Chapter Text
All anybody is not talking about before and after Thursday’s gala and Friday’s council session is the latest scandal regarding Councillor Salo being walked in on inside one of Councillor Hoskel’s parlours, in the dubious company of a male and, ostensibly, married Demacian foreign dignitary.
It’s one of the open sessions, so in addition to Jayce and the usual suspects, several Houses, Academy associates and business partners linger in the Audience Hall. Salo himself is conveniently absent, citing urgent and decisively unrelated in-House business. Absent, quite typically, is also just about anyone Jayce would actually wish to talk to—the list, unsurprisingly, beginning and ending with Viktor, who had looked at him as though Jayce had grown a second head overnight, two days prior, when Jayce slyly suggested they can share a carriage to the gala.
(“The only thing I will be sharing with anyone tomorrow,” Viktor said, in an exaggerated sort of disdain, “is the last of the laboratory coffee with Miss Young, when we set up to recalibrate the rune arrays for the second round of testing.”
“So you won’t come?” Jayce said, attempting to look guileless and shocked.
“I shudder to think,” Viktor responded, “what I’ve possibly done to imply otherwise.”)
And that was that.
And really, months into reducing his lab hours to part-time, joining the council, and unsuccessfully trying to pull the same stunt with each gala, Jayce should probably resign himself to the fact that there is simply no hope of enticing Viktor into this particular flavour of what Jayce still sees as HexTech work.
As it is, Jayce can’t even blame him: he is uncomfortable, exhausted from hours of socialising and rueful about the fact that he has, as of today, missed the third rune array recalibration in a row, leading him to the realisation that he would need to be briefed by Sky, if he attempted to do it now.
Jayce shudders.
“Exactly!” the woman—Mrs Daglet—or perhaps Deugal—says, evidently thrilled with what she takes for Jayce’s response. “It’s simply unthinkable. Scandalous.”
“… Right. Of course.”
“I mean, I’ve heard what they say about the Salos having, shall we put it, an appetite for—”
The fact of it is that Jayce has managed to tune out most of the unspoken yet increasingly obvious details of Salo’s misadventure, but … well, there is only so much euphemistic innuendo one can stack within one conversation without it becoming more explicit that actually naming names and deeds.
Once again, he misses Viktor. Viktor, who would likely actually retort something jaw-droppingly blunt in the Undercity way, about Salo and Piltover in general, and manage to unselfconsciously embarrass everybody into a stunned sort of silence.
Alas, Viktor is busy calibrating rune arrays, with Sky Young’s excessively—in Jayce’s opinion—helpful hand, and Jayce is left on his lonesome to awkwardly smile and nod and wish to be anywhere else.
By the end of the afternoon, even Heimerdinger is beginning to cotton on to something, and Jayce finds himself unspeakably relieved to find Mel’s elbow, quietly and elegantly looped under his own, in the midst of his latest valiant attempt at pretending he does not understand what Mrs Dubonnet is busy hinting at regarding Piltover’s tall glass windows and the placement of seats underneath them.
“I think that’s enough,” Mel murmurs, mercifully, as she glibly leads him away. “I was thinking, coffee?”
“I could kiss you right now,” Jayce groans. “Please.”
She hums. “Well, that can be arranged. As long as we stay away from Hoskel’s parlours, that is.”
Jayce almost chokes on his own saliva but manages to disguise it as a cough.
⚙
That’s how they wind up in a café in the lower town, seated on the balcony in the mellow, apricot-tinted afternoon light. Spring is coming to an end, slowly unfurling into Jayce’s favourite type of summer: air thick with magnolias and lazy. The days will be longer now, and Jayce will lose the rest of his winter-induced brain fog and maybe develop more stamina even on afternoons following the schmoozing. Maybe he can squeeze in a slight schedule adjustment, take up some work at the Forge again, or extend his lab hours a bit. All within reason.
Jayce lets himself relax, a little.
He’s whipped out his journal and taken to doodling a preliminary sketch of a new rune array—which could easily replace the one he can no longer read—while idly pondering how and when to convince Viktor and Sky that he knows what’s good for the project and replace it.
