Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Ever thought of calling when you've had a few?

No story that starts with an overpass and a bottle of vodka ends well.

Viktor knows this. It blares faintly like some muddied warning in the back of his head as he watches the headlights of the cars under him flash past in bright bursts - exploding supernovas caged in the bulbs of machines. The alcohol is heavy on his tongue but it slides down smooth as oil. His tolerance has hit this terrible equilibrium where he’s still a lightweight but the effects are dampened - it just makes him fuzzy, not numb.

He’s standing on the overpass with a bottle and death wish. He’s a cliche ripped right out of some sad contemporary novel, which is how he knows he’s truly hit rock bottom. It’s fucking freezing this time of year - the wind bites at his skin, locks his muscles into stone blocks. It's the kind of cold that worms down the collar of your shirt and skims across the hem of your pants, pressing flat and ruthless against slivers of skin. The frigid air is only fought off by the bottle he’s incrementally sipping from. Every year he hopes it will get warmer. Every year the opposite happens.

He traces one of the names carved into the railing, spirals like a routine, and here's the big question: is it possible to be disillusioned if you were never fucking illusioned in the first place? Can you really be floored by the crushing dullness of life when you always knew there would be nothing but crushing dullness? Logic says no; Viktor's existence says yes. Life is cruel for serving him debilitating disappointment even with the safeguard of having zero expectations. It’s funny, actually. Ironic. If he had the energy he’d laugh, but he isn’t quite that manic yet.

Zaun's city lights are multicoloured, some imitation of variety and excitement, but Viktor's world is back in greyscale; it had been back in greyscale for a while. Everything about it is washed over in some noir filter: the empty labs. The whiteboard scribbles that trailed off to nothing after the equal sign. The stacks of work to mark, the same rectangle boulders of classes to teach, blocked out in his timetable. The realisation that he was forgetting all of his students’ faces. The chronic pain that became little more than pestering white noise in his life. The loneliness that snarled like an anguished howl. The cold. The dishwasher that didn’t exactly work right, that he did not have enough energy to fix. The same pothole he drove over every morning that he couldn’t avoid. The same Sisyphean routine - reliving the one day again, and again and again.

He presses his forehead against the cold railing and takes another swig of the bottle. Again, fuzziness - static. No numbness. The world is glitching around him. Instinctively, he digs blindly for his phone in his pocket. When he fishes it out his vision is slightly blurry - letters fade into blobs, names become squiggly impressions. 

He should probably text Sky. He doesn’t. He forces out a short sigh, more pained than relieving, when he taps into one of the long-abandoned chats - cobwebbed over with age, that conversation. And honestly, what the hell. He’d blocked Viktor years ago, anyway. Whatever Viktor had to say would disappear into the technological void. Another closed door, another sealed letterbox.

Viktor leans over the edge, imagines slipping, imagines the release of the impact. The sad thing is that he has no spectacular reason for wanting to die. He’s not going out with a bang, reacting nobly, resisting some act of cruelty - he’s just giving up; his death is as boring as the rest of his existence.

But it will be a release. For two short seconds he will fly, before he explodes on the concrete. He needs this. He needs the warmth of the blood on his skin. He needs steady arms to hold him. He needs to hear the laugh of a golden boy who doesn’t belong to him. He needs and he’s been needing so desperately, so painfully for years, fucking years –

Viktor opens his eyes and he steadies himself with a sharp breath, takes a step back. Vertigo swarms his consciousness, makes his legs weak. A horn blares and tapers off from under him. The wind kicks up and it’s a sobering slap to the face. His hands are shaking.

He needs to go home.

Funny thing is this: Viktor had met Jayce on the overpass with a bottle of vodka.

Eleven years ago he was strolling on an overpass just like this one - except it had been slightly warmer that night. Eleven years ago he’d met for the first time a boy sitting roughly where he’s leaning now, just teetering over the railing as if the hardness of the asphalt could save him. Eleven years ago his eyes had gazed into the lost, glassy surprise of hazel ones, and his life had bled colour. Rivulets of it, bright and violent and glorious.

There’d been an Orientation Week event in their second semester of university. Viktor was dragged there by Sky - in all their years of friendship, that was the evillest thing she’d ever done. 

“You need to put yourself out there,” Sky had said. Viktor had no idea where “there” was, but regardless, he didn’t want to be out anywhere. “There”, by the by, turned out to be a makeshift club in one of the multi-purpose rooms on campus. Viktor would hesitate to call the music music - not a fucking semblance of a tune, there. It sounded like a power tool mating with a jet engine.

He’d told Sky such upon walking in, to which she’d replied: “what did you say?!”

“I said–” His voice drowned immediately. It was a curious effect; if he screamed nobody would hear. Like outer space. “Never mind.”

He’d spent three whole minutes in the room, barely surviving the bass track that rattled each of his individual bones, and then promptly left, picking up a whole bottle of vodka on the way out. He did not have patience like the other students who were clearly out of their depth - they bobbed awkwardly to the not-music, waiting for the high to kick in. Viktor could not afford to have patience. He was living on a ticking time bomb. He only had one life and he was not spending it jumping up and down like a rabbit at a half-assed rave. He knew that Sky likely would only last another ten minutes in there - clubbing was not her scene either - but she could deal with it. He was in no mood to be gracious to someone who had literally hauled him off his couch and out the door. 

Drink and spite emboldened him to trek around the city like a crazy person, just waiting to be kidnapped. Well, who was he fucking kidding? This was shiny golden Piltover. People didn’t get kidnapped. People walked around at night like psychos. Felonies were probably the stuff of fiction. 

Fear of kidnapping gone, and body numbed considerably by the vodka, the walk was marginally pleasant, so long as he pretended the world around him was a movie set. The stretches of preserved historical buildings were made from plaster and foam; the sky was painted, each star formed by a paintbrush dipped in the white. The people he passed and their blurry faces were extras. He was an actor. He was not Viktor. This was not his real body, and not his real life; only the shell of whatever role he had been cast in in this universe.

Floating and not quite on earth, he had already wandered down the highway and was halfway up the ramp to the overpass before he registered that his leg would be dead in the morning, burning with pain. He faltered for half a second, decided he could blame Sky for it, and continued. It was nice up here, a little closer to the moon - the city lights blinked over the bridge, close-up manmade constellations. The traffic roared under him; he could feel the vibrations through his shoes, the restless hum of the night.

A buzz from his pocket - he slid his phone out. It was, as always, Sky.

Where are you???

I’m sorry for forcing you to come but are you safe? Call me I’m being fr rn!!!!

Guilt trickled in slowly, a tepid stone in his gut. He threw her back what he hoped was a reassuring response: I’m fine. Taking a walk. Sorry for abandoning you.

Realistically, he knew why Sky had dragged him out, although he kept those thoughts boxed up in some dusty corner of his mind. Viktor did not exactly have friends, or a circle. He’d tried, but apparently he had a resting bitch face, a poor attitude and no patience for meaningless conversation. The fact didn’t bother him, not entirely - admittedly there were moments where he spotted two people with heads dipped together in conversation in the university courtyard, or watched a group of laughing students hurriedly hushing their tones before entering the library, and felt the disorienting reminder that people lived like this. People had friends in real life. To some extent in his mind, they were also just actors.

Legs numb and thoughts temporarily stymied, he stopped at the top step of the overpass and froze. There was somebody sitting on the railing, head dipped, legs swinging. For a moment Viktor thought he’d imagined it - his vision was blurring in and out like a camera lens struggling to focus. The wind whistled around him as he ventured closer, strategically leaving a few metres between them. (Piltover may not have kidnappers, but he wasn't taking any chances.)

He squinted again - that was definitely a real person. 

He blinked the fuzziness out of his eyes. Raising his voice to be heard above the muted bustle, he asked pleasantly: “am I interrupting?”

Clearly Viktor was, if the leg-swinging death wish's reaction had any indication. The man’s head whipped to the left to stare at Viktor, surprise melting almost immediately into annoyance. His expression was crystal clear. He was not an extra. “What the hell’s your problem?”

He’d heard that one before, and he had half a mind to laugh, vodka toggling the faucet of endorphins open in his brain. “Do you want an alphabetised list?” Viktor had peered over the edge of the overpass. The traffic was light that night. The lights on the freeway were quite pretty, especially when he squinted to muddy his vision. He leaned against the railing, taking the weight off his leg. “Nice night for an attempt, no?”

The man stared at him like he was an idiot.

Viktor raised the alcohol like a peace offering. “Vodka?”

The man squinted at the bottle like Viktor had handed him a raw placenta, before his shoulders had dropped. “Sure. Why not.” His fingers brushed Viktor’s when he took the offering. He took a painful swig, wincing as it went down.

Viktor hummed when the man handed the bottle back, and he took a graceful sip. “What was your plan, even?”

The responding voice had been flat. “Wait til a truck comes up and then throw myself over.”

“You’d have to time it well,” Viktor commented. “Or else you might land on the truck and not in front of it.”

“Yeah, I know.” The student swung his legs. “I did calculations.”

Viktor had been impressed by the man’s dry wit, until he pulled out a small notebook from his hoodie pocket and flipped it open to reveal extremely literal and extremely precise scientific diagrams on the trajectory of his hypothetical fall. 

Viktor stared at the notebook, brain swinging like a volatile pendulum between horror and deep fascination, and startled a laugh, looking up to meet eyes flickering with mossy green. “There’s something very wrong with you.”

“Well, I was planning to jump off a bridge. So, yeah.” The words were grim but something lighter had entered the man’s voice. He’d asked: “what’s your name?”

“Viktor. That’s– a very professional diagram.” The equations were perfect, the arc of a sharpened pencil clean. Viktor tore his eyes from the notebook to the man’s earnest expression. “I assume you’re a STEM student?”

“Yeah. First year engineering.” A short pause. “Well, formerly. I’m…getting expelled.”

That explained the bridge. “Within one semester?” Viktor asked. “Impressive. What did you do?”

“Blew up the new lab on a stupid project,” the student responded vaguely. There was so much self-loathing in his voice that it was startling - painful. 

Some memory in Viktor’s tipsy mind clicked into place, and his eyebrows raised in recognition. “Ah. You’re Jayce Talis.”

“Unfortunately.” A self-deprecating smile. Talis reached out for the vodka again, and Viktor passed it over. “I’m sure you’ve heard everything about me.”

Anyone in Piltover University with a pair of functioning ears knew who Jayce Talis was - he’d become something of a microcelebrity in the past few weeks, ever since the entire wall of the newly opened engineering wing had been blown off. Apparently things like that simply never happened in Piltover. Viktor felt the aftershocks from across campus and determined that it was an average Tuesday. Everyone else around him collectively lost their shit.

Perceptions of the perpetrator were mixed. It ranged from domestic terrorist to heroic protestor of institutionalism to terminal dumbass. In Viktor’s Foundations of Engineering lecture, one of his classmates had said: “I had an evening class and I saw Talis from across the lawn when I walked out and I swear to God, my soul left my body. I thought he was going to kill me.” Another person next to him had said: “I wish I was in that lab when it exploded, dude. I got a fucking 27% on my midsem.” 

For every article the news pumped out, Piltover University's PR department shot out its arm of Suing Power and snatched it back down. It was actually quite funny. Viktor would observe the tug-o-war every morning, watching articles appear and disappear on his news app.

Viktor observed the face behind the name. He looked beautiful. He looked young. He also looked terribly lonely. Viktor was not excellent at reading people, but he could read misery - the way you spot your own darkened eyes in the mirror, the way you magnetise to a like force in a crowd.

“I have heard everything about you,” Viktor conceded, fingers tapping along the railing. There was a heart carved by some spontaneous lovers - he traced the clumsy etchings. “But I know nothing about you.” 

Jayce shrugged, gaze unfocused. “There’s not much to know.”

Viktor doubted that, truly. His eyes flitted down to Jayce’s Piltover University hoodie. “Nice merch. Still loyal to advertising the university after they kicked you out?”

Jayce had laughed, resigned. A shade of what a real Jayce laugh sounded like, Viktor would soon learn. “I thought it would be pretty scandalous if people found a Piltover kid dead on the road. Might shake their reputation a bit.” He sounded slightly ashamed when he said it, as if he was becoming awfully self-conscious of how far he had fallen.

Viktor kept his voice calm. “You have a fascinating mind.” And he meant it entirely - Viktor did not say things he did not mean. He was acutely aware that Jayce was still sitting on the railing and very much at risk of falling off. So he’d said: “tell me more about this project of yours.”

Jayce turned to him finally, and stared blankly. “We’d be here all night.”

“Yes. And I cannot stand for one whole night,” Viktor had quipped simply, cocking a head in the direction of his cane. “So I suggest we go back to the student dorms so we can make ourselves comfortable.”

Viktor held out a hand. Jayce faltered for a moment before he took it. Viktor had not let go until they were fully off the looming stretch of the overpass.

Viktor doesn’t think about that night often. He doesn’t try to think about Jayce, period, even though there was a long time in his life where he was the only thing Viktor ever thought about.

He wakes up the next morning sick from vodka and with his ex-partner imprinted across his consciousness like an iron-hot brand. He has to remind himself that he is, in fact, not dead, that he did not throw himself over the railing. He’s stunned at his ability to fail every task he’s attempted.

He doesn’t have the liver and pure insanity of a first-year university student anymore. But his brain is largely the same - volatile, mean, depressed. The fatigue and sadness presses like a pile of stones. He calls off sick for the next few days. It’s the biggest service he’s done himself in a while, although he tells himself it’s really for his students, whose names and faces he cannot remember.

The worst thing about his depressive episodes - emotional damage notwithstanding - is that it strips away all of the things that make him him - the tenacity, the passion, the discipline, the routine. The dry wit. The quick thinking. He’s wrung dry and empty like a threadbare sheet ghost and it’s a harrowing feeling, to be conscious of your own nothingness. All that’s left is a collection of bones and skin and flesh that hates the world and hates himself to the core. 

He’s been lying in the same position for far too long - his hip burns and his shoulder is going numb. The sunlight struggles through the thick curtains. He doesn’t move. He cycles through every mistake he’s made in the past few weeks, a scrutinising and loathing probe. He thinks about the overpass again, both of them.

He gets up only once to refill his glass of water, and then he crawls back into bed. There’s no point sleeping - he is too sad to do that, even. He just lies there, cold.

Viktor is not a poet but the actor analogy makes sense to him. He is a puppet in a pre-written film by a director who languishes off of his misery.

Here’s how it goes: boy is lonely. Alcohol and overpass cliche. Boy meets boy. Boy loves boy. Boy does not say a word about it. Happy montage. Slice of life montage. Sad montage. Boy and boy grow further apart. Boy leaves boy. Boy does not get over it. Alcohol and overpass cliche returneth. Boy is lonely.

Sisyphean indeed.

It has been two hours lying here. His inbox is flooding with emails, and he knows he has three missed calls from Sky. He rolls over to give his other hip a turn at bearing the weight of his whole body. He wants this movie to end.

Viktor’s brain rolls into consciousness some hour in the afternoon, shaken lethargically into alertness by an insistent pounding at his door. The voice is frantic, pitched higher than it usually is. No matter - Viktor would recognise it in any corner of the earth, in any chapter of his life. 

“Viktor?” 

For a moment he thinks he’s dreaming. It’s not uncommon for him to hear his long-estranged partner’s voice calling out to him after too many all-nighters - sometimes a soft echo just behind him, sometimes an anguished scream from across the country. He’s not sure which iteration is worse. Sky had said with the half-suppressed grief of a message sent too late, Viktor, that means you love him. Vi had said, oh my God, bitch, you have schizophrenia.

His second thought is that he might be dead, and that he’d actually fallen over the railing of the overpass and not realised. Whether Jayce’s presence indicates heaven or hell is yet to be decided.

The knocking continues. Viktor had specifically not installed a doorbell to deter visitors. Somehow, he hadn’t considered that the alternative would be people hammering his door down. An uncharacteristic oversight on his part. He hauls himself out of bed, almost immediately wants to flop back down, and fights that urge with the very little strength he has left. His apartment is not big, but he might as well be trekking the Sahara, the amount of time it takes to get out his room and across the living room and to the front door. The dishwater that he still hasn’t fixed coughs mournfully when he walks past it, floorboards cold and loud under his feet. 

He opens the door with a learned cautiousness, claps eyes on his visitor and he dies on the spot. Well, no, he doesn't really, although it’d be welcome - he just blacks out for all of two seconds before scraping some semblance of cohesive thought together in his brain.

He feels like he's been gut-punched and pulled into an embrace at the same time, which feels as terrible and confusing as it sounds. The world suddenly makes no sense - time trickles backwards, the sun is dead, Jayce Talis is on his fucking doorstep. They are both five years older yet simultaneously, no time has passed at all.

“Jayce?” His name sounds foreign in his mouth - out of use. Viktor’s voice is pitched up at the end like a question, which to be fair is what Jayce has become in the past few years - an unanswered query, some abstract concept blurred at the corners, uncertain. An unsolved equation long given up on.

Jayce’s expression falls slack with relief, his shoulders heaving with a shaky sigh. He’s so real, it’s startling - all these years and he still hasn’t become an extra. Viktor feels slightly faint.

“Viktor.” It comes in a reverent exhale and Viktor’s entire body seizes up at the sound of it. “You’re alive.”

“Of course I’m alive?” That one sounds like a question too. The air between them is profoundly awkward and uncomfortable; as if they’d tried to fit into a coat long outgrown.

“Yeah, I just didn’t think I’d…” Jayce’s voice tapers off and Viktor reads, with practised precision, every ambiguous emotion he cycles through in the next five seconds. Relief, confusion, fear, grief. Relief again. Something close to care and affection that Viktor doesn’t want to delude himself into believing is there. His voice is impossibly gentle. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.” 

Weird, weird, this is getting too weird– So he does exactly what a sane and healthy person would do. He slams the door in Jayce’s face, narrowly missing the man’s fingers. Jayce’s yelp of surprise would be comical if Viktor wasn’t so incredibly fucked right now.

Jayce, true to Jayce fashion, doesn't waste a minute before he starts talking. 

“V, please.” Viktor’s throat tightens at the familiar nickname, thrown out without thinking. “Can I– You can’t just shut me out–”

“I just did.” He’s been doing it for years. Viktor forces the words out through gritted teeth. “Why are you here?”

There’s a moment of agonising silence, and then a deep breath. Jayce's voice is remarkably even. “You asked me to come.”

“I did not,” Viktor answers calmly, even as his heart rate spikes up traitorously. “I don’t believe there’s a single universe where I would have–”

Jayce’s voice comes exasperated, and Viktor knows the exact expression he’s making, the hand he’s running down his face. “Open your messages.”

Viktor is so above taking orders from this motherfucker, but some sordid feeling - close to dread and skewing dangerously towards horror - is already creeping up on him. His hands are stiff when he slides his phone out of his pocket and taps silently into the messaging app.

Ah.

“So I did,” he says, keeping his voice steady, even as the fabric of reality twists around him and folds itself into some origami middle-finger because what the hell. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”

That’s a stupid thing to say. Viktor doesn’t say stupid things. He assesses the solidness of the wall and considers knocking himself out.

“You don’t have to apologise.” Jayce’s voice is soft. Not even consciously - as if he just naturally has this instinctive tenderness reserved for Viktor after all these years. “I just– Can I come in?”

Viktor considers the closed door in front of him. He considers the many nights he’d wanted - needed - Jayce to be on the other side of it, waiting. After so many years, still waiting.

Viktor considers that he was literally going to jump off an overpass one night ago, and he doesn’t really have anything to lose.

Because I always do

Chapter Text

If you send for me you know I'll come

The beard is new. So is the general air of tiredness. He’s taller, bigger, if only slightly, and for a ridiculous moment Viktor wonders to himself how he’d even be able to tell; as if he remembers what Jayce looked like five years ago down to the centimetre. But the question is absurd - of course he knows. Of course he remembers. He has every part of Jayce sewn permanently into his memory. He could recognise the curve of Jayce’s smile in a line-up of three hundred. He could pick the exact colour that his irises glistened out of a wall of paint swatches. 

He traces the lines of Jayce’s face with his eyes and ponders. Somewhere under there is the man who’d metamorphosised into some untouchable Piltover advertisement in their final year of university. And somewhere under that is the sweet, gorgeous boy who laughed like the sun and smiled with the ease of someone who believed the world was effortlessly good and kind. Jayce is many, many layers, a bit like a matryoshka doll and a lot like a paper-mache creature who’s been swathed in blankets and blankets of newspaper.

All in all, Jayce looks oddly settled in Viktor’s living room despite his obvious nervousness - as if there had always been a space carved out for him here, filling out the empty gap. The final piece in the puzzle.

Viktor sips his oversteeped tea and tests how long the silence can stretch for before Jayce’s big mouth needs to start filling it. The clock ticks stalwartly. The tap in the bathroom drips once. The dishwater groans like a woman in labour.

Some time in the years Jayce had been lost to him, the man must’ve learnt how to shut up, because he seriously doesn’t say a thing. The silence is unnerving, tight and tense like a violin string with the knobs turned too far. The minute hand makes another three rotations. Viktor decides to take the leap.

“You blocked me,” he says emptily, lowering his mug. “Five years ago.” He would know - he’d cried for four consecutive hours when he’d realised, even though he’d remained dry-eyed in their final argument. The memory upends a sobering bucket of shame with it, a cold rag wrung into his gut; he’d always prided himself on properly moderating his emotions.

Jayce winces slightly; Viktor knows this is only a toned-down visualisation of his internal self-loathing. “I, um. Yeah. Initially.” He rubs the back of his neck, and Viktor wonders faintly how he never grew out of that idiosyncrasy. It’s endearing. He shouldn’t be endeared. “But I got your message.”

Viktor stares. “And you came.”

Jayce looks up to meet his gaze. His eyes are pools of gleaming hazel. “You asked.” 

Simple as that. Viktor’s chest hurts like a flower bulb is trying to punch out of it. His knuckles whiten around his mug.

“And!” Jayce adds, waving a hand vaguely, “I was in the area anyway.”

He’s always been a shit liar. “No, you weren’t,” Viktor clips flatly, leaning back and crossing a leg over the other. Jayce’s eyes flicker down to watch the action. “You had a conference in Noxus yesterday.”

The second the words leave his mouth - carrying a humiliating confession in it - a faint terror seizes him. There’s a stark moment of silence when the two of them marinate in their respective mortification - Jayce for lying out of his ass and Viktor for blatantly confessing to stalking his ex-lab-partner.

Jayce cracks first. He always does. “Okay, yeah. I…was in Noxus.” He looks at Viktor with his stupid earnest puppy eyes and Viktor imagines slapping them straight out of his head. “I flew over when I saw your text.” 

Again, he says it as if it’s impossibly simple and intuitive. Viktor’s head swims - it feels cottony like it’s been stuffed with wool. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his thoroughly muddled mind, he thinks: it’s really that easy . He wonders with a dull ache if he’s wasted five years of grief for nothing - if he’d called Jayce one week after their fallout and asked him to come, would he? Would he have dropped everything, taken the next flight and arrived at his doorstep, no questions asked? Like a dog to a heel, a migratory bird knowing exactly where home is?

Viktor desperately wants to ask but he can’t. So instead he probes, “how did you even get my address?”

Jayce would fold two seconds in a police interrogation, Viktor knows that much. Hazel eyes shiftily blink to the left and then to the right. “Um. Sky.”

Viktor is genuinely appalled by the betrayal. “That snitch,” he mutters, eyes narrowing.

“No, don’t blame her, seriously,” Jayce responds, sighing. “She put up a good fight. It’s all on me.”

Viktor squints. “Did you blackmail her?”

Jayce seems to laugh a little and it shakes some of the tension out of him. He leans back against the couch. Mirror images, the two of them. “God, no. That’s your signature move.” There’s an undertone of fondness in that statement, and Viktor wishes he had the energy to reciprocate the smile.

“Gaslighting.” Viktor tries. Jayce’s only response is a blank stare. “Bribery. Guilt-tripping. Seduction.”

The corners of Jayce’s mouth tugs upward in amusement. “None of the above.” And then, belated and scandalised: "seduction?!"

Viktor shrugs and takes cover behind his mug of tea. There’s not much left - just the bitter remnants of loose leaves. 

