a moment again, but his face contorts with pain in a way that stops Jayce from continuing further, despite the fact that he has countless other things to say on the matter. He continues to stare at Jayce with a concerned, contorted sort of curiosity—and Jayce again refrains from meeting his eyes. The Herald waits, and waits, and waits… the mosaic windows that had become the irises of his companion's eyes drilling into Jayce for so long that he feels his skin begin to bead with an anticipatory sweat. He shifts uncomfortably—even clears his throat at one point—but says nothing more, refusing to elaborate until finally, the other relents. Viktor inhales sharply, posing his question much in the same way that Jayce has heard him offer countless other questions of philosophy or theory:
"Is that what I am to you, Jayce? What this place is?" He counters with a firm defiance, motioning around them as though it proves his point. The inner corners of his eyebrows angle up sharply, flittering colors of otherworldly irises moving rapidly as they question the lush plant life that surrounds them. "Of all things, of all the possibilities… what you come up with to describe all of the things before you is dead?"
Jayce doesn't know how to reply. His brain scrambles and races, mouth parting but not even bothering to stammer while thoughts begin supplying too many answers rather than a lack any to the question. There are simply too many things he wants to say coming to mind much faster than his mouth could ever hope to form them, even if his heart was willing to share. All his efforts are focused on forcing his lower jaw back into place and physically biting back the words on the inside of his lip. It requires enough force that he can feel the imprint it'll leave later forming, the slightest taste of iron and blood spreading across taste-buds as only his mind screams:
Oh, come on. What do you expect me to say to that, Viktor? Yes, no—I don't know! Do you even know if you're alive? Are you even you anymore?! You asked me to destroy the very thing you became. So what are you—who are you, now? Viktor, or "The Herald", or the Hexcore itself, or—or someone, something else entirely? You never let me figure out. You never really let me see who you were, let alone what you became! You barely let me see you at all! You just left the second you were back—and then I died. Inside and outside, I was nothing anymore. Not alive, just empty, dead. Everyone was dead to me. Everything. For months—or was it years? I don't still don't even know that! Fuck! I-I don't know how much time I spent there, what or where there even was—how long we've been apart or-or if what I experienced as months actually was months at all?! If it wasn't for this fucking rock embedded in my wrist and everything else that proves it was real, I'd write the whole thing off as a psychotic break. I don't know what happened to me, or to you, or why it fucking happened! All I know is that I died. I was dead. I died with you, Viktor, don't you fucking get it? I died when I saw you in the rubble of the council room, and I died again when your heart stop beating on our lab table; I died when I betrayed you, and then I died every day you were lost to me, and died all over again of joy when you came back, and then died in tenfold new way when you left. I hated you for leaving me! I hated myself for failing to love you enough to keep you from leaving at all! And-and then—fuck! I don't even know, Viktor! I don't know what happened. I don't know where I was. It was horrible. I can feel it calling me back, luring me to die again. Was any of it even real? I don't know. I just—I lost you and then I lost everything. I lost my fucking mind, and lost the person I loved, and this whole world and-and myself. So of course you're dead. Because you're here, and I'm here, and I'm dead too. I don't what I am either. I don't know what that or any of this means for any of us, either, and God Viktor sometimes it feels like I'm still there—still choking on the gaseous stench of death and sting of starvation—so take your pick. Yes. No. I don't fucking know! Of course you're dead! I'm dead, you're dead, we're all fucking dead and it's all because of me—
The toll of attempting to choke back this selfish, sour stream of consciousness comes at the cost of his voice. Instead of finding it or attempting to form words, Jayce turns to focus on glowering at some indeterminable point of space. He knows he looks like he's pouting, but he's really just processing. Attempting to, at least: all the while, his mind supplies vivid, rapid reminders of that future he was sent here to prevent. Rot. Corruption. Decay. Crumbling masses of mankind and matter; a stench like acid and the great heat-death of all DNA, all naturalistic life. A thick, humid blanket of smog that suffocates even the strongest, healthiest of lungs: let alone those like the ones Viktor was born with. Time bends around him, and he's lost to the present. Jayce can't prevent the tremble that takes over his body as memory pulls him back; he tries to suppress it but fails, all the more frustrated that he still can't seem to get a goddamn wrap around the reality in front of him. His own expression falters into an accompanying anguish to his companion, and he feels himself fall into a form of living rigor morris.
