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Chapter Text

“Do I make it hard on you?”

Viktor glances up, his face softening as he takes in Jayce’s posture, his expression: slumped, bent, his eyes shining. 

Carefully he puts his hand on Jayce’s knee. 

“No, lásko,” he says. “What makes you think that?” 

“We were talking about—” Jayce breaks off, gives him a quick helpless look. Viktor nods, he knows what it means—we, talking, that shorthand for Jayce’s therapist—and Jayce looks at him gratefully, wetting his lips. It’s still hard for him to talk about these things. Sometimes Viktor thinks it only gets harder for Jayce, his tender Jayce. 

“How not getting… help,” he says hesitantly, “makes other people do it for you. If you don’t do the work, everybody else has to…” he smiles, quick and nervous, like a flinch. “To take it on.” 

“Ah,” Viktor says. 

“I didn’t mean to make it hard on you,” he says, rubbing his wrist. 

And again Viktor knows what he means, because he has to; because all their life is like this, the shadowy parts, this anxious shorthand, inability to touch the darkness because Jayce is afraid of touching something that touches back. And he thinks about the self-destruction, the awful nights Jayce didn’t come home, the worse nights he came home wrecked and inconsolable, caught in loops, repeating terrible things about himself, all misrepresentations and pain. 

Coaxing him shaky into the shower, holding him close as he howled, face wrenched up. 

Waking up to find him on the floor, because he thought he belonged there. 

“You haven’t made it hard on me,” Viktor says. “You’re getting help, no?”

“But before,” he says, almost swallowing his words. The guilt in his face is terrible. Such a delicate face for such a strong man. Viktor tilts it towards him and kisses it. 

“And you don’t think it was better than the alternatives?” Viktor says. “Never knowing you, never helping you? Watching you suffer?”

“You still watched me suffer,” Jayce says, averting his eyes. His thumb, rubbing the same spot on his wrist, the skin already turning pink. 

“I did,” he agrees. He stills Jayce’s hand, his coolness over so much heat. Jayce’s eyes tracing the shape of his fingers, his palm finally turning to hold Viktor’s in his. 

“And it was… hard,” Jayce says. The pad of his thumb touches Viktor’s. 

“It was terrible,” he agrees, brushing a soft curl from Jayce’s forehead. “And I loved you, and I love you. And I would do it again.” 

Jayce winces. 

“I don’t want to do it to you again.”

“You won’t,” Viktor says easily. “Not in that way. And not to me, you understand? But if you’re struggling again, I hope you know I wouldn’t hesitate to carry you again. Even if you think you can, eh. Take it. Perhaps especially then.”

The soft curl falling into his eyes again, Viktor tucking it back. 

“Don’t hide from me, lásko,” he says. “If you need me, never hide.” He brings Jayce’s wrist to his lips, worried pink, and kisses the marks. “I want to find you every time.” 

Chapter Text

For a long time he needs to be held. 

As a child Jayce remembers tucking a frozen pup inside his shirt, holding it there against his heart until it was warm, saved by love. He was a child; of course he saw it in those terms. But here he is in his thirties, tucking Viktor against his chest, and thinking about it again. 

He’d been everything in the universe, his Viktor, quilted from a thousand souls, memories and visions and flashes of touch threaded together, and then he was nothing, and alone. He woke up crying the way an infant cries, senseless, and Jayce had torn open his shirt, pressed him into warm, wanting skin: hot, vital, encompassing. 

“Vik,” he whispered then, kissing the top of his head over and over. “Oh, Viktor.”

He doesn’t know how anyone survives it. Was there any precedent? Viktor had been given divine understanding, torn from the patterns of the stars; and then he was sick in Jayce’s arms. “Oh Vik, it’s okay,” Jayce says, as his partner cries. 

Since their great catastrophe Jayce has often felt like two people—one innocent but infuriatingly guileless, undamaged, the other twenty years older or more, wiser, mostly destroyed—but this is the first time he’s wished it was really true. That he could split himself in two, hold Viktor twice as much, keep him twice as loved. 

Another way of saying this: Jayce doesn’t feel like enough anymore. 

—

There’s no answer, really, to the question how do you go from everything to something? Not in the usual sense of answer. But here he is, rubbing soft circles with his thumbs into Viktor’s milky white thighs, and it does feel like something; it feels like the something he wants Viktor to be. 