Jayce makes a face. “I…appreciate that you think I have the ability but I have no idea who that would work on.” 

I mean, look at you,  Viktor wants to say. Instead he says: “you’ve always had a shocking lack of self-awareness. You have an alluring air about you.”

“Thanks,” Jayce says flatly. “It’s the clinical depression.”

Viktor has to physically fight the laugh that threatens to spring up. He forces it down in a swallow and succeeds in keeping his expression placid. The mug clinks on the coffee table. “Lovely. Now we’re matching.”

Jayce smiles slightly, sharply. “Cute.” Then he sobers considerably and makes a face, leaning forward. Viktor is very fluent in Jayce Face. This one is abject concern. “How bad is it?”

Viktor shrugs again, like he can roll the sadness off his shoulders if he does it enough times. “Maybe a nine.”

Jayce’s expression crumbles. “V, that’s– you’ve never hit more than an eight.” He leans even closer - he’s practically hanging off the couch. “Have you been talking to anyone? Like, a professional?”

Who the fuck does he think Viktor is? “No,” he answers, affronted.

Jayce pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Viktor.”

“I hate professionals,” Viktor answers evenly. “You know this.”

“Well, yeah, but.” Jayce’s gaze turns blank. “I don’t know. You could have changed.”

Viktor had hoped that he would, too. But he’d left Jayce and since then he’d been stuck at twenty-five forever. 

Jayce, alarmingly and without any warning, gets off the couch and for a moment Viktor thinks he's slipped on the floor but no, he kneels down in front of Viktor. It’s a terrifying position to see someone in - casually vulnerable, devoted. Worshipping, that’s the word. He used to do this all the time to get Viktor to look him in the eye. And damn him, it works again. “I know you don't want to see anyone. That's fine,” he says, completely serious. His hands reach forward but come to rest on the arm of the chair - just short of Viktor's knee. As if Viktor is the misty mirage borne of a parched man's longing, liable to disappearing when touched. “But I'm here. If you need me.”

If Viktor wasn’t completely drained he would grab Jayce by the shoulders and ask why? Why now? You’re here now but what about one year ago? Two? Where were you then? If Viktor wasn’t a coward he would pull him close and say, yes, I need you, I’ve never stopped needing you.

He says neither. Instead, he tamps down any urge to fold into Jayce and nods once, brisk and mechanical. “Thanks.” 

Viktor kicks the door of his bedroom closed, crawls back into bed like a necromanced corpse to its turned grave, and calls Sky while Jayce does fuck knows what in the kitchen. In his kitchen. In his apartment. He hadn't asked whether or not he could cook, but Viktor would have said yes anyway. There's still some dormant code in them, it seems - rusty cogs that still work in perfect tandem.

He has to take a moment to remind himself that Jayce fucking Talis is actually in his home. In his life. Not for the first time today, his head swims with the bizarreness of it all. He’s going to die. Actually - Viktor pivots his perspective decisively - Sky is going to die. 

She picks up after the second ring, and he doesn’t even give her a chance to greet him first. “Et tu, Brutus?”

Sky’s voice carries the immediate guilt and apprehension of someone who is very aware of their transgressions. “Hi, Viktor–”

His tone is as dead as roadkill, which is conveniently also exactly how he feels. He rustles around to find a position that doesn’t feel like a dulled axe to his spine. He does not succeed. “Do you take joy in my misery? Do you laugh in the face of my anguish? Do you mock me from your ivory tower while I am ruined permanently?”

Silence, and then a sigh. “Look, I know I shouldn’t have.”

They always said that, didn’t they? “Then why did you? Jayce told me that he made you fold. Whatever he paid you, I promise I can give you double.”

“You don’t- have enough in your savings to be talking like a mafia boss.” Sky has the rare ability of delivering the most devastating reads with the hesitance of a baby deer. The tonal whiplash is disorienting.

“Please enlighten me as to how he was so compelling.” What is he saying? Jayce Talis is the dictionary definition of compelling. He could sweet-talk fucking rain clouds away.

“I don’t even know,” Sky confesses, sounding decently tired. “He sent me, like, a whole essay. I read the entire thing”

“Are you serious?” Viktor momentarily considers hacking into Jayce’s phone to read said essay. His password is - was - Viktor’s birthday. He’s most definitely changed it, though, but still, Viktor figures he knows him well enough to guess it.

Sky is talking. He reluctantly zones back in. “Viktor, you’re not– you’re not well.”

“The sky is blue. Any other new observations?”

“Don’t get smart with me, Jesus.”

“You are asking me–”

“Yes, I’m asking a PhD genius to not get smart with me.” Sky’s tone becomes snappy, frantic. She’s not usually like this. “I’m serious! I’m– I’m worried about you. All the time.”

“And you let him come thinking he will make me better?”

“Yes,” Sky answers bluntly. “Honestly, yes. Okay, well, no, backtrack a bit. He doesn’t make you better, you’re not a fix-it project. You feel better around him. That’s different. And–" She falters. Viktor waits, heart twisting and twisting and twisting. "You miss him. You’ve been missing him for years.”

His heart twists into a deadlock. It can't go any further. “That doesn’t mean I want him back in my life.”

Another stretch of silence. Sky sounds very fully tired now. He genuinely wishes he could bring himself to care, he really does. The part of his brain that functions for sympathy is rusted over. He’s a bitch when he’s depressed, and it’s like watching some septic asshole puppet his body. He'll have to apologise when he's better. “Viktor. I’m never one to question your judgement–”

“And you should continue not to,” he clips. “Have a terrible night.”

“Viktor!” Sky snaps, and it’s the closest thing to actual anger that he’s heard come out of her mouth. “Don’t you dare hang up. Listen to me-”

“No, thank you,” Viktor answers pleasantly. “My office hours are being transferred over to you, by the way. I hope you’re available on Wednesdays. Ta.”

He hangs up before Sky can splutter out another argument and tosses his phone onto his bedside table. It clatters - slightly concerning - and he curls back up, closing his eyes to the world. If he makes himself smaller, and unassuming and weak and tiny, the universe will stop seeing him as an antigen and it will stop trying to kill him. If he gives up on acting like the functioning human being that his role clearly demands, the audience will leave, the director will give up and he can fade into being part of the set, the way it was always meant to be.

The smoke alarm blares for one startling, piercing second where Viktor feels the grating friction in his bones and a painful ringing in his ears - and then a loud thump silences it. He blinks up at the ceiling. Jayce is going to upend his whole life and he’s starting with the kitchen. Classic.

Jayce gently nudges Viktor's door open some indeterminate time later. Viktor has not moved.

He asks the ceiling, “how’s the damage?”

A delayed reaction: “what?”

“Smoke alarm.”

“Oh. Yeah, I’m so sorry. Nothing’s broken, I swear.” Jayce sounds so mournful, like a wet-eyed cartoon of a kicked labrador puppy with his tail between his legs. The kind of thing FaceBook grandmothers would caterwaul over. “How are…how are you, uh, doing?” He falters at the threshold, shifting his weight from one foot to the other - self-aware of his intrusion. 

“My mental state hasn’t changed from the last time you asked,” Viktor responds. “Which was an hour ago.”

“Right.”

“You can come in,” Viktor sighs, not taking his gaze off the ceiling. There’s a vent that’s been sealed and painted over, and it reminds him of a mummified corpse. “It’s not booby trapped.”

Jayce obeys, but stands a notable distance away from the bed, as if he’s afraid Viktor will bite. “Have you got someone else taking care of your work?”

“Yes,” Viktor drolls out. “I’m thirty, Jayce. I know how to take sick leave.”

Jayce takes a deep breath. Viktor knows exactly what’s happening in the poor man’s head - Jayce has planned out the entire conversation in his mind, Viktor is going off script. “Sorry. Just checking.”

The unsettled silence returns, expectant and lingering. Waiting. Viktor feels the warm - almost too-warm - weight of Jayce’s gaze on him.

Without turning to look at him, Viktor comments listlessly: “you’re staring.”

Jayce doesn’t disagree. “Your hair’s gotten a lot longer.” And honestly, what does that even mean? 

“Fantastic observation." Viktor creaks his neck to the right to stare, half-lidded with fatigue, at him. "That’s the magic of mitosis for you.”

For a moment Jayce looks like he wants to say something, but he doesn’t. That’s new. Jayce Talis isn’t exactly famously known for being prudent and holding back, but Viktor doesn’t have the energy to chew him out on it. Instead, he asks: “what’s that?” 

Jayce stares at the bowl in his hands, as if he doesn’t know either, and it had just materialised from some other dimension. “Goulash?”

It’s said so casually, Viktor’s mouth trips over itself. Rather unceremoniously: “what?” His brain doesn’t have the instinct to put up a filter when it’s too preoccupied pumping itself full of sad chemicals. His brows pinch together. “Why did you say it like a question?”

“Well, it’s– It’s been a while since I made it, so. It’s probably questionable. So, goulash, question mark.” Jayce puts it down gently on Viktor’s bedside table. The smell of it is overwhelming - like home. Like care. Like their university days, when Jayce spent a week trying to perfect the recipe, burning his fingers and scarring around six pots. It was the only thing Viktor would eat when he had an episode. “You don’t have to have all of it. Or– any of it, if you don’t want. But it’s there for you.”

“I see,” Viktor answers slowly. His heart hurts so much. He hates it. He thinks about pulling it out of his chest and squeezing it to teach it a lesson. 

Jayce shifts and yes, he’s doing that thing again - kneeling at Viktor’s bedside like a repentant sinner so the bedridden man doesn’t have to stare up at him. He is so close, and so real, and Viktor has no idea what to do about it. “Anything I can do for you?”

Viktor ponders, hooking a pillow under his knee to give his leg some support. The joint feels locked into place, rusted over like Oz’s Tin Man. “A bullet to the head would be nice.”

Jayce’s eyebrows furrow. “V, don’t say things like that–”

“I am kidding.” Viktor’s instinct to bully Jayce is stirring, out of all the things that he could be working on. “I know your aim is shit anyway. You’d probably shoot my ear and land the both of us in jail.” Jayce’s jaw drops, as if he isn’t immune to Viktor’s jabs. Viktor folds his hands neatly over his stomach. “You can kindly gift me silence and solitude for the next six hours.”

“Sure.” The response is soft, and under that a lingering eagerness at being told to do something and be able to execute it perfectly. Viktor supposes Jayce never outgrew that tendency. 

He stands up and exits the room as per request. The smell of his cologne lingers in the air and Viktor is so sick with wanting and simultaneously so devoid of the ability to do anything about it. Viktor thinks, for the fifth time, that maybe he should’ve gone over that railing.

Two years ago, Viktor had watched the path of two asymptotic meteors on the television screen of his hospital room, folding the hem of his papery gown into little accordion layers. 

He’d had another health scare, though he hesitated to use the word scare. It was less of a health scare and more of a health resignation. A health oh-well. A health it-is-what-it-is. The cannula was basically an extra organ at this point; he felt weirder without it. The dead eyes of the receptionist at the ER had flickered with recognition - you again , her gaze said - when Viktor had shown up.

“They barely missed each other,” Sky was saying, propped beside him on a plastic chair. Her head was drooping, lolling dangerously to the side; Viktor reached over to nudge it back up with a sharp poke and she mumbled something likely offensive before continuing on her spiel. “They were on the trajectory of crashing into each other, but then the smaller one swerved for some reason. NASA’s loving it.”

She had bought a packet of M&M’s from the vending machine and Viktor had spent the past few minutes sorting them into coloured piles on a paper plate. He said suddenly, “it’s a good thing they didn’t hit each other.”

Sky picked up a green M&M. “You think?”

“Well, of course.” There were too many painkillers swimming in his cranium for him to arrange some grand astrophysical argument. “They would have shattered into pieces.”

Sky tilts her head, in the other direction this time. “Ten years ago there were those two asteroids that collided, do you remember? Around Easter, I think.” They watched the news channel animate the path of the almost-touching meteors, two red dotted lines like some hacked-up string of fate. “My class talked about it for the entire lesson instead of revising thermodynamics. It looked like fireworks. It was beautiful.”

Viktor pictured those two chunks of pockmarked space stone, rocketing through the vast expanse of nothingness. The sight of the other mirroring meteor hurtling towards them - the graze of powdery rock against powdery rock, barely an edge shaved off. Each one flying on its own unspoken path, back into the pocket of the universe. Barely changed. Fundamentally changed nonetheless.

While Jayce lives and exists and breathes and moves like a shifting heartbeat in the cold rooms of Viktor’s apartment, Viktor fights the pain in his back and assesses the facts in his head. He visualises pulling out threads of meaning and untangling them and laying them down flat in neat rows.

In the end though there are only two main truths he needs to accept: that he is currently relapsing, and that Jayce is here. 

In the grand scheme of things this should not be surprising and it should not be difficult to process. Because Jayce has always been here when he’s relapsed - these two facts belong together.

For all his insane, near-religious commitment to the fifty-odd responsibilities that piled on him throughout his and Viktor’s undergrad years, Jayce had always dropped everything when Viktor had some sort of collapse. Often it was physical, other times mental - if the world was particularly sadistic, both at the same time. 

One terrible unspoken thing about being thrown into a depressive episode or a physical flare up was that Viktor had been rendered static, locked back by some invisible harness, whilst the world kept moving. If he had any moments of cognition beyond pain, pain, pain,  it would be used to stress over everything he’d fall behind in; he’d mourn over the progress he’d lost, strategise how he’d have to claw himself out of this quicksand pit when everyone was, as always, a thousand steps ahead.

At least, that was how it used to be before he’d met Jayce. He’d voiced this concern to the man literally once and since then, Jayce did everything in his power to make the world pause for Viktor so he could catch a breath. He’d put a hold on any projects they were working on, sweet-talked sponsors into graciously accepting the delay. He’d ask other TAs to take Viktor’s classes and mark his students’ work. For a month, Piltover University’s golden boy would become every professor’s worst nightmare as he sidled up to their offices and demanded extensions for Viktor. 

And naturally, Jayce’s own life stopped temporarily as well. His own studying and his stacked timetable of events were put on the back burner. The amount of times he cancelled on previously accepted invitations to sit by Viktor’s bedside was honestly slightly alarming. It doesn’t matter, Jayce would say every time Viktor raised it. There’ll always be another gala. And anyway, you’re more important than any of that stuff. You’re my partner.

Viktor was quite sure that if Jayce could, he’d find a way to halt the earth from spinning on its axis. He’d stop time for him. If Viktor’s brain wasn’t too busy beating itself up it would get drunk off of that kind of devotion.

And the thing is: Jayce didn’t cure Viktor. Of course not - he wasn’t superhuman, even though he wished he was. Always fighting with his own limits, that one - wanting to be everywhere at the same time, wanting to save everybody in the world. 

But Viktor liked Jayce’s raw humanness, as intensely as Jayce hated it. The white nicks of scars on his hands, the flush on his skin when he got flustered. The five-second delay it took for him to comprehend something, the corresponding arch of his eyebrows. His sporadic and tediously inconsistent bursts of energy. The smothering physical affection that poured out of his body before his brain caught up. Jayce had so much love, ladled into his projects and into the world and into people, and he loved in the most human way - unthinkingly, excessively, indiscriminately. 

So, no, Jayce didn’t cure Viktor. Nobody could. But, immobile on his mattress, in his dorm room that was far too small, Viktor would turn his head to watch Jayce in the low lamplight - head pillowed on his crossed arms. He'd often fall asleep reading the notes he’d taken for Viktor when the latter hadn’t been able to get out of bed to attend his lecture. His hair was uncharacteristically dishevelled; he’d been wearing the same hoodie for the past two weeks. Everything was second to taking care of Viktor.

He’d watch the steady rise and fall of Jayce’s shoulders, consider his place always anchored to Viktor’s bedside, the softness of his voice before he’d fallen asleep, and he’d think to himself: I cannot die.

Viktor blinks back to the present, marinates in the ache in his limbs and reaches out for his phone again. The chair he keeps next to his bed is draped with clothes - clearly empty. The apartment is silent. He wonders what Jayce is doing.

Against his better judgement, he pulls up his messages just to stare at the mortifying text he’d sent Jayce last night - some desperate white flag of surrender. God, vodka did a fucking number on his brain. He feels a visceral recoil in his gut at the forwardness of it, the blaring lack of context in the command. 

Can you come? I need you to stop the world for me again.

Jayce’s answer, the first thing Viktor had heard back from him in five years: of course. No questions asked, no surprise or resistance towards Viktor’s impossible request. As if it really was that easy.

...And if you call for me you know I'll run

Chapter Text

You're coming back and it's the end of the world

The night Viktor had found Jayce on the overpass, he had taken the man back to his university dorm room. They’d traded sips from the vodka bottle on the way back, talking about menial things - the one building on campus that looked like a psych ward, the thunderstorm last week that had kept both of them awake. The drink loosened their tongues but it was a strange spark between them that turned the wheels of the conversation. Viktor had never talked so much to someone else before. 

True to his word, after making a stop at Jayce’s locker where he stored all of his research, Viktor ushered them back to his student dorm, where the two made themselves as comfortable as they could in the cramped space. There was the thumping raucousness of some DIY house party one floor down. The window of Viktor’s stuffy room had been cranked open, bringing with it a merciful cool breeze and the faint fruity scent of someone vaping on the next balcony. Heat settled like a blanket around them; it was the kind of heat that had weight, like a third presence in the room. 

Sprawled on his front on his mattress, Viktor swept his discerning eyes through the entirety of Jayce’s work, following each feverish tangent. There were pages and pages of equations and scrapbooked research; it was, all in all, a loose sketch of a self-healing, hyper-adaptable artificial biomaterial; skin grafts and missing organs and limbs that could be built. It was loose, yes, but undeniably there, solid. It was improbable, insane, and incredibly dense. Viktor thought it was the most brilliant and perfect thing he had ever seen. 

Viktor held out his hand blindly for the vodka, humming in thanks when he felt the coolness of glass press against his fingers. “I’m very sorry that you’re getting expelled.” He took a swig of the bottle; the mouth of it carried the lingering warmth from Jayce’s lips.

“Thanks,” Jayce had said absently, folded up on the floor, back against the foot of Viktor’s bed. He was flipping through one of Viktor's textbooks, though whether he could read any of the original text under Viktor's erratic annotations was hard to say. “Not sure you can do anything about it, though.”

And that thread of the conversation could very well have ended there, except for this - Viktor had a problem. Well, he had many, but he had one blaring problem: a natural and increasingly absurd defiance towards authority. He shut Jayce’s notebook gently and manoeuvred his body so he could lower himself to Jayce's eye level. “I can talk to somebody.”

Jayce twisted around to look at him, smiling like Viktor was saying something endearing. “Yeah? Who?”

“I am the Dean’s research assistant,” Viktor had supplied helpfully.

Jayce’s smile froze. “You? But– you’re a first year.”

“So are you,” Viktor countered, raising Jayce’s notebook and tapping him on the head with it. “And you came up with this . It is intriguing. It would be a waste to lose you. I will talk to Heimerdinger.”

Jayce’s expression thawed into one of gratitude and disbelief. Viktor knew that look very well - the surprise of someone who forgot kindness could apply to them. His eyes were glistening. “You– Viktor, you don’t have to. Seriously.”

“Too bad. I will.”

Jayce had frowned. “What if you get in trouble? Oh my God, what if they expel you too?”

Partly fuelled by stubbornness and partly by alcohol, Viktor responded: “Heimerdinger is surprisingly easily convinced. And I am very convincing.”

Jayce faltered for a moment before he gave in. “Yeah,” he had muttered, resigned. He tilted his head back, meeting Viktor’s gaze through his lashes. “I bet you are.”

Something hot had pressed, like a burning poker, at the back of Viktor’s neck. He cleared his throat and flipped open another one of Jayce’s notebooks. “Tell me more about these smart polymer chains.”

So Jayce lit up like the sun and talked, and Viktor listened, and then Viktor talked and Jayce listened. Passing the bottle back and forth in their little utopian capsule amongst the vape smoke and rooms of drunk partygoers.

Viktor persisted in his drunken promise. An efficient combination of rational rhetoric, extremely subtle blackmail and guilt-tripping successfully scratched Jayce’s name off of the university’s blacklist at Heimerdinger’s behest. He was able to enjoy the fruits of his labour the next week, when he was waiting outside a lecture hall for his bioengineering class. 

“Viktor!”

He turned, shifting his weight onto his cane, when Jayce bounded up to him; nobody had ever looked so excited to see him. It was a little exhilarating. “Aren’t you trespassing?” he’d asked wryly.

“Funny,” Jayce snorted. “No, I’m not, thanks to you.” He beamed - Viktor was struck by the loveliness of it. He almost didn’t look like the same student who was hanging over the overpass. “Oh my God, I’m actually– I can’t believe you did it.”

Viktor loved proving people wrong. “That is often the case.”

Jayce clasped his hands together and leaned close. “I owe you my life. Literally. I’ll give you everything. My firstborn child. My credit card number.”

Viktor had laughed, and Jayce looked thrilled at the sight of it. “No need." He waved a hand. "It was a very selfish endeavour, to be honest. I love making Heimerdinger uncomfortable, and I want to keep you.”

Jayce did that movement where he tilted his head to the side like a puppy - one of the habits he had that Viktor was beginning to catalogue as a Jayce Thing. It did funny things to Viktor, for some reason. “Keep me?” Jayce echoed.

“Here. At the university,” Viktor clarified evenly. “With your research.”

“Ah, right.” 

The doors to the hall were pushed open - students from the previous vet science lecture flooded out, the echoey basement reverberating with their chatter. Viktor, as per usual, stood to the side whilst a horde of his bioengineering peers shouldered their way past the current. Jayce waited with him.

It occurred to Viktor, after two minutes of them wordlessly waiting for the doorway to clear, that he and Jayce had silently adopted each other as a lifeline amongst a sea of strangers, the way most university friendships started. “Where do you want to sit?” he asked graciously, knowing full well that if Jayce considered anything other than the back row he’d tell him to pick again.

Jayce saved them the effort of that conversation. “Your pick,” he answered brightly as they stepped into the lecture theatre, and then stood by and waited like Viktor was about to do something particularly interesting.

Viktor sidled to the nearest row and proceeded to embarrass himself in executing the inevitably awkward cha-cha-slide past people’s knees to settle in an empty seat in the middle. Jayce followed, his instinctive apologies an echo behind Viktor’s back.

He flopped down beside Viktor, their shoulders brushing even though neither of them leaned closer - Jayce was tall and broad. He simply did not fit in the four-sided enclosure of a lecture seat. “You’re also a back row seater, hey?”

“Taking the stairs all the way down is detrimental and embarrassing,” Viktor droned, sliding his laptop out of his messenger bag. “Besides, it is easier to get away with taking a nap here.”

Jayce nodded. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“You?”

“I’m kind of…too tall for sitting in the front. Also, I can feel people staring at the back of my head. And it’s weird.”

Ah, right. Jayce was still Public Enemy Number 1 at the university - no doubt even more so in the aftermath of his very wide known execution- sorry, expulsion, being mysteriously vetoed.

“Very fair.”

Their lecturer began after fumbling with the projector for a good three minutes, and the conversation fizzled out reluctantly. Viktor spent most of the lecture shamelessly sneaking glances at Jayce’s laptop screen. He knew all of the material anyway - and learning about the man beside him was infinitely more interesting. Jayce’s app icons were sorted in colour order, and his folders were named and organised meticulously. He took notes on OneNote, and he took notes on everything - he didn’t stop typing even once, fingers flying with miraculous precision. There was a yellow post-it stuck next to his keyboard, which simply read: CALL MAMA, underlined three times. He had a little Smiski hanging off his screen. It peered at Viktor for the entire hour.

Jayce had asked amidst the low chatter post-lecture, “how did you find it?” 

Viktor slotted his unused laptop back in his bag. Jayce closed his heinously full OneNote tab. “Enlightening.”

Jayce raised his eyebrows. “That’s high praise.”

“You didn’t like it?” Viktor asked.

“It was a good refresher, I guess,” Jayce responded diplomatically, absently tapping his chin with a finger. It was one of those cartoonish idiosyncrasies that Viktor didn’t realise people did in real life. “But I actually knew all of the material anyway.”

Viktor decided he could not let this boy out of his life.

