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Chapter Text

The hall outside the Engineering Department pulses—sharp, volatile, as if a live wire skinned bare and thrumming with anticipation. Today, the air hums with a different charge. Hushed murmurs ripple through the students like wind through tall grass, all eyes angled towards a singular piece of paper glued to the wall with all the ceremonial gravitas of a public execution post. The semester rankings are up.

Viktor lingers at the edge of the crowd with the stoic resignation of a man already preparing himself for disappointment. His frame is brittle, sharpened by sleepless nights and pressure that speaks only in silence. There’s a glint in his eyes that’s less fire, more steel—weathered, unyielding.

He does not push forward to see. He does not need to. He already knows.

His name is always there, just a whisper beneath the top. Always close enough to smell victory, never close enough to taste it.

The paper ridicules him when he finally takes a glance:

#1 – Jayce Talis

#2 – Viktor (Surname Unlisted)

He reads it once. Twice. A third time, as if the weight of repetition might change its meaning. But the words don’t blur. They stay solid and smug, the letters sneering at his personal suffering.

As always. As expected.

Jayce, the golden boy, the Academy’s walking sunbeam, ranks first—again. Without the effort, without the nights spent hunched over textbooks until the spine breaks, without the extra shifts in Heimerdinger’s lab or the cheap instant noodles eaten cold over formulas that blur into scripture. Jayce is just the perfect kind of student all professors adore. The perfect type of boy the campus either wants to befriend or share a bed with. He has that sheen, that glow, as if even light is drawn to him, helpless in its affection.

Viktor hates him.

He pivots sharply, coat flaring behind him like the final sweep of a curtain on a bitter performance, and disappears down the stairwell. The heels of his shoes echo with the quiet percussion of his self-deprecation. He pulls out his phone and swiftly writes a text to Mel:

(02:24 PM): Fuck my life

Mel responds in an instant.

(02:24 PM): well hello to you too

(02:24 PM): Golden Boy ranked first again. Even after missing two deadlines and joking about how a Bernoulli equation looks like an Egyptian myth in class.

(02:24 PM): maybe the equation was mythical

(02:24 PM): like your dream of ever beating him

Viktor rolls his eyes. His fingers dance against the screen with the desperation of a man trying to salvage his wounded ego.

(02:25 PM): If I disappear, it’s because I’ve been arrested for homicide.

(02:25 PM): oh, viktor

(02:25 PM): you’ll make a very stylish convict

Mel responds with a sticker of a smiling cat giving a thumbs up. Viktor stares at it, sighs like he’s aged five years, and tucks the phone away to the depths of his pocket.

It’s not just the ranking. It’s what it means. That tiniest, sliver of distance. That breath of difference. A taunt, carved in ink. A reminder that no matter how sharp his intellect, how meticulous his work, how furiously his mind races—he’s always one step behind the boy born already standing on a pedestal.

Jayce Talis arrives like a summer storm dressed in sunshine. The world as it is, at least to Viktor, is charmed into submission by a young boy who is yet to realize the gravity of his power. Conversations pause at Jayce’s lightest approach, and the buzzing fluorescents overhead flicker with approval in his wake. Jayce leaves prints on the ground where he walks. He moves with the careless grace of someone used to admiration, whose confidence is not learned but inherited, folded neatly into his genes alongside charisma and a jawline sculpted by divine intent.

His hair is tousled just enough to look unintentional, but not enough to suggest he hasn’t checked the mirror three times before leaving his dorm. His hoodie sleeves are rolled to the elbows, showcasing forearms dusted with faint burn marks and grease stains from his latest personal project—an AI armature that, as far as Viktor can tell, serves no discernable purpose other than to give him a wave or two every time he walks into the lab.

As if summoned by Viktor’s utter disdain, Jayce spots him the moment he passes the stairwell.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite storm cloud,” Jayce says, draping himself against the railing with all the poise of a man sidling up to a bar—as if they’re old friends and not rivals with inconveniently entangled fates.

“Did you come to gloat,” Viktor replies flatly, “or do you do that naturally by existing?”

Jayce lets out a laugh—bright, boyish, infuriatingly warm. The sound sets Viktor’s teeth on edge. It burrows under his skin, a reminder of everything he resents; Jayce’s laughter is too light, too genuine, too easy.

“Can’t a guy just say hi?” Jayce asks, feigning offense with theatrical flourish.

“No,” Viktor’s answer is quick, piercing. “You lost that privilege the moment you answered a quantum mechanics question with, and I quote, ‘It’s all about the vibes’.”

Jayce shrugs, a gesture made more juvenile by the exaggerated movement of his shoulders. “Still got the full class cheering for that answer.”

“And the system continues to rot,” Viktor mutters, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Remind me again how you’ve survived this long without the Academy throwing you out of a window?”

“I smile a lot,” Jayce says. “You should try it sometime. I think it’ll look good on your mouth.”

Viktor finally turns to face him, his expression unreadable except for the quiet fury burning in his eyes. “I’ll smile when I’m standing on the podium you think belongs to you.”

For a moment, Jayce falters. The grin slips, just slightly, like a window catching the wind. A blink of something real stutters across his face, and then it’s gone, buried under the same frustrating, charming confidence.

“Looking forward to it, V,” he says, voice softer now. “Really.”

Viktor doesn’t answer. His silence feels like the tightening of a spring.

Jayce melts into the sticky purgatory that is his mattress, limbs tangled in a pile of sheets made heavy by sweat. The windows are open, but the breeze is a lie—thick with the scent of asphalt, sun-warmed metal, and the distant tang of melting plastic. Outside, the world simmers: cicadas scream in the distance like tiny dying machines, and the heat hangs in the air like an unwanted roommate, presses down on everything with damp, relentless fingers.

He rolls on his back, shirtless, one leg thrown lazily over the other. His phone hovers just above his face, his grip slipping now and then from the sweat on his palms. Jayce blinks at the screen, squinting at the glare of sunlight that pours through the blinds in stripes. It is far too hot to move, let alone think, and yet—

He taps the group chat with Vi and Caitlyn open, thumb hovering as he debated how much self-respect he is willing to part with today. Not much, apparently.

Vi (11:04 AM): so… viktor still hates ur face?

Jayce snorts, a sound that startles even him in the sweltering quiet. His thumbs fly across the keyboard without hesitation.

Jayce (11:07 AM): he looked at me like he was weighing the cost of murder against academic suspension

Caitlyn (11:07 AM): Sounds like a promising foundation for romance

Jayce stares at the message a moment longer than necessary.

God, if only.

Jayce (11:08 AM): i wish

Vi (11:10 AM): wait… srsly???

Jayce bites the inside of his cheek. He can play it off again, reduce it to a joke like the previous times it slipped from him. But not now, not today. The terrible, terrible weather has settled somewhere inside him, loosening the threads of his usual restraint. Today, the truth is buzzing under his skin like caffeine and bad decisions waiting to happen.

Jayce (11:11 AM): he’s intense

Jayce (11:11 AM): and brilliant

Jayce (11:11 AM): and infuriating

Jayce (11:11 AM): but like, hot about it

He grins, teeth sinking into his bottom lip as he opens his camera roll. His finger lands on a blurry, half-zoomed photo of Viktor mid-glare from the stairwell—sharp eyes narrowed, lips pursed in perpetual judgment. Jayce had taken it stealthily yesterday. For research purposes, he told himself.

