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In the after, amidst the warm breeze and birdsong and the steady overwhelming calm, there is no hesitation. The minute Viktor opens his eyes it is nothing but Jayce, a large body being thrown against his, and an all-encompassing kiss. They don’t need to discuss it. Viktor has seen into Jayce’s soul. He knows exactly how he feels about him.
He’s known it for a while now, that his feelings were never as one-sided as they seemed. Has known it since he saw Dr. Reveck’s daughter lying in stasis and realized that maybe Jayce’s bout of necromancy wasn’t simply an act of panicked and selfish stupidity.
When he woke up all metal and magic and wrong it was easy to hate Jayce, just for a minute. There had been a plan for his life. A short one, and certainly not the ending he would have picked if he’d had a hand in his own destiny, but he’d made his peace with it. Done what he thought he could to help change the world before he left it. And then Jayce had taken that from him too. But he can see now what it really was. He can’t pretend he wouldn’t have tried to do the same were their positions reversed.
From the time they met they had been Jayce-and-Viktor. Always two halves of a whole, better together. The two of them created actual, literal magic. It wasn’t an exaggeration that the feeling of that floating, glowing moment in the airspace above Heimerdinger’s lab was the same feeling Viktor felt now, felt sparks of every time Jayce touched him. It was only the logical conclusion that their partnership would come to this.
When Jayce tells Viktor that he loves him it's with the sort of uncontested finality usually reserved for facts. It's the sort of observation that has no place in their kind of science: has no room to be tested or tried. No hypothesis to put to the blackboard. The sky is blue, water is wet, and Jayce loves Viktor.
He knows the words Jayce wants to hear—means them, of course—but he can’t get them past his tongue. They sound strange and gargled and Jayce deserves better. Deserves to hear them the right way. Viktor has never done things by halves, could never afford to and won’t start now. But that doesn’t mean the feeling isn’t there. It’s always been there.
Part of him still feels like he still doesn’t deserve Jayce, doesn’t deserve his love. The weight of what he’s done hangs over him like an anvil ready to drop once the universe thinks better of its decision to release him from the arcane’s grasp. It’s stifling to finally have something you wanted so desperately and still feel as though you shouldn’t take it.
But now that he knows how Jayce feels it's hard to unknow it, even from as far back as their academy days. The steadying touches and gap-toothed smiles and the pastries from the corner store before a late night—none of that has changed. There were signs of it back then if Viktor had known how to read them better. Yet another Piltie language he’d had trouble with.
Love in Zaun is obvious, can’t afford to be anything but. It’s a city of time running out, head on a swivel, kiss me quick before I lose you because we don’t know what could happen tomorrow, I’m all in if you’re all in. Jayce tells him sometimes that he kisses like a man starved of affection, and he doesn’t think it’s far from the truth. Not now of course, never with Jayce. But there’s some validity in being able to count the people who have shown Viktor unconditional kindness on one hand.
Jayce presses the words to Viktor’s mouth often enough that he knows how they’re supposed to sound. He wants to give them back to him, wants to cover him in I love you s like the threadbare blanket he still clings to in the evenings when the nightmares are inescapable.
Instead he makes him another cup of coffee in the morning. He rests his thin fingers over Jayce’s shaking leg when he can tell the cold is making it ache more than usual. He holds the mirror steady when Jayce’s hair gets too long for him to feel like himself.
The days where Jayce lets himself break are scarce and Viktor often has to coax it out of him when he can tell he’s been bottling up too much for too long. He faces Jayce’s self doubt like he would a particularly tough equation and starts with the facts: You are strong, you are capable, you have so much to offer this world. Yes, still. Yes, even now. There is time to make up for the things you have done, that we have done. It is alright to feel your emotions.
Once the facts are established, he goes over what he personally knows to be true. The things that have helped before.
You are the kindest man I know. Your past does not have to define you. I do not think less of you for having these thoughts. You do not have to carry them alone. Why don’t you speak with your mother, and I’ll sit beside you and hold your hand. We can go to bed early tonight, and I’ll sing you that lullaby.
Jayce scares him when he’s like this, speaks openly about feeling like he doesn’t deserve Viktor. Viktor can’t imagine any reason why someone like Jayce could feel like there was anything in the world he didn’t deserve. He reassures him all the same pressing soft kisses to the scar over his eyebrow, the roughness of stubble on the underside of his jaw, and each mark on his forehead in a promise that he’s not going anywhere.
Viktor’s bad days are stormier, more frequent. Set off by the pain that even now won’t leave his leg, the unbearable weight of the past, and the actions that were his but also not his. He wakes up frustrated, melancholy, inconsolable.