The next week, Jayce wasn't there before the lecture as he'd been in the first one. Viktor sat in the back row of the theatre with the restless hyper-awareness of one waiting for someone while trying to not make it abundantly obvious. He wasn’t about to turn his head every two seconds to monitor the door like some mercurial owl, so he angled his laptop towards the entrance, watching students file in through the reflection on the black void of the screen.

A minute passed. Enter: Jayce. He stepped inside, looked around, very clearly spotted Viktor and - that sneaky bastard - walked right past him, seating himself in an empty row near the right.

Viktor, affronted and slightly betrayed, stared holes into the back of Jayce’s head for the entirety of the lecture, tying the cords of his hoodie into knots, and then bows, and then looping them in folded spirals. A man with Jayce’s self-admitted sensitivity to being stared at couldn’t possibly have sat comfortably with Viktor’s laser-burn gaze singing his entire body. Impressively, Jayce didn’t make any sign of restlessness in the entire hour - he just sat there and typed his stupidly thorough notes.

And Viktor wouldn’t have thought much of it - university acquaintances were flighty, sporadically amiable at best - except Jayce wasn’t just a university acquaintance. Viktor had pretty much accepted that there was some resonance between the both of them, founded on the fact that both of their brains possessed the same combination of scientific obsession and unresolved mental illness. 

The lecture was, as always, okay. He’d planned on skipping in; he’d only come at the prospect of sitting with Jayce again. It was a sodden waste of an hour; the brain-numbing PowerPoint grated to a conclusion at twelve. Viktor got out of there as fast as his legs would allow.

A familiar figure, and the victim of Viktor’s laser beams, was standing at the foot of the stairwell outside the lecture hall; people flowed past him, leaving a wide berth between them. It was frankly bizarre - as if they expected Jayce’s expulsion curse to be contagious or something.

Viktor wordlessly planted himself right in front of Jayce and waited for him to react.

He did react, almost immediately pocketing his phone that he’d been scrolling through. Viktor watched, with great interest, as Jayce’s expression very clearly filed through surprise, joy, guilt, and self-consciousness in rapid succession. “Viktor! Hi. How are you?”

“Alive.” Lost for what to say, Viktor resorted to Ye Olde Generic University Question. “How did you find the lecture?”

“Ah, it was. Fine. Kind of boring, but.” Jayce shrugged - it was a mechanical movement. 

Viktor pondered how to bring up the question without sounding like he was desperate for Jayce’s company. Fortunately, Jayce saved him the effort. “I saw you.” He looked terribly embarrassed once he’d said it, as if the words had tumbled out of his mouth, unbidden. “Sorry. I didn’t sit with you because– people were being weird about it last time-" They were? "-and you looked uncomfortable.”

“Did I?” Viktor blinked, surprised. “I kind of look uncomfortable all the time. That’s just my default expression.”

“Oh. Right." Jayce flushed. "Sorry, I did want to sit with you, I was just worried you’d– not want to sit with me?”

“Very self-sacrificial and noble of you.” This, Viktor would eventually learn, was one of Jayce’s terrible destructive flaws. He snarked dryly: “you left me bereft and alone. You could have just asked me if I was comfortable.”

Jayce made a face, something both apologetic and knowing. “Well, yeah, but– you’d just tell me it was fine even if you weren’t fine with it.” And this, Jayce would eventually learn, was one of Viktor’s terrible destructive flaws. “Also,” he’d added, “I don’t want to, like, taint your reputation or anything.”

Viktor suppressed a laugh, patting Jayce on the shoulder placatingly. “I have no reputation to speak of. I wouldn’t mind riding on your coattails and leeching off some of your notoriety.” He started towards the lift; Jayce, as if by instinct, followed on his heels. “I heard one of the Engineering Society’s committee members say that you’re a kamikaze spy planted by Noxus Uni to sabotage Piltover.”

Jayce looked genuinely flabbergasted for a moment before his expression dissolved into a laugh. It was a magical thing to witness. “Damn, I should’ve pleaded that when the uni board interrogated me. Much more interesting than the real reason.”

Viktor tilted his head. “Which is?”

Jayce pressed his lips into a thin, shameful frown. “Left a fuse running because I fell asleep reading notes.”

Viktor snorted. “Seriously?”

Jayce pointedly avoided his gaze. “I know.”

“They must have been boring notes.”

“Well.” Jayce looked inclined to agree, and then he added: “I wrote them.”

Viktor didn’t bother to hide his amusement as the two of them shuffled into the lift; Jayce kept an arm out to keep the door open for him, which was entirely unnecessary. “You write a lot of notes," he commented casually.

“I have a lot of thoughts,” was the defensive answer.

Viktor poked the button for the ground floor with the tip of his cane. “Oh, my apologies. I didn’t realise I was in the presence of a genius.”

Jayce groaned and ran a hand down his face. “God, that's not what I- don’t even. I have a lot of thoughts but I didn’t say they were smart thoughts. I think maybe ten percent of them are actually useful.”

“Yes. And the other ninety percent are just stupid, shit like I shouldn’t sit next to Viktor in the bioengineering lecture.”

Jayce sighed and blinked his big sad puppy eyes down at Viktor. “You’re mean.”

Viktor smiled sweetly. “You can take it.”

“Debatable. I was literally gonna kill myself less than two weeks ago, dude,” Jayce said flatly. Viktor’s laugh startled out of him so abruptly that he almost choked. “You’re on thin ice.”

“For you to do that after I pulled so many strings to get you back is just disrespectful,” Viktor clipped lightly, valiantly composing himself as the doors slid open. Jayce held them open for him again; Viktor contemplated telling him not to, but it seemed to just be a Jayce Thing to do. 

Jayce raised his hands in surrender as they headed across the lobby. “Wow, you’re right, my bad. I’ll leave you all of my money in my will.”

“All thirteen dollars?”

Jayce gaped, and then hissed: “Viktor, oh my God. You’re so cruel, you know that?” But he was fighting a smile, like it was some precious thing he’d found out about him.

A laugh bubbled out of Viktor, again, and it hurt his lungs a little. Maybe Piltover was going to be okay. Maybe life was going to be bearable.

Viktor sleeps fitfully and painfully for a few hours. He wakes up, head pounding with the remnants of some tossed-out memory, with the sky outside is still overcast and grey - some perfect stroke of pathetic fallacy. His blankets have pooled and melted over the side of his bed - his skin is cold as steel and rippling with goosebumps, spelling out little braille SOSes. The chair beside his bed is still empty. 

It takes a moment to remember what year it is, who he is and what’s elapsed in the past twenty-four hours, and when he does, he wishes he hadn’t.

Unfortunately, Jayce’s voice is ringing clear from the kitchen, so Viktor can’t even gaslight himself and pretend he’s not there. He forces himself out of bed, vices trembling fingers around his cane and shakes all the way to his feet. His limbs are feeling heavier today than usual - hunks of white stone, gravity’s favourite toy.

He cracks the door open and peeks out. Jayce is sitting at the dining table, MacBook propped in front of him and headphones on. The beard is still kind of a whiplash, especially after Viktor's sadistic subconscious had been hitting replay on his earliest memories of Jayce for the past however-many-hours he's been asleep. There are faded stickers on the back of Jayce's laptop that Viktor still remembers - a set of constellations, a peeling iridescent butterfly that Viktor had gotten for him at an art market. Some bizarre and painfully millennial meme about metalworking. The same little Smiski is hanging off, looking a little worse for wear. 

Viktor’s caught him in media res, like Jayce is a film he’d only stumbled on twenty minutes in. “Oh, yeah. I’m at a friend’s house.” He spins a pen idly in his hand while he talks. “Hmm? Ah, no. I’m not near uni at all, actually - I’m not too sure when I’ll get back. Definitely before exams, don’t worry.” There’s a stretch of silence again, and Jayce's words come in a relieved sigh. “Thanks for being flexible, guys. Seriously.”

Viktor stands in the doorway, watching him, chest hurting. Jayce’s smile is so easy, loose-limbed and shoulders free of tension. Jayce pauses for a bit, listens, and then he laughs - a proper full-bodied Jayce Laugh, a burst of sunshine. “Oh my God, did she really? Look, tell Jinx she’s going to have to start compensating me for the wine I’m using to ply the Dean into letting her keep her scholarship.” 

The world halts when Jayce’s eyes flicker up to meet his. The golden brightness of his expression changes - his smile becomes more subdued, fades a little. “Oops, okay, hold on, I gotta do something real quick.” He’s already taking his headphones off and getting out of his seat before he finishes his sentence, barely tipping his head back into frame. “Feel free to chat amongst yourselves! I’ll be right back.” 

He runs a hand absently through his dark curls and makes his way towards Viktor. “Hey. Sorry, did I wake you?”

“It’s fine. I wasn’t really sleeping in the first place.” Viktor ignores his earnest gaze and hobbles over to the table, angling himself away from the camera. He tilts his head towards Jayce’s laptop. “Your students?”

Jayce smiles. “Yeah. Mechanical engineering. They’re smart as.” That’s right. They’d always talked about being professors together, Viktor recalls hollowly. Jayce’s eyes are trained on him, careful. “How are you feeling?”

“Mm. Maybe an eight.” The world is still muddy. He’s still not himself yet. There is still a wall between him and everything he comes in contact with. He is painfully cold, joints locked.

“That’s– better.” Jayce sounds somewhat relieved, and then his voice softens. “You’re out of bed.”

Viktor monotones, “it’s because I wasn’t about to piss on my mattress.” Jayce is standing in front of the door to the bathroom, so Viktor whacks him in the leg with his cane. “Move.”

He doesn’t switch the lights on in the bathroom and keeps his gaze averted from the mirror, knowing he won’t like what he sees. There’s that psychological phenomenon where your reflection begins to distort into something distinctly inhuman and terrifying when you stare at it for over thirty minutes. Viktor doesn’t need thirty minutes. Usually five seconds is enough. 

When he swings the door open, it barely misses smacking Jayce in the head. The man careens back, narrowly avoiding getting brained by the slab of wood.

Viktor glances at Jayce as he rights himself. “Nice reflexes.”

Jayce, slightly disoriented, takes a step back. “Thanks. Uh–”

“Any reason why you’re hovering outside the bathroom?”

Jayce makes the expression where he’s contemplating coming up with an excuse, and then he almost immediately gives up. “No. I was just– worried? It’s cold in here. You’re freezing,” he says, which is a presumptuous statement considering he hasn’t even touched Viktor to test it. Terrible scientific practice. He is right, of course.

Viktor says anyway, “I’m fine.”

“Are you?”

See, Viktor, as previously established, is very fluent in Jayce Face. He is also extremely fluent in Jayce Rhetoric. He has learnt that when Jayce asks a question like are you, he actually means you’re clearly not and you’re being a fucking idiot. It is not a question, it is an invitation to relinquish your previous argument and admit that you are a fucking idiot.

Viktor is not a fucking idiot, so he insists: “yes. I’m going back to bed.”

Jayce squints, hums monotonously, and then says: “right. Okay.”

Alright, Viktor is fluent in three Jayce-specific languages: Jayce Face, Jayce Rhetoric and Jayce Tone. Current Jayce Tone: blaring scepticism, secondary notes of disappointment and exasperation. More subtly: amusement is currently battling with frustration. In the end, neither of them win.

“I’ll make you some tea in, like, five minutes,” Jayce says softly, stepping out of the way so Viktor can make his out-of-beat staccato stumble back to his bedroom. “I just have to get back to my students for a bit.” 

Jayce Tone is very easy to read because past the first two layers of notes, the underlying emotion in everything he says is always the same, and it’s tenderness. Real, red, unbearable. Always. 

Viktor’s knuckles are white around his cane again. “You don’t have to.”

“I want to,” Jayce responds, earnest. “If that’s okay with you?”

“Whatever you like.” Viktor brushes past him, retreats back into his bedroom and burrows back into his warren of blankets, hauling them back onto his mattress with some effort. The linen does little to ward off the cold, and his leg is not cooperating. He hauls the dead, sore weight of it with an arm that isn’t much better off and settles there. Settles is the right word - his bed doesn’t seem to cradle him properly, in any way that is conducive to his body. But he can settle, for now.

Both of them hate the cold. It’s something that banded them together in the early days when Jayce was still a little too awkward and Viktor was still a little too distant - complaining about the cold gave them some casual common ground beyond shop talk. They conducted an honest-to-God formal experiment on the warmest place on campus (it was the practice rooms in the Music Department, which they had no access to. They grovelled to Sky’s then-boyfriend, a violinist doing a music performance undergrad, for the key card). They scoured online stores for the cheapest and thickest winter coat available. Jayce always kept an extra blanket in the lab for Viktor.

Later on, the ever-present blanket wrapped around Viktor evolved into a roster of Jayce’s hoodies that he’d cycle through. It was an unspoken system of finders keepers - Jayce left his hoodies in the lab, Viktor was cold. A very simple equation. 

They were warm and they smelled like Jayce - cinnamony and earthy, like the dry rustle of a sun-baked meadow. It was most certainly a violation of lab safety - the sleeves dangled well over Viktor’s hands. He’d roll up the cuffs and push them up his elbows. He’d tie the worn hoodie cords into neat little bows - frayed from Jayce’s anxious, absent fingers, which always needed something to twist and pull and thread. 

When Jayce began frequenting the lab less, the hoodies became some hollow surrogate for his presence - like Viktor was crawling into Jayce’s cast-off moulted shells, desperate. Wanting.

There’s only one of Jayce’s hoodies still in Viktor’s possession now, stuffed into his suitcase the night he’d left Piltover University. At the time he’d written it off as an accident - he was in a rush, he wasn’t thinking clearly. He’d bundled all of the clothes piled on his bed into his luggage. It’s now folded neatly in a box in the bottom of his closet along with the rest of his memories, because he’s not going to torture himself. 

He’d only given in once, on his first birthday away from Jayce. Viktor was never one for big celebrations; prior to university he never celebrated his birthday. Naturally, Jayce was appalled when he heard this, as if to not celebrate Viktor was the worst trespass ever entertained by a human mind. (“Worse than blowing up the university’s new lab?” Viktor had asked. Jayce was still sore over his half-healed reputation and he’d started wailing about Viktor’s meanness immediately.)

The typical routine was that Jayce would bring in something he’d hand-crafted from the forge and the sweetest baked good from their favourite cafe, with notably only one candle; the first time Jayce tried to fit twenty candles on a cupcake, he dropped half of them and set their notes on fire. He’d sing happy birthday - badly, really badly - and practically beg Viktor to make a wish. It was childish, but what the hell. Viktor needed all the luck and good juju in the world with his thoroughly cursed existence, so he took it.

Viktor still thinks his existence is thoroughly cursed, the universe’s most well-developed practical joke. Because they had given him five years of this, and then snuffed it out. Taken it away. Not too much happiness or else he’ll get used to it, the nameless gods up there said.

On his twenty-sixth birthday, alone in his new flat, Viktor, possessed by some unnameable but deeply shameful force, had dug through the box at the bottom of his closet, taken the hoodie out and pulled it on. It was red, worn into a muted rusty colour from too many washes. One of the cords was singed from when Jayce had leaned over a bunsen burner and dangled it right into the flame. 

Viktor was conscious of not taking it out too many times - it would lose its smell, the infinitely precious combination of Jayce’s body wash and the scent of the earth and the lemony sharpness of the sanitiser they used in the lab. He’d bought himself a cupcake from the bakery one block down, stuck a candle in it. Singing himself happy birthday was absolutely pushing it, and he wasn’t that pathetic. He was pathetic enough to make a wish though, because he’d been sentimental and mopey, sue him.

I wish Jayce would come back to me. It was  too embarrassing to say out loud, to even mentally enunciate, so he’d only thought about it as a vague concept. And then he’d blown out the candle.

Viktor blinks blearily into a stretched tangle of blankets and he immediately realises that his bedroom is different. The half-picked bowl of goulash has been cleared off his bedside table, a glass of water and a mug of tea in its place. 

He turns his head. The chair is not empty anymore. Jayce is in it, hunched over, head pillowed on his crossed arms. It tilts the angle of the mattress slightly where he’s leaned on the bed. 

For a moment, Viktor just watches the slight rise and fall of his shoulders, the rhythmic in-out of his breathing - like a tide swaying up and down the shore. A beautiful sight for a parched man but painfully undrinkable. 

Jayce is so close that it’s tantalising - if Viktor reaches out just slightly he can put a hand on his cheek, trace his smile lines and run knobbly fingers through the thick brown of his hair. There’s a scattering of dimpled acne scars across his temples, and faint freckles nested among them - once, Piltover University had airbrushed the beautiful humanness out of Jayce’s skin on one of their billboards. Viktor had never forgiven them for it. 

There is gorgeous, and there is handsome, and then there is Jayce. Leagues above either of those labels. The scar on his eyebrow and the slight lopsidedness of his smile breaks the symmetry of his features in the most captivating way. His face is the perfect shape to rest in the cradle of Viktor’s hands. 

Viktor stares at him, haunted perpetually by the what if. One of his hands reaches out of its own accord, slightly trembling, magnetised. 

Jayce immediately stirs and Viktor snatches his hand back as he blearily blinks - he’s always been hypersensitive to Viktor’s movements, in a way that’s near psychic. The mattress shifts when he pushes himself off it and catches Viktor’s gaze. He flushes immediately, a lovely shade of pink. “Shit. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Viktor doesn’t even know what Jayce is apologising for. It doesn’t matter anyway. He forgives him. 

Jayce rubs an eye with the back of a hand, and when he sits up properly Viktor’s stare drops to his dangling dark green hoodie cords. They’re tied in little bows. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to– I wasn’t meant to fall asleep. I was meant to be reviewing the firsties' physics exam.”

Viktor forces his eyes back onto the ceiling. Blank, white, bare. Safe. “Was the paper so boring?”

“Yeah.” Jayce says immediately without thinking, and then his voice blanks. “Well, I wrote it.”

Viktor snorts slightly. “That would explain it.”

“Yeah, funny. I’m just really tired today for some reason.”

Viktor turns to him. “You didn’t sleep well on the plane.” He states this as a fact, not a question. 

“No,” Jayce concedes slowly. “I was too anxious.”

“About what?”

Jayce stares at him. “Guess.”

Viktor can do this. He is a genius, he has been told. He decides confidently, “writing exams.”

Jayce’s gaze becomes very unimpressed, and scrubs a hand down his face. “No. You. I was worried about you.” He sighs, pressing his hands together as if he’s about to break bad news to Viktor, something like I'm sorry, I'm afraid it's terminal, you don't have long left to live. (He already knew that, though.) 

Instead, Jayce says solemnly, “you’re an idiot.”

Not what he was expecting, Viktor grumbles, “I have a PhD.”

“So do I,” Jayce responds flatly, propping his chin on a fist, “and I set your stove on fire yesterday.”

“Stoves are meant to be on fire.”

Jayce supplies monotonously, “you have an electric stove.”

“Oh. Right.” To be fair, Viktor hasn’t cooked a proper meal in– weeks? Months? Surely not. “Sorry, I left my brain in the bathroom.”

Jayce laughs, just a little. “Fair enough. I left mine in Noxus.”

And then Viktor notices something belatedly: his limbs don’t feel stiff and iced over. He sticks one arm out of the covers and pats the neat layers of extra blankets tucked around him; he feels a little like a matryoshka doll, a lot like a paper-mache creature.

Jayce reads his train of thought immediately and blurts out guiltily, “I was worried you’d be cold.”

Viktor isn’t, not anymore. He’s silent for a moment, lying in the weight of it. “Thank you.”

“Also, I can– I can go,” Jayce adds cautiously, although he makes absolutely no sign of moving. “I’m not trying to trespass or anything.”

Viktor shrugs the best he can while lying down. He keeps his expression carefully nonchalant. “You can go if you like. It’s up to you.”

Jayce looks very obviously relieved by that, jaw untensing. “Then I’ll do my work here. I’ll be quiet,” he promises.

“Can you be?”

Jayce sighs. “Yes, actually.” He leans back, stretches out one arm and retrieves a stack of papers from where he’s plopped them on Viktor’s bedside table. “Once I figured out I could monologue internally, it was a game changer.”

Something close to a smile tugs at Viktor’s lips. “Nice. Well,” he announces, “let me know if you have any of the useful ten-percenter variety of thoughts.”

Jayce’s surprised smile is the last thing Viktor sees before he closes his eyes and turns over - slightly painfully - to his side, a golden image lingering on the back of his eyelids. 

Maybe Viktor can afford to make some more wishes.

We're starting over and I love you darling

And I am done, dear

Chapter Text

But tell me you love me, come back and haunt me
Oh, and I rush to the start

When Jayce had asked to stay in Viktor’s room, Viktor had anticipated that to mean a few hours’ bedside vigil. But apparently when Jayce suggested staying he meant staying. He barely leaves Viktor’s side over the next few days when the latter fades in and out of restless consciousness, becoming a shifting piece of furniture in the room, a slightly more mobile lighthouse. Viktor becomes used to opening his eyes to Jayce typing on his laptop or shuffling through papers; in a way, he is already used to it. 

All things considered, it is pretty on brand. Jayce had been the person to peer between Viktor’s ribs and into the empty room of his fraying heart and asked, sorry, is this space taken? And he had settled right there without waiting for an answer, and never left. 

Viktor pushes himself to sit up one morning when Jayce comes in with his breakfast, which is usually a mug of tea or sweetmilk. Solid food is still a problem, something neither of them have articulated but both of them know. Jayce’s hand ghosts Viktor’s arm, only hovering and not touching, as if he’s afraid he’ll break him. 

Viktor screws his stiff fingers around the proffered mug and then frowns. “This smells different.”

Jayce snorts, leaning back in his chair. Something has thawed between them, letting the familiar motions of conversation bleed back into their interactions. “What are you, a bloodhound?”

“What did you put in here?” Viktor asks suspiciously.

“Protein powder,” Jayce confesses after Viktor stares at him long enough. In response to Viktor’s grimace, he insists, “you need some kind of protein.”

Viktor takes a sip, also suspiciously. It tastes acceptable - Jayce is staring at him with big shiny worried eyes, so he drinks the entire thing to put his mind at ease. “Consuming nutrients orally is tedious. I wish I could photosynthesise.”

“That’d be efficient,” Jayce says, eyes narrowing, and Viktor knows he’s seriously considering how he’d go about constructing such a body for him. “But you burn too easily.” Viktor hums flatly in concession. Jayce adds after a minute, “oh, also, can I use your shower? Sorry, I haven't- I haven't showered since I got here.”

“You could drop a bomb on this apartment and I wouldn’t care,” Viktor drones back. “Use the shower.”

“Okay, thanks.” Jayce takes the mug gently from Viktor and stands up. The chair coughs when it scrapes across the floorboards. “Also, I’m buying you new shampoo.”

Viktor pauses and tries to recall the last time he used shampoo. “I don’t think I’m running out.” 

“Yeah, no, but I’d literally eat dirt before I use 3-in-1.” Jayce absently picks up one of the blankets that have slid off the side of Viktor’s mattress and fans it out again over his duvet. “I’ll get us something lavender scented.”

Viktor is incapable of keeping a poker face at that suggestion, and Jayce laughs slightly when he sees it. “What? Lavender is calming. It’s good for you. My therapist recommended it.”

Jayce hadn’t gone to therapy at all when he and Viktor were in university. Viktor tries not to think too much about it.

“Mm, wait, but–” Jayce is rambling again, talking out loud to himself. So much for committing to the internal monologue. “You’re not as anxious as me, though, you need something a bit more rejuvenating. Like– ginger? I’m pretty sure that’s rejuvenating.” 

He has a habit of tapping whatever he’s holding against his lips when he’s rambling, a move that has hypnotised Viktor for years. The object in question currently is Viktor’s mug. Ceramic lip against human ones.

“It’s fine, Jayce,” Viktor tears his eyes away from him, tips his head and sighs at the mummified ceiling vent. “Just get the lavender.”

“Okay.” Still tapping. “You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“I’ll only be out for a bit,” Jayce promises as he steps towards the door. “You can call me if you want me to do– I guess literally anything. I’ll come back as soon as you ask me to.”

“Alright,” Viktor responds. He doesn’t doubt it.