Jayce hits send.

Jayce (11:14 AM): look at this, this is not the face of a man in hate

Jayce (11:14 AM): that’s yearning, in disguise

Caitlyn (11:15 AM): That’s a restraining order in disguise

Vi (11:15 AM): im rooting for u, jayce

Vi (11:15 AM): but also, this is gonna crash and burn spectacularly, lmao

Jayce lets the phone drop to his chest, still grinning like a fool. He is vaguely aware of how ridiculous he looks, splayed out like a sunstruck idiot, beaming at his cracked ceiling while sweat collects at the small of his back. He should probably be worried. He should probably stop.

Instead, all he can think about is the way Viktor’s voice dips when he is annoyed—gritty and golden, like sandpaper and honey—and how Jayce has never wanted to win against someone so badly in his life, if only to earn Viktor’s gaze. If winning means that Viktor will have his eyes on him, and maybe, just maybe, see him.

Jayce is, without a doubt, screwed.

The bell above the café door gives a tired jingle as Viktor steps inside, brushing a curl of wind-swept hair out of his eyes. The scent of roasted coffee beans, burnt sugar, and the faint bite of citrus peel envelops him in a warm, sweet cloud. The place is dim and cozy, all amber lighting and worn furniture, its walls plastered with mismatched art and flyers for local open mics no one attends. There is jazz music drifting from the speakers, and Viktor tilts his ears if only to catch the rhythm better. It’s one of the few kinds of noise that doesn’t exhaust him.

It does not take long before he spots Mel.

She’s curled into the far corner booth by the window, half-obscured by a hanging plant and her own impossible coolness. One booted leg is crossed over the other, her spine slouched just enough to look effortless, and a thick paperback—another book on politics, no doubt—rests open in her lap.

He considers Mel a friend. The sole exception in a world that, in Viktor’s opinion, talks too much and listens too little. He doesn't understand how she tolerates political science—so much of it seems built on performance, on carefully chosen phrasing and moral gymnastics—but he respects her intellect enough to overlook the fact that half her classmates seem to enjoy hearing themselves speak more than breathing.

He slides into the booth across from her with the slow, deliberate grace of someone already exhausted by the day—and it’s barely noon.

A waiter appears then, notepad in hand.

“I’ll have an espresso, please,” Mel says without looking up, her eyes still tracing the words on her book.

“Chamomile tea,” Viktor mutters. He offers the waiter a polite smile.

Mel raises a finely shaped brow, suppressing a laugh. “You’re too young to order like my widowed grandma, Viktor.”

“It’s for my sleep,” he replies, a touch defensive, already fishing out a stack of readings and half-scribbled problem sets he knows he won’t have time to finish later. He spreads them across the table like cards in a losing hand.

The waiter nods and vanishes, leaving them in a companionable silence that stretches just long enough to be comfortable.

Finally, Viktor speaks.

“Professor Heimerdinger welcomed another engineering student to manage in the lab today. Guess who.”

Mel does not miss a beat. “Talis?”

Viktor groans like the name physically injures him. “The Golden Brat himself. He strutted in late, called a capacitor a ‘zappy boy’, and then flirted with the spectrometer.”

Mel looks up now, lips curling into something halfway between amusement and disbelief. “Sounds like true love.”

“I will drown myself in the acid wash tank,” Viktor deadpans. His hands move to organize his papers again, but his fingers twitch slightly, betraying a restlessness he does not have time to name. There’s a pinched look around his eyes—tight, tired, the beginning of a headache that hasn’t quite arrived but promises to.

“Please refrain from committing any crime until after you graduate.” Mel says, flipping through a page.

Viktor scowls. “If he breathes near my data one more time, I’m defecting to Zaun.”

"In light of recent advancements in adaptive biotech,” Heimerdinger begins, his voice clipped but demanding, “propose how moral responsibility shifts in the presence of sentient design."

He stands at the front of the classroom, bathed in the warm spill of morning light that filters through tall, dust-flecked windows. The glow catches on the rim of his spectacles and outlines his wild white curls like a halo of static.

After a passing heartbeat, Jayce raises his hand.

His voice is easy and assured when it comes, like he’s tossing out an idea over brunch rather than dissecting bioethics in front of a full room. “I think it’s still ultimately the creator’s responsibility,” he says. “Sentience does not absolve origin.”

There’s a murmur of agreement. Viktor glimpses a few students nod. One girl, to his horror, taps notes into her tablet with something perilously close to a dreamy sigh.

Viktor exhales sharply through his nose. Without bothering to stand from his seat, he contends, “That argument is convenient until your creation starts making decisions you didn’t program. If something can think independently, it can choose independently. The weight of responsibility shifts.”

Jayce turns to him, slow and casual, a grin blossoming at the corners of his mouth like a challenge in full bloom. “So if I build a system with free will, and it decides to set the lab on fire, it’s not my fault?”

“If you engineered it poorly, no,” Viktor shoots back, tempered even in the face of debate. “But if the fire was the result of its own rationale, you are not the arsonist. You are simply the idiot who built one.”

Laughter ripples through the room. Jayce raises a brow, tilts his head. “Right. I must’ve missed the part where giving something intelligence makes you immune to consequences.”

“It doesn’t,” Viktor says. “It makes the consequences shared. Not inherited.”

His voice catches slightly on that last word—inherited—his accent curling around it with deliberate force. The emphasis lands like a subtle blow, not obvious enough for most to catch, but pointed enough for Jayce to feel. A barb laced in intellect. A dig into his legacy.

“Mr. Talis… and Viktor,” Heimerdinger interjects before either can escalate. His voice is mild, but carries the weight of finality.

There’s a beat of silence. A collective inhale.

“I have been meaning to announce this to the two of you in private, but given the—ah—spectacle you just unleashed in this class, I believe this seems a good time as any.” He says, eyes twinkling with a strange mirth.

Viktor feels his stomach twist. In his seat, Jayce straightens as though preparing for impact.

Heimerdinger beams, “The two of you, the top-performing students from the department of engineering, are chosen to represent Piltover Academy for the upcoming Innovator’s Competition.”

The words fall like gravel.

Jayce lifts his head slowly, like a soldier hearing his name drawn in lottery. His mouth parts, but no sound comes.

Viktor does not move. His expression stays unnervingly still—unblinking, unreadable, too quiet to be calm.

Then—crack.

The pencil snaps clean in his hand.

“I expect great things.” Heimerdinger announces, still aglow with enthusiasm, utterly oblivious to the blossoming tension between his two students. “The future of innovation lies in collaboration!”

Jayce dares a glance at Viktor. The gesture is laced in caution, as if he’s approaching a sleeping beast.

“Guess we’re partners now,” he says, his voice quieter than before. It clings to his face like something ill-fitting, fraying at the edges with hesitation.

Viktor does not look at him.

He’s already calculating how long it would take to fake his own death.

Chapter Text

The door slams open with the force of someone making a dramatic entrance on purpose.

“Heimerdinger has lost his mind.”

Jayce barrels into the apartment in a storm of limbs, wind, and panic, the messenger bag slung over his shoulder swinging wide and nearly decapitating a floor lamp in his wake.