Opposite to him, Mel is musing about the predicted long-term effects of the latest quarter in the Council. Her voice is low and familiar, in a soothing way. She does this sometimes: narrate the events of things they have attended together to him, as though both to order her own thoughts and hint at what sort of things he should have paid attention to. It’s endearing, this sort of unsubtle nudging that he is nonetheless grateful for; and reminds him a little of Viktor correcting his maths in a roundabout way. They are very similar, Mel and Viktor, in some ways—though Jayce would struggle to explain how to anyone who would ask.
He is struggling to follow Mel’s thread, today—he feels a little bit like his brain has vacated the premises somewhere in the middle of interacting with Mrs Dagonet. This sort of thing—the whole thing with Salo, interpersonal relationships, muddled even more by the convention and gossip—never tends to stick to Jayce’s attention. People’s business, he thinks, should be people’s business. He’s not really interested in ever making it his own.
Mel asks, “… and what about Viktor?”
The word Viktor finally nudges through the thick miasma of Jayce’s inattention—if only for how unusual it is for Mel to bring him up—bringing him back to the café.
Blinking, Jayce asks, “… what about him?”
Mel does not seem to register his confusion. “What’s his opinion on Salo? Has he mentioned anything to you?”
Jayce blinks again, then laughs. The notion is absurd—silly, even. “No, Mel. I don’t think he has an opinion on Salo. I don’t think he has much of an opinion on most of the council members—save for Heimerdinger.”
“Really? He doesn’t seem to like me very much,” Mel points out, mildly.
Jayce frowns. When he finally properly looks up at her, Mel’s expression is one of those rare ones which Jayce can’t easily parse. Not reserved, not quite, but focused enough to be slightly unsettling, in a casual setting like this one.
“I don’t think he dislikes you specifically, Mel,” Jayce says at length, hedging. Which is not … untrue, really. Jayce is not exactly sure what Viktor’s real opinion on Mel is, only that it’s markedly less optimistically charmed than Jayce’s. “I think he just doesn’t, uh, love what the Council stands for. In general.”
Mel looks sceptical as she picks up her teacup. “If you say so.”
Jayce frowns again. Something about the answer evades him, internally convoluted once again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs, looking away onto the Piltover coastline. “Nothing, really. But I have to say, I’d be curious to hear what he thinks of the whole mess with Salo.”
“Frankly, I can’t think of what he could have to say about it,” Jayce admits. Then, after a slight moment of hesitation. “We don’t really … talk, about these things. Much. I mean—he doesn’t.”
One of Mel’s eyebrows rises as she looks back to Jayce. “What—never?”
Jayce shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah, kind of? Not really. I mean, it’s come up, in the past … like, once or twice. But, um, he doesn’t really … do that sort of stuff, if you know what I mean. I think it doesn’t … interest him. So it’s … kind of awkward to bring up.”
Not to mention Jayce’s own—painfully obvious, perhaps particularly to Mel—lingering and deeply entrenched aversion to putting anything regarding the specific of his sexuality in words. Something to do, perhaps, with being raised by a tight-lipped, religiously inclined single mother.
But there’s no need to bring that up right now.
When he looks up, Mel seems even more surprised. Both her eyebrows are raised, now.
“Really?” she says, at last. “I have to say I’m … surprised.”
Jayce is confused. “By … which part?”
Mel gestures vaguely. The golden ring on her hand glints dimly in the softly setting sun. “All of it, I guess. But mostly—” Unexpectedly, she cuts herself off, tongue touching the back of her front teeth. She looks up—another one of those strangely probing glances, as though testing Jayce—and then purses her lips.
“What?” Jayce probes back, curiosity winning at last; caught hook and sinker.
Mel leans in, slightly, conspiratorial. “He … told you that? That he doesn’t do … what, relationships? Sex?”
Something about the conjunction of the concept of Viktor, their casual, half-outdoors, public setting and the word sex—all coming from Mel’s glossy, distracting mouth—makes Jayce rapidly and distinctly uncomfortable.
It’s not unlike bringing up his own … well, particulars; he suddenly feels like they have strayed into a territory that is somehow forbidden; somehow wrong.
