it would be awesome if you wrote jaykoz. like jayce league of legends and vel'koz league of legends. like the two scientists kissing except velkoz doesn't have a mouth unless its underneath him like an octopus. two fellow creatures exploring the universe. hand in hand. #jaykoz. sorry it's 3a.m. youre the best!!
This is for you, Sync. Content warnings for.... Google vel'koz, my beloved arcane only followers. Google him.
More seriously, passing references to psychosis, mental health crisis
---
Jayce has just sort of accepted that he's going insane.
He's cracked under the pressure, it's fine, it was bound to happen eventually. Lack of sleep can cause hallucinations, and had in fact given him hallucinations before. He was pretty used to it, actually, it was downright passé.
Most of his hallucinations weren't this chatty, though.
The light here is harsh.
Yeah, of fucking course it is, it's the middle of the afternoon in summer.
I must know more
Give it a few hours, another seven trials, the experiment will run enough times to reach the start of a conclusion. Or at least figure out if the hypothesis is even... In the right ballpark.
Tears serve no function.
Yes they do, jackass, they're a release of an overabundance of a brain chemical.
Shit, Jayce thinks, blearily, with his face down on his lab's counter. He must be doing pretty badly if his hallucinations have decided to take up toxic masculinity.
That's novel information.
Jayce lifts his head. "What?" He says, out loud.
That your tears serve a function. Scientifically significant.
Jayce wipes his eyes. "--Everything serves a function." He says. "Or used to. We've evolved to our niche. Nothing happens for.... No reason."
The universe is full of randomness.
"No it isn't. It's just full of effects so far removed from their sources that they seem random."
Either an enlightened perspective or a stupid one.
"Enlightened." Jayce says, grabbing a tissue.
There's something like laughter, and Jayce is... Pretty sure this is too coherent to be a hallucination.
"What are you?" He asks.
An anathema to sanity. A watching eye. A scientist.
"A scientist." Jayce repeats. "Well. I can work with that." He rubs his face, blows his nose.
"--lets see what we've got on the docket today, then."
Pave the way.
Jayce snorts. "Have you just--- been in my head? Listening to my thoughts?"
Not all of them. You have a lot of thoughts and there are many other minds to examine. Yours is particularly interesting.
"Well, I'm a scientist."
You are.
Jayce nods and then goes to work. It's just long enough of a delay that it startles him when the voice cuts in again.
Why were you crying?
"What?"
You heard the question.
Jayce sighs. "And you already got this answer."
Yes, chemical overabundance. Emotion. What emotion?
Jayce tries to think back, to figure out what he was thinking about. Right. Viktor.
"Love." He says. "Hate. Six of one half dozen of the other. It's all the same thing."
Those are not remotely similar emotions.
"Yes they are."
Explain.
"it's a positive." Jayce says, turning a dial. "In the scientific sense. The presence of something rather than the absence. The opposite of love is indifference because it's a void that love leaves behind. Hate can be love too. The other side of the coin is still the same coin. Part of the same paradigm. I hate because I have loved, I still love because I can't let it go, because I'm still angry. It's all terribly human of me, which I'm guessing is hard for you."
how do you feel about writing jayce/velkoz for your loyal fans
hello 1/2 of my loyal beloved fans you are so awesome thank you for supporting me through all the jaykoz haters. here is chainsawman au jaykoz just for you. viktor is here but **** doesn’t follow me so free speech.
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In the end, all the anti-discrimination classes Camille enrolled him in with taxpayer dollars paid off, because when Jayce saw him for the first time the moon-slash of Viktor’s splintered teeth all gnashing in confused mockery of a human grin didn’t quite superimpose upon the half-divine abomination standing before him. Both he and Viktor were perfect negations of space but Jayce saw them separately, which was better than the poor dead rookie, anyway. Jayce’s new partner was an angular creature with long, pale fingers, disjointed as if a hammer had broken his bones one by one, and the remains were stretched and molded by a taffymaker’s touch.
“What are you supposed to be?” Jayce asked, exhausted. Camille was walking away already, black coat trailing behind her and his eye twitched with the odd sensation of rejection. “Fear of voyeurs? Overlord of masturbation? Patron Saint of middle schoolers vaping in the bathroom?”
The devil replied with the acuity of a razor slicing through his thalamus, [Is that any way to greet a fellow scholar?]
He was a giant motherfucking eyeball. He didn’t have a mouth. His nametag said Vel’koz :)! and when his voice rang clear pinpricks of ice kissed Jayce’s retinas. Caitlyn said it was specific to fiend devils, the strange dense way they spoke. Jayce said she was wrong, Camille had the same severity, hard as underwater pressure. All dark and pressurizing, eyes closed and waves crashing into the shore a thousand miles towards somewhere. Nowhere was up. And maybe Viktor’s voice had changed like hell when he finally severed what he said was the fear center in his brain and found his humanity a long black reflective pool where he drowned a young boy and out rose the fear devil. The fiend-fear devil. The Viktor who wasn’t Viktor who kissed Jayce like a scalpel to his gums. Could never get the taste out. Viktor was so fucking scared he handed his fear the bullet-trigger-handgun-key to his mind screaming with scientific reasoning and Jayce walked into the shared apartment complex of their heart to kill him:
Moldy walls. Leak they never fixed. That chiming and Viktor’s steady incongruous voice rendered beautifully self-assured by his steady accent. He could tell Jayce anything, so Jayce shattered the walls which carried his melodious hymn all creaky with coughs and raspy with grit because the asshole liked to shout and a hundred civilians died and now the fiend devil of Benevolence Towards Humanity and Pretentious Tweed Jackets and Protectorate of Your Chromebook Camera was holding out his hand for a shake.
So it goes.
Jayce wanted to scoff but he also didn’t care because one of them was going to end up an empty shot glass and one of Vi’s resounding “he always broke the coffee machine, anyway” soon enough, so he touched Vel’koz’s palm. The eye which was Vel’koz’s face shuttered. The iris shrank and the pupil vanished and a sheen of pristine black obsidian ran over where the purple expunged flesh rotated wetly seconds ago and Jayce saw himself, the hollow slashes of his cheekbones and bruised eyes and thin black suit. The man in the mirror-eye was dull, stupid, and boring. Jayce told the asshole to run into an ice pick and carefully took his hand away. Vel’koz was warm. He looked slimy and cold like seafood but damn he was warm as a summer day that dried the back of your throat.
[I am a hand mirror,] Vel’koz said, and Jayce still felt stagnant in an exchanging of recognition. [I am a yearbook. I am an unseen camera and footprints unbroken behind you in a dusk-filled street, the way the hairs at the back of your neck rise when you’re alone-but-not. I am the burst capillary in the corner of your eyelid as you are forty hours awake chasing a dead king’s dusty footprints along your library’s shelves and the tapping of your fingers against the edge of a page as you beg for another definition. I am your mirror and a frame of your dead mother and my love is unconditional.]
Within the expanse of Vel’koz’s blank visage, Jayce’s mouth moved, albeit slowly. “The Western dichotomous bullshit about all this isn’t real. Heaven and Hell. Good and not-good. There’s no hope, just the absence of fear, and there is no Heaven, only Hell. Your play-acting of God is pathetic.”
[Who made you?] Vel’koz asked instead.
Jayce narrowed his eyes. Scholar? Bullshit. “A somewhat unimaginative evolution,” he said.
[Yes.] Vel’koz sighed with eminent satisfaction. [And God made the prokaryotic cell. He did not make you. He made the primordial Eve, therefore He is simple and ugly, and the one who made something so inconsequential and small and fragile is bound to disappoint you, brilliant and gorgeous you are as a consequence of millennium. But I will not. You created me, therefore I behold you, darling.]
The eye opened. Every inch of Jayce’s skin recoiled with the careless disillusion, the mirage of himself melting into Vel’koz, and only Vel’koz, and his lips parted reflexively with a sharp burst of air. It hurt, to be watched. It hurt that they lingered.
Vel’kos dusted a speck of dust off his suit. [Have we reached an understanding, inventor?]
