Archive of Our Own

i lied about the whales

The afternoon of Viktor’s 32nd birthday, Jayce takes time off from the Council. It is the fourth miracle of the day.

The first was Piltover waking up to a thin layer of rare and coveted snow. The second involved the delivery of an official letter from a clinic in Shurima inviting “Viktor Talis”—as though such a person ever even existed—to their sought-after sanatorium in the course of two weeks to commence the drug trial.

The last miracle, of course, is that Viktor is still even alive to see thirty-two.

Not for much longer, perhaps. No matter the nonsense Jayce keeps spouting about actually going through with the whole ludicrous Shurima trip.

Nonetheless:

“We should celebrate!” Jayce exclaims, too enthusiastically, having manifested at Viktor’s door at five p.m. dressed in his full Council getup with a mysterious brown paper bag, a cake in a box, the menacing envelope and a visibly strained smile.

“Celebrate what?” Viktor grumbles suspiciously. He is clad in his thick plaid pyjamas and the deeply embarrassing red sweatshirt he’d nicked from Jayce years and years back, with a huge TALIS HAMMERS logo embroidered across the back, and which has, up until bloody now, been one of Viktor’s best kept secrets.

… Which Jayce is now getting a mortifying eyeful of, lumpy as it sits on Viktor’s bony shoulders.

It’s hardly Viktor’s fault. He’s been really bloody convinced that Jayce was due at a Council gala this evening. The gala was marked in the lab calendar, circled in red. Jayce himself has said he is attending about ten times in the lab earlier that morning—which, sure, maybe was somewhat out of character, but Viktor chalked it up to the general air of festering awkwardness permeating all their interactions as of late.

And, sure, Viktor had been summarily dismissed—nay, banished—from the lab at four p.m. by Sky the Fearsome herself, who went as far as to threaten to call an ambulance on him in case he refuses to leave and have him intubated for disrespecting his mandated bedrest. Again, though, Viktor rather thought this lunacy in line with Sky’s recently developed commitment to supervising his observance of “life-work balance” rather than any Machiavellian ploy. Fine, he’d acquiesced, herded out of the lab, he would continue his work in the sanctity of his apartment; to tell the truth—not that he’d admit it to Sky on pains of death—it would be good to lose the braces and put the well-washed sweatshirt on. It would be good to be miserable without being scrutinised by her maddening, compassionate eyes.

Viktor has just settled himself on the couch, ready to continue annotating his rune arrays as he broods on the sad joke of his rapidly dwindling life, when a suspiciously jaunty knock comes upon his door and he realises he’s been played for the fool.

Again. It is not his fault: he’s hardly been anywhere even approaching the top of his game in the recent weeks. Still, as a rule, Viktor considers himself rather dedicated to pretending he does not observe such mortal trifles as the number of laps the planet has made around the sun that he has gotten to witness. He’d like to keep it this way. Go out with style, as they say.

Not bloody likely.

“Since when are we celebrating Thursdays?” Viktor tries again, valiantly, as Jayce inches a little bit forward, getting both the proverbial and the literal foot in the door. “What is next? Should we sing a bloody song every morning in the lab in thanks for the power of friendship?”

“Cut the crap, Vik, and let me in,” Jayce responds, all but shoving himself inside. The bulk of him unfortunately deprives Viktor—irritatingly waifish as he has become as of late, like a crusty old gingerbread man being chewed on slowly by mice inside a dark kitchen cupboard—of any solid chance to bar him entry.

“Nice sweatshirt,” Jayce says smugly, the second he is in.

“One more word and you are out on the street, Talis,” Viktor issues his empty threat in his coldest of voices, paired with his fiercest frown. Jayce only beams at him.

“The battle’s already lost,” he announces. “Mel’s approved my time-off ages ago. I got all the goodies,” he rattles the brown bag invitingly, “and Sky’s manning the lab. You’re not getting out of it, V.”

“Out of what?” Viktor demands, in increasing malaise, clutching at his crutch like a lifeline.

“Of fun,” Jayce says, threateningly.

And now, hours later, here they are: having. Fun.

Or whatever sorry approximation of it they’ve managed to crawl towards.

As it is, Viktor lies stretched on his couch, swaddled with the thick navy blue blanket Jayce had brought to the hospital and which has somehow gone home with Viktor following his discharge. Jayce himself is sat on the floor by the couch like a dog, stripped down to his undershirt and eating dried Zaunish fungi straight from the bag. Who sold them to Jayce, Viktor has no fucking idea. They must have robbed him blind.

They are, ostensibly, watching a documentary on Bilgewater marine life. The air in Viktor’s living room is gauzy and pungent with medicinal weed smoke. Jayce seems to be eating mostly out of nerves, given that he usually has no stomach for Undercity cuisine, and Viktor wishes he could join him, but he is unfortunately nauseated by most food these days. He has barely managed a sliver of Ximena’s embarrassingly heartfelt homemade cake—with a yellow HAPPY BIRTHDAY V written in icing—though that might have had more to do with how much looking at it made Viktor want to weep.

Regardless, he is now too busy attempting to get himself crossfaded enough to stop feeling so bloody awkward.

It’s all a bit mortifying, Viktor thinks, staring at the fish colonies billowing out in formation on the screen like fractals. It’s been awkward and mortifying between them since the night Sky’s found Viktor in the lab, collapsed mid-seizure and bleeding profusely and raised absolute hell.

Said hell involved—apparently, as Viktor was blessedly unconscious enough to miss the whole spectacle—tearing Jayce out of Mel Medarda’s arms and bed and having him leg it half-dressed to Piltover General to almost get in a fistfight with the reception staff attempting to bully them into treating Viktor under the House Talis insurance plan.

Viktor recalls a grand total of none of it—luckily, or he’d have surely perished right there from sheer embarrassment.

He woke up to the fallout, instead: that is, Jayce haggard in the chair next to his bed, Sky rumpled in the other, and a horrible, festering silence in the room; the only leftover of whatever went on between the two of them while Viktor was out. And whatever it was seems to have been—well, bloody awful.

It must have been, because two weeks later, Sky is still not quite talking to Jayce, and Jayce is still brooding and seemingly attempting to shrink three sizes whenever she’s in the room.

It’s all ridiculous, is what it is, and unnecessary.

Once again, Viktor wishes—well, he wishes none of this was happening. He grits his teeth, staring at the ceiling in a poor attempt at not succumbing to that heady mixture of grief and frustration again. He had been doing great concealing his increasingly poor health from them both, for long months since he first heard the wretched diagnosis, Progressive Grey Lung, I am very sorry, and he hates—he hates that it is no longer his decision, and that it is all out of his hands, now.

“Fuck me these fish are creepy,” Jayce says from the floor through a mouthful of dry mushroom.

“Luckily,” Viktor mumbles to the ceiling, “you’re unlikely ever have to see any of them up close.”

“I bet there’s weird creatures in Shurima,” Jayce says innocuously and Viktor shuts his eyes, muttering noiseless curses to himself.

