Archive of Our Own

When Viktor comes to, it’s like waking up from a dream where everything wrong with him was made right.

No more stumbling, struggling to keep up with even the weakest link in the chain that made up Piltover, and inevitably falling only to look up and see them high above him.  No helping hand offered by those indistinguishable faces held genuine intent behind it; he could see through their facades.  But he- lonely Viktor, after peeling himself from a chrysalis made from the scar tissue his creation scored into the world- would do what no one had ever done for him.

He would fix people , and he would do it well.

He watched their amalgamate faces, beaming for the first time since he laid eyes upon them, free of grief and pain and inadequacy.  It felt good.  And so when they looked to him for guidance as they would their mother, springing from his womb as ready-made, eager disciples, he comforted them with a gentleness that contrasted the cold metal that replaced their faulty bodies.

Even then, in his beautiful sequestered utopia, he was incapable of fully repairing himself.  Each birth took its toll on his body, a violent explosion of energy from within him- his gut churning, chest heaving, eyes going blurry for long minutes after purging the filth from their own bodies.

Sky’s hand on his shoulder steadies him, even if he can’t feel it, and he puts more effort than it should require to stymie his envy toward his children.  He is no flawless savior, but he plays the part of one with stunning ease.  Perhaps the source of his deepest guilt whispering in his ear oils the gears well enough to make them turn, but he feels them catching on the fraying strings of his sinew with every revolution.

It’s almost a relief when Jayce shows his face, sweaty and shaking, and levels his hammer at Viktor with the determination of a man on a Crusade.  Viktor watches him from above, strung up by arcane umbilical cords, and tries not to let his fear permeate his skin and take up residence within his expression.  Like a child whose parents told them their face would get stuck like that, he worries that once he shows how afraid he is, he might never be able to stop.

The beam of light pierces his side just as the spear of longinus had done to his predecessor.  A shrill whine of pain echoes through the bodies of every single one of his followers, their bodies falling limp like puppets with their strings cut.  (It’s still better than they were before.  At least they paint a pretty picture like this, no gnarled flesh or lopsided limbs.  Just empty, waiting to be filled again.)

Something goes funny in him after that.  His eyes are opened, and he feels like he’s seeing the truth of the world for the very first time, even though it had been right in front of him his whole life.

He had wanted to give them a choice, as to whether his healing hands might grace them or not.  But now he knows, with such finality that he can almost hear a bell tolling above: nobody gets a choice, no matter how fervently they believe they do.  Greater forces decide the course of their lives before they’re even born; station, deformity, disease.  Every little puzzle piece of their existence slots into place and makes a person whose decisions could never have been any different.

Those greater forces had never shown their face to Viktor, but he was always acutely aware of their presence.  Perhaps if he’d been born in Piltover, he’d have received proper preventative care.  Perhaps if he'd been born with a functional body rather than this piecemeal vessel, made with whatever scraps were left over once the better people were finished, he wouldn’t have needed such care.

In the end, it doesn’t matter.  He is what he is, and no amount of daydreaming will solve him.

When he is young and naive, yet to watch a beautiful creature transform into a twisted mockery of itself, he pretends he can do just as well as his peers.  He lies to himself, insists that he can achieve just as much, and that he’ll only have to work twice as hard as anyone else.  It’s not so bad- he’s a hard worker, if nothing else.

But then, faced with what might have once been Rio, delicate skin punched through with wires, gasping for breath in some desperate attempt to survive even while knowing it’s not worth it, he sees his future.  This is where he will end up if he gives in.  This is where he will end up if he carries on.

It was never going to make a difference.

When Singed finds him once more and treats his broken body in much the same way, he can’t bring himself to hate his once-teacher.  He prefers this to the empty consolation Heimerdinger offered him, a eulogy offered to the dead rather than the living.  He accepts the new blood into his veins, drinks it up greedily, and chips away at everything he’d ever been.

At first he thought it was just his faulty flesh that needed replacing, but now he knows he needs to rid himself of everything that flesh had made him into as well.  If he carried on desperately curing the sick at his own expense, he would have broken down and fertilized the earth, only remembered by the hole he left.  He would transform into a martyr rather than a savior, some beautiful crystallization of his ideology that exists only in concept.

(He could.  It would, perhaps, be the right thing to do.  But Viktor is tired of losing.  He wants to live, and he wants to do so unburdened by as he chooses.)