He traces up the white cathedral of Viktor’s ribs, bends to let his lips drift up Viktor’s spine. Crooked, familiar, like his smile. Jayce loves him more than anything, down to his crooked bones. 

“How’s that, baby?” he murmurs, and Viktor deflates underneath him, sinking into the bed. “That good, huh?”

He kisses the sharp edges of Viktor’s shoulder blades, the knobs of his hips, the sweet-smelling length of his neck, salt, clean skin. Jayce missed this body. He touches every place like he’s making a pilgrimage, an invocation. Viktor was always a god in his eyes. 

The only time in his life Viktor had known such abundance, up in the stars. Well, Jayce can give him abundance. He turns his partner over and kisses the exact center of his chest, like burying his nose in a flower, breathing, lingering. “Missed you,” he says. “God I missed you, Vik.”

And Viktor curls his arms around Jayce’s neck, heavy and tired. He looks up at Jayce through slit eyes, the seam of gold he loves, the throaty murmur as he tries to speak. 

Jayce can almost see him smile. 

Chapter Text

They start with such practical things: fingers, a voice box, articulated knees. And Viktor is quiet, still, wanting more. 

“I want to—“ he says one evening, abruptly, before cutting himself off. His voice is metallic, but metallic in the way that melted gold is metallic: silky, golden. 

Jayce covers his hand. He knows Viktor can feel it, just a little. 

“Tell me what you want, Vik,” he says softly. He would do anything for Viktor; hasn’t the past year shown them both as much? 

Viktor’s porcelain face is tilted away, and his lips are painted on but tense, somehow. Or maybe it’s the old Viktor, images superimposed: memories of the way he would worry his lower lip, the way his eyebrows draw together when he’s puzzled, the way he would hold his jaw, the precise angle. Everything about Viktor had been precise, long before he was a machine. 

“I want,” he says, pausing again, and when he finishes his voice is very quiet. “To be soft.”

It occurs to Jayce that he’s embarrassed. He traces Viktor’s hand lightly with his fingertips, encouraging.  

“Touch is… important to you,” Viktor says. “I think we both know this. I want to be something—” he flinches, they both do; Viktor still hesitates to think of himself as a person “—inviting. And comfortable.” He closes his hand around Jayce’s. “When you hold me at night it’s like holding a carburetor,” Viktor says plainly. “I want it to feel like you’re holding some— something that loves you back.”

“Viktor,” he chokes. 

“These things seem so… small,” Viktor says, his gold eyes glancing down. “But they aren’t really. Not to me. Not to you.” He leans in to press his mouth to Jayce’s cheek; the cold enamel makes him shiver. “I want to be good for you.”

“You’re good for me,” Jayce insists. 

“Then I want to be better.” The cold face again, nuzzling at his cheek. 

Something about it always startles him. This is Viktor to him—his slow nod, his delicate way of talking, his warm sense of humor—until the moment they touch and he realizes, nearly surprised, that the person he loves doesn’t take that shape anymore. And a blanket wouldn’t change that, or quilted padding, not in a way that mattered, but—

But—

“During the day it would be impractical, I think,” Jayce says. “But maybe something soft you can wear at night. I can help you into it like I used to help with your brace.”He smiles, a little teary, not sure if he’s feeling joy or grief. “I miss that.”

“I miss it too,” Viktor says. He draws Jayce closer, against the cool cylinder of his chest. A carburetor. 

Jayce’s carburetor, engine of his days. 

Chapter Text

There are the usual nightmares, and the unusual ones. All day after a bad dream it lingers with him, stays inside his bones, and Viktor can see it. He’s jumpy, ill at ease, the whites of his eyes showing. They walk to the market together hand in hand, and as Viktor’s paying for their bread someone gets too close, cutting against Jayce’s bad side. He snarls, like an animal. 

“Jayce,” Viktor hisses, appalled. He takes Jayce by the wrist, applying soft pressure to the meat of his palm—urgent little signals, tapped out. Jayce closes his mouth, looking dizzy. 

“I’m here,” Viktor murmurs in his ear. “I’m here and you’re here.”

Jayce looks down, jerkily. 

