Chapter Text
Viktor had never cared much for parties or student get-togethers. That, however, didn't mean he didn't care about his friends.
Friends.
The word still felt strange rolling around in his mind, foreign somehow, like a smooth pebble that didn't quite belong. University had given Viktor something he'd never expected to find: friends. The realization surprised no one more than it surprised him. A lifelong loner, he'd been fully prepared for his classmates to overlook him entirely. A scrawny, brooding nerd of questionable origins wasn't exactly the sort of person Piltover's golden children gravitated toward.
To his astonishment, he discovered he wasn't the only one. He wasn't the only student who had earned a place at Piltover's finest university through relentless work and ability rather than family money. Even more surprising was the realization that some of those wealthy heirs turned out to be genuinely kind, interesting people. Sometimes.
He'd noticed Jayce Talis almost immediately. It was difficult not to notice someone who looked, at first glance, like every cliché brought to life: handsome, athletic, effortlessly charming, flashing that dazzling white smile. Surely hopeless in class, Viktor had assumed. It fit the image so perfectly that it hardly seemed possible for the reality to be any different.
If only it had been that simple. If Jayce had truly been nothing more than the campus heartthrob straight out of a painfully predictable teen rom-com, their paths would never have crossed.
Instead, he proved to be something far more complicated—and, depending on how one looked at it, far worse. Or far better. It was as though life itself had handed him the winning lottery ticket. He had everything: the looks, the charisma, and—to Viktor's genuine disbelief—the brains to match. The life of every gathering, a favorite among professors, and the object of at least half the girls' collective sighing, Jayce had every reason to be insufferably full of himself. Yet Viktor had never seen a trace of arrogance. He could have been the sort of person who looked down on anyone weaker than himself. The kind who made cruel jokes at other people's expense. At the very least, Viktor expected him to have an endless supply of tasteless one-liners. Surely nobody could be that perfect.
Apparently, somebody could.
Jayce was unfailingly warm, considerate, and, in his own way, almost disarmingly modest. Someone like him could easily have gone through university without ever noticing someone like Viktor.
But he did notice.
He greeted him before lectures. Smiled at him with infuriating ease. Was always happy to puzzle through the more fiendish homework problems together—after all, there was hardly anyone else in their year who could keep up with him intellectually.
Even so, Jayce never seemed interested in becoming anything more than friendly. During those first months, they couldn't honestly have been called friends. Acquaintances, perhaps. And even that was stretching it. Viktor never took it personally. As far as he could tell, Jayce was simply like that with everyone. Endlessly kind. Endlessly approachable. To Jayce, Viktor was just one person among many—one classmate out of twenty, one student among hundreds, one more face in an endless sea of people he treated with effortless warmth.
But to Viktor… Jayce had become someone special almost before he realized it.
Viktor denied it for a long time, even to himself. The fact that, in every lecture, his eyes unfailingly drifted toward Talis as though pulled by a magnet meant nothing. The way his mood lifted the moment Piltover's golden boy walked through the classroom door each morning meant nothing either. Nor did the way his heart skipped whenever Jayce wandered over during a break with an easy, "Hey, how did you solve the fourth task?". Those conversations inevitably spiraled into lively debates and collaborative attempts to find the most elegant solution. Afterwards, Viktor would spend the rest of the lecture suppressing an inexplicable smile. That, naturally, had everything to do with the pleasure of a stimulating intellectual exercise.
Nothing else.
He tried not to dwell on any of it. Talis was simply one of those people whose natural charisma affected everyone around him, and Viktor had become yet another casualty. Besides, who in their right mind wouldn't want to be friends with someone like him?
Viktor certainly did.
Jayce was brilliant, endlessly enthusiastic, consistently earned the highest marks in the class—or, occasionally, the second highest, after Viktor himself—and somehow managed to do all of that without becoming the sort of dreary academic whose entire personality revolved around studying. He had hobbies. A social life. An effortless way of talking to people that Viktor found almost incomprehensible.
Though they stood at the top of their class together, they reached those heights by entirely different paths. Viktor had never believed in talent. He believed in discipline, persistence, and relentless work. Yet talent was the very first word that came to mind whenever he thought of Jayce Talis. He belonged to that infuriatingly rare breed of people who never seemed to spend sleepless nights buried in textbooks and still sailed through every exam with effortless brilliance. How? It couldn't simply be luck. Charm? Granted, Jayce had an uncanny ability to win professors over, but charm alone wasn't enough to ace advanced engineering courses.
So what was it? A phenomenal memory? Lightning-fast intuition? A mind that recognized patterns before anyone else even realized there was one?