“I guess,” he says, shifting in his seat. He clears his throat. “I mean, yeah. Yes.”
Mel looks—doubtful, again, of all things. Jayce cannot understand why.
So he forces out, “Why?”
She is silent for a moment, toying at first with her little gem-encrusted spoon and then stirring some milk into her rose tea. “I guess it’s just not what his … track record seemed to suggest,” she says in the end.
It’s as though Jayce has stopped being able to parse Piltovian. For a lengthy moment, he finds herself unable to as much as process the sentence in any way that makes sense.
Eventually, he caves: “Mel, what are you talking about?”
Mel bites her lower lip. “Well—it’s just that … you know that, as part of the Council, I’ve always been affiliated with the Academy, yes?”
“Uh-huh,” Jayce confirms.
“And, well … it’s just that, Viktor used to have quite a … reputation at the Academy. Back in the day.”
Jayce feels like he’s missing some giant—glaring—crucial context clue.
Dumbly, he asks, “Reputation for what?”
Mel casts him another pointed look, shrugs one nonchalant shoulder, and casually delivers what can only be described as a hammer blow straight to the very foundations of Jayce’s general worldview. “Sneaking men into his dormitory. Mostly.”
Everything skids to a jagged stop.
The people in the café, the restless twitching of Jayce’s leg under the table, the fucking—birdsong, or whatever. He could swear everybody around them jointly hold their breath.
Mel goes on, as though entirely unaware of the unsalvageable damage her remark has dealt upon maintaining fundamental peace in society. “Though, as far as I understand, not recently. Which is precisely why I find it interesting to hear what to think. Because I’ve assumed … well, you know. Public profile, and all of our insistence on propriety, I thought it got through to him enough that he simply became more … discreet about it.” She puts down her napkin. “Hence, Salo. I do so wonder what his take on the whole thing is.”
Jayce is staring at her, mouth open, in nothing short of absolute shock.
“What?” he manages to choke out, finally.
For the first time, Mel seems to register his discomposure. She frowns, then folds her arms, a little defensively. Leans back in her seat—suddenly elegant as ever, unruffled; a distinct change from her previous air of curiosity.
“I thought you knew,” she says, a little pointedly.
“What—no. No. Mel, what the fuck?” Jayce’s voice drops to an urgent hiss. He looks around them, half-expecting to find a throng of onlookers gathered around them like vultures hungering for gossip.
Alas, nobody else seems to have a care in the world for the most absurdly incendiary information of Jayce’s life being so carelessly thrust upon him.
“What do you mean, sneaking men into his dormitory?” Jayce’s voice comes out uncharacteristically high-pitched, the way it used to be when he’d get carried away with theorising, before all the media training. “To do—what?”
Now Mel’s face turns incredulous. “Oh, for god’s sake, Jayce, what do you think?”
The silence sinks slowly between them like a particularly heavy stone. Jayce swallows, audibly.
Mel’s eyebrow arches even higher, as though prompting him to compose or explain himself.
“But he’s not—he’s never—” Jayce flounders, thickly. He settles, eventually, on a decisively tenuous: “He would have told me.”
Mel shrugs again. “I am surprised that he didn’t,” she allows. “I’m sure he’s had his reasons not to,” she says neutrally. “Again, discretion … is an asset, here.” She bites her lip again. “Though I’m led to believe the Undercity is a bit more … liberated, in this aspect.”
“Huh,” Jayce manages.
Conversation peters out, after that.
Jayce participates—tries to—but only in the most liberal sense of the word. It all feels a little bit like there is a noise, some sort of ringing, shrill, incessant fucking thing, insinuating itself between his attention and the topic at hand, disrupting it permanently.
Viktor. Men. Dormitory.
He would have told me. Surely, he would have—
By the end of lunch, Mel seems a little terse with him. Annoyed, perhaps. Jayce can’t help it. He still can’t quite bring himself to focus.
⚙
He spends the first half of the night awake, gives up his writhing at 4 a.m, and the second half at the forge.
⚙
He falls asleep there, briefly, around 6 a.m., and has a bizarre, inexcusable dream, half-aware and uncomfortable, of a queue of men stationed in the corridor outside of Viktor’s Academy bedroom, lined up politely and waiting their turn.