Vi glances up mid-chew from her sprawl across the cushions, a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza suspended between her fingers and her open mouth. Next to her, Caitlyn sits neatly cross-legged with a well-thumbed copy of The Ethics of Enforcement balanced on her knees. She doesn’t look up right away—just calmly slides a bookmark into place before lifting a single unimpressed eyebrow.

Vi chews, swallows, and gestures vaguely towards Jayce. “Please tell me this is somehow about Viktor.”

Jayce breaks into a guttural sound—loud, theatrical, the kind that seems to start in his soul—and collapses face-first into the couch cushions like he’s trying to physically bury the memory that brought him here.

“It’s about Viktor.” He mumbles into the fabric.

Caitlyn snaps her book shut with a soft but menacing thwap. “You finally confessed? Did he call you delusional?”

Jayce groans again, flopping sideways with the full weight of someone burdened by a mid-life crisis at twenty-one. “No. Worse. Heimerdinger paired us together.”

A pause.

“…For the Innovator’s Competition.”

Vi lets out a low, gleeful whistle. Her hands shoot to the air flailing. “Oh, we are so back.”

“We are not ‘so back’, what,” Jayce hisses, voice muffled by a small pillow he’s now clutching like a lifeline. “Viktor’s going to murder me. Or out-logic me into an early grave.”

Caitlyn sets her book aside and leans forward, hands folded in a way that reminds Jayce of dangerous ideas. “You’ve been manifesting this exact scenario for months. Don’t pretend you’re not thrilled.”

Jayce sits up just enough to glare at her. “I am not thrilled. I’m—terrified. This is Viktor. You’ve seen how he glares at me. His eyes do that squinty ‘I’m calculating the square root of your soul’ thing.”

“Okay, Romeo, enough with the sexy talk,” Vi says, laughing. “So what’s the actual issue? You get to spend months in close proximity to the absolute crush of your life, surrounded by caffeine, competition, and high-stakes stress. That’s literally your mating ground.”

“It’s not—” Jayce groans for the third time, slumping backwards. “He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you,” Caitlyn says, voice soft but firm.

“He literally called me a ‘reckless golden brat’ last week.”

Vi shrugs. “Yeah, but like, in a hot way, right?”

Jayce only glowers at her in response.

“Your words, man, not mine!” Vi says, smirking as she flicks a piece of crust at him. “And let’s be real—you’re not just spiraling because you think he hates you. You want to impress him.”

Jayce goes quiet.

There it is—raw, unspoken—the truth dragged reluctantly into the light.

When Jayce finally speaks, his words come slowly, as if he’s weighing each one in his mind before he gives them a voice. “Viktor is brilliant. Scary smart. I don’t want to just coast through this… or somehow screw this up. I want to win with him. I want to make something great, something that actually matters. And maybe—I don’t know—prove that I’m more than just the shiny “golden boy” who he thinks got here on charm and privilege.”

His voice trembles at the edges, each word quieter than the last, as though even the air is reluctant to carry them.

Caitlyn’s gaze softens. She reaches across the space between them and squeezes his wrist, gentle and grounding. “Jayce. You do work hard—harder than most. People might not always see it, but we do. You’re not just some poster boy with a nice smile. You push yourself. You stay up until 3AM fine-tuning equations no one assigned. You care. That’s not arrogance. That’s excellence.”

“Yeah,” Vi adds, her voice surprisingly earnest. “I mean, half the time I don’t understand jackshit of what comes out of your mouth—no offense—but honestly? That just proves that you’re actually smart.”

Jayce blinks at them. He basks in their kindness, at the warmth they kindled in a space he’s been satiating with self-doubt.

Caitlyn smiles. “You don’t have to prove anything to us. But if you want to prove something to Viktor? Then do it. Show him what you’re capable of. The two of you together—there’s no way you don’t burn half the lab down and make something brilliant.”

Jayce lets out a breathless laugh, shoulders sagging as the tension drains from them. “You guys are the absolute worst. Why are you so nice to me?”

“Because we love watching your slow descent into academic madness,” Vi deadpans. “Frankly, it’s my main source of free entertainment.”

Jayce laughs again—brighter now, easier, more himself. But then the reality returns, and he slumps back into the couch with a fresh groan.

He exhales. “I don’t even know how to contact him. I don’t have his number, and talking to him in person is impossible without it spiraling into some tiring debate. He probably strictly communicates via email, during business days only, for all I know.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so worried about all this.” Vi says, digging her knuckles into his shoulder in a half-hearted massage. “You’re Jayce fucking Talis! The star of Piltover Academy! Where’s the confidence?”

“Relax.” Caitlyn says, “Try approaching him after class. No theatrics, full professional. Just ask to meet up and start planning. I’m sure he’ll cooperate.”

She glances towards Jayce, and something in his expression must have prompted her to say more, because she adds, “This is a prestigious competition after all, and Viktor’s reputation and name is also on the line. I hear there’s also his scholarship he needs to maintain.”

“Right,” Vi chimes in, voice playful now as she continues to knead his shoulders, “go talk to him. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

It’s hard.

Impossible, even.

Trying to catch Viktor in the chaos of a crowded hallway is akin to holding a ribbon of smoke with bare hands—elusive, stubborn, slipping through his fingers no matter how tightly Jayce closes his grasp.

Jayce rushes fast, dodging a tangle of second-years trickling into the late morning sun, trailing chatter and the hushed rustle of notebooks. The unforgiving summer heat presses down on everything, dense and stale, and Jayce’s palms are sweating as he weaves through the tide.

“Viktor!” He calls, voice bouncing too sharply against tile and plaster, echoing through the noise.

No response.

Ahead, Viktor only keeps walking, slender frame cutting a straight line through the crowd like blade. His coat sways with his steps, efficient and deliberate with every stride. The binder he cradles to his chest is stuffed to bursting—its sharp corners worn down by handling, its edges marked by ink and rough equations.

Jayce gasps and picks up his pace, irritation flaring with the heat in his cheeks. “Viktor! Can you just—please wait for a second?”

Viktor stops. But it’s not a pause that invites conversation. It’s a pause that feels like a slammed door. He turns towards Jayce with a slowness so mechanical it borders on mockery, his spine a line of tension, his expression carved from nonchalance.

“Yes?” Viktor asks, voice flat and inflectionless—polite in the way that feels like an insult.

Jayce flashes him a perfect smile, a fragile attempt to bring lightness into the otherwise terse space they share. “Hey. Just wanted to talk. About the competition.”

Viktor doesn’t blink. “We’re talking.”

The smile on Jayce’s face flickers, then steadies. He shifts his weight, gestures vaguely between them. “Right. Cool. Just—figured we should start planning? Maybe get on the same page?”

Viktor tilts his head a fraction. The fluorescent lights catch in his amber eyes, which now look more like molten brass than the usual honey Jayce adores. “Send me your initial thoughts.”

Jayce frowns, walking in step beside him again when Viktor starts moving, clearly dismissing the conversation.

“I could,” he says carefully, “but I don’t have any way to contact you. Like, at all. You’ve managed to avoid every group project and social platform known to man. Do you have a number?”

“No.”

Jayce blinks. “No, as in... you don’t have one or you’re not giving it to me?”

