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The Doorman didn't remember what he had said. That was the worst part. Some… off-hand remark about efficiency, about not having time for broken things, probably spoken while polishing the grand hall's brass fixtures. He had been distracted. The hotel had been busy.
But Victor heard.
And Victor, who had always been a collection of other people's discarded pieces. Someone who had always seen himself as borrowed or stolen. Who had never seen himself as ever truly his own… took those words and turned them into something sharp.
The river bit at his stitched and stapled flesh. Soaking into the seams where different bodies met. Victor pulled at the threads that the Doorman had so carefully placed. Neat. Orderly. Just like the young god himself.
The current pulled him downstream, and he made no effort to fight it. He thought that he would need to fill his lungs deliberately. His survival instinct would make it difficult. He lets his head dip under the water, and he opens his mouth. The water rushes in.
He'd imagined drowning would be warm, like slipping into a bath. Like the nothingness he'd been courting ever since the moment he opened his eyes in that room and realized he was alone and alive. But he had never been living.
The panic set in instantly as his lungs burned. The useless and desperate kicking of his legs.
He sank.
The Doorman is checking a guest's ID, verifying the stay when the first image hits him.
Dark water. Pressure. The rumbling silence of being beneath the surface.
He staggers and catches himself on the concierge desk.
The guest… a… thin… wearing a man's skin like an ill-fitting suit tilts its head at him. "Problem?"
"None," The Doorman's voice is perfect. His smile is perfect. "Enjoy your stay"
But inside his skull, behind both eerily blue eyes, he sees what Victor sees. Sees through the gifted blue eye, the one he personally placed there himself and created this tether between them.
Victor is drowning.
The curse brought him back. A violent electric jolt seized his muscles and threw his heart into stuttering motion. The shock radiated outward, making the wet stones steam and killing a fish that had been investigating his open mouth. Victor woke up on the riverbank, vomiting water. He doesn't know how long he was dead. Doesn't know if he was dead, truly or just…paused.. or unconscious. He just knew that this damn curse would drag him back to consciousness without explanation or mercy.
He pulled himself back to his feet, not certain why because he didn't think. No decision or choice. His feet simply carry him there, and his body folds back down into the water with his arms held out, embracing the dark.
The Doorman is in the middle of welcoming a group when the second vision strikes.
The current turning him. Stones cutting his back. The distant dim light of the surface is growing smaller. smaller.
He doubles over.
The group murmurs among themselves.
He waved them past with one hand pressed to his right eye.
"Sir?" One of the other hotel staff, a new and mortal one who hadn't learned to not ask, hovered by his elbow, "Should I call for-"
"Get out." The Doorman's voice cracked like a whip, "All of you! Out!"
They scatter.
He is alone in the grand lobby, surrounded by the sudden creaking of a dozen and more doors swinging open leading to bathroom tubs, jacuzzis, pools, the hotel kitchen. Victor was in none of those places.
Victor tries to make it stick. No more washing ashore. He finds a weight. A broken piece of machinery, probably from the docks. It was something iron and rusty, he simply couldn't tell what it was. He tied it to his ankle after forcibly tearing at one of the suspenders on his pants. He carries the weight in his arms, wading in deeper.
The riverbed is soft beneath his boots, giving in to his weight.
He lets the weight pull him down to the deepest part.
Finally. He thinks. Finally, something that works.
The Doorman is screaming, and he isn't aware he is making the sound. He's only aware of the pressure in his chest. The burning of a stranger's lungs. The desperate animal need to surface that isn't his own. He falls to his knees on the marble floor. His hands claw at his face and throat. He gasps for air, as if trying to fill the other's lungs for him.
He reaches for the connection, sapphire eyes a glow, and forces thoughts through the tether that the eye in Victor's skull created. A bridge of consciousness that he never thought would be this open. It bound them now, through a pact.
Then? Nothing. The connection goes dark. Victor is dead again, and the Doorman is alone in his own head, gasping for air he doesn't need, surrounded by useless doors.
Victor wakes to pain. The curse tears through him like lightning, a jolt so violent his back arches and his mouth opens in a silent scream. Water erupts from his lungs in a gush that leaves him retching under the water. He floats there, trembling, feeling his heart restart, feeling the resurrection tighten its grip and refuse to let him go. He doesn't want this. He doesn't want to be awake, to be conscious or to even be here.
The Doorman feels the jolt through their connection. a sudden spike of electric agony. That means Victor is alive again, if only for a moment.
Where ARE you?