Viktor is mentally filing through which happy memory he should choose to watch in the miniature theatre of saudade in his head, with the plasticky yellow curtains and rose-tinted lighting. Jayce, true to his word, has returned from the store exceptionally quickly. 

Viktor calculates how long it takes for an average person to walk to the strip of shops a few streets down, buy something and walk back to his apartment. Jayce took around half those number of minutes; he either sprinted the entire way or found a way to bend linear time itself. Both are equally likely.

He listens to the water buzz in the pipes for the duration Jayce is in the shower. He's humming a tune that Viktor can't make out over the sound of the spray, like a staticky radio. It's familiar, Viktor knows it is, but he can't remember where he's heard it.

The water's buzzing trickles off to a halt, leaving Viktor in loud silence. He tries replicating the tune in his head, but it doesn't sound right.

When Jayce wanders back into the bedroom and into Viktor's line of sight, Viktor feels knocked out of orbit. He's wearing a pair of shorts and there is a brace wrapped around his leg that Viktor hadn’t noticed and he does not know how to feel. He wants to ask, desperately, he needs to know. He needs to know everything that has happened to Jayce or else he can’t function - he is greedy for the knowledge of him. But at the same time, there’s nothing Viktor himself hates more than people probing about his leg, and he’ll choose suffocation over hypocrisy every day.

It looks wrong on Jayce and Viktor watches its smooth hinges bend when Jayce sits back down on the chair, drying his hair with a towel. Viktor absently shifts his own leg. It’s been aching badly for the past few days; he wonders if Jayce’s leg is the same, if the pain is red or blue or sharp or dulled. He wonders if Jayce also feels betrayed by his own body. 

Viktor closes his eyes and breathes in the lavender.

Viktor decides that he needs to shower. He tells Jayce that’s what he’s doing, because every time he gets out of bed Jayce watches him like he’s afraid Viktor will crack open the window and throw himself out of it.

“Would you like me to do anything?” Jayce asks. He knows all of the cheat codes to Viktor - like not asking do you need help, because in the strictest sense of the word Viktor never needs help.

Viktor slides open his top drawer to extract some clean clothes. “I can get in by myself. I might need you to help me get out.” 

“Okay, yeah, of course. Are you cool if I check up on you after maybe…” Jayce pauses, considers. “Twenty minutes?”

Viktor collects everything he needs and bundles it under his arm. “Sure.” When his scale of relapse-ness goes above a six, Viktor has a habit of staying in one position for hours so long as he’s left there without interruption. Jayce knows this. It does numbers on his water bill.

“Call me if you need anything,” Jayce adds, following Viktor to the door of the bathroom like he’s sending him off to war.

Viktor hums in affirmative response, and then adds, “thank you.” One day, when he is out of this slog, he’ll be able to thank Jayce properly, and will process everything he’s done for him. 

He closes the door and considers the task in front of him, which suddenly seems a lot more daunting now that it has to be done. Viktor’s relationship with his body lies somewhere between neutrality and loathing. On bad days, it veers towards the latter, and today is a very bad day. He considers undressing in the dark for all of ten seconds before he decides it’s not worth the potential broken bones. 

He is ghost-pale and corpse-thin, skin stretched over a brittle skeleton and barely functional organs. There are moles scattered everywhere, like an artist haphazardly flicking a paint-soaked brush over the worn canvas of him; sometimes if he squints they look like little bugs, flies hovering over a cadaver. There are silvery-pink scars pressed into his limbs, discombobulated hieroglyphs from his own shaky hands when he’d tried to carve his soul out of the prison of his body. He knows that Jayce gets sad every time he sees them. The first time he had caught Viktor with the cuts still fresh and blooming red, he had dropped to his knees in front of him and cried into his lap. He didn’t let Viktor out of his sight for the next month, and somehow found a way to hide all of the sharp objects in the lab.

Viktor kicks his pyjamas and underwear into a pile in the corner of the bathroom and then, suddenly curious, checks the cabinet behind the mirror. Sure enough, Jayce has been that thorough again - his razor and tweezers and scissors have all been removed. 

He processes that information slowly and braces himself on the sink over to the shower stall, screwing the water on. The spray takes a moment to heat up; when steam begins to fog the glass, he steps in and parks himself on the bench. The tile is cold and there’s a knobbly bit of the grout that bites the back of his thighs a little, but the feeling reminds him that he is alive and that he inhabits this body, and both of those things are important to know.

He squeezes a dollop of Jayce’s newly purchased shampoo, rubs the silky coldness of it across his palms and slowly lathers it into his hair. It has gotten long, he realises. The lavender is actually calming. It’s a brief, thin balm tempering the many layers of spikes that make up him. He doesn’t know if it’s actual science, the reliable old placebo effect, or the fact it smells like Jayce. 

He makes a perfunctory scrub with the shower gel - he doesn’t like ghosting his hands over the hard angles of himself, as smooth and slippery as his skin is under the lather. 

The spray pummels him and he stares at the grinning teeth of the drain. He could slither down it if he tried hard enough - the boiling water could melt his skin like one of Dali’s dripping clocks, shadowed by the rivulets of his blood washing pink down the tiles. He could tear his tendons into little thin ribbons, rub his bones against the pipes until they eroded into dust. He could disappear.

The thrum of the water fills his ears with wool. He imagines this is what death sounds like - so loud that it becomes nothing.

“Viktor?”

Someone is calling his name, the spray falls silent and his eyes wander lethargically, loosely, his gaze slipping all over the place, trying to find somewhere to stick. He is floating again, the world is white and he thinks that he might actually die.

A touch on his leg, gentle fingertips barely skimming his skin, like a butterfly landing. Viktor zeroes in on it, lets it guide him back to earth.

He meets a pair of sad eyes. “Jayce.”

Every time he says Jayce’s name, the man seems to light up a bit, as if it’s a sound he’s never heard before. “Hey.” His voice is gentle; it echoes off the tiles; the reverb makes the edges of his words softer, glowier. “Are you back? Missed you.” His voice breaks on the last syllable, as if it contains more weight than either of them can ever realise.

Viktor says glassily, “I didn’t go anywhere.”

Jayce’s eyebrows twitch and his touch lingers on his leg just briefly, painfully, before he seems to remember himself and back off. “Mm, not physically. Mentally you were on Venus.” Viktor watches the shower head’s final singular drop tumble onto the tile and roll off to be swallowed by the drain. It makes him slightly envious. He wants to cry.

“Do you want to sit here for a bit or do you want to dry off?” Jayce asks, crouching in front of him.

Viktor closes his eyes, willing the pressing heat to retreat. He could blame his tears on the shampoo, but Jayce would probably sue the entire company in retaliation. “Give me a minute.”

Jayce’s voice is still so soft. “Okay.”

Viktor sits for far longer than a minute, but Jayce doesn’t say anything about it - he just waits, as he always has. When the lid on Viktor’s wayward emotions feels firmly screwed back on, he opens his eyes again, blinking away the bright white sparks collecting at the corners of his vision. 

“Could you help me up?” he asks. His voice is so quiet that it’s a wonder the other man hears it.

“Of course.”

Jayce slides one gentle, careful arm around Viktor’s waist. For a moment Viktor feels foolishly, thrillingly whole, all of the broken and crumbling bits of him pressed back into each other under the bandage of warm touch. He steps out of the shower and onto the bath mat; his ankle lands at a weird angle but Jayce lifts him very slightly to take the weight off his foot, narrowly rescuing him from a sprain.

Viktor lets Jayce lower him on the chair he keeps next to the sink, blinking away the rivulets trickling into his eyes. A towel is draped over his shoulders, and Jayce drops down to his knees in front of Viktor to pat his legs dry with another. 

“You don’t have to do that,” Viktor says suddenly, his voice echoing in the resonant chamber of the tiled room. “I know you hate looking at me.”

Jayce looks up at him. “Why would I?”

Viktor floats, but his voice is as hard as the dust of the earth. “My scars.”

Jayce frowns, his hands stilling. “No, I don’t– I don’t ever hate looking at you. I mean, I get sad because I don’t like seeing you hurt. But I don’t hate a single thing about your body.”

Viktor doesn’t respond to that. He has a lump in his throat again and he wants to cry, but he can’t cry, not in front of Jayce, not now. So he breathes in the lavender and lets Jayce dry him; his actions are firm but somehow simultaneously careful, as if hurting Viktor is the worst thing he could do. 

He helps Viktor into his clothes and for a moment - and not for the first time - Viktor is possessed with the pressing fist of deja vu. For a moment they are twenty-one and in the shared bathroom in the student dorms, amongst fogged-up tiles and mismatched towels. It's the first time Jayce has helped him shower, and Viktor is too clogged with blankness to feel vulnerable.

Jayce finishes buttoning the last button on Viktor’s pyjama top and pulls a blanket - the same one he always uses - over his shoulders, catching Viktor’s gaze. There’s a faint smile on his face, a gentle reassurance.

“You seem to be fond of doing this,” Viktor comments listlessly.

Jayce is adjusting the fabric around Viktor so that it covers all of him. He is achingly close. Viktor wants to touch him, to press a palm into the curve of his face, but he isn’t bold enough. “Doing what?”

“Swaddling me in a blanket.”

Jayce pauses at that, and winces like Viktor has pressed a specific bruise over his chest. “I–”

“You what?”

“Nothing,” comes the incriminating mumble.

Viktor’s eyebrows quirk up. “You nothing?”

“V.”

“Jayce Talis.”

Jayce sighs, tipping his head back like he’s praying for mercy. “No, please don’t use that face on me.”

“What face?” Viktor asks blankly, genuinely lost. He has no specific manipulative expression, not like Jayce and his extremely devious, extremely effective puppy eyes. “This is just my face.”

“Well, yeah, exactly.”

“You didn't answer my question. Do you enjoy babying me? Is that it?” Viktor asks. He knows the exact angle to shove his knife between Jayce’s ribs.

A storm cloud rolls briefly over Jayce’s expression. “No,” he responds immediately. “I’m not– I’m not trying to baby or infantilise you. Ever. And I’m sorry if it comes off as that.” He smooths the blanket over Viktor’s shoulders. “It just reminds me of being in the lab, when– you know. You’d fall asleep and I’d chuck a blanket over you?” He says it quickly, like a guilty confession. He immediately adds, “sorry.”

Viktor doesn’t know why Jayce is sorry, though he has a suspicion. “Me too.” For some reason, he finds that he must also follow up with: “but we can’t go back. To then.”

Jayce’s eyes flicker, shadow over like it’s been passed with a grey filter. “No, we can’t.” Silence sweeps them both up, soaks into the tile and the grout between. It is the first time either of them have alluded to anything that has happened over five years ago. Jayce asks gently, “where do you want to go?”

Viktor is tired. “Bed.”

Jayce nods. “Bed.”

Showering has proved to Viktor that he can get out of bed for a moderate amount of time without shattering completely. It has also proved that he craves Jayce’s presence and the butterfly kisses of his touch like a starving man, a realisation he is a lot less content with. So, the next morning, as he waits for Jayce to come back from the kitchen, he concludes it would be easier to get up and see him himself. 

Viktor sweeps into the kitchen, blanket-cloak brushing the floorboards. He steps on one that creaks, and Jayce turns around from where he’s unloading the dishwasher. His eyes seem to sparkle at the sight of Viktor. "You're up!"

All of the cabinet doors are open. “Bottom drawer on the left,” Viktor says, tilting his head towards the mug in Jayce’s hand.

Jayce follows the instruction automatically. “Thanks.” He puts that back, and then stacks the last plate and closes all of the cabinet doors. He knows better to ask if Viktor slept well or what he wants for breakfast or why he's not dying on his mattress right now. “Your dishwasher’s very vocal, you know.”

Viktor leans against the kitchen counter with one hip, picking up the tea Jayce has brewed for him wordlessly. “Mm, a bit like you.”

Jayce smiles slightly. “I don’t sound like a choking whale.”

“You do sometimes when you sing.”

It would be unreasonable to call Jayce’s expression a pout because he is a thirty year old man, but he does manage to pout, somehow. “You love my singing.”

“Only when we’re both drunk,” Viktor quips. The tea is half milk and has three spoons of sugar, which Jayce, he remembers, always complained about (“that’s not real tea, Viktor, that’s sugar with a side of tea”. If he really had a problem with it, he'd stop making it for Viktor.)

Jayce sighs, but there’s no weight nor unhappiness behind it. Viktor feels slightly insane when he realises he missed that sound, too - Jayce breathing, the pass of air through his nose. “Have you tried fixing it?”

Viktor shakes his head. “No.” He’s planned to, of course, but he’s been putting it off, like he has with most things in his life. It makes no sense. He is Viktor, he likes fixing things. He likes pulling machines apart. This is what he’s meant to do. Yet, flipping the manual for the dishwater open had rooted something impossibly heavy in the back of his mind; the diagrams blurred, the instructions were constructed from some foreign language he used to speak.

“We could do it together,” Jayce offers out of the blue, looking oddly excited at the prospect. Viktor studies him, stares hard into his eyes to see if there is still a semblance of fresh-faced twenty-year-old Jayce Talis in there. Yes - there he is. “If you wanted.”

Viktor takes another sip of his sugar with a side of tea. “Are you familiar with fixing dishwashers?”

“Uh, no. I looked at the manual and it was like a– foreign language.” The light in his voice fizzles out like a wet candle at the end of his sentence. Viktor wonders if Jayce, too, has lost himself as potently as he has. “But we can figure it out.”

“Yes,” Viktor finds himself saying, because twenty-year-old Viktor is still flickering faintly somewhere in him, too. “We can.”

And so thirty minutes later, Viktor is sitting at the dining table with the instruction manual and toolkit spread out neatly on the lacquered surface, and Jayce is cross-legged on the floor, dissecting the offending dishwasher. 

They are fixing the dishwasher, or more accurately, Jayce is gutting its insides with little progress and Viktor is dissociating and staring at the back of Jayce’s head. The sight of his partner in his kitchen, on his floor, elbow-deep into his dishwasher is something out of a surreal dream. Viktor still has the suspicion that he may be dead and hallucinating all of this in the back of an ambulance.

“I wonder if it’s something with the pipes,” maybe-dream-Jayce says absently. “It kind of sounds– gurgling, you know?”

“Jayce,” Viktor tries, just to make sure that Jayce is still here and real.

The man in question turns to look at him. “Mm?”

The question that has been thumping gracelessly around in Viktor’s head for the past week takes shape, becomes sound and stumbles out of his mouth. “Why are you acting like you care about me?” He asks. His fingers are making a mess of the tassels at the end of the blanket.

Viktor may as well have slammed an anvil into Jayce's head; his voice is remarkably calm even though his hurt is palpable, which is another surprise. “Do you think I’m acting?” His eyebrows are furrowed, and Viktor thinks about smoothing the crease between them with a hand.

Viktor says distantly, “you were always quite adept at it.” 

Jayce’s shoulders tense and raise, a telltale sign that he’s mounting an argument - but then he deflates, head dipping. “Fair enough. But now I’m way too tired - and smart, hopefully - to act. Doesn’t really seem to be a point.” He doesn’t look at Viktor when he says, “I do care about you, despite any evidence to the contrary. If that’s alright. I’d like to make sure you’re okay. I’d like to sit with you and fix your dishwasher. But I’ll leave if you ask me.”

Viktor finds it difficult to swallow all of a sudden, and he takes a mouthful of the sweetmilk Jayce has brewed for him to help the lump go down. “Would you like me to excuse you so you can go back to Noxus? Only your favourite place in the world.”

Jayce’s face falls flat immediately. “Oh, my God. Don’t even.”

“What were you doing there, anyway?” Viktor asks, tilting his head.

Jayce pulls out a sheet of metal that Viktor does not remember having in his dishwasher. “They invited me to lecture at the university.”

Viktor pauses and narrows his eyes, taking the sheet from Jayce without thinking. “Ambessa invited you?”

“Yep,” Jayce answers shortly. “I can’t believe she took me off her blacklist.”

Viktor watches him. “You are just irresistible.”

Jayce laughs through his nose, an amused huff. He reaches into the dishwasher, extracts an oblong rotating arm and passes it back. Viktor arranges it neatly on the table alongside the rest of its organs. “I wish.”

Viktor surmises that his partner is still as dense as they come. He asks flatly, “still scared of that woman?”

Jayce makes a face. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

“You’re a thirty year old gym bro,” Viktor drones, angling all of the components neatly.

“Yeah, and she’s built like one,” Jayce retaliates. “She can probably bench press my weight. I had a panic attack when I landed in Noxus. And another one right before the lecture.”

He says it casually, but Viktor feels his stomach curl into a fist. He doesn’t know why for a moment, and then finds a label for it: concern. It’s not a nice thing to feel, but it’s not numbness, and that’s a good sign. He’s healing, incrementally. 

“Are you alright?” he asks Jayce. It’s a euphemistic question, hiding many other questions - since when did you get so many panic attacks? Were you alone? Were you scared? Do you think of calling me when it happens? Do you know that I would pick up without asking?

Jayce shrugs lightly. “Yeah. I’m glad to get out of there.”

“So I saved you, technically,” Viktor snarks dryly.

Jayce turns to him. His response is far too serious for Viktor’s jest. “You did,” he says solemnly. 

Viktor is too brittle for the weight of a conversation that seems to be looming on the horizon, so he pivots. “What do you teach?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Jayce’s voice suddenly has a smile in it, something decidedly smug. This new conversational path is shit, too. Viktor can't win.

He feigns innocence. “Hmm?”

“It’s on my LinkedIn. Which you’ve read." Jayce smiles wider. "Many times.”

Viktor opens his mouth, and then gives up immediately, dropping his head into his hand. His skin is far too hot. “Fuck. How did you know?”

Jayce grins and Viktor would consider slapping it off his face if he didn’t miss seeing his smile so much. “I have LinkedIn Premium, so I can see who looks at my profile.”

“Pretentious ass,” Viktor mutters contemptuously.

“Sorry?”

“Who the hell gets LinkedIn Premium?” Viktor demands.

Jayce shrugs again, turning back to the open maw of the dishwasher. “Pretentious asses like me.”

Viktor scrunches his nose. “I hate you.”

“Who doesn’t.”

“Who doesn’t,” Viktor repeats mockingly in Jayce’s accent. “Shut up. You have a third of the world’s population connected with you on LinkedIn.”

Jayce laughs. “Half of those are my students who only got it to bully me for my profile photo. They think I look weird without the beard.”

Jayce’s profile photo is clean shaven and bright-eyed; the Jayce that Viktor knows. Knew. Viktor considers for a moment which Jayce he prefers, but the answer is murky and uncomfortable and spined with spikes. Instead, he asks, “why don’t you take a new one? With the beard?”

Jayce’s grip around his screwdriver tightens for a moment, knuckles pressed white and voice suddenly stretched thin. “I don’t like taking photos.”

Viktor senses that he’s veered into uncharted territory, the kind with scaly beasts rolling around in the water. He steers the ship away, injecting lightness into his voice. “I should’ve made an alt account.”

“Why LinkedIn, though?” Jayce asks, taking Viktor’s direction in stride. He bounces back into his usual bright tone. “Like, all my posts I write there are so cringe. I don’t want you to read that stuff.”

Viktor snorts. “I already know how cringe you are. No damage done.” Considering his cards are already on the table, he goes all in. “The one you posted about the International Women’s Day conference–”

Jayce shrieks immediately and covers his face with his hands, screwdriver clattering to the ground. “Oh, fuck, no, I thought I deleted that!”

“You did. Not before I and one thousand other people read it,” Viktor answers congenially as the other man drags his fingers down his face. He nudges the screwdriver back to Jayce with a slippered foot and is promptly ignored.

Jayce sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose before he steels himself. “Okay, no, I’m not the only one who’s going to get embarrassed. Pass me my phone.” He flaps out a hand.

Viktor does so without question, an automatic response, and regrets it immediately when Jayce leans back against the leg of Viktor's chair and pulls up his LinkedIn stats. “Let’s see. You viewed my profile three times in the past week.” The corners of his lips quirk up in a smile. “I feel like that’s a little–”

Viktor feels the tips of his ears redden and he immediately announces, “Jayce Talis, go back to Noxus.”

Jayce splutters an indignant laugh. “V!”

Viktor threatens with an impassioned glower, “I’m going to say Ambessa Medarda three times in a row in the bathroom mirror so she can come get your ass.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Viktor reaches down and plucks Jayce's phone out of his hands. “Try me.”

“Who’s going to fix your dishwasher?”

“You’re hardly fixing it, you’re just pulling it apart.”

“I’m doing great," Jayce protests. "I’m gonna add this to my LinkedIn.”

“You already have an impressive catalogue,” Viktor says, scrolling through Jayce’s profile with the faux interest of someone who hasn’t already memorised every single word. "Genuinely."

“Says you.” Jayce inclines his head at the wall of accolades behind Viktor’s couch, neatly framed certificates and awards. Viktor wishes the sheets of paper and thin ink could mean something to him now; that the hidden code in the letters could reveal to him his raison d’etre. “Look at that. Casual flex, hey?”

“I put them up there for conference meetings and interviews,” Viktor explains, not bothering to look back. Jayce pauses for a moment as he peers at their current project; Viktor leans in, considers, and then hands him a pair of pliers, tapping him lightly on the shoulder for him to take it. “People tend to speak more respectfully when they realise who they’re actually talking to.” 

Their fingers brush when Jayce takes the proffered tool, a shock of golden warmth. He scoffs, going elbow-deep in the dishwasher. “They should speak respectfully to you regardless. You’re incredible.”

“There was this one interview in July–”

Jayce lights up and turns around again. “Oh, the one about MRIs?”

Viktor startles for a moment. Jayce is so bright sometimes that it hurts. He composes himself and then drawls casually, “funny you should know that off the top of your head.”

The other man shrugs. “I keep in the loop with engineering news.”

“That interview was exceptionally dull,” Viktor remarks, propping his chin on his cane. “It wouldn’t be anything you’re interested in.”

“No,” Jayce concedes after a moment. “Yeah, I guess not, I just–”

Viktor studies him, tries to glimpse at the flickering green in his eyes. “You just what?”

Jayce presses his lips together, like the words will fall out of his mouth if he doesn’t. “Nothing.”

“Jayce.”

Viktor has learnt that it is extremely easy to get Jayce to cave, or at least extremely easy if you are Viktor. 

Sure enough, Jayce surrenders once again. “It was nice hearing your voice,” he mumbles stiffly, turning away. The back of his neck is red. “That’s all.”

Viktor doesn’t know how to respond to that. It feels like there is a fist around his heart wringing it for all it's worth, blood dripping through the gaps of fingers. He can sense Jayce’s embarrassment the way a musician is attuned to a wrong note.

“I think it is the pipes,” Viktor speaks up after a moment, strangely desperate to tumble back into the soft down of their comfortable banter.

“Hm?”

“You said the sound might be coming from the pipes,” Viktor retries. “I think you’re right. They’ve always been at a weird angle.”

“Yeah.” Jayce’s eyebrows furrow in contemplation. “Let me look under the sink.”

Viktor’s forgotten what it’s like to be working with Jayce - tossing suggestions at each other, the smooth clockwork of their collaboration. He throws out an idea and Jayce picks it up and polishes it a bit and they pass it back and forth. It’s comfortable. It’s right. 

He needs to be careful with this, he knows. The universe likes to dangle good things in front of him and then reel him back up when he’s snapped at it, hook digging into his throat.

Usually, Jayce only leaves Viktor’s side in fifteen-minute intervals, and only when it’s necessary. 

Viktor is back in bed at half past seven after their first attempt to fix the dishwasher. They’d only succeeded in tearing the entire thing apart, which Jayce seemed moderately dissatisfied at. “That’s the first step to everything, though,” Viktor had told him. Although, he isn't quite sure if he believes his own philosophy anymore. They’d hit a slump, and usually Viktor, who has a big problem with authority, considers any roadblock a personal vendetta against him and tackles it with a persistence motivated half by endeavour and half by spite. He doesn’t have that drive in him now; molehills are mountains now.

He’s the safest here in his bedroom under his blankets, away from the world and everything in it that hurts him. He’s the safest here - implicitly - with Jayce next to him on the chair. But Jayce stepped out twenty minutes ago without warning and hasn’t returned, and Viktor considers it pragmatic to deem this odd. 