“I will miss our talks,” he says, truly meaning the words that fall from his lips.  But as soon as they leave his mouth, they’re gone from his heart as well.  So when she replies, “No, you won’t,” and disintegrates into the nebulae that greedily devours her consciousness, it comes as no surprise.

It’s easy, after that.  He emerges from his own womb, a reverse ouroboros, infinitely creating itself rather than infinitely destroying.  He has become greater than any man could.  Once, it might have seemed an impossible dream to be a man at all, but now the idea is laughable.  What could truly match the impossibility of walking forward, never stumbling or swaying, a steady forward motion that makes even Jayce balk in fear?

“Despite the circumstances, Jayce,” he says, syllables scrabbling at the air and growing grainy when they escape the mechanical mask that has become his true face.  “I am… pleased to see you.”

“There must be some part of you still in there,” Jayce says softly.  He does not understand that whatever he saw of Viktor beforehand was only his prison.  That feeble, frail form trapped him, strengthening every loss and dulling every victory.  But Jayce cannot understand, because he is only a man.

“I am more than I ever was,” he says simply.  He will tell his former partner the truth, and he will have to listen.

No one else could become this, he thinks.  Only he, who was doomed from the start to amount to so little, could become so much.

“It is the answer you and I pursued all our lives.  An end to cruelty, injustice.  All of us our own authors to an unbroken saga of progress.  To the benefit of all.”

“People deserve to choose their own fates,” Jayce pleads, a whimpering tone that Viktor might have mirrored if he were still the weak, unborn thing he had been before, still clutching onto the umbilical cord that was his crutch to keep him steady rather than commanding the universe with a pluck upon its length.

“Choice is false.”  The words might have tightened his throat before, but his throat has been sealed with liquid metal that solidified and filled his empty vessel with new purpose.  “It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division.  Death…”

His third arm (a new favorite of his, something untainted by the fragile mess it used to be, entirely new and created at his behest) pushes and pulls at the very fabric of reality.  “War…”  Those greater forces he cursed for most of his life belong to him, now.  “Prejudice…”  He can hold them in a single palm and feel them give way.  It is intoxicating, to have true power for the first time in his life.  “Energy spent only to consume itself.

“But we can be of one mind.”  He watches Jayce’s back and imagines how it will feel once he finally persuades his partner.  He wishes for nothing more than to join with him, to allow Jayce to enter him and show him everything he couldn’t see past the facade of humanity he put on when he was nothing more than an animal.

“Your eyes won’t lie… when your mind is open, Jayce.”  He raises his stave, a shepherd’s rod ready to guide humanity into a golden age, to herd them with the care he was never granted without having to give up some part of himself in exchange.  They rise, as they had risen that first day together, reality swelling with the shimmering blue fruits of their efforts.

Soon, they’re tangling together in the air, a writhing mass of limbs against limbs, metal against skin.  When they burst through the ceiling, shattering yet another structure that prevented them from reaching higher than they were permitted, he looks down on Jayce’s trembling form.  He wonders if this is how the Pilties felt seeing him limp through their streets after his partner, pretending he didn’t know that they only kept him around because he was Jayce’s favorite pet.

Viktor will be a much more attentive master than Jayce had been back then.

It is no small struggle, but he manages to snare Jayce in the end.  He grasps his leash tight and pulls his mind along behind it, strangling his struggling thoughts with the sheer beauty of his vision.  He thinks it might be over, then, and that Jayce will finally see.  But then he starts to speak, voice thick with sympathy, and Viktor would have recoiled if his every action was not now deliberate by necessity.

Jayce speaks of what he thought were weaknesses , and Viktor worries he might never understand.  It’s easy enough to admire the beauty of a two-headed calf from a distance, but it’s harder to justify that kind of existence when you’re stuck in that duplicitous body, knowing you won’t survive the night.

“There is beauty in imperfections,” Jayce murmurs, seemingly unaware that he’s looking up at Jesus after the stone was rolled away and insisting he should have stayed in the cave, decomposing while wholly conscious.  “They made you who you are.  An inseparable piece of everything…”  His eyes flutter shut, as though Viktor’s grace is too painful to continue gazing upon.

Is he imagining human Viktor?  Viktor who needed leather bound to his spine to keep his lungs from collapsing?  Viktor whose crutch came closer to dislocating his shoulder each day, who may have ended up bound to a wheelchair insisting he wasn’t an invalid as he visibly decayed?  Viktor whose bones jutted awkwardly out of his imprecise fingers, whose muscles spoiled and congealed under his skin, who staked his value entirely on his mind because there was nothing worthwhile to be found in his body, from the surface down to the marrow?