Jayce, standing on the other side of the corridor and rooted in place, watches two construction workers bypass the line entirely, carrying the equipment to install a tall window and an accompanying window-seat inside.
⚙
Jayce wakes up, stares at his own hands, and decides this insanity is not to be borne. He sends a message as soon as he exits the forge, goes home to have a morose shower, and then hurries to the designated meeting spot, avoiding meeting anyone’s eyes in the street, bizarrely feeling like it’s him who has some sort of unsavoury secret to hide.
To her credit, Caitlyn manages to listen to his whispered, harsh recounting of it all, with something resembling patience.
When he’s done, she makes a face, considering.
“Yeah,” she says, in the end. “The asexual thing’s never really made sense for him, in my opinion.”
It’s like everyone in Jayce’s life has decided to lose their marbles and get roped into some sort of conspiracy against him and logic.
“How do you mean?” he demands.
Caitlyn shrugs, bizarrely mirroring Mel. “He’s just so intense about everything,” she says. “You know? Not to say that people can’t be intense about things without being down to … you know. But it was just so … I don’t know. Politely unaddressed. He’s always so brash about everything else, making everybody uncomfortable, and here, such a … clean disinterest. Seemed like … dunno. Like maybe there was something more to it, no?”
“No?” Jayce says, disbelieving. “No! What do you mean?”
Caitlyn shrugs. “I don’t know, you asked me what I think. I guess what I’m saying is, this doesn’t really surprise me, is all.”
“Well, it does surprise me,” Jayce declares. “I just—I can’t believe it.”
Caitlyn looks at him oddly. “Why not?”
Why indeed.
He throws up his hands. “It’s Viktor!”
“So?” Caitlyn frowns. “What, is Viktor like—inherently unfuckable, somehow?”
“I—no!” Jayce splutters, aghast, looking around. Even fewer people are even remotely in danger of overhearing them in the depths of the Kirammans’ private gardens, and yet here Jayce is, feeling like he is standing directly under a gigantic, hyper-acute lens of a cosmic microscope. He has not slept much. “Of course not! I just—I can’t picture—”
Lie.
He has proved able to picture—he has, in fact, been repeatedly trying not to picture. He has been dead-set, in fact, on not picturing—
Caitlyn is frowning even more, now. Something in her face has shifted from sympathetic to downright displeased. “So what, just because you don’t want to fuck Viktor, means nobody else can find him attractive? Grow up, Jayce.”
He reels back, as though struck. “That is not what I said.”
“Sure is what it sounded like.”
Jayce shakes his head, stubborn. “Caitlyn, he basically told me he doesn’t. Why would he lie about that?”
“I don’t know,” Caitlyn says. “Were you weird about it?”
“No, I wasn’t weird about it!”
“Uh-huh. Because you’re so normal right now,” Caitlyn says. She seems offensively sceptical of the whole thing. Traitor. “What exactly did he say?”
“Well—” Jayce hedges. “I don’t remember, really, it was years ago. He … well, I said something about being bad at, uh … pulling in college, and then he said he doesn’t do that sort of thing. And I asked, what, ever? And then he said something, like, I suppose not.”
There is a moment of silence.
“A, clearly you remember it pretty clearly,” Caitlyn says, eventually. “B, that could mean anything, Jayce. That’s the vaguest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. He might as well have told you he doesn’t unsuccessfully pull people, or maybe he was just referring to girls. This is not conclusive, Jayce, I thought you were a scientist.”
“But, I mean—I’ve never, ever seen him with anyone,” Jayce says. “Never even seen him interested in anyone.”
“Maybe he’s private about it.”
“I’m his best friend. He’d have said something,” Jayce insists, helplessly. Desperately.
Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? Desperation.
Caitlyn snorts. “Like what?” she asks. Then, in a horrible, unfairly accurate parody of Viktor’s accent: “Hey, Jayce, I like to fuck men. Hope you don’t mind, old sport. Pass me the chalk, will you.”
Jayce is too stunned—and, frankly, traumatised—to bring himself to answer.
