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“I’m not,” Jayce says, curling a piece of Viktor’s hair around his finger.
“Not what?” Viktor replies.
They had moved from the lab some hours ago; the cot isn’t big enough to be reasonable, and Jayce really did need a bath and a change of clothes. Not to mention, they’d needed sleep, and couldn’t risk the Jayce of the present stumbling in on them unprepared. They’d moved to an Academy dorm nearby, one Viktor knew to be reliably abandoned. He knew this because it had been his, and he’d never officially moved out or returned the key. The ineffectiveness of the Academy’s bureaucracy worked in his favour more often than not. They hadn’t closed the curtains before they fell asleep, so the early morning light is pooling across Jayce’s skin, catching on the dark sweep of his eyelashes. Viktor is completely comfortable against the broad expanse of his chest. It’s wonderful.
“Not good,” Jayce says. His voice is sleep-rough, vibrating through his chest and against Viktor’s back. “You kept saying it, but it’s not true. Anymore, anyway.”
“Well, I’m not beautiful.” Viktor says. Jayce scoffs as though mortally offended, pulling retributively at his hair. “Ow. Stop, go back to doing what you were before. That was nice.”
Jayce dutifully returns to petting him, but it’s with a more disgruntled air.
“You’re gorgeous.”
“So you say. Still, I look at myself in the mirror and see only what is there: a sickly, underweight, onion-pale runt from the Sump.”
“Onions are brown,” Jayce interjects.
“Not on the inside, Jayce. The point is, I have no reason to believe what you say over my own judgement. I am, by all accounts, a very intelligent person, with a reasonable grasp on things like beauty standards and societal convention. Why should I assume you know more than me?”
“Because you're gorgeous,” Jayce insists. “You're all elegant, and you have those cheekbones, and - look, I spend more time looking at you than anyone else does, including you. I think I'd know.”
“And I spend more time inundated by your kindness than anyone else does, especially you. I'll trust your evaluation of my looks, if you trust my evaluation of your character. Deal?”
Jayce grunts, which is a bit of a non-answer, but that's alright. Viktor plucks the hand that's not in his hair up, cradling it in his own, drawing patterns across the back of it with his thumb.
“I think I’ve figured it out, by the way,” he says. “How to save the timelines.”
“Of course you have,” Jayce murmurs. He drops a kiss on Viktor’s head, still running his other hand through the shorter hair at the back of his neck.
“First course of action,” Viktor starts, listing off on his fingers, “is of course to dismantle the hexgates. A tall order, seeing as it’s the most profitable piece of infrastructure Piltover currently has running, and is the main reason behind HexTech’s funding, but we’ll find a way. Then, I need to never invent the hexcore. There’s no other scientific team in the Realms that can match us, so I doubt we need to worry about copycats stumbling upon it, and Jayce will listen to me if I guide us away from that particular stream of experimentation. Catastrophe averted. Third of all,” he says, ticking up another finger, “Cure myself, preferably in a way that doesn’t involve turning into a living metal machine. Tricky, but one must remain optimistic.”
“I like that step,” Jayce says. “Oh! I have another one.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a girl in Stillwater, one of Caitlyn’s friends. We should get her out.”
“Caitlyn has a friend in Stillwater? ” Viktor asks, leaning his head back to stare at him in shock. “Caitlyn Kiramman? ”
“She does in the future. Or they’re - I don’t know what they are, really. She’s important, though, and she’s innocent. She was put in there as a kid with no official charges.” Jayce drums his fingers against Viktor’s skull thoughtfully. “I could talk to Mel, or Cassandra, they’d be sympathetic. Gods, I’d love to talk to Cassandra.”
He’d told Viktor that she had died in the same bombing he had. It’s funny; he’d never thought of Councilor Kiramman as someone who could die, really. All that money - all that power. It’d make more sense if she crumbled over time, like a marble statue.
“Alright, liberate Caitlyn’s imprisoned friend.” he says, sticking up a fourth finger. “Fifth - and finally - we need to send you back to your own timeline.”
“Do you think we can reverse-engineer the time rift? I didn't exactly do it on purpose the first time.”
“Of course we can. I'm a genius, you're alright-”
“Only alright?” Jayce protests, laughing. Viktor can feel his breath on his neck.
“And we have two of you, once we tell the other Jayce, which essentially makes one whole genius. I stored a few samples of the wild runes for examination, and I'm sure you won't struggle to secure us funding for the research. You've always been so good at that.”
Jayce kisses Viktor’s bare shoulder, still smiling. “I did it for you,” he murmurs. Viktor tuts.
“You did it for HexTech, Jayce. You're just being romantic.”
Jayce shakes his head. “There's no difference. If I did something for HexTech, I did it for you. You were all that ever mattered.”
Viktor can feel himself flushing, something that he knows is painfully obvious on his sallow skin, so he ducks his face back out of Jayce’s line of view. “Nightmarish, you are. Relentless.”
“Yeah, well,” Jayce says, kissing his ear, the side of his neck. “You’re wonderful.”
Viktor scoffs. “Completely incorrigible - I don’t know what I’ll do with you.”
Jayce hums, tilting Viktor’s chin to mouth softly at his jaw. “You don’t?” he murmurs. “I have a few ideas.”
“I’m sure you do. Unfortunately,” Viktor says, pushing Jayce’s face away with the flat of his palm, “we have plans to make. When you get back-”
“If.”
“When you get back, you’ll need to reassess, of course. I can’t imagine it’s exactly the same as you left it, given all your time away. You have a seat on the council, you said? And you have the Medarda and Kiramman Houses on side, that’s a majority - you’ll have no small amount of influence. As for me, well. I’ll listen to you too. Hopefully.”
Jayce makes a face. “‘Hopefully’ doesn’t fill me with a lot of confidence, V. The way you were…” He trails off, eyes distant. When he speaks again, his voice is low and quiet. “I was going to kill you, I think. I couldn’t see any other way. I’m still not sure what else will work.”
Viktor runs his tongue over the back of his teeth, thinking. “You still might have to.”
“No,” Jayce says firmly. “Not an option.”
“Jayce-”
“No. I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to - I can’t. I was ready to, when I got here, but only because I was out of my mind. If I go up against him now, after all this, and I have to pull the trigger, I just won’t be able to do it. He still has your face, V. He’s still you.”
Viktor breathes out, long and slow, turning it over in his mind. Then something sparks. “Jayce,” he says, sitting up in the bed. “Jayce, I think that may be the point.”
He shuffles to the other side of the bed so they can talk properly, face-to-face. The wooden headboard is nothing to the glorious cushioning of Jayce’s pectorals, but it’ll do.
“The Viktor you met in the time rift, he was harnessing the wild runes, wasn't he? Not just the arcane, but the raw, sentient magic of it. You were surprised when you ended up here because you presumed he was sending you back to your own time - perhaps he was. ”
“You think the arcane hijacked the rift,” Jayce says, catching on immediately. “Why would it send me back here? If it wanted to get rid of me, it could have sent me back to- to prehistoric times, or the center of a volcano, or something. Why would it put me somewhere where I could still influence the future?”
“You know as well as I do it's easier to redirect a force than altogether reposition it. It's like… like the hexgates. Or- shit, I wish I had a blackboard.” He holds out his hands, keeping them a width apart, and attempts to demonstrate. “One object,” he says, emphasizing his left hand, “that's you. Future-Viktor sent you on a trajectory to meet one destination,” he emphasizes his right, “and that's me. If the sentient arcane wished to interfere with your ability to destroy its host body, it would have been infinitely easier - and perhaps it's only option - for it to simply adjust the time-stamp of your destination, rather than fundamentally alter future-Viktor's design.”
“Okay…” Jayce says slowly. “But I still don't understand why.”
“I'm getting to that part. With magic, intention is everything. Future-Viktor intended to return you somewhere relatively safe, from whence you would be able to access and subsequently neutralize me. The arcane intended to send you somewhere that would prevent you from doing just that. That brings us here.” He interlocks his fingers, presenting his joined hands like a diagram. “The nexus of those two ideas. It’s as you said - after all this, after calming down and seeing me in my pre-evolved form again, it becomes exponentially more difficult for you to hurt me. It’s all part of the arcane’s defense mechanism.”
“Huh,” Jayce says. “So the arcane is… emotionally manipulating me?”
“In its defence, that’s historically been extremely easy to do.”
Jayce lightly slaps his shoulder. “Oi.”
“I’m just saying!” Viktor laughs, trying and failing to dodge his hand. “Oh, don’t be hurt. I’m sure your mental defences are much stronger these days. Unless the arcane bats its eyelashes at you-”
“That’s not fair-”
“Or tells you what a good boy you are. Then we might run into issues.”
“Stop, stop,” Jayce says, blushing now. “I get it. I’m an idiot, you’re an ass.”
Viktor is still laughing - he won’t call it giggling, he’s a grown man, even though that is probably closer to what it sounds like - when he rolls over to pin Jayce to the bed.
“Really? I thought you said I was wonderful. ”
He kisses him, pushing him back into the cushions. It’s not necessarily a surprise to Viktor that Jayce Talis is an excellent kisser, but it is a consistent delight. He hasn’t grown any less pleased by it since last night, and - quite frankly - he doubts he ever will. Jayce is fantastic with his jaw, his tongue, the way he draws Viktor’s bottom lip between his teeth and runs that tongue across it.
“I have an alternate hypothesis,” Jayce mumbles. Viktor doesn't process the words at first, as distracted as he is by a particularly lovely thing Jayce is doing with his chin.
“Mm?”
“I think your theory is sound,” Jayce says, moving his head back, “but I have a different one, based on my personal study of the subject. Extensive personal study - spanning multiple years, actually.”
“The subject being…”
“You.”
“Ah,” Viktor says. “Well, let me hear it. Fortunately for you, I’m something of a world-leader on the topic.”
“I think you sent me back here on purpose,” Jayce says, tucking a strand of hair behind Viktor’s ear. He’s looking up at him with wide, golden eyes, face soft. Viktor would keep him safe in this bed forever, if he could.
“Why would I do that?” he asks. Jayce lifts a hand to hold the side of Viktor’s face, tracing his thumb along the cheekbone.
“You knew I needed it,” he says. “You knew I needed you. A reprieve, that’s what you are. Like fresh air when I’ve been drowning.”
“That’s a hackneyed metaphor,” Viktor says, but softly, so softly. Jayce smiles.
“I knew I needed to get back, but it was so hard just to stay alive. I was an open wound, down there. And then you send me here, and everything is warm, and whole, and you’re…”
He lays his other hand on Viktor’s cheek as well, cradling his face.
“Mine. I think, anyway. Are you mine?”
Viktor can feel warmth from his head to his feet, like the morning sun has soaked past his fragile skin and thin blood and weak muscle, all the way down to his bones. He responds to Jayce’s question by dropping back down into a kiss, pressing his answer into the corner of Jayce’s mouth, sweeping it across his tongue. Then, because this Jayce is one who needs constant, careful reassurance, he says it out loud.
“For as long as you want me,” he says, and he means it. He wants this - love, affection, sex, whatever - but he’ll take what he gets. If all he gets to keep of Jayce is his mind, he’ll still be satisfied; that’s the part he fell in love with, anyway. His glittering, brilliant mind.
Jayce grins wildly, flipping them over on the bed, burying his face in Viktor’s neck and his hand in Viktor’s hair.
“Mine, then,” he says, kissing a bruise onto the mole below Viktor’s jaw. “Forever.”