He looks peaceful as he does so.  Viktor almost wants to squash him like a bug for the insolence, smear his insides across his palm.  He won’t, of course.  Such an act would debase him.

This consequence should be of little consequence.  Jayce will join him eventually, and it doesn’t matter how long it takes, only that it happens.  But when the boy launches an inexplicable device intent on devouring him just as his dream had done to Sky, all the carefully curated beauty of his body seems to turn to ash in his hands, falling through his too-thin fingers.

He retreats, curls around himself, makes himself as small as he can fathom to.  He is that familiar fetus he inhabited for most of his life, cloaked in the broken promises of what he could be, an exoskeleton that sloughs off of his face and reveals the unsightly creature beneath.

The umbilical cord snaps, and for the first time in a long time he feels well and truly alone.

He hasn’t felt this way since he approached Jayce on the balcony, extending a hand clutching that treasured rune like a crucifix.  He muttered about how little faith the world had in him and knew it was selfish, but carried on regardless.  The more selfish act would be for Jayce to take his life, when he’s been blessed with so much opportunity, the likes of which Viktor himself had to beg on his knees for.

Viktor latched onto him like a brood parasite, sharing with him that which he felt he was rightfully owed.  Jayce accepted him with open arms, taking an even half of all of his burdens, and Viktor tried to convince himself he was tricking him to get what he wanted.

The more frightful truth was that all Jayce gave him was freely offered, not from pity or pride but from the kind of kinship formed from blood spilled, rather than shared.

Jayce took his frustration and despair and helplessness in stride.  He accepted every biting insult thrown at him on the bad days, basked in every scrap of praise he received on the good ones.  It was as if his world revolved around Viktor for a few short years.  When it started to drift and fall into another’s orbit, as Viktor always knew it would, he’d grown used to it.  It hurts, worse than the blood that spills from his nose into thin lips, a metal taste he can’t rid himself of no matter how many times he scrubs a rough toothbrush across his abused gums.

Now he is pleading with him, reaching out with the sort of caution one does not take when approaching a deity.  It makes his stomach hurt.  Faintly, he wonders if it had been hurting the entire time, and he simply hadn’t noticed.

Together, they see something fathomless: the reality of the world he wished to create.

It is terrible in its beauty.  The achievement is an empty one: a world free of love or hate, made up of silvery statues that stand vigil on their dead planet.  They can move, of course- every single one of them is capable of it.  They simply have no need to.  They can, so they don’t.  (Viktor thinks, distantly, of all the times he couldn’t and did so anyways.)

He might have been able to grapple with the realization were it not for the other reality he sees.  The depths of the emotion which he thought forced upon him, the stabbing pain in his chest from a source other than trembling lungs.

He knew that Jayce cared for him.  He simply thought it was more like a mother bird accepting a too-large egg into her nest rather than the kind of love shared only between equals.  Even then he tries to reason with it, wondering if he merely wanted him because he knew he could never have him- too fragile, too stubborn, too brittle not to break the second he took him into his arms.

But here he is, fulfilling a promise made to a version of him to which he held no obligation.  All because that Viktor- elder, weary, looking like he might start weeping at the sight of his old friend’s face- asked him.

“Only you,” the man that shouldn’t be him says, “can show me this.”

The stabbing in his gut he feels at the words does not stem from any weakness of will or of body.  He can see his younger self, healthier but still not healthy, and knows he leans on a cane rather than a crutch.  It hardly matters when he’s swimming through the air, filled with the heady excitement that only comes from discovering something new with someone.

Perhaps if he were alone, he would have felt more fulfilled- he’d have achieved something on his merit alone, something he could use to his advantage in any which way he pleased.  But, he thinks, it would have been a shallow victory compared to this.  He surely doesn’t think he would have smiled so genuinely, were he alone.  He doubts his lips would have even twitched.

But then, his chest filled up with laughter rather than vomit.  They’ll fall in a minute or two, and he will land painfully on his knee and have to wrench it back into place.  He’ll try to be discreet, but Jayce will notice, and for some reason he’ll burst out laughing at his concerned face.  “Chin up, Talis,” he’ll say through tears of pain and joy.  “There’s no way I’m going to die on you after that .”

