Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

And I’ve been thinking

Of all the little things

That you’ve been missing,

When will you learn? 

I could love you with my eyes closed,

Kiss you with a blindfold,

Figure you out.

(VOILÀ - Figure You Out)

Jayce never really knew what to make of the stories people like to tell about kindred spirits, people you’re so intimately familiar with that they could be a part of you, around whom you don’t need to finish your sentences because they know what you’re thinking anyway.

He’s always regarded it as a bit of a cultural white lie, similar to Santa Claus and happy endings. A nice idea that doesn’t exist outside of children’s hopes and dreams.

But everyone finds themselves proven wrong at some point.

When he and Viktor first start working together, Jayce concludes that there must be something to it after all.

Their shared enthusiasm is a vortex of late nights and hastily scribbled numbers on a chalkboard and “wait, I think I’ve got it!” and “holy shit, you’re right!”, an echo chamber that throws his own excitement back at him in a way he always wanted but never thought possible.

It’s an incredible feeling.

His lifelong passion, which has thrown a wedge in many a friendship over the years due to its obsessive nature, finally seems to build bridges rather than tear them down. That final glass wall between him and the social world he so easily visited but never felt quite at home in is the very thing that now locks the two of them in a shared headspace, and it is exhilarating.

Jayce is as singularly focused as he has been his entire life, but now there’s someone else in here with him.

It’s only natural that he would get curious about the man that made it all possible.

At first, Jayce thinks that that curiosity must be one-sided.

Whenever he asks a question or broaches a topic that doesn’t pertain to the science at hand, it’s not that Viktor doesn’t answer—he does, perfectly politely…but he remains very much on a surface level, either carefully guarded or simply disinterested in such distractions.

Or both.

“What was your family like?” Jayce asks him one day, both hands stuffed in his academy uniform pockets, bag over his shoulder and idly shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he waits for Viktor to gather his notebooks.

It’s not that they’re leaving because it’s already dark, that wouldn’t stop them. They’re only leaving because Heimerdinger got word from a concerned security guard that the light in these rooms seems to always be on throughout the night, and the sounds of minor explosions are getting unsettling.

Heimerdinger lectured them about lab safety and a work-life balance and both their eyes glossed over a little as he kept talking. He doesn’t get that this is their life. But ultimately they agreed to call it a night anyway, if just to get him off their backs.

“Oh? Well”, Viktor says, pushing one notebook down a little less than gently in his bag so that another can fit, “My mother was a seamstress, and my father worked in the factories.” He shrugs.

That doesn’t feel like it answers his question, but Jayce notes the past tense and his follow-up dries on his tongue. Okay then.

So the next thing he says pertains to the science.

Jayce learns that this doesn’t just happen with potentially sensitive topics, though.

It happens when he asks about Viktor’s hobbies (he doesn’t really have any, work takes up too much time), his experiences at the academy (he’s had decent grades and the people were pleasant), or what he’s planning to do with the rest of the day (not much, really, probably keep working on this formula).

Viktor is a master at responses that are short enough to not give much away, but not so short as to appear like he is trying to shut down the conversation.

He never once offers up anything on his own, and he never asks a question back.

It’s an odd, detached way of socializing that Jayce doesn’t quite know what to do with, and so at first he thinks that maybe Viktor just isn’t good at conversation, but that doesn’t quite sit right with how brilliant he knows the man to be.

So instead he concludes that Viktor simply doesn’t want to be his friend and he’s letting him down gently. Maybe Hextech really is the only thing he cares about and he can’t be bothered with social chit-chat or knowing Jayce as a person outside of their work. It stings a bit, but he can work with that.

Eventually though, slowly, Jayce learns that maybe he simply needs to be more patient.

It takes months, but ever so slowly Viktor begins to thaw around him. At first, he barely notices when Viktor casually mentions how the archaic grammar in this old tome reminds him of his mother’s native language. 

Or when Jayce brings food to the lab—because gods know Viktor won’t—and he points at a chunky little pastry and explains that those sweetcakes are originally an invention of the undercity and he used to eat them sometimes as a special treat when he was little. They need almost nothing except flour and water, and some spices that grow natively down in the shadows.

“Though if you saw the plant, you would not be inclined to eat it,” Viktor says and takes a bite of the sweetcake Jayce offered to him. He hums with closed eyes, and for a moment he reminds Jayce of a purring cat.

He really picks up on the shift in demeanor when one day, after being stuck on the same problem for hours and finally accepting that perhaps they need a short break, Viktor asks him about his patronage with the Kirammans. 

Jayce can’t quite hide his surprise, but he beams as he responds. He talks of his friendship with Caitlyn, how he wishes they were the same age so he wouldn’t have had to spend so much time with people he didn’t like in order to get through his school years, and all the little social niceties that her family had taught him over the years that now allow him to navigate the world of Piltover’s elite whenever he briefly crosses into it.

Viktor nods and asks polite follow-up questions between sips from his mug.

The conversation lasts much longer than Jayce ever would have expected it to.

“You’re absolutely fucking brilliant!”

It’s only barely the proof of concept for Hextech-based remote control, not even a prototype yet, but it works. The gems react to each other at a distance. 

Viktor turns back to him with a small, sheepish smile and his ears a little pink at the compliment. “Eh, you almost had it anyway,” he says. “I just finished it.”

Jayce came in this morning after a night spent pinching his nose bridge in frustration at equations that wouldn’t work even though they should work and there was no reason why they wouldn’t work, and he was ready for another day of wanting to rip his hair out hunched over a textbook.

Instead, he came in to learn that a) Viktor hadn’t gone home, b) Viktor hadn’t even slept, and c) Viktor had found the solution.

The gem he turns in his hand glints, and the other one in the brass contraption on the other side of the room hums and visibly vibrates with the movement. One step closer to their hex-claw project, with its diagrams that fill pages upon pages of each of their notes.

“Shut up,” Jayce says, but there’s no malice in it. There wouldn’t even be any space for malice on his face, not with how wide his grin is. “You’re a goddamn genius, Viktor. Gods…” He shakes his head and huffs out a single laugh. “You didn’t just save my life, you also keep saving my life’s work when I’m too dense to do it myself.”

“Tch!” Viktor hisses and handwaves him away, but the little smile still plays around his lips as he turns back to the board, and when he looks at Jayce again later there’s something genuine and open in his expression that wasn’t there before.

After that, it becomes more obvious. Viktor goes into more detail when he does occasionally speak about himself, and he no longer stares transfixed at his notebook or the board while he does. He’s more comfortable asking questions and seems genuinely interested in the answers. 

In general, a sense of ease and familiarity seems to permeate their lab as the months go by. They comfortably settle into the spaces the other leaves, they adjust to their respective idiosyncrasies, and piece by piece they slowly learn about what makes them each tick.

Viktor learns how Jayce likes his coffee (no milk, two sugar), Jayce learns that Viktor doesn’t like coffee and prefers to drink alarming amounts of sweetmilk instead.

He learns how to make sweetmilk.

His first attempts are atrocious, so eventually, when he stubbornly insists no no, let me, I got it, Viktor lets himself be dragged away from the board for a minute to teach him the right ratios, and after that, he no longer pulls a face when Jayce is the one to make their drinks in the morning.

Viktor learns that it’s best to just let Jayce rant when he’s frustrated, because arguing doesn’t work and he calms down quickly if he can just let it out, like a pressure cooker venting steam. Without even looking up he makes various sympathetic noises while Jayce paces the lab with steps that are a lot more forceful than necessary, and he no longer shrinks away from it.

The first few times he saw Jayce in this mood, he was guarded, careful, like a bird eyeing a cat and debating whether it was getting close enough to fly off to safety. As he got used to it though and learned to trust that Jayce wouldn’t turn his frustration to anything except perhaps the tiny bits of chalk he rubs to dust between his hands, he relaxed and learned to simply let it pass.

Sometimes he gets up in the middle of it and reappears a minute or two later with a cup of coffee, no milk, two sugar. He’s learned that when Jayce finds a gesture particularly sweet, he sometimes forgets that he was angry just a moment ago, and that way they can get back to work quicker.

Jayce learns that Viktor has better and worse days in terms of his pain levels, and he learns how to loosen his leg brace when it begins to chafe and pinch on days when Viktor’s back hurts with bending down.

“You don’t have to do that,” Viktor says on the first such day, with his face set and brows furrowed as if trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle, though his eyes are trained on the blank wall.

“Hey, nonsense, come on. You’ve been wincing all day every time you move. I’m glad to help if I can.” He kneels on the floor by Viktor’s knee and hovers his hand over the brace, looking up to check Viktor’s face for permission. He nods but still refuses to meet Jayce’s eye.

“The buckles around the knee itself first,” he mutters. “Top one, then bottom.”

Eventually, he lets Jayce help him without protesting every single time, citing simple efficiency. It’s good enough for Jayce.

Viktor learns to interpret the many sighs and huffs and mumbles that Jayce makes over the course of any given day. He knows which sigh means to leave him alone, and which one means that he should come over to Jayce’s desk to take a look at what he’s working on and offer his opinion. 

“Give me that,” he says then and gently pulls Jayce’s notes out from under his arm, flips through them with thoughtful hums. Sometimes he pulls his own chair up so they both sit at the same workbench and can go through the papers together to locate the issue.

When invitations to galas and networking events begin to come in, Viktor seems to know just by Jayce’s face as he reads the letter whether he wants to go or not—and whether he needs Viktor to come along.

He hates it, but sometimes he does anyway.

And Jayce learns that Viktor does not like the nickname “Vik,” but he doesn’t mind “V”—and so that’s what Jayce calls him more often than not when they’re talking in the privacy of their shared lab, which is most of the time.

Occasionally, when nights get particularly late and they can’t agree on the set-up of an experiment, they fight. They raise their voices, sometimes sweep papers off a desk or scratch a heavy line through their work on the blackboard, and sometimes they leave the room to cool off and slam the door behind them. 

It never lasts long, though. They never get personal with it, and it doesn’t take them long to come back with a sheepish smile and an apology. They’re both comfortable admitting fault, which Jayce notes as something he doesn’t easily do for everyone.

Over time, Jayce begins to realize that while he’s had friends before, none of them have really seemed to get him the way Viktor does.

He would name Caitlyn as the one exception, but she’s a noblewoman’s daughter who only just turned sixteen a few weeks ago—they may be on the same wavelength, but there is still a disconnect there in terms of interests and their respective places in life. She is his little sister.

Viktor is his equal.

One time, Viktor points out how nonchalantly tactile Jayce is—an absent-minded observation while he’s chewing on his pencil as they’re both hunched over the same page in a dusty tome from the library.

Jayce is taken aback for a moment, but he considers it, and Viktor might be right. 

He didn’t even realize how often he finds himself with a hand on Viktor’s shoulder, or nudging his arm aside so he can reach the chalk, or tapping his back in warning when it’s a tight squeeze to get past him so he doesn’t suddenly take a step back.

“Oh,” Jayce says, taking his hand from where it was resting on Viktor’s shoulder to stabilize himself—damning evidence. Instead, it wanders to rub the back of his own neck where it’s heating up with embarrassment. “I swear I don’t even notice I’m doing it. Sorry. I’ll try to uh…stop.”

Viktor glances over at him. “That’s not what I said.”

It happens when Jayce gets ready to leave that same night.

“I’m gonna head home,” he says as he grabs his keys. Viktor doesn’t look up right away; he seems preoccupied. “V. You probably should, too. Come on, it’s really late.”