The combined force of Jayce’s inherent bullheadedness, Mel’s wide net of contacts and Sky’s increasingly hysterical agenda—as well as a frankly astounding case of insurance fraud that, under Ximena’s signature, retroactively claimed Viktor as a longtime proud member of House Talis—has, as of this morning, borne fruit in the shape of the most double-edged sword Viktor has ever laid his eyes upon.

He scowls at the envelope as it lies motionlessly on the table.

Ever since first learning of “the treatment”, Viktor had found himself half-hoping to never as much as get the chance of genuinely considering it. From the doctors’ summary, it sounded painful, arduous, time-consuming—and exactly the sort of thing he could not afford to hang his hopes on. He’d do much better, he thinks grimly, utilising what little time he has left on getting the Hexcore somewhere. On the off-chance it might work, sure; but even if it doesn’t—then at least he’d have given it his all. Left a mark.

He swallows, stomach twisting. Now, this? Wasting scant and precious time on a perilous journey so far away from home Viktor can barely picture it, without a guarantee he would return, away from—from everything that matters to him, really.

He can picture this all too easily: himself, alone and fading like an old picture, wizened and paper-thin in the pale walls of some unknown hospital room in Shurima, hallucinating Jayce and their lab in a fever of longing, the wind blowing sand in through the windows.

The vision makes him sick to the stomach; bitter and dizzy.

“… You okay, Vik?” Jayce asks from the floor.

“Fine,” Viktor lies.

He wishes he could time travel. Not even to save himself from the Grey, not even to get a less shitty run at life, but to earlier this morning, to intercept that letter and perhaps burn it. He was meant, Viktor thinks, to remain at the bottom of that queue, with no insurance to speak of, and work on his life’s work until he was no longer able to. During their brief conversation, Heimerdinger had told him as much, after all: one got what they got, and that was the order of things. Viktor should simply accept it.

Now all this nonsense.

Swallowing the bile, he glances down to where Jayce seems to have polished off the mushrooms by himself. The mysterious brown bag had contained a very Viktor-tailored set of birthday indulgences: the sort of weed they only sell down in the Lanes, a canister of real, spiced sweetmilk, an array of snacks which would make a Kiramman faint by sheer proximity and a small flask of a pungent, almost bioluminescent blue alcohol called Water of Life which Viktor used to joke was the very stuff Hexcrystals were made of.

“Sky would kill you if she knew you managed to get all this without sharing it with her,” Viktor murmurs, a smidge of errant fondness creeping up on him over the dark bitterness in his heart. It is a sort of miracle that Jayce is here. He should be happy.

On the screen, a huge Ionian Whale is feasting on krill. Briefly, Viktor imagines himself disintegrating into a storm of little sea creatures and a whale suspiciously remnant of Jayce swallowing him whole.

Maybe he’s higher than he’s thought.

“… Sky would kill me for less that than that,” Jayce mumbles meanwhile, taking a swig from the flask and shuddering. “She’s, uh, not the … biggest fan of me these days.”

Understatement, Viktor thinks, wincing. In truth, he had hardly ever before seen a look of such unadulterated rage on the timid, kind-hearted, sweet Sky’s face—the very Sky who used to stutter when introducing herself to her Piltover classmates, prompting them to mock her and prompting Viktor to whack their ankles with his cane.

Granted, Sky has always been sort of stilted around Jayce, but Viktor has hitherto assumed she was either put-off by his zeal or perhaps harboured something of a crush on him. She would not be the first or last one, that’s for sure.

There is, presently, nothing stilted about the way Sky glares icy daggers and all but hisses at Jayce every time they share a room. It’s, in Viktor’s view, sort of mind-boggling.

Especially that Jayce seems genuinely cowed by her acidity, hanging his head whenever she’s around and assuming a hangdog aura of despondency that hardly befits Piltover’s youngest and shiniest Councilor.

Viktor does not understand it. He’s sick of being out of the loop, and too loopy to loop himself back into the …

… Gods, yeah, he’s high.

“I noticed,” he says aloud, dimly remembering that the mechanics of a conversation rather involve input from two people. And, because Viktor is curious to a fault, “What have you done to scorn her?”

He and Sky and Jayce have all known each other since childhood. More specifically, they have known each other since Viktor and Sky had been chosen—as part of Cassandra Kiramman’s charity drive of resettling Zaunite orphans Topside to “provide them with better opportunities”—and hurtled upwards in a teeth-rattling elevator.

They were subsequently placed in special housing alongside several other children, assessed for their mental capacity—both blowing more than one examiner’s mind with the notion that Undercity kids could in fact be smart—and promptly advanced several grades to be placed on the same course as one Jayce Talis.

None of this had made them feel at home, exactly: torn out of Zaun and dressed-up in Piltover uniforms like two underfed and unwieldy dolls, they both stuck out like sore thumbs. Sky was painstakingly shy, hiding her face behind newly acquired oversized glasses, and Viktor was, well, Viktor.

Malnourished, visibly defective, strange. He had used to be as shy, if not shyer, than Sky, but the combined heartbreak of his parents, Reveck and Rio hardened him into something mutinous instead; unruly and off-putting.

In the end, none of the “better opportunities” did his Grey-wizened lungs and spine much good—but, at the very least, both he and Sky got a good education out of the whole ordeal.

And Viktor got Jayce.

Well. He got some of Jayce.

… Jayce, who is suspiciously silent.

“Jayce?” Viktor prompts, blinking.

“Uh,” Jayce says, and then hangs his head again. “Well. She’s. She’s understandably unhappy with me for—for fucking up.”

“But fucking up what?” Viktor wonders aloud. “Is this about you ‘accidentally’ melting her rune array prototype in the forge, because I told you that was a pathetic excuse—”

“Fucking up with you,” Jayce cuts in, tensely. “When you got sick. And … in general.”

Got sick, Viktor knows by now, is the Piltover euphemism for his almost keeling over at the lab. He sighs deeply.

“Jayce,” he says, world-weary even to his ears. “None of that was, or is, on you.”

Something weird crosses Jayce’s face. “Yes, it is,” he bursts out, sounding strained.

It feels like something cold and viper-like has crawled into the room to poison the air. Viktor raises himself up a little on his elbows, which protest violently as if on cue. Even such small movements tend to make him break out in a sweat these days. Clearly, he thinks irately, he is in no condition to withstand the weather in Shurima.

“No, it isn’t,” he says, a little more harshly than intended. “Despite your mother’s creative … liberties with that insurance claim,” he holds up a hand before Jayce manages to interject, “I am not, in fact, your dependant, and you are neither required nor do I want you to monitor me at all times.”

Jayce exhales a short, huffed breath of frustration. “I know,” he says, “but I should’ve—”

“What?” Viktor snaps. “It’s not like I had it pencilled in for that evening, Jayce. You can’t stop living your life just because your coworker’s lungs have decided to try and exit through his oesophagus. Preventing that is, frankly, way above your pay grade.”

That weird look on Jayce’s face again. He has twisted himself up on the floor to stare defiantly and forlornly up at Viktor, much like a kicked dog would. Viktor kind of wants to strangle him.