He can see the way he looked up at Jayce when they first became two halves of the same whole, a pair that even death could barely separate.  He was curious, calculating, and trying his best to hold his cards close to his chest.  But for a split second, his eyes softened.

Viktor remembers how he felt back then, for the first time in a long time.  It weighs upon him too heavily for him to stay upright.  He barely manages to shove Jayce away before he collapses, the breaths he doesn’t need to take growing ragged.

“You must go, Jayce,” he says, a futile effort.  Some things are predetermined by forces greater than any man- perhaps this was, as well.  Perhaps he never defied fate after all, and remained a helpless human in the hands of the universe’s whims until the end.

Jayce rests his hand upon his shoulder, and he feels its weight, the warmth seeping through the thin veil of the cosmos that permeates his skin.  Jayce’s hand dips into his own wrist, retrieving the rune that should’ve signed his death warrant but instead gave him a new lease on life all those years ago.  Viktor accepts it graciously, not even bothering to argue.

He’s fed up with making loathsome choices just to try and free himself of the role he was forced to fill.  Indiscriminate defiance is yet another way of subjecting oneself to the great puppeteer that is fate, is it not?

He probably won’t ever know.  He hardly even thinks of it as he struggles to keep hold of the exploding star which his fragile fingers clutch, a burning that makes his form spasm from the recoil.  Jayce falls away for him from a moment, and for the infinity that occupies that singular moment, he is certain he’s been abandoned.

(In the end, he is left to struggle and fight the undertow he knows is destined to pull him under, unable to do anything but flail and kick and thrash against the tide.)

Jayce takes his hand again, covers it with his own, and pulls him close enough for Viktor to feel his breath upon his mouth if there were any.  Viktor grabs his arm and squeezes his eyes shut against the tidal wave as it crashes down upon them.  He is sure that this final victory, won over himself, should be shared.

Then he wakes up.

The homogenous soup they’d just started to dissolve into fully separates itself into parts once more, sifting swathes of spiraling metal from spongy flesh and vice-versa.  He peels himself from Jayce’s womb just as he had from the chrysalis, freeing him from the burden of Viktor’s body.  His head falls back, and soon his body follows, subject to the whims of gravity once again.

He collapses on a cold, artificial surface, the reams of hair he’d accumulated in his days in the undercity commune fanning like a halo around his head.  His chest heaves, unclothed with the dubious exception of his brace, which had spread its roots all throughout him, easily carrying the body he struggled to manage when it was half as dense.  Now it’s returned to its original state, a medical apparatus of his own design, following furtive requests for advice from his colleagues, made as vague as possible to save himself some small shame.

The support it provides is a welcome relief.  He feels strange- he’s been falling through space with nothing to anchor him, and suddenly he finds himself on solid ground again.  His joints pulse with the subtle sort of pain that comes from soreness, strained by the acts he took in a better body he no longer inhabits.  The palm of the hand he clutched the rune in throbs particularly persistently, and he presses it to his chest like the pain is a precious gift and not a reminder of his failure.

(“In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good,” he said earnestly too near to a ledge, one which seems less dangerous and more inviting.  Then he sought that same greatness without the slightest hesitation, too drunk on the dream of perfection.)

“Viktor?” Jayce’s voice rasps, and it hits him all at once.  They’re alive .

After all of that, after he picked apart humanity as if it were nothing more than a scab.  His next breath catches in his throat, a shard of glass that threatens to puncture his lungs if it goes any further.  He hides his face in his hands, unable to look up at his ‘partner’, unable to do anything at all apart from shuddering in place.

Jayce’s hand comes to rest upon his shoulder again, as free of judgment as one should expect a hand to be.  Viktor’s arm twitches at the contact, but he doesn’t push him away, just allows himself this facsimile of comfort.  In turn, Jayce’s hand slides up the length of his arm, over his bony elbows and weak forearms, only stopping when it reaches the pulsing hand he’s using to clumsily cover half of his face.  Jayce grasps it as he had before, though his touch is lighter now, barely pressing down upon his knuckles.  Viktor wishes he would tighten his grip enough to break a few fingers.  He’s sure the man is more than capable.

“Are you alright?“ he asks stupidly, a question that answers itself with its necessity.  Viktor’s chest swells with something like a normal breath- there’s air in his lungs, at least.  Jayce presses his fingers up against the dips between Viktor’s, asking permission he doesn’t need.  Viktor spreads his fingers to the best of his abilities and Jayce fills in the blanks, interlocking them with his own.  Viktor exhales slowly, more of a sigh than anything, and a knot starts to unravel in his chest.

