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----- 𝔦'𝔩𝔩 𝔟𝔲𝔯𝔶 𝔲𝔰 𝔟𝔬𝔱𝔥

ʰᵗᵗᵖˢ://ᵃʳᶜʰⁱᵛᵉᵒᶠᵒᵘʳᵒʷⁿ.ᵒʳᵍ/ʷᵒʳᵏˢ/⁸⁷⁸⁰⁸²⁹¹

summary:

“Put the knife down. You cannot hurt me, not here. You don’t exist, you’re just a shadow of him.” “Oh, I'm pretty real.” Just as Victor finished his sentence, the knife slowly went down. Eli is currently in Doctor Haverty's lab being studied when Victor (or the hallucination of him) takes over.

cw/tags: angst, hurt no comfort, blood and violence, knifeplay (if u squint lol), religious imagery and symbolism, sexual tension, unresolved sexual tension, mild gore, mentioned past abuse, past torture, past violence, medical kink, medical examination, hurt/comfort, eli's a mess as always, victor plays doctor.

A/N: this is my fisrt fic here and in AO3, i hope y'all like it and if u do please like or comment!! thanks for reading!!!

18+ minors dni!!! pls

Feeling the cold of the metal table on his skin, Eli waited patiently for the day God would come to relieve his suffering. He couldn’t even remember when was the last time he was fully conscious; sometimes he missed his EOn cell, he missed being in control of his space, his body and, above all, his thoughts. It felt surreal that they were cutting him open over and over again, the sweat dripping from his forehead onto the table forming a pool between the table and his neck. Crying would do him no good, nor would screaming until his lungs gave out. Over time, Eli began to drift away from reality; his senses and memories all blurring and merging into an amorphous moment slipping through his fingers.

In the EOn lab, making sure he was strapped to the gurney, Dr. Haverty seemed like he was having a great time as he cut Eli open from time to time. But now he felt like prey, like a test animal, as he felt Haverty inject an inhibitor. One of the first symptoms of the vaccine drugs was dizziness, nausea and an extreme sense loss. Now, his body won't regenerate. Eli could feel his mind slipping away.

With his eyes closed, he could sense it. Sense him. Wandering around the table, Eli could even recognize him by the way his footsteps sounded on the floor. Victor. Eli listened closely to the sound of his living hallucination walking toward him; he felt his chest rise and fall heavily, quicker as the steps drew nearer, until they stopped right beside him. Eli’s wrists, tightly bound, moved anxiously; he could hear the latex gloves resonating against Victor’s skin, and the sharp sound they made when he finally put them on sent a shiver down his spine.

These kinds of hallucinations happened several times before. It always happened when Eli found himself in this unconscious limbo, when the boundaries between reality and his own memories and thoughts blurred and faded. The drugs did their part, too. Even though he didn’t like it, Victor was there. Appearing in the mirror, behind him, laying against the wall of his concrete cell, sitting on the mattress the guards laid for Eli. Victor was always in his thoughts, like a bloodhound searching for his worst flaws, rubbing salt on the wound.

Watching Victor so vividly made him recall his university days again. Suddenly, the sterile, blinding white lights of the lab dissolved, blurring into the dim, shadow-drenched illumination of their shared dorm and the long anatomy halls they walked over and over for practice, Lockland was a cage devoid of color but somehow Victor wasn’t the one to mimetize with the ambience. He remembered watching Victor back then. Victor, with his elegant, pale hands, holding a scalpel with the casual reverence of a priest wielding a crucifix. They used to stand on opposite sides of the metal dissection tables, their eyes meeting over the cold, gray flesh of corpses, sharing a silent, arrogant understanding; they were the jewels of an entire generation of new clumsy med students. Victor had now turned the tables, Eli realized with horrific irony– he was now his favorite specimen to dissect on.

Eli knew that if he opened his eyes, Victor –or the hallucination of him– would leave. He would rather die than remain in this abyss without something, or someone, to bring him back. Victor brought him back to life once, he might bring him back to life again. He couldn’t stand the thought of being left between Victor and nothingness.

“Am I making you nervous? What is it that you are so afraid of, Eli?” Said Victor, noticing his nervous movements. Eli could feel his breath on his skin, so close that if he moved, it would all vanish again. He pictured Victor, his blonde hair turning white in the shiny lab lights. He recalled Victor back in their university days, playing doctor, then playing God.