“I… know that,” he says under his breath, but the edge of the words curl up, a question. Viktor sends him to buy meat, tucking the coins into his hand. 

“Nothing to be ashamed of,” the old woman says when he’s gone, patting Viktor’s shoulder. “Plenty of men damaged in the war.”

Viktor looks at him through the sunny haze of the market: his sweet man, suffering, lopsided, white-knuckling the grip of his cane. The traces of silver shining in his hair. 

“Yes,” Viktor says faintly. “He was, ah. Damaged in the war.”

—

Viktor understands. He has dreams too. The white perfect bodies, the white perfect mask of the man he loved, ferns and lichen breaking through. 

There are the things he’s seen and then there are the things he’s seen through other people’s eyes: sharp, vivid, indistinguishable. 

The things he’s seen through Jayce’s eyes. The sharpest of all. 

—

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he had said, before he stopped talking. He said it wistfully, like he was confessing his dreams, casting a spell. Viktor hadn’t protested, knew better than to argue. Instead he held Jayce a little tighter in bed, nosing kisses into the nape of his neck. He smelled like woodsmoke; he smelled, a little, like Viktor. 

Of course all he does now is worry, quietly. He sees the way Jayce has to pull himself up in the morning, the way he sits on the side of the bed, head hanging in his hands. He knows that sometimes Jayce’s leg hurts so badly, deeper than bone-deep, that he can barely get dressed. Silently Viktor kneels at the foot of the bed and helps him into his pants and brace. He can see how hard it is for Jayce to trust anyone anymore. How easy it is for him to turn his face away. 

And he feels it, the way Jayce loves him. 

Probably that worries him most of all. 

—

He’s tired now of hearing his own voice. In the old days Jayce was the one who told their story, hour after hour—excitable, pleased, endearing—and Viktor hardly needed to say a thing. He would nod, smile a little, tilt his head. He let Jayce tell him who he was. 

And now it’s Viktor’s responsibility, and he finds that he can’t take it. 

The day Jayce starts telling his own story again, Viktor will know he’s healing, if not healed. 

But he doesn’t think Jayce should tell his story for him anymore. 

—

He hasn’t spoken for a while now, but Viktor hears him in other ways. His hands, the softness of his touch. The surprise on his face, the slow hope seeping through it and the faint, jerky smile when Viktor touches him back. 

“I love you,” Viktor murmurs, cupping his rough face in his hands. “I love you more than anything.”

He worries Jayce is done believing him. 

Still he tries. Devotion, devotion. Holds Jayce close at night, lips pressed to his shoulder like a prayer. Lives for the soft moments when Jayce forgets where and when he is, safe in Viktor’s arms. Those drowsy minutes, half-asleep, when he believes safety is possible. 

Looking at him then, stroking curls from his sweet face, Viktor believes it too. 

He holds Jayce a little closer and lets his body tell their story now: wounded, soft, forgiving. 

Chapter Text

He had been an alcoholic for a long time and his body carried that story. It was something Viktor accepted about him, something he accepted about himself; they were both broken permanently, in certain ways. 

He’s accepted that he’ll never know a Jayce who doesn’t drink himself to sleep at night, doesn’t wake him up with warm, soft kisses to his neck at three in the morning, sleepy and needy and drunk. Doesn’t need holding, arms snug around his heavy waist, doesn’t need Viktor’s hands on his back when he’s sick, bent over the kitchen sink. Viktor loves him so much, loves him more than he hates what Jayce has done to himself. 

They’re the same that way. 

There’s someone brighter he’ll never know, someone he has no desire to know.  

He loves his Jayce, who takes his flask to faculty parties, tucked discreetly in his back pocket; who smells like vodka and peppermint gum; who dances with him a little too close, warm calloused hands on Viktor’s waist, and mouthes careful kissed into his neck; who looks apologetically at himself in the mirror, his hairy belly and the mess of his hair, and rubs the back of his neck; who looks at Viktor apologetically when he knows he’s gone a little too far, tipping over from sweet happy drunkennness into tears, his hot red face pressed into the safety of Viktor’s shoulder, wetting his checkered shirt.  