Caitlyn sighs. “You know, it’s reactions like this one that make me think that maybe he just correctly assumed you’d be a little judgemental about it.”
“I’m not judgemental,” Jayce denies, instantly. “I’m—I’ve never been judgemental. How long have you known me? And you—you told me, about yourself. Years ago! And I was normal.”
Caitlyn rolls her eyes. “That’s different.”
“How is that different?”
But Caitlyn seems to have lost some patience. “I don’t know, Jayce, it’s—just different, okay? You’re like a brother to me. And I was fourteen.” And, before Jayce can as much as open his mouth, “And before you say anything, yes, it is different from whatever it is that you and Viktor have got going on. It just is.”
He closes his mouth. Somehow, he can’t exactly refute that.
And anyway, something else gnaws at his mind, now. His leg has started bouncing up and down, and he tries to force it down.
“Do you really think he thought I’d—treat him differently for it?” he asks, and some of the raw, sleep-deprivation-fuelled hurt must finally bleed through, because Caitlyn’s face softens at last.
“No, I—look, Jayce, Viktor knows that you’re a good guy. But … let’s just put it this way. I doubt you’ve ever discussed at length just how much of an ally you are. And you … I mean, you get this constipated look whenever you have to talk about things that are even remotely removed from the realm of your proverbial chastity belt—”
“Hey, that’s not—”
Caitlyn talks over him, “Face it, Jayce, you’re … like, really repressed. Like, way more than me, somehow, and you’ve seen my parents. And besides, you’re … it’s different for people like you.”
Jayce frowns. “People like me? What the hell does that mean?”
She shrugs, looking mostly unrepentant. “People who are not like me. Or Viktor,” she says, pointedly. When Jayce refuses to budge and stares at her, confused, she begrudgingly goes on, “You’re used to this whole thing being so easy, Jayce. Just something you can do at will. You just … randomly, casually got with maybe the most beautiful woman in the world, and she made the move on you. Just like that.” Caitlyn snaps her fingers, and then pauses, biting at the inside of her cheek. “I can only imagine that it wasn’t quite so easy for Viktor. I mean, he’s already got, like, several targets on his back.”
“Targets?” Jayce asks. “What targets?”
“Jayce, he’s from the Undercity and he looks … well, different, and his body isn’t exactly cooperating with him at the best of times, is it? I can’t imagine being stealth and having requirements which are a bit more difficult to accommodate in public to be … well. Easy.”
She pauses. “All I’m saying, cut him some slack,” she says. “This probably really isn’t about you.”
⚙
Jayce decides that he’s normal.
He is going to be normal.
He’s going to have a normal, well-adjusted, civil conversation on this perfectly regular topic.
“Ah, Jayce.”
Jayce stiffens in his seat. He chances a furtive glance at the door.
It is five past nine. Viktor shuffles unhurriedly into the laboratory, wearing his tie slightly crooked—and why is that?—and with the sort of windswept look about him that invokes a clear image of a hand being perhaps irately dragged through his hair at best; and certainly never coming into direct contact with a comb.
“Um,” Jayce says. “Hi, V.”
Viktor casts Jayce a somewhat dubious, half-lidded look of his hazy, dull-honey eyes, before being promptly pulled into the orbit of their coffee machine, as though a magnet lived inside it and Viktor was made of metal.
Turned away from Jayce, he busies himself clogging the milk-diffusing compartment with sweetmilk—“The sugar will clog the pipe. Do you ever even clean it, anyway?” “Shut up, Jayce.”
Then grunts, a little hoarsely, “Yes. Good mornink.”
That ending -k in place of -ng, a little too pronounced in his accent. Jayce can’t help but smile a little, relaxing. It’s literally Viktor. What’s better than this?
Then he remembers that he is a normal human being about to have a normal conversation, and a wave of vague dread crawls inside his stomach and lodges itself in there.
For a moment, the lab is swathed with peaceful silence, marred only by the coffee machine whirring languidly as Viktor glares daggers at it, as though to incite it to work faster.
Now or never, Jayce thinks.
“… Actually, uh. Funny story. I was having lunch with Caitlyn, and,” Jayce begins, at the same time as the coffee machine growls, for the lack of a better term, and then Viktor curses in Zaunish and whacks it with his cane.