He is torn between being annoyed that he cares and being relieved that he cares, that he has the capacity to care. He is turning from porcelain robot to human again, the nothingness of his mental state is slowly disappearing.

He clears his throat and tests his voice. “Jayce?”

There’s no response.

Viktor frowns and tries again. “Jayce!”

There is nothing again - no answering call, no sound of footsteps brisking their way back to him. Viktor curses, slides off his blankets and hauls himself out of bed, taking his cane off his bedside table as he goes.

He doesn't have to wander very far to find who he's looking for, which is more bizarre than not finding him at all - for Jayce to be so close and so inaccessible is disorienting. He is a trembling shadow on the couch, his fingers clawed into his hair where he’s scrunched over on himself, his breathing coming in short, tedious bursts. Viktor’s brain may be having a field day but his eyes are functioning just fine. Jayce is, practically speaking, in excruciating pain.

Viktor’s cane stops in front of him. “Are you giving birth?”

Jayce makes a tortured sound and curls up deeper into himself; it triggers some animalistic terror in Viktor that he can't describe. “Sorry. I wanna laugh,” he says, voice a gritted mumble, “but if I do my head is literally going to implode.”

Something sharp worms its way through the thick foam layers of Viktor’s nothingness. “What’s wrong?”

Jayce’s knuckles whiten. “Nothing.” He's going to pull out his hair from the roots, his beautiful hair.

Viktor's voice comes out clipped. “Try again.”

“It’s fine, I just–”

“Jayce.”

“I just–” Jayce’s voice catches like a snagged sweater. “I get really– really fucking bad migraines. Sorry.” He sounds so ashamed. Viktor can’t fathom why.

“Do you have medication?” Viktor bends down even though it’s going to kill his back. He instinctively lifts a hand to press it against the side of Jayce’s face, but the other man flinches like he’s about to get hit. Viktor drops his arm back down to his side, heart twisting and twisting and twisting.

“Yeah. I have– sumatriptan.” Jayce takes another loud, harsh breath through his nose. He presses a fist to his forehead. “In my bag.”

“I’ll get it,” Viktor says gently. “Do you want to lie down? I’ll make you a cold compress.”

Jayce’s head whips up in alarm; it’s a stupid thing to do because it very obviously hurts him. “No, don’t–”

“The only way you’d be able to stop me is if you got up right now and tackled me to the ground, which I doubt will happen,” Viktor answers. His voice is miraculously calm even though his heart keeps breaking and sewing itself back together and breaking again. “Ergo: I am getting you a cold compress. Lie down.”

Jayce grimaces. “But–”

Viktor angles his head to catch Jayce’s half-lidded gaze. “Please.” Jayce stares at him for a good minute before he nods once in defeat and slumps down on the couch. “Thank you. I’ll be right back.”

Viktor shuffles, excruciatingly slowly, to his room and roots through Jayce’s bag for the pills, his hands shaking and half-useless where they fumble for the foil. He dips into the bathroom for a towel to run under the cold spray of the tap. He is uncomfortably, terribly aware that every second he lingers is another second Jayce is killing himself in the living room. 

He is still trembling when he returns to Jayce, drops the pills into his hand with a glass of water and folds the towel on his forehead, carefully nudging Jayce's strained hands out of the way. He presses the compress a little with the tips of his fingers; he can feel the warmth of Jayce’s skin through the towel, the same way he felt it through the blanket. Laughter is the best medicine or however that stupid adage goes, so Viktor says, “God, please double his pain and give it to Ambessa Medarda.”

Jayce huffs a laugh, and then immediately screws up his face. “Okay, laughing is actually the most painful shit. I’m so sorry but you’ll have to be less funny.”

There seems to be something stuck in Viktor’s throat. He pushes past it. “Near impossible for me, but I’ll do my best.” Jayce’s lips tug up in a smile again, like rays of sunshine pressing through the seams of a stormcloud. 

“What usually helps when you get migraines?” Viktor asks, fingers still pressed to Jayce's forehead, because he knows all of the cheat codes to Jayce, too, still. Like not saying what can I do for you, because Jayce will always reply: you don’t have to do anything for me.

He counts four deep breaths from Jayce before the man answers. “Darkness?”

Viktor can do that. He switches the lights off and closes the blinds so the streetlights don’t cast their glow into the living room. The moon and more accurately the sun's rays, unfortunately, cannot be exterminated, though Viktor is not unwilling to try. He returns to Jayce’s side, watching. He considers preparing another cold compress, but that would involve being separated from him and Viktor isn't quite sure either of them will survive that ordeal.

Jayce laces his fingers together and presses the backs of his hands to his closed eyes. He swallows. “Sorry.”

Viktor keeps his voice calm. “Why are you sorry?”

“I’m being an inconvenience,” Jayce answers, his voice splintering a little.

Viktor says intensely, “you are not.”

“I’m meant to take care of you-”

“You did.” Well, technically: “you do.” The words are heavy and purple on Viktor’s tongue, some intimate secret spilled in the dark. His voice is soft. “You always take care of me.”

Jayce inhales hard. For a moment, Viktor’s scared that he might be crying - but his breathing is dry. “I didn’t for so long. I could’ve–”

Viktor grips his cane so hard that his hand cramps. “It’s okay, Jayce.” And he repeats again, because they both need to understand: “we can’t go back.”

Silence stretches between them again. Jayce takes a deep breath, and then another, and Viktor grounds himself in the sound of it. Jayce is alive and he’s here, and those are important.

Viktor counts another forty-three breaths from Jayce before he breaks the near-silence again. “Are you feeling okay?”

Jayce hums faintly. “Yeah." He sounds tired. "The world is so loud.”

Viktor takes a shaky breath, lungs rattling and delicate. “It is.”

Jayce’s voice is small when he speaks again. “Can you stay here?”

What other option is there? What singular other choice in the world would be more intuitive, more natural than that?

“Of course,” Viktor answers softly. He wants to touch Jayce desperately, again, but he knows he is not allowed, that he can only have good things one at a time.

He sits on the stool next to Jayce and makes peace with the distance between them. The room is uncannily dark, they are both in terrible pain but his partner is back, somehow. The dishwasher's innards are arranged perfectly on the dining room table and they both smell like lavender. That is enough.

Running in circles, chasing our tails
Coming back as we are

Nobody said it was easy
Oh, it's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be so hard
I'm going back to the start

Chapter Text

Our field of dreams engulfed in fire
Your arson's match, your sombre eyes

Viktor sits next to the couch and watches Jayce sleep like a lunatic.

The heater is turned up far too high for Viktor’s liking, but it’s the temperature that settles Jayce. If he needed it to be warmer, Viktor would have no qualms setting the apartment on fire. Watching Jayce is like looking at a Michelangelo statue in a museum, less so because of his Adonisian appearance and more so because of the invisible fence around him. You can admire but you cannot touch, and you cannot lean too close. 

Jayce is more settled now, though there is still a crease between his eyebrows that Viktor wants to level out. He wants to touch Jayce, and to believe that his touch will actually do something. He wants to ask, the urge bubbling in his bones like an itchy scab begging to be picked. He wants to ask about the panic attacks, the migraines, the therapist, the leg brace.

S till asleep, Jayce rolls over, tucking in himself, making himself smaller. What a strange man, Viktor thought. To be so commanding and big and powerful simply by virtue of being tall, only to want to be less. 

Viktor reaches out a hand to place it on the spot of the couch where Jayce’s arm just was; the ghost of his presence lingers, warm and living. This is enough, surely. Viktor settles back and retreats into himself.

A few months into working together, Viktor became privy to the fact that Jayce actually had friends outside of their partnership. He was returning to their lab (which strictly speaking wasn’t their exclusive lab, but they’d grovelled at their lecturers' feet and terrorised the other first years enough that nobody else wanted to use it) with a box of new equipment, trying to balance it on one arm with his cane in the other. Pulling out his keycard was another annoying affair; usually Jayce watched the door for Viktor’s return and opened it for him when he heard him arrive. After a few minutes of unsuccessful fumbling, Viktor peered into the small lab window to check if his partner was in.

Jayce was in his usual chair, back to the door, and the reason for his inaction lay clear in front of him; someone else was sitting in Viktor’s rolling stool. Viktor didn’t give a rat’s ass about lab safety - to Heimerdinger’s great distress - but even he questioned the presence of a random high schooler materialising in their lab whilst chemicals were boiling on one of the benches.

Viktor bit back a sigh and placed the box on the floor to dig his card out of the opposite pocket, shoving the door open and kicking the box in with his good foot. “Is this our new test subject?” he asked in lieu of a greeting, footballing the equipment further into the lab. “I didn’t know we were dabbling in human experimentation.”

The girl looked up. Her eyes were pink-rimmed and glistening under the fluorescent lights, and Viktor faltered, stopping in his tracks. “Oh. Sorry. Is–”

Jayce swiveled around to face him. “Oh! V, this is Caitlyn. Caitlyn, Viktor. My partner.” His introduction was perfunctory; usually Jayce informed the other person of Viktor’s various strong qualities and achievements (unprompted) before they looked uncomfortable and bored enough for him to taper off his waxing.

Viktor knew Caitlyn well enough from Jayce’s scattered anecdotes - she was purportedly the only person who was immune to Jayce’s puppy eyes. “Are you alright?” he asked her.

“Fine,” she clipped, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Viktor wasn’t aware that people actually had those these days. “Just getting some counseling from Jayce.”

Jayce nodded emphatically and turned back to Caitlyn, reaching out to pat her on the shoulder.

“Ah.” Viktor wandered over. “On what, may I ask?”

Caitlyn blew her nose. “Relationship stuff.”

Viktor hummed. “From Jayce? That’s like asking me how to do a pirouette.”

Caitlyn snorted, and then hid it behind a hand. “God, he’s kind of right.”

Viktor smiled at Jayce’s back. “Stop pouting.”

Jayce muttered back, “not pouting.”

Viktor put a hand on Jayce’s crown and gently tipped his head back, looking him in the eye. “Yes, you are.” 

Jayce, who was definitely pouting, suddenly lit up. “Well, if I’m so incompetent at this, maybe you should help out, then.”

Viktor, whose repertoire of comforting things to say was limited to “you’ll live” and “how sad”, looked around for an exit. “I don't–”

Jayce had a death grip around Viktor's wrist and the latter deemed it unwise to try to pry him off. Sighing, he settled onto the stool Jayce pulled up for him, and Caitlyn straightened up. “I had a fight with my girlfriend,” she said briefly to Viktor, which he assumed was an oversimplification of her problem. “We’ve never had such a big argument before and I don't know what to do.”

Following this perfunctory introduction was an account of everything that happened to Caitlyn in the past week, recounted with military precision. Jayce nodded intently to everything she was saying with a concentrated expression and hummed in sympathy after every second sentence, which - let it be known - by no means indicated actual understanding of her words. Viktor had been stone-faced. His comprehension of romance came from the comfortable mundanity of his late parents’ interactions, the overhyped love stories of cinema and the occasional barely constrained lovers’ quarrel in the university library. The intricacies of Caitlyn’s dilemma with her girlfriend - Vi - was beyond both of them.

At some point after Caitlyn started crying again, Viktor stood up to take one of the mugs off the shelf, bypassing the row of beakers that he and Jayce used as cups (he had a feeling Caitlyn wouldn’t appreciate it) and got to brewing a concoction over a bunsen burner.  Caitlyn, who looked mildly confused and peeved at his leaving, seemed even more confused when Viktor returned and slid the mug over. “Here you go.” He settled back on his stool, Jayce’s hand hovering at his back as always. “Sometimes sadness can only be remedied with base animal comforts. Like sugar.”

Caitlyn dabbed at her eyes. Her voice had a slight tremor in it when she spoke. “I thought you weren’t allowed food in the lab.”

“This is a drink,” Viktor clipped.

She frowned. “You’re not allowed drinks in the lab.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Viktor and Jayce responded simultaneously. 

Caitlyn gave it a dubious sniff, and an even more dubious sip, before wrinkling her nose. “Oh, God. Which of your ghastly chemicals is this?”

Viktor said, “that's sweetmilk.”

“It tastes like molasses,” Caitlyn declared, not before going back for another sip, “and heart disease.”

Jayce smiled. “That’s what I keep telling him.”

Caitlyn tipped the mug in his direction. “You let him drink this?”

“Yeah,” Jayce answered with a light shrug. “He can do whatever he wants.”

Caitlyn’s pinkie was lifted when she drank from the mug again, which Viktor found somewhat absurd. She paused for a moment and levelled her gaze to his. “You look pissed.”

Jayce, cheek propped on a fist, said, “no, that’s just his thinking face.”

“I haven’t experienced a breakup before,” Viktor explained, ruminating on it, “so I’m trying to imagine what it would feel like.”

Caitlyn put the sweetmilk down. “Okay, well. How would it feel if you had an argument with Jayce?”

The answer to that was that Jayce would apologise after two minutes, and Viktor would welcome him back with open arms. She seemed to sense it, because she added: “I mean a life-changing argument that you can’t go back from.”

“That’s a bad hypothetical,” Viktor responded tonelessly. 

Jayce nodded emphatically, tipping his head towards Viktor. “Yeah, it’s literally impossible for us to have an argument that lasts more than a day.”

“Also, we are not dating,” Viktor found it important to add, for some reason.

Caitlyn scoffed, though she tried valiantly to disguise it as a cough. “Well, I know that. But Vi is my best friend. I’m not just losing someone I kiss every now and then. She means everything to me.” Her voice fissured then, like a thin crack in the glass. “That’s how it feels.”

Viktor has always been more afraid of absence than excess; he’d rather shoulder the burden of additional knowledge than live ignorant of it. Still, in his dreams he floats in a time where he couldn’t conceptualise what it meant to lose the most important person in your life. It’s the only time he’s ever wanted to know less.

If Caitlyn was a lesser woman, she might have thrown an I told you so their way when they had fallen out. Fall out is a strange verb, oddly casual and gentle and simple for the emotional brutality of a separation like theirs. 

Viktor remembers that Cait and Vi had gotten into an argument on their behalf, because Vi had blown up at Jayce for letting Viktor leave, and Cait loved her brother too much to allow any of it. He’s never forgiven himself it. He had a few days of mutual depressed camaraderie with Vi, calling each other if only to placate the thrashing loneliness in both of them. But Caitlyn and Vi reconciled soon enough - Jayce and Viktor never did. It was true - neither of them would ever be qualified to handle a breakup.

So, what happened between you two? Viktor’s heard that question too many times to count, and he still doesn’t know how to answer it. 

People seemed to expect that there was some specific event, some sudden and monumental rift that split them open - as if their fallout could be attributed to one thing. Implicit in that question - what happened between you two? 

In truth Viktor had left because nothing happened between them two. Perhaps the nothingness in itself was the event - not an empty absence but an existing physical force. A solid wrench wedged between the two of them.

For a long time, they were okay. They were more than okay - they were happy. They were thriving. They went to classes together, bumped knees in lectures, skipped raves, poured everything into Hextech.  Viktor was a diehard hater of group projects until he worked with Jayce. Technically, he was and is currently still a diehard hater of group projects; Jayce was simply a magical exception. There seemed to be infinite threads of understanding between them, and they moved like the fluid cogs of a machine. Jayce’s initial idea was a brilliant start, a solid foundation for Viktor to start building the scaffolding. Hextech became somewhat of a home for them - bricks laid in turn and then removed, re-polished and inserted back. Somewhere to return to and curl up in when Viktor’s health and Jayce’s anxiety rattled their respective lives.

At the end of their first year, however, they came across a very pressing problem, which was the fact that they had a grand total of zero funds. There was only so much they could do in the realm of pleading at lab techs and mass-applying for research grants. 

Jayce, who had a habit of taking everything personally, had collapsed face-down on their usual table in the library come their twelfth failed grant application. “God, what is it about us? Does Hextech just sound shit on paper?”

“Hextech is perfect,” Viktor responded, flicking through the rejection email with little interest. “Maybe they’re homophobic.”

“Your mum’s homophobic,” Jayce had mumbled into his folded arms. Not his best work.

“My mother is dead.”

“Fuck.”

“It’s because we’re only first years, Jayce,” Viktor said reasonably, trying not to smile at Jayce dying from mortification beside him. “Nobody with a right mind is giving two nineteen year olds an absurd amount of money to spend on their pet project.”

Jayce, still face-down: “they should, like, just trust us.”

“Imagine if the entire world operated only on a system of trust.” 

“That sounds kind of nice?”

“It will be a nightmare, Jayce.” Viktor tapped the table. “Up.”

Jayce, still miserable, obediently lifted his head. “What are we doing?”

“Grant application number thirteen.”

It was like looking outward to some endless plateau; it wasn’t downhill but it wasn’t an ascent either. It would have continued like that for years; maybe they would have gotten used to it and found home in the slowness. And they were only first-years; the rest of their classmates were barely getting themselves to lectures and still learning how to file their taxes. But Jayce was always restless, and Viktor knew implicitly that he was running out of time. The universe sensed it too, probably; because some divine peripeteia swivelled them right around and pointed them up.

It was at the start of their second year when Jayce strode into the lab, looking more alive than he usually did. “Vik! I have news.”

Viktor was currently curled over one of the benches, leg propped up on the stool. “Good or bad?”

“Um, good?” Jayce dropped his satchel down by the door and paced over. “You know Mel Medarda?”

Viktor adjusted the lens on his microscope. “Who doesn’t?” Mel was the golden girl of the commerce department, with too many case competition wins under her belt for a normal second-year student; she was the perfect student ambassador. Piltover loved plastering her beautiful face on as many of their socials as possible.

“I talked to her at a networking event yesterday,” Jayce began. It was difficult to get a read on his tone. “About Hextech.”

Viktor stiffened, the lens blurring in his faltering gaze. “You told her everything?”

“No, not everything. I just told her the general premise and how it works. And how we’re really short on money. She says we’re not selling ourselves well enough.”

Viktor squinted. The slide looked like a surreal kaleidoscope of red triangles. “We’re not selling Hextech well enough?” he repeated.

“No, us. She, uh, said that she could get us a grant from the university’s biomed department. Only thing is that we have to be willing to market ourselves a bit better. She said the uni can help us polish our image.”

Viktor paused, finally lifting his head from his work. “Right.” Jayce’s recount of Medarda’s proposal seemed to have some dangerous gaps in it, which either meant that he was deliberately withholding information, or he hadn't processed her words himself. Both were plausible, and both were bad.

“This could be big, Vik. Like, we could get a proper lab, all to ourselves. Oh!” Jayce leaned across the bench and grabbed Viktor’s hands, sending a squiggling bolt of warmth up his spine. “We could get an automatic door so when you’re carrying something and I'm not in the lab you don't have to put it down. And we could get a proper fumigator. We could– Hextech could go somewhere. We could actually go somewhere with our dream.”

That again. Our dream, two syllables round as a globe, honey-sweet and golden.

Viktor sighed, though there was no real weight to it. “Alright. Let’s hear them out.”

“Great!” Jayce’s hands squeezed Viktor’s, twice, before he pulled away, leaving Viktor’s fingers empty and ghostly. “Because we’re meeting with Heimerdinger and some other school council members tomorrow at two.”

Viktor’s head snapped up, following Jayce’s figure as he paced around the lab. “Seriously? You locked it in without even asking me?”

His partner blinked, as if the thought had just come to him, and immediately switched on his puppy eyes, clasping his hands together. “I thought you’d say yes?”

Viktor, painfully susceptible, sighed, flapping a hand out to beckon Jayce over. He did so immediately, and the second he was within reach, Viktor pinched Jayce’s cheek with one hand, making the other man yelp. “Consider yourself lucky.”

Jayce’s grin turned into a wince when Viktor pinched harder. He closed his own hand over Viktor’s to smooth out his touch. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.” 

Viktor ended up understanding around thirty percent of the meeting. Jayce understood probably even less, given that he spent the entire time bouncing his knee under the table and, if Viktor knew him well enough (which he did), overthinking. Viktor would have reached out and put a hand on Jayce’s leg to steady it, only he couldn’t: the council had sat them too far apart. 

The general consensus, Viktor and Jayce concluded after valiantly trying to unpack what had elapsed, was that the university was interested in Hextech and wanted to support it. They’d get a research grant and a lab just for them - insanely generous considering they were still measly little undergrads - given that they allowed the university to take care of Hextech’s advertising.

“You’re young and inexperienced,” one of the people at the meeting had said. Viktor remembered that she had a giant diamond ring that she turned around on her finger as she spoke. Viktor couldn’t imagine carrying around something so densely concentrated with pure money. “So you won’t sell particularly well right now, regardless of how good your work is. You need to polish your brand.”

What Piltover University really wanted, Viktor suspected, was a nice looking puppet to pose for their science faculty advertisements - someone like Mel, whose achievements were neatly and implicitly credited to the university.

Neither of them were particularly enthused about being Piltover’s poster boys. They talked about it properly over a bottle of cheap vodka after Viktor’s final assignment before semester break, Jayce’s head on Viktor’s lap, the latter propped up on his bed.

“Maybe we should introduce a third member to be the face of Hextech,” Viktor mused, tipping his head back. The longer strands of his hair caught on the frayed wood of the windowsill, bidding him to remain still.

Jayce looked so offended and distressed at this that Viktor had to choke down a laugh. “What? No.”

Viktor twirled a lock of Jayce’s hair around a finger. “Why are you so sad?”

Jayce’s frown was a perfect upside-down U. “Well, this is, like…our thing.”

“We’re making it for the entire human population,” Viktor pointed out.

“Yeah, I know that. I mean like, the lab. And…us. We’re just us.”

Viktor patted Jayce’s head absently. “You’re not making any sense.”

“V, my brain is literally soaked with alcohol right now.”

“We can build you a new one with Hextech.”

“Mm." Jayce closed his eyes, and he quietened. "When we put it into production and perfect it completely, we could literally build you a new set of lungs and it would be as good as real human organ tissue.”

An edge formed in Viktor’s voice, hard as razor-sharp as a blade. “I’ll be fixed and perfect.”

Jayce’s eyes were soft when he opened them again. “You won’t be in pain anymore.”

Viktor wanted to tell Jayce that his body would find other ways to hurt him; that he was engineered to live in pain, that he would always be balancing on the edge of a cliff with a death grip around a frayed rope tethering him to the world.

Jayce suddenly sighed; Viktor felt the movement of it, the rise of Jayce’s shoulders against his thighs. “You know what, I’ll do it.”

Viktor felt like the previous half of the conversation had fallen off a ramp and he was trying to locate the context again. “Do what?”

“The marketing thing.”

Viktor peered down at him. “Really?”

“I mean, it’s embarrassing,” Jayce conceded, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “and I’m probably going to throw up every time I see my face somewhere, but progress is progress.”

“That works. Out of the two of us, you have the nicer face.”

Jayce snorted. “Hilarious.”

“Not trying to be.”

Jayce fell silent at that, before tilting his head to meet Viktor’s gaze. “Viktor, you’re beautiful.”

For a moment, Viktor felt as if the solid ground had melted under him; his chest hurt like he was falling. “Oh. I don’t–”

“Seriously.”

Viktor, throat dry, swallowed. “If this is your attempt to coerce me into being the marketing campaign–”

“No, God. I’ll do it, don’t worry. It’ll just be a few pictures. I mean, of course I’d rather have you with me. We’re a package deal.”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s up to you. No pressure. But we are the founding fathers of Hextech. Both of us.”

“Founding father,” Viktor repeated flatly, eyes half-lidded. “That just makes me think of colonisation and low ponytails.”

“No, but, like, if you think about it, Hextech is basically our baby. Except maybe it will take less than eighteen years to raise and it doesn’t piss itself.”

“We could engineer it to piss itself.”

“Why would we do that.”

“You gave me the idea.”

“You twisted my original intentions.”

Jayce giggled, which was something he exclusively did when he was drunk or when Viktor said something slightly funny. “Wow, I love….” He trailed off with a sigh, a smile stoppering his words.

Viktor, feeling like a hand was clenched around his heart, probed, “you love…?”

“I love talking with you. Being with you." Jayce smiled again and his smile was so beautiful and lovely; Viktor wondered if he could graph the exact shape of it as a parabola on Desmos. "You sure you don’t wanna join? It’ll be more bearable if you’re there with me.”

