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“Are you really sure we’re allowed to be wandering around like this?” Jayce asked, unsteady from the jagged edges of the rocks beneath his heavy boots. “Doesn’t this count as private property?”
Viktor gave him a fleeting smile, taking a little satisfaction in the fact that even with his cane he was more graceful here than his unable-to-be-one-upped partner. “Who would be privy to it?” He shot back lightly. “No one really owns anything here, in any case.”
It was true that this little stream, spilling over from Piltover’s popular natural kiddie pool and down into Zaun’s sewers, was probably mentioned on some kind of land deed shoved in the back of a file cabinet wealthier than either Viktor or Jayce could imagine. But it was such a small section of the strip between the twin nations, and the craggy landscape and comparatively dismal trickle of water all added up to make it a location that was undevelopable at best. Even Zaunites with their scarce natural resources tended to steer clear of the place, if only because they didn’t like seeing topsiders up close.
To Viktor, though, it had always been a place of escape and solace. His weak body craved the freshness of the spring water—a respite from the thick fumes of the undercity that seemed to permeate even the tallest of its rooftops and the deepest of its basements. Even now, coming to this place felt like throwing a weight from the center of his chest, or standing on his own two feet after being bedridden for a week.
“You climbed these rocks when you were a kid?” Jayce huffed—he’d caught up, but only just, and he braced his hands on his knees with an expression of exhaustion that seemed undue considering how many hours a day he spent swinging heavy tools around in the forge below their laboratory.
“Almost every day. My guardians would scold me for wandering off on my own so often, but I never told them where I wiled away the hours. I liked to have a secret of my own.”
A beat—then Jayce righted himself, and with the beginnings of a glimmering smile he asked softly, “So you’ve never shown this place to anyone else?”
Viktor ducked his head shyly, then shook it once. He heard Jayce let out a puff of pleased laughter—then he felt fingertips on his knuckles, and reached out to catch them in his palm without a second thought.
It was still awfully new. Everything was when it came to this. Viktor felt himself aflush with new emotions whether Jayce was around him or not. The jealousy whenever he saw Jayce chatting up someone at the other end of the dining hall, the embarrassment of his own desire exposed whenever he caught Jayce changing in a locker room or his quarters—these were all feelings he’d grown used to. Sensations he’d learned to recognize, reject, and padlock away somewhere so deep inside of himself he couldn’t hear or feel them anymore. But the euphoria that could accompany yearning for someone after learning that they felt the same; this was an unsettling novelty. The practice of wanting to hold, to embrace, to comfort, and not resisting was so unfamiliar to Viktor that he wondered if he was actually incapable of doing it, and those fears carried with them guilt and frustration in ways he hadn’t known he could feel too.
But Jayce understood. And his understanding made Viktor want to change, so he was willing to try.
This evening venture was one of his attempts at doing so. He’d been meaning to visit the shallow spring anyway, just to make sure all was in order, and Jayce had asked him where he was off to for the evening, so. It had become something like a date.
A pretty lame one, Viktor thought cruelly to himself, and pulled a little closer to Jayce without realizing it as if to distance himself from his own mind.
“Cold?” Jayce asked. He disentangled their fingers only to wrap his arm around Viktor’s shoulders, navigating himself so their torsos and limbs were flush together without Viktor having to relinquish his cane. “Want my jacket?”
Viktor paused, then remarked a little superciliously , “It’s the end of summer, Jayce. I would have to be well and truly sick if I was cold in weather like this.”
He said as much, but he didn’t stop himself from leaning into the warmth of the bridge between Jayce’s neck and shoulder. He felt an upswell of adoration for the weight of him, his solidity, and imagined for a moment that he was a balloon and Jayce his tether string—keeping him right where he was supposed to be, which was always in Jayce’s hands.
Jayce scoffed. “I try to be nice and you tease me—you’re cold in a whole other sense of the word.” And Viktor couldn’t help but chuckle into the thin weaving of Jayce’s jacket.
After indulging in their closeness for another moment longer, Viktor drew himself back and tucked their hands together once more. “Come on,” he leaned in to say quietly, the only way to speak that seemed befitting of the twilight that was quickly dipping into true night around them. “There’s more to see than just the stream.”