“Of course not.  But, eh… that is hardly a problem,” he answers, waving his free hand dismissively.

“It is.  Hey, it is .”  Jayce cups his chin with his free hand, dragging his face from the palm still encroaching upon his eye socket, freeing the soft meat from the pressure that left stars dancing across his vision.  He pulls his head around to face him, but Viktor keeps his eyes tightly shut.  He feels heat radiating off of the warm body across from him and knows it’s better this way.

“I would have torn you apart,” Viktor confesses, cradling his burning hand to his chest once more, this time with Jayce’s own accompanying it.  He can feel the warped skin where the rune burned into their flesh when their hands shift against each other with more friction than they should.  Where the girdle of Venus might have cut through smooth and rough skin alike, they now have twin scars.  “I would have broken you into little pieces and put you back together.  And then I would have pretended I improved you, and I would have… believed it to be true.”

“Because that’s what you did to yourself,” Jayce says carefully, unspooling the web of his tangled thoughts with practiced ease.  “Isn’t it?”

He almost wants to say: that’s what you did to me.  You did it when you took my limp body and molested it with the Hexcore.  You did it when you ran me through with your holy spear, a cleansing light that scored a hole into my chest and left me empty.  But he knows, with startling finality: he would have made this of himself no matter what.  Not because of fate, merely because he wanted to .

“Yes,” he mumbles, shifting onto his side to relieve the strain Jayce is putting on his neck.  His spine cracks at the motion, not in protest but as a natural response to his movement.  “I didn’t even think twice.  It was…”  He bites his lip, running his teeth over the somehow familiar and alien skin.  “ Easy .”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Jayce protests foolishly, though he’d have thought he’d have taken his rose-tinted glasses off by sheer necessity.  Viktor cracks an eye open, catching a glimpse of the eyes that he knows will inevitably trap him under their weight.  The hand upon his face has stayed planted there, comfortably resting upon his jaw and lower cheek, thumb rubbing over skin sensitive from its recent reassimilation.

He peels his eyelids the rest of the way back, allowing Jayce to lock gazes with him as he had their hands.  Jayce’s hand skates across his skin, gliding over his cheekbones and tucking stray hairs behind the shell of his ear.  It’s too gentle for someone who’d nearly done what he had.  It’s too warm for someone who only just remembered how it feels to have blood in his veins.

“You wanted to help people,” Jayce insists, even now.  He huffs out a laugh, shaking his head.

“I wanted to help myself.”  Without that night he spent sprinting, chest hot and buzzing with the strain, adrenaline filling every bit of him in every way it could, he doubts he would have gone as far as he had.  He wanted more nights like that.  He wanted to feel like an essential part of the organism that made up their cities, not just an extraneous organ, easily cut out and discarded.

“That’s fine too.  It’s not like…”  Jayce swallows, like it’s physically difficult for him to continue.  “It’s not like anyone else was planning on it.”

Viktor knows, of course.  His life had been an unending series of men and women who seemed incapable of doing anything but dismissing him, or discarding him altogether.  He just didn’t consider that Jayce might have thought the same.

“I could have stopped at any moment.  I didn’t.  Not until you made me.”  Once again following in his more successful partner’s footsteps.  His legacy would no longer be that of a background character but a villain, bringing about unnecessary evil.

“That was your choice, Viktor.  I didn’t make you do anything.  I just…”  His eyes fall shut again, as they had when reminiscing upon Viktor’s lost humanity.  “… asked.  I just asked.  It was all I could do.”

“Ah.”  Viktor struggles to grasp a more articulated reply, words falling from his head like Jayce’s own had knocked it loose.  Perhaps the fact that the little agency he had was used up saving humanity from himself only on someone else’s behest should make his skin crawl, but when it settles onto his chest it feels more like comfort than he expected it to, like his brace constantly digging slightly into his ribcage.  “Well.  Thank you for asking.”

“Thank you for listening,” Jayce says, even softer than he was speaking before, verging on a whisper.

“Where are we?” Viktor asks, filling the silence with none of the words he really wants to say.  Jayce’s hand falls from his face so he can use it to maneuver himself upright.  The second Viktor starts to feel the loss, Jayce pulls him up by his hand, sending a jolt through his spine with the movement.  Viktor practically slams into his shoulder, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Stretching out before them, made tiny by their heightened perspective, is the whole of Piltover.  It looks, however, entirely too different to be the Piltover they left- for one, there is no army marching through its streets, no legion of mechanical puppets stripping people of their personhood.  Viktor presses his lips into a thin line, glancing down in his shame.

