Work Text:
Neither of them were clear on how it started. There were half a dozen deadlines they were behind on, pressing down on both their shoulders like heavyweight torture devices, and promises they knew they couldn’t keep—maybe not to each other, but certaintly to their clients. Mel Medara didn’t have her eyes on them, she was far too busy for that, but her assistant Elena passed by the laboratory every day just, “Checking on things, seeing how they’re going,” with a polite smile that screamed blazing red alarms of warning. And because they were stressed, they were getting sloppy, and getting sloppy was the one thing they couldn’t, absolutely could not afford to do right now. It was one thing to be ashamed of that on your own; it was entirely another to feel that shame in front of a partner.
Perhaps it was Viktor, snapping thoughtlessly at Jayce that he was so slow, they didn’t have time to question every choice they made. Or maybe that was something Jayce could have forgiven, it might have been only a momentary slip of the tongue had he not thrown his wrench onto the table and told Viktor, listen, it’s my project, and if you don’t like the way I do things around here then why did you even bother signing up? Like an accusation or a threat.
Wherever they’d started, they’d ended up with heaving chests, clenched fists, feet planted spread eagle like they were about to break out into a run, and neither of them could hardly stand the sight of one another anymore.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Viktor spat. “We don’t have time for these kinds of silly arguments, we have bigger priorities at stake here than this. I want to get back to that, not…fritter away our time like this.”
He felt tired to his bones, the kind of exhaustion that normally only seeped in after a long day at the doctor’s office getting prodded and bent and splayed till he felt more like a Hextech device himself than a person. He ducked his head, shook it, repeated, “This is no time for screaming at one another like children.”
“So that’s it then?”
Viktor frowned. “What do you mea—”
“Everything we’ve worked for and been together, it's just…worthy of throwing away, like none of it even matters?” Jayce’s face was twisted in an ugliness Viktor hadn’t seen yet, not even during the red-faced peak of their arguing. He shuffled a step closer, feeling the air begin to darken. Jayce stepped back two.
“I didn’t—I don’t mean we can’t solve this later, Jayce, I just think we need a little time to—”
“Yeah. A little time, it’s always a little time. Fuck, it’s fine, Viktor, you just keep working and I’ll pick up the pieces by myself, like I always do, it’s just fine. I’d forgotten what it was like to do this alone, but, hey, I’m sure I’ll pick it right back up, eh?”
“Jayce—” A pool of emotion in Viktor’s stomach—normally calm, placid—had begun to shake dangerously. Trepidation gripped him like a fist. He tried to walk closer again, white-knuckling his cane with the effort of not moving as fast as he was able towards Jayce, but again Jayce turned away. “Jayce, please, I just want to let things settle for a little while, I don’t want either of us to be alone, it’s just—”
“Whatever, Viktor.”
Jayce’s footsteps were matches striking for a light, each scuffing the floor with harsh finality. He didn’t turn to meet Viktor’s wide-eyed confusion; barely even stopped to pick up his toolkit before leaving. He let the door slam hard behind him.
Viktor was bewildered. He stayed where he’d planted himself, staring at Jayce leaving, stomach in knots. Never before had he and Jayce fought like that—to the point where one of them had actually given up, like there was nothing else either of them could say that would make a bit of difference anymore.
His chest grew tighter as he turned back to his work with wild eyes. He searched the trinkets strew across the table and his dozens of notes, and none of them seemed to fit into his world anymore. He couldn’t make sense of them. He picked up one small golden screw, then set it back down without having really looked at it at all.
Was what he’d said really so terrible? Jayce had spoken like they were over, over. As though Viktor had been the one cutting their string in half, simply by pointing out that there was no use to them fighting over petty insults when they had people to please and schedules to follow. The memory of Jayce’s expression sent a twinge of fresh irritation through Viktor—it was his idea to take whatever Viktor said in precisely the wrong way. Didn’t he know him better than to make him a villain?
A cloud colored in shades of hurt and anger and guttural confusion hung over his head as he absentmindedly continued his studies. An hour passed. Then two. Jayce didn’t return, even though Viktor noticed he’d left behind his notebook and several items he’d been using prior to their argument—it would have been impossible for him to make any progress without them. What’s he doing, then? Viktor wondered, and images came to mind severe and hard; Jayce drinking his anger away; Jayce, glum in his quarters, thinking about Viktor too; Jayce, Jayce, Jayce.