“We don’t–” Viktor held his tongue between his teeth, trying to consider how to word it. English seemed to escape him when he drank. He stared at Jayce - beautiful, golden. Carved by someone who loved him. He then thought of himself - withering, slate-pale, a half-formed clay thing left in an abandoned workshop. “We don’t look good together,” he said finally.

“Oh.” Jayce deflated slightly; at this level of tipsiness he didn’t have enough control over his facial muscles to hide his sadness. “Yeah, I guess– I guess not. Just me, then.”

“Yes,” Viktor said, absently. He felt, somehow, like he had said the wrong thing, though he couldn’t pinpoint where or how. “Just you.”

Viktor wonders, a lot of the time, what would have happened if he’d had the gift of foresight, or at least the strength to press more on his initial suspicions. He was, and is, not a man of weak convictions; but he has always had one weakness - their project. Or just them. Or just Jayce.

The new arrangement started out perfectly fine. They were giddy about the new lab and rode the high of having an official space to themselves for a solid three months. Simultaneously, some secret door seemed to have swung wide open for them; they were invited to lists of galas and conferences and meetings, full of big names and people sitting on hills of money. Viktor tried one networking event and decided he’d never attend one again. There was the fact that he was expected to stand for most of the night, which did a number on his aching muscles. There was also the fact that nobody recognised him, and even if they decided to stop and talk to him, they seemed more focused on his leg, his upbringing or his accent, rather than anything that came out of his mouth. It was a jarring realisation made starker by the fact that most of his interpersonal interactions for the past two years had been with Jayce, who hung onto every word he said.

Jayce was pretty shit at socialising himself. Viktor always found Jayce charming and lovely, but he was starting to realise he was maybe the only person who thought so. Jayce’s intense earnestness, occasional snarky retort and general golden retriever energy didn’t fit into the polished angles and pressed lapels of the societies Piltover associated itself with. They had a few interested sponsors and some people who visited their lab to look over the blueprints and their prototype progress, but opportunities were looking thin. 

Viktor neatly and very clearly slid himself out of the publicity part of Hextech; he wasn’t what the connections they needed were looking for. The nebulous figure of someone young, healthy, bright, sprightly and polite meshed a little better with his partner’s demeanour. Jayce still didn’t quite fit the mold, both of them knew; so he went about this the same way he went about most things that weren’t the right shape: sticking it into the fire and hammering it until it was right.

It was small things at first, menial things. There was that one time when Jayce came back from a meeting with some corporate bigwigs and quietly removed the Smiski from his laptop. Viktor found the poor green soul in the wastepaper basket in their lab a few hours after and fished him out, sliding him in the pocket of Jayce’s hoodie lying limp across the back of a chair.

There was the one Sunday of their third year when Jayce started smelling different. Viktor didn’t know how to make a point of it without raising the fact that he had a personal investment in what Jayce smelled like; luckily, Jayce saved him from it. “Mrs Kiramman gave it to me. She said that people’s first impressions are based on how you smell.”

“Interesting," Viktor said, which was a pretty kind response, all things considered. "Are they dogs?”

Jayce cracked a smile. “Nah. Just picky.”

There was that billboard that edited Jayce to the point of uncanniness. They’d both stared at it from across the road, and Jayce had raised a hand to his face. “They told me they got rid of my acne scars,” he had said, and then he had laughed. It was not a proper Jayce laugh. “I didn’t even know I had them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Viktor had replied, quietly seething but hiding it expertly. “You look so odd up there.”

“Yeah, they– uh, I don’t know what it’s called but they like, taped my face and pulled it back.” Jayce had rubbed his temple, as if the sticky residue remained on his skin. “That’s why my eyes look so weird, I think.”

“What did they do that for?” Viktor asked, bewildered. “You’re a scientist, not a supermodel.”

“I know,” Jayce had said morosely, like it was the worst thing in the world.

The entire process was uncanny, and if Viktor wasn’t so preoccupied with making sure Hextech was on track, perhaps he’d have made a comment on it - the fact that every week, Jayce returned to him slightly altered. He was, at the root of it all, terrified that one day Jayce would walk in the lab and Viktor would not be able to recognise him. How many planks of a ship can you replace before it’s a different ship?

There were other things, worse things.

It happened in their fourth year, during a time when everything seemed to be going right. Jayce was getting more comfortable fraternising with the elites and could deliver a speech without wanting to throw up beforehand. Hextech was on the radar of the big name benefactors in Piltover, boosted by interviews and news articles; they'd even gotten a segment on a TV program. Funding was flowing in. Viktor’s body wasn’t trying to kill him for once - his leg was in surprisingly good shape, enough that sometimes he could stand without his cane. 

It was nearly one in the morning and Viktor was in the lab, trying to perfect the microfibre distribution on their sixth prototype. He technically wasn’t allowed to be in here, but he’d figured out quite quickly that as long as he left the lights off and worked in the darkest corner of the room, night security wouldn’t catch him.

Jayce’s absence yawned like a gaping shadow; the room seemed too big without him, and too cold. To make up for it Viktor had put on one of Jayce’s warmest hoodies, worn at some of the seams, splattered with bleach on one shoulder. It still smelled like Jayce, Real Jayce and not the expensive Fake Jayce cologne that Cassandra kept bequeathing on him.

His fingers floated down to tie the dangling cords of the hoodie in little bows. Suddenly, the doorknob rattled viciously and for a moment Viktor was certain that somebody was breaking in; he straightened up with some effort and made a mental note of where he kept the concentrated acids. Then the door swung open, punctuated by the thump of a disoriented body. Jayce stumbled into the lab shaking uncontrollably, tie loosened and hair falling in oiled tendrils. The visceral wrongness of it stunned Viktor; he jolted up, harried, feeling for his cane in the dark and pushing himself off his stool. 

For a moment that felt far too long, they were two half-blind, limping bodies stumbling towards each other; then Jayce fell into Viktor’s arms, nearly knocking him over. Viktor landed on his bad leg and swore, loudly - the pain tunneled into skin and curled like a fist. A rare second of rage made him want to shove the other man off. “Jayce, be careful, Jesus.”

Jayce, even in his hyperventilating state, somehow managed to right Viktor, whose hand scrambled for purchase on one of the lab benches, “Sorry.” His head dropped in front of Viktor’s chest; he was slumped over like a melted candle, his face in his hands. “Sorry. Oh my God.”

Fear kicked anger out of its place, dousing Viktor in a slough of ice. “It’s alright.” He had never been so scared; Jayce was slipping through his fingers, dissolving quicker than he could catch. “You’re alright.”

“He– um– oh my God.” Jayce heaved a sob and Viktor’s heart splintered clean in two. “Vik–”

Viktor, carefully - as if he was handling glass - led Jayce’s head to his shoulder. Jayce pressed into Viktor’s neck without a thought, a somatic reaction knitted into his bones. His tears were hot against Viktor’s skin. “I’m so stupid.”

“No, no. You’re the smartest man I know.” Viktor reached out to take Jayce’s face in his hands, lifting his head to lock their gazes. He tried to be gentle with him, to not squeeze or press too hard; but that kind of softness was always in Jayce’s ballpark, not his. He didn’t know how to be gentle with all the sharp cracks and hard edges that made up him. “Take a deep breath, Jayce.” Jayce hummed in miserable assent, trying to comply, and he looked so defeated that Viktor could barely stand it. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, I– Um– you know the– you know Crawford?”

“Yes?” Crawford was their primary sponsor. Viktor didn’t know where this was going. He was suddenly terrified of finding out.

Jayce’s forehead knocked against Viktor’s, voice wrung out. “I was drunk, Vik, I shouldn’t have drunk so much.”

“He, um– he was saying that he wanted to chat to me about Hextech privately and I was like okay, should we go back to the lab? But then I remembered the things he’d said about you and your leg and I was like, let’s not go back to the lab, actually– so he said let’s go to a private room, and I said yes. Because I want him to be happy with me, you know?” Jayce sucked in a breath like he was drowning. “But I’m so fucking– stupid because he was looking at me weird the entire night and he– I was– I went with him. And when we got in there he asked me do you believe in your dream? And I said yeah of course, and he said how much?”

Jayce was dissolving again and Viktor needed him to be alive and solid. He swept his thumbs in a gentle path back and forth across Jayce’s face, trying to calm them both.

“He stood in front of the door and he was taking off his jacket and everything and I was like, maybe he’s just warm? It’s pretty warm. But he– he told me to pull down my pants. And–”

“What the hell,” Viktor spat. Jayce flinched at the vitriol in his voice. Viktor’s heart suddenly plummeted in the pits of hell, and he stared at the man bundled up in his arms. “Did you–”

“No, of course I didn’t,” Jayce answered brusquely. Then his expression changed. “Should I have?”

“No,” Viktor snapped, more forcefully than he intended - he could feel Jayce’s startled jolt in his hold. “Absolutely not.”

Jayce’s hands closed around Viktor’s wrists, desperate, pleading. “But Viktor, he could’ve– we could’ve–”

“No,” Viktor repeated, as firmly as he could. “It’s not worth it. It’s never worth it.” He let Jayce bury his face in his neck again and wrapped himself around him, shielding Jayce’s big shaking body with his own broken withering one. He could not protect his partner, not with these spindly limbs and this failing frame. He visualised bundling Jayce up into some bubble-wrapped package and putting him in a corner of the lab, labelled fragile. Do not touch. “It’s never worth you. Do you understand?”

And he told himself that this was it. No more. He would not let Jayce out of his sight, he wouldn’t let him attend an event with all of those people. 

But what could they do? Crawford pulled his funds out the next day, and it was as if the ground had disintegrated from under their feet. Jayce ran himself ragged trying to find another sponsor. Viktor told him they’d do it together from now on, but the next day his back ached so much that he couldn’t get out of bed. The day after that, he downed a handful of melatonin so the sleep could, at the very least, take him away from the pain. He slept through five of his alarms and three calls from Jayce.

He picked up the fourth call groggy and wishing he could escape his body.  “Mel invited me to a bioengineering summit next Wednesday.” Jayce was talking quickly, and there was the staticky blanket of white noise in the background. “There’ll be a bunch of big names there so I might be able to find us another sponsor - the people who funded Nano Plus will be going, so I think– it might work. If I bring our research. I mean, I’ll only have, like, ten minutes to sell this to them–”

“Mmhmm.” Viktor tried to focus on what Jayce was saying, focus on the shape of each syllable, connecting the squiggles to meaning. The world felt like it was melting around him, and he moved his fingers to get some feeling back into them. For a few minutes he felt nothing, like sensation had been stripped off him with the clean ferocity of an extermination. 

It took him those minutes, and then some, to realise Jayce was still talking. “Vik, when you don’t pick up, it really freaks me out.”

“Sorry,” Viktor had answered. His face felt fuzzy, but the knots in his body were squeezed as tight as ever. “I was out cold. took too much melatonin last night.”

Jayce was silent for a moment. “Viktor, be careful with those. If you take too many you’ll kill yourself.”

“Mmhmm.”

Jayce sighed. “Okay, I’m coming over.”

“I’m not getting out of bed,” Viktor intoned, inspecting each of his fingers in turn. He imagined pulling them out of his sockets. Surely he’d be able to feel that.

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m coming.”

“The door’s locked.”

“I can pick it.”

Viktor narrowed his eyes. “You can?”

“You taught me in first year.”

So he did. “Aren’t you busy right now?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Twenty minutes later, Viktor’s dorm door swung open, pin jammed into the lock.  Jayce was in a pressed dress shirt and tie, the gel in his hair was loosening. “Hi, Vik.”

“What excuse did you give this time?” Viktor asked as Jayce took four tries to yank the pin out of the keyhole.

“I just told them the truth.” Jayce closed the door with a foot, then settled in the chair reserved for him at Viktor’s bedside. “I had more important things to attend to.” He still smelled like the not-Jayce cologne. It was a little too strong. Viktor’s instinct was to lean away. “What are you– any plans for today?”

“Hextech.” Obviously.

“That can wait.” Something strange crossed Jayce’s expression. Viktor reached out slowly and instinctively and Jayce, unthinking, pressed his cheek into his cold hand. 

“What’s wrong?” Viktor asked.

“You look…” Jayce’s eyes flickered. There were infinite ways to finish that sentence, and it seemed like he wasn’t sure which one he wanted to pursue. His mouth did something that, by textbook definition, was technically a smile but didn’t feel like one. “You look so tired.” He put his own hand over Viktor’s.

Viktor hummed slightly. “Look at you.” Jayce really was looking worse for wear, and Viktor wondered when the transformation had happened. Overnight, when he was tossing in his sleep? Behind his back when he wasn’t looking, like some sneaky quick-change act?

One would think the universe would get sick of playing with two worn-down puppets with scuffed joints and fraying strings. He imagined it perfectly: some deity holding one meteor in each hand, smashing them together gracelessly like they were plastic action figures. Over and over, wearing each other down. Now kiss. Now fight. Now die. 

Viktor hadn’t known why Jayce, in spite of all this, kept going back. He chalked it up to his partner’s dedication to their project and his natural inclination towards the limelight; Jayce certainly seemed to glow up there. And for every bad day there were many good days - when he came back to the lab with a new grant or sponsor, when he got through a speech without shaking, the standing ovations and feature articles and successful interviews.

But in hindsight, Viktor knows exactly why Jayce stayed in the scene, and it’s as simple as this: Jayce was a giver. He gave and gave and gave - scraping the last remnants of himself, digging deeper into the scratched walls of the well. This was beyond selflessness - it tipped over into self-harm, straight down the barrel of some pointed gun. Jayce forewent sleep and meals, steamrolled over his anxiety and tried to beat his panic attacks down with a stick and a looped, muttered mantra of “I can do this.” Viktor wasn’t much better, so he was in no place to comment. 

Perhaps the real question was why Viktor kept letting Jayce go back. He knows, now, that he should have said something about it. That he should have wrenched Jayce back from running on overdrive for one minute, grabbed his face and forced that Icarian tragic hero to look him in the eye with a kind of ferocity that only comes out of love. That he should have screamed: you do not have to do everything, you are already everything to me. Open your fucking eyes and see how perfect you already are, goddammit.

But Viktor did not, because Jayce was dying but Viktor was dying too. A much more overt and pathetic kind of dying, the type that bore receipts on medical reports and radiated off of his body. The simple fact was that the powers that be had given up on him. They’d thrown him everything to help him - modern medicine, a partner who bled love, a space to pursue his hobbies - and he was still floundering, still dying. You can only make the soil so perfect before you realise the plant is just sick and helpless, unrevivable even with a gracious amount of watering.

It was getting increasingly difficult to get out of bed, so Viktor began sleeping at the lab - the lab that was built under both of their names but really belonged more to Viktor now.  As long as Hextech could be perfected and produced formally, it could save Viktor. It could build him a better body, though any body other than his was better, really. Working on it became less of climbing towards a dream and more a frantic sprinting from a nightmare; his notes were imprinted on the back of his eyelids each time he stole a few minutes of sleep on the lab bench. He was perfectly aware that staying up for days and foregoing meals was tunnelling him down a hole - but did it matter, really, when he could speed up the process of fixing it all entirely? No pain or illness he amassed couldn’t be eradicated by the finished technology; it was a small sacrifice to pay for salvation.

The two of them faded slowly out of each other’s lives, which was a given. They were too busy bleeding themselves out. The only difference was that Viktor only bled in one direction and Jayce tried to put himself into everything.

Jayce was the golden boy and Piltover’s obsessive council was King Midas, clamping their ringed fingers onto his soft body. Jayce turned stone-cold and glistening and statuesque like Midas’s daughter and Viktor watched him get dragged everywhere like some ornamental vase, some expensive doll who said charming and lovely things when you pulled the string. He was their passion project and their favourite toy. They might as well have pissed on him like an animal marking its territory. They wouldn’t be above it.

The worst thing was this: Jayce didn’t belong to him but he’d always belong to Jayce. Without labels, without words, without formalities. Willingly, desperately, selfishly. Leaning into his casual touches. Letting people think that partner meant more than it did. Watching the transparency of his expressions with an endeared reverence - Jayce always felt so much so intensely.

Viktor belonged to Jayce through every hour separated and every stupid decision Jayce made, and by God did he make stupid decisions. The world had trained him up to lap at their validation, to sit and speak and shake hands and roll over when they desired. Jayce approved a reorganisation of the university budget to redirect money for financial aid scholarships to fund some conservative politician’s campaign. Viktor forgave him. Jayce suggested, for profit’s sake, extending Hextech to the cosmetic surgery sector instead of keeping it contained within life-saving procedures. Viktor humoured him. Jayce changed as long as people kept making comments about it. Viktor watched him do it.

Jayce was good at this, yes. He’d be good at selling his soul to the devil, too. He gave himself to everyone so everyone took and everyone pulled. He was pulled into parties and committees and cliques. He was pulled into partnerships and board rooms and eventually into Mel Medarda’s bedroom. Viktor sat in the lab, lungs burning, still belonging to him.

Viktor had a flare-up in the lab. One moment he was upright and the next he was on the floor, muscles aching and red where they had landed. 

It wasn’t the first time he’d buckled during work; it was, however, the first time he was almost paralysed, some invisible bear trap gnawing his legs. He’d hit his head hard and it felt like warm wet fluff in his brain; the shock froze his limbs. He cursed, the words bitter against his teeth, and felt around painfully for his phone. He managed to send some incoherent text to Jayce before his head thumped against the floor, ringing with the screeching toll of a death knell. 

He sobbed. What else could he do, frozen and locked onto the ground, every nerve in his body twisted into a burning hot spiral? Every sharp inhale came with a grater scraping against his lungs; he wanted to vomit but he didn’t have enough food in his stomach for it. He had no idea how long he lay there; he tried counting the ticks of the clock, but gave up when he reached seven hundred and fifty. 

He was half-unconscious when he felt a soft hand land on his shoulder. He lifted his head out of the slippery murk. “Jayce?” he ventured, even though he could recognise that the touch was not his.

It was silent for a moment, until Sky’s voice came clear. “No, it’s me. Sorry. Jayce is in a meeting right now. He called me to get you.”

That wasn’t right. That couldn’t be right. Jayce never prioritised anything over Viktor, ever. Viktor did not like to think of himself as a selfish person, but was it his fault that he was used to that kind of love, that kind of undivided loyalty?

Viktor’s brain felt like it was melting out of his ears in molten trickles, but even in that state he could sense a palpable shaky disconnect between him and Sky; his begrudging guilt that she had not been her first point of call, her uncomfortable awareness that she wasn’t the one he wanted. She was talking about getting someone else to help, something about calling an ambulance. Viktor let her do whatever she thought was right. He just wanted to die.

He just wanted to die.

Once, at the start of their second year, the two of them had come across a cat seared into the frosted tarmac of the road. They were walking back to Viktor’s dorm, sharing a scarf that Ximena had knitted, their voices taking shape in the form of white fog around their faces.

Viktor noticed the cat first. There was something wrong about the street they had just turned into, he felt; too quiet and slick, his cane fumbling for grip on the sheen of ice. Jayce, who had noticed but pretended not to, walked with one hand hovering at Viktor’s back, like he was desperate to touch him but didn’t know how to ask. They had been talking about something menial - the price of the oranges they’d just bought, or the semantics of a self-serve checkout. 

Viktor stopped first and Jayce, naturally, did the same, even though he despised the cold and did the best he could to stay out of it. Wordlessly, his gaze followed Viktor’s eyes. They both stared at the cat, which looked less like a cat and more a mangled pile of fur and redness. Something Viktor always seemed to forget was that corpses were more than just preserved shells, wax statues hollow on the inside; they were stuffed with organs, strung with bones and veins, the life pressed out of them like they had been steamed flat with an iron. The cat’s innards were spewed in brilliant tangles on the road. The blood looked beautiful against the snow.

When Viktor turned to look at Jayce, hazel glistened and warbled, shiny and wet in the street light. “Are you alright?”

Jayce’s face screwed up. “Look at her.”

Viktor’s eyes locked onto the cat’s gaping maw, open and glistening. It looked like it was laughing, or maybe screaming. “I am.”

“She’s wearing a collar.” So the cat was; a frayed purple thing with a golden tag. “Somebody loved her. I mean, not that it makes the entire thing sadder. It’s sad already.”

“It is sadder,” Viktor had said, flexing his stiffened fingers where they’d been clenched around his cane. “When something loved dies it is more than one death.”

They were lucky the snow had let off earlier that day and was becoming grey and unassuming under their feet. If it was a few degrees colder, Jayce would be curled up crying on the side of the road and Viktor would be locked into place, muscles frozen. Viktor imagined that they were in a silent snowglobe; in a moment, the second someone was bored, they’d pick up the glass and shake it, until both of them were rattling in a blizzard, their bodies rolling limp like marbles. 

Viktor thought of that moment as he stood in the parking lot of Piltover Hospital at the end of sixth year, the most recent medical certificate turning into little accordion folds under his fingers. When he’d read it, the words had grown into strange shapes on the paper, dancing squiggles. He folded the paper to suffocate them, to kill them.

Death dangled on a hook in front of him, like waving a piece of dancing fluff in front of a cat, bouncing away every time he inched closer. You are going to die, his prognosis read, but not yet. Viktor wasn’t sure which half of it was worse.

He inspected one of his wrists under the light from the glass doors as he waited for Sky to finish her last workshop and drive over to pick him up. He hadn’t told Jayce about this visit. To be fair, Jayce hadn’t asked. His own bones, Viktor noticed, were so fragile. One sharp force would snap him clean in two. He wondered if it would feel nice, the quiet release of tension. When Sky’s car pulled up, he thought about what would happen if his neck was under the tyres.

He knew that it was time when he woke up one morning in seventh year and did not care about Hextech anymore. His own apathy terrified him, so much that he felt like crying, but that too required emotion and he had none of it. It was as if someone had pricked a hole in him and bled out all of his selfness. Viktor was disappearing piece by piece, and his heart went first.

Death dangled on a hook in front of him, like waving a piece of dancing fluff in front of a cat. He snapped at it and swallowed it down.

He did the calculations. Of course. Of course he did - he was always thorough with things. He liked being in control, to curl numbers and logic into his hands. He also hated making mistakes, which he very rarely ever did. Hextech was potentially a mistake. Jayce, also a potential mistake. But Viktor could fix both.

He locked the lab door and listened to Strauss, twirling the cord of Jayce’s hoodie around his fingers as he downed his fourth handful of Luminal with a shot of vodka. The ground was lovely, so close, so solid against his body. He could fall no further; there was no fear of hitting the floor. He propped his legs up on a stool. It was terrible for his posture. Jayce would admonish him, except he wasn’t here to do so, and Viktor wouldn’t be here to suffer the aftermath in any case.

He lay there for hours, blissfully floating. He wasn’t sure, actually, if this was bliss or if it was simply the absence of pain, which he had felt so rarely that he could only be categorised as bliss. He thought about Jayce, and his parents, and Heimerdinger and Mel Medarda and Cassandra Kiramman and the entire Piltover University board. He thought about the cat melting onto the icy road, with its wide-open mouth and spilt insides.

A triangle of light grew on the floor; Viktor’s head was twisted, watching it, morbidly fascinated. And then someone was walking in and someone was next to him and someone was holding him and crying, and that someone was a complete stranger Viktor had never met and simultaneously as familiar as his own soul.

Viktor wanted to tell Jayce that it was alright, that everything would be fine. This had not been the plan. He didn’t want to see his partner hyperventilating - he was barely clinging onto consciousness, certainly not enough to talk Jayce down from a panic attack. He could not move his body.

He wanted to tell Jayce that he didn’t need to cry, that he was just going to sleep for a bit. It sounded nice, actually. Viktor hadn’t slept well in years, hadn’t felt the wash of peaceful unconsciousness over him since he was a child. Now he could lie in it forever and it would be lovely. 

The problem was that Viktor woke up. 

It felt like he had been slammed back into the concrete after he’d floated through the weightlessness of a freefall. He tried to pull himself out of the hospital bed, he started crying, he most definitely yelled at the nurse a few times and he’d never yelled at medical staff before. Nobody would let him escape his body, and he knew exactly who to blame for that. 

“Your partner is asking to see you,” the nurse had said a few hours later, once Viktor had calmed down or at least been sedated enough to be harmless. “Jayce Talis?”

Viktor felt like his entire body had become heavy foam - porous and weighty and nothing. “I don’t want to see him.”