“You know what prison taught me?” Eli felt Victor’s hand pressing on his temple, just enough pressure to keep his head in place, still Eli’s eyes were closed; “That putting you in a cell wasn’t enough.— I wanted more.”

As he finished his sentence Eli felt a slight ‘click’.

He knew that sound, from their last fight, their last time they were together. Bounded one last time. He recalled that moment the blood smeared across his hands and Victor dying, but here he was. His pocket knife in hand.

Eli’s heart sunk into his chest, then surged back to life until he felt his own blood pounding in his ears. He felt the urge to scream; moaning against the stretcher, Eli opened his eyes slightly. His hallucination was looking him in the eyes—piercing blue eyes that stared directly at him.

“Missed me?” Victor said with a crooked smile on his face. Eli felt like he just swallowed his own tongue.

“P– please, Victor. I don’t know what you’re planning to do but–” A nauseous wave hit him, Victor’s image blurring into Dr. Haverty’s then back to Victor. The lights felt too bright and Eli felt he was on the edge.

“It’s been such a long time waiting for this. Look at you.” Victor almost laughed. “Finally.”

“I could kill you,” He continued.

Eli’s heart skipped a beat.

“But what’s the fun in that?”

Eli tried to free himself from the straps holding him to the table but it was in vain, his strength would be no use. Victor silenced him, as if he were taming a wild animal. The thudding of Eli’s limbs slamming into the metal was a cacophony of raw desesperation made audible. He won’t– he mustn't let Victor win that easy. Not without a fight. Not like this.

“Still biting your tongue when you’re scared.”

“Put the knife down. You cannot hurt me, not here. You don’t exist, you’re just a shadow of him.”

“Oh, I'm pretty real.” Just as Victor finished his sentence, the knife slowly went down.

Victor leaned toward him and placed his hand just above Eli’s head, so that they were at the same height, face to face. The sharp tip of the knife grazed Eli’s cheek, applying enough pressure to make him bleed. The blade descended even further, tracing his neck and passing beneath his Adam's apple. It reached just to the base of his neck, further down his chest and body laid bare, unprotected. There was nothing between him and Victor, no salvation and no escape. Just the slight buzz of the fluorescent lights and Victor’s calm breathing contrasted with Eli’s ragged gasps.

Underneath the cruel, unblinking fluorescent lights of the EOn lab the pain didn’t vanish; it pooled. His faith, once so strong, was fading underneath the scalpel blades, the pinching of the needles. There were no prayers at the laboratory, only the sharp stench of antiseptic, the hum of air conditioning, and the slow, agonizing drag of his own blood trickling down the cold slope of his neck.

Dr. Haverty's inhibitor was working. After all those tests in which Eli didn't believe would work, it finally did so. Eli was at Victor’s mercy, to be toyed with and hurt however Victor pleased. You aren’t some avenging angel, Eli, Victor had said to him. You’re not blessed, or divine, or burdened. You’re a science experiment. After all, God would do him no good; if He was still there, he had looked away from Eli long ago.

Tapping the blade on Eli’s chest Victor finally spoke, breaking the tension, "Can you feel it? You're a mortal now." He chuckled softly as he played with his knife, tracing gentle patterns on Eli’s skin.

“Do you remember what you did to me?”

His sharpest knife already in hand, Victor lowered it as he carved a long line in Eli's chest. With a scream, Eli’s vision got blurry with pain. He often forgot how hurt he was. For him, pain was a state of normalcy. For years, agony had been nothing but a brief vibration in his nervous system, a minor inconvenience that his flesh would instantly knit over and erase. Throwing his head back forcefully, gritting his teeth to bear the net deep cut. His blood smeared across his chest, falling into the metal. Finally, the blood ran and didn’t stop, flowing like a river.

“Then you’ll remember this too.”

The lines converged on a small "V", which made Eli realize what Victor’s plan was.

To remember Victor as he remembered him. Scarred and utterly his.

Eli’s mind was playing games again, this couldn’t be true. But as he saw his chest bleeding he was pretty sure it was already happening. The figure holding him flickered. One, two, three times. Victor’s cold eyes becoming Haverty’s tired brown eyes. Eli shut his eyes one more time and listened as Haverty’s voice broke the hallucination.