“I wish you wouldn’t say shit like this,” Jayce whispers, sounding wounded.

Viktor curses again, inwardly. “Like what?” he snaps. “It’s my bloody birthday, for gods’ sake, am I not allowed a joke—”

“Never mind,” Jayce cuts in, visibly upset, turning himself away to the fish again.

“Jayce—”

“I just don’t get why you’re doing this. Calling yourself my coworker,” Jayce bursts out. His voice wobbles, horrifically. “Is it to punish me? Sky’s already—and I fucking know and—and I hate when you joke about that, you know. None of it is funny. All I think about, all I do is think about how I should’ve noticed how bad it was getting, and then maybe you’d—but you wouldn’t, would you, you never tell me anything, you never even—”

“Jayce, for gods’ sake, please,” Viktor grits out and something in his voice must be desperate enough to cut Jayce short, red-cheeked and watery-eyed as he surely is. “Please. Not today.”

They have had this argument, or some variant thereof, by this point, upwards of ten times across the span of the fortnight that’s elapsed since Viktor’s collapse unleashed his third best-kept secret—the diagnosis—upon all and sundry.

The second secret being the sweatshirt. The first—

No. Viktor won’t have this on his miraculous fucking birthday.

Jayce hangs his head.

“Okay,” he whispers.

“I am sorry Sky is giving you a hard time,” Viktor says coolly, addressing the ceiling again. “I’ve spoken to her already and told her to cut it out. I think she’s just … eh, traumatised, a little, by  … ah, you know. She’s overreacting. But none of it is on you.”

If anything, Viktor feels bad for her. Finding him in the heap of twisted limps and a puddle of blood on the lab floor—no, he thinks with a sickening feeling, he would not wish that on an enemy, let alone poor, dear Sky. At times, he wishes more than anything that it had caught him at home, instead of the lab. Sure, by the time somebody would have found him here, it might have been too late. But perhaps it would have spared everyone that Viktor cares about the horrid fucking mess of dealing with this drawn-out countdown, instead. And spared him the indignity.

“It is, though,” Jayce mumbles. Viktor inhales, bristling again, but Jayce goes on: “And like I said … that’s not even all Sky’s mad about. It’s that we both—and then I. I never even.” He cuts himself off and rubs at his eyes, strangely miserable. “Fuck. She’s right, is my point. On all counts. I’d be mad, too.”

Now, this is news.

“… What are you talking about?” Viktor asks, narrowing his eyes at him.

Jayce hangs his head even lower. From this angle, Viktor can see the close-buzzed hair at the nape of his neck. Irrationally, he wants to reach over and scratch it. Rub his face all over it. Or have Jayce come up onto the couch and lie on top of him, heavy, until Viktor is pressed completely flat, grounded and painless and weightless.

Janna, he should not have smoked all that weed. He doesn’t even want to be mad anymore, he just wants a hug, one good hug and five minutes of life that is not so doomed, and maybe more alcohol.

Jayce mumbles something incomprehensible which ends with,“… Mel.”

Viktor’s eyebrows rise. Another surprise. “Mel? What does Mel have to do with all this?”

It’s bad enough that he’s had to withstand the strange, piercing intensity of Mel Medarda’s beautiful eyes when she’s visited upon the lab—out of which Viktor refused to be permanently displaced by saying, “Over my dead body, and I mean this literally,”—to magnanimously aid in Jayce’s insurance fraud scheme and offer her support to Viktor. 

It pissed him off more than most things, precisely because it was unselfish and kind. 

Viktor cannot imagine Mel having reason to be particularly fond of him as of late, as his misadventure seems to have put something of a damper on her and Jayce’s rapidly blooming romance.

He and Mel never exactly managed to become true friends, despite Jayce’s obvious efforts to endear Viktor to Mel and integrate Mel into their lab-based friend group once he joined the Council. On his part, Viktor has proudly done absolutely nothing to make a single part of it easier. He is no saint and he’s never pretended otherwise. In the general lottery of life, he does not feel like he’s been dealt too many winning cards; he must be allowed his petty grudges at least. Like remaining civil but aloof towards whom he cannot but see as his, soon to be victorious, rival. 

Not that Mel gives an inch either way. Contrarily to Sky, whatever ire she might have for Viktor, she is concealing with enviable dignity. He supposes it makes sense: it takes quite a small person to wish ill on someone as visibly ill as he is. Mel is not a small person. Sometimes he wishes it wasn’t so. In the private hush of the night, he has cursed her name more than enough over the course of the years himself, for taking Jayce  so finally and thoroughly away from him. Perhaps this entire debacle is his punishment for that.

Still, it’s his birthday, which so very few people even know about, and Jayce is in Viktor’s apartment rather than at the Council or with Mel, so it all really shouldn’t feel like a slow march to the gallows, not yet—

Jayce is wincing, and hugging his knees like he is fifteen again, and not thirty-one.

“… It’s kind of a long story,” he grits out.

“Hurry up, then,” Viktor says grimly, “because I don’t exactly have a lot of t—”

Jayce swivels around with the astounding agility of an overgrown cheetah. In a blink, he crawls up onto the couch and lunges at Viktor, plastering a hand against his mouth before he can finish the offending sentence.

“Stop joking about it!” Jayce all but shouts.

“Mmmph!” Viktor responds, frowning furiously. “Mmph!”

But Jayce is also frowning at him, knees lodged on both sides of Viktor’s narrow body and eyes weed-red and mutinous.

“It’s not funny!” Jayce insists. “I know you think you need to make us pay for the crime of caring about you, but fuck, Viktor. Imagine it was me saying I’ll throw myself out of the window every five minutes, would that feel good?”

Viktor deflates, somewhat. The anger is still there, simmering somewhere unquenchable inside him where he is still struggling to make peace with the sheer injustice of it all. But it’s—suddenly distant. He feels tired, and small, and—

He lowers his eyelids a bit. And then he forces his jaw open, nudges his chin up and bites into the meat of Jayce’s hand.

“Ow!” Jayce howls, yanking his hand back. “Fucking hell, Vik—”

Flailing and trying to balance, he lands clumsily back on his haunches.

Somewhat smugly, still half-lidded, Viktor levels a lazy smile at him.

As unhinged as it is, this, to him, is nostalgia at its purest.

It brings Viktor back to the very first year they have known each other, when Jayce had been a pudgy, round-eyed and excitable child with a collection of “ROCK FACTS!” to share and Viktor, for the lack of a better weapon against bullies and Piltover in general, had often had to resort to … well, teeth.

Jayce had accosted him in the school backyard one day: snotty, with a tear-streaked face, hunched over the remnants of his toy boat that one of the more vicious Piltover children had stomped to bits.

“Are you okay?” the little Jayce asked, stupidly.

And Viktor, used as he was to everything being awful and the few good things he had being usually torn away from him in the end, took a wet gulp of air, ceased his crying and glared at Jayce’s outstretched, sticky hand.

Unheeding of the warning, Jayce advanced closer, looming over Viktor. 