“That’s perfectly fine,” his nurse responded, folding his blanket down so he could move his arms. “I’ll let him know.”

A few minutes later, they came back and said, “one of our psychologists will come see you tomorrow. We might move you to a room in the psychiatric unit. It won’t look too different from this one–”

Viktor stared at the ceiling. “I don’t need that.”

“Could you–”

“I need to die. Now. Please.”

“Mr Viktor–”

“Please. I shouldn’t– I should be dead.”

“Mr Viktor.” The nurse’s voice was firm, trying to meet Viktor’s evasive gaze. “Dr Sabre will be chatting with you tomorrow." What were they saying? "You’re welcome to let her know how you feel and we’ll do the best to accommodate you and make you as comfortable as possible." What were they saying? "Is that okay?” What were they saying?

Viktor took a deep breath from his sorry excuse of a pair of lungs, and released it. He lamented the necessity of him doing so. “Is there somewhere I can go aside from Piltover?” he asked. “I’m not comfortable staying here.”

“Oh–" Perhaps surprised by his sudden compliance, the nurse flicked up a page of their file and nodded. "We have Firelight Health, right outside of Zaun. The staff body is smaller, and the facilities aren’t as recently renovated - the heating isn’t nearly as good.”

Viktor couldn’t imagine caring about fucking heating, of all things. “I don’t care.” Those three words, he would find, became a true answer to everything he’d be asked.

“Right. We could move the program over there. How does that sound?”

“Good.” The word was wooden and hollow in his throat. He could feel the stiff tracks of salt on his face, trailing from his eyes to the pillow. “That sounds good.”

By some miracle, the hospital discharged him for a few hours so he could collect his things, ready for shipment over to Firelight. Viktor wasn’t sure what he’d said or done that had allowed the doctors to deem him sane, but he decided he better do it more often so he could spend as little time in medical care as possible.

The lab had a blood stain on the floor where he had been lying. It was strange to behold; he didn’t remember bleeding. He stepped over it and slid his laptop into his satchel, folding his printed notes neatly into the zippered pocket. 

Viktor heard the door open behind him, and his blood froze. 

His voice was small, so small. “V?”

Viktor could not, under any circumstances, look at him. “Hello.”

“You, uh– you didn’t want to see me. At the hospital.”

Viktor arranged all his lab reports into a neat pile, to occupy his hands. “I still don’t.”

“Are you angry at me?” Still so small. 

“Take a wild guess.” Viktor turned around. Jayce stared back, wide-eyed and heavy, hair ragged. Dorian Gray’s half-eroded painting. “Why didn’t you let me die?” 

“I can’t– I can’t lose you. Please, Viktor–”

Viktor paused and tried to look for the boy he recognised. “You don’t get to decide that for me, Jayce.”

“You can’t decide that either!”

Viktor felt a fissure in him crack and then explode. His anger viced around his voice and made it small. The more distressed he was, the quieter he got. “This is my body. If I let it kill me, that is my choice to make.”

Jayce’s eyebrows lifted and he worked his jaw, clearly floundering for a response, and then– “I can’t let you.”

“Why not, pray tell?” Viktor snapped.

“Because,” Jayce said, slowly as if he was trying to remember how to speak, how to think. He moved closer; he was stripped of the masks that they dressed him in. He was real, and the real Jayce was afraid and confused. “I can’t live without you.” 

His eyes burned; Viktor felt like he was being scalded, like he was dying again, again and again and again. “You’ll have to learn, then,” he said, keeping his voice even. “I’m leaving.”

The words weren't as satisfying to say as Viktor would have liked. The hard lines of Jayce’s expression melted. For a moment Viktor could not read his face, and the thought of it disturbed him. “Where?”

Viktor looped his laptop cable into a neat lasso. Meaningless things, useless things to do. His hands were shaking, and he prayed Jayce didn’t notice. “I’m going to Zaun.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not. Stay in Piltover where you belong.”

“I don’t– what? I don’t belong here, I–”

“You what?”

“Well, I belong with you.”

“Do you?” Viktor clipped. Still looping, cord folded into a noose. “I don’t think you’ve stepped foot in this lab in half a year.”

Jayce dragged one hand down his face. “It’s because Piltover–”

“Because Piltover needs you. I know." Viktor's voice was hard. "There you go. Piltover needs you. I do not need you. I think it’s quite obvious that you should stay here. And you clearly value your position, so I do not want to tear you from the love of your life.”

Silence fell like an anvil over the room, and then Jayce laughed - mirthless, slightly manic. He ran a hand through his hair, strands mussed up. He looked a little like a mad scientist, Viktor thought at the back of his mind. “You did not call my work the love of my life, holy shit. I don’t–”

“Am I wrong?” Viktor interrupted stonily.

“Yes!” Jayce threw his arms up, like he was trying to uproot the wall between them. “You’re not right all of the time, V, even though you think you are. I fucking hate it! Did you ever consider that?” He was pacing again, moving his arms erratically like a conductor directing some cacophonous requiem. Viktor was strangely mesmerised. “I hate going to meetings, and parties, and– I hate it when people put their hands on me without asking, and I hate it when I can’t go back to you. I’m stressed all the time! All the fucking time!”

The more distressed Jayce got, the louder he became. Always opposites, the two of them.

Viktor put his laptop cable down, steadying himself on the bench. His hands were shaking so hard that his phalanges were rattling. It was a miracle his voice remained firm. “Jayce, do not yell at me.”

Jayce stopped short and scrubbed a hand down his face, his breaths shallow with the exertion of trying to calm down. It was about as effective as putting a Tupperware lid over a volcano. “Oh my God. Sorry. Fuck. I– Sorry.” He pressed his hands together. “But you don’t understand–”

“I don’t understand because you don’t tell me.”

“But you’ve been so distant, and you seem pissed at me all the time, I don’t want to burden you with my stupid problems. You’ve been so…I don’t even know." Jayce faltered. "Cold?”

Viktor took a breath, and then another, and his lungs hurt from it and that drove the knife deeper. “Probably because I am dying, Jayce.”

Jayce’s voice broke then. It was a painful sound, and Viktor hated that he was the one who caused it. He sounded like a little boy again, tired and scared. “Don’t say that.”

“Why? It’s true.” But no, Viktor was a hypocrite because he was just as bad, if not worse. He didn’t want to believe it either. “And I’m sorry that I can’t be your funny, sharp, intelligent little lab partner when I am literally actively fighting for my life.”

“I don’t care about any of that shit! I don’t need you to be– funny, or sharp, or intelligent, even if– even if you are all those things, effortlessly. I don’t need any of that bullshit!”

“Then what do you need?”

“You! I need you! Just– you. In any form or capacity. And I know I sound like a fucking crazy person but I don’t care if you hate me, I just need to see you. Every day. I need you in my life even if you don’t want to be there. And–” He swiped a hand roughly across his eyes, as if he was furious at himself for crying. Oh God, he was crying. Viktor made him cry. Viktor’s throat seized and he willed his heart to feel something, anything - but it was iced over, a whole handful of nothing. It reminded him of when his leg had been pumped with anaesthetic, how uncanny it was for his limbs to become rubbery and unfeeling, a hunk of disembodied flesh under his poking. 

“I know you don’t. I know you don’t need me.” Jayce fought down a sob and he pressed the backs of his hands to his eyes; he was struggling to breathe again and Viktor needed to hold him, to cup his face in his hands and breathe with him. “But I can– I can be useful, I promise. I can–”

Viktor didn’t move from where he was standing. “You can’t do anything.”

“I’m not fucking kidding, I will get on the floor right now and beg you to let me go with you.”

“Don’t,” Viktor had snapped immediately.

“Why not?”

Because then I won’t be able to say no to you. “Because you don’t need to debase yourself like that. I think you’ve done that enough. Thanks for being a good partner,” Viktor said, which didn’t even begin to cover half of it. He felt so much for Jayce, but somehow it had all been pumped out of him alongside the pills, emptied into the hospital’s garbage disposal. “Goodbye.”

He did not face Jayce when he left. He didn't think he'd be able to leave the lab alive, if he had. 

Something that Viktor realised, as Sky had driven him to ward, was that Jayce hadn’t said goodbye back. In that moment, as he folded himself into the passenger seat, he’d been frustrated that his partner - ex-partner? - hadn’t possessed enough manners to return his farewell. Some time later, he realised that Jayce hadn’t said goodbye because he desperately didn’t want it to be one. 

Life oozed on from there, sluggish as molasses, pleasant as chewing glass. Firelight Health was actually decent. The nurses didn’t have that strange pitying arrogance in their eyes that Piltover medics did, and the rest of the patients were quiet and kept to themselves most of the time. His roommate folded origami butterflies out of bible pages, because it was the only paper that failed spectacularly at giving papercuts, and strung them up on the walls. Viktor spent his weeks rereading their notes on Hextech in a corner of the lounge and learning how to knit with chopsticks from an older gentleman whose lungs were in as good shape as Viktor’s.

Viktor was a star patient. Without the lab and without Jayce, he had nothing to obsess over, nothing to love - so he channeled his rare moments of energy into wholeheartedly committing to the program. One month later, he was set up to leave, with his returned folders of Hextech notes, a garland of dangerously thin origami butterflies and the promise to bring more yarn for Mr Foley. 

He also got his phone, freshly charged and choked with notifications. The numbers on the little red badges almost sent him reeling. Jayce had sent him walls of text - essays and essays that slowly tapered off and lost momentum when Viktor never answered. Still, he persisted, that stupid boy. Another message popped up when Viktor was scrolling through a month’s worth of them. 

Heimerdinger’s dog threw up in the lecture theatre today. Remember when you said that thing was too old to be running around? I think that’s true bc it basically fainted after it upped its breakfast all over Heimer’s shoes. I don’t know if I was meant to laugh or offer help. You would’ve laughed. Miss your laugh. I hope you’re taking care of yourself. I hope you’re still finding things to laugh about. I’m sorry I literally sound like a lunatic rn but I miss you so much. Please come back. Where are you?

Where indeed? And where to now? Viktor had no idea. He had been ready to die and, uncharacteristically, did not have a Plan B. He had no intention to return to Piltover unless it was to throw himself over a balcony, not even when Sky offered a room in her apartment and a restraining order on Jayce. The latter suggestion made Viktor smile. Sky looked like she was going to die from relief when she saw it.

It seemed, though, that the higher powers had gotten enough out of torturing Viktor, and were maybe feeling guilty for pushing him to kill himself; because a few days later, a local university who had received a government grant ran an advertisement on their website. They were looking for someone to help expand the research faculty for the bioengineering department.

Viktor had taken the out.

Two weeks into his first job, Viktor had returned to his temporary accommodation past midnight - he’d spent hours organising his office space and trawling through the endless list of onboarding tasks.  He was still in the middle of unpacking; what was the point, he thought, when he wasn’t going to stay here long? What was the point when they’d have to pack all this up soon, return his belongings to their boxes and hand them off to his nonexistent progeny?

This time, however, he was on a mission - the science faculty was in dire need of a pedagogical revamp. He needed to find his first year bioengineering notes so he could propose how to change to curriculum; those early university days felt long ago, rusted over and covered with dust. Maybe they’d never happened, because his notebooks were nowhere to be found.

Having accepted defeat and slumped down on the couch, he considered asking Sky to check. But she was in and out of Piltover these days; there was only one person he really could consider. He pulled up Jayce’s messages and stopped breathing for a minute. This was simply a professional enquiry; nothing more, nothing less. 

It took himself three glasses of water, four laps of pacing around his room and half an hour to muster up the courage for the task ahead.

Hey do you know if I left my first year bioeng notes somewhere in the lab?

His hand was shaking when he pressed send. The message shot out in an exhilarating second - and then hit a wall and bounced back, spat at his feet. Viktor sat up suddenly, ice dripping down his spine, but his mind had already wrapped itself around what had happened.

Jayce had blocked him.

Planets seemed to slam into him. For a moment the universe was swirling in chaos and it could never right itself again.

For a month he’d been selfishly letting himself catch glimpses of Jayce - covetously collecting his sporadic, desperate messages like precious tokens, proof of his devotion. Because Viktor was like a starving dog with a bone - he had sunk his teeth into Jayce and he couldn’t let go even if it killed him.

He had realised, like the slam of a black wave, that he had lost Jayce completely. He had no idea how to react in the face of that information - this had never been a plausible conception.

It made no fucking sense. The tears didn’t make sense, the shock, the shaking. It made no sense because he had always held acceptance on the inevitable tragedies of life. All things ultimately taper off into an end. The human race will run itself to the ground. The sun will explode one day. Viktor will die. He just didn’t think it would happen while he was still breathing.

For the next couple of years Viktor remained a starving dog, and Jayce remained that bone. He wasn’t bold nor stupid enough to stalk Jayce on all of his social media accounts, so he just stalked the pages that floated in Jayce’s orbit - the Piltover University website. Engineering newsletters. Instagrams of singers that Jayce used to hum to in the lab. Jayce’s LinkedIn was the most disingenuous piece of social media he had and thus Viktor deemed it acceptable to loiter on that one. It was nice to see Jayce still being the perfect, good golden boy. He seemed to be doing well without Viktor. 

There were moments where he entertained giving in and texting Jayce. Calling him. Apologising, begging him to take him back. Shamefully, he was not below begging. But he just carried on loving Jayce the way he always had - silently, secretly, from the wings. 

So, when someone asks: what happened between you two? , Viktor remembers. And when he says that he remembers, it is not a purely cognitive reaction, some detached recollection. He remembers with the visceral violence and recoil and flashing pain of a lightning strike.

But Viktor never has the time to explain any of that. So he just says: “I’m not sure. We just grew apart.”

The moment Jayce feels better, he slips back into taking care of Viktor, like a fish returning to water. 

Viktor watches Jayce’s back at the kitchen bench, running a pale finger along the broken pieces of the dishwasher still arranged uselessly on his table. Jayce is making sweetmilk, with no protein powder this time. (Viktor threatened him.) In his university years, Viktor dreamed of a vision like this - sitting in an apartment he owned, a perfect domestic space for the two of them, protected from the outside world. In those visions, Jayce didn't have a beard nor a brace, and Viktor wasn't depressed. 

Viktor watches his moving Michelangelo statue and he wants to press a hand between Jayce's shoulder blades, feel the warmth of blood and the softness of skin. The distance between them yawns and stretches. Five years and things still haven’t changed, really. Jayce is still here. Viktor still can’t have him.

Jayce turns around and hands his mug over, their fingers narrowly missing each other. Viktor can't quite look at him. “Here you go, Vik.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you alright?”

Oh, cardinal sin. Viktor hates being asked that and Jayce knows this - he immediately winces and corrects himself, “I mean, you look like you’ve been thinking?”

Viktor sips the drink. It’s perfect, as always. “Is that so bad? One of us has to.”

Jayce catches the blanket when it slips off one of Viktor's shoulders, tucking it back in. “I mean, in your current state, yes.”

Viktor adjusts his grip on his sweetmilk, but in a fumbling moment of weakness his fingers slip and the mug topples to the floor, shattering into a million pieces. Viktor instinctively stays still and frozen in the shrapnel, staring at the milky white spilling into the cracks of the floorboards. The sound of the crash rings in his ears, grabbing him by the shoulders and screaming in his face. 

A strong arm loops around his waist and gently pulls him backwards. Jayce practically picks him and sets him down away from the shattered fragments. “Hey. Careful. I’ll clean it.”

Viktor mentally adds that to the tally of everything he’s done wrong, everything he’s fucked up because he keeps doing this. He keeps messing up, he keeps breaking things. He’s broken everything good in his life. His tongue feels like it’s stuck to the roof of his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Jayce answers simply, looking around for a broom. “I shouldn’t have put it so close to the edge.” He sweeps up the sharp remnants, ridiculously thorough with it. Viktor wraps the blanket around himself tighter.

“I’m sorry. I broke it,” he repeats again, like a looped record. 

Jayce pauses in his tracks and leans down slightly to meet his gaze. There’s so much pain in his eyes. Viktor’s the one who put it there. “V,” he says softly, as if Viktor is worth this softness, this kindness. “You don’t have to be sorry. It’s my fault too.”

Viktor only realises he’s crying when Jayce’s expression becomes pained. He lifts a hand to his face. It comes back warm and wet. His circuit is broken; he is glitching, because his breathing hitches and he has to push through a sob lodged in his throat. 

The crying is good. It means the ice in him is thawing and dripping out of him - the coldness has let him go, the numbness. The crying means he can feel again, even if the feeling is agonising.

Jayce looks tormented, like watching Viktor cry is the worst torture anyone could put him through. “V–”

Viktor keeps his hands tucked at his sides. He can’t move, he can’t keep ruining things. “I’m fine,” he says, sobbing, crying, breaking into little bits.

Then Jayce asks, “can I touch you?”

Viktor can’t answer, but his body reacts before his brain, arms reaching up to lock around Jayce’s shoulders and pull him in. It’s uncoordinated and sudden and desperate; Jayce’s surprise is palpable but muscle memory works faster, his arms circling around Viktor’s chest, catching him. Jayce squeezes Viktor so tightly that it’s just short of suffocating him. Viktor has been floating listlessly for so long and the contact throws him back into his own body; it reminds him that he’s alive, that he’s a person, that he has breath in him to lose. 

If they get any closer they will bleed into each other; swallow each other like warring black holes. Viktor is fine with that. He can’t believe he survived five years without Jayce’s touch. 

Jayce melts effortlessly into him and is mumbling nonsense into the crook of Viktor’s neck, trying to burrow deeper as if he can get inside Viktor’s skin and to his heart and make him believe everything he says. “You did nothing wrong. I’m so sorry. For everything. I missed you so much.” His voice is wet and deep red with emotion. “I missed you so much.”

Viktor chokes back a sob and presses his face into the warmth of Jayce’s skin, pulling him in as close and tight as the laws of the universe allow, trying to breathe in any atom-sized sliver of space left between them. He wants to say so many things but he doesn’t even know where he would begin. I’m sorry too. I watched them kill you and I didn’t do anything. I kept your hoodie. I left you. I started wishing on stars for the first time in my life to get you back. I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

In the end he cannot say any of them; he just holds onto Jayce like he’s holding onto life itself, and cries.

And I'll still see it until I die
You're the loss of my life

Chapter Text

When it's 4 AM
And your heart is breaking
I will hold your hands
To stop them from shaking

The crying is the worst part. It's when he upends all of the broken, melted waste in him, liquefied and salty. It's a full-body rinse from the insides, spewing all of him out onto the hardwood floor.

It feels like dying, and Viktor isn't being dramatic about it because he's well acquainted with the grip of death around one of his ankles, the weight of it like some great bird perched on his back. It feels like being a fish out of hibernation, the moment of world-bending, searing pain as the first trickles of water seep into dormant gills; the terrifying second where it must remember how to filter the liquid through the feathery cuts, the dissonance of realising permanent ice is not its usual home.

He cries for everything, thirty years of grief stoppered with a cork. Tightly wrapped kernels of acid exploding into salt and liquid. Molten hot trails sear down his face, abrasive enough to leave scars. His lungs are filled with saline.

Jayce is trying to gently loosen himself from Viktor's death grip. Viktor will die if he lets go, he knows it. "V?" His voice is right next to Viktor's ear, concerned, vaguely terrified. "Hold on, let me—"

Viktor's arms are locked around Jayce's neck, and then— nothing. Through the wobbling veil of his tears, Jayce flickers in front of him like a low resolution video, fades at the corners like a still-wet painting scrubbed too hard. He's not real; he will disappear again, too tall on his polished pedestal to reach, pressed flat into pixels on a cold screen. Viktor flounders, panics - he reaches out, frantic, and Jayce catches his wrists as if containing a restless bird, pressing Viktor's shaking hands to his face.

Viktor breathes, something that is harder than it should be - he cups the solid realness of the man in front of him. He is twenty again, and he is beholden to the gravity of loneliness's gaping maw, and he is sitting in the lab alone waiting for his partner to come back. He pushes past a marble lodged in his throat. "I miss you."

Jayce's expression crumples and he turns his face to press a kiss into the junction between pale wrist and palm, soft as a butterfly wing. "I'm right here."

Viktor sucks in a deep breath and his lungs rattle like a bag of rusted coins. "Jayce, I can't-"

"Vik? I'm with you. I'm not going to leave."

He's stroking soft circles into Viktor's wrists, white and delicate and sliceable as paper, brittle as branches. He is so gentle, it's unbearable. Viktor doesn't deserve this gentleness.

"You're here."

"Always. Forever."

What an idea. Jayce has him uncomfortably obsessed with the concept of forever; the kind of forever that has archaeologists digging up their entwined bones one thousand years in the future. Characteristic of everything that is impossible, he wants it so much that it kills him.

Forever is the antithesis of everything in his life. He is a being of impermanence - everything he owns dissolves into air, as inevitable as the day losing itself to twilight. Three vapid syllables don't mean anything, Viktor knows they don't. Everything he has filed in the safe box of forever is gone. Parents are meant to stick around for your birthdays, graduation, wedding, not die on you when you still haven't begun reading chapter books; all the projects he has bled himself into have coughed their last weak breaths and failed; the unrelenting drive that has defined his entire character for his entire life has been wiped out, quick and ruthless as a torrential flood.

And Jayce will leave again. He will leave Viktor alone - he will realise for the hundredth time that he's caring for a silent sack of bones who cannot love back, and he will just have to watch Viktor die over and over again. It's only a matter of time before it catches up to him. Viktor's bones will give out if his brain doesn't first, rotting in sludges and trickling out of his nose and eyes. He is already losing himself but he'll lose more of it - soon he will be fully untethered from his body like a strange human-shaped helium balloon floating above the earth.

Viktor's head feels like it's going to implode, like a water pipe shrivelling from exhaustion. The entire universe closes in on him, squeezing - warped compression of the atmosphere, miniature black hole for him only. Jayce's touch burns him, too hot. He lets go. He tries to hear his own voice above the white noise buzzing in his ears; his mouth is detached from the rest of him, like the cable between his brain and face has been snipped in half.

He takes a mortifyingly loud, laborious breath. He lets go of Jayce. "I want to be alone."

"Okay," Jayce says immediately. And then he seems to process what Viktor has been said. His brows press together, perfect worried arches. "Wait. Are you—"

"I'm sure. Please." He takes a step back, and Jayce reflexively reaches out. Viktor wants to fall into his arms; he will be whole again, fixed and perfect. He needs Jayce like a madman but he needs distance to become a sane one. "Sorry," he manages between another terribly forced inhale. "I need to think."

He is not sure how he is going to achieve that, exactly. A storm is bucketing down in his skull, hail rattling against the cradle of bone. He sees the walls move around him, he hears a door closing. It takes him five minutes to realise he has walked into his bedroom. His tailbone shrieks, its echo shooting up his spine, when he hits the floor.

He has his brain back now, and he needs to think.

Viktor spends three days alone in his room, doing exactly that: thinking. Marinating in the shallow quicksand slough of life. He cries more, and he's no longer self-conscious enough to muffle it.

Crawling out of his own head is an arduous task, unglamorous and unromantic. It makes him feel insane, warring with an invisible enemy.

He sits at his desk and stares, listless, out of the window, watching the sky melt from powder-blue to bone-grey, tangerine-orange and soon, the colour of the ink. He digs down to the root of it.

He tries to extract the facts, iron them flat and neat.

Take 1.

Five years back, the beginning of Spring. He'd died. Technically Viktor has died many times, not always physically, but that was the closest he'd gotten. Viktor had died, and only half of him had risen. The other half was still in the coffin, still on the floor of the lab where he'd drugged himself out, still in the hospital.

He had died, and then he had left his partner, which was really an additional death. What would have happened if he'd stayed? If he'd let Jayce beg, if he'd let himself be swayed by it - it wouldn't have taken a lot. He would have saved himself five years of endless pacing and lonely winters - saved them both from it. But Viktor is not a man who saves people, least of all himself; it is not in his nature to rescue.

No, he's not sure he could have. He had been angry at Jayce in a way he had never been before - the raw devastation of betrayal was like a soldering iron to the skin. Viktor had turned himself a fresh grave and laid in the coffin for all of one night before his partner was taking a shovel to soil and prying the nails of his sarcophagus lid open, unprompted, unconsented.

