Chapter Text
The gala has long transitioned into an afterparty and Mel Medarda is for sure the most beautiful person Viktor has ever seen.
It’s not just her dress or hair. Or her voice. Or her skin. Or her smile. Although all of those things are dizzyingly flawless. Viktor is beyond denying what’s glaringly obvious.
It is her perfect politics. They leave no gaps; she’s laughing at jokes and shaking hands like she’s pushing and pulling. It’s almost cosmic; she’s playing with gravity. And, on top of that, she manages to be one of two people in the room looking entirely honest as she does.
Jayce is with her, talking to different drunk academics, making different jokes, but never too far away. Every once in a while they meet each other in the middle, like their paths collide by accident, and there’s always a soft word, or a gentle squeeze of an arm. It’s like watching something choreographed. They’re projecting an image of perfect alliance so beautiful you can’t help but stare. Viktor can’t help but stare.
They dazzle.
Shoulders tight, Viktor takes a deep breath through the mouth. He’s too clever to start wondering why he’s even here. He knows exactly why he’s here. And besides, the lights look lovely. Fake and too-bright as they are, when he squints his eyes, the room blurs into a sparkling plain of colour.
Not that he’s paying much attention to the lights. As Viktor watches, Mel slides a hand onto Jayce’s back, and Jayce’s body straightens, his face going soft. He turns to her and says something meant for no one else, a twitch in the corner of his mouth, deep, visible smile lines around his eyes. She nods.
Viktor can feel that Jayce is tired more than he can see it. The air around him is worn. It makes Viktor uneasy. He wants to leave; he wants Jayce to leave with him.
Standing there, staring, he notices someone’s been approaching him from the left. It’s a first-year student Viktor has never consciously seen before, but he knows she’s a student from the uniform, and he guesses she’s a first-year from the size of her awed eyes. He wonders dimly how she got into the party, expensive-liquor-fueled intellectual masturbation room of Piltover’s finest that it is, but he stops wondering, because he doesn’t care. She’s holding a brown book bag. Viktor makes a note of that, to have something to make note of that isn’t her cane.
“Hello, sorry,” she says as she stands next to him, and pushes up her glasses. “Having fun?”
“Uh,” Viktor says.
“They’re all so…” The student trails off, looking at the people, the hairdos, the dress jackets, the shoes. It’s quite a sight. Viktor uses the opportunity to look at her, properly. She’s short and red-haired and button-nosed, and altogether looks a lot like some sort of small garden creature.
“Aren’t they? Sorry. I’m Abby.”
“Oh. Why are you talking to me?”
Viktor realizes how that sounds a second after he says it, and so he quickly adds: “Nice to meet you,” but not before her face falls.
“I’m Viktor,” he tells her, feeling terrible. She nods at the ground. Then she turns to leave just as somewhere in the center of the room, a group explodes in laughter. Viktor misses her mumbled apology because he turns toward it reflexively, only to see that, of course, the source of the laughter is Jayce. He’s started wading through the crowd toward Viktor. He's looking trim and proper in his tailored clothes. His face is flush and radiant. His mouth is halfway opened for a question, but Viktor does not feel like answering questions. He doesn’t even have the grace to watch Abby go.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asks when Jayce reaches him, before he can get a word out.
Jayce closes his mouth and thinks about it, really truly thinks about it. “I mean, no,” he finally admits, with a sweet lopsided half-smile, and Viktor raises an eyebrow at him.
“You want to leave?”
“Yeah,” Jaycs sighs, “I do, but I gotta… you know.”
Viktor tells himself he does not feel surprised. “Of course.”
“You can go, though,” Jayce says, and reaches a hand toward his shoulder. Then he stops himself. His hand hangs in the air heavily for a moment and then he drops it again. Viktor doesn’t know why this sticks out to him as much as it does.
“You’re probably tired. It’s so nice that you came, but really, it’s fine.”
Viktor nods very slowly. “Thank you. Would you like me to-”
Prep your station, is what he meant to say, in case you come to the lab after this , but he’s interrupted by a man wearing a light blue suit and a remarkably narrow nose who grabs Jayce by the arm. "Mr. Talis," the man says, overjoyed, and gets as far as, "I hope you don't mind, I was told that you-" before Viktor stops listening. He doesn’t mind, this time. It was a stupid question he was going to ask anyway; Jayce is going to come to the lab in any case, even just to straighten his tools and nap on a workbench. Viktor still likes to ask, though.
Jayce smiles apologetically at him and Viktor knows he’s going to try to make up for it later. He’s going to finally clean the drains, or write the method section of the lab reports for a week, or shower him in a random burst of heartfelt compliments, or another ridiculous Jayce-can’t-say-sorry-normally thing. Viktor smiles back at him, so he can see the relief smooth out Jayce's eyebrows and everything rights itself for a second or two, across heads and fancy fabrics and artificially colorful lights.