A lot of crying, apologies, a visit from a very understanding Ximena and a hearty scolding from Mrs Kiramman later, Viktor went to the Talis family house bearing Jayce a shiny, toxin-glazed rock from the Fissures as an apology and a bid for truce. As Jayce yanked him into a hug in instant and dizzying forgiveness, Viktor was befuddled to find out he got himself a friend.

“… You absolute maniac,” Jayce now says, with deep fondness, shaking his head as he rubs the inside of his wrist. “Never grew out of your fangs, did you?”

Viktor manages as much of a nonchalant shrug as one can while horizontal and half-buried in blankets. “I save it for, eh, special cases.”

For a moment, Jayce just watches him, still sat on his haunches over Viktor’s thin legs, with a sheen of what Viktor thinks must be twin nostalgia in his eyes.

And then, quite carelessly, Jayce deploys the cataclysmic declaration of:

“You know, I used to have a massive crush on you when we were kids.”

Viktor freezes so abruptly his leg locks up and twitches under Jayce.

Seemingly heedless of his reaction, Jayce goes on, “Yeah. When we were like … twelve? Thirteen? I thought you were hot shit. You were so … mouthy and sarcastic and well-read. So cool. I don’t think you ever even realised, but I was kind of obsessed with you. Wrote your name in my journal and everything. Like, all the embarrassing shit.”

“What?”

It comes out more like a strangled wheeze than an actual word. For a moment, Viktor thinks the sheer volume of his shock will be enough for his heart to finally give out. Surely, this is it. This is how he dies.

Still evidently unaware of the critical damage he is dealing him, Jayce huffs an embarrassed laugh. His hand comes up, flashing the Hexstone band, to scratch at the back of his head. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “It was a whole thing. I was at war with Sky.”

“At … war,” Viktor repeats, dumbly. “With … Sky?”

“Mhm.” Jayce tilts his head to the side, reminiscing. “I was blackmailing her. Threatening to tell you that she was the one sent you that horrible valentine that made you cry because you thought  it was a prank.”

Viktor’s mouth is hanging open in shock. “Why in gods’ name would you do that?”

Jayce laughs again. He scoots backwards—lifting up Viktor’s blanket-bundled legs—before letting himself slouch against the back of the couch, and pulling them in his lap. “Well, A, because it was true, she just didn’t mean it as a prank. Like, that poem about your eyes being the colour of Stanwick Pididly’s statue? That was genuine, V.”

Jayce pauses for a moment. “And B, I did it because she was going to invite you to the school dance, and I also wanted to invite you to the school dance. Bit of a stalemate,” he says blithely. “I won, by the way. She hated my guts for it but she was too embarrassed of that valentine to risk me exposing her.”

He shakes his head, a distant fondness in his eyes. “All that evil scheming and you didn’t even end up going. You were sick all week, before I even asked you. Flu, or something. Sky and I both had a miserable time.”

Viktor is so shocked—so absolutely flummoxed—he almost forgets how to form words.

“I wasn’t … sick,” he hears his own voice, eventually, as though coming from a great distance. It sounds something like a dying frog’s croak. “I just … didn’t want to go.”

Jayce scoffs, shaking his head. “Figures.”

There is a moment of pause, in which Viktor tries to rebuild the entire foundations of his worldview only to run into a wall.

“Jayce, I—really?”

At last, Jayce gives him a sideways look. He smiles. “Cross my heart and hope to die, Vik, really,” he says. “Ask Sky, if you don’t believe me.”

And in truth, Viktor still isn’t sure that he does believe Jayce.

The whole idea is so ludicrous—so absolutely out of the left field—that he briefly wonders if it’s not some sort of horrid Make a Wish bucket-list plan that Jayce and Sky have hatched to indulge him as he lies expiring on his sagging, lonesome couch. He instantly berates himself even thinking so—neither of them would ever be so cruel. And yet. It’s absurd.

No, he thinks, it’s much more likely that the weed Jayce bought in the Undercity is spiked with Shimmer and Viktor is simply tripping balls by now.

“I … never realised you liked … boys,” is what comes out of his mouth, cringeworthy and juvenile as it is, in something like a drawn-out wheeze.

It feels like it’s him deploying something, this time. A ticking bomb. Something with the power to harm and destroy.

But Jayce does not even have the dignity to look bothered. Only mildly pensive, as though this is something he has not given much thought in a while, but still something that he had thought about. Previously. Perhaps at length.

“I didn’t for a long time, either,” Jayce says, one of his idle hands finding Viktor’s weaker ankle and absent-mindedly rubbing it through the blanket. “My mum did, though. She kind of tried to give me hints, but I was really slow on the uptake. Though I did figure it out in the end. Way later.”

“Oh.” Every-time Viktor feels like he has exceeded his capacity for shock, a new blow comes.  Involuntarily, against better judgement, he asks, “So … back then …?”

Jayce laughs again, though it’s a bit quieter, now. “Yeah, no, it’s … it’s weird. Like, hard to explain, but I … I didn’t really see you as boys.”

“What?” Now, this is even more absurd. “You didn’t think I was a bloody girl, did you?”

But Jayce waves him away, still laughing, but kind of abashed, now. “No, no, just. It was like. Boys, girls and … Viktor. My Viktor.”

And, cutting Viktor another sideways look, Jayce smiles—warm and easily nostalgic—as though he isn’t breaking Viktor’s fucking heart.

Misreading his expression for judgement, it Jayce’s his turn to shrug. “I know, I know. But it made sense to me, at the time. At least it’s how I justified it to myself.”

At the time.

Suddenly, without warning, it feels like all light and breathable air have been sucked out of the room. And Viktor feels like he had been plunged into the cold, deep waters of Bilgewater, too roughly to take a proper breath or cling to something. Too heavy to float, he is now falling, deep into a pit where nobody can follow him, towards the very bed of the sea.

He swallows, painfully.

For the first time, Jayce falters a little, something sober entering into his eyes. “Sorry, uh, if this was a bit too—I mean, kids are kids, right?” He laughs, somewhat nervously this time. He lets go of Viktor’s ankle. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I—”

“It’s fine, Jayce,” Viktor says through numb lips, before Jayce manages to spiral any further. He feels searingly cold, all at once, regardless of all the heaped-up blankets. “You … surprised me, is all.”

“Right.” Pause. Jayce’s thick eyebrows have knitted together. “It’s just, you seem a little—”

“It’s a … bad day,” Viktor cuts in. He hates it, because it is not a lie, which is precisely why he would never say it if it wasn’t his only and last diversion from whatever deep-sealed misery is settling inside him. His longest-running fucking heartache. “Pain-wise.”

Jayce’s demeanour shifts instantly, all mirth leaving him in one fell swoop.

He replaces Viktor’s legs where they used to be stretched out, scooting up to sit next to him on the couch instead.

“Do you need anything?” he asks anxiously. “Meds, a heating pad? Are you uncomfortable, do you want to go to bed? I can get your laptop and we could lay down and finish the documentary in your—”

The idea of laying down in his bed with Jayce and the enormity of grief that is slowly swallowing Viktor whole is simply too much to bear.