Viktor's spine creaks as he leans over his desk and plants his face into the hard pillow of his folded arms, breathing deep, thoughts a rabbled mess.

Orpheus had come down to drag Eurydice out of the Underworld and only managed to doom them both further. He loved Viktor too much to not look back.

Take 2.

The sky melts from blue to grey, orange to ink. Desk, again. Empty mug and bowl from the food he'd collected from outside, like a self-referred prisoner in a maximum security jail.

Five years back, beginning of Spring. Viktor had died, half-resurrected, and then he'd left.

Jayce said it was not his fault, but he knows, even in his depression-beaten brain, that his partner takes certain liberties when it comes to Viktor. Liberties like abandoning his responsibilities, abandoning sanity. Horrifying, the realisation of Jayce's pure, monstrous devotion, too large for Viktor's body to contain, too late for the disease of his brain to process.

Of course Jayce loved him. That was why he got off the overpass for him, why he always threw everything else to the side to stop the world for him. That was why he hauled Viktor out of the grave. That was why he sent message after message to a silent void. That is why he's here, still here, leaving Viktor by himself but never leaving him alone - placing cups of water, sweetmilk and bowls of food in front of Viktor's door, like an offering to an imposing God or a feral animal.

But - and here is the but, like the gavel of some cosmic judge - but, though he loved Viktor, he sold his soul to Piltover. He left Viktor alone in the lab that was meant to be theirs, to host two bodies. It makes sense, though. Viktor is nobody's first choice.

Take 3.

Blue, grey, orange. Black. Viktor's inkless pen scribbles invisible patterns into a stack of notepaper.

Viktor had died, and only half of him had risen. He had left the other half in Piltover.

He had left Jayce, who had to stay. It was intuitive. Even though he loved Viktor, he sold his soul to Piltover. No, that wasn't right. Viktor presses the heels of his palms to his closed eyes, rearranges the logic in his brain like he's shuffling Scrabble tiles. Gets up and paces the short length of his floor, slumps back at his desk chair. Because he loved Viktor, he sold his soul to Piltover. The ultimate proof of his adoration.

It was a stupid venture, of course, but Jayce doesn't think in his love, not the way that Viktor does - obsessive, paranoid, calculated, scant offerings to test the waters, like hovering your hand for one second in the jaws of a beartrap.

Of course Jayce loved him. Loves him still, foolishly, unquestioningly, unconditionally. What do you do with a love like that - where can you store it? Where does it fit? Some nebulous cosmic force, an enormous sun crashing into you, a billion-degree embrace.

Viktor cries more when he realises. He's melting again, quicker than he can process. Jayce is powerful like that - a furnace that thaws icebergs.

Take 4.

He has taken to the bed now - he is too steeped with exhaustion to be sitting up.

Some facts: Jayce loves him. Jayce forgives him. Jayce is staying. Those three statements mean the same thing.

More facts: Viktor had died. Half of him had risen and hauled itself, limping, to where he is now. The other half he had left in Piltover. The other half of him has been in Piltover for the past five years. The other half of him has hazel eyes that hold all the emotion in the world and the glow of someone loved by the sun. The other half of him is pacing in his living room right now, keeping quiet; cooking him food, knocking gently on his door to deliver it.

Viktor's heart hurts so much that it pushes tears into his eyes. He wants his other half back.

The mattress fights back when he tries to sit up, gnawing at him like quicksand; his shoulder cracks when he forces himself onto his elbows.

"Jayce?" The first time he says it it's too quiet, and his voice trembles like he's summoning a ghost.

He hears it anyway. Perfectly attuned. Like a dog to a whistle. "Yeah?"

"Can you come here?" He sniffs and swipes roughly at his eyes, trying to keep his voice steady. "I'm sorry. I can't— I can't move much right now."

"Oh, um." Jayce speaks between rapid, heaved breaths, messy and percussive and abrasive. A stab of concern tunnels through Viktor's chest. "Do you—" He inhales deep. "Need something?"

Technically no, and an apt response lies ready on Viktor tongue. But in a moment of silent understanding, he switches gears. "Yes. I need you. Can you come here?"

The sound of footsteps - notably, yes, uneven footsteps. Viktor recognises that rhythm in his own gait, the staccato of one step and the heavy fall of the other. Jayce appears in the doorway like an apparition, half shrouded in the blankness of the dark - half-human and only half-real, the worst kind of sleep paralysis demon.

Jayce makes an odd noise, and it takes Viktor a slow minute to register what he's hearing. It's the sound that comes out of a lost child, a bleeding animal with an arrow lodged in its side. The dissonance of the universe toppling onto its side, one of the celestial bodies falling out of the sky and screeching on the asphalt. Jayce is crying.

Viktor's heart aches like a bruise when he realises. "Come closer? Please."

With some effort he shuffles back to rest his back against his headboard; he cannot hold Jayce's weight, regrettably. Jayce obediently edges closer, careful, like he's afraid Viktor will explode if he brushes against the wrong wire. "Did you— could I do something for you?" The unbearable and insatiable urge to be useful.

Viktor pats the edge of the mattress next to him, uncharacteristically tentative. Jayce is fragile right now - no, he's always been fragile, precious, meant to be bubblewrapped. "Sit."

It takes a few slow moments for Jayce to comply completely. Once he is seated and painfully close, he sways slightly, eyes sheened with liquid grief, half-rocking himself; close to losing his balance but trying not to lean into Viktor, terrified of being a burden. Viktor knows, because he acts the same way. Mirror images.

"I'm alright now," Viktor says softly. He's surprised at the surety of his own voice. Jayce's eyes are staring at him, wide and wet and confused.

"Are you sure?" he hazards. "You don't have to be."

"Maybe not entirely," Viktor responds after a moment. "But I'm better. Sorry for being a shut-in."

Jayce's responses are a tad too late, like he's taking extra time to process Viktor's words. "No, no. Don't apologise. Whatever you need."

"I've made you worried," Viktor ventures.

"No. I mean, yes." Jayce pinches the bridge of his nose briefly before he brushes his hand down. "But only because I care about you."

"I care about you, too." I love you, I love you, I love you. "I don't think I've been clear enough about it. Have you been alright?"

Jayce doesn't answer. He doesn't really have to. Instead, he looks down at Viktor's open hand. The silence, the weight of his gaze, is unbearable.

His voice is quiet. "Can I touch you?"

"Please."

Jayce bypasses the hand to collapse forward and bury his face in Viktor's neck, and the weight of it is startling. His wracked breathing is a thing that rattles his entire body, like an engine surrendering its steam. He tucks himself like a parcel into Viktor, whose arms automatically move to wrap around his shoulders. He reminds Viktor of the roly poly bugs that curl themselves into little armoured balls. "Sorry," he manages, voice choked. "I'm too big for this."

Viktor tightens his hold, squeezes his eyes shut and presses his cheek against soft brown hair. The lamp buzzes like a time machine. "No, you're perfect."

Viktor feels Jayce's hands ghost his hips, and then come to an abrupt stop. "Is your back okay?"

"Yes. Go ahead."

Jayce inches his arms around Viktor's waist, and then squeezes, bandaging him together - fluid brace of muscle and blood and longing. Viktor cannot imagine he is a nice person to hug; too many sharp angles and cold spots, like a metal armature. Jayce somehow holds him like he's holding the entire world.

"I'm sorry," Jayce says, his voice a fragmented whisper. Viktor would not know to listen out for it at all, without the feeling of Jayce's lips moving against the skin of his neck.

Viktor tries to even out his own breathing. His tears are hot and prickly. "You have nothing to be sorry for." He cradles Jayce's head in his arms, the world's most precious cargo - curling himself around his golden boy like some medieval serpetine beast around his jealous hoard. Jayce reacts by burrowing closer; they are both trying to absorb each other. Viktor's hand wanders unwittingly - his fingers skim the slope of Jayce's jaw, the soft curve of his earlobe, the cropped hair at the back of his neck that he's been longing to touch for years, wondering if it feels like fine sandpaper or if it's as soft as the rest of him. It's more like the former. He loves every part of Jayce that is not perfectly polished and smooth and shiny.

"No, I do," Jayce insists. "I've been stupid. I guess…I don't know." He sounds so tired. "I thought that when I came back it would fix everything. That I would magically make you better, or something." He presses his face into Viktor's neck. "That sounds so messed up. I'm sorry."

"I thought so too, for years. But I shouldn't expect this from you. It's not fair to you."

Jayce shakes his head, adamant, stubborn. "What good am I to you then?"

"You're good to me. Good for me." His palm is flat over the back of Jayce's neck, moving gently - he is half-starved for touch, he can't help it, pressing the iciness of himself to Jayce like a cold-blooded animal to a sun-warmed rock.

"But I don't know what to do. Sometimes you go so far into your head and I can't get to you and I'm scared I'm going to lose you in there. I don't want to lose you."

"You don't have to follow me in there. It's not a nice place to be. As long as you're waiting for me in the doorway when I find my own way out. And you don't have to drift with me when I'm drifting somewhere above you. You just have to catch me when I land."

"I'm— I'm always so scared that I can't bring you back. When you were crying, I had to call out to you ten times before you heard me. You weren't responding. It was like—" Jayce heaves and Viktor passes a gentle hand down his back. "And I thought— this one's been worse than the ones before and I was so scared I wouldn't be able to save you."

"You always save me," Viktor insists softly. "Always."

"I almost couldn't." Jayce's voice cracks over a sob, and his breathing is staggered. Viktor feels the heat of tears on his neck. "You were bleeding. You'd cracked your head open." It takes a second for Viktor to catch on to what Jayce is talking about. When he does, his stomach twists into ugly knots. "I don't think you noticed, you were so drugged out of your mind. When I saw you like that the world ended. It was over. You were gone and I wouldn't be able to come with you."

"But you brought me back. Like you always have."

Jayce is weeping now, ragged and broken. "If I hadn't gone to the lab in time, you—"

"But you did." Viktor leans back, gently dislodges Jayce's head from his shoulder so he can level their gazes. He never really understood the physicality of heartbreak until he saw Jayce cry. He strokes the nape of his partner's neck. "You got there and you pulled me out and I'm here now, aren't I?"

Jayce's face crumples over another tide of sorrow. "But you were gone."

Viktor cups the man's face, thumbs stroking a path back and forth, windshield wiper for his tears. He presses their foreheads together, their noses ghosting each other briefly. It's never as soft an endeavour as he imagines - skulls are hard and brittle, liable to cracking. "Almost. Not gone."

"When you sent me that text I—" Jayce heaves a shaking breath, tries to steady his words. "I thought I was going to lose you again. That I'd come too late and you wouldn't be here."

"I'm sorry for scaring you."

"No, don't— I'm so grateful you messaged me."

"I'm grateful you came."

"Always. As long as you want me. I'll always come. I shouldn't have—" And then he's sobbing again, unravelling and tumbling unspooled, and Viktor is folding Jayce into his arms, shushing him gently, rocking them both back and forth. The natural boundaries of mortal flesh are arbitrary and ridiculous. Viktor wants to fuse his soul with Jayce. Skin to skin they are still too far apart. He presses half-kisses into the soft line of Jayce's hair, cups his precious face with icy hands. His beautiful partner, his golden boy, too soft for the world's blows. Viktor will never understand how they moulded the essence of tenderness and sensitivity into a frame so tall and strong.

"God, I'm so sorry." Jayce's laugh is phlegmy and splintered, when his breathing has evened out enough for coherence. Viktor feels Jayce's pulse jump under his palm. "I'm really fucked up."

"You are looking at the CEO of fucked up right now," Viktor responds, pressing a kiss in the middle of Jayce's forehead. "My middle name is Fucked Up."

Jayce squints, sceptical. "You don't even have a last name."

"No, so my name is just Viktor Fucked Up," Viktor answers, tone flat. "Which is coincidentally the title of my memoir."

Jayce laughs softly, and Viktor could die from love, straining at the thin walls of his weak heart until the muscle explodes. It will clog up his bloodstream and push at his skin, forcing itself through. The vessel of his body won't be able to contain it.

Jayce says, impossibly fond, "I don't think you've ever fucked up in your life." He's looking at Viktor as if he's looking at some sublime stretch of galaxy, a sight almost holy.

Viktor doesn't know what expression he makes, but it makes Jayce smile. "You must have a very selective memory."

"Maybe. I'm a bit biased when it comes to you."

Viktor cups his partner's face. "I'm starting to learn that."

Jayce leans into his Viktor's touch, the gentle stroke of his hand, closing his eyes. "Can I stay with you tonight?"

Stay with me forever. I want forever. I love you, I love you, I love you.

"Of course." Viktor drops a kiss on his head. Soft as a butterfly's wing. "You can shove me off the bed if I kick you in my sleep."

Viktor wishes he was in a better state to take care of Jayce. As of now they're two glass bodies in lopsided orbit. Two dogs crawling out of the same mudslide. A pair of meteors hurtling towards each other.

It's alright. He can make do. Viktor knows how to handle delicate things. It's one of the traits Jayce would always vocalise his admiration of - Viktor's nimble fingers, careful, not pressing nearly hard enough to bruise. Prying things open with the thinnest scalpel, easing the flat blade into a promising opening. He had no strength for brute force; he envied the power in Jayce's movements, all smooth broad brushstrokes, compared to Viktor's menial stippling.

"You have to be gentle," Viktor had chided Jayce once, in third-year, as he was trying to replace the needle of a faulty barometer, smacking him lightly on the head with a screwdriver.

"That's your thing," Jayce had responded. His frown was very nearly a pout, which made it difficult to be angry at him. "I don't know how to be gentle."

What a liar. Jayce knew gentleness; he was gentle with Viktor, always. He is gentle with Viktor, over the next few days - impossibly gentle. He learns and cooks more of Viktor's comfort meals, the only flavours he'll stomach. He disguises vegetables in sauce like he's making food for a picky child. He runs Viktor's errands. He folds the laundry. He helps Viktor out of the shower, calls him back down from the liminal space he hangs in between living and dying. He dries Viktor's hair. He tells Viktor about his students while he works out the knots in Viktor's leg - he's very good at talking about other people. He doesn't talk about himself.

They sleep in the same bed, which is how Viktor learns that Jayce doesn't sleep well. When Viktor heaves out of semi-consciousness, Jayce is already awake, hand at Viktor's back, moving in slow circles. It's not the nightmares that Viktor is afraid of - it's the time between consciousness and dreaming when his mind is forced to wander in the heavy silence. The thoughts that are bred from that in-between state are cruel, luminous, terrible to dwell on.

"You should sleep," Viktor says like the hypocrite he is between two quaking breaths, hyperfocusing on the point of contact between the skin of his spine and Jayce's palm. The centre of heat, the nucleus of the world. It's been at least an hour, and Viktor's heart rate hasn't slowed, thumping like a prey animal's in the darkness.

Jayce's hand stutters for a second. His shoulders fall. "I can't."

Doomed to consciousness, then, both of them. They lie awake at night and talk about everything and anything. The weather, Jayce's latest pop music obsession, writing mid-sems. Jayce reads the articles from the engineering newsletter Viktor is subscribed to, the weeks and weeks of content he's missed, things he can't bring himself to look at. English swirls into melted glyphs in front of his eyes all too often.

Jayce's voice is calming. Viktor loves listening to him even though his brain slips, confused, over the meaning of some of the words. Jayce never reads a full article without adding his own interjections. It reminds Viktor of their early years - Jayce fresh faced and still full of hope, reading the lecture notes he'd taken down for his bedridden partner. He always had too many opinions.

Jayce wakes up one night clearly shaken. Viktor strokes his hair and talks to him, slow, mindless, soft, until his breathing evens out and he has gained enough lucidity to feel stable.

He traces the contours of Viktor's frame - his narrow shoulders, the shallow dip of his collarbone, the landscape of his profile. Slowly, as if he's trying to burn the shape of Viktor into his fingertips.

Viktor presses a kiss to Jayce’s head, lifting a lethargic hand to cup his face. “What are you doing?”

Jayce hums in response. “Trying to memorise you.”

Viktor's hand wanders up further. He twirls one of Jayce's stray loose curls around a finger. “You don't need to. I'm not going anywhere.”

Jayce is silent for a moment and Viktor closes his eyes, meditating in the movement of Jayce's shoulders rising and falling in the darkness, pressed against his. “I have dreams,” Jayce begins after a minute, “that you're with me again. And then I wake up and you're gone.”

Viktor opens his eyes. His thumb sweeps gently over the curve of Jayce's jaw, a silent confirmation that he's listening.

“What if this is also a dream?" His eyebrows are twisted in pain, his voice strained. "You know? I'm scared that–”

Viktor pinches Jayce’s cheek lightly. “Does that feel like a dream?”

“Do it harder.”

“Why?" Viktor asks flatly. "Do you have a pain kink?”

Jayce scrunches his nose. Viktor taps it like a Pavlovian instinct. “No.”

“That took you a suspiciously long time to respond," Viktor remarks, raising an eyebrow.

Jayce frowns, but his breathing is lighter. “You're bullying me.”

“Only because you set yourself up," Viktor chides. He can feel Jayce smile against his palm. Sparks fizzle in his chest, warm and golden. "I'm not leaving you again," he adds, quieter. "I'm sorry I left.”

“No, don't apologise. I shouldn't have–" Jayce's voice brakes itself to a stop. He sighs, presses a hand to his eyes. All his movements are steeped with exhaustion, exercised in slow motion. He rolls onto his back, wincing slightly. "I shouldn't have done a lot of things, actually. But I shouldn't have tried to stop you."

Viktor remains silent. His heart trundles stickily in his throat.

"I was so selfish. I couldn't let you go. I had to make sure you were alive even if you hated me.”

"I didn't." Viktor is starting to realise that now. "I don't." He leans closer, drops kisses like offerings on Jayce's cheekbones where the salt of his tears are collected. He smooths the anxious crease between Jayce's eyebrows with his fingers. Outside, the sun claws its way up from the horizon.

Viktor is getting better but the finish line is always fifty steps ahead, and the journey there is full of spikes and mountains, pits that he doesn't realise are there until he wakes up at the bottom of a hollow hole.

One night he finds himself in the kitchen. The floorboards are cold under his feet, and that's where the entire concentration of his being is focused; it almost hurts, that kind of coldness. Slowly, he traces the sinewy path of flesh upwards; the chill under his feet to the brittle stiffness of his ankles, ice locked around each round joint; up his calves and knees and thighs, of which the dull ache is asymmetrical, a thorn lodged in his right leg; the narrow dry ledge of his hips, his knobs of his spine like the precarious bricks of Babel; bricks that stack in a line up to his hunched shoulders that slope and taper off into his arm, his wrist, his hand.

His hand. His hand is in the cutlery drawer, against a hard metal handle, clenched so tightly that his knuckles ache, that his fingers cramp.

Why is he here? He can't remember, and then he does remember - it's because he's cold, down to the soles of his feet - his body is frozen granite, a lump of coarse stone. He needs to be warm - he needs the heat of his own blood smeared over his skin like a coat, crimson layer of protection; he needs the burning hands of fire wrapped around him, branding him with life and redness, melting the ice off him. He needs nails and sandpaper against his skin for friction, to set himself aflame. He is far too cold.

He picks the handle up. The handle is attached to a knife. It makes sense now. His skin itches. He thinks about starting with his feet, but that will leave red footprints all over the floorboards.

Then there is a warm weight at the small of his back, and a third hand which is not his own hand and not attached to his body. The third hand closes around his fist and the knife in it. The third hand is trying to unfuse the knife from his grip. "Vik, could I grab this off you?"

The third hand is joined by a fourth hand, and the weight at Viktor's back is gone. Now there are two hands and many fingers attached to those hands that are gently, gently prying his hold off the knife. He is enamoured by the warmth of them. He's so cold.

The knife clatters when it hits the kitchen counter. Viktor turns his head to look at Jayce, a murky figure in the dim room. So close to him but nearly invisible. Moonlight strains through the blinds that Viktor refuses to raise because Jayce rests better in complete darkness.

He reaches out and touches Jayce's cheek, and Jayce flinches slightly like it hurts. Like Viktor is hurting him. Viktor feels as if he's been stabbed. For a moment he is certain his fingers have slipped and he's accidentally shoved the knife between his own ribs. He wants to take a step back, but his bones are locked into place. His own body is sharp and lethal and terrible, and he needs it far away from Jayce.

But then Jayce takes both of Viktor's hands in his and cradles them to his chest like they are precious. Treasures and not weapons. "Damn, your hands are cold."

This is true. Viktor says, "I'm cold." The shame of hurting Jayce is still there, a dark bruise on his chest.

Jayce kisses Viktor's knuckles. "Come back to bed?"

Viktor focuses, tries to dissect this sample of Jayce Tone. He sounds tired, and scared, and more than a little desperate.

He's silent for too long. Jayce is wilting. "Please?"

"Okay."

Viktor lets himself be led, lets his body be guided back to his bedroom like a wayward sleepwalker being shepherded back from the ledge. He lets his body be lowered onto the mattress, the ergonomic way, almost winded when his head hits the pillow.

Jayce collapses next to him, tucks his face into Viktor's neck and bundles him up in his arms. He radiates warmth, like a droplet of the sun wrapped in human skin. Viktor melts slowly. He counts Jayce's breaths, something to ground himself in the terrible silence. His skin fizzes like a bubbling chemistry experiment. He wants the release of something sharp and unspeakable, but he can't have it.

What time is it? He doesn't know. There are so many things he doesn't know - when he'd got up, how he had gotten to the kitchen without his cane - how long he would go at it with a knife before he was satisfied. What would happen if Jayce woke up too late, if Jayce hadn't gotten up to check, if Jayce hadn't been here at all.

But they are useless thoughts, Viktor knows. No point in thinking about what didn't happen. Jayce is here, and he is warm and soft and alive, and he's saved Viktor again, like he's cursed to do. Over and over. Same rock, same hill. He smooths stray tendrils of Jayce's hair behind his ears and presses himself closer into his partner. His veins sing with heat. Pygmalion loving his statue to life.

Jayce asks, "back?" His voice buzzes against Viktor's skin.

Viktor hums into Jayce's hair. The fizzing in his skin has subsided, leaving an imprint of ache in his muscles instead. "Think so."

Jayce's hands move slowly across the planes of Viktor's body, as if he's trying to find any cold spot that he's missed. When he seems satisfied with his checkup, he settles his hold around Viktor's waist. He's shaking slightly.

Jayce takes a deep breath and sighs like he's expelling his anxiety. It tickles Viktor's neck. Then: "I love you, V. "

The world trembles to a halt.

"More than anything else in the universe."

Viktor's heart twists and twists, but it's a good twist, a good pain. A good type of pain like the pain of crying, a good type of pain like the pain of sore muscles after a long walk. His eyes sting. "Thank you," he says quietly.

He doesn't say it back, not yet. He's not right, his head is still filled with strange fuzzy toxins and a million little knives. Jayce doesn't deserve a sick man's half-conscious confession.

"I didn't think this was the best time to say it," Jayce admits after a moment of silence. "But I wanted you to know as soon as possible."

Viktor shakes his head slightly, burrowing closer. "I always knew."

Jayce breathes in, and breathes out again. Viktor keeps counting them. "That's good."

There's a stone in Viktor's throat. He clears it, tries for some lighthearted conversation. "When would have been the best time to say it?"

The bedsheets rustle when Jayce shuffles into a more comfortable position. He keeps his arms locked around Viktor. "Ideally? When we've just come home to our twenty-three stray cats after being awarded our Nobel Prize. And I walk outside with a boombox and a giant cardboard sign—"

Viktor snorts, a bright chime sounding in his head. "You're going to sing?"

"Yeah."

"God forbid," he mutters.

"No, you'll love it." Jayce is grinning, Viktor can hear it. "You'll cry. I will also be crying."

"So in this hypothetical universe we've moved in together and adopted twenty-three stray cats before we've confessed to each other?"

"Yep."

"Sounds like us," Viktor says, and when the last syllable leaves his mouth he's surprised at the comfort of it, the us. They have not been us for a long time.

He takes Jayce's hand, slightly clammy, and presses it against his heart, skipping softly under his brittle ribcage. This is how he says I love you. He hopes Jayce knows. He doesn't need to hope - Jayce always understands.

If it takes all night
I will be on your side