Chapter Text
Common superstition in Zaun had it that there were five bad luck days in a year. Near the end of the year, you would reminisce on what those days were – to remember you survived them, and to be assured that they had already passed. Anywhere in the Undercity, as the year was winding up, if you listened, you’d hear the question asked too-casually between friends, “Have you had your days?”
Because just as common a superstition was the belief that if you could not count out your five days, you were in danger. Bad luck would come for you, and have something all the worse in store. A death was the usual warning given when explaining it to children – either of a loved one, or even yourself. Hence, the artfully casual question of bad luck, and counting them out. Having someone else listen and agree was usually good, because you could count your days but what if you were lying to yourself about having five days of truly bad luck – would the assumption make Fate raise Her brow?
As a consequence, the last five days of the year were spent carefully, as much as was possible. No one wanted to tempt fate, even with your five days accounted for. It was too bold, crying out “What more can you do to me?” Some people went so far as to not even cook, preparing simple cold meals in advance.
Viktor had grown up with those cold meals and kept the tradition even still. Right before the end of the year, his parents made sure they had stockpiled enough cold food for five days, and as they made the last batches, they would call to him to ask about his days. As a child, it had been recounting of losing his most recent tinkered toy, or the older kids making a game out of him, until the year he didn’t know how to explain Rio and the Doctor so all he had said was, “I thought I had made a friend, but…I hadn’t.”
Nowadays, up in Piltover and ensconced in the Academy’s process-of-approval enforced safety, Viktor had had to adjust his means of measurement. Bad luck in Zaun could and did include deaths (those usually meant two days – the day of the loss, and your first day living without them), but in Piltover bad luck was missing your streetcar. He would never call himself superstitious, but it was too ingrained in him the way everyone had their habits – touching wood after making a wish, throwing a pinch of salt over the shoulder – things you didn’t think about. For Viktor, it was cold meals and theoretical work only, no experiments.
Piltover did not agree.
The last day of the year was a time for drunken parties, revelry and celebration. Most things seemed to be an excuse for that, but the sending off of the old year most of all. His first year in Piltover, on the last day of the year, eating his cold dinner to ward off Fate and absentmindedly reading a novel a classmate had gasped over being a classic, Viktor had been startled fiercely at the boom of fireworks at midnight, not knowing to expect them. That was one way to celebrate that the bad luck days had not hit you, he had thought.
Piltovan celebrations were fireworks, heavy drinking, linking arms around the room and singing half-remembered songs, where the chorus was the only thing sung with confidence. Part of a long string of celebrations all to fill the end of the year – countless public parties announced in newspapers and private festivities that ranged from his peers getting together with cheap wine all the way to the glittering assemblage of the Council. He had been dragged to one of the endless parties by Heimerdinger at the start of his assistantship, and by the end of the third hour he had made the decision to never return.
Everyone was dressed to the nines – to the tens, even, drifting around under sparkling chandeliers and sipping sparkling wine and nibbling at elaborate platters of food that were halfway just for display. It would be a good while yet before Viktor would learn the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” but he understood it intimately the first time he heard it. This generic “Holiday Party” was a massive display of wealth, and Heimerdinger was cheerfully greeting people he knew and was fond of, towing Viktor to introduce him around, and chatting about the rest of the parties they planned on going to for the rest of the year. Leaving Piltover to ring in the new year in the snow, or escaping the cold by going somewhere warm – oh, the Opera Ball, of course, and who could possibly miss the party that one family threw between the party they were at now and the Opera Ball. And would you be back in time for the Ball the Guild of Legal Professionals was throwing?
It was all about as far as it could possibly be from the intentional bunking down the Undercity did at the end of the year. It was easier to tell Heimerdinger that he didn’t like parties as a whole (which was not untrue) than to explain the superstition – he was more secure now and was fairly sure he could explain the cultural difference, but he had been young and anxious about making the professor think of him as less of a scientist and not worth his time because of some belief he couldn’t even honestly say he held. It just was wrong to spend the end of the year in endless parties.
And now there was Jayce.
The first time the New Year came around, Hextech was still entirely in the theoretical side. It was easy for Viktor to keep from doing experiments that could tempt in bad luck, because they just weren’t there yet, it had only been a few months and whether or not they had stabilized the crystal in Heimerdinger’s lab, it had involved a spectacular lightshow and destruction of property that was perhaps not ideal to have inherent to their designs.
And now it was coming around again. They had been partners for over a year now, and while theory was still a good part of their work, they had prototypes and models, practical experiments to run. And Viktor…didn’t want to.
