Work Text:
“I don’t remember mine being this,” the Defender pauses, leaning his cheek into the palm of his hand in a way that Viktor has always thought was especially petulant, “...rigorous.”
Viktor huffs. “You were barely conscious. Of course you don’t remember it.”
“Well, that’s not fair. I very clearly remember the shape of your mouth.”
Viktor smiles, turning his head away as if the Defender can see the expression beneath a layer of steel masking every inch of his face. He takes a moment too long to respond, waiting until his voice doesn’t seem so horrifically drenched in affection.
“Is that so? I’m sure you remember me telling you to shut up and be still,” he replies eventually, and it still lacks any sort of bite that he might wish for.
Jayce’s laugh is nothing but a ghost of air, soft between them, and Viktor finds himself turning back to chase it, to follow the sound to a face and see the sort of fond smile Jayce has offered behind the laugh.
This turns out to be a mistake.
His eyes are half obscured by lash and lid, his expression is so sweet it seems like swallowing pure honey. He watches Viktor with the sort of endearment that you would associate with new lovers and newlyweds, almost sticky in how raw it is, and the feeling of his gaze swallows all other sensation. Viktor looks away a moment too soon. He would trust Jayce till the end of the continent if it meant he didn’t have to see his affection.
There is something too heavy about the way Jayce loves him.
“No,” he corrects, still staring like he has found something soft in whatever memory he’s conjured up, “I remember you smiling. Right before I went under. I remember you smiled like you thought I wouldn’t see it.”
“You dreamt that,” Viktor says. He remembers having smiled. He remembers Jayce’s hand reaching to find his wrist as he faded into unconsciousness, still seeking touch even as he faded, and he remembers listening to Jayce warble about nothing and everything like he trusted Viktor implicitly. He should have been afraid. Jayce should have been terrified.
Instead he had trusted Viktor till the end of the horizon if it meant he could see his affection.
Viktor had smiled because he had known the same.
“I didn’t.” Jayce didn’t. They both know it.
Viktor fails to argue any further. Instead he shifts the angle of a scalpel. Rotates a pair of metz scissors. Bends a malleable retractor into shape. He pretends Jayce is barely even there, walking to the other side of the lab like a prey animal fleeing.
The dismissal is not mutual. The Defender says, “You still do that.”
“Do what?”
“Double check your equipment. Twist the needle like the angle will change its effectiveness.”
“I like order,” Viktor says, like it’s obvious that it will change the effectiveness.
The Defender scoffs. “And I thought I was meant to be the vain one.”
“You are. The difference between us is that while you make things that look good, I make things that look good and work. I know the idea of functionality is a new and novel concept to you.”
His partner laughs, warm in the cold of the lab, and Viktor again appreciates his mask if only because it can hide the twist of his own smile like a betrayal of nerve endings and meat.
It isn’t that Viktor can’t trust the Defender. That has never been the problem. It has always been that Viktor cannot bear to have anyone know the length in which he trusts him, the lengths in which he needs his Defender, the lengths that are so quietly singular that they could barely exist for anyone but Jayce. This is an operation that will help no one but him. This is an operation he barely believes he could manage without Jayce sitting beside him.
“Do you need help with that?”
“Don’t touch my equipment,” Viktor snaps, and Jayce’s laughter continues to chase him across the lab.
Jayce’s hand finds the junction between his shoulder and his neck moments later, the side plated in silver instead of skin, and Viktor can’t find it in him to pull away. Jayce takes this as an invitation, pressing beside him, bracketing Viktor’s body with his own like they are one bleeding organism with a shared beating heart. His voice is soft, and close enough to be a distraction. He is annoying enough to know it.
“Why am I here then?”
Viktor turns where he stands, putting himself face to face with Jayce. Close enough that their mutual breath warms the metal between them as if it wants to converge. Jayce’s hand never pulls from its place on him.
“Do you have to make everything so difficult, Defender?” The anger is still missing.
It is replaced by Jayce’s low-simmering delight. “Don’t act like you don’t prefer a fight.”
Again, he’s lost.
“Shut up,” Viktor says, shifting to step around the fully grown man in his way, “go sit down. I despise you.”