He was caught in his own head, fumbling about on the table for a screwdriver without actually using his eyes to find it, when his fingers happened upon the familiar shape of a small, inconsequential spur gear. It was probably useless, just a spare amongst the many they’d already used in creating Hextech; if either of them bothered to clean their workspaces it probably wouldn’t even still be there for Viktor to find.
But it was, and he did find it.
He hesitated, then reached out slowly and took it in his hand. It was smooth, new-goods smooth, without any wear or grime from use. He held it up to the dim light of his table lamp and examined it like it was a gemstone, he an evaluator assessing its worth—which wasn’t much. The materials weren’t even up to the standard needed for working with Hextech, they used gold alloys now. This was really just a malformed chunk of silver. It was probably a piece from their earliest days, when they knew nothing except for the excitement of creating something new, and were sustained through their (many, humiliating) failures only by their certainty that it had to be possible because they’d done it before.
Now, it seemed, they worked for everyone except for themselves and every reason except innovation. Looking at that little gear, Viktor suddenly felt very small in his body, lost to the world, alone even in a city full of people that celebrated his and Jayce’s names with every new invention. It was a familiar feeling, an old ache that he realized he hadn’t felt since the very first time he’d heard Jayce speak up about his ideals in front of the council and all those angry eyes. Their ideals, though at the time Jayce hadn’t known that yet.
It wasn’t the gear they’d tossed through the air to one another that fateful night spent hovering in the glory of what Hextech could become. Viktor knew it wasn’t, because that gear hung around his neck that very moment; a gift, Jayce had told him, for his one and only partner on their first anniversary of creating Hextech. He’d made the chain it dangled from himself and encased it in a thin layer of blue glass that he swore wasn’t enchanted (Viktor had always suspected otherwise). Elevated it from an inconsequential puzzle piece to a wearable memory, always kept close to Viktor’s heart.
Viktor let his head fall into the heels of his palms. He sighed like what he exhaled wasn’t just air, but all the tension in his limbs along with it.
Jayce was right where he expected to find him. There was a small clocktower on one end of the academy campus, not the great, shiny, Hextech-powered one with a hundred additions for telling the weather and alerting of unwanted presences at Piltover’s borders, but a traditional-style build with a clockface containing the moon and sun. Its hands were edged with stars. Though it had been out of use since well before Viktor and Jayce’s time, the maintenance rooms below it had become a sanctuary for them both. Viktor had found it before they met, when he’d just become Heimerdinger’s assistant and was so overwhelmed with a new city, job, and all the expectations that came along with them that sometimes it felt like he’d forget how to breathe; it became his blessedly quiet place the first time he stumbled upon it. Then he’d brought Jayce there for lunch one day when his eyebags were looking even worse than Viktor’s—and now it was a given that they could find each other there if nowhere else.
He was sitting on an overturned wood crate, his back to the door. The room was empty save for a few scraps, tools that hadn’t been needed or furniture left unwanted. Late night moonlight pressed through the inside of the wall-sized clockface, illuminating the emptiness and Jayce with pale blue. Viktor stopped for a moment in the hall, watching the lowly slope of those shoulders that were usually set so straight, so sure—and for a moment their argument seemed like such a dream, or more aptly a nightmare, that if Viktor just clipped his way across the room and bowed his head against that broad back, everything would be as it was supposed to be. Jayce would look up and greet him with a smile wanned from a long day of working at the forge and meeting with the Council, and Viktor would chide him gently for not taking care of himself properly, he needed to take care of himself before looking after the people, and didn’t he understand that yet after all this time? as he ran his fingers gently through Jayce’s short, soft hair, feeling his scalp bleed tension till he was like a large, sleepy dog leaning into Viktor’s arms without a care in the world. And he would take Viktor’s hand and kiss the back of it, looking up at him with those eyes the color of ochre and mist.
“Jayce,” Viktor called out, voice still tender from the embrace of a thousand good memories.
