Chapter Text
He woke to the smell of fresh bed sheets, a slight perfume. The dimness of a room with the curtains halfway drawn.
Through squinted eyes, he looked to his right. There was a small antique clock on the table beside him. A quarter to six.
Where was he?
Beside him, someone shuffled in their sleep. They tugged the blanket a little from where he was holding it. Viktor smiled slightly and decided to let them. He tucked his right foot back underneath.
“Jayce?” he asked.
A grunt came from beneath the rolled blanket. He seemed to be very cold. And it was cold, Viktor realised, but there was cold and then there was cold. This was only about as bad as a breeze.
Briefly, Viktor considered getting up. He was fully awake already, and he could start the research on his new sample of plants. He could imagine the glowing blooms and beautiful webbed designs created by the hexcore, and couldn't wait to bring life back to them, to bring life back to the Undercity. Jayce would join him later.
“Viktor?” Jayce whispered, muffled.
His plans dissolved with warmth.
“Areyou… feeling bedder yet?”
Confused, Viktor checked his limbs for injury. Was this why Jayce had brought him there? he thought. Some fall, some accident in the lab?
He had assumed he might be there for… something else.
He raised his hands to his head, and felt bandages wrapped tightly, if a little roughly, around it. Strangely, there was no pain.
“Mhm. I’m feeling a lot better,” he commented. He looked to the pile of blankets under which Jayce lay. “It seems each day I owe you more.”
There was a pause and another shuffle. A mumble. “S’not safe to work there late. ‘Thout me.”
Viktor turned towards him in the bed and smiled. “And you’re just as much a hazard as the work.” It’s easy to be consumed by the things you’re passionate about, he thought. It’s easy to believe in all the ways they will bloom when you spend your days and nights with them.
Jayce aimed a small pillow at him. It landed somewhere off to the side, and Viktor chuckled.
“And you’re just scared the world will end before you get a chance to save it.”
He was prodding him, teasing him, guessing. He could not have known that that was exactly what it felt like, to Viktor.
“Eh. You never know. My time is limited.” He stated it lightly, staring at the ceiling. A fact, as clear as the cane by his bedside.
But Jayce opened his eyes. In surprise- that’s what it was. Still, after all this time?
Viktor turned to leave. “Can I make you breakfast?”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s six in the morning, my friend.” He really did need the time, and Jayce’s kitchen couldn’t be too difficult to figure out.
“Viktor. Wait.” Jayce’s voice was urgent. He was clearly still groggy but had decided this was more important. He closed his hand around Viktor’s wrist.
“Before you go, I have to ask.” His gaze flicked across Viktor’s bandages. “Was it really an accident?”
Viktor frowned. “How do you mean?”
For a moment, Jayce averted his eyes. “Well, I don’t know if you remember this but, yesterday we were talking. In the lab. I mean, of course we were talking in the lab. But you said some things that maybe… I didn’t reciprocate. At the time.”
Viktor had not moved his hand away, and Jayce interlocked their fingers.
“And I’m sorry.”
Viktor didn’t remember.
And then suddenly, he did.
It came back to him in flashes. A hand on a shoulder. The last equation in their notebook. A head cradled in the nape of his neck, soft brushes of hair in the fading light. A bolt of inspiration, a head jerked awake. Frantic scribbles, levers pulled and a test to be remembered. The beginning of a new age of agriculture, a new age for the Undercity.
The hexcore had beat and glowed with every rhythm of his heart. The plant was a beautiful creation; its fruits were sweet and filling. This could feed a nation . They had laughed over everything, at the fact that it had been so simple all along, at the spot of drool left behind on Viktor’s coat. This happiness could feed us for a lifetime. His hand had reached out to touch Jayce’s smiling, berry-stained face…
“Ah.”
Now, he withdrew his hand, and turned his face to the ceiling. “Jayce, emotions are a fickle thing. They make a poor master.” But a good servant, he did not say. He had no way of knowing if he believed it.
Last night, Jayce had gone home before him. He had insisted that he accompany him, but Viktor had been too ashamed, too heartbroken to spend yet more time with him. And he could not have shown it. So he had waved him away, appearing more engrossed than ever in his work. The few hours after a breakthrough were always the most productive, no matter how late they were.
The hexcore had already been pushed to its limit, but Viktor had yet to reach his. With every new equation he had solved, he buried his feelings deeper, deeper, until all that was left was a desire for invention that bordered on destructive. He had modified the hexcore until it glowed, brighter than all of his problems. If it had consumed him, perhaps he would not have cared.
And there had been a pencil by the desk that he had not spotted in his fervour. As the hexcore began to create a small whirlpool of air around it, the pencil had shot out at alarming speed, the blunt end colliding with his head in blinding pain. That was the last thing he could remember, before a vague feeling of warm muscle under his skin. Lifting him.
So it must have been a concussion that brought him here. Secretly, Viktor was glad that he had missed the obligation to be honest on a technicality.
Jayce sighed in relief. “So your injury, after I left– it was an accident.”
“Of course,” said Viktor. “I am not so fickle when it comes to matters of the heart.”
But the moment he said it, he became aware of his heartbeat. It began to run, to sprint forward with its pounding rhythm.
“Look Jayce, I apologise for putting this all on you-” He turned around under the sheets, and Jayce’s face was much closer than it had been. A ray of light began to fall through a crack in the curtains.
Jayce took Viktor’s hand from beneath the covers, and placed it around his neck. Viktor caught his breath; the light shone like a halo around Jayce’s face.
Golden Boy .
His eyes fell on Jayce’s lips.
And like that was the trigger, Jayce kissed him. He pulled him close in one motion, a rough-mouthed kiss. A press-you-against-the-wall and a lift-you-up-like-a-trophy kiss, a kiss like a bullet shot dead-centre.
A bullet of euphoria had hit Viktor, dead-centre.
Then they both pulled back for air, breathing hard.
Viktor relaxed helplessly into a smile. For once, there were splotches of pale pink on his face. “Are you sure we shouldn’t get to the lab?”
Jayce smiled. “What, so we can make out there instead?” he teased.
Viktor reached his hands up to Jayce’s neck and pressed their lips together again. He tastes sweet, he thought. He tastes so, so sweet.
At some point, the alarm clock would ring, only to be knocked to the floor with a clatter.
Back then, they thought they had all the time in the world.