“No,” he says, a little sharply. Too sharply, by far. “No, it is okay. I don’t want to move right now.”

“Do you—” Jayce begins, and then cuts himself off.

And Viktor waits in silence, unkindly, finding it a little beyond his capacity to do anything else. He has nothing to give. Nothing left. 

“Do you want me to go?” Jayce asks, at length, sounding pained.

No, Viktor thinks. I don’t want you to ever leave me. I don’t want to lose a single moment with you until I am forced to. Fuck going to Shurima, I’d rather die at the lab than lose any more time with you. Even a second more.

“If you don’t mind,” he says aloud, quietly. “I would like to sleep, if possible.”

He pauses. Swallows. “Thank you for the birthday, Jayce,” he adds, forcing himself to meet Jayce’s worried eyes, and pouring all the earnestness he has to spare into the insufficient words. “It was a nice day. I’m glad I spent it with you.”

For a moment, Jayce only stares at him—looking, oddly, not so different from the boy in the school yard, clutching his bitten hand to himself and staring at Viktor and his shattered little clockwork dream with wide, uncomprehending eyes.

“… Of course, V,” Jayce then says, in a small voice. “Anytime.”

Viktor nods.

It takes a few more remarks, a little more lingering awkwardness. Jayce insists on filling a glass with water and laying Viktor’s painkillers out on the coffee table for him within reach. He dawdles longer than usually, shuffling from to corner to corner, as though trying to find an excuse to stay. Viktor half-wants him to refuse to go at all: with that small, childish part of him who learned not to bite and glued himself to Jayce instead, all those years ago. It urges him, even now, to leap out of his blankets and keep Jayce in the room; apologise, hide in him, take it all back.

He closes his eyes instead, pretending that he has dozed off already. He can feel Jayce adjust the blanket over him, gently, before he heads out.

Viktor waits for the door to shut with a low click before opening his eyes.

On the screen, the whale is swimming across the dark water, slow and alone.

***

He increases the volume of the documentary to drown out the silence.

He eats one more slice of Ximena’s cake, takes his medication, chases it with water. Then tries to will himself to begin the arduous process of heaving himself up from the couch—and finds that he cannot. He does not want to go into his room. He does not want to lie in his bed, where the monotone narration of the documentary can no longer reach him, staring at the ceiling and hearing his own rattling breath. The very thought of it makes him feel so alone he thinks he could choke on it.

He lets go of the crutch, sinking back into the pillows instead.

With cold fingers, Viktor picks up the blue flask and drinks deep; the metal cool and burning against his the lips. He shivers, shudders maybe, his head swimming. The weed is still in his system, and so are his horrible thoughts, swarming his head like shiny plankton or a myriad tiny Hextech gems. He feels ruptured somewhere on the inside, oozing something vital, losing substance minute by minute.

Abruptly, without warning, Viktor starts crying.

His body has given up on him already. He can feel it, the slow downward pull. This is the last stretch of the road, he knows, and the road does not lead to Shurima or anywhere else in this world.

When Viktor turned twelve, Jayce gave him a gift. It was a replica of the boat he had lost to the bullies at school, a couple of years before. Jayce had remade it to the smallest of details, save for the paint: instead of blue, he made half of it red.

When he gave it to Viktor, Viktor didn’t know what to do with it. How to react. He just stared, wide-eyed, into Jayce’s bright hopeful face, and asked, somewhat awkwardly:

”… For me?”

“Of course for you, V, silly,” Jayce said, and then hugged him.

He still has the boat, hidden in a safe place in the deep confines of his bedroom. Each year he carefully unburies to look at it and brush off the dust: a private ritual.

But not today. He is too tired.

He pictures it: going slowly into the room and crouching in front of the shelf to retrieve from the hiding spot, and he knows he cannot do it; knows he will never be able to do it ever again.

He thinks, this was probably my last birthday.

Breathing unevenly, Viktor shuts his eyes. He drinks from the flask again, hoping to fall asleep, hoping to somehow wake up young again and try doing it all again, this time better.

***

It’s the noises that rouse him, though they are quiet.

First, the sound of the front door opening. A rattle of the spare key. Then, the light whine of the hinges. Footsteps, the telltale floor-creak of someone stepping inside. A thin streak of light in the corridor appears, dim through his closed eyelids. Distantly, half-consciously, he thinks he should be afraid, panicked even. He is no state to defend himself from burglars or worse. Everything around him is unsteady and sinuous. The ocean has risen high, swallowing the room. Soon he will either float or drown. He stays still, eyes shut, waiting.

A lamp is flicked on.

“… Vik?”

Quiet, disbelieving.

Viktor’s eyes flutter open: swollen, crusty, sore.

And then Jayce is there, haloed with lamplight, as though conjured from his deepest dreams—worried and windswept and damp from rain, kneeling on the floor by the couch so that his face is level with Viktor’s, and Viktor—blinks at him.

“What are you still doing on the couch?” Jayce whispers, concerned. “What’s—were you crying? Viktor, are you in pain? Do I need to call someone, the doctors?”

He sounds out of breath. He makes as little sense as any of Viktor’s medication-fuelled projections, but he feels strangely real, smelling of damp wool and day’s old sweat and cologne.

“Jayce,” Viktor croaks out, still blinking. “Why are you here.”

Jayce swallows. “I—I just had a bad feeling, I—I’m sorry, ever since you, ever since that night, I’ve just been paranoid, and you got so weird and sad and I don’t ever want to—”

He trails off. A large, warm hand cups Viktor’s face, instead, thumb stroking the drying moisture on his hollow cheek. A small shock. His eyelids flutter, involuntarily.

“V, talk to me,” Jayce pleads. “What’s wrong? Are you in pain? You couldn’t walk to bed?”

“I …” Viktor swallows. “I didn’t want to.”

Jayce exhales audibly, still cradling Viktor’s face.

“You can’t sleep here,” his voice is thick with concern. “Your back, you—I’ll help you, alright? Would you let me? Just this one time.”

Everything is so odd and improbable and distant. What does it matter if Jayce is lying. It feels impossible enough that he is back at all.

Weakly, Viktor whispers, “Okay.”

“Okay.” And then Jayce scoops him up from the couch like a ragdoll; blankets and all. Viktor should hate it. Hate him. But he can’t. He feels so ill and disoriented, in the swaying not-water that’s swallowing the room, and he is so relieved to no longer be wholly alone that instead, he clings on as Jayce carries him into the bedroom, Viktor’s head buried in his chest.

But the fear returns, sharper than ever, as he is lowered into the sheets. Almost compulsively, Viktor’s hand shoots out, grasping at Jayce’s wrist. “… Don’t.”

Jayce blinks, hesitating. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t let go.” Don’t let go of me. Please. Viktor’s hand is shaking, unable to maintain its grip. He lets the fingers uncurl from Jayce’s wrist, but keeps it there, outstretched—as though pleading with him.

Looking him in the eyes, Jayce slowly shakes his head. “No,” he says. “No, I’m here. I’m not letting go.”