Jayce no longer bothers to gather all his things in a bag just to bring them back in the morning. Most of his stuff just stays here at this point. It’s no big deal, the only one who is ever in here is Viktor anyway.

Viktor, who turns around in his chair as Jayce shrugs on his coat, and regards him thoughtfully and with an intensity that feels a little out of place. 

Jayce stills. “What? Did I forget something?” His eyes dart around the room—library books, but those don’t have to be returned until the end of the week. Chalk and pens and notebooks and the briefcase with the Hextech gems they’ve refined. Nothing out of the ordinary.

When he looks back to Viktor, he has gathered his cane and pulls himself to his feet, his expression still unreadable. Jayce frowns as Viktor crosses over to him in two decisive steps, and opens his mouth to ask again what the problem is when Viktor’s free hand lightly grabs the edge of the coat. 

“Wh—”

“Tell me,” he says quietly. “if I’m gravely misunderstanding something here.”

And Viktor leans in, lightly pulling Jayce down by his coat, and he kisses him.

Jayce short-circuits.

Viktor’s lips are a little dry and chapped and they only press on his for a brief second or two, so much softer than he would have expected. More a question than anything else, before he pulls back to search Jayce’s eyes for the answer.

And Jayce stands completely frozen. He knows his shoulders must be tense and his eyes must be wide, and he can’t even bring himself to close his mouth for a second. He’s reeling.

What?

Has he misunderstood this whole thing? His sluggish, frozen mind tries its damn best to rake through the memories of the past days, weeks, months, as a vague sense of panic slowly claws its way up. Has…Viktor ever mentioned an interest in men? Hell, in anyone? 

He knows Piltovian culture doesn’t much care about fixed definitions around patterns of attraction, but still, Viktor would have somehow mentioned…it would have come up at some point if he preferred men, wouldn’t it?

Has Viktor been flirting with him, has…shit, has Jayce been flirting without even noticing? It wouldn’t be the first time his actions were read as something they weren’t intended to be. 

He feels like someone dropped a boulder into his stomach from a great height. Did he fuck this up?

Oh gods, did he royally fuck this whole thing up?

It sure looks like it, if Viktor’s face is any indication. Whatever he is looking for in Jayce’s gaze, he clearly doesn’t find it. His eyes widen for a moment—shock, embarrassment? Fear, even?—before something in his face changes. He lets go of Jayce’s coat and takes a step back, straightening as though steeling himself.

“I’m very sorry,” he says, and it sounds heavy, like the echo of a door falling shut. “It seems I really have…gravely misunderstood.”

That finally manages to get Jayce out of feeling like a deer in headlights and thaws his words—except now, it feels like they all want to come gushing out at the same time.

“No no, I’m— I’m sorry. Clearly I— Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” He takes a deep breath and tries desperately to sort his thoughts into something resembling a logical order.

When he was fifteen, Jayce had his first girlfriend. Her name was Aria, and Jayce blushed every time she kissed him, in that clumsy, experimental way teenagers do in their first relationship.

He never wanted to do anything else ever again.

They dated for a few months, and Jayce wanted to marry her.

When his friends spoke of boys, he never understood.

“I just, I’m not— I don’t like men like that.” His face burns. “I’m sorry if I—”

Viktor shakes his head and takes another small step back. “You did nothing wrong, Jayce. I apologize for overstepping. I, eh…jumped to conclusions. It was my mistake.”

The look on his face makes something seize in Jayce’s chest. For a moment it evokes a feeling reminiscent of being handed something fragile and dropping it, that moment of staring at the shards on the floor in silent horror as it dawns on you what you’ve done.

As quickly as the feeling comes, though, it passes, and the hurt seems to wipe off Viktor’s face. Or maybe it just retreats inside. 

Jayce doesn’t want to think about that.

He rubs the back of his neck with one hand, trying a careful, sheepish smile. “Nothing to apologize for,” he says, and he hopes his attempt at a light-hearted tone doesn’t sound too forced. “Are…are we good?”

Viktor gives a small smile of his own, but it looks wrong. “Of course. We can just forget about it. A lapse in judgment on my part.”

“Yeah, for sure! No big deal, I promise,” Jayce says maybe a little too quickly. He won’t hold it against Viktor, of course he won’t. It’s fine, it happens—this kind of thing is only awkward if you make it awkward, and Jayce is determined not to be that guy.

He leaves the lab quickly after that and promises to be back in the morning in a voice that’s perhaps a little too strained to be upbeat.

Chapter Text

The next morning, Jayce comes back into the lab expecting uncomfortable silence, or perhaps more rushed apologies.

People always say let’s forget about it, but they never really do, do they.

That’s what he told himself last night after he got home, after he dragged himself to bed and then, despite the exhaustion in his bones, found himself unable to sleep.

For hours.

See, this, what they have, is a good thing. A really, really good thing. And Jayce is absolutely terrified that he may have ruined it. Viktor telling him it was fine and that he hadn’t done anything wrong was reassuring in the moment, but as soon as the man left his line of sight, the worrying set in.

He can’t help it, it’s how he’s built.

He’s not sure whether to be anxious or relieved when he finds the door still locked and has to dig his keys out from somewhere in his coat pockets, between the random receipts and spare buttons and paper clips that seem to accumulate in everything that he inhabits.

It’s barely sunrise as he enters the lab, and he immediately notices how eerily still it is compared to its usual air of productivity. He hasn’t seen it empty in a long time. Usually, Viktor leaves after him and returns before him the next morning—if he doesn’t just straight-up sleep in the lab.

At one point, when Jayce had just bought a new mattress for himself, he insisted on keeping the old one in here. Viktor mumbled something about an unnecessary waste of space, but he had noticeably fewer bad pain days in the weeks that followed, and that was enough for Jayce.

Now, the mattress in the corner is as empty as the rest of the lab, and Jayce sinks into his chair with a sigh. He throws his coat over the back of the chair, even though they have perfectly functional hangers, but this way he can lean his head back on it almost like a pillow and stare at the ceiling above.

He decides on anxious.

Or stressed, maybe. Terrified. Ever so slightly panicked.

Either way, the relief of not having to face Viktor immediately doesn’t last long, and he’s right back in the same spirals of rumination that he has spent half his night in.

By the time he hears another set of keys jingle in front of the door—and then stop upon realizing it’s already unlocked—Jayce hasn’t done any work at all, he hasn’t even opened the library books that are haphazardly strewn over both of their desks. He’s bitten off all of his fingernails and now finds himself with a pencil between his teeth as he looks up to the door.

His heart lurches as Viktor pulls the door closed behind him, and…and he doesn’t look at Jayce at all. 

Jayce clears his throat. “Hi,” he says.

Viktor looks up and their eyes meet briefly, but he quickly turns his attention back to his bag as he chucks his keys back in and makes his way over to his desk. “Hello, Jayce.” 

It sounds…not unkind. But also somehow not normal, either.

“Listen,” Jayce starts, because he just has no goddamn control over his mouth, does he. “I’m really sorry. Again. I, um. I’m sorry if I made things…awkward yesterday.”

That gets Viktor’s attention. When he looks at Jayce, it’s with a deep frown. “What?”

Jayce shrugs one shoulder, feeling the back of his neck heat up again.

Viktor sighs. “Jayce. I already told you, you have nothing to apologize for. If anyone has made things, eh, awkward, that would be me.” Jayce opens his mouth to protest, but Viktor raises a hand and he keeps quiet. “Please. I think we agreed to forget about it. Let us please just do that?”

He smiles ever so slightly, and it still looks very, very wrong.

“Okay, yeah. Sure, no problem. Good.”

“Good. Now,” Viktor slings his bag on his desk, shoving a few loose papers aside and making the three empty mugs rattle slightly. “I thought about something to help with keeping the gemstones linked over a longer period of time, minutes at the very least, maybe even hours, if we’re lucky.”

And he looks so much more at ease then that Jayce immediately finds the tension in his shoulders loosen.

Okay then. He can forget about it. It’s going to be fine.

“Alright. Show me what we’ve got.”

It goes on almost entirely like normal after that.

Almost.

At first, the changes are subtle, because they’ve always spent the majority of their time talking about their work anyway. That way it takes a few days for Jayce to notice that they currently seem to, in fact, be spending all of their time talking about work. He tries not to read into it too much when he tries to recall the last time Viktor has so much as mentioned anything that isn’t specifically Hextech.

Unfortunately, not reading into things too much is not exactly Jayce’s strongest suit, and so he can’t help feeling antsy about it. He decides to give it a week or two for things to settle down.

And a week in Jayce still feels acutely aware that he has lost something.

Viktor still brings him a cup of coffee back from the lab’s little kitchenette whenever he goes to get himself sweetmilk, and he still leans over Jayce’s shoulder to be a second pair of eyes when his own get too bleary and tired to focus.

After that first morning, the tone of their Hextech-related brainstorming goes back to the same animated back-and-forth it always has been, and their project still advances in leaps and bounds. 

But Viktor doesn’t ever really talk about himself anymore, and Jayce notices.

Jayce catches himself asking questions again, often, and digging for responses that go beyond a single sentence, trying to drag the normalcy between them back by its hair. And somehow it hurts worse than he expected it to when Viktor answers them in that same detached, evasive way that now feels like needles under Jayce’s skin, as though he were speaking to a stranger again. 

Or a colleague he has no intention of knowing outside of the lab. 

It’s subtle, but it’s there, and it keeps Jayce up at night more than once.

It’s a little more than two weeks after that evening when Viktor inhales with a sharp hiss as he sits down in his chair and carefully extends his bad leg, testing how far it can stretch. Jayce is up before he even realizes it.

“It’s fine,” Viktor says and handwaves him away. Jayce hesitates.

“Are you sure?”

Instead of a response, Viktor leans down to run his fingers along his brace and starts loosening the straps where it digs into the skin, and, again without thinking, Jayce takes another step toward him. “Do you—”

“I said it’s fine!” The tone is much harsher than Jayce expected. Maybe even harsher than Viktor himself expected. But it succeeds in rooting Jayce where he stands. He sees the way Viktor screws his eyes shut and grits his teeth as he leans further to reach the lower buckles. Jayce doesn’t say anything as he returns to his own desk.

That also hurts much worse than he expected it to.

It’s hard, but Jayce adjusts.

He learns through experience that this Viktor doesn’t appreciate a casual hand on his shoulder and that he prefers a quick verbal warning when Jayce has to pass by him rather than a touch.

He returns to calling him Viktor, because the few times he feels brave enough or simply slips up and calls him V, he almost seems to flinch. He adjusts to that too, even though it, too, hurts, and sometimes he has to flex his fingers at his sides to keep from reaching out. What for, he doesn’t even know.

Outside of all that, though, they still work marvelously well together, and for that at least Jayce is beyond grateful. Their minds still work in tandem and they can still finish each other’s thoughts. They still often don’t even have to speak in the first place. 

The hex-claw comes along even better than expected, and it only takes a few more weeks until they have a rough but functional prototype. It’s Viktor who carefully sets the gemstone into the metal mold that Jayce has made in his family’s forge, and it’s Viktor who dons the glove first.

Somehow it makes his slender fingers look even more elegant as he stretches them to feel how the leather shifts.

He points, and a red line moves over the floor where he does. A small laugh escapes him, and Jayce can feel himself grin from ear to ear. That means it works—and they can start getting to work on the real laser, with ample time left until Progress Day. 

