Work Text:
You both stay up at all hours of the night over working yourselves to make deadlines. You both have a need to be remembered but in different ways. For Viktor, it's to improve lives. For you? It's to help capture history. It feeds his ego and he becomes your muse.
As Jayce spends more and more time on his councilor duties, there's more time for the two of you and Viktor to get to know each other. What starts as shared quick dinners, late night coffees, and library trips; turns to forced naps, tidying of each other's spaces, and gentle massages.
Quiet moments of intimacy are shared during the early hours of golden light in the lab. Midday forays into a nearby studio result in evidence of your new romance as swathes of color beneath ruffled clothes.
He gets used to you tracing intricate patterns on his skin, you get used to falling asleep to his exhaustion honeyed voice going over notes. Many of your more passionate nights have ended with some paint on his body. Viktor loves the coolness of your brush, of your pigment soaked touch. It relaxes him on days where his leg is sore, or his shoulder from over-supporting on the crutch. He'll rub your neck when you've spent too long bent at a weird angle trying to get a line just right.
It's a tender and slow love. One that exponentially builds in your mutual affections, one that crashes down after the attack on Piltover's council.
This time it is him who leaves his mark on you, his slender fingers have lost their warmth when they grace your face. The weight is familiar, but the emotion is not. When he calls your name, the mirth and soft laughter is replaced with a metallic echo. You lean into him all the same.
The multicolor chroma of his fingertips mimicking marks you've left long ago.