Quickly and efficiently, he toes off his boots, coat, blazer, tie; tosses them all to the ground in a crumpled heap, before crawling over Viktor and into the bed, scooping him close. The weight and warmth is almost disorienting, a little dizzying—after Viktor’s slow shivery decay on the couch, swathed with a horrible medley of drugs, alcohol and misery—and for a moment, he waits for Jayce to retreat again, leave.

But Jayce only leans in, pressing his mouth to Viktor’s sweaty temple as he asks, “Are you sure you don’t need your medication?”

“I took it already,” Viktor admits. “But I, eh, maybe drank too much.”

Jayce heaves another shaky breath. He squeezes Viktor lightly, keeping his arms looped around him. “You scared me a little today,” he admits in turn.

Viktor blinks. His head feels heavy and waterlogged, as though the world is still quite drowned. But he finds himself able to think more or less clearly, if a little too openly.

So he says, “So did you.”

He can imagine Jayce’s frown rather than actually sees it. He predicts it, instead, from the minute stiffening of Jayce’s arms, the little hitch in his breath.

“What—what do you mean, V? I scared you? How?”

For a long while, Viktor drifts in the water, close-eyed, silent.

Then he says, “I didn’t have a crush on you as a child.”

Jayce huffs out a laugh which sounds slightly hysterical. Wary, uneasy. “Viktor that’s—that’s okay, I didn’t mean to—”

Viktor interrupts him. His voice comes out surprisingly steady, considering. Almost dull.

“It’s not that I didn’t feel things back then,” he says, “but you remember me. I didn’t … understand my emotions very well. Or social cues, especially those common in Piltover. I think, after my parents died, and the whole thing with the doctor and moving up here, it was just … too much. It scared me. Enough, I think, that I tried not to feel anything. It took me … a while. A long while, to adjust. A … eh, a late bloomer, you would say, in many ways. Whatever I was feeling confused me too much to give it any thought. So I didn’t.”

Jayce says nothing.

Viktor swallows. His throat hurts from the alcohol, from crying, from coughing and trying not to cough—and from the strain of holding it all back, all the things he is now so carelessly saying. Years and years of it.

“Until I was older,” he says. “Maybe sixteen. Years after everybody else. It all … hit me. And then I fell in love with you and it was agony.”

Jayce’s jaw clicks shut with an audible sound. He tenses so much Viktor can feel it all the way in his arms, wrist to shoulder. Viktor screws his eyes shut, seasick, nauseous.

“You never even looked at me anymore,” he says, almost inaudibly. “Certainly never looked at me like that. I didn’t know where the hell to put it. What to do with it.”

He thinks he can hear Jayce swallow. He thinks the frantic thumping he feels might be Jayce’s rabbiting heart. Or perhaps it’s all him, as always.

“I’m sorry I reacted so poorly, Jayce. It’s been a nice day.” He is beginning to slur his words a little. “But I’ve been in pain. And I wish you hadn’t told me this.”

At last, Jayce tries to speak, the word escaping him choked and stricken: “Viktor—”

Viktor inhales sharply. “No. I, I spent most of my life trying not to delude myself that you could ever want me.”

Silence.

“Only to realise, now, of all times,” he goes on. “That there was a time, however brief, that you had.”

Viktor’s breathing is choppy, strained. His eyes are full of saltwater and cinched shut. “And I missed it,” he whispers. “My window.”

He manages a wet chuckle, which comes out more like a cough, and then a desperate gulp of breath. He clutches at the sheets, in the end, trying not to choke on it.

Then Jayce moves closer, so rapidly Viktor isn’t at all sure what he’s going to do—until his forehead is pressed tight against Viktor’s clammy one. His hand finds the side of Viktor’s face, the side of his neck, almost shakily. 

“You … you haven’t missed anything, Vik, holy shit,” Jayce then says, rushed, as though he’s scared Viktor will tell him to shut up. There’s an odd, almost reverent caution in his eyes, a terrified wonder that hardly befits Piltover’s Man of Progress. “There’s no window. There’s never been any window, it’s always been like this, do you—do you hear me? Do you get what I’m saying, Vik, I’m—I, I kind of can’t believe that we’re really—”

Viktor is not sure that he does understand. Everything around him is swaying, new and unmoored; a boat flung deep into roiling waters. He feels dizzy, under-oxygenated. Jayce seems to be saying—but also not saying, in his choppy words—something either impossible or miraculous.

His heart is beating fast when he blurts out: “Can you stay here tonight.” It comes out strained and interrupts Jayce’s own words. “The … the whole night. I hate to ask. But, couch, or—anywhere, really, Jayce. I’m. I suppose, scared. Would you—”

Jayce pulls him close, swallowing him up in a bearish, near-suffocating hug.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispers, the force of it a thunder in Viktor’s ear. “Not a chance, now, horses wouldn’t drag me away. Not in any reality. Even if you told me you’ve murdered everyone we know, I’d still be here. I’d—”

Viktor surprises even himself with a genuine, if wet, laugh. “Careful what you wish for,” he breathes out. “They say, go out with a bang, no?”

Jayce makes a wounded noise again, not unlike a whale. “Viktor, for fuck’s sake, can you stop, can you stop saying that—”

But Viktor shakes his head, pulling back from the hug. “Don’t, Jayce. Not today. My one wish.”

For a moment, it seems like Jayce will argue—there’s that tight expression on his face again. But then it clears, becoming resolved instead.

“Fine,” he says. And then, almost angrily, “I love you.”

Viktor stares at him: drifting, dizzy, unreal.

Through numb lips, he echoes, “I love you too, Jayce.”

He feels, finally, something approaching calm.

In front of him, Jayce is nodding, a little deliriously.

“We’ll talk … tomorrow,” he decides. “Right now, you. You, uh, you need water. Are you cold? I’ll … I’ll keep you warm, anyhow. You … wait here, I’ll be right back.”

Viktor stops himself from protesting. If Jayce wants to run away, it’s not like Viktor can stop him. But for once, he doesn’t think Jayce will. Everything is too much in flux now; cold hard logic giving way to something out of a child’s wish or daydream. Perhaps Viktor is higher than he’s thought, perhaps he is already dreaming—it would explain more than one thing.

He lies still, letting the unreality wash over him like water lapping at the sand of the shore, dispersing it grain by grain. He watches the door through half-lidded eyes to the beat of his own heart.

Jayce comes back. Faster than seems possible: he stumbles a little on the threshold, spilling some water from the glass he’s brought alongside what looks like a damp towel.

He helps Viktor up into a sitting position—the room spins, carelessly and entirely—and dabs at his forehead and the nape of his neck with the towel. It feels nice, Viktor thinks, like relief. He drinks the water dutifully, avoiding Jayce’s eyes. He spills some of it towards the end, and belatedly realises his eyelids are drooping, and so is his head.

“Alright, sleepyhead,” Jayce says with a lag, ruffling his hair. “Let’s get you back to bed.”