His eyes fall upon the metal brace surrounding Jayce’s leg like a cage.  This injury, whatever its nature, is his fault, he realizes.  He did this- will do this, when he saves Jayce’s life.  Perhaps it lies in his future, or another Viktor’s, but it was his hands that handed that rune over.  Why, he wonders, what purpose could it serve?

Did he, does he, will he want to burden Jayce with the same suffering wrought upon him by bad luck?  Can he, may he, shall he really come to see his nearest friend living only to end up crippled as an act of kindness?

Here- watching the gears on that deceivingly delicate device turn to accommodate his knee bending, hearing them squeak in protest against unoiled springs- he realizes that he already does.  His heart pounds hard in his chest, wild as an untamed dog tearing into meat granted by human hands for the first time.  He feels dizzy, the world going topsy-turvy around him, leaving him hanging off of Jayce’s side to keep himself upright.

“Is… there something wrong?” Jayce asks past the blood rushing to his head, voice cutting through the ringing in his ears.  Have I done something wrong, he knows Jayce wants to say, but won’t for fear the answer might be yes .

“Nothing,” he mutters into Jayce’s neck, closer than he’s ever allowed himself to get before.  This kind of closeness feels even more dangerously intimate than when their consciousnesses had become one.  Jayce must be able to feel his pulse through his skin, based on the way he can feel each pump of his heart all through his body.  “Nothing is wrong.”

“Is that right..?” Jayce asks, hesitant but hopeful.  He turns to look at Viktor where he rests upon his side, searching his face for something specific.  Viktor hums, glancing back down at the brace Jayce must have modeled after his own.  He is so still against him that Viktor might have mistaken him for a statue, were it not for the warmth under his clothes and the slightest tremble to his shoulders.

He knows, then, that Jayce will not take anything if Viktor does not take it first.  He’s waiting with bated breath, anticipating his partner’s next move, hoping he might take his leash into his hands and pull.

“I don’t know.  I think it ought to be.”  Viktor wraps a hand around Jayce’s waist, pulling him closer and closer until their torsos slot together like puzzle pieces.  The angle looks uncomfortable for him, so without a second thought, Viktor hoists his leg painfully over Jayce’s bent knees to straddle him.  He twitches under him, but ultimately remains just as he was before, merely accepting Viktor’s negligible weight atop him.  “I’d ask if you meant what you said, but I already know the answer.”

“You don’t have to,” Jayce says wearily, weakly paddling against a tide neither of them could hope to resist.  “Even if you hated me, I wouldn’t care.  I just wanted you to be you again.”

“Jayce,” he says, in the least scathing tone he can manage, “If you really wanted me to hate you, you shouldn’t have kept your promise.”

Jayce’s brows furrow in confusion, like Viktor confessing he doesn’t hate him is more shocking than if he said he loved him.  The corner of mouth twitches, and soon enough he’s smiling down at Jayce, struggling to contain the laughter that builds up in his body at the sight of his dumbfounded expression.

“I didn’t want- ” Jayce starts to stay, but Viktor swiftly cuts him off.  He clamps his lips over Jayce’s, hanging open and still-moving with unspoken words.  He swallows whatever his partner might’ve said, shoving their tongues together with their bodies, saliva mixing and filling his mouth up with bacteria belonging to another.

When he pulls back, a long string of saliva follows him, drawn out of Jayce’s mouth like a string from fraying fabric.  It snaps after a few seconds, half of the synthesis of their spittle dribbling down their chins and the rest dotting their shirts.  “You look good like this,” Viktor says around an open-mouthed grin.  “Maybe I’ll keep you.”

“Yeah?” Jayce says faintly, staring up at him with more reverence than when his wingspan could have engulfed the entirety of the cosmos.  Viktor can feel his bad leg twitching under him, and adjusts his weight to take some of the pressure off of it.

“Yeah,” he echoes, bearing down on Jayce’s chest with all of his weight, until he has no choice but to drop onto his back.  He’s malleable in Viktor’s hands, like clay, like the whole of the universe had been not long before.  When their mouths lock together again, he thinks this might be an even greater victory than that which he forsook.

If this is his fate in every universe, perhaps he’s luckier than he thought.