“Enough.” Haverty said loudly enough to make Eli flinch. “What are you screaming at, huh?"

Haverty, with a scalpel in hand, continued the incision the hallucination left behind. The "V" was still there, the blood, thick and abundant, too. The doctor pressed the blade into his chest skin, cutting layers deep. Doctor Haverty got close to him, his lips brushing against Eli's ear. Until the image of Doctor Haverty flickered in front of his eyes, turning into Victor once again.

"I'll give you something to scream for." Victor said, lips brushing his ear as he began cutting. This time, he drew an "A".

The line between his ghosts and his captors evaporated completely. As the blade dragged across his skin, sending a jolt of white-hot agony across his sternum, Eli’s vision fractured like a mirror breaking the floor. One moment, it was Haverty’s cynical look staring down at him, viewing his torment as nothing more than a box to check on a lab report. And in the next, a violent flicker as fast as his heartbeats brought Victor’s cold gaze back with his lips curled in a devastating smile. The blood gushing from the fresh incisions were real, he could taste the iron in his mouth from biting his lip too hard. His blood falling like a waterfall into the floor, listening to the drops crashing against the white tiles, but Eli could no longer identify which hands guided the blade deep into his flesh. Either of them, they were making him pay for his sins.

Somehow, even when his blood gushed from the wounds, he couldn’t feel anything else but warm. His skin hot against the freezing gurney, his breaths rapidly increasing. He was so accustomed to pain that it was the only thing that kept him in the line of feeling everything or nothing at all; in a sense of disgusting pleasure– he wanted more as much as he wanted it to stop. The warmth radiating from Victor’s figure was doing nothing but helping.

Either way, Eli wished it was him. If that was what his ghost wanted then he could admit it out loud: if he was hurting, he wished it was Victor who did. As he always did.

It was Victor who always brought him to life, not only literally. Back in the university days, it was Victor’s voice who dissected him. He sometimes heard it on those lonely nights, the humming, the lingering sound of his fingers drumming against their shared coffee table back in their dorm. Sitting across from each other those long nights at the table at the corner of the library where the damp smell of old leather books lingered in the air. Victor had a way of speaking—low, clinical, and completely devoid of warmth—that made Eli feel like a specimen under a microscope even back then. Eli missed hearing the cadence of his voice, crossing his mind from time to time. Victor, after all, was the only thing Eli could hold onto.

Eli would have gone through hell just to be with Victor again.

When he finished cutting the “A” into the flesh of his chest, Victor's image reappeared in his field of vision. With his jaw completely clenched, Eli felt his breath escape him, feeling his throat tighten as one of Victor’s hands grabbed his face forcefully; the hand covering most of his jaw, pinching his skin.

“Yes, I do.” .

Eli felt his throat tighten. How could Eli explain to him how much he needed this? How could he also explain how much he resented him?

Wasn't that what bound them together? The blood they both shed just made them return to one another once more. Eli still remembers the night he discovered his powers, sitting on his cot, clutching the cross that hung from his necklace. Ever since that night, he has been waiting for redemption. For mercy. A guiding hand to hold him when his eyes clouded over with pain but, somehow, that hand was always there. It was Victor’s. The one who always held him, even as he plunged a knife into his gut.

“Do what?” Victor answered at last, furrowing his eyebrows.

Victor did not wait for an answer.

Before Eli said anything Victor’s knife turned inside his flesh, cutting him deeply. Eli grunted and moaned, almost blacking out from the pain. The smell of iron and blood grew stronger and the lights seemed to burn on his skin. His eyes found Victor's, a smile plastered on his face which didn't quite reach his eyes. Those eyes always make his skin prick, evenmore whent they weren’t looking at him. He could remember vividly the first time Victor asked about his scarred back, back on that night where everything changed. Eli was leaning against the bathtub, getting rid of his clothing, silently considering his life decisions until that moment. He could feel those deep blue eyes piercing his soul, wandering –and wondering about– through his back, Victor had known every single detail of Eli, he knew he could see through the plastered mask he wore all his life. The most annoying part? He would let him in. If Victor requested it, Eli could be anything he wanted him to be. His mind ultimately came back to the lab and his eyes found Victor’s gloved hands covered in blood, the wet plastic shining under the fluorescent lights. The red of the blood contrasted with the black of his clothing.