“Do not fuss over me,” Viktor grumbles, momentarily heartier even as he’s becoming drowsy, and hence mulish again. “I am fine.”

“Liar. Besides, I want to fuss over you. C’mon, lie down.”

Protests are futile, anyhow: despite his wounded pride and the swimming confusion of the evening’s unresolved anguish and all the strangeness that followed, Viktor is well on his way to drifting off again by the time Jayce lifts the covers to tuck him back in.

Dimly, Viktor feels Jayce brush his sweaty hair out of his eyes and then kiss him there. A silly idea. His eyebrows furrow again.

“Fucking hell, Vik,” Jayce whispers, from somewhere very close. “Sky was right. What have we been doing?”

Viktor means to tell him he does not know either, but he can’t. He is too busy swimming through the ocean, glib and fast and sinuous like a deep-sea creature, alone but unconstrained by his body and free for once as he chases the rolling tide.

***

He wakes up in the middle of the night: sober, sweat-drenched and absolutely terrified. He remembers in absolute clarity every word he had said the previous day and none of the answers. In his dream, he was falling slowly through dark murky sea, beyond help as he could no longer cry for it; too heavy to be pulled out anyhow. For a moment, he thinks he must be in the hospital, and that the time has come, and it frightens him. He wrenches himself upright, struggling to draw a breath, lungs full of choking fluid. Gasping, clawing at the sheets, he tries to sit upright.

“Jayce,” he chokes out, trying to call for help after all, “Jayce.”

And somehow Jayce is there, though he really should not be; not by any logic. But he is, big warm hand to Viktor’s back between the shoulder blades, pushing, rubbing firmly. “It’s okay, V,” he says groggily. “I got you.”

Viktor gulps in air. He can breathe, he realises. It is panic in his chest, not fluid. He can still breathe, for now. He only dreamt that he couldn’t anymore.

“What’s wrong,” Jayce croaks again. “Pain?”

“No. I’m—”

Viktor’s heart is hammering. He’s still scared, though no longer sure what scares him the most: that he is dreaming or that he isn’t. Memories of yesterday are floating up to the surface, fragmented and drenched thoroughly in the blue-tinged haze of the marine documentary: he sees himself and Jayce as though caught on film, suspended in water, swimming around each other like two guileless creatures.

He should wait for morning to make another move; he should wait for certainty of waking up at all before plunging them both into free fall.

Who has that sort of time?

So Viktor twists back, groping blindly in the dark to find the stubble-rough edges of Jayce’s well-known face and the pliable shape of his mouth under Viktor’s as he kisses him.

It’s a hungry thing, lacking nuance or dignity; and a stupid idea at that. But he’ll take what he can, Viktor thinks, even if it means waking to a shattered reality; even if he’s only dreaming. He is sick to bastard death of waiting either way. From now on, and for every remaining day, he will take.

He expects to be pushed away—gently, probably, kindly but firmly; to be told he is not well, told that he needs to stop—

Jayce kisses him back, one hand holding Viktor’s twisted face in place, the other still firm around his waist.

And he does move, pulling them back down into the pillows. But Jayce remains behind him, a solid brace to keep him steady even as their lips part. And Jayce goes on kissing him: first his lips and then his neck, shoulder, the side of his jaw. Viktor breathes loudly, trembling.

“Hold me,” he demands, redundantly.

Both of Jayce’s arms wind around him like anchor-chain, engulfing and thick. Without letting go, he has tided them over to the side, so that Viktor’s weak leg is propped up by Jayce’s own knee underneath it.

Viktor’s breathing evens out.

“I’m sorry,” he thinks he says. “I think I’m going mad.”

“S’okay,” Jayce says, mumbles really. He, too, is drifting back into sleep. “Love you, it’s okay. I’m mad, too.”

***

Viktor wakes late, mid-stretch, with his elbow ramming into something soft, eking a low, offended grunt from the soft thing.

He blinks.

He tends to stretch quite expansively, and quite violently, for someone so narrow and rickety as he is. This time is no different: he has flung his left arm and leg out to the side, but instead of reaching the end of his modest bed, both hit a warm wall of … Jayce.

Jayce, who is staring at him with tired eyes and shadows pressed under them like the imprints of fists. Jayce, plastered dutifully along Viktor’s side, waiting for him to wake up.

Viktor freezes mid-stretch.

Heart rabbiting, he feels heat rise in his face like a high tide. Fuck.

“Do you have,” Jayce meanwhile croaks out, without moving, “more than two elbows?”

“… Khm?” comes out of Viktor—an odd, somewhat startled sound, though he can hardly be blamed for it. He is unused to visitors in his bed these days, and he has not expected a verbal response to either his stretching or his, rather justified, panic. “… What?”

“Have you made yourself a third elbow in the night?” Jayce asks again, picking idly at the red fabric of the sweatshirt swathing Viktor’s elbow. “In order to kill me with it?”

There is a moment of silence.

“I have a regular number of … elbows,” Viktor says at last, sounding slow and muffled and perhaps not as certain as he’d have liked.

But Jayce only smiles. He swings himself fully to the side and scoots closer towards Viktor, burrowing his entire face into the sweaty bundle of sheets and limbs. Viktor tries to protest, but the first touch of Jayce’s scratchy face rubbing against his own robs him of both strength and whatever grey cells he could hope to still host in his brain.

“I think you do,” Jayce meanwhile mumbles, insisting, even as his arms snake around Viktor, pulling them flush together and pinning him in place, “and they’re a safety hazard. Hazardous objects. We could patent them and sell as weapons. Hexbows.”

Lifting up his face at last, Jayce meets Viktor’s eyes. Viktor stares at him blearily.

“… No.”

In truth, he does not feel all that wonderful. Aside from the usual aches and pains his body tends to accrue overnight and greet him with in the morning, his head is pounding, nausea crawls up his throat and it is taking him enormous efforts to keep his eyes open, prickly-sore as they are.

Viktor swallows, panicking again, and tries to brace himself.

It all has a strange, eerie quality to it: the light, too bright and lovely in deep mid-winter, the half-lidded look of Jayce’s eyes, the discordant chronology of the previous day which eludes Viktor so entirely.

“You—” he rasps out, “Jayce, we.”

“I’ll make us coffee, okay?” Jayce parries. “I’ll put some sweetmilk in it. And we’ll have a talk and everything. Sound good?”

Viktor stares at him, pinched.

But whatever he might wish to do, Jayce beats him to it. A determined look crosses over his face before he dives down again to press a kiss to the small uncovered patch of Viktor’s neck. Viktor’s breath hitches loudly, the rug swept quite thoroughly from under him once anew. Like he’s been shocked with electricity.

When Jayce leans back away, his face is flushed red. He gives Viktor a tiny smile, before all but leaping  out of the bed and disappearing in the kitchen.

***

Viktor chases him like a white rabbit, terrified of losing his way underground. He makes a point of limping all the way into the kitchen before Jayce can as much as think of bringing anything back to bed. He is sore all over and still worryingly vague on the minute details of the mortifying conversations of the accursed previous day, so he braces himself against his crutch and readies himself for battle.