The man drags Jayce away. Viktor drags himself away. He's going to get chalk from an empty classroom, and then he's going to go to the lab and indulge in listening to the soft sound of the magnetic mixers spinning in circles while he draws runes on the board until he can hear the birds outside.
Viktor looks around for Abby, but she has disappeared into the crowd. The terrible feeling spreads; the door closes behind him. No one sees him leave, except for Mel. He knows this, because he can't not pay attention to her, because she's the center of the room, as in, the room quite literally stretches and bends around her.
She leaves only a short while after him.
----------
They meet in the atrium. Viktor is slower, but he has a head start. He’s been hearing Mel’s heels on the marble for the past few minutes, catching up slowly, but then again, she has to hear his cane, too. Neither of them stops or changes direction. Viktor picks a classroom at random. They reach the door at the same time.
"Viktor," she says, bending her head. The gold accessories in her hair catch the dim light. It looks like she’s actually glowing.
"Councilor Merdarda," he replies stiffly, and Mel looks at him, forehead to feet, and back up again. Viktor knows that look. He knows everything about it. He spots the exact flutter in her eyelashes when she truly looks at the cane for the first time. He hates her for it, but no longer or more intensely than he hates everyone else who has ever done it. Heimerdinger has done it. Jayce has done it.
Viktor endures it this time, too. Then it suddenly occurs to him that he must have done the same thing to her several times tonight alone, at least hourly, but probably more. Haunting the corners of the room as he does, staring at Mel commanding it as she does. It also occurs to him that there is no way someone as observant as her would not notice that. He shakes his head at himself slightly and Mel zeroes in on his face at last, and then she shrugs and holds the door open for him, finally averting her gaze.
"What are you doing in this classroom, if I may ask?"
She follows him in as he steps into the room and lets the door slam shut.
"Stealing chalk," he says.
She looks amused by this, and while Viktor limps slowly toward the board in front and indeed pockets some chalk, he hears her pull back a chair and take a seat.
"Is there a shortage?"
"I like to inconvenience professors."
"Or convenience students."
He turns back to her, amazed. She's sitting with her chin innocently resting on her folded fingers, and with a twinge in his stomach, Viktor realizes what he already knew: she really is brilliant.
"Don't think that highly of me."
"I don't think any certain way of you, yet."
A small quiet spreads. Viktor takes it bravely, with a nod, knowing what will follow.
“What are you doing in this classroom, if I may ask?”
“Finding a certain way.”
She says it like one might say, clearing my head or taking a break or stealing chalk. He walks around the teacher's desk over to her, and when she speaks, he's braced for it.
“Which one of us is the affair, would you say?” she asks with a smile. Viktor shrugs, lingering on her face. It’s a kind smile.
“Having an affair implies breaking one’s commitment to something,” he says with a sigh and sits down heavily on the closest chair. “It implies cheating. Do you think him capable of cheating?”
She isn’t looking at him, and for a moment he thinks she might be offended.
“Yes,” she replies simply, after a pause, and Viktor gets the dreadful feeling in his stomach that she knows something about Jayce that he does not. It’s ugly, the jealousy, and he wonders how Mel bears it. Maybe she does everything as gracefully as she wraps the council around her finger, or maybe, she feels no jealousy of someone like him, someone with not an ounce of grace. The thought is worse.
“I think I’m the affair,” Mel says lightly into the silence.
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m being left alone in bed before dawn.”
She turns to look at him like she feels his puzzled gaze, which he doesn’t try to hide. The vulnerability in that sentence shocks him almost as much as its implication.
“He’s…” Viktor struggles for the right word. “ Infatuated, ” is what he settles on, but even that feels insufficient. “He loves you so much that he forgets how to talk properly. He grows odd and quiet and stares at the wall. His words fail him.”
This pleases her, and how could it not. Flattered, she gives him another of those warm smiles, that have so little politics in them.
“When it comes to you, all he does is talk,” she admits. “Your name is in every second sentence. Viktor said this, Viktor is doing that. Whenever he’s with me, he’s unable to fully forget about the work.”
This pleases him, now, and how could it not. Viktor fights down the heat rising in his ribcage and adjusts his grip around the cane. All he can do is clear his throat in response. They sit there for another few minutes, probably thinking the same thing.
Finally, Mel asks: "Do you think any certain way of me, yet?"
“I… suppose?” No point in lying now. “Yes.”
Mel nods slowly, and for the first time, there is real hesitation before she speaks.
“Would you still allow me a chance to change it?” Perplexingly, her voice falters on the last syllable. Her eyes flick anxiously downward and back up at him. “The way you think of me? Be truthful.”