Despite his best effort to hide it, the length of time it takes for Viktor's patience to bridge into offense is not long enough for Jayce to collect himself. Viktor notices the distress—but Jayce isn't paying enough attention to spot what, exactly, it is that he recognizes. Maybe it's the shudder in his hands, the subtle tremble of his shoulders, or the bouncing of his good leg that Jayce doesn't even notice until he freezes a moment later. If anyone had learned to intuitively recognize pain, it would be Viktor. Jayce never stood a chance at hiding any of it from him. He knew that. He doesn't know why he bothered to. Not to mention the fact that Jayce had noticed even from afar that The Herald's natural understanding and his innate capability to sense even the most silent suffering in those around him had only become preternaturally heightened since his transformation.
Viktor closes the gap between them when he recognizes it, coming into Jayce's bubble with the calm certainty of someone doing nothing abnormal or wrong. He reaches one tenderly reverent hand forward, outstretched it in an effort to place it over Jayce's arm—a misplaced attempt at offering comfort Jayce knows he doesn't deserve, doesn't want. Not from anyone: and above all not now, not here, and not from Viktor. Jayce recoils with a hushed snarl, eyes shuddering with the strain of a visceral wish to retreat that causes the other to violently retract. Jayce's body prickled at the proximity of his ex-partners hand, skin lit with the sensation of a million needles as he's still lost in recollection of his painful travels through the anomaly and back—the similar, sharp feeling being seen only further cemented the reminder of unwanted eyes lurking in shadows into his flesh. Jayce finds himself consumed again amidst the famished, frozen, and fathomless ache of a form of suffering that had no end, no purpose—only could end in death or a resilient survival of the circumstances that bred it.
"Don't," he snaps, shuddering harder as he fails to choke back a sob. He shrinks away pathetically from Viktor's overwhelming presence, the waves of unfettered feeling hitting him from every conceivable angle, every single one all-consuming and never ending. He wants to throw up. He feels his breathing turn to harsh bursts of barely-held back hyperventilation, a small noise of desperate frustration accompanying one particularly shaky exhale.
"I—" Viktor's voice cracks, and he looks… hurt? Betrayed, and boldly bothered by the refusal; but still, his hand curls back to his body reflexively.
maryam headcanons? were porrim and kanaya sisters from the start or did they meet when they were both adopted? who all calls dolo mom?
good
porrim and kanaya were sisters from birth! they may not have shared both blood parents but they’ve mostly been together their entire lives, besides some very sad stints when they were forced to be apart due to foster housing constraints
that said kanaya was adopted first, and it took longer to be able to adopt porrim for bureaucratic reasons
dolo is called mom/ma/mother by yusea, diantha, and siimon, and generally the younger kids call her abuelita while kankri, meulin, mituna and porrim call her rosa
other general maryam hcs:
rosa is not yusea’s biological mom; she’s incapable of having biological children and has been since she was very young. she adopted him through a nunnery she was once a member of and moved away to have a life with her son.
kanaya is the oldest of the children in house (the oldest child who comes for daycare is equius)
kanaya’s favorite book is “The Vampire Lestat”, though rosa has mentioned that it’s too mature for her
porrim planned for the first year she was with the whole big fam to just save up money from her part time job and buy an apartment and get emancipated, but she calmed down when it was clear that they were good people
both porrim and kanaya are black/latinx but haven’t gotten around to looking into their birth mother because they don’t know if they’re ready to yet
headcanons for that humanstuck poly ancestors thing you posted a while back?
I know I’m super super late here but what kind?
here are some general:
nepeta is trans, which is tbh my general hc for her in all universes so jot that down (though as a young child that just means she asks for dresses and her parents are happy to give them to her)
at school, nepeta has to wear pants and t shirts which don’t make her feel good, hence all the princess outfits at home
siimon hates his job but knows he needs it to provide proper care for mituna esp after his accident
sollux gets migraines and dizzy spells and his family worries to no end about it
karkat is the youngest
kankri loves his family and will eventually see that he’s not showing it by not supporting his parents and siblings
others if you’re willing to be more specific (mb one character or direct line at a time?)