His clothes reminded him of their classes in Lockland, Victor's dressed from his shoes to his t-shirt completely black, how he hated to put his white coat over them. Eli felt somehow distracted wherever Victor moved back on those days, seeing Victor work at the lab, his fingers moving carefully over the bodies at the anatomy room, his metodic cuts, his fingers working masterfully, with reverence. It was comical to think Victor in those pristine rooms all dressed in black, as if he was mourning the people he had yet to kill, his white lab coat was nothing but a cassock he despised putting on. And Eli could pray to him all day long.

Victor finally finished carving the next letter: "L".

For the first time in his life, Eli felt the true, hollow chill of blood loss, a freezing tide rising from his stomach up to his throat. The "L" felt different –colder, sharper– cutting through his skin that was already weeping too much blood to ever be clean again.

"I do. I remember you," Eli almost screamed to his face but it came as a whisper, "more than i should."

Victor's breath seemed to catch. His hand resting on Eli's chest, Eli thought of reaching it, but he couldn't, restrained as he was. Exposed and naked.

In that sudden silence, Eli couldn't tell if the shadow of Victor was surprised by his devotion, or if Dr. Haverty had simply paused outside his skin to check his failing pulse.

The blade glistened as the light touched the metal, moving against Eli's skin once again.

"That isn't enough."

It was that moment when Victor’s knife cut so deeply into his chest that his heart, his mind and his thoughts gave up. Leaving him in a limbo of nothing more but blood, ragged breaths and sweat running through his spine and arms. Victor seemed to be enjoying himself as he thrusted two of his fingers into Eli’s wound, so deeply that Eli felt as if he were seeing white. He seemed fascinated by the idea that he could keep doing it for as long as he wanted now that Eli was exposed, so he was simply looking for ways to enjoy it. Eli was doing it too, in a way—he seemed to revel in the pleasure of being hurt and in the pain lingering over time, just as Victor did. A passionate union of blood and a libido that hadn’t come together in years.

“I never would have known you were this responsive to me. Well, you were at one point, weren’t you?”

Eli could do anything but moan at the intense pain.

Even when he faded away into darkness he could still feel the pocket knife carving into his chest. The pain was so sharp that Eli couldn’t distinguish where the blade ended and when his body began. A cruel anchor maintained his senses vivid enough for him to know what Victor was spelling out in him. The only name that had ever mattered in the dark.

He didn’t need to see the canvas to know what he was writing on his skin anymore; he could feel the symmetry of the four letters written, burning in his bones: "VALE".

Before his pulse eventually gave up, a last thought crossed his mind, like a shot to the heart.

Eli was going to be his.

Forever.

When Eli’s consciousness came back he was already in his EOn cell. He probably blacked out and was carried back there by the jailers. It was a normal body reaction if you thought about the amount of blood he lost, he recalled the last moments trying hard to remember every detail, searching in a blur of soggy memories. He laid on his bed, now dressed with the usual prison uniform they gave all of the EOs here, clothes carefully designed for people as dangerous as him, probably.

His hand trembled to his chest. He searched for those neatly carved letters Victor should have left. Sitting on the mattres, he removed his shirt then, standing up, he faced the mirror. Eli was the mess he always had been, Victor –the memory of him– didn’t change that fact. His eyes looked tired, his hair disheveled but there was nothing new on the fact of his tousled appeareance, no shift in him nor on his chest. No signs of letters engraved on his skin, no vestiges of Victor.

It was both a relief and a horror to think he was actually gone. The apparition slid away from him, like he was never there. Victor always had that effect on him, to escape and then come back as hard as a crash. Was he only on his mind? Or somehow he was recalling things that had happened and reutilizing them in some twisted way for the mere pleasure of seeing Victor again?

Eli longed to finally stitch the wound that Victor meant but it was a pleasure to revive the pain one more time. Victor was the hole he always craved to fill but found that nothing quite could fill it. Victor was all those things he buried just deeply enough to hurt.

The tip of Eli’s fingers traced the shape one more time; “VALE”, and then muttered to himself.

“Forever.”

The silence swallowed him whole.

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