The Defender follows this order if nothing else.
He knows why he’s here. They both do. Viktor has answered stupid questions before, but to confirm Jayce’s happiness is something different.
Call him petty. Whatever.
Viktor follows Jayce a moment later, popping the latch on his armor to reveal the mess of skin beneath.
“Are you sure you’re not Vitamin D deficient? I’ve never seen someone literally reflect light like th–“
“I will skin you.”
Jayce’s expression does something bright and melty, and Viktor goes immediately back to smoothing iodine across the curve of his chest.
Jayce sits while he works.
He watches Jayce settle beside him, chest to the back of his seat, like he’s in their college lab watching Viktor pace and rant and explain the unethical details of his own biomechanical plans instead of watching Viktor cut himself open.
Jayce’s mouth shifts upwards, entertained. Viktor ignores him.
“You’re gonna tell me when you need me?” Jayce asks. Each word seems less bright and more satisfied, like he knows better than to tease but he means to make Viktor answer anyways. It’s almost as if he wants Viktor to reassure him.
How ridiculous.
Viktor finishes before he allows himself to confirm. He marks a line across his skin, a curving arc lining the bottom of his breast, then smaller incision marring the top. The left side of his chest had been augmented years and years ago, flat as the steel plate that covered his heart, but the right side sat unaugmented and untouched.
It didn’t bother him while he worked on more important upgrades.
Now, years later, with his body soldered to near perfection, it feels like the right time.
“I’ll tell you when I need you,” Viktor parrots, and it feels like the only honest thing he’s said all day.
He lifts the scalpel with a practiced grace and finally—
The first cut feels like home. It feels like years of sliding needles through skin and scissors through hair. It feels like everything else he has cut away and cut into to become the person he is. He has done this countless times for operations far more invasive and far less weighty.
There is a welling of blood, so sharp and fast that it beads and falls in a rush, and Viktor feels Jayce’s hand before he sees him move. The color red catches in white. Jayce holds a forgotten piece of gauze to his skin and Viktor loves him. The feeling wells like blood and rushes across him.
He loves him.
When Jayce speaks his voice is low enough to be a secret. “How did you do this alone?”
“I usually don’t mind a bit of blood splatter,” Viktor insists, snipping at pieces of fat with scissors, “I’m sure you’ve seen the walls.”
He glances to see Jayce’s face, to find any disgust that he knows should be buried there, and instead he finds that same heady devotion. It is muted only by focus. Nothing more. Nothing worse.
Jayce loves him. Viktor knows Jayce loves him. That is the only reason he can show himself to him, why they have always been raw, bloody, twisting things together.
The weight of adoration holds him here.
“I’ve never minded cleaning up your messes,” Jayce says, a moment too late but never truly falling behind, as he pets blood from Viktor’s skin. It feels like an electric current with each swipe of fabric. It feels like his body is brand new and this is the first time he’s ever been touched.
Viktor huffs, and Jayce finds his leverage in nothing more than the sound.
“Mask. Off. Come on, V,” he says, quickly, confidently, in the sort of voice that Viktor has come to associate with ‘Jayce has solved the problem and whatever he says next will be unapologetically correct’.
“I’m sorry?” Viktor counters, pushing habit from his mind like it is something foreign. There is no problem Jayce could have possibly solved.
Jayce taps the center of his face like a fishbowl and Viktor twists away. “You’re currently conscious and performing an invasive surgery. I want to be able to see you’re breathing correctly. That – and we both know you can see better without the mask. Let’s put those fucked up eyes to good use, baby.”
“They are not fucked–“
“If that’s the part of my argument you’re targeting, you know I’m right. Subjective opinion does not change the validity of my statement, Viktor. Give up.”
Viktor feels his breath shudder again.
There is a difference between being seen and being known. He has always felt the sort of difference, not only by those who have read his words, heard his thoughts, known his work, but by those who have looked at him and frowned. Asked for his name and misunderstood. Heard his voice and refused to accept him.