And Jayce who sleeps at his bedside when he’s in the hospital; who comes every day, unquestioningly, full of gossip and soft words and containers of his mother’s tamales he’s snuck in, with forks so they can share; who brings him stones he picks up on the walk over, because he knows how much it wrecks Viktor, being kept inside a white room, not getting to feel the world under his hands, how it takes him back to his lonely sickness as a child. Who kisses the bruises on his leg at night, touches them distinctly, like letters of the alphabet. Who hasn’t let Viktor feel sick in that lonely way again, not once since the day they met. 

He wouldn’t want another Jayce, no. 

Chapter Text

For so long they’ve been pursuer and pursued, moth and lantern. It’s unsustainable, they both know it, even if they can’t admit it to themselves; even if Jayce’s wings are flaring to ash at the edges, even if he would throw himself at the light a thousand times again. 

Even if Viktor would watch him dissolving, helpless, behind glass. 

Jayce has always been the one who loves abundantly, loves through abundance, who wants and wants and burns. For the longest time it was impossible for him to identify what he felt for Viktor, a single confused and nearly oppressive emotion of yearning-affection-admiration and not a little hero worship, because he didn’t want anything from Viktor, didn’t dream about his mouth or his cock or any particular placement of his hands, and wasn’t that was love was, wanting something very badly? And here Jayce was, hapless, only wanting to be wanted.  

To be needed, even. 

And Viktor has always been the one who curtly refuses to be helped, not always distinguishing between help and love, love that looks like offered forearms and borrowed coats and massaged hands and can be mistaken for pity. And Viktor was the one who always retreated, because retreating was easier than being known; because his life in Piltover was a series of imagined identities and performances that had to be carried out exactly right, often through omission, mostly by suggestion, and anyone who got too close would inevitably pierce the veil. And behind the veil was a thin, lonely boy in a cave with a dirty face and a leg that didn’t work and a cane that didn’t work either. 

Unsustainable. Afterwards, in a dark ramshackle house with nothing but time, they talk about it, tentatively. Indirectly, because Viktor shies away from direction; gently, because Jayce is easily hurt. If there’s one thing Viktor saw in the arcane it was that enormous, luminous heart, impossible, wounded. 

“It’s not that I think you can’t do it,” he says, touching the small of Viktor’s back.
It’s that I like doing it. To show you I…” he falters. “I care.” 

“But I know you care,” Viktor says. 

“I know,” he says, frustrated. “I know you know. But I have to do it. If I don’t do it, what’s the point?”

“You can’t possibly—”

“It’s like a theory that’s never been put into practice,” Jayce continues. “Like some big wonderful equation and you never use it. An airship you never put in the air. And you could use it as a house, I guess, but—” He laughs, helpless. “But I want it to put it in the sky.” 

Viktor considers. 

“And you do this by… holding my arm as we walk.” 

“Yes!” Jayce says excitably. “Yes. Not all the time—not, you know, overbearing, but—I know I’m overbearing—”

“You are not overbearing,” he says. “But, eh. Sometimes a little bearing.” 

Jayce laughs, eyes crinkling. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “I’m bearing. But it’s how I love you.” 

There’s a silence that stops them both. It’s too direct, love; it makes Viktor pull back. Jayce touches his wrist. “Sorry,” he says softly, absurdly. 

Viktor shakes his head. They cut his hair almost immediately, in those first days, and here it is growing out again, dark and shaggy, falling over his eyes. 

“Don’t apologize for it,” he says, behind the veil. 

—

“I worry I’m not very good at this,” he says finally. “And you’ll find out.” 

The lantern burning on the table, the rain shining on the window. Jayce’s calloused fingers smooth over his, a small, repeating motion. 

“You think that’s better than never trying?” he asks.  

“Yes,” Viktor says, studying his hands. “No. I don’t know.” 

“I don’t think anyone is good at love,” he says. “I think you can’t apply, uh. Performance standards.” 

“I suppose it sounds a little ridiculous,” Viktor says. 

“A little,” he concedes, with a half-smile. “But that doesn’t mean you’re ridiculous. I just think you’re… hard on yourself.”

Viktor leans back, crossing his arms. 

“And you’re not?” he asks. 

Jayce barks out a laugh. 

“Oh I’m hard on myself,” he says. “Absolutely. But I’m not hard on you.” He touches Viktor’s hand again, light and careful. “Never hard on you.”