To his mild surprise, Jayce is sitting at the kitchen table in front of two coffee mugs, waiting. He looks, more than anything, exceedingly polite. Tense. Somewhat sheepish.

Blinking, Viktor draws to a halt in front of the table.

He decides to dive straight in, “What … is this, Jayce?” he asks.

“Sit down?” Jayce replies.

Somewhat reluctantly, Viktor does.

“You told me you’re in love with me yesterday,” Jayce then says, responding to Viktor’s bluntness with the force of a hand grenade. Viktor sags into his seat like a loose-stringed puppet. “Or you were in love with me,” Jayce amends. “And you kissed me. But you were high, and drunk, and …  and wildly unhappy, so I, uh, I need you to tell me if you meant it. Any of it.”

Viktor says nothing. His mouth twists, body rigid, and he stares at the ceiling as all the blood in his body seems to burst inside his cheeks, painting him the dull colour of a ripe tomato.

“… Jayce,” he mutters, grasping at his chipped Man of Progress mug like a lifeline.

“Because I lied,” Jayce goes on, bravely, before taking a long, trembling breath and reaching out. Hand stretched, palm open, towards Viktor.

Viktor lets go of his mug and takes is without thinking.

“When I said I loved you as a kid,” Jayce says. “I lied. Its wasn’t just then. It never went away. I don’t think it ever will.”

There is a moment of silence.

“Jayce,” Viktor says again, after a long time. This time it comes out like a plea.

Jayce takes it as invitation enough. He takes a deep breath. “You said I never looked at you anymore, not that way but I don’t even know what that means. All I’ve ever looked at was you. I don’t know how else to look at you. You must’ve just gotten used to it, I don’t know, because—”

“Jayce—”

“Ask Sky,” Jayce whispers, staring at the table and gripping Viktor’s hand so hard it nearly hurts. “If you don’t believe me. She’s so mad at me, but she knows. She still fucking hates my guts.”

“I believe you,” Viktor says, hoarsely.

Jayce’s eyes snap up. Viktor forces himself to meet them. His own eyes are brimming with tears again, and he watches Jayce try to refrain himself from leaping from the table to come to him.

Yes, come, Viktor thinks. Come to me.

“Why now?” he asks instead, quietly, squeezing Jayce’s hand. “I’m … Jayce, you know I’m—”

Dying. It’s the worst time for this in the world.

But Jayce shakes his head. “It just wouldn’t stay in anymore,” he says. “I should have told you in that hospital room. I should have told you years ago. Fuck, Viktor, sorry. I’ve been … I’ve just been really scared. I’ve been a coward. But you know what was even fucking scarier? When Sky called me and, and I had to wait for you to … to wake up at all. And I realised you wouldn’t even know, you wouldn’t fucking know, because I never told you. How loved you are. So even if it’s just me, even if you don’t, you have to know.”

Viktor swallows.

“Is it just me?” Jayce asks, quieter.

Viktor shuts his eyes, overwhelmed. His mouth twists again, something between a smile and a wince; a laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he chokes out. “It’s all I’ve ever—all I’ve ever—and now I won’t even get to—”

Jayce is on him before Viktor can properly cry, sinking to his knees in front of the chair and pulling him closer. He takes his bony face in both hands and kisses Viktor’s eyelids, his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, sloppily and annoyingly, smudging the tears all over him.

He gets to his lips, finally, and Viktor responds in turn, hungry and demanding until he bites down on Jayce’s lower lip and they break apart to the stifled sound of Jayce laughing.

“You really like to bite, huh?” he whispers, grinning. Licks his bruised lower lip. And then, “You will, Vik. Whatever you were gonna say, you will get to it. You’ll get it.”

Viktor only pushes their foreheads together. He is breathing a little too fast, strenuously. All of his body still hurts. But tentatively, he raises a hand and plants it on Jayce’s sternum, where his heart is beating very fast. Then, gently, strokes the side of his gristly, sunkissed face.

“Jayce,” he says. “I’m.”

“… Going to be okay,” Jayce insists, hushing him. Crowded like this, Viktor feels like he is being scooped up into a pocket universe, folded in and out of the world. He can feel his sweetmilk-sticky breath mingling with Jayce’s, the movement of his chest under his hand. “In less than two weeks, we’ll be roasting in Shurima and you’ll drink all their horrible potions and infusions, and then—”

Viktor laughs. “We’ll be in Shurima?” he asks, shakily. “I wasn’t aware you were planning on going. Do we have investors there?”

There is a silence, long enough that Viktor opens his eyes.

Jayce is staring at him in disbelief.

“Of course I’m fucking coming to Shurima, Viktor, what did you think was the point of involving Mel and all the House Talis crap?” he asks incredulously.

Viktor blinks, taken aback, and begins to lean away, but Jayce holds him in place.

“No, tell me.”

“… Insurance fraud?” Viktor hazards.

Jayce winces. “No—well, yes, though you really shouldn’t be saying it—but not. Not just that? I mean, it was mostly so I can plead family emergency and pack up for three weeks to go with you. Why do you think Sky’s getting a speedrun on investor showcase protocol? She’s going to have to go to all the shit I usually do when we’re away, and that’s where Mel comes in, because it really takes a while to get the gist of it.”

Viktor swallows. “Oh. I thought … Well, I suppose I thought it was just for when, for when I—” he trails off. “Oh,” he says again.

“Yes, oh,” Jayce says. Something calculating appears in his eyes. “And before you get started on wasting time away from your research again, I, uh. Might have found a way to transport the Hexcore with us. Maybe. I mean, Heimerdinger is sceptical, but—well, if it works, you can literally keep fucking with it while we’re there. And, well, it’s good to have a Plan B, just in case, yeah? I know you and Sky have been experimenting with the houseplants and all and—”

“I doubt they’d take well to the climate in Shurima,” Viktor offers, placating. “I will leave them here.”

Jayce ignores him. His grip on his forearms tightens, as though he wishes to shake him. “Janna, Vik, did you really think I was gonna send you to goddamned Shurima alone?” he demands.

Yes, Viktor wants to say, only now that he thinks about it, it sounds so far-fetched and out of character it’s almost embarrassing.

Of course Jayce would go with him. Jayce couldn’t stand even leaving Viktor to sleep alone last night. Jayce left Mel Medarda’s bed in the middle of the night to wither away at Viktor’s bedside in the hospital. Jayce hasn’t left Viktor—not really—since they were both kids.

He blinks, swallowing. “You won’t let go,” he says.

He’s still not sure if he believes it: the probability of all of this being real, of him making it all the way to Shurima and anything there making a big enough difference to give him back to life. He still has a sense, deep-down, of some sort of dream-logic being at play here: an interference which should not quite have a right to play out the way it does; a misdirected current. The kitchen is swathed with unwinterlike light, and something inside Viktor feels like they are drifting, suspended together somewhere out of time, in waves of unearthly blue.

He’s not sure what to make of it, or whether he can make it out at all.

But he believes Jayce when he says, looking him in the eyes, “Not a fucking chance.”