He could explain the cultural difference, probably. But here he was at that same crossroads again. Here was someone he respected, deeply, and Viktor had to tell them that in some wild about-face of personality, he no longer wanted to work endlessly on their projects and inventions, and not even come into the lab at all for no good reason.
Viktor could not, in the middle of the year, even pretend he believed in Fortune keeping the scales in balance or anything similar. But as the nights got longer and the year came to a quiet end…things changed. He sped up, he wanted to get more done, so that in the last five days he could stay out of Bad Luck’s way.
And Viktor was perfectly aware what it looked like, that his momentum kept increasing and then suddenly pulling back, but he didn’t know how to explain his adherence to traditions he didn’t necessarily believe in. Any attempt in his own mind or in his journal led to just going in circles, saying the same things over and over.
Leading him where he was now – in the last week of the year, with only two days to start to explain before he would either get to spend the last days ensconced in quiet, or be recalcitrant and snappish in the lab to a man who absolutely did not deserve it.
“V!”
Speak of Cao-Cao, and Cao-Cao appears.
“You’ll never guess what just happened.”
“Then tell me,” said Viktor, turning to see Jayce, with one hand obviously behind his back. With a warm smile, he amended, “Or show me, rather.”
“I was passing by an undergraduate symposium, I think it was a presentation of their capstones? I don’t know – it was art history, I saw that on the sign.”
“And, what, you have a painting behind your back?” teased Viktor, settling back in his chair as he watched Jayce get closer and closer.
“Better. They were finishing up, and Professor Collum was there.”
“Collum? What would he be doing with art historians?”
“I asked him the same thing! That’s why I stopped. Turns out, one of them was writing about the physics of some form of vaulting? Fan vaults, I think they’re called? He had helped the student with the physics while they did the work about the patronage and development…anyway, they had finished up the symposium, and Collum knows me and…”
With a flourish, Jayce pulled his hand from behind his back, to reveal a whole bottle of wine. Viktor couldn’t help it, he laughed.
“You’re right, I would never have guessed you committed petty theft of alcohol,” he said. “I thought you swore off crime after breaking and entering.”
“You used keys, Vik, we didn’t break anything. And Collum gave it to me, it wasn’t even poured and they were leaving,” laughed Jayce, playfully admonishing. “Come on, you’d take it too, it’s sparkling – it would go flat otherwise.”
“Oh, and we can’t have that.”
Still, he pushed himself to his feet and fetched whatever clean mugs they had floating around, because who kept coupé glasses in a lab? Jayce didn’t complain about using the wrong drinkware for sparkling wine the way someone else probably would, just poured for them as they took their seats far away from where their work was done.
“I wasn’t sure you’d take a break at all,” admitted Jayce, about two mugs and one playful tussle to get another mugful into the bottle. “You’ve been working so hard lately.”
“Was the story about Collum a trick?” teased Viktor, yet he was still gratified when Jayce gave an ugly snort that said it certainly was not, even before he spoke.
“Do you think I know what types of vaults there are on my own?”
“I suppose not. I…will slow down.” It was a promise, a placation, and also a warning. Jayce wouldn’t pick up on all of that, but Viktor still said it.
“You don’t have to. I admire how hard you work, I really do.”
Viktor hummed a note of pleased embarrassment, touched at the sentiment but unsure how to respond. Still, they were quieting down now, and he thought that this was perhaps a way to explain. Jayce poured the last of the sparkling wine between them, topping up their mugs and warning that they had to really savor it now, before launching into an anecdote from the meeting he had been at before snatching their prize.
Viktor half-listened, thinking instead of how to explain what change would take him over in just a few days.
Viktor was quiet beside him; a warm, slight weight. He had leaned against Jayce while playfully stretching out for the wine over fifteen minutes earlier, and Jayce had done all in his power to keep Viktor from remembering that he had done so. He wanted to keep his partner against him long as he could.
So Jayce talked, telling bits from the meeting he had been all but strongarmed into, some distant cousin of Shoola’s that Jayce had gotten the impression only wanted to know about Hextech because of some form of family rivalry. He had taken the long route back to their lab from that meeting to decompress, which was the only reason he saw the art historians and Professor Collum among them.
Finally, he ran out of stories, and just sipped his mug of wine, happy in the ideal scenario of his most juvenile dreams – in his own lab, pursuing his lifelong dream, with Viktor leaning against him, his elegant hand of blocky knuckles resting on Jayce’s forearm. If the room was at all colder, he’d put his arm around Viktor, hold him small and warm against him.
He wished the room was just that little bit colder.
The art historians and their symposium had been the firmest reminder of the ending of the year. He and Viktor had been keeping such absurd hours at the lab that the lengthening of the nights meant virtually nothing to him. They had left into the night plenty of times even in the summer. But the year was ending – they had received an invitation to the Council’s Holiday Party, and Viktor had turned it down firmly, citing that he never went even when he had been Heimerdinger’s assistant.