For a moment Viktor can’t find his voice. It’s the warmth of Jayce’s hand, like a small shelter, and the warmth in his eyes, the earnestness in his face. The glittering marks where Viktor touched him and never really left. He doesn’t know why he can’t be even half as brave as Jayce, to let someone touch him and linger; to admit he’s afraid of letting go. 

“Well,” he says faintly. “If you’ll be patient.” 

Jayce’s fingers tighten around his. 

Love again, in different words. 

Chapter Text

Afterwards Viktor knows what he means; of course he knows what he means. The stilted way he walks, constrained little steps, the hesitant way he holds himself, the burning copper in his eyes. 

So Viktor opens his arms and Jayce comes to him, slumps into him, a slow-moving collapse. He curls against Viktor on the couch, taking up as little space as he can, his head resting on his partner’s shoulder. A little wetness creeps onto Viktor’s shirt. 

“Sólnyshka,” Viktor says. He tucks Jayce’s big body into his arms, threads his fingers through his dark hair. 

“They don’t get it,” he chokes. “They’re never gonna get it.” His voice cracks. “Or me. There’s something wrong with me, Vik.” 

Viktor kisses the top of his head. 

“Deep breaths,” he says. 

Violation. Viktor knows it. Another night of fundraising, another night of hands he doesn’t want patting his back and shoulders, laying proprietary claim to his arms, laughing at things that weren’t jokes, not to Jayce. Never to Jayce. 

“I’m so tired,” Jayce breathes. “I’m tired of feeling like the only one in the world who—” he sucks in air. “The only person who makes sense to me is you.” 

He cries wetly into Viktor’s shoulder for a while, in the darkened room. The lights are low, just the softness of the table lamp, and Viktor’s paperback is wedged open on his knee, and the man he loves most in the world is crying in his arms. Viktor kisses his ear, breathes in his comforting scent. Even like this Jayce is comforting. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says, running his knuckles down the sharp line of Jayce’s jaw. 

“I’m gonna feel this way forever,” Jayce weeps. 

“Oh sweetheart,” he says. 

Viktor loosens his tie, kisses a bit of exposed neck. Jayce whimpers. His cool lips on Jayce’s hot throat. Carefully he unbuttons Jayce’s jacket. 

“I’m here,” he says. “Even when I’m not with you I’m here.” 

These nights are no good for his leg, his back, hours on his feet pacing the ballroom, chatting up sponsors, bent over canapés. The rare blinding flash of Jayce’s smile across the room: a rescue signal, but also a plea to be rescued. And Viktor could never rescue him enough. 

He braves it for them both. This sweet, trembling man, too human, soft parts too exposed, translucent, a pear too easily grasped and bruised. Manhandled in these crowded rooms; mauled by eyes. Viktor can almost see the impression of fingerprints on his skin. He traces little circles in the short hairs at the nape of Jayce’s neck, feeling him shudder, breathing out, giving way. “Sweet boy,” Viktor murmurs. Delicate, his Jayce, an invisible kind of delicacy. 

A crowded room; his frantic eyes. 

“You do so much for us,” Viktor says, kissing the tender space under his ear, then his warm sweaty temple.  

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, ragged. “It doesn’t make a difference. We mean nothing to these people. They make me feel like—” his lips are parted, dry, searching for words. “Like no one loves me at all.” 

And Viktor knows what he means; of course he knows what he means. Not I wish I was admired, but these people care about me so little, misunderstand me so profoundly, that I feel like no one has ever understood me, ever.

And he knows what that’s like. He’s felt it a thousand times, in the years before they met. 

Viktor eases his jacket off his shoulders, kisses his shivering face. He traces a soft line between Jayce’s shoulder blades, up and down, watching his back rise and fall, slower, less pained. “When I’m with you, I’m quiet,” Jayce told him once. He kisses the nape of Jayce’s neck. 

“God, V,” Jayce breathes. He kisses Viktor back, nuzzling the crook of his shoulder. 

He’s starting to let himself into Viktor’s touch, drunk with it, the pink flush of his cheeks from love and champagne. Senseless people; but then the two of them, the only sense left in the world. Viktor wants it to be enough. 

“I love you,” he says. “In the middle of a crowded room I love you, Jayce.”