Jayce swallows, cowed.
“What was that, Jayce?” Viktor meanwhile asks, finally wrangling his coffee mug free—one of those awful Man of Progress ones, with Jayce’s own mug on it—and dragging himself to the chalkboard. He sets his cane against it, raises the mug to his lips and mumbles, words blowing the warm, anise-scented steam into vague shapes over the cartoon of Jayce’s face, “I didn’t quite catch it.”
“… Caitlyn is gay,” Jayce blurts out, forgetting his entire, pre-planned, normal sentence.
Viktor’s pauses, just for a moment, lips poised at the rim of the mug. His drowsy eyes flick sideways to Jayce, a semblance of something sober stirring in them for the first time.
He takes a large sip, swallows, then frowns.
“She came out to you?” he asks.
Yes, years ago.
“Well—yes,” Jayce says. “I mean, I knew. I’ve known. For a … while, actually.”
Viktor takes another huge gulp of his coffee-flavoured sweetmilk. Idly, he picks up the most worn down bit of chalk known to man—a crumb of chalk, really—and raises it to the exact spot where he’d stopped writing an equation, presumably the previous evening.
“And?” he asks, mildly.
“And, of course, that’s great,” Jayce says. “I am very happy for her.”
Another slurp of coffee. Viktor always drinks it like this, Jayce thinks, a little annoyed, one direct sucker punch of caffeine to his system and then he’s awake and ready to go. If Jayce tried to drink a full mug like this, he thinks he’d go straight into cardiac arrest.
“… I feel like I’m missing something here,” Viktor admits, after a moment, setting his emptied mug down on the workstation.
“Oh,” Jayce blinks up to the chalkboard. “With the coefficient? You seem to be on the right track—”
“No, with the point behind your anecdote,” Viktor interrupts him, resuming his chicken-scratch scribbling with nary a lag. “Is Miss Kiramman in trouble?”
“Oh. No, no,” Jayce says, cringing. “I mean—I don’t think so? She seems to, uh, have it in hand. So to speak.”
“Hm,” Viktor says. “Do you need advice on how to … handle it? Is that it?”
Jayce blinks. Well, this is new. “What, uh … what is there to handle?”
Viktor casts him another unimpressed look. “Well, if you want her to feel supported,” he says. “And let her know how, eh … great it is. An idea would be to start, perhaps, with you not making it a big deal out of it.”
Pointed. It’s like a weird mirror of what Caitlyn had said, and Jayce finds himself almost offended.
“It isn’t a big deal,” he says, strangely defensive.
Predictably, Viktor has already run out of his microscopic chalk piece. He picks up another one—pink, now—and keeps writing. “I think—” he underlines a solution,“—in Piltover, at least—,” crosses out something else, “—it is.”
The wretched, morbidly curious thing that dwells inside Jayce’s stomach comes alive again, buzzing like a beehive. Slyly—or as slyly as he Jayce has it in him to be, which isn't very—he asks, “Not in … Zaun?”
The question feels huge. Loaded.
But Viktor only snorts.
“No, not in Zaun.” He seems to consider something, one hand tucked casually into his trouser pocket. “Not in the same way, at least.”
Jayce frowns. “How do you mean?”
For a moment, Viktor is silent, and Jayce is convinced that when he speaks again, it will be to gently but firmly change the topic—in a way he has done many times, in many ways. And Jayce would have no choice but to let it go, like a normal person would, due to his newly and forcefully established modus operandi of one such normal individual.
But then Viktor speaks, sounding a little distant—perhaps lost in thought—but still earnest. “Well, we are all—othered, there. One way or another. At the outset. There is some … community in that, solidarity that’s … difficult to explain to someone from Piltover. Us against them, and, eh, I suppose it makes it easier to accept a some variety in the us when there isn’t exactly a status quo to threaten. We’re, after all, all filthy outcasts in Piltover’s eyes. Racking up more crimes, by their metric … there’s a sense of pride in it. In individuality, authenticity. In not hiding.” He huffs, softly. “So, yes, it is … different.”