Jayce had gone alone, and been bored to tears.
But the Opera Ball was usually fun – they built the dancefloor out from the stage to a false-floor over the seating, and built up a mirror image of the boxes, the proscenium arch in the middle the only thing that reminded you that this was an auditorium.
House Talis had a box at that party – on the constructed side, yes, but still a box. His mother liked to watch the Opening Waltz from it, to see the formations the debutantes and bachelors made. Jayce liked to have the place to take breaks from it all. Viktor could sit there all night, Jayce would waltz with his mother at the opening of the floor, and Caitlyn if she was dragged along, and then retire back to the Talis box, and sit with Viktor, gossiping all night, drinking sparkling wine just like this.
He should invite Viktor now – the Opera Ball was in a couple days, it was close to the wire, but the Talis Box wasn’t full yet, he could still do it. That was the balancing act – too far in advance and Viktor would find a good excuse to get out of it, and too late and it wouldn’t be possible to invite him at all.
A vision, suddenly, of himself on the dance floor, spinning his mother through the waltz, and looking up to see Viktor in their box, watching him. It was a good, warm idea. His partner, with him and watching over him, but at a distance that made him comfortable – and a ready-made excuse for Jayce to hide away with him. Perhaps he’d swipe one of those platters of chocolates they always spread out in the lobby space.
“How has your year been?” asked Viktor out of nowhere, his voice quiet.
“Hmm?” managed Jayce, shaking himself out of fantasy to pay attention.
“You know, your successes, your disappointments – your good and bad luck. Have your days come?”
“I think it’s been a pretty good year, V.”
Viktor’s mouth soured for a moment before he said, “We blew up a prototype, in April.”
“We did,” agreed Jayce, distracted by the single finger now pressing on his forearm, the rest still at ease. “Set us back by weeks. But we got back on track, didn’t we?”
“I suppose.” Then, consideringly, he continued, “Your mother wasn’t too happy, though, you had to miss something with her, what was it again?”
“Don’t remind me. Cousin’s wedding, Mom still gives me grief over that. I don’t even spend time with him socially, I was only invited because I had to be.”
“Your mother’s ire is not to be scoffed at,” agreed Viktor. A second finger now, twin points of pressure. “And in the summer, you complained for days about the Council demanding we explain the mathematics of how the Hexgates make their trajectories, even though they couldn’t understand them. You were insufferable, and then the day actually came, and it was worse than we thought. Salo asking about the square root of negative one?”
Jayce groaned, dropping his head backwards. It had been terrible. The whole presentation had been derailed by Jayce (because Viktor would have torn them to pieces) having to explain about imaginary numbers and their importance to complex mathematics, and then longer with both of them (and Heimerdinger, at the end) having to soothe egos that no, Complex Mathematics was the name, they were not saying the Council was not intelligent enough to understand – okay, let’s start from the beginning, there are things called natural numbers…
(Mel Medarda had been laughing, her eyes sparkling the entire time. As to whether or not she herself was any form of mathematician, Jayce did not know. But she had certainly found the offended barking of her fellow Councilors amusing.)
“Why would you bring that back up?”
“You told me not to remind you about the wedding, I thought a worse memory would make you forget,” said Viktor, his voice sly in the way Jayce really liked. And now three fingers were pressing into his forearm.
“You just reminded me about the wedding, now I’m thinking about both of them. You’re the worst, this is the worst.”
“Bad luck, having me here, huh?” The fourth finger was pressing and retreating, a restless almost tapping.
“No, never,” said Jayce. He didn’t know why, but it felt important to tell Viktor that no, it was good to have him there.
Or maybe he did know why – Viktor was counting the worst days of the year, and nearly adding this (warm against him, mugs of sparkling wine, taking a rest after two weeks of nearly ceaseless work) to the count. And sure enough, the fourth finger completely retreated.
“You lead a charmed life, then,” said Viktor, his thumb beginning to tap against Jayce’s arm, a metronome ticking to some unheard song. “Surely you’ve had something else unlucky?”
He was so close, and so friendly with his fingers, and Jayce didn’t know why, and he shook his head a moment before saying, “Why are we reminiscing over all the bad that’s happened? Can’t we focus on the good?”
Viktor’s thumb kept tapping, but the beat slowed and slowed until it stopped. Then, with a short nod to himself, the pressure lightened, his hand just resting again, not counting anything.
“I had a day I could not manage to come to the lab, do you remember? Too much pain.” One finger pressed in again, counting once more.