Jayce was never that. Jayce had seen him and seen only what Viktor provided. There was a mutuality. A lilting understanding that told Viktor ‘I will always know that your hands are not you so much as they are what makes your thoughts a reality. You are what you provide. You are a self because you have built it, not because you were born into it.’
Viktor wants to hate Jayce for so many things. He can’t find any real capability. Jayce has always seen him raw and bleeding.
Jayce has always provided his own heart the same way.
Viktor has known cruelty like a knife in his own hand, the way it bites and begs you to be something you are not. He has known the way it feels to withhold yourself from any who would care to even look.
Why would he ever withhold himself from Jayce?
The mask’s latch releases with a hissing of steam, a vent somewhere beside his eye puffing in time with his own breath, and Viktor does his best to not look at the soft features of Jayce’s face without the haze of golden glass obscuring his vision.
“You’re annoying,” Viktor says, but his voice comes out wrong, too false and not diffused by the staticky call of the modulator, and all at once he wishes he had that separation to keep himself from his own story.
The mask is not a way to hide. It is a facet of him, a piece of the puzzle that makes up Viktor or The Machine Herald in turn. It is his face as well as any he was born with.
But without it there is a closeness that he cannot find in the relief of steel.
To give his gaze to Jayce is something akin to an offering.
To press his teeth against Jayce’s is something akin to religion.
Jayce doesn’t dignify him with an agreement. He doesn’t even gloat. He simply holds what Viktor presses into his hands and presses into the spots Viktor shows him to hold. They work together like they might have, years ago, when they were young and foolish.
Viktor remembers Jayce’s own surgery like it was yesterday. There was less blood. Less hands easing his struggle. But there had been the same confirmation there, a simple devotion that laid in the knowledge that they were the only two that would understand.
His breath stays even. He can feel Jayce’s heartbeat in the man’s fingertips.
They’re almost done.
Drains and stitching. Nothing more.
“Mine will heal better I think,” Viktor says, eyes still cast downwards. He seems perfectly factual even in query, “Does the appearance of your scars upset you, Defender?”
What he means to say is, do you still love my handiwork upon your skin, Jayce?
Jayce’s hands slide across his, warm palms strong against the pain-shaky movement of Viktor’s bloody fingertips. For a moment Viktor thinks he means to interlace their fingers, but then he slides the needle and thread into his own grip and begins to loop them.
“No, V,” and when Viktor’s eyes lift from the needle to Jayce’s face, he finds the softest expression he could have dreaded, “I wouldn’t trade them for anything. If I could go back, I would do it the same. There’s only you.”
What he doesn’t say is, I would bear your signature a thousand times over if it meant we would be one.
Viktor means to say something about Jayce’s bad taste. He intends to upset him, but the words fail to meet the air when Jayce slides the first stitch into place. His hands are sure. He stitches like he is mending something he cares for. Each movement is a slow slide, a familiarity by his own hand turned to a comfort in Jayce’s. Viktor watches each time the needle dips into his own flesh and pulls out the other side, sturdy as fact and just as neat.
It only takes a few minutes for Jayce to finish, his red tipped fingers snapping the thread off in a tight loop against Viktor’s bruising skin, but when he’s done he runs the same soft gauze against the stitching, cleaning it up like he might smooth away the wound entirely.
Viktor lets himself relax into it, leaning further into Jayce when the metal of his arm meets warm skin. He is not permitted many moments of weakness. This one feels perfectly deserved.
They sit in silence for long enough that Viktor thinks Jayce might leave, and it is only then that he can bring himself to say the words, “Thank you.”
His eyes are shut, the blackness beneath his eyelids thrumming with the same warm reminder as his stitches. The relief is too big a feeling. The comfort of Jayce’s company is too tangible. If he looks now, he knows it will break him into something too indulgent to even manage.
If he looks now, he might even smile like he once did as Jayce had reached for his wrist before he fell to dreaming.
Jayce says, “Sure, V. You’ve done the same for me.”
And it’s enough, between the years of comfort and the years of commitment, to tell Viktor that he needed this. The company. The solid hand beside his own.
There is a difference between being seen and being known. With Jayce, he doesn’t need to pick.
He simply loves him. The feeling is heavy enough to hold them both.