The response comes slowly, drifting up in tired pacing. Victor's voice in his mind distorted by something. The water? The distance?
Somewhere you can't get to. Your doors… they need a flat surface don't they…
"Oh." The Doorman understands now. He understands the cruelty of it, after all he had spent an eon torturing humans. But this was precision! An Exquisite precision with which Victor had chosen this method of trying to end himself.
You've been watching me. Learning me. But I can make them in the air, my little spark.
He's already trying. In the lobby, doors are appearing everywhere. On walls, on columns, on the ceiling itself. Doors that lead to docks, to the river, to everywhere along its banks. But he can't feel the right one. He can only find the general area and Victor is moving somewhere in the water that looks all the same.
There is no air down here, Dorian.
The Doorman is now at the river. One moment he was in the lobby, the next out here. He opens his mouth to call out but stops himself because…
What would he say? That he's sorry? He doesn't know what he's sorry for.
That he needed Victor to come back? But why? He doesn't know why he needs that, only that the absence is a hole in his chest that matches this broken, self-destructing thing that he-
That he what? He doesn't know.
He's never known this feeling. He's been around for more than a handful of millenia in existence and he's never been uncertain of his own wants. Now this stitched-together boy who isn't even properly alive has made a mockery of his certainty.
He stands at the edge of the water, gloved hands curling to fists as he feels Victor die again somewhere below. Over and over.
Victor sees this vision being sent with a burning fury. He can see the shadow of the doorman standing. The fiery orange curl of hair just above the peripheral of the vision. Perfect and polished as always. Ah…and furious. He thinks…
Good.
Let him watch. Let him see what he made. Let him understand that some things, once broken, cannot be stitched back together. No matter how skilled the hands are.
The Doorman feels the deliberate surrender of Victor looking up into the moonlight light above and choosing to refill his lungs with a full breath of fresh riverwater. No panic. Just him choosing death with the same care he'd shown in choosing whatever alley he'd die in in lives before. The connection cuts off, mid animalistic thought, and The Doorman is left with nothing but the certainty that Victor is drowning deliberately and methodically where he couldn't reach him.
Electricity dances across the water's surface as deep below a flash of light sparks. Stunning and killing small fish that float to the surface belly-up.
Doorman feels Victor's envy.
He kicks off his shoes and shrugs out of his bellhop coat. White crisp sleeves rolled up and buttoned in place. He dives.
The water is worse than he expected. He's never been submerged in waters like this before. His kind don't need to breathe. They don't suffer from pressure or cold. But he's wearing a body not his own, and that body remembers fear. It remembers its base instincts to prevent drowning. The slowing of a heart rate to use less of its limited oxygen supply. It's taking longer than he thought. Panic rises in that body's nerves, but he forces it down, swimming through murky waters that even his perfect eyes can't seem to penetrate.
He is reaching for the connection like a lifeline because Victor is down there, and he is going to find him even if he has to search every inch of the riverbed. Even if he has to drown this body a thousand times over, if he has to drag himself back to consciousness and dive again and again until that curse that keeps Victor alive finally lets him win.
Victor doesn't understand it. The Doorman doesn't get wet. He doesn't get dirty. The Doorman doesn't dive into rivers in the middle of the night to save broken things he doesn't remember breaking. He feels the presence in the water now and feels the mind reaching. It was searching and so desperate.
Are you doing this for yourself or for me?
He tries to swim away. The weight grounds him. In the darkness he reaches down tugging at the knots he had made.
The Doorman is close now. Close enough to feel the electric magical residue of whatever kept Victor coming back. His skin tingled and he swam toward it. Then he felt his gloved hands wrap in something. He felt around. An arm. A shoulder. He closed his arms around the cold torso and hauled upward, against the weight and against the current. Against Victor's own limp refusal to help himself.
Instead Victor fights. He doesn't want to but his body is reacting and thrashing to shake off the grip.
They struggle in the dark, two bodies that don't need air fighting over whether one of them gets to die.
The Doorman wins. OH, he always wins. He hauls them toward the surface, on arm locked to Victor's chest. They break the surface together and The Doorman gasps for air that his body wants. Air that he doesn't need but the body insists on having anyway.
Victor doesn't gasp. He hangs in the Doorman's arms, water streaming from his open mouth and eyes fixed on nothing. body waiting got the bolt that would bring him back again.
"WHY?!" The Doorman's voice is wrecked. His body is wrecked. His muscles are shaking, teeth chattering but he doesn't care. He's never cared about the bodies he wears. He is struck at the same time as Victor is and feels the agony of blood vessels bursting from the shock. Victor is back and looking at him with something worse than hate. "Why would you-"
"You don't even remember." Victor's voice is barely a sound. Just water gurgling out as his lungs push it out. He breathed in, the water in his lungs bubbling. "You said… you don't have time. For broken things."
The Doorman stares at him. The memory surfaces slowly, filtered through hours of distraction, of guests and demands and the endless maintenance of a place that exists between worlds. Some careless words. Some moment of inattention. "I didn't mean-"
"You never do." Victor pulls away, or tries to, since the Doorman doesn't let him. "That's the problem. You found me and you don't even... you don't even see me. I'm just... something to maintain. A project. Something to fix when you have time."
"That's not-"
"Then what am I?!" Victor's eyes stung with tears.
The Doorman has no answer. He's never had to name what Victor is to him, he had carefully avoided naming it. He had told himself it was kindness, or obligation, or the simple mechanics of having given away a piece of himself and wanting to see how it settled. "You are..." He stops. The body is still shivering. He ignores it. "You are the only thing that has ever made me uncertain."
Victor laughs, or tries to, because he begins to cough up the rest of the water that had been inside of him. "That's not an answer. I want an answer!" He raised a fist and brough it down against the side of The Doorman's skull over and over. "Just! One! Answer! In! My! Life!"
He took the beating. He did deserve it. "It's the only one I have." The Doorman tightened his grip, pulling Victor ever closer, close enough to feel the stitches failing and the corpses that man was made of coming apart in the river. "I don't know what you are. I've never known. But I know that watching you die feels like dying myself, and I have died enough times to know that I don't want to do it again."
"You know you can't fix me." Victor says after a pause, "You can keep trying. You can keep stitching. You can adjust and keep trying to make me…functional. But you can't make me want to be functional, and you can't make me want to exist."
"I know."
"Then… why?"
"Because…" The Doorman rests his forehead against Victor's, prompting the corpse man to pause trying to bash his skull in. "Because I am selfish. I would rather have you broken and hating me than have you gone. Because I have lived hundreds of centuries without wanting anything, and now I want this. I don't know how to stop wanting it. Because when I gave you my eye, I didn't understand I was giving you everything else as well."
"I don't know how to want to live for myself."
"I know." The Doorman's voice is stripped of its usual polish, the beast undercurrent tones of a god speaking coming through, "And I don't know how to help you learn. But I will keep pulling you out of rivers until you teach me, or until you stop trying to drown…or until the world ends and there are no more rivers left."
"That's not healthy."
"No." The Doorman laughes, "It's not but I've never been 'healthy', Victor. I am a thing that wears bodies and opens doors between places and worlds. I am ancient but I am empty. I have spent four centuries learning to simply be careful and polite."
Victor doesn't answer. His shivering is at its worst. His body already ran cooler than the average person's and he lost body heat faster than them too. He could feel The Doorman's heart beating where they were pressed together.
"Come back." the Doorman says. "Not to the hotel. Not to being fixed by my hand. Just come back. Let me try to learn how to see you. I can't promise I'll succeed and I can't promise I won't hurt you again carelessly. Because I am careless, Victor. I have always been careless with things that don't matter to me, and I am trying to learn how to be careful with the one thing that does."
"Y-you're not very good at this…"
The Doorman pulls back enough to look at him and into those beautiful eyes that Victor had. He could make any eyes look beautiful, though. Those lashes… "I'm not, but here I am in the river with you. Drowning with you, and I didn't know how to get out except by pulling you up with me."
Victor looks at him. Really looks. He's never seen The Doorman like this, not even when they had both been in the ritual. "That's…This is manipulation."
"Yes." The doorman admitted with no hint of denial or deflection. "I am manipulating you into staying alive. I am not sorry for it."
"You really are terrible."
"Will you let me be terrible at you for a while longer?"
"You torture me. You know that, right?" Victor doesn't know if he wants to stay alive yet. He doesn't know if this would change anything, doesn't know if he'll find himself back at this river tomorrow or next week or in an hour. But he's cold and tired.
"I know." The Doorman's grip shifts as he begins to guide them toward the shore. They stumble onto the bank together.
Victor pressed his face to The Doorman's broad chest, his arms tight around the bellhop's tight waist. The Doorman is warm against him. "You're manipulating me again. You're never this warm…" He wants to sap all of that warmth away and leave his god cold.