“No, as in I don’t give it to anyone.”

Jayce stares, incredulous. “Okay, so what do you do? Please don’t tell me you only communicate through the university email?”

“I don’t see a problem with the university email.”

“Of course,” Jayce mutters, exasperated. “Because nothing says collaboration like a formal correspondence with the emotional intimacy of a brick wall.”

Viktor exhales then, long and dragging, as if Jayce is giving him a migraine just by existing. Without looking, he reaches into his binder, scribbles something down on a sticky note, and slaps it flat against Jayce’s chest mid-stride. His fingers linger for only a second, perhaps two—just long enough to make Jayce think it’s personal.

The note flutters slightly in the breeze as Viktor walks away, his coat sweeping dramatically behind him like he routed an exit in advance.

Jayce reads the handwriting, scrawled and precise:

[email protected]

He calls after him. “You’re not seriously going to ghost me and expect me to email you like some kind of sad academic pen pal—”

But Viktor is already gone.

Jayce sits at his desk like a soldier at the brink of battle, cloaked not in armor, but in the dim wash of his laptop’s glow. The screen casts a pale, ghostly blue across his face, flickering like a distant storm waiting to break.

He spins once in his chair. Then again. A slow, thoughtful orbit, as if gathering momentum from the room itself. Finally, he plants both feet to the ground with a particular stubbornness and fixes his gaze on the blinking cursor. It blinks back—taunts him. It knows this is ridiculous.

But if Viktor wants formal, Jayce is going to go so formal. The challenge is on.

He cracks his neck. Rolls his shoulders. Places his hands on the keyboard like a man about to conduct an orchestra.

And then he begins to type.

Subject: Initial Collaborative Proposal – Annual Innovator’s Competition

Dear Mr. Viktor (Surname Unlisted),

I hope this message reaches you at a convenient time, and that your academic week has been both fruitful and unburdened by excess bureaucratic strain.

Following Professor Heimerdinger’s announcement regarding our joint selection as Piltover Academy’s representatives for the upcoming Innovator’s Competition, I wanted to promptly extend a hand of cooperation and outline a proposal for our collaborative structure.

Should your schedule allow, I believe it would be mutually beneficial to convene for a brief ideation session. My proposed agenda is as follows:

• Identification of key thematic pillars (scope, ambition, and potential for world-changing genius)
• Division of labor (as determined by personal strength, preference, and/or disdain)
• Shared calendar construction (to avoid scheduling conflicts, burnout, and/or blood feuds)

Please advise your availability. I am open on M/W/F post-lecture and weekends, excluding Tuesday mornings, during which I attend a mandatory Advanced Thermodynamics lecture and experience a small existential crisis.

Looking forward to your esteemed response.

With respect and anticipation,

Jayce Talis

Third-Year Student, Department of Engineering

Founding Member, Hextech Society

Accidental Overachiever | Known Offender of Fashionable Lab Safety Goggles

Jayce hits send, leans back in his chair, and exhales like he’s just signed a diplomatic treaty.

“This’ll show him,” he mutters to himself, then immediately doubts every single life choice that led to this email.

Because somewhere, far away, Viktor is probably reading it, frowning with the cold judgment of a man who considers emojis a war crime.

Jayce slaps a hand over his eyes. “I should’ve just asked for a pigeon.”

The email arrives just after midnight, its notification pulsing in the corner of Viktor’s screen with all the tact of a fire alarm. The blue light flickers against the stark white of his wallpaper, casting long shadows across his cluttered desk. He blinks once, slowly, the sender name catching his eye like a sliver of glass beneath the skin.

Jayce Talis.

Of course.

He hovers for a moment, cursor trembling ever so slightly—then clicks.

And immediately regrets it.

The subject line alone makes his eye twitch:

Initial Collaborative Proposal – Annual Innovator’s Competition

The entire email itself is a mockery. A litany of formal language, structured bullet points, and sentences so polite they practically bow at the waist. Viktor’s jaw tightens the longer he scrolls. The sheer nerve of Jayce to adopt this tone after three years of mocking lab safety procedures and showing up to class with the top buttons of his uniform unfixed. Who, just last week, suggested skipping their Advanced Thermodynamics lecture because “the stars felt off today.”

Viktor’s eyes narrow at the closing signature:

“Accidental Overachiever | Known Offender of Fashionable Lab Safety Goggles”

With the mechanical grace of someone holding back a primal scream, Viktor shuts his laptop. His hands curl into the desk for a beat longer than necessary. Then, he reaches for his phone and opens his messages.

He fires off a text to Mel:

(12:22 AM): He sent me a formal email.

(12:22 AM): I don’t know who I want to kill first: him or myself.

Three dots bubble on the screen. Then Mel, as always, replies back with her brand of dry amusement.

(12:24 AM): i almost spat my coffee

(12:24 AM): i can’t believe he actually went through with it

Viktor lets his head drop back against the chair. His right hand rises instinctively to rub at his temple, massaging slow circles in the spot just behind his brow where his headaches like to bloom. It’s always Jayce. Always Jayce Talis, as if the universe itself is staging an inside joke at the expense of Viktor’s crumbling sanity.

(12:25 AM): I’m going to murder him.

(12:25 AM): clearly he’s trying, viktor

(12:25 AM): maybe don’t commit murder just yet?

(12:25 AM): It had bullet points, Mel. Bullet. Points.

(12:25 AM): this is what happens when you act like a toddler with the emotional maturity of a teaspoon

He clicks his tongue. Mel’s sense of justice is irritatingly consistent—she believes in playing fair, in giving people a chance, in balancing the scale. But tonight, Viktor wants her to be petty with him. He wants her to say ‘You’re right, Viktor, Jayce should be arrested for crimes against email etiquette.’

(12:30 AM): I’m going to block him. I’ll tell Professor Heimerdinger I’m withdrawing.

(12:30 AM): I’ll say I’ve developed an allergic reaction to golden retrievers in human form.

(12:31 AM): that’s… oddly specific

When Viktor fails to reply immediately, Mel sends another text:

(12:33 AM): viktor, you’ve wanted to join this competition since forever

(12:33 AM): why are you acting so petty all of a sudden, you’re not usually like this

He stares at that message for a long time.

Around him, the silence of the room settles like fog—soft and suffocating. The dim light of his desk lamp pools across worn-out textbooks and mechanical sketches left half-finished. He sits in it, his thoughts coiling tightly under his ribs.

This competition has been his fiercest ambition since he was nineteen—just a freshman at the Academy, hungry and unproven. Viktor’s future hinges on it. His name, his worth, the weight of every sleepless night and every precisely calibrated system—everything has led to this. This was meant to be the moment he proves he belongs. Not just to the Academy.

To Piltover itself.

And now, Viktor is sharing it. With him.

His thumbs move slower now, the truth cracking its way out.

(12:40 AM): Because it’s him, Mel.

(12:40 AM): Jayce Talis.

(12:40 AM): Walking sunlight, effortless charm, golden boy the entire world bows for.

(12:41 AM): so you’re mad he’s good at things and people like him?

Her question is gentle. But it strikes the nerve raw.

(12:45 AM): I’m mad because he represents everything I’m not.