Jayce didn’t turn, but he raised a backwards hand in greeting. Better than nothing, Viktor thought. He stepped into the room, took a seat on a stool set a yard or so away from Jayce. From there he could just make out the beginnings of his profile, the tip of his nose, the corner of his lip—he could see that his gaze was cast on the trinket in his hand. He thought it looked like the beginnings of a jack-in-the-box toy.
“I’m…sorry,” Viktor tried again. Getting those two small words out of himself felt like hauling a water from a bottomless well, but once they were in the air he couldn’t remember why it had been so hard all of a sudden. Now he couldn’t stop saying them. “I’m truly sorry, Jayce. I have too much on my mind these days, my—my health, my work. Our work. I got angry, I blamed you for my stress. It wasn’t fair of me. I don’t want to…push you away, not ever. I’m sorry I was cruel to you.”
It was gasping for breath, for relief—drowning in a sea of realizations. Suddenly understanding that he couldn’t be without Jayce, not again, in his life or in his work, that he’d existed that way for so long without understanding that half of him was missing, and if Jayce couldn’t understand that—god forbid, didn’t feel the same—and they couldn’t work through this, Viktor had no idea what he would do. Where to go or who to be with that would rescue him from such a misery.
“…I ever tell you about my parents’ divorce?” Jayce spoke, finally but slowly, without raising his head. Viktor let out a hm in the negative.
“They separated when I was young. Nine or ten, I guess, just before I saw magic for the first time. I just remember a happy childhood, you know? We were really close, I thought. Then one day, poof,” he threw his hands up, glancing up at the ceiling like he could see his words dissipate into silence, “They were screaming at each other. I’d never heard my parents fight before, never even saw them disagree. And my dad left at the end of the month, just like that. I don’t even remember him saying goodbye—he was just gone. I never saw him again, not till the day he died. It's a miracle his parents didn't cast us out on the street after that.”
The air felt thick and dull. Viktor tried to reconcile the image of a younger Mrs. Talis yelling at a faceless man, or Jayce clinging to his mother as they watched him leave, with the tranquil Talis family of mother-and-son he knew now—found he couldn’t bear it. Jayce spoke frankly, like his childhood was as unremarkable as safety instructions for navigating laboratory equipment. But Viktor could taste his pain like too much salt.
“Jayce…” he tried, soft and uncertain. But Jayce shook himself all of a sudden and finally looked up, over his shoulder to meet Viktor’s eyes, and when he did his gaze was clear and profound.
“I’m not good at this,” Jayce continued, fragile as the glass of the clockface, “probably because of that. I don’t really know how to do this with people without getting too afraid of losing them in the process, or—I don’t know, I guess, assuming that they’re going to want to lose me by the end. And the thought of being lost to you is worse than anything I can think of.”
Viktor couldn’t remember for the life of him how he got there, but there he was, leaning down, taking Jayce’s shoulders in his arms and curling over his head to encapsulate him, embrace him so utterly. His cane had clattered to the ground somewhere along the way. Jayce smelled like fire and citrus, and he was as warm as the first step of the day into morning sunlight. He reached up an arm and curled it over Viktor’s bent waist, and he held him there, his support, his comfort, tight and solid.
It was a clumsy hug, all wrong in the ways an embrace of forgiveness should have been right. But all that mattered to either of them was that they were holding and being held, and by each other.
“I’m sorry I stormed out on you, I’m sorry I yelled, I—” Jayce was fumbling for words as badly as Viktor had, but it just made Viktor want to laugh. Apologies abruptly seemed so inconsequential, such finite things, incapable of bridging the gap between them any better than this could.
“I don’t care,” he murmured, and chastely kissed Jayce’s shoulder. “It’s all good, yes?”
Jayce’s arm squeezed him tighter in response, punching a breathless laugh from Viktor at the acute discomfort he was only really aware of now that they were good.
“Get off me,” he chuckled, wriggling in an attempt to stand upright again—to which Jayce responded by hooking his hand tight and pulling Viktor ungracefully into his lap. He looked down on him with gentle eyes that belied the crooked smile already lurking at the corners of his lips. “Ah! I need my cane! Jayce, that tickles—ah! Hey!”
As they devolved into messy kisses and interlocked hands, Viktor almost could feel the gear on his necklace tenderly pulsing like a living thing—accumulating one more memory to safeguard and keep.