He led him down the other side of the rocks they’d just climbed and along the length of the stream, where it dropped off into the pits of Zaun’s flooded underground wells in a dim trickle. Where the earth became a rocky wall there was the shallow entrance of a cave—not the one his scientist friend from his childhood days had inhabited, but another a little farther along the water—and Viktor took them both inside and down the murky tunnel. Their shoes alternated between making quiet splashes in the clear blue and crunching on ground that couldn’t decide whether it was pebbles or sand.
“So you were a mole-person as a child?” Jayce teased, and Viktor admonished him with a squeeze of his hand.
“Only if mole-people lived in caves like this one,” he replied, and urged Jayce to enter ahead of him as the corridor widened into a round cavern with a ceiling that was more sky than rock, listening eagerly for the gasp he hoped would come.
In this place grew enormous flowers of a hundred different hues and varieties, each of them shattering through the cold stone and unwelcoming earth to sing their colorful praises to the heavens when the timing was just right. Some of them floated on top of the continuous stream of water, too, with great round petals that shined even when they were shut tight. There was almost no room to walk without crushing a vine or leaf underfoot—unless, of course, you knew the path that Viktor had carved out for himself as a very young child. Each plant was different, and each of them was more beautiful than the last; the kind of beauty that was enticing enough to drain all the sight one had from their eyes.
The gasp did come, and Viktor was very pleased when Jayce turned to him after a moment of wide-eyed gazing with delight on his face.
“You found this place? All on your own? And you never, ever told another soul?” He asked once again in disbelief, and Viktor nodded once, shrugged like he couldn’t feel himself preening under the glow of Jayce’s admiration. “God, Vik. I would’ve told everyone I knew before I’d even known what I was looking at! Always running off to share things even I don’t understand.”
A beat, then, “You’ll have to take me back tomorrow, when they’re in bloom.”
“Ah,” said Viktor with a hint of superiority in his voice, “But that is where you’re wrong.”
He ushered him to a smooth flat stone near the entrance of the cave where the rising moon would kiss their cheeks, told him to sit and be patient before doing the same himself—at first at a reasonable distance from Jayce, and then practically on his lap with his shoulders and torso squeezed between Jayce’s arms in an embrace that was so tight it should have been uncomfortable, but wasn’t. And they waited. And they watched.
And as the moon rose, the flowers each began to shudder and move; their buds unfurling almost quickly enough to see, speeding to release their scents and petals to the sky before the hasty night was finished, the silver luminescence they sought gone again. It was the habit of some of these flowers to release their pollen as soon as they had blossomed in tiny, glowing darts, figments of gold and green light escaping up into the dark air and out of the cavern to repopulate God knew where. The others only had their petals to offer, but it was a sea of violet and blue and emerald that did not disappoint.
“…You really, really never told anyone about this place? You promise?” Jayce repeated himself—this time like it was a prayer just between the two of them.
Viktor told him with a laugh threatening to spill from his throat, “Goodness, Jayce, I promise! I could pinky promise, if that would convince you once and for all.”
It was an unbreakable habit of his to utter everything like it was matter of fact—like revealing this place wasn’t uncovering a part of his past and his childhood that no one had ever bothered to ask to see before Jayce, and no one besides Jayce likely would do so again. Like sitting here, now, with someone else at his side, wasn’t the beginning of unwrapping the bindings of the most painful inner wounds he possessed.
Jayce offered his pinky without looking down, and when Viktor reached out with a bemused expression and took it he jerked his arm back suddenly, took Viktor with it, till they were close enough that Jayce was able to snatch him round the waist and take him in a kiss that left him—many, many moments later—panting for breath.
“I don’t know,” he replied to the unasked question in Viktor’s pleasure-misted eyes, “I just…I guess I’m really happy. And I—I love you. More than I feel adequate enough to say.”
With one hand around Viktor’s waist, the other entwined with Viktor’s across their legs, it almost felt as though they were about to dance through the night garden. Viktor felt so deliriously happy that, for a moment, he thought he really would pull Jayce to his feet and lead him into a spin that left them both too dizzy to walk. Even if he limped, even if they tumbled over each other’s feet and fell to the ground in a heap, he didn’t care, as long as whatever happened next would be with Jayce and Jayce alone.
Instead of dancing, though, he sat a little more upright and leaned forward till their foreheads gently bumped together, and whispered against all his outdated inner warnings not to, “I am the one who loves you more.”