People hand Jayce everything Viktor bleeds for. Applause comes to him like gravity—natural, inevitable—while Viktor claws his way up from the dark, carving brilliance from bone just to be seen as equal.

His hands falter. A tension long welded into his spine fractures, just slightly.

It’s not hatred that curdles in his chest, but weight—grief shaped like envy, heavy as lead. A slow, sinking dread that no matter how many sleepless nights he pours into invention, no matter how ruthlessly he scours himself into something sharp and clever and irreplaceable—he will always be an echo in Jayce’s light.

Never enough. Not next to someone like him.

A pause.

Then:

(12:47 AM): but this isn’t about beating him, it’s about working with him

(12:47 AM): maybe that is the real challenge, viktor

(12:47 AM): not just building something great, but building it with him

The silence that follows stretches long and full. Viktor’s reflection stares at him from the blank screen of his phone, jaw tight, eyes shadowed.

And slowly, something gives.

(12:48 AM): I hate when you sound like my conscience.

(12:48 AM): that’s because I am

(12:48 AM): now, go write that boy back

(12:48 AM): you’ve made him suffer enough

After three full days of silence—three agonizing days where Jayce spiraled at least seventeen times about the overly formal email he sent and wondered if he accidentally committed some kind of scholarly war crime—his phone rattles him awake at three in the morning.

It’s a number he doesn’t recognize.

The message is simple.

(03:56 AM): Hello, golden boy.

Jayce squints, heart lurching with the sudden, absurd clarity that only comes at ungodly hours. He blinks at the screen once, twice. The corners of his mouth twitch. The nickname is sharp, unmistakable.

There's only one person who would use it like that—like a scalpel laced with dry irony and salt.

He types back, brow raised.

(03:56 AM): viktor?

(03:56 AM): Excellent deductive reasoning. No wonder you’re Piltover’s brightest.

Jayce huffs a sleepy laugh, rolling onto his back and sinking into the warm sprawl of tangled sheets. He can almost hear Viktor’s voice in that message—velvety and tired and steeped in disdain.

(03:57 AM): wow, three whole days and you finally emerge from your cocoon

(03:57 AM): what, did my prim and proper email emotionally wound you?

(03:57 AM): You think too highly of yourself.

(03:57 AM): Someone ought to drag you down from your throne.

(03:57 AM): so you admit I’m king?

Jayce winces at his joke and scrambles for a new message to write:

(03:58 AM): admit it, you were impressed with my email

(03:58 AM): Eh, I’ve seen more structure in non-peer-reviewed articles.

He grins in the dark, shaking his head. Somehow, even through text, Viktor can drip sarcasm like venom. But curiosity gets the better of him.

(03:58 AM): wait, how did you get my number

(03:58 AM): I asked Professor Heimerdinger.

Jayce lets out a groan loud enough to startle the silence. He throws an arm over his eyes and pictures it now—Viktor, grim-faced and reluctant, interrupting Heimerdinger in the middle of calibrating something deeply urgent just to ask for his number. The mental image is so ridiculous—so painfully, perfectly Viktor—that it almost endears him. Almost.

(03:58 AM): you asked heimerdinger??? what, did you also file a formal request in triplicate?

(03:59 AM): He seemed delighted. Said “communication is key to innovation” and gave me your contact with the energy of someone paneling a research defense.

(03:59 AM): wow. great. amazing.

Jayce watches as the typing bubble appear. Then vanish. Then appear again—flickering like a nervous heartbeat.

(04:00 AM): I suppose I should thank you. The email was thorough. Irritatingly so.

(04:00 AM): is this your way of saying you actually want to work together?

(04:00 AM): This is my way of saying I’ve accepted my fate.

(04:00 AM): so dramatic

(04:00 AM): im honored to be your reluctant lab partner

(04:01 AM): “Honored” is a strong word. You should be terrified. I have very, very high standards.

Jayce snorts, knocking his ankle against the bedframe as he shifts restlessly. His room is still and quiet, filled only with the glow of his phone screen and the hum of something else—something shifting. Something soft and strange.

It’s stupid. It’s barely anything.

But it feels like something—something unraveling, loosening.

The tension of three years. Slowly, softly easing.

(04:02 AM): alright, v. wanna meet up in the lab this week to plan?

(04:02 AM): Saturday. 10AM. Not a minute later.

(04:02 AM): 10 it is. hope you’re ready to be dazzled

(04:02 AM): If you manage to prepare the complete list of materials I’ll send you tomorrow, I’ll consider being civil.

(04:03 AM): deal

(04:03 AM): it’s a date

There’s a pause. One that stretches too long.

 For a second, Jayce wonders if he’s pushed it too far.

Then, finally, the typing bubble flickers to life again:

(04:07 AM): If you’re late, I’m going to dissolve you in acids and pour all your remains in Erlenmeyer flasks.

Jayce stares at the message. His thumb hovers over the keyboard, but he doesn’t type anything.

Instead, he lowers the phone slowly into his lap and tilts his head back until it knocks against the headboard. His gaze drifts to the ceiling, where the faint reflection of streetlights flickers in lazy gold bands across the plaster.

“…Jesus Christ,” he mutters, the words a whispered exhale between disbelief and reluctant awe.

Jayce laughs. Soft at first, just a huff of breath through his nose—but it builds. Until it becomes a full-bodied chuckle that curls into the quiet and refuses to leave. He’s horrified. He’s delighted. He’s weirdly, insanely charmed.

Maybe it’s the late hour. Maybe it’s the fact that Viktor finally replied after three full days of silence. Or maybe it’s just that there was something in that final message—something dry and venom-laced and so undeniably Viktor—that made Jayce feel like this wasn’t going to be the disaster he braced for.

Like maybe—just maybe—working with Viktor wouldn’t kill him.

Or, if it did, it’d be one hell of a way to go.

Chapter Text

The physics lab beneath the morning light is sleek and quietly bristling with restrained potential. It smells faintly of disinfectant and ozone, undercut by that distinct mineral sharpness of cold metal that reminds Jayce of places built for ideas more than people. On the far wall, the whiteboards are blank, but not empty. They wait like a held breath, ready to bloom with equations, theories, the shape of something not yet real.

Jayce is the first to arrive.

He shoulders the door open with more flourish than necessary, the sound of his polished shoes soft but certain against the tile. There’s a thread of mint in his breath and the expensive trace of cologne that doesn’t quite suit the lab, but suits him—brash, prematurely confident, and trying not to show it.

His bag lands on one of the chairs with a soft thunk, and without wasting time, he crosses the room to the tall storage cabinets in the corner. He’s working through the list Viktor sent the night before: graphite rods, insulated wire coils, a short-range emitter module, precision calipers, and three types of solder alloy Jayce had to Google twice.

Jayce collects each item with careful hands, setting them in a precise, almost reverent row across the workbench. There are no muttered jokes this time. No idle humming. He even double-checks the labels, which might be a first.

Ten minutes pass. Then, at precisely 10:00 AM, the door clicks open with mechanical precision.

Viktor enters like a storm dragged in by the wind.

Rain clings to him in streaks, darkening the shoulders of his coat like bruises. His scarf—charcoal gray and frayed at the seams—winds twice around his neck, less for warmth than for defense, a barrier between skin and world. A few curls of damp hair cling to his temple, pushed loose by the wind’s unkind fingers.