He shakes his head, suddenly impossibly tired. “You don’t need to. I have no aversion towards you.”
This shocks her, and Viktor is sure of it, this time. It’s getting easier to read her. She hasn’t brought her a-game into this classroom. She’s slipping up. Maybe, Viktor thinks, she’s tired too. Tired of this dance, tired of conversation. He wants to be alone. He's tired of himself, too.
“I’m aware of what I’m doing,” she goes on, a little too fiercely. “What I’ve been doing. To you.”
“To me?”
“By taking him from you.”
Viktor loses control of his face. She sees it. Tale as old as time; he’s been caught off guard. He searches for a response; “I don't have him,” he ends up saying, but his free hand shakes. He shoves it in his left pocket and crushes a stick of chalk.
“Don’t you?”
“And I have no interest to,” he continues firmly. “In my bed or elsewhere.”
“Not even in your lab?”
Vicious. She’s very, very good. He’d be angry, if he wasn’t so tired. “Councilor, please. He’s an adult man. He works with me. It does not need to be any more complicated than that.”
He’s made her second guess herself, now, with those belittling words. He doesn’t like to make up hysterics in another person to lay the blame on, but he’s getting desperate. She knows too much; she understands too quickly.
“No, of course not, I’m sorry,” Mel hurriedly agrees, but as he’s getting up to go, her resolve starts to crack. “Viktor, the work, the, um… hexgates. It’s good. The ideas. Your work, your approach. I’ve seen it. The drafts.” She pauses, thinks, then: “Listen, I don’t see why we can’t be friends.”
He stops in the doorway. Me neither, he thinks, a little more longingly than he expected, and then hooks his cane into the door handle to push it open. He’s not going to think about anything today. He's going to let the quiet constant of the lab lull him into an unthinking, unfeeling trance.
“I hope your research tonight was conclusive. Good night.”
He leaves her sitting at a desk, alone.
----------
The lab is spread kind and true behind the locked door. Viktor flicks switches in a familiar, habitual sequence: the lights, then the safety alarms for overheating, overcharge, and gas leaks; then the ventilation; then the individual parts of lab equipment.
And then, the device they’re working on. It’s a tricky thing; a prototype meant to catch and reflect whatever little spurs of energy Jayce’s hex crystals eject. Being fed with its own energy is meant to keep the crystal from absorbing anything from its surroundings, but it also means a constant ebb and flow of power, a charge crackling like electricity and flowing like ink. If it was handled inattentively, it would probably mean an explosion. If it was handled maliciously, it would probably mean war and destruction. In short: whenever it’s turned on, it needs to be monitored. The less happens, the better. And, also, once it is turned on, Viktor is disinclined to turn it off again.
Because of this, they’ve been working in shifts. Or they were, until the gala interrupted their routine. It still feels good to twist the wires together and to flip the little switches on and to hear it hum to life, shooting tiny blue lasers of energy, like taking a lungful of air in your home after being away for a while.
Viktor almost melts into his chair. He stops being in his body and starts being in his lab, instead. He lets the work overtake him entirely.
----------
A few hours later, there’s Jayce, holding a bottle in one hand and loosening his collar with the other. He sighs a kiss onto Viktor’s cheek that smells like disinfectant and has the decency to put his tailored jacket on a hanger before falling asleep the moment he closes his eyes.
A couple more hours, well into sunrise, and he wakes up to take Viktor’s place.
“My turn,” he says, putting a hand on Viktor’s shoulder gently. Viktor still jerks. There’s always a hypnotic tension in sitting there, him and the blue lightning. Then he nods. Jayce’s turn. Viktor is pretty sure he’s already seeing double.
Slowly, he stretches his stiff limbs and gathers his things that are scattered around the table. He’s glad to get some sleep, but there is something, one thing, before he can go rest. Mel has gotten in his head. She’s not showing signs of leaving. The thought is almost amusing.
He hears himself say: “I had a chat with Mel yesterday.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jayce beams at him, all dimples. It’s obnoxious how well he looks on over twelve hours of hosting and under four of sleep. “She’s been talking about wanting to ask you about the hexgates.”
“Really.” Viktor can hardly believe that.
Jayce hums, picking out pens and paper. He usually does something mindless while he watches the crystal. “Yeah. I think she really admires your dedication.”
“You should tell her where the idea came from.”
“I did. And then I told her where the continuous advancements came from.”
There is a twinkle in his eye when he says this, and Viktor smiles at him, and then they’re smiling at each other and again, everything rights itself for a second or two, across notes and reports and brass appliances.
Jayce sits at the desk. Viktor goes to sleep, and dreams of nothing.