That mystery fascinated Viktor. More than Jayce himself, perhaps—though the distinction was becoming increasingly difficult to make. He wanted to understand a mind that worked so differently from his own.
As it happened, he soon got the chance.
At the end of their first year, they were assigned a major group project that, alongside their final exams, would determine a substantial portion of their grade. Rather than assigning partners, the professor told everyone to choose for themselves.
Viktor knew this was his opportunity. Normally, he avoided taking the initiative in social situations whenever he could. This time, however, he shoved his introversion somewhere deep out of sight, gathered what little courage he possessed, and approached Jayce during the very next break. There was no time to hesitate. Someone like Talis wouldn't stay available for long.
"Hey, Jayce..." His own voice came out strangely high. His palms instantly grew damp, and he gripped the strap of his satchel to hide the faint tremor in his hands.
Why am I this nervous?
It was just a conversation about a class project. He wasn't asking him out.
"...If you haven't picked a partner yet..." Viktor cleared his throat. "Would you want to work together?"
He braced himself for disappointment. It wouldn't have surprised him in the slightest if someone faster had already claimed Jayce before the lecture had even ended.
Instead, Jayce broke into a broad smile. "Absolutely."
The answer came so quickly that it caught Viktor completely off guard. Then Jayce said something even more unexpected.
"I was actually thinking about asking you." He rubbed the back of his neck with an easy grin. "We make a pretty good team when we're studying for exams. I figure if we put our heads together, we'll run circles around everyone else."
The weeks that followed became, without question, the happiest of Viktor's entire first year.
Now Viktor had an official excuse to spend more time with Jayce. They met for lunch. Stayed after lectures to work together. Texted in the evenings and over the weekends. Even six a.m. alarms became bearable when they meant another day at the university.
In May, Powder finally looked at him suspiciously. "You're awfully happy for someone about to start finals."
Viktor only waved her off.
Of course he was happy. He finally had a project worth caring about instead of another set of tedious, formulaic assignments. And he had someone to work with who was every bit as passionate about their field as he was, whose mind challenged him at every turn, and who—like Viktor himself—couldn't have cared less about the gulf between their social classes.
Of course he was happy. He'd finally found everything he'd come to university for.
Powder merely smiled to herself, wearing the sort of knowing expression Viktor chose to ignore. She nodded as though perfectly satisfied with his explanation. She very clearly wasn't.
Working with Jayce came effortlessly. They dismantled each other's ideas only to come up with ten better ones. They could spend an hour passionately arguing over an approach, then another two buried in calculations side by side in the library. Before long, they were finishing each other's sentences. Sometimes one of them would call the other on a Sunday morning with nothing more than, "You have to hear this idea right now."
They started sitting together during lunch and in lectures, usually in the back row where they could whisper without attracting too much attention from the professors. Their friendship still existed almost entirely within the walls of the university. But friendship it had undeniably become.
Then, at the beginning of their second year, Viktor finally admitted to Powder that he was in love with Jayce. He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the floor as he said it. After all, he'd had an entire summer to think—and, eventually, to stop denying the obvious.
Their endless intellectual sparring was wonderful. But somehow, even more wonderful were the fleeting brush of Jayce's warm hand against his own. Their knees bumping beneath the desk. The way a single smile from his project partner could make something inside him quietly melt. And surely your heart wasn't supposed to beat somewhere in your throat every time you talked to a friend on the phone.
Ordinarily, Viktor kept his feelings locked away where no one could see them, yet telling Powder turned out to be surprisingly easy. The emotions had been building for months, pressing harder and harder against his ribs until it felt impossible to contain them any longer. They burned too fiercely to stay hidden.
Besides, for reasons he couldn't quite explain, he trusted her completely. She would never betray his confidence. Though that didn't stop her from teasing him mercilessly. Whenever Jayce appeared in the doorway, she'd nudge Viktor with her elbow beneath the desk and struggle not to laugh. If the two of them ended up alone in the library after class, Powder would make some transparent excuse to leave first, flashing Viktor an infuriatingly smug smile on her way out.
Viktor and Powder had grown close early in their first year, much to both of their surprise. At first glance, they couldn't have seemed more different. Viktor was calm, reserved, buttoned-up in every possible sense. Always impeccably neat—save for the perpetually unruly chestnut hair that refused to cooperate—he favored tailored clothes in muted shades of gray, white, and brown and almost never strayed from them. Powder, meanwhile, was a walking firework. Bright blue streaks in her hair, sometimes dusted with colorful chalk. Eclectic clothes in every color imaginable. An endless parade of makeup experiments. And, of course, that perpetual spark dancing in her eyes.