Jayce’s left hand twitches, then. An involuntary stutter of muscle, as if pulled by some quiet gravity towards Viktor, as if his body remembers before his mind does: to move, to reach.

Viktor pauses in the doorway. His gaze sweeps the lab before it lands on Jayce.

Jayce, as if on instinct, straightens his spine. His face lights up with a grin he does not bother suppressing. “Morning, sunshine.”

Viktor does not dignify him with a response. He strides towards the central table, movements crisp and deliberate, and drops his bag beside a nearby stool. Out comes a thick binder, a laptop covered in cracked, half-peeled stickers, and a dented black tumbler that lands against the table like punctuation.

Jayce watches this display of quiet precision, then reaches into his bag and tosses something gently across the room.

Viktor catches it mid-air without looking.

It’s a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Neatly folded, like someone took time with it.

“I figured you might be hungry,” Jayce says, attempting a casual tone that almost works.

The sandwich is homemade, but Viktor does not need to know that. Viktor also doesn’t need to know that Jayce made it earlier this morning, still half-lost in sleep, standing in the kitchen with mussed hair and mismatched socks, assembling it like a half-formed dream he wasn’t ready to name. Jayce wasn’t sure exactly why, only that he remembered Viktor never seems to eat lunch. And in the rare times he does, he always eats something pre-packaged and shrink-wrapped from a vending machine, consumed like obligation rather than sustenance.

Jayce doesn’t know what Viktor liked, or if he had any preferences at all, so he settled with the safest options he could think of: thin-sliced ham, one crisp leaf of lettuce, a slice of tomato, and just enough cheese. Nothing fancy. Balanced, simple, the way he imagined Viktor might approve of things.

“Are you bribing me with food? ”Viktor looks at the sandwich with eyes brimming of suspicion.

Jayce shrugs, his grin lopsided. “I’ve heard it works on cats and feral academics.”

Viktor narrows his eyes, all sharp cheekbones and burnished gold glare. “I assure you, I bite harder.”

“Mind if we put that to the test?” Jayce teases.

Viktor doesn’t reply. Just a pointed shift as he turns away, opening his folder with a particular kind of grim reverence.

“We begin with timelines, task division, and literature review.” Viktor says, tone clipped. “I've highlighted several key sources and outlined a tentative proposal on page three. Please review it before speaking.”

Jayce tilts his head. “How about we begin with coffee?”

“I don’t require caffeine,” Viktor replies without looking up. “I require silence.”

Jayce beams. “Then you’re really not going to like me.”

Viktor lets out a breath—not loud, but unmistakably pained, like someone enduring an itch they’ve sworn not to scratch. It slips between clenched teeth, long and weary.

Still, despite himself, he unwraps the sandwich and takes a small, almost reluctant bite.

Three hours in, and by some miracle known only to the gods of innovation and sheer stubbornness, Jayce and Viktor are still alive. No yelling, no storming out, no wiping the whiteboard clean in frustrated rage. Just two brilliant minds burning hot, locked in orbit around a shared goal.

The whiteboard is now half-covered in scribbles: schematics, timelines, and the occasional desperate question marks. Notes scatter across the worktable like fallen leaves. Viktor’s laptop hums softly between them, screen lit with overlapping research papers and blueprint mockups. It falters once, then steadies—like it, too, is trying to keep up.

They’ve gone back and forth on at least five ideas, three of which Jayce shot down for being convoluted, and two that Viktor shredded with clinical savagery for being, in his words, “scientifically offensive”.

Now, Viktor paces.

He does that when his mind is in motion—tight, relentless, like a pressure valve ready to snap. There is no rest in his steps, only purpose, chased by a thought he is yet to catch. His fingers tremble as if reaching for something invisible.

“I want to make something real,” he confesses at last. “Something that actually helps. Not another frivolous tech marvel with zero application outside the walls of this campus.”

Jayce, who had been idly spinning a pen between his fingers, pauses. His eyes lift to meet Viktor’s.

“You’ve got something in mind?” He asks. The open sincerity in his voice startles even him.

Viktor doesn’t speak at first. He only lingers in his silence, his presence flickering at the edges, as if he is only half-present—one foot in the moment, the rest of him drifting somewhere unreachable, far from Jayce.

“I was a sickly child,” Viktor begins, voice quieter now. “Lung condition. Congenital. Rare.”

Jayce draws in a breath, surprised at Viktor’s sudden admission. Viktor is always guarded—never offered so much as a fragment of his life, let alone his childhood in the Undercity. But now, something is beginning to fracture. Jayce glimpses the traces of a silence slowly cracking.

“Every breath hurt, like swallowing glass. And in the Undercity…” Viktor pauses, the words splintering from the walls of his throat. “The air was thick with smoke and metal and rot. I spent most of my days in collapsing hospitals and clinics—only if I was lucky, only in the rare chances my family could afford them. The rest of the time, I waited. For the next cough. For the next time I could not stand. For all of it to end.”

Viktor’s hand finds the edge of the table, fingers curling—not in anger, but to anchor himself against a past that keeps dragging him under.

“There were no diagnostics. No real treatment. Just rusting machines and kind words from people too poor to dream of healing.” Viktor’s lips stretches into a semblance of a smile. There is no joy in it. Just a particular kind of melancholy sewn too deep in his bones, like a memory worn and heavy. “But somehow, I got better. I still don’t know why. Maybe luck. Maybe cruelty.” A beat, as if the air itself leans to listen. “Or maybe it was just unfinished work.”

Jayce is silent. The expression he carries in his face is not pity—he knows better than to offer Viktor that—but something gentler. Respect, perhaps. Recognition.

Viktor’s gaze sharpens, returning from wherever it had drifted. “That’s why I build,” he says simply. “Because I lived. And too many others don’t.”

“I want to build something affordable. Something smart. Something that doesn’t cost a childhood.” Viktor continues, not quite looking at Jayce. “A portable diagnostic interface. Wearable. Lightweight. Something that scans vitals, identifies early abnormalities, sends alerts. Prevents before the damage is irreversible.”

Jayce exhales, slow and steady. Then he nods.

“Your idea’s not just good, Viktor,” he says. “It’s important. It’s the kind of idea that matters.”

Viktor clears his throat, suddenly wary of his own vulnerability. “It’s ambitious.”

“Good. We’re allowed to be ambitious.”

In an attempt to lighten the mood, Jayce reaches for a light-hearted joke. “I mean, have you seen my hair?”

Viktor looks at him with exhausted eyes. “I’m trying to share a vision of humanitarian innovation, and you bring up your hair?”

“Oh, my hair’s very ambitious,” Jayce says in mock solemnity. “The product of years of engineering, really.”

“God,” Viktor mutters, but his lips are heavy with the ghost of a chuckle. “Why do you even speak?”

Jayce laughs, buoyed by the warmth in Viktor’s expression. He grabs a marker and stands, dragging it across the whiteboard in broad strokes. Circular nodes branching from a central line, each labeled with a function: pulse, oxygen, neurological relay.