When he gets like this he thinks of another timeline, one where he and Jayce are out there just solving equations together and he never corrupted the Hexcore and everything stayed good until the end. He thinks of the universe that must exist where Jayce had told him how he felt before it’d been too late, and the ones where he’s able to tell Jayce in plain and simple words that he loves him too.
Selfishly he wonders about an existence where he lost the battle with time and disease, and if Jayce stayed with him until the end. If he stayed with him even after, left his heart in the past while the world kept turning. Maybe in that universe Viktor wouldn’t be a coward. He hopes he didn’t wait until his last breath to tell him, in that one.
He doesn’t know how to ask for Jayce’s help with this, doesn’t even know where to begin or what would ease the screaming in his head. He pushes Jayce away on these days, and Jayce gives him the space.
But he’s always there when Viktor opens the door again, a safe harbor with a steaming cup of something sweet at the ready. He encourages the thoughts out of his head and reminds him to breathe and shares his pain, never letting him face it alone. Jayce reminds him that he loves him still, he will love him forever. That was his part of the deal. Viktor would stay, and he would try, and Jayce would love him. Simple as that.
The fingerprints on Jayce’s forehead don’t hurt, but he swears he can feel them. Viktor asks once what the feeling is like, and the answer makes him cry. A little warm, a little tingly. Not much different than how it feels when you hold my hand except it's all the time. Viktor doesn’t know what to do with such softness, has never welcomed anything in that didn’t bite.
What was it like, Jayce asks one night when they’re tangled in the sheets. To be the Herald? Viktor grimaces.
At the time it had been everything. It was power, and respect, and all of the things his ‘before’ body was never granted. It had been the ability to help, to finally do the good he had always strived to do.
Of course, that had been the manipulation talking.
Viktor never wanted to be a god, not really. He’d only wanted to help, never comfortable with the praise and adoration that came with it. That was part of the reason he’d stayed comfortably in the shadows at the academy. The reason he was happy to let Jayce be the face of Hextech.
When it’s Jayce taking him apart—with his hands and his mouth and his words—he feels the closest to how he had back then: revered and cherished and almost holy.
He thinks now that he might not mind the worship if it’s Jayce at the altar.
Jayce has always needed to make sure that everyone knows what’s his. Viktor had teased him for it when they met, called him egotistical then and most days since, albeit with all the bite of a newborn kitten. He signs every page of Viktor, too; marks Viktor’s pale skin with deep purple blooms just beyond the reach of his collar.
It’s not meant to be a challenge. Viktor knows who he is, what he’s done. The imprint of Jayce’s teeth on his neck isn’t what keeps others away. The reminder is for Jayce to brush his fingertips against when he starts to get the faraway look in his eye; when he shrinks down into himself. Much less a beacon and more an anchor.
Viktor is hesitant to belong to anyone. He has always been defined by something else. A child of the fissures, the assistant to the dean, a conduit for the Arcane. He’s from Zaun, a city that’s very existence is inextricably bound and tied to another’s and Viktor has always refused to be that as well. His whole life he has been a victim of poverty, of disease, of experimentation. He hadn’t been sure he was ready to be a victim of Jayce’s love too.
He knows now that it’s different. That being loved does not equal being a belonging. He has seen the actions Jayce performs out of love—the way he fusses over his mothers’ fingers like they’re precious gold and not simple metal; like they’re a true extension of herself and not a reminder of what they used to be.
When Jayce calls him his , he knows that he is Jayce’s not in the way that a dog has a master but instead his in the way that Zaun is his. His to call home. His to care for, to defend, to cherish. Jayce calls Viktor his not like possession, but like devotion.
Viktor thinks that this is something he can learn to accept.
One evening Jayce returns home late and deposits a small bundle onto Viktor’s lap, looking down at him like a pup waiting for a reward. Viktor eyes the package skeptically; it looks to be from a market, definitely outside of the small radius they’ve allowed themselves to travel for fear of being recognized. He unwraps it to find anise—the key component in his favorite drink—something they haven’t been able to get their hands on since their Hextech days.
He feels his throat tighten with emotion as the scent of the star-shaped pods fills the air. He needs to tell him, he needs to say it now. This man who risked his safety just to buy Viktor the ingredients for sweetmilk…
“Do you like it?” Jayce asks sheepishly. “This is the right thing, right?”
They’d argued so many times about what was worth going into town for. Viktor had assumed that something like this was so unimportant that it went without saying.
“Jayce, I…”
But the words he wants still won’t come. Jayce takes the bundle from him, sets it on the table and pulls Viktor to his feet and into a kiss sweeter than any drink.
“I know.” he tucks back a loose strand of Viktor’s hair, kisses him again, and whispers against the shell of his ear: “I love you too.”