“You were a terror,” agreed Jayce, a little thrown. “I thought you would actually kill me when I checked on you.”
“Eh, well, I never pretended to be gracious. And then we blew up the prototype.” Two fingers. “After that conference we went to, where they promised there would be food and only served those little snacks all night? I went home, and I had forgotten that I had eaten the leftovers I had been relying on. I went to bed hungry that night.” Three fingers.
“Vik –”
“A pipe burst in my building this fall, the whole place was without hot water for two days. I learned that the hard way when I came home from our lab and tried to take a shower.” Four fingers.
“I still don’t –”
“And earlier this month, I erased some of my own work before I transferred it to my notebook, I had to redo an entire day’s work.” Five fingers, pressed to Jayce’s forearm. “The superstition is that every year has five days of bad luck. You count them, at the end of the year, to remind yourself that you survived them, that they already happened. If you can’t count five days of bad luck, then they will come for you in the last days, and be all the worse for it.”
Do you really believe in that? Jayce wanted to ask. But at the same time, that was unfair. He certainly counted the alphabet while twisting the stem of an apple, to see what the first letter of his spouse’s name would be. He always hoped to get the coin in the cake and the prosperity it promised.
He had his superstitions that he did without thinking too much about it. Viktor had his. His just included making sure all his bad luck was behind him.
“So, what do you do if you don’t have five days?” he asked instead.
“Brace yourself,” said Viktor with a shrug. “But most people keep quiet, the last days of the year, try not to tempt fate.”
“Do you?”
Viktor was quiet a long moment, before he said, “My family kept the older traditions. Not everyone follows them, you must understand. But in the last five days, we hunkered down like everyone else does – at least as much as we could, sometimes you have to take the shift. But on top of that, we only ate cold food.”
“Because of cooking on an open flame?”
“The old reasoning, I suppose. I think most people eat cold meals on New Year’s Eve, but we kept all five days.”
A realization, then. “You promised to slow down. That was a warning, wasn’t it?”
“The end of the year is something quiet, not for parties. I was intending to do theoretical work, our experiments are too risky. Is that…alright?”
Is that alright – as if Jayce hadn’t been dreaming of making Viktor take a break and wondering if the promise of a Box at the Opera Ball would be enough. A Ball, he realized, he had been imagining hiding away from, tucked away in a quiet Box with Viktor, watching everyone else dance and not having to participate. Quiet and alone.
“We’ll both take a break,” Jayce said aloud. “There’s nothing so pressing five days would make a difference. Do you have enough food already, or should you take tomorrow off too, get groceries? I’m not great at meal prep, but I could help.”
Jayce was perhaps more important to Viktor than he was currently comfortable admitting even to himself (especially to himself), and his opinion of Viktor was more important to him than even Heimerdinger’s had been. Which was also not a comfortable realization to have made.
It was why the mugs full of sparkling wine had been so important to Viktor’s ability to say anything about his traditions and superstitions – alcohol was a reliable scapegoat that most people were very happy to honor the invocation of. Viktor could always blame it, if push came to shove, and Jayce would likely let the polite fiction slide.
And now, instead of an understanding that Viktor would retreat to his apartment and to his theories while Jayce shone at all the parties Piltover could conjure – he was suggesting that he come over and help Viktor cook in advance.
So he sat up, pulling away from the comfortable place he had made for himself in Jayce’s side, looked Jayce in the eye and said, “I did not tell you that to make you feel you have to follow my traditions. I know there are a lot of parties you will want to go to and–”
“Well, what if I want to stay home from the parties and spend it doing theory with you?” challenged back Jayce.
“But – you must have your own traditions.”
“My mom makes me go to the Opera Ball and I spend half of it in House Talis’ box already. We already had our family’s get together for the end of the year – my cousin just got back from his honeymoon trip so it was two birds with one stone.”
(Just got back? It had been over half a year since the wedding!)
“V, I would much rather spend the end of the year doing theoretical work than being dragged from party to party. The Opera Ball is only fun if you’re with people you like, and Caitlyn warned me she was going to skip it this year.”
Viktor worked his jaw for a moment, before he warned, “I did not plan to come to the lab.”
“I figured, from how you said it. I could come over, in the mornings? You could kick me out when you had enough of me.”
And wasn’t that a thought? Viktor turned the idea over in his mind a few times, calculating the facets of the idea – Jayce in his home and doing math together, like that first precious night before their world changed in an explosion of magic. It works! On paper.
Finally, caving to the heart he often tried to keep in check, he said, “You are in charge of your own food.”
The smile he got in return was blinding, and Viktor reflected that perhaps having Jayce so close at the end of the year was defeating the purpose. So much for trying not to tempt Fate.