“Okay,” he says, swiftly gearing back into focus. “Imagine this: a modular sensor system, calibrated for pulse oximetry, cardiac rhythms, and neural feedback. Something powered with a micro-hex core. Small enough for the wrist, but strong enough to run diagnostics. We can make it energy-efficient, too, and have it locally processed. Data encrypted then pinged to nearby relay hubs—medical stations, mobile responders, even personal devices.”

He draws faster, momentum catching fire. Labeled arrows sprout across the whiteboard—‘O₂ saturation,’ ‘ECG,’ ‘neurostim loop,’ ‘latency buffer’. A framework begins to form, no longer abstract.

And Viktor watches Jayce—really watches him, for the first time, since they first met at nineteen—with something so tenderly close to awe. Only genuine, startled respect.

Because it’s easy to forget, at times, that beneath Jayce’s bravado and terrible jokes, lies pure, unfiltered brilliance. A boy who is sharper than he lets on—always thinking, always building. And this sketch on the board isn’t mere decoration, it’s invention gradually taking form.

“I like this,” Jayce says. “It’s meaningful—important to you. And we can do it. With your code and my hardware experience? We’ll make it work.”

Viktor is quiet for a moment. Then he steps forward, picks up a marker, and begins refining the sketch.

Their shoulders brush once, brief and warm.

Jayce does not move away.

“You really think we can pull this off?” Viktor asks. And it’s rare, the tremor in his voice—like the echo of too many nights asking the same question into silence.

Jayce nudges him gently with an elbow. “With your brain and my biceps? We’re practically unstoppable.”

Viktor gives him a flat look. “You’ll lift the soldering kit while I finish coding the neural interface.”

“Exactly,” Jayce winks. “See? Division of labor.”

For a heartbeat, Viktor lets the tension drop from his shoulders. Lets the hope edge in—tentative, trembling.

Lets himself believe.

And then, like a shadow catching the light, a smile flickers across his lips. Fragile as breath, but real all the same.

Jayce’s phone buzzes just as he flops onto his bed, the spring groaning beneath him in protest. His arms ache from three hours of hovering over circuit boards and sketching layouts, but there’s something in the tiredness that feels good. It feels earned.

The group chat with Vi and Caitlyn lights up, a notification bouncing at the top of his screen.

Vi (10:43 PM): soooo jayce

Vi (10:43 PM): how was ur date with mr. doom and gloom

Jayce smirks, despite himself. He rubs a towel to his hair still damp from a brisk shower, rivulets still clinging to the nape of his neck, collar dampening the back of his shirt.

Jayce (10:43 PM): went great

Jayce (10:43 PM): wedding’s in three months

Jayce (10:43 PM): you bringing the cake or the weapons?

The typing bubble pops up almost instantly.

Caitlyn (10:44 PM): We’ll bring both

Caitlyn (10:44 PM): You know, just in case he tries to run

Jayce (10:44 PM): listen, once I undoom him from the narrative, the marriage is back on

Caitlyn (10:45 PM): What does that even mean?

Vi (10:45 PM): what a fucking SIMP

Vi (10:45 PM): jayce talis, golden boy, rank 1 engineering student, hextech org president, caught simping in 4k

Vi (10:45 PM): i hope ur fanbase knows what ur type is in men because god i feel bad for them holy shit

Vi (10:45 PM): theyre over there doing god knows what to get ur attention and ur head over heels with mr. doom and gloom i cannot lmaooo

Jayce breaks into laughter—loud, unguarded, the kind that scrapes out of his chest and leaves him breathless. He flops back, one arm flung over his eyes, grinning like a fool.

Then he lifts the phone again and changes the subject.

Jayce (10:47 PM): i may or may not have made him a sandwich

Caitlyn (10:47 PM): You made him a sandwich?

Vi (10:47 PM): bruh u packed him lunch??? that’s domestic as shit

Vi (10:47 PM): ur gone jayce, he owns ur soul now

Caitlyn (10:48 PM): @Jayce you didn’t even pack me a sandwich when I got shot last semester

Jayce (10:48 PM): you said hospital food builds character

He sits up slowly, elbow resting on one knee, phone cradled in his hand. His smile fades—just a little—as he thinks back to Viktor’s voice earlier. Raw, but determined. The kind of certainty that grows from pain, not pride.

He types slower now.

Jayce (10:50 PM): no, but seriously, viktor thought of something

Jayce (10:50 PM): an invention that actually matters

Jayce (10:50 PM): a wearable diagnostic that detects disease early for the undercity

Jayce (10:50 PM): for kids who don’t get help until it’s too late

There’s a pause. Then:

Caitlyn (10:50 PM): That’s really incredible, Jayce

Vi (10:51 PM): as someone from zaun, that’s big

Vi (10:51 PM): wow, thank you, i hope u two manage to build that

Jayce (10:51 PM): i want to help make it real

Jayce (10:51 PM): whatever it takes

He stares at the screen for a second longer, heart beating slow and sure.

This is not just about his stupid admiration towards Viktor anymore. Not even about winning the prestigious competition.

It’s about making sure Viktor’s voice—the one that lived through what their invention could stop—gets heard in every line of code, every circuit Jayce will build with his hands.

Caitlyn (10:52 PM): Did you impress him though? That’s the real question

Vi (10:52 PM): yeah, did he look at u like u were his second favorite sandwich???

Jayce (10:52 PM): oh, absolutely

Jayce (10:52 PM): had him smiling at least twice

Jayce (10:52 PM): thrice, actually, if we count the barely present one

Vi (10:52 PM): bro actually counted

Jayce (10:52 PM): of course i did

Jayce (10:52 PM): viktor’s made of marble, that half-smile was a miracle

He grins again, softer now. Jayce doesn't know how this project will go, or how long Viktor will allow him to stay close. But for once, the distance that separates them does not feel insurmountable.

This is merely the beginning. The blueprints are still ink on paper, and their future is still waiting to be forged.

The lecture on Advanced Electromagnetism ends. Students rise in a slow wave, gathering their things with murmured conversations and the biting scrape of chairs.

Viktor is slow to rise, not out of fatigue, but habit. He likes to wait until the room empties a little. Likes the quiet when the chaos drains out, leaving only the raw trail of thought behind. He adjusts his coat, tucks a battered notebook under his arm, and slips a pencil behind one ear.

Then he hears it. The confident rhythm of shoes against tile. That painstaking, familiar cadence.

He doesn’t have to look up to know.

“Hey,” Jayce says, too bright for someone who just spent two hours ignoring the laws of Maxwell’s equations. “You heading out?”

Viktor blinks. He glances up. Jayce Talis stands a little too close to him, shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow, hair tousled like he fought a wind tunnel and lost beautifully. A tender shaft of the afternoon sun cuts across his face through the window.

There’s a kind of brightness to Jayce that grates on Viktor—radiant in a way that sinks beneath his skin and settles like a quiet, simmering ache. A sunlit ease that feels dangerous. Like something that might burn Viktor’s hands if he ever dared so much as to reach for it.

Viktor adjusts the strap of his satchel. “I was planning to,” he says dryly.

Jayce chuckles. “Figured I’d catch you before you disappear back into the ether. Thought we could talk for a sec.”

Viktor hesitates. The word “no” flits across his mind like moth to a flame. But Jayce is already leaning against the desk beside him, too tall and too easy, and some exhausted part of Viktor can’t summon the strength to fight it.