The more Viktor got to know her, though, the more obvious it became that their differences were mostly skin-deep. They were both brilliant, restless minds, endlessly curious, forever chasing the next puzzle. They genuinely loved difficult problems, impossible challenges, and the thrill of figuring things out. They shared audacious dreams and the determination to become something greater than the circumstances they'd been born into. They had both grown up in the undercity and clawed their way upward through sheer grit. And both carried pieces of a past they preferred not to speak about. Looking at Powder's sunny smile, it was hard to imagine that her heart carried as many scars as Viktor's.
Now he knew better. In truth, they were remarkably alike—except Powder possessed a spectacular streak of recklessness that made Viktor look downright sensible. Before meeting her, he'd considered himself prone to dangerous experiments. Well. He had since discovered he ranked, at best, second. Powder could think—oh, she absolutely could—but she usually preferred to act first. As she liked to put it, that just gave her more data to think about afterward.
Through Powder, Viktor also became friends with Ekko—her childhood friend and an engineer nearly as obsessed with his craft as they were. A good guy. Just... a little too hyperactive for Viktor's taste.
The group project that had first brought Viktor and Jayce together ended with the close of freshman year, but the habit they'd formed of sitting together in the back row never went away. Jayce always sat on Viktor's left. Powder claimed the seat to his right. Ekko took the one beside hers. And somehow, without anyone ever suggesting it outright, the four of them simply became a group.
Then Powder's older sister, Vi, joined the gang. She was two years ahead of them at the same university, which was something of a miracle considering how little effort she seemed to put into her classes—not to mention her spectacular talent for collecting disciplinary warnings. On the other hand, she was one of the university's top wrestlers and competed on the varsity team, which apparently bought her an astonishing amount of forgiveness. Normally, that kind of favoritism would've irritated Viktor. And yet… Growing up on the streets of Zaun had a way of creating an unspoken bond. Every one of them had clawed their way upward the only way they knew how.
To Viktor's surprise, Vi and Jayce hit it off almost immediately. Within days she'd started calling him bro, and Jayce, in turn, introduced them to Caitlyn—his childhood friend, who was studying law.
And then there was Mel. That Mel. The one fly in the ointment of their otherwise perfect little college friend group, according to Viktor—and Viktor alone. She was Caitlyn's friend, the model student from the School of International Relations. Viktor happened to know that the program didn't even offer need-based scholarships. It was populated almost entirely by the pampered children of politicians and corporate elites.
To say Mel came from money would have been a spectacular understatement. Jayce's family was comfortably well-off. Caitlyn's was genuinely wealthy. But Mel—whose mother held one of the highest positions in the government—made both of them look almost ordinary.
And the worst part? She wasn't even easy to hate.
She never looked down on people. Or, if she did, she was exceptionally good at hiding it behind impeccable manners. She didn't coast through university on her mother's influence, either. Quite the opposite—she worked hard, earned top grades, and gave nobody a legitimate reason to question whether she belonged there.
There was simply nothing to criticize. Beautiful. Brilliant. Diligent. Charming. And, infuriatingly, not even arrogant.
Viktor searched desperately for a believable reason to dislike her. Because the real one… The real one he wouldn't have admitted at gunpoint. The real reason was the lingering looks she gave Jayce. The honeyed warmth that slipped into her voice whenever she spoke to him. The way she shamelessly stole him away during lunch breaks.
In short—
Viktor was jealous. Painfully, hopelessly jealous.
Before he'd admitted—even to himself—what his feelings for Jayce really were, he tried to rationalize it every way he could.
She's just another spoiled rich girl. Of course she annoys me.
She looks at me like I'm some kind of cockroach. Naturally I don't like her.
That last one, admittedly, was a gross exaggeration. Mel was, if anything, politely indifferent toward Viktor. His friends couldn't understand why he harbored such a grudge against her, but Viktor stubbornly stuck to his narrative. And even after finally acknowledging his feelings for Jayce—and confessing them to Powder—he continued diligently painting Medarda as the villain.
At that point, backing down would've been far too embarrassing. In the end, Mel's presence was the only shadow over Viktor's otherwise idyllic university life. Fortunately, there were still the things that belonged to just the two of them. The presentations they gave together. Their endless debates over homework. Preparing for engineering competitions. Those precious hours alone in the laboratory or the library. Hours that belonged to Viktor and Jayce. Hours Mel could never steal from him—if only because she had the misfortune of being a humanities student.