“You’re brilliant,” Jayce says. It feels hollow without being able to squeeze his partner’s shoulder, and Viktor doesn’t respond, but he still smiles.

Jayce can’t tell if they look wrong anymore.

Somehow that’s worse.

More and more Jayce realizes that all eyes truly are on Hextech, at least all eyes that are interested in academics.

The more concepts they can present, sketched out and annotated on pages upon pages of notes, the more the thick-papered letters reach them—extravagant galas where only the rich and powerful will mingle, Piltover’s aristocracy and highest-ranking figures in the academy. Invitation only.

“Come on, they really want to see us there,” he says, loudly enough that Viktor can hear him from where he is rummaging around the kitchen area. 

His response sounds muffled. “Don’t be ridiculous. They want to see you, Jayce.”

“It explicitly mentions both of us on here!”

Viktor returns with the little makeshift serving tablet he’s turned the cutting board into so that he can carry two mugs and still have a hand free for his cane. He drops the board on the workbench and hands Jayce his coffee. 

“Please, Jayce. You’re not stupid, don’t act like it. It mentions both names because they know you’ll throw a fit otherwise. They don’t even notice I barely ever attend these things.”

He shrugs and leans his weight on the edge of his desk. “None of them appreciate some gutter rat stealing their golden boy’s fanfare.”

Jayce frowns, part of his exasperation directed at his partner’s stubbornness…and part at the fact that he’s right. 

“Don’t say that,” he says, but more out of habit than an assumption that Viktor will actually listen to him. It still makes something in his chest ache whenever Viktor speaks of himself that way, even when he sounds so matter-of-fact, like there’s not even any malice behind it, just the world as he sees it. Somehow that’s even more heartbreaking than if he simply had a habit of insulting himself when he gets emotional, like Jayce sometimes does.

Viktor waves a hand dismissively. “It is what it is. You and I know the extent of my contributions to this project, do we not?”

He pauses, and when he speaks again his voice is quiet. “I’m here to change lives for the better, not for filthy rich topsiders to grovel at my feet.” But there’s a hint of bitterness in his voice that Jayce doesn’t miss.

They’re silent for a long moment.

Not for the first time, Jayce envies Viktor’s love for sweetmilk. Even at peak temperature it’s only pleasantly warm, so Viktor can stand there leaning against his desk and he can already take sips from his mug, while Jayce has only his own hands to fiddle with if he wants to avoid looking him in the eye.

It’s a habit he’s picked up these past few weeks, the avoiding-looking-him-in-the-eye thing. It somehow makes things easier.

Viktor has accompanied him to these events more than once, but with how their friendship cooled over the last two months, Jayce hasn’t dared to ask again.

This is one of the big ones, though—the ones hosted at council members’ residences, where he knows investors will be among the crowd and willing to chat between their glasses of champagne. Viktor has always come along to the big ones.

And really, he knows that too. Jayce knows that he knows that, and Viktor knows that Jayce knows. This stupid argument is little more than a dance, a song they both know the last note to. When Jayce looks up from his fidgeting hands, Viktor no longer has an expression like he’s trying to pick a fight—he looks resigned.

He rolls his eyes. Jayce grins.

They don’t need words.

The gala is hosted at Councillor Salo’s estate. 

Jayce has learned that some of them are held indoors, some outdoors, some keep the doors open and people make their way in and out of the mansion at their leisure—depending on which part of their residence the host is most eager to show off. 

This one is an outdoor gathering. The guests mingle outside his marble steps in the mild summer evening, winding their way between the meticulously trimmed bushes that line the path through the gardens, the crowd spilling over into the space in the center, where a huge open pavilion frames the scene. It’s beautiful, really. 

Jayce thanks a server when he’s offered a slender glass with something light and sparkling in it, and just as he takes a sip he catches one of the council members casting an obvious glance in his direction. It’s not the first time tonight that he’s felt Councillor Medarda’s eyes on him. He smiles to himself, trying to conceal it as a friendly gesture towards a passing patron.

Mel Medarda is a beautiful woman.

It’s not that Jayce hasn’t noticed that before, of course, but it seems to take on a different meaning tonight.

It takes another half an hour until she makes her way over to him, with her glass raised just a fraction in small cheers and a light smile on her face. “Good evening, Mister Talis,” she says and something about the smoothness of her voice evokes the imagery of gently flowing water. “It’s good to see you.” 

She reaches out for a feather-light touch on his shoulder and he returns her smile with his own favorite one. He has picked this one out in the mirror specifically for investors, but it doesn’t feel misplaced here. 

“Councillor Medarda,” he says and, with a glance at her almost empty champagne glass, politely waves a server over.

“Oh, no need for the titles. Mel, please,” she says, and, with a look of open curiosity, “I hear your partner has decided to join us today?”

Jayce feels his practiced smile shift to something more genuine. She’s the only one besides Heimerdinger who refers to Viktor as his partner and the co-founder of Hextech and doesn’t hide him away behind that post-grad from Zaun who helped out with Hextech, or Mister Talis’ assistant, or forgets to mention him at all. Jayce appreciates that more than she will ever know.

“Oh, yes,” he says, looking over her shoulder to see if he can spot Viktor now from where he’s standing. He can’t, so he shrugs lightly. “He’s somewhere around here.”

The two of them had arrived together, but split up early on and only drifted in and out of each other’s orbit every once in a while. It’s how they’ve done these galas from the beginning—Jayce needs to rub shoulders with politicians and investors, and Viktor does his best to do the same, but mostly Jayce just needs him to be there and exchange hellos so that Piltover’s elite don’t forget that he’s just as much a part of Hextech as Jayce is. 

They learned very early on that they’re approached less often for conversation when they stick together. People see them walk side by side and don’t stop to introduce themselves or exchange pleasantries, perhaps for fear of interrupting their conversation.

So in order to give themselves a better chance at charming potential patrons, they’ve learned to spend the majority of these events more as tangents than anything else.

The last time Jayce saw Viktor tonight, he was speaking to a man Jayce identified as the new youngest board member of the academy, and by the animated gestures and a look in Viktor’s eyes that didn’t look like he wanted to strangle someone, it seemed they were talking about the science of Hextech, more so than the political workings around it.

Viktor seemed comfortable and the man stood a little closer to him than was strictly necessary.

When he said something, Viktor laughed and it looked more genuine than anything Jayce had gotten out of him in weeks.

And even though spending most of their time at these events apart is normal for them, Jayce doesn’t feel normal.

He feels sick.

Mel Medarda hums as she accepts another glass from the server who Jayce gestured to when she arrived, and if he concentrates it almost waves away the queasy feeling. Perhaps this should be his last glass of champagne for tonight.

A lot of their following conversation is surface level, the social niceties that he has spent his entire childhood learning from Caitlyn’s family, but somehow it lasts longer than most of these conversations go. She touches his shoulder, his upper arm, his hand. He smiles, and so does she. When she leans in to whisper some of the sordid histories of this House or that as their members pass by them, he can feel her breath on his cheek.

Yes, he thinks as later that night she slowly leads him further into the gardens by the hand. Mel Medarda is certainly a very beautiful woman.

Buzzed and dizzy as he is, Jayce is reminded of when Viktor kissed him as she threads her fingers into his hair and pulls his face down to her own. If Viktor’s kiss was a question, Mel’s is a demand, and because he doesn’t like to be reminded of breaking delicate things, he gives in to it wholeheartedly.

Her lips are insistent and easily take the lead. They feel cool from the champagne and the summer night wind, and as her long, delicate fingers run down his arms, those, too, remind him of someone else and this, too, he ignores.

Tonight isn’t the time for a guilty conscience, or whatever else this is.

Tonight he can taste the expensive drink on Mel’s tongue and he hums into her mouth and pulls her closer as her nails scratch at his scalp. When they break apart, her eyes shine with an intensity that almost makes him queasy again.

She whispers to him how she has wanted to do that for a while, and he says that so has he because it’s true. It is, after all, not the first time he’s noticed how beautiful she is.

Before they rejoin the rest of the attendees, Jayce does his best to smooth down his hair and Mel leans in to give him another soft kiss on the lips.

When they reach the pavilion lights they let go of each other’s hand with a final squeeze, to perhaps minimize the rumors just the slightest bit. Jayce is not sure if it has much of a chance of working.

He winds through the crowd a moment later, but he can’t find Viktor anywhere. When he asks around for him, the first person he approaches doesn’t know who he’s talking about. The second one tells him that he seems to have left a little while ago. Jayce thanks them and begins his rounds to say goodbye to everyone he’s spoken to tonight, in the name of etiquette and a good impression, finally landing on Councillor Salo.

He bows respectfully and puts on his favorite smile as he thanks him for lending his wonderful home estate to the event, and for the invitation to him and his partner. The ghost of a frown seems to pass over the Councillor’s face at that, but he bows and he smiles and he wishes Jayce a safe journey home.

Jayce leaves with a final smile to Mel as he passes her by.

After that night, Viktor doesn’t attend another gala with him.

“I don’t know”, Caitlyn said. “You just know.”

She was only twelve when, in response to a teasing remark about a male classmate she’d mentioned often, she announced to him that she liked girls and only girls. Jayce laughed and told her he certainly gets why, so does he. It was fine, he assured her, he still loved her just the same. She stared at him like he had grown a second head, as though it had never even occurred to her that that might be a question. And it shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t.

Of course it wasn’t. Jayce felt bad for even thinking it.

He asked her how she had figured it out and she just shrugged.

“I mean, once you know you don’t really have to think about it again, right? So like, when you stop thinking about it is when you know, I guess?”

He chose not to point out how young she was and that she very well may think about it again in the future. Because as far as he was concerned, she was right.

Chapter Text

They don’t talk about the gala after it happens—Viktor doesn’t bring up his early departure when they meet at the lab the next morning and Jayce doesn’t, either.

In his mind there are two possible reasons, one being it’s nothing and thus not worth talking about, and the other being that Viktor is upset about something, perhaps something the young academy board member said to him after Jayce lost sight of them, and he doesn’t think Viktor would appreciate him asking.

Not with how altogether quiet he’s gotten and how vehemently he now shuts down all questions about his personal life, to the point that if Jayce were a smarter man, he would just stop asking questions altogether.

It feels even colder in the lab now than it did right after the awkward evening where Jayce now thinks he definitely said the wrong thing. He doesn’t know what the right thing would have been, but it feels like he must have messed it up in the worst way possible. Anything must have been a better response than whatever he did to implode the whole thing.

Their friendship hasn’t been the same since, and despite all his efforts to repair it, it seems like all they do is drift further apart.

Jayce would love to pretend that he’s okay with that, but he’s not. Not even a little bit.

It’s been months, and yet it still stings every time Viktor changes the subject immediately upon Jayce bringing up anything not immediately work-related, or excuses himself from the lab early without an explanation, leaving questions unanswered that Jayce tries his hardest to bite his tongue and not ask, but sometimes he does anyway, and then Viktor rolls his eyes and ignores that too.

They fight more and more frequently and recover from it less and less quickly as the weeks drag on, and sometimes after an argument Viktor simply stays away for the rest of the day to finish his work from home without any grating interpersonal distractions.

Any reasonable person would accept this gracefully and conclude to maybe just give the man some space. Jayce, though, feels more and more like he can’t breathe.

Their dynamic was so light and easy before, and it was the first time Jayce truly felt comfortable being his whole self around another person. It felt like a mask he had barely even realized he was wearing getting the chance to slip, like feeling fresh air on his face for the first time in such a long time that he had forgotten what it felt like. 

Now the lab has transformed from a safe haven into a minefield and Jayce can’t stand it. The sick feeling in his stomach has made a permanent home there, and now he can’t just blame it on alcohol. 

It’s not just the set-up of experiments that they fight about anymore. 

“Oh, please.” Viktor glares at him and it might be the first time he’s made eye contact with him today. Jayce wants to spit. At the ground or at Viktor, he doesn’t even know. 

“What the fuck do you even care,” Viktor continues and his voice sounds like ice, while Jayce feels like he’s on fire. “You’re not my fucking mother, it’s none of your business!”

“It’s our work, Viktor, of course it’s my fucking business if you just ditch it!”

“I was not at the lab for a few goddamn days, Jayce, give me a break! You’re the one who can’t ever shut up about taking time off.”

Jayce’s nails dig painfully into the flesh of his palm, but he doesn’t open it. The pain is a welcome distraction. He tries to even out his voice and fails. “Not without telling me about it! I was worried, Viktor, you’re never even late, let alone don’t show up at all for like three days, and then you’re not even home when I try to check that, oh I don’t know, that you’re not fucking dead. Fuck!”

He runs his hand through his hair. “We depend on each other for our work, what did you think I’d be able to accomplish if you fuck off for several days? Where were you that was so important!” 

Viktor stares at him like he’s being utterly ridiculous, and maybe he is. Maybe he’s just slowly going insane.

Where Jayce’s voice gets louder when he’s angry, Viktor’s has a habit of going quieter. The contrast is jarring. 

“I have a life, Jayce.” It’s barely loud enough to hear across the room where they’re standing at opposite ends of it. “Or rather, I try my damn best to. And I left a note. Sorry if you feel like I need to tell you exactly where I’ll be and if I’ll be home for supper, and that you need to sign me a fucking permission slip to leave the room, but you don’t own me. I repeat, it is none of your business.”

Viktor’s face is set, unmoving, as though cut from marble. In the vanishing light of the evening, lit up mostly by the slight glow of the hex-crystals, he looks like a striking statue of a person. 

Jayce stares at him and imagines scratching the surface with his nails, picking him up, shattering him into a thousand pieces with his own bare hands. 

He quickly banishes the imagery from his mind, it’s…much too visceral. 

Perhaps instead he wants to find whatever Viktor would rather spend his time on, clearly important enough to leave Jayce not even worth telling where he would go and for how long when he drops off the face of the earth, important enough to ditch the work that he claims is his life’s ambition. Perhaps whatever that thing is, whoever that person is, perhaps they deserve breaking instead. 

But that too is an unproductive thought, so Jayce rams it back down with force. Their work is important, it’s everything, but perhaps it’s not worth committing murder over…what, a few lost days of it? Perhaps a bit of an overreaction. 

This whole thing has him way more emotional than it has any right to, and he hates it. He doesn't understand it.

And so, finally, he sighs and it feels like deflating. “I know, Viktor. It’s just…you can just tell me how long you’ll be gone if you want time off, so I know to work on something at the forge, or…or just do something else. Whatever.” He runs his hand through his hair again. “We’re partners.”

Viktor’s eyes are still cold enough to make Jayce shiver. “Oh, we are? Could have fooled me.”

They apologize as they did for every other fight before it. Somehow though, it feels like they never fully come back from this one. 

It feels like their friendship has just about eroded and left little more than a cracked shell behind. Hextech begins to suffer, though it’s still by far the thing that works best between them, the only time they can actually look each other in the eye.

And so, because the lab currently feels like little more than a battlefield and an echo of what it used to be, Jayce tries to find his safe haven elsewhere. 

Caitlyn is caught up in studying for her finals—it’s her second-to-last year of school and if she’s serious about training to be an enforcer her grades need to be in the top fifteen percent. Jayce will never forgive himself if she fails any of her exams because he spent too much time dragging her away from her books, so he avoids going to the Kirammans’ house most days.

Outside of visiting his mother a little more often than usual (which he does and she loves), this mainly leaves one person for Jayce to spend time with and hope to find comfortable companionship with. 

After the gala, Mel Medarda sent him a personal letter, addressed to only him, thanking him for the evening and inviting him to join her for dinner sometime soon. The letter arrived at the lab instead of his home address, and later at home that made Jayce smile—she knows where the majority of his life takes place. 

Jayce came in a little late that day and Viktor handed him the envelope without a word. That was a few days after their fight. Somehow it felt inappropriate to open it right there, then, and so he tucked it into his coat to read at home. 

Viktor barely spoke to him the rest of the day.

The first night that Mel takes him out to dinner, he finds himself enamored with the gold patterns on the walls and the high ceiling with its chandeliers, and he gapes at the prices listed on their menus. Mel smiles and reaches across the table to brush her fingers over his knuckles. 

“Tonight is on me,” she says. Jayce wants to protest, but she continues before a word can come out. “If you wish to insist on fairness that just means that you can get the next one.” 

He doesn’t have a good response to that, so he smiles back at her and orders the cheapest thing on the menu.

All in all, their first dinner is very pleasant. Mel is a good conversationalist and she is, of course, just as well-versed in etiquette as he is, so their conversation flows easily and without any hiccups. It’s a dance they both have memorized, and it allows the choreography to shine. 

By their second dinner at a restaurant of Jayce's choosing that is just slightly outside of his budget, she thaws a little and allows a few peeks behind the meticulously maintained façade. She tells him light-hearted anecdotes about her childhood and comments on an item on the menu being a traditional Noxian treat that he should absolutely try.

At that moment instead of feeling charmed by her Jayce feels nauseous. 

He decides against the highly praised dessert that time but he kisses the taste of it off her lips later. 

He was eight when his mother took Jayce to the shops in Piltover to buy some new clothes to accommodate his recent growth spurt. They walked hand in hand, because the city was big and Jayce wasn’t used to it yet—their hometown on the outskirts of Demacia had been much more sleepy and predictable. 

After the terrible snowstorm that haunted Jayce’s nightmares for years to come, they had never vacationed in the Freljord again and instead would come to Piltover in the summer. 

Last summer had been the one where his mother had met a man with calloused hands and kind eyes named Talis, and this summer had been the one where Jayce had bid his childhood home goodbye and had to adjust to the big, bustling city as a home rather than a place he saw in passing once a year.

Jayce openly gaped at the tall buildings and the many different storefronts they passed, and when he saw something particularly fascinating he would pull on his mother’s hand and point with his other. 

That was how they ended up at a quaint little ice cream parlor, because the flavors it had advertised on a board by the door sounded so outlandish that Jayce couldn’t believe they were real, and in general he couldn’t believe that Piltover had the kind of climate where you could enjoy ice cream all the way into late autumn.

His mother had a gentle smile on her face as she allowed her son to lead her inside and told him he could pick two flavors. 

It was at that ice cream parlor that Jayce first saw two men kiss. 

He was focused on his treat and only looked up because he saw his mother eye something outside the window by their little wooden booth. Jayce followed her gaze and he blinked in confusion as, on the sidewalk in front of their window, two men embraced the way that men and women do and kissed goodbye on the lips as they parted in opposite directions.

Jayce turned to look at his mother’s face—this wasn’t something that had ever happened in Demacia, not that he was aware of. He hadn’t even known that was possible. 

His mother looked a little strained as she smiled at him. “That’s very normal here,” she said and patted his knuckles on the table. Jayce stared at her wide-eyed. “I know it’s not something we’re used to seeing from home, but this is Piltovian culture, and it’s a lot more accepted here. You’ll get used to it quickly.”

Jayce nodded, then poked at his ice cream with his plastic spoon, deep in thought. 

“Is it bad?” he asked after a moment.

“No,” his mother said immediately, and that tight smile was back. “As long as they’re happy and not hurting anyone, people should do whatever they want. We’ll get used to it. It’s…no, it’s not a bad thing.” She sounded like it was a lesson she was teaching herself as much as him, and Jayce nodded again.

After that, they didn’t speak of it again. Over the years, Ximena Talis came around, she did indeed get used to it, and she visibly relaxed around displays of queer affection simply because they were so commonplace in Piltover. Eventually, it truly wasn’t a big deal anymore, and her smiles at those people became much more open and genuine.

Jayce still didn’t tell her when Caitlyn told him she liked girls.

Jayce and Mel’s dates get longer and the topics more familiar as the weeks go on, and he spends less and less time at the lab. It’s a welcome refuge to get away from the tense atmosphere that doesn’t seem to ever leave the place anymore, but he can’t help but notice that Viktor also seems to be around less often and so their work slows down considerably. 

He wants to ask, but he knows Viktor wouldn’t tell him where he goes, and he’s scared of another vicious fight because it feels like the next one might be the last. So he doesn’t ask.

Instead, he takes Mel to dinner, to performance shows and the orchestra, they go for walks through the park and later through the garden of her estate. 

She invites him in.

He declines.

See, the truth is, something is wrong. At first Jayce can’t quite put his finger on it, but the more he goes out with Mel the more obvious it becomes, and now that he’s aware of it it’s like an itch he can’t scratch. 

She is beautiful, she is charismatic and witty and very smart, considering she has no background or interest in academics beyond what they can provide for the city. When her touch ghosts over his skin there is no reason that he shouldn’t shiver. When she asks him if he has anywhere to be in the morning with a heated gaze there is no reason that it shouldn’t make his heart skip a beat. Or whatever other cliché metaphors he can come up with. 

But it doesn’t happen. None of it does. And it bothers him immensely.

At first, he thinks that maybe he just needs more time—it’s always taken him a while to warm up to a potential lover, and it’s not out of the ordinary for him to politely decline the more suggestive of a date’s offers early on, because he’s never enjoyed sex without an emotional bond.

Usually, though, it doesn’t take nearly this long to even know if there’s potential. If there’s something there, or even if there may eventually be something there.

Because while Mel looks like a painting in the low light of their evening strolls and her lips are soft when she kisses him and their conversations are perfectly pleasant…it all seems to stall at that passive interest, his feelings no deeper than they were the night of the gala when they first kissed. That sense of why not, she seems lovely.

Eventually, there should come a point where he makes a decision. And if he’s being entirely honest with himself, he probably passed that point at least four dates ago, and he can’t help but feel that he is stringing her along.

And then there’s the other problem.

There’s the fact that every time she kisses him he’s transported back to the lab and the feeling of someone else on his lips, and there’s that sick, sinking feeling in his stomach that feels less and less like something he could mistake for guilt and more and more like something else that he at first can’t…and then doesn’t want to name. 

Maybe that’s why instead of thinking about it he keeps asking her out again and again, even though he keeps coming home at the end of the day feeling that he had a perfectly nice time, and wondering when that is going to make way for fireworks and wedding bells.

The longer this all goes on, though, the more he can feel himself wearing thin. Like a string being pulled taut with the weight of Mel’s clear infatuation with him, and his own hopes of taking her to meet his mom and watching her eyes light up and having her whisper to him later that this is exactly the kind of person she’s always seen him marrying one day, and the way his stomach twists with the growing, terrifying hunch he has of just why he might be unable to open his heart to her right now. 

It feels like the pressure just keeps building, and sooner or later something has got to give.

In the end, it’s Mel who turns around one evening as he’s about to say good night at the gates of the Medarda residence, and the look on her face immediately makes his train of thought stutter to a rough stop, the casual conversation dying halfway up his throat. When he lay awake at night and worried about this exact moment, she always looked angry in his mind’s eye. 

She doesn’t look angry, she doesn’t even really look hurt.

She just looks sad. 

“Jayce,” she says, and his own name sounds painful to his ears. “I’m not going to ask you to come in again. I think I’ve reached my capacity for rejection, and I’d like to keep my dignity intact and end this here on good terms.”

Really, he shouldn’t be surprised. He’s known that things can’t go on like this forever, and something in him feels relieved that someone is saying it out loud at least. He doesn’t know what to do or what to say, where to even begin, so he just nods wordlessly. He feels hollow.

“I’ve had a wonderful few weeks with you, Jayce. I really have. But at this point in my life I’m looking for something that can grow and evolve, and I think I’m realizing that this won’t.” She falls silent and searches his eyes for a moment, and it feels like an invitation. A last chance for him to interject and tell her no, he does want this, and he’s sorry for the arm’s length he’s been keeping her at, and he would love to come in if she’ll allow it. 

Instead, he nods and he says, “I understand” and “I’m sorry” and probably some other such things that are so deeply ingrained into his trained persona that they don’t even fully register.

She smiles at him, and the smile looks wrong, and something seizes up inside him and grips him so tight that for a moment he can’t breathe, and all he can think is gods, not again. He can’t just keep breaking good things and good people. 

“I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for,” Mel says, and she pulls him into a soft hug that lasts a few seconds longer than it maybe needs to. When she lets go of him, her eyes seem to have just the slightest sheen to them. “A wonderful good night, Jayce.”

He watches her go with the echo of the gate’s metallic shuttering still ringing out long after her footsteps are out of earshot. Hot tears prick in his eyes and he still struggles to breathe and something deep down inside him wants to scream, and…and all of it has absolutely nothing to do with Mel.

And maybe that’s the part he feels most wretched and reprehensible about.

Chapter Text

His feet carry Jayce toward the lab without him ever making the conscious decision to go there. He’s not even sure what he is hoping to find, given that Viktor is rarely around until this hour these days and even if he is, it’s hardly the bastion of comfort and understanding that it used to be with him there.

And still, at one point it was the safest that a place had ever felt to him, and like a child seeking out his mother’s arms when the world gets scary, all he wants is to crawl back—to that place, that time, that feeling. 

That person. 

So yes, it’s naïve and it’s stupid, and that’s what he would have said if he had taken the time to rationalize his way through his options after he had finally left Mel’s gate behind, but he didn’t. He just wants his safe haven and his best friend back and to feel seen and understood again.

He wants to go home. 

It leaves no room for rationalizing. If he had left any room for it, he almost certainly would have had a breakdown with the realization of just how terribly he fucked up. 

Oh no, not today, not these last few weeks with Mel.

How terribly he fucked up that night several months ago, and every day since.

Jayce hears muffled voices as he’s halfway up the stairs to their floor and for a moment he hesitates, considers turning back around. He’s really not in the mood to run into other graduate or post-graduate students carrying bags full of books from the library on the top floor and without a doubt eager to stop him for a chat. 

Ever since his face has become one that people recognize and knowing Jayce Talis, the Hextech guy has become something that people tell each other about, he’s found it so much harder to blend into the background unnoticed, but that is truly the only thing he wants right now. 

Ultimately though, whatever compelled him to come here in the first place is stronger. He doesn’t even stop to wonder about the fact that it’s way too late at night for anyone to still be here—except for maybe himself or Viktor once upon a time—as he climbs the last few stairs and takes the familiar turn down the hallway to his left. 

As he rounds the corner, Jayce freezes.

He notices several things at once, but none of them seem to process correctly for a long moment, instead they register sequentially one after the other.

One, Viktor is there, leaning lightly on his cane in the open doorway of their lab, and both his hair and uniform look a bit disheveled.

Two, there’s someone else with him, a tall, broad young man who, after a brief moment of confusion, Jayce recognizes as the academy board member Viktor spoke to at the gala. 

Three, they’re kissing.

The man has his hand on Viktor’s waist, fingers digging into his academy vest as though trying to keep him from drifting away, and Viktor has his on the man’s chest, in an odd gesture halfway between pulling him in and just keeping him there. Like he’s holding on for dear life. 

And they’re kissing. Deeply.

Jayce makes an odd, strangled noise, but it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from him. It sounds utterly foreign. 

Viktor’s eyes fly open and for a second he meets Jayce’s gaze past this man’s—his lover’s—head. Jayce wants to cry. 

The man pulls back from Viktor’s lips and turns around, and Jayce feels absolutely frozen on the spot. Not a single coherent thought passes through his brain, he just feels incredibly, namelessly cold and he wants to cry.

It reminds him of the visceral, non-verbal helplessness of being a small child in a snowstorm in the Freljord. 

The other man’s eyes flit between Viktor’s face and Jayce’s for a moment, and if Jayce had any presence of mind he might recognize the look on his face as something not unlike what he saw on Mel’s just an hour ago. Instead, he only half-registers the man passing by him with a soft, almost trembling “excuse me” and leaving down the stairs without so much as a look back over his shoulder. 

Viktor takes a step towards him, as if he wants to say something.

That gets Jayce out of his stupor, and he takes a step back. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “Really sorry, I didn’t mean to…” He turns around on his heel to run after the gods-forsaken academy board man with his stupid fucking pretty face and his stupid fucking broad chest that Viktor had his stupid fucking hand on, and to just leave, go home, and do his damn best not to think. 

Maybe, he thinks as that well-known sick feeling twists his stomach with its full force, he can take a detour to throw up in a bush somewhere. No, that’s most definitely not guilt he’s feeling. It never was, and Jayce was utterly blind to ever think it was. Sure, regret, maybe. And grief. 

And also the desperate, visceral, nauseous realization that he’s in love with the man who used to be his dearest friend before Jayce fucked it all up beyond repair, and who now barely speaks to him. 

Who has a lover. Because of course he does, because Jayce turned him down. Because Jayce didn’t think he could possibly feel this way about a man, because he never had before.

Except, of course, apart from the fact that he was clearly very, very wrong—this isn’t just any man. He’s the closest thing Jayce has ever had to a kindred spirit, the only one who Jayce thought ever saw his entire self without a filter. 

Viktor with his striking features, and the little gold flecks in those eyes that track movement like a cat follows a laser, and his clever wit delivered in that soft, clipped accent that makes everything sound sharper, and the moles on his face and neck that Jayce could map out precisely even with his eyes closed, and with his lips that are so much softer than expected and Jayce has had the chance to kiss them and never stop, and he threw it away, and now he needs to get out of here before he doesn’t even make it to a bush.

He hasn’t even managed two steps when he feels cold, slender fingers close around his wrist, tight enough to hurt and sending a jolt through his entire body. 

“No,” Viktor says, and although it’s quiet it feels sharp like the crack of a whip. “Don’t you dare.” 

The hand pulls on him, hard, and with his heart hammering out of his chest, Jayce allows himself to be dragged back the few steps back to the door of the lab and almost shoved inside. 

When the door closes it reminds him of a cage locking. “Don’t you dare,” Viktor repeats and Jayce can’t bring himself to look at him. He feels like if he looks him in the eye right now, he will just break down on the spot and grovel and pour his heart out right here on the fucking floor, and he can’t do that.

It’s too late, and there is someone else, and that is not his right. 

He’s made so damn sure that it is not his right. Gods, he is so utterly fucking stupid.

“You do not get to just run off,” Viktor says, his tone cold enough to chill Jayce to the fucking bone. “You do not have the right to keep jerking me around with this hot-and-cold, egotistical, nonsense ego trip of yours.” 

Jayce frowns. Wait, what? When has he…

For a second he forgets to avoid Viktor’s gaze, and what he sees has him absolutely transfixed—he couldn’t look back down at his feet if he wanted to. 

If every time that he’s seen Viktor angry so far the man turned to ice, right now is the first time Jayce also sees something burning in his eyes, and the intensity of them flays Jayce where he stands and lays him bare. 

He can feel his mouth working, but no sound comes out. The confusion on his face must have said enough, though, because Viktor hisses and it sounds like pure disdain. 

“Please. You’re not stupid Jayce, don’t act like it.” Jayce still can’t make his mouth form sounds, but the familiarity of the words feels like a kick in the gut. Viktor takes a step towards him, and Jayce’s heartbeat threatens to drown out his voice. 

“Do you have any idea how much it takes to risk the most important work I’ve ever done? How sure I was that you…” His voice quiets, tightens even more. A clenched fist rather than a cold whip. “But I was wrong, I read too much into it. You rejected me, that is fine. I took a chance, it didn’t work out. I can live with that, Jayce, gods know it’s not the first time. The undercity gets you well used to not getting what you want. I was ready to let it go.”

His voice cracks.

“Except you just can’t help yourself, can you? Every step I try to take back, you fight me for. The moment I try to put some distance between you and the rest of my life, to give myself a little space to breathe, you won’t stop asking about every fucking detail of it. 

“You have the audacity to look like a kicked puppy over…what, the fact that maybe I cannot handle you acting all sweeter than any boyfriend I’ve ever had while I’m actively trying to get over you—politely and quietly, might I add, doing my damn best not to jeopardize the work?”

Viktor’s chest heaves, but he shows no sign of slowing down. 

This is definitely the longest string of words Jayce has ever heard come out of him at a time, but these seem to have been stored somewhere deep and steeped in something viscous and sticky, and now that some are forcing their way free, all of them are. There’s no stopping a train once it’s in motion. 

“You drag me to a gala I never wanted to go to, and because I’m stupid and I’m still too fucking weak to tell you no, I let you. Except, the moment you’re there, you sneak off to stick your tongue down the throat of some councilwoman making eyes at you.

“Fine, you’re dating her—quite unnecessary to drag me along just to rub it in my face that hard, but fine! Message received.”

Jayce stutters out some semblance of words for the first time at that. They’re not the ones he badly, desperately wishes he could say, but they’re the only ones he has. “It’s not— Y-You…You saw that?” 

Viktor’s laugh is bitter, and the open hurt in it makes Jayce want to reach out and touch him, do anything to make it go away. But he can’t, now can he. He’s missed his chance and now there’s someone else whose job it is to chase those expressions off Viktor’s face. 

“Everyone who paid the slightest bit of attention saw that, Jayce.” Jayce screws his eyes shut. Fuck.

“But at least now I know you’re, eh, spoken for, right? So I can stop reading into it all like a pathetic teenager and move on. Except,” he spits. “I can’t do that either. Because you act like a jealous ex the moment all my attention and time isn’t spent solely on you!

“You act entitled to me, when you’re the one who willingly forfeited that right when I offered it to you. I try my hardest to give other people a chance and get over you, but you just won’t let me.”

If Jayce had full control over his facial muscles and a slightly stronger inclination for hysteria, he may have laughed out loud at that. 

Gods, has he really been this obvious the entire time, was he seriously the last fucking person to see it? 

“Viktor—” he starts, but Viktor cuts his hand through the air in an almost violent motion to shut him up. 

“I’m not done,” he says and takes another step toward him. Jayce’s mouth goes dry. 

“And then,” Viktor says and there’s another crack in his voice that goes straight to Jayce’s heart. “And then you have the audacity to walk in here, while I’m having to tell this perfectly kind, handsome, generous young man that I cannot keep seeing him because I’m still too hung up on my straight colleague like some sickening cliché…”

Something jolts violently in Jayce’s chest, his thoughts grind to a stuttering halt. Wait.

So then…?

“And now you try to run off to sulk, again, because you’ve seen me try to have even a semblance of a chance at moving on from all this, and I know, I just know that it will leave me wondering and second-guessing all over again, but I can’t keep doing this.” 

All of a sudden, all the fight seems to leave him and he deflates. He looks even thinner and smaller than usual, he leans on his cane heavily as if all those words took so much out of him that he can barely stand upright, and all Jayce wants is to wrap himself around the man as tightly as he can go. 

Something glistens on Viktor’s cheek and Jayce raises his hand without even thinking, because that tear can’t be there, it needs to go away, he needs to—

But Viktor shoves his hand away, takes a step back, shakes his head. Takes a deep, stabilizing breath, and then another. 

“Just a note, Jayce,” he says, almost too quietly to hear. “If someone is in love with you and you don’t want them, the kind fucking thing to do is to let them go.” 

The briefest moment of tense silence. 

You can’t keep adding pressure indefinitely. Put too much weight on a thin, fraying string, and sooner or later it will snap.

“Do you just enjoy keeping people on a leash? Do you just want to be admired and revered by everyone at all times, is that it? Is this just an ego trip, Jayce, because if so, please, I want off. Make a goddamn decision and then stick to it for once. 

“Take me or leave me, but if you’re going to leave, let me go.”

And so it snaps.

In one movement Jayce closes the distance between them and crashes their lips together with a sound that reminds him of a wounded animal, and he’s not sure who of them it comes from.

It feels like an inevitability, like gasping for breath after holding it for a long time, something that despite all determination is ultimately not really in his control. All Jayce knows in that moment is that that thought, that dark and painful thought that Viktor is nothing to him but a pet or a way to feed his ego, needs to be pushed back down right to where it came from before Viktor spends even another second thinking it. 

His hands fly up to Viktor’s cheeks and he thumbs away the tears there, their lips slot together and Jayce’s are unwavering, insistent. He’s made his decision. 

Viktor hesitates for only half a second before he melts against him, kisses him back with the same hurt and fire he gave his words, whines into his mouth and it sounds almost like a single sob. Jayce wouldn’t be able to form a proper thought even if he tried.

They never made it very far into the room, so it only takes him two steps forward to crowd Viktor against the closed door and press against him, trying to find purchase, trying to get as close as he possibly can, somewhere between proving a point and making a promise and…and something else. 

Something less sophisticated and much more carnal.

Something that’s had a lot of time to feed and grow in the shadows where he couldn’t see how big it got, and now that it’s free it threatens to overwhelm him.

Somewhere, Viktor’s cane clatters to the ground and both of his hands are on Jayce’s shoulders, around his neck, in his hair, as though he wants to touch everywhere at once. His mouth opens ever so slightly under Jayce’s lips, carefully, like a question. And this time, Jayce doesn’t hesitate for a second in his answer.

He’s made his decision.

The groan that tears its way out of him as their tongues meet and Viktor's teeth scrape his bottom lip lives in that same, primal part of him, and it barely sounds like his own voice.

When they break apart for air, it’s only for Jayce’s mouth to travel on, to the mole above Viktor’s lip, to his jaw, to his throat. 

“F-Fucking figured,” Viktor huffs and Jayce bites him in response. 

The noise he gets for his troubles is the sweetest thing he’s ever heard and he’s fairly confident that he would die a happy man if the only thing he does for the rest of his life is coax those sounds out of him. 

Instead though, he forces himself to slow down just a little, just to catch his breath enough to speak. What he has to say is very important, and the urgency of it cuts through the haze a little. 

“It’s not an ego trip,” he says against the skin of Viktor’s collarbone, and he tries his best not to get distracted by the gooseflesh left behind by his breath. “I swear it’s not. I just…” He presses a kiss to the dip of his throat. “I’m just an idiot. I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot.”

Viktor laughs breathlessly. “Eh, just a little,” he says, before he seems to focus and his tone shifts to something a little more serious, a little apprehensive. “I hope you’re not, eh, cheating on your girlfriend here. Because I can not condone that, I—” 

Jayce looks up to meet Viktor’s eyes, still nuzzling his neck as though he can’t stand a second of losing contact. Because he can’t. Gods know he’s spent long enough fooling himself into thinking he doesn't want this, doesn’t crave it. 

“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’re not— She um, dumped me, actually. Because I’m too hung up on my colleague.” 

Viktor barks another little laugh. For the first time in a long time, his smile looks exactly the way it’s supposed to, and Jayce surges up to kiss it because it’s real and it’s honest and it’s Viktor, and he has to taste it.

The desperate fire from just a moment ago seems reduced to a simmer for the moment, and with a sigh Jayce pulls Viktor in close for a tight hug and buries his face in his neck. How he’s ever lived without the feeling of their bodies slotting together as though made for each other, he truly has no idea. 

“I’m so sorry,” he says, muffled against Viktor’s neck to the point of being almost inaudible, “for…acting more stupid than I am. And for being an ass about it.” 

Viktor cranes his neck a little to rest his cheek against Jayce’s head, and his fingers run soothing circles over his shoulders. “Hush, you have nothing to apologize for.” His hands still for a second. “Eh, well. A little.” 

He picks up the circles again, only to freeze again a moment later as Jayce slowly mouths at the skin of his neck, somewhere between kissing and nipping. Viktor’s breath hitches, and it zaps through Jayce’s body and goes straight to his dick. 

“Any way I can prove just how very sorry I am?” he mumbles, and the fingers resting on his shoulders dig in. Viktor lets out a tiny whimper at his words, and his hips shift ever so slightly. Jayce can feel a telltale hardness pressing against his inner thigh. 

“I, eh…I could think of a few, but,” Viktor’s fingers come to rest on his jaw and gently push his face up so he can look at him properly. “You are sure that you want to?” He searches his gaze carefully and the genuine concern in his eyes makes Jayce melt and makes him want to cry all over again, for entirely different reasons. 

Because Viktor has never once demanded anything of him, because everything he does is a question that patiently waits for an answer, an offer he’s free to accept or reject as he sees fit. 

“You did say that you’re not—” 

His sentence is interrupted by a sharp intake of breath and a stutter in his hips where Jayce has pushed a hand down between them to cup the bulge in Viktor’s academy uniform pants. He presses against it, fingers experimentally running up and down the hard and straining shape, as though mapping it out. Viktor’s entire body shudders. 

“I’m sure, I promise. Never been more sure of anything,” Jayce says and leans in to kiss him again. This time, Viktor’s mouth opens immediately and between the sliding of their tongues and Jayce’s hand rubbing lazy, slow up-and-down lines over him, Viktor whimpers and arches into him just a little.

Jayce has a thought, then, that quite violently pushes its way to the forefront and he pulls back, his hand slows. Viktor whines in protest, his eyes fly open and his hips jerk again, mindlessly chasing the friction. 

“The guy that was just here,” Jayce says and Viktor blinks, bewildered, as though he’s forgotten entirely. That thought makes some deep, animalistic part of Jayce purr. 

“You looked quite the mess…” He nips at Viktor’s jaw. “Did…did he touch you like this too?” 

Viktor huffs a single, breathless laugh. “Jealous?” Jayce nips again, harder, and he gasps. “Fine! Yes! Yes, he did.” 

Jayce surprises himself with the noise that he makes, almost a growl, as he presses Viktor harder up against the door, mouth traveling down his neck in bruising kisses, sucking and biting, desperate to chase the memory of another man’s lips from his skin. Viktor moans and his knees tremble a little, even though they don’t even bear his full weight. 

“But,” he says between ragged breaths. “I couldn’t do it. I had to tell him to leave. Because…Because I kept imagining that it was you instead, and that just doesn’t…doesn't seem fair to the poor man.” 

Jayce hisses at that and sinks his teeth into Viktor’s shoulder and Viktor keens. All Jayce wants is to push harder, get closer, pull him open and crawl into his ribcage to make a home there. Mark every inch of his skin with his teeth, so that next time Viktor sees that man, he’ll know he can’t have him.

So that everyone knows that Jayce has made his decision and it’s taken him way too long, but now that he has all of this he’s never, ever letting it go again.

His fingers blindly fumble for the buttons of Viktor’s pants, but then his teeth meet the neckline on Viktor’s collarbone and he whines, because there’s so much fabric everywhere and he hates all of it equally and can’t decide what he needs gone first, and for a moment it’s almost overwhelming.

Viktor helps him with the decision by pulling on his academy vest where he can reach it with Jayce in the way, and Jayce quickly follows the lead and pulls both layers up and over Viktor’s head. 

Gods, he has moles all over his chest too. That’s the kind of thing Jayce has wondered about in the traitorous corner of his mind that he has been ignoring for gods know how long, and now that that’s out in the open he will think about it again and again. 

One hand still supporting his weight so his bad leg doesn’t have to bear it, Jayce’s other hand comes to rest on Viktor’s collarbone where he’s already left a small bruise. He marvels at it for just a second, presses his mouth on it, laps at it, bites the same spot again. 

His fingertips are a little too frantic, a little too desperate to be as slow and precise as he’d like them to be as they travel down Viktor’s chest, splaying on the plane of it so Jayce can marvel at the downright obscenity of just how much of Viktor’s chest he can cover with a single one of his hands, and thumbing at a nipple on his descent down to his flat stomach. 

His fingers play with the thin line of hair just above the waistband and Viktor shivers, still shifting, hips jerking forward, his body still looking for friction without a single conscious thought. 

"Jayce, please,” he whimpers, and gods, who is Jayce to deny him when he asks so fucking sweetly.

Swallowing his nervousness, Jayce thumbs open the buttons enough to give himself wiggle room and dips his hand in, searching for skin-to-skin contact. And oh, how he finds it. 

Viktor’s cock is straining and leaking and various fascinating noises fall from his mouth as Jayce’s fingers explore it, run along the underside, circle the head, gather pre-come from the slit, wrap around it experimentally. It’s not so different from what he’s used to, though the angle is different and a little awkward, and the lack of immediate feedback from his own body makes it a little more difficult.

Viktor supplements that with a lot of feedback in the form of whimpers and gasps and desperate mewling, though, and that does an excellent job at teaching him precisely where he’s needed. 

At one point, he has to take his other hand off where it’s stabilizing Viktor’s waist for just a second so he can yank the pants and underwear down a bit to give himself free reign, and the poor man’s knees almost buckle.

Jayce leans into him, holds him up with his own weight, mouths apologies at the spot where his neck meets his shoulder, and makes up for it by wrapping his whole hand around his now-free cock and giving it a few quick and hard strokes that have Viktor gasping and hitting the back of his head into the door.

Jayce adjusts and works up to a steady and unforgiving rhythm, and he has no concept of time passing, but it doesn’t take very long for Viktor’s breathing to come in little more than occasional desperate gasps and for the noises he makes to get more and more erratic, his back arching into Jayce’s body and hips stuttering as Jayce scrambles not to lose the rhythm. 

“J-Jayce,” Viktor says and he barely has the breath for it, fingers digging into Jayce’s shoulders so hard he’s sure they’ll leave bruises. “Gods, please don’t stop, I’m…I…”

The last thing Jayce would ever think of is to stop. Spurred on by the cacophony of high-pitched mewls in his ear he groans and picks up the pace and mumbles “V…” into his skin, and then Viktor’s body goes completely rigid against him and he cries out sharply and buries his face and his teeth in Jayce’s neck as he comes. 

Jayce strokes him through it, his touch going from feverish to a slow reverence as Viktor trembles against him and the noise against his jaw sounds like a sob. He presses kisses to the side of Viktor’s head that he can reach, buries his nose in his hair, inhales the heady scent of him on a shaky breath.

Eventually, Jayce’s hand stills and he raises it to admire the mess. How he ever thought he wouldn’t enjoy this is absolutely beyond him. Viktor turns his head from where it’s pressing feather-light kisses to the spot under Jayce’s ear, and he grabs Jayce’s wrist between his fingers to pull his hand to his face. 

“Wh—” Jayce starts, but the words die on his tongue as Viktor draws his come-smeared fingers into his mouth and sucks. Jayce’s eyes widen, and he thinks he sees something glinting in Viktor’s gaze. Now Jayce is the one who shudders as he feels the tongue swirl around and dip between his fingers. When Viktor finally lets them fall from his mouth, they’re clean and glistening wet. 

Jayce thinks he might come right then and there. 

Viktor’s fingers come up to scratch at Jayce’s scalp and he pulls his head in for a kiss. It’s deep and wet and open and so utterly honest that Jayce feels delirious, and if this is what Viktor’s come tastes like on his tongue, Jayce wants to swallow down all of it next time.

“What do you want?” Viktor asks him softly when they break apart. His eye contact is heated and intense, and Jayce doesn’t think he could look away even if he wanted to. 

“If you want to fuck me”—Jayce shudders even at the words and Viktor smirks—“you will have to give me a moment to recover. Unfortunately and fortunately, I am no longer a teenager.” 

Jayce’s laugh feels breathless and nervous even to his own ears, and Viktor doesn’t miss it either. His gaze immediately softens and the fingers on the back of his neck loosen to draw soothing patterns there instead. 

“Are you okay?”

Gods, Jayce loves this man. The thought scares him with how absolutely unsurprising it is—the shocking thing is how he’s ever managed to think otherwise.

“I think,” he says, “maybe, um. Not today, not…not yet? Sorry, I’m still—” 

Viktor surges up to silence him with another kiss. “Shut up. Don’t you dare apologize, Jayce.” He smiles, a little lop-sided. “Set your pace. I’ve, eh, how do you say. Been on this ride a few times, after all. You’re the one in uncharted waters here, so to speak.” 

Jayce returns his smile and nods. “Next time, though, you can bet your ass,” he promises and revels in the undeniably hungry gaze that the double entendre elicits. 

Viktor pulls him in again and when their lips meet his mouth is open and waiting and their tongues press and slide against each other as if they’ve never done anything else. The fingers on the nape of Jayce’s neck get more insistent again in their touch and he feels Viktor’s nails run down from his hairline to the edge of his uniform collar. 

He shivers. 

“Don’t you think,” Viktor says, “that this is all a little unfair?” 

He tugs at the collar, and without hesitating Jayce pulls back enough that he can wiggle out of the shirt and vest and discard them somewhere on the floor along with Viktor’s. 

“Better,” Viktor purrs and allows his mouth to wander lazily, over Jayce’s neck, his collarbone, his shoulders, nails scratching lightly along his back. Again, he shivers. Viktor mumbles something against his skin that sounds something like I’m seeing a pattern here, and drags his nails down all the way to the small of Jayce’s back. 

This alone could kill him. Just wink him out of existence. 

He shudders and groans and Viktor hums, clearly pleased with his discovery and filing it away for later. 

“Now. Do you want my hands,” he says, “or my mouth?” 

Jayce wants to say he doesn’t care, either, anything, as long as they do something because if he stays this painfully fucking hard for much longer he may just pass out. Then he remembers the feeling of pressing his fingers down on Viktor’s masterful little tongue and he swallows thickly. 

“I, um…” he says, but words are hard. 

Viktor looks up from where he’s sucking bruises into the spot between Jayce’s neck and shoulder and raises an eyebrow. “Share with class?”

Jayce has no idea why that mocking tone goes straight to his cock, and he refuses to examine it right now. 

“Your mouth,” he says, and it sounds like a plea even to his ears. 

Viktor hums into his skin. “Hmm, my mouth what?” he says and his accent clips his words even more than usual, making them sound delicious enough to steal right from his lips. “I’m sorry, it’s not my native language, I think I may need clearer instructions.” 

Gods, this man is going to be the fucking death of him. Jayce whines and screws his eyes shut, and for a moment his mouth works without allowing any sound to escape. 

“I…” Gods, why is this so difficult, he’s never had this much trouble with women. Though verbalizing in general can get  difficult for him in compromising positions, this feels different. 

“I want you to suck my dick,” he finally says and the back of his neck feels like it’s on fire. 

Viktor hums again and suddenly his fingers are on Jayce’s jaw again and they tilt his head up with more insistence than he expected. 

“Look at me.” Jayce opens his eyes, because how can he ever deny this man anything. “Good,” Viktor says and that, too, goes straight to Jayce’s dick. “Again, and this time look at me.” 

So much for Viktor doesn’t ever demand anything. And yet…despite the stern heat of his gaze there’s also something there that betrays the way he’s carefully studying Jayce, gauging his reactions, making sure he doesn’t go too far. The drawn-out whimper that escapes Jayce is anything but dignified, but he can’t bring himself to care in the slightest. 

“I want you to suck my dick. Please,” he adds. He could easily get lost in the eye contact, even now as he’s pretty sure the heat on his face must be at least a little visible, even though he generally doesn’t tend to flush. 

Viktor smiles at him and his response is a purr. “Good boy.” 

His hips jerk at that and the intensity of his reaction surprises no one more than Jayce himself. Viktor studies him with a raised eyebrow and that smile still spreading on his face. 

“Interesting,” he says, and he sounds like a scientist. “Very, very interesting.” 

With all due respect, though, Jayce does not have time for him to marvel at his discoveries. He shifts until he feels Viktor’s thigh against his aching hardness, and he presses into it with a hiss, trying to find friction but it’s far, far from enough. 

“V,” he mumbles and watches his eyes soften, watches him melt just a little, “I…please?” Viktor gives another hum and drops one of his hands right to where Jayce needs it, but he only massages ever so slightly through the confines of his pants, and it’s not nearly enough.

A whisper of a kiss lands on Jayce’s temple, right next to his ear. “You will have to help me to a chair.” 

Jayce nods frantically, yes, a chair, good idea. He casts a glance through the lab and it’s almost jarring to see it, it’s as though he forgot that they’re even in here. Or anywhere in particular, really.

“The chair at your desk,” Viktor supplies, but it’s very hard to focus on the logistics he’s proposing when he’s being so damn distracting with his teeth on Jayce’s earlobe.

“You can lean back on it. As much as I would love to get on my knees for you, I am afraid that will have to wait until another day. I can sometimes do it on my good days, but, eh…we have been doing a lot of standing up.” 

Jayce barely listens to him. He has a mission. He picks Viktor up by the thighs, the uniform pants still around his knees, and Viktor gives an undignified squawk as Jayce carries him a few steps over to his desk chair and carefully deposits him into it.

Viktor mumbles something about would have been perfectly able to walk and just needed a hand, that’s all as he reaches down to set the chair to as low as it will go, and Jayce is really very sorry, but he really cannot pay attention. 

Viktor looks like an obscene vision there, leaning back in Jayce’s own chair, with his sweat-damp hair curling at the ends, his lips swollen and his entire chest flushed, his pants dropped all the way down to his ankles. Jayce’s mouth waters at the sight of his still recovering dick and for a moment he imagines sinking to his knees and working him all the way back up, seeing how deep he can take him without gagging, swallowing him down and drinking him dry…but the way Viktor stares at him is quite distracting.

He’s staring at the very unmistakable bulge in his pants, and when Jayce doesn’t move immediately, Viktor leans in to grab his hips and pulls him back in. 

“Now, I believe…” he says, and he doesn’t sound quite so teasing and unbothered anymore. He sounds hungry. “You asked me for something.” He tugs at Jayce’s waistband. “Off.”

There’s no way he could tell him no even if he wanted to. He fumbles with the buttons and grunts in frustration when his rushed fingers won’t get them open immediately, and the light chuckle from the chair only spurs him on more. Finally, the offending garment is on the floor where it belongs, and Jayce hisses at the sensation of his cock finally springing free. 

He doesn’t even get a second to register the cool air or the relief of no longer straining against fabric that won’t give way before Viktor has pulled him close by the hips again and presses kisses to the side of his stomach, his deft fingers lightly trailing along his inner thighs before digging his nails in. Jayce groans and Gods, all he wants is to rut into Viktor’s hand and relieve this pressure that’s already way too fucking much, but Viktor nudges him back against the desk. “Sit.”

Jayce pushes some papers off to the floor and hoists himself up until he’s half-leaning, half-sitting, his hips tilted forward and his hands gripping the edge of the desk.

Viktor hums and again he reminds Jayce of a satisfied cat. The noise doesn’t stop even as the chair scrapes an inch closer and hot breath ghosts over him. Viktor forces his knees apart so his own legs have enough space for him to sit comfortably, and Jayce gasps. Despite the unfamiliarity of the position, knowing that he’s here on his feet, spread for Viktor as he takes his time to settle in as if on a throne, as if he were fucking royalty…that image alone has him breathing hard while Viktor still won’t touch him where he needs it.

For a long, long moment, that is all he gets—the faintest sensation of breath on his skin. Jayce trembles and still his only instinct is to thrust forward, to blindly bury himself in something, because otherwise he will lose his goddamn mind. 

An outcome that Viktor seems not at all invested in preventing. 

“Gods, please,” Jayce hisses as Viktor begins to just ever so slightly mouth at the length of his dick, pressing the lightest of feather-light kisses to it, the tip of his tongue darting out for barely a second at a time, a single finger running up and down the side of it. He looks up at Jayce and the eye contact alone makes Jayce’s breathing stop. 

“Are you trying to kill me,” he mutters and he doesn’t hear the chuckle so much as feel it on his cock. 

“Just trying to make up for lost time. Don’t rush me.”

It’s agonizingly slow. The ghosting kisses move to the head of his dick, a tongue darts out to lap at the slit, and…gods, and then Viktor just returns to pressing soft and lazy kisses back down to the base and to his thighs and his hips, his fingers all the while trailing over the skin. Jayce screws his eyes shut, because he can’t handle feeling this and seeing it at the same time. 

At that, though, the fingers still and Jayce whines, loudly, a high-pitched noise in the back of his throat. 

“Look at me,” Viktor says, and Jayce does. He gets another “good boy” for his troubles and he’s not sure Viktor has any idea how hard he’s working to stay still, instead of desperately, feverishly rutting against any kind of purchase he can find, instead of wrapping a hand around himself to cut his torture short, work himself hard and fast and just spill everything that he has so that maybe he can breathe again.

Or maybe Viktor knows exactly what he’s doing to him. 

And so he watches, transfixed both by the visual itself and the fear of losing the contact again if he doesn’t, as Viktor slowly swirls a tongue around him, pops just the very tip of him into his mouth just to let him go again immediately, all the while looking up at him. 

The string of noises that fall from Jayce’s lips feel barely human anymore as Viktor smiles, takes him in hand, pumps him hard, once, twice…and then lets go. Jayce feels like he’s being very slowly, very agonizingly, ripped into two pieces, minute by minute by minute. He loses all sense of time.

“Fucking hell,” he whines and his knuckles on the desk are locked and painful. “Please, V. Please…” falls from his mouth somewhere between broken whimpers, and Viktor, the bastard, just presses another light kiss to the head of him. 

“I think,” he says, “I may need more precise instructions.”

“Take me in your mouth, suck me off, let me come, please, gods—” This time he doesn’t even have the wherewithal to hesitate or feel embarrassed, he’s way past that point. Whatever it takes to get some release. 

Viktor hums approvingly then, and Jayce sobs with the sensation as he finally takes the entire length of him in his mouth. And then he pulls back off him again, and…

And you can’t keep adding pressure indefinitely. 

Something has got to give.

He does it again, once, twice, three times, four, and Jayce feels like he’s quite literally dying, like his heart is about to give out before Viktor finally, finally takes him in his mouth and keeps him there. But gods, it’s still so incredibly slow, too slow, too soft, just enough to make him lose his mind but not nearly enough to set him free. Minute by minute by minute, and all he can do is sob and hold on for dear life. 

Jayce thinks he feels something wet on his cheek. “Please,” he whispers. “Please let me…” And without warning Viktor sucks, with everything that he has, his cheeks hollowing out and his lips sliding on him and Jayce cries out and even to his own ears it sounds like he’s in agony and his hips buck, and he cries even more when it stops. 

Viktor pops him out of his mouth and when he looks up at him he pauses, reaches up with one hand, wipes the tears off his face. 

His eyes are full of concern, full of love, and Jayce leans down as far as he can, pulls Viktor up from his seating position to meet him a little less than gently, and the kiss he presses to his lips is bruising and wet, desperate, needing. He sucks Viktor’s tongue into his mouth, bites his lip, sobs into his mouth. Viktor is struggling to breathe when he draws back, and he searches Jayce’s eyes with a deathly serious expression.

“Are you still feeling okay?” he asks quietly. “I am only intending to, eh, be mean here in a good way, not in a…way that truly upsets you. If it’s not enjoyable, please—” 

And Jayce shakes his head vehemently, presses another kiss to Viktor’s forehead and tries to pour all of his feelings into it, shakes his head again. 

“No,” he whispers. “No, I’m more than okay. I promise, I’d tell you if— I just, I need— Fuck, V, please.” 

Relief shows clearly on Viktor’s face and he smiles as he nudges Jayce’s torso back up and presses a kiss to his stomach, settles back down into his chair comfortably. 

“Good.”

Jayce isn’t sure if that’s good for him, or good for Viktor, who seems dead-set on sending him to an early grave, and he’s too afraid—and too far gone—to ask.

He grabs Jayce’s hips again and he leans in, and he sinks the entire length of him into his mouth until Jayce can feel himself hit the back of his throat, and he cries out, and Viktor sucks him off in earnest. The coil in Jayce’s abdomen is already wound way too tight, and the pressure builds way too quickly—and he wants to fucking scream when Viktor pulls off him again. He presses a kiss to Jayce’s hip bone and runs his fingers over his abdomen, plays with the hair there.

All the while looking way, way too pleased with himself, and Jayce can’t help but jerk violently into every single touch. His nerves feel like a livewire. He doesn’t even know what kinds of sounds he’s making anymore.

Viktor does the same thing again, and Jayce’s entire body is trembling when he pulls off, but this time it’s just so Viktor can say “okay.” Jayce blinks down at him through bleary eyes and tears. Viktor’s eyes look unfocused. 

“Okay,” he says again. “You’ve earned it, you’ve been so good for me. You can move if you need to,” he adds, before he sinks Jayce’s cock back in and this time it’s like a starving man swallowing down a three-course meal. 

He takes him as deep as he can, he bobs his head, and his fingers dig into Jayce’s hip bones hard enough to bruise. He sobs and cries out as his hips scramble to chase the friction, rutting forward into Viktor’s mouth until he hits the back of it and Viktor moans around his cock. 

He only backs off for the briefest second to breathe and to choke out something resembling come for me, then he swallows him back down and Jayce keens as he fucks into his mouth, once, twice, and then he goes rigid and his leg kicks out and painfully hits the leg of the desk and his vision bursts into pure white and he can’t fucking remember how to make his heart keep beating. 

He has no idea how much time passes.

He can still feel himself pulsing and twitching in Viktor’s mouth by the time his vision clears and he manages to choke out a few ragged breaths. His whole body shudders, then shudders again. He tries to say something, but it’s little more than broken, trembling noises. 

Viktor swallows greedily around him and Jayce twitches again and cries out with the overstimulation, and his hand is fisted into Viktor’s hair like it’s his only lifeline.

It takes a few moments for the shuddering aftershocks to subside. He gently pulls Viktor off his dick then and rests a hand gently cupping his jaw. He leans into it and closes his eyes.

For a long, long moment they’re both just catching their breath, fingers trailing over each other’s skin and drawing random patterns on it. He could honestly stay in this moment forever and he would not mind in the slightest, but then he notices Viktor shivering ever so slightly as their sweat begins to cool, and he pushes himself off the table to grab their clothes. His legs tremble dangerously and his knees threaten to buckle for a moment, but he grabs on to the edge of the desk until it passes, and he stays upright. 

With Viktor’s undershirt in hand, Jayce kneels down next to the chair, but instead of putting it on, Viktor just wraps the garment around his shoulders like a blanket and leaves it there as he reaches for Jayce and tugs him up. Jayce gets the message, gathers him in his arms for a moment, before sitting back down on the chair and pulling Viktor into his chest where he curls into him. Slender fingers make their way over bare skin, tracing slow, lazy patterns. 

It’s tender, affectionate. Serene. 

They don’t need words. 

He turns his face a little to press a reverent kiss to Viktor’s neck, tasting the salt there, and Viktor sighs. 

Eventually, coherent thoughts begin to re-enter Jayce’s mind and he chuckles lightly. Viktor’s fingers stop their soft tracing for a moment before continuing, a wordless question. 

“I just thought,” Jayce says, “that in retrospect this must feel like a very unfair trade to you.” 

Viktor huffs out a single laugh and presses a light kiss to his chest. “Yes, well.” Jayce can’t see it but he can hear the smile in his voice. “Maybe that’s something you can make up to me some other day.” 

There’s a moment’s pause. 

“But in all seriousness, not at all. I very much enjoyed both, eh, sides of the equation here.” 

“Good,” Jayce says. “I’m glad.”

“And…did you?”

It seems like a ridiculous question to ask, but Jayce understands, he would also likely worry if the roles were reserved. 

“Yes,” he says. “Very much so.” 

He has made his decision. There is not a single doubt in his mind, and he will say it as often as he needs to for Viktor to believe it.

They stay like that for another few minutes, just leaning into each other, faintly trailing their fingers over each other’s skin and through each other’s hair, and a few times their lips meet for lazy kisses. It’s such a tender moment that Jayce wonders if the wetness on his cheek is still drying or new.

Eventually, they gather their clothes and Jayce helps Viktor up and brings him his cane, and Viktor excuses himself to the kitchen to get a wet rag and clean them both up as best as he can, and Jayce straightens the desk and the chair and gathers up the papers he threw off, neatly stacking them again. 

It must be well past midnight by the time they feel ready to leave the lab, and they hesitate for only a moment at the door before Jayce asks “do you want to come home with me tonight?” and Viktor says “yes” without hesitation. 

They fall asleep later that night tangled in each other’s limbs, hair still damp from the shower and still without bothering with too many words. 

There will be enough time for words in the morning. 

That’s when they talk about them. 

Jayce apologizes again, and so does Viktor, and Jayce gets up to see if he has all the ingredients for sweetmilk in his kitchen cupboard. 

“I love you,” he says when he comes back and hands Viktor a lukewarm mug, and Viktor freezes, hesitates like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. So Jayce smiles and sits down on the bed next to him, and he says again “I love you” and presses a kiss to Viktor’s forehead, one to each of his cheeks, and finally one to his lips. “I love you, V.” 

For a moment, they just sit there, Viktor searching his gaze and Jayce holding it steadily.

There’s a treacherous sheen in Viktor’s eyes, but this time the tears don’t feel like something terrible that Jayce must prevent, he simply catches them with his thumbs and with his lips and he leans their foreheads together. 

“So much for I don’t like men like that,” Viktor says and Jayce huffs a laugh into that space between their faces where they share their breath. 

“Everyone’s proven wrong at some point,” he says. 

Viktor hums and shakes his head. “I love you, too,” he says, and it feels like the raw antidote to that sick feeling Jayce has gotten so used to. “But, eh, you know that already.”

Chapter Text

Jayce takes a sip from his champagne, and he smiles his most perfect, practiced smile at the older woman in front of him. She speaks of her family’s legacy and of how she wants to make sure to invest their fortune into things that she can be proud to attach her name to. 

And Jayce smiles and nods and says he completely understands. He tells his personal anecdote about how magic saved his life, because she seems like the type of potential patron who would feel touched or charmed by that and is more interested in his passion than the cold, hard facts and numbers.

By the end of their conversation, she pats him on the shoulder with a wide smile.

“I’m very much looking forward to hearing from you,” she says.

“Thank you, ma’am, so are we! I will personally write the letter and make sure that it reaches you.” He laughs and leans in conspiratorially. “I might even deliver it myself, you know how the messengers can be.”

Her laughter sounds like wind chimes, and Jayce has no doubt that this one is a success as he bids her farewell.

He finds Viktor by the steps that lead up to Councillor Hoskel’s main door, underneath one of the lanterns that have been installed to keep the outside area of the party lit until deep into the night. In the low, warm light, with the wind catching his curls where he hasn’t managed to brush them out, he looks like the most beautiful thing Jayce has ever seen.

“Hey, stranger.”

“Hey yourself.” Viktor turns around and—with a look at his face—raises an eyebrow. “You look like you just adopted a puppy.”

Jayce snorts. “Not quite. But…I did secure our funding for the Hextech gloves.”

Viktor’s eyes widen and a surprised little smile spreads over his face. “You did? Just like that?”

“Just like that. No way she’ll say no. She wrote down all of our contact information, just in case we would ‘forget to write to her’ and had me check the spelling twice, and she asked when I think we might be ready to present a prototype.”

“Well, well. Congratulations,” Viktor says and takes Jayce’s champagne glass from his hand to take a sip. 

“Oh shut up, it’s your accomplishment as much as it’s mine. I’d never even be in this position if it weren’t for you,” Jayce says and takes his glass back, threads his fingers through those of Viktor’s now-free hand, and lets his thumb run over the knuckles.

When their eyes meet, there’s something else there besides the celebratory spirit, and goosebumps rise along his arms. Overt public displays of affection are frowned upon at these high-brow gatherings, he knows this all too well, but as he watches the golden specks in Viktor’s eyes dance with the flickering lights he can’t really remember why he should care. 

“Come with me for a second?” He nods towards the path that leads around the main building, to where the lanterns fade out and the shadows grow longer.

“Oh, believe me, I would love to.” Viktor’s voice sounds lower than it was just a moment ago. “But I can tell you from first-hand experience that you are not as sneaky with these things as you think you are, Jayce. People will definitely notice.”

Jayce raises Viktor’s hand to his lips and presses a kiss to the knuckles before tugging on it lightly, and Viktor allows him without another protest to lead him away from the steps. 

“Let them.”