“Fine,” he sighs.

They speak in low voices—something about timelines, material requests, a scheduling conflict Viktor had anticipated and already worked around. Jayce’s sentences loop in slow, confident arcs. He gestures as he talks, his hands animated like he’s building the words mid-air.

And then—Viktor notices.

A pair of students near the back of the room are watching them. One leans in to whisper something to the other, then laughs, glancing between Jayce and Viktor like they’ve just stumbled onto a particularly juicy contradiction.

Viktor stiffens.

His mind follows the thread of thought like a wire pulled too tight: What do they see?

Jayce, warm and golden, the Academy’s wonder boy with his gleaming future practically stitched to his shoulders. And him—a bleak enigma from the Undercity, shrouded in old coats and unearned suspicion, always standing a little too far from the sun.

They must look ridiculous together.

“I can adjust our lab time if Saturday’s still inconvenient,” Viktor says, redirecting the moment with cold precision.

Jayce just waves him off. “No, Saturday’s good. Let’s meet in the morning again, same as before. Actually, do you want to meet more often?”

“What?”

“More often—I mean, I’m sure we’ll need more time as we start to build and polish. You might want to meet weekdays, too. Can’t afford to miss me too much, you know?” Jayce tries to play it off with a shrug and a grin, but it lands sideways—too fast, too hopeful. The joke flounders, unable to hide the sincerity behind it.

Viktor swallows an existential scream clawing out of his throat. “I juggle two jobs outside of classes. Time isn’t something I can afford at the moment.”

Something in Jayce’s expression shifts enough for Viktor to glimpse. His grin dims at the edges, a flicker of understanding slipping through. “I see. I respect that, just let me know what works for you. And Viktor—” He snaps his fingers, as if remembering something vital. “One more thing.”

Viktor raises a brow. “Yes?”

Jayce grins. “Ham or chicken?”

“What?”

“Ham or chicken?” Jayce repeats, as if mere repetition clarifies anything.

Viktor stares at him, completely nonplussed. “...Chicken, I suppose?”

Jayce’s grin widens, that signature spark lighting his face like it always does when he’s pleased with himself. “Noted.”

And just like that, he gathers his things and starts towards the exit, humming something under his breath that is lost to Viktor’s ears.

Viktor only remains where he is, watching as the door swings shut behind Jayce.

Chapter Text

Viktor enters the lab at precisely ten in the morning. The door clicks shut behind him with a soft, practiced ease, a sound swallowed by the quiet hum of idle machines and the faint scent of solder still lingering in the air.

The room appears empty at first glance. Jayce is nowhere in sight—but Viktor’s eyes land almost immediately on the leather messenger bag slumped at the far corner of the worktable, straps undone like it had been dropped in a hurry.

His gaze shifts upward the whiteboard, where a message is scrawled across the top margin in Jayce’s rough, barely legible handwriting—half block letters, half an impatient cursive, with a trailing underline that resembles a comet tail. It reads:

‘Running by Heimerdinger’s office to fetch some materials real quick! BRB! — Golden Boy’

Viktor huffs a quiet breath through his nose. Golden Boy. He shakes his head, but the smirk that tugs at the edge of his mouth is undeniable. Infuriating, that nickname; except it has gradually grown on him now, as strange as it is, like lichen on old stone. Stubborn, oddly endearing.

Then he sees it.

On the chair where Viktor usually sits, rests a sandwich. Wax paper folded with meticulous care, the corners pressed down like creases in origami. No note, no explanation. No flourish of a signature or a cheeky add-on scribbled across the wrapper.

But Viktor doesn’t need one to know.

He crosses the room slowly, each step softened by thought. His hand wraps around the sandwich and examines it. A breath slips from him—quiet, unthinking, barely more than the sound of stillness shifting. But something changes in his expression. Something tender, flickering, private. It lingers longer than he’ll admit.

When Viktor unwraps the paper to eat the sandwich, he does with such softness, as though the moment requires gentleness.

He sees chicken.

Viktor blinks once, lips quirking with the vague memory of the ridiculous question Jayce had thrown him a couple of days ago. ‘Ham or chicken?’ That grin on Jayce’s face when Viktor mumbled ‘Chicken, I suppose’ like it had been a private secret.

And now this.

No fanfare. No teasing. Just something quietly left behind. Something considered.

Something remembered.

The door creaks open twelve minutes later with the same carelessness as always—hinges protesting under the weight of Jayce’s arrival. He strides in balancing a stack of materials precariously against his chest: a box of copper coils, a case of microtools, and what looks suspiciously like a bottle of iced coffee wedged between his chin and shoulder.

“Delivery for one undercaffeinated genius,” Jayce says without missing a beat, kicking the door shut with the heel of his shoe. The materials rattle ominously.

Viktor doesn’t look up from where he’s seated, quietly reviewing notes from their initial brainstorming. His pencil hovers in the air mid-annotation. “Heimerdinger sent you back with refreshments now?”

“No,” Jayce replies, setting the stack down with a grunt. “This was self-motivated. I figured one of us should have caffeine in their system, and it certainly wasn’t going to be you, tea snob.”

“What?”

“Wait—actually, do you even like tea?” Jayce asks, already arranging the tools atop the central table. “I don’t even know and just assumed.”

Viktor slides his notes back into a folder and finally glances at him. “Tea is by far the superior beverage. Coffee is a scam perpetuated by capitalists with burnt taste buds.”

Jayce takes a long, dramatic sip of his iced coffee, then spreads his arms in mock reverence. “Spoken like a man who’s never known the joy of a proper iced latte. Tragic, really.”

Viktor hums, noncommittal, already opening his laptop.

Jayce meanders around the lab like usual, trailing fingers over benchtops and circuit trays with the attention span of a two year-old. Yet noticeably, he refuses to glance at Viktor’s workstation. Doesn’t acknowledge the empty sandwich wrapper now folded neatly beside his laptop. Doesn’t even let his eyes linger near the chair where he’d left it.

It’s intentional. Subtle, but Viktor notices.

Jayce, for all his flair and noise, says nothing about the sandwich.

And that silence, Viktor thinks, might be the most telling part of all. He watches Jayce from the corner of his eye, bemused by the deliberate avoidance.

With a rustle of foil and wires, Jayce drops a pack of copper conductors onto the central table and claps his hands once, theatrically. “Alright, what’s the plan today, V? Now that I’ve had my coffee, I’m fully stocked, mostly alert, and debatably brilliant.”

Viktor opens his notebook with all the patience of a man used to this exact degree of chaos. “We recalibrate the sensor nodes, update the signal parser, and begin testing cross-compatibility with the diagnostic shell. That is, if you can remain ‘mostly alert’ long enough to not short-circuit something again.”

Jayce gasps, hand to heart. “That happened once, Viktor. Once, last week. And the lights barely flickered.”

“You vaporized a resistor, Jayce. It screamed.”

“That was a dramatic resistor. I freed it from its mortal coil.”

Viktor levels him with a withering stare, utterly unimpressed. “If you ever utter that joke again, I will reassign you to cable organization duty. Permanently.”

Jayce salutes with mock solemnity. “Copy that, mister.”

They set to work.

Jayce manages the wiring with steady hands while Viktor adjusts the readings on the display interface. Their conