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Jayce fixes cars. Viktor sleeps in. It’s a living, and they’re doing it.
Jayce is gone in the morning, but there’s a still-warm cup of coffee in a heated mug on the bedside table, and four pills in a shot glass advertising a gimmicky bar in Zaun that’s gone all in on the theme; bright, neon colours splattered everywhere like someone threw them up, rickety chairs that did nothing for Viktor’s back so he talked Jayce out of the greasy booth seat, Jayce playing up the stubbornness even though he was scooting out as soon as Viktor mentioned it. Jayce is gone in the morning, because Jayce fixes cars, Viktor sleeps in, and neither of them are better off alone. Down the street, Jayce has rolled up his sleeves, and already gotten an oil stain. Viktor can’t see him, but he’s sure of it.
Viktor’s not Jayce’s wife, but he likes slagging Jayce’s carelessness when he’s focused, and he likes being good at removing stains for a reason that’s not washing his own blood out of the cuffs of his white shirts. He likes wearing white shirts and dyeing them brown in Jayce’s mother’s biggest pot when they get too stained to save. Mel hasn’t tried to kill any of them. Maybe she’s still sentimental, maybe she feels bad about something. Jayce is stiff-shouldered when he talks about her, and will just summarise that she shouldn’t be crossed, and that Caitlyn got together with a Zaunite and Jayce doesn’t know how to look his mother in the eye, so he doesn’t. Viktor isn’t sure that either of them have faked their deaths, or if they’re just actually dead. They’re not in their Zaun, and they figured it out because Piltover didn’t have Viktor’s favourite late-night takeaway, and because Jayce was supposed to have blown up years ago.
Jayce fixes cars, and Viktor sleeps in. Sometimes, it’s dizzying. Sometimes, he can still feel the arcane thrumming through him, and he burrows himself into Jayce’s side until it shuts up, crawls back to whatever hole it came from. They don’t talk about it. Jayce fixes cars, and he keeps the beard. He finds Jinx, but her name’s Powder and she’s cagey in different ways, or that’s what Jayce thinks. Viktor doesn’t agree or disagree—he doesn’t think that he met Jinx when either of them were in the headspace to make connections. Viktor picks up his coffee, wraps his fingers around it. Jayce designed the mug, and he jokes that they could probably get rich off it—mugs that keep the drinks hot. And that they’d probably get richer than they would off hextech. Jayce probes Viktor to sketching out all his old ideas—air filtration for Zaun, even though from what Viktor’s been able to glean, Silco, whose eye is blind instead of mutated, has already handled that. Jayce fixes cars.
Jayce takes half-days, even though Viktor tells him that he shouldn’t. They get by on Jayce’s one income, and they have a small apartment atop a raucous bar in an independent Zaun, and the air doesn’t stink of premature rot. Their stairs are, rickety, uneven and creaky, and both of their bad legs protest it. If Jayce took more hours, they might be able to afford to move to the ground floor somewhere, but then it would be dark by the time Jayce was opening the door with his toes, shrugging off his stained shirt and keeping his shoes on as he walks around the apartment, stretching out his joints, calling out for Viktor. Viktor shouts back that he’s on the couch.
They woke up in a field, and they weren’t wearing any clothes. Jayce didn’t ask how Viktor got them clothes, but he did pout when it took Viktor longer than five minutes to do it—Viktor had spotted a house nearby, with smoke rising from the chimney and heavy sleepers inside; a window slotted open enough that he could wriggle his thin frame through the space and stagger around until he found clothes. The shoes that Viktor stole didn’t fit either of them, and they followed a rustling creek to gilded civilisation, Jayce half-remembering the route as the one he’d taken with his mother. It didn’t take long for either of them to admit that they didn’t think they’d come back to where they came from.
Viktor’s skin is pale and untarnished, his gait aching and his chest heavy.
When they walked into Zaun, Singed recognised Viktor and made it obvious with a gasp. On his hip sat a little girl with bright eyes, and ringlet curls. Orianna, Viktor whispered to Jayce, squeezing his hand in the way he did when he promised that he’d explain later, like he always did when they walked through their Zaun for spare parts and food that was illegal in Piltover but that Viktor always missed. Singed had less scars and more trust in the authorities, and he still dabbled with things he shouldn’t. He couldn’t stop looking at Viktor as they spoke, as Viktor tried to find his footing in the deep end.
Viktor learned that he’d died of his disease, and Jayce assumed that meant he’d never made it off the mountain. Later, they discovered that there was an obituary to Jayce Talis, student with four metal fingers on one hand as a result of frostbite as a child, who’d blown up alongside a pink-haired girl who’d broken into the Academy. Viktor had gone to Singed, and Singed, who’d been able to cure his daughter, couldn’t do anything like what he’d like for Viktor—three months after he sunk Viktor’s body in the water, belly cut open and filled with stones, Singed didn’t have a cure, but he did have a functional treatment for Viktor’s advanced stage, four pills in the morning, served in a shot glass advertising a gimmicky bar.
He's not going to race ships, and he still has to stop in the middle of the stairs sometimes, but he’s not going to die either.
Jayce tells Viktor, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch as Viktor plays with his hair—Jayce is growing it out for the first time in his life, and he’s terrible at braiding it and loves when Viktor does it—that Powder came by, and wanted to buy a motorcycle. She’s got blue eyes instead of Shimmer-pink, and she says that her dads think she’s going to kill someone on the damn thing, but that it’s still what she’s going to buy herself when she turns twenty, all with her own money, so they can’t say anything at all. She wants to take Ekko, her boyfriend, on a ride. Powder visits often—Jayce thinks that if he gets to take an apprentice next year, he might extend the offer to her. She’s brilliant, he says, and she’s focusing her energy on making things that go fast instead of boom.
Right now, Jayce sometimes takes her up on her offers to paint the rides that he restores, because people like her art, and they like Jayce’s mechanical know-how. Viktor listens to all of this, and some part of him screams that he should be the one rolling up his sleeves and getting black stains, but the other says that Jayce takes half-days, and that Jayce had recommendations for where Powder should take Ekko for a ride, because the first thing Jayce fixed, when he was proving himself worthy of working at the shop, was a motorcycle that he took home, and that Viktor spent weekends on the back of, pressed tightly against Jayce’s warm back.
Jayce tips his head back against Viktor’s side, and Viktor strokes his fingers through Jayce’s messy hair. Jayce’s eyes slip closed. It’s six months since they woke up in the field, and every year, Caitlyn Kiramman hosts a competition for young inventors in Jayce’s memory, where she always chokes up as she gives the same speech that describes him as someone who just wanted to make sure that no one was cold. Ekko and Powder, both haunts of the shop, have asked Jayce if he’d like to be their guest, because they’re both attending, and they’re both shortlisted to win. Jayce, foolishly, said yes, and is now planning to lie about getting a gnarly bout of food poisoning. Viktor insists that he doesn’t look anything like the young man who died, and Jayce answers that he doesn’t know what he’d do if he saw Caitlyn and couldn’t throw himself at her. Or his mother.
Their apartment is simple but gets ample natural light. Jayce plucks weeds and puts them in empty beer bottles that he rests against the windowsill.
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Jayce asks, eyes wide open and looking right at Viktor. “We have time.”
“We should cook,” Viktor answers, twirling a lock of Jayce’s hair around his finger.
“Fuck that,” Jayce says. They’re both terrible cooks. “Let’s get takeaway and eat it somewhere new.”
Viktor quirks his lip. “Somewhere new?”
“Somewhere new,” Jayce confirms, pushing himself off the floor with a low groan. “Come on,” he says, hand against Viktor’s thigh. “Go get your coat.”
Viktor reaches up to grab Jayce by the chin, pulling him back down just enough to press a kiss against his waiting lips, one that Jayce deepens.