It is, Jayce thinks, maybe the third longest thing Viktor has ever deigned to share with him about Zaun, following a drunken, soft-spoken anecdote about his dead mother, and another, equally fleeting story about the story behind the first toy he had ever built. Jayce treasures both dearly, and finds himself struggling a little to reconcile the weight of being handed material so new and exciting to add to his roster with the very nature of his current investigation.
He tries to re-orient himself. “So people just … accept it? Without … questioning it?”
“More or less,” Viktor says, shrugging. “What is there to question? You like who you like. You, eh, fuck who you want to fuck. As long as both parties are happy, it shouldn’t be anybody else’s issue, no?”
Jayce makes a truly Herculean effort to bypass the inherent shock of witnessing Viktor so callously utter the word fuck without betraying his own honest reaction to it.
“I guess it is … different,” he manages to strain out, in the end. “We never really, um, talk about things like this here—”
Once again, Viktor snorts. “Yes, you do.”
“... Huh?”
Viktor rolls his eyes. “Homosexuality exists in Piltover, Jayce, both as a fact of life and a topic of conversation. It is, in fact, talked about. More covertly, yes, and using different words. Certainly with different attitudes. But it is.”
Jayce is trying to think of something even remotely smart to say.
“Councillor Salo, for instance,” Viktor goes on, meanwhile, erasing a chunk of his equation, “is only as subtle as your own suspension of disbelief allows him to be. As per recent—eh—conversation, this has become … quite apparent.”
If Jayce had been mildly—well, put off—by Salo, and the entire affair, it has nothing to do with the sheer wall of hostility that seems to lodge itself directly inside his oesophagus, from the stomach all the way to the throat.
“You’ve … heard about Salo, then?” he says, and his own voice sounds—not normal. Decisively not normal.
“Jayce, I think even the Sumps have heard about Salo by now,” Viktor says wearily. “And I suspect he likes it that way.”
Something inside Jayce’s stomach dies.
Viktor, did you—? something in his head asks, horrible. Awful. Did you fuck Salo?
Would you?
He feels ill.
Somewhere behind his haze of torment, he becomes vaguely aware that Viktor is measuring him with a very strange look. “Are you alright, Jayce?” he asks. “I assure you—Councillor Salo’s, eh, appetites, are not exactly … the standard deviation, so to speak. You need not worry about Caitlyn.”
And how would you know that? Jayce almost asks.
“No, yes, I … know,” is what he manages, at last. “I mean, I don’t. But I suspect that it’s—yeah.” God, he’s fucking this up. He’s fucked it, thoroughly, from the very outset, when Viktor walked in and his tie was crooked and Jayce let himself wonder about whose anonymous, masculine hands might have tied it for him and done a poor job of it.
He flounders, “I guess, I mean, when I said. Um. That we don’t talk about it. I meant to say—that there are certain rules—it’s not—you don’t really—”
Viktor sighs.
“Yes,” he says, taking pity on Jayce. “I know. Propriety. Polite company. All that … ” he makes a vague, limp gesture in the air. “I am aware of it. It is simply hard to … apply such metrics to a place like Zaun. And I forget, sometimes—mind you, rarely—that things are not so simple up here.”
“So you think it’s … simpler there?” Jayce asks.
Viktor nods. “In this regard, at least, yes.” He picks up another stub of chalk, drawing a straight yellow line under the last equation. “My parents were never married, as you know. I think they knew each other for … all of a month, by the time I was conceived. There is no … sacred family structure to hallow in Zaun, per se. If you find a child on the street and they like you enough not to rob you blind—or, better yet, if you find it in yourself to overlook being robbed—then you can count yourself a legal guardian. We’re all bastards in eyes of Piltover, but we are also, quite literally, all bastards. I do not have a surname. That is common. What difference does it make, then—queer or not queer?”
Jayce is staring at him.
So—are you?
But he cannot bring himself to ask.
Perhaps misinterpreting his face for confusion, something in Viktor’s face softens. “But I digress,” he says. “My point, Jayce, was that Miss Kiramman will be fine. She is … protected. This is why I brought up Salo. Those … higher up, so to speak, are allowed a certain … leeway.”
Jayce shakes his head. “How do you know this?”
It is as close as he lets himself get to asking the real question.
Viktor shrugs. “It’s just how things are.”
“I see,” Jayce says.
But he doesn’t.
⚙
He does not feel like he can stomach a single more minute of the same conversation—not yet. In the end, he manages to last a solid five hours of supremely half-assed lab-work and a mangled rune array prototype—which Viktor stares at with a pitying wince and not a single comment before it is swiftly tossed in the trash—before prodding the beast again.
Jayce clears his throat. “And what, uh, about you?”
Viktor does not look up from where he’s hunched, bespectacled in his precision goggles, over the HexClaw model.
“… do I think Tiedemann’s proposal for hyper-viscosity is, eh, how to say it, bullshit?” He deliberates for a moment. “Yes,” he then says, nodding to himself, as though coming to terms with the truth of it in real time. “I do. I do think it is bullshit. There is infinitely more merit in approaching it from the viewpoint of—”
Jayce just … lets him talk. It’s nice, anyway. He likes listening to Viktor talk. He’d much rather just listen to him, really, endlessly, than ask more idiotic fucking questions—
But he can’t stop himself.
“No, yeah, totally,” Jayce blurts out, after Viktor’s soliloquy devolves into his usual Zaunish mumbling. “Hundred percent with you, there. But, uh,” he clears his throat again. “I meant. Khm. Our earlier conversation.”
“Do you have a sore throat, Jayce?” Viktor asks, still focused on the HexClaw. “I have a medicinal lozenge for that. If you care for it. It’s, eh, in my drawer. Which conversation?”
Jayce is momentarily arrested by a distinctly unwelcome vision of Viktor sucking on a medicinal lozenge.
“The one about … Zaun,” he says, after a beat. “And … people being their, uh … authentic selves. Or ... yeah.”
Maybe it’s a trick of the Hex-crystals’ mercurial blue light, but it seems to him that Viktor tenses.
Slowly, he moves his head back to the refining position, leaning in towards the model again.
“And … what was your question, again?”
An edge to it now. No doubt about it—Jayce can hear it, plainly.
He inhales, slowly, through his teeth. “I know you once told me you don’t really … do that,” he says, carefully. “But … I suppose I am … curious.” There is a moment of quite heavy silence. “I mean, not that I’m inferring that—it’s not like all of Zaun is queer, right? I mean, Sky has a crush on you. Obviously. So, clearly, not everyone—”
Abruptly, Viktor looks up at him in mild horror, pushing up his goggles. Jayce falls silent, startled.
“Does she?” Viktor asks.
And is the sky blue?
Jayce blinks, thrown off balance. “Uh, yeah?”
Viktor frowns, staring off into the middle distance. The goggles tangled in his hair are making him look a little like a mad scientist, which—well, Jayce supposes he is a little bit of a mad scientist. They both are.
Attempts at normalcy aside.
“Oh, goodness,” Viktor says, as though struck with a horrible realisation. “Well, that’s … unfortunate.”
Jayce pounces on the tidbit of information like a man starved. “You’re not interested, then?”
Viktor seems to recoil in some horror. “Not in my lab assistant, no.”
Jayce finds the answer equal parts relief and—something else. Something, somehow, entangled with a sinking sense of dread. Why? he tries to ask himself.
Unclear.
“But in—someone?” he hazards, instead.
There is a moment of silence, as Viktor replaces his goggles and calibrates the pressure valve again, eyes glued to the matrix.
And then he asks, as unforgivingly blunt as he sometimes is, and entirely without warning: “Are you asking me who I’m attracted to, Jayce, or whether I experience attraction at all?” The eerie serenity of his voice belies the sharp knife-edge of danger Jayce knows to be underneath. “There is a presupposition at work, here, that I am not sure you are aware of.”
For a moment, it is Jayce who is silent.
Then, quieter, he says, “I suppose I am asking both.”
He waits.
“I do,” Viktor says. “Experience attraction. Though it is not always convenient, so I tend not to prioritise it. Now, excuse me, but I need to focus on this.”
He says nothing more, and Jayce does not dare to ask.