Chapter Text
The heart is a butcher.
It is a liar. A thing that goes on until it doesn’t. A thing that beats like a fist against bone, red-knuckled, evil-grinning, until one day it decides no more.
Jayce stands in the grass, bare feet sinking to the wet blades licking at his skin. The earth is hungry. Wants to take him in, chew him down to marrow. Part of Jayce wants to let it open its mouth and swallow him whole. The same part of him that dove into all of this recklessly and ribs cracked wide and heart first and never once considered the fall.
The heart is cruel because it deserts. It walks out in the middle of the night. Leaves the stove burning. Leaves the door open. Leaves the people who were still talking still reaching still carving their names into something permanent. It’s an executioner with a lullaby voice and eyes the colour of drowned light. No ceremony. Just silence. Then it leaves the rest of them here, throbbing and heaving and eating through their own grief like wolves through a carcass.
Science calls it a machine. Pump. Valve. Motor. But Jayce knows better. The heart is a trick. A joke. A mouth that takes and takes and takes then one day forgets how to swallow.
He looks at the garden. The flowers fat with dew, bloated, vulgar. The sky a stretched-out piece of something tired and unfinished.
He shuts his eyes. And that’s worse.
Because now it’s Viktor.
Viktor in the mornings with his crooked grin and his mouth full of dreams too big to swallow. Viktor at night with moonlight lapping at his ankles and the gold of his eyes drinking it all down, greedy greedy greedy. His voice like a door swinging open, You think too much, Jayce. Come sit.
His eyes open and now it's just Jayce standing in a garden, staring at his hands, staring at the flowers, staring at the sky looking for a squint of hope.
But there’s nothing. Because the heart doesn’t care. It doesn’t care who it leaves behind, who it forgets, who it fails.
It doesn’t care about Viktor.
It just stops. And that’s the cruelest thing of all.