Work Text:
“Are you leaving?”
Viktor’s hands still. His fingers hover poised at the point of interruption, midway through reattaching the dented panelling of his thigh, fingertip-bruised. He spares a glance at the body on the bed to his right.
“Yes.”
It’s twilight in Piltover, the haze of city lights painting the apartment bedroom in grey tones through the slats in the window blinds. Viktor sits in a chair by the bed where Jayce lays prone, the bare expanse of his back exposed to the cool air. Thin sheets pool below his waist.
“Why?”
The word comes to him muffled through the press of the pillow against Jayce’s face. Viktor turns away.
“You know why.”
A shifting of the bedsheets.
“Tell me. Explain it.”
Another shift or a sigh, Viktor can’t tell. Then, smaller:
“I’m tired.”
Viktor pauses. It’s such an inconspicuous phrase — hardly two syllables, hardly heard in the low rumble of Jayce’s voice through the feather-down — but it knocks at something in the hollow of his chest. He speaks before it has a chance to resonate.
“It is almost sunrise. If I am caught in Piltover —”
“Don’t do this to me, V.”
…Then again, Jayce could always tell with him.
He allows himself to imagine, for a moment, what it might be like to reassure him — to reach out and comfort him, to take away that weariness that saturates his voice, the guarded curl of his body on the bed, the very air he breathes.
Only for a moment.
“I can’t.”
“You could. Stay for breakfast. Grab something at that deli you liked near the station.”
“Jayce.”
“Would that be so bad?”
Viktor doesn’t know how to argue with him like this, doesn’t know how to navigate this terrain. It’s not a side he sees very often — soft and sad and old and tired. Vulnerable. He doesn’t know what to do with it.
“We can't, Jayce. It’s…”
He searches for the words. It’s easier when the fight takes them both down bloody, runs their vocal cords hoarse. Therein lies the problem.
“There's too much.”
Too much smog between the sky and the sump. Too much work to be done.
“You know this.”
The moment stretches, then:
“How about you just kill yourself, Viktor,” Jayce says.
“I’m sorry,” Viktor replies.
“You’re not,” Jayce says.
He turns his head, no longer facing the window but not quite looking at Viktor either — speaking to the middle distance in the seam of the ceiling.
“You act like it’s this terrible ultimatum — you think you’re this sacrificial martyr-lamb but you’re not . Blue-balling yourself isn’t doing shit for the world, Viktor, you just get off on being the tortured poet.”
He pauses. Turns back towards the window.
“Please stay.”
Viktor isn’t phased by Jayce’s words as much as he is caught by the tone of them. It’s like he’s saying them just to say he did, just to say he “tried.” One asks the other to understand and the other walks away. A man walks into a bar. “To get to the other side!” This is the beat of the joke. Cue the canned laughter.
He makes to speak, but as he turns to look at him — falters.
Jayce looks so small for a man his size, small and so still, wrapped in white sheets in a too-large bed. For a moment the thought lances through Viktor’s brain that he needs to check if he’s still breathing, sharp in the empty space between the metered squeezebox-sighs of his own lungs.
He’s stepped forward before he even realizes it, hand outstretched, then stopped on the verge of — something.
He could still save face. Turn back around before Jayce notices, leave him alone with his penthouse view and the quarter-drunk whiskey they sipped the night before that Viktor knows Jayce will dip into when he drags himself out of bed. Ride the Howl and forget Jayce’s please stay by rote somehow more piercing than if he had begged on his knees.
He gives.
With a guilty indulgence he pilots himself to the side of the bed, sitting with motions mechanical and overly smooth. It’s a strange sort of carefulness, the way the needle doesn’t hurt if you press in slow enough. The skin breaks smooth on the exhale if you keep your hands steady.
Thin pretenses of distance loop electric through his nervous system as he places a hand on Jayce’s bare shoulder, the hard line of his trapezius under his thumb. Jayce doesn’t move but he can feel the minute rise and fall with his breathing, and Viktor feels something like relief to the irrationality that he’d bolt under his touch, or that he wouldn’t move at all. Relief and the repulsion of it.
He should say something now, but there is too much the taste of grease in his throat; the fatty drippings of affection he can’t afford to let colour his words. When he moves he doesn't speak, the same strange carefulness dogging him as he brings his legs up onto the bed, above the covers but still turning his body into the crook of Jayce’s bent knees, aligning, as he lays back down, to the rest of Jayce not covered by the blanket. Chest to the curve of Jayce’s spine, warm metal to skin. The hand he’d placed on his shoulder now manoeuvring down, then up under Jayce’s arm, open palm thumbing his collarbone. An instant’s tenseness, then — the weary slump of Jayce yielding against him, despite everything. The moment breathes with the superposition of his pulse over the thrum of Viktor’s gearbox heart.
“I hate this,” Jayce says.
“I know.”
“I hate you ,” Jayce says.
“I know.”
Jayce presses himself closer regardless and Viktor tightens his embrace just so.
He won’t lie to Jayce like this, not when he knows he'll leave when the dawn finally breaks. He will not murmur sweet nothings, he will not make promises he can’t keep or pretend like things will be different this time, because they won’t. He won’t insult him with meaningless platitudes.
He leans into the small of his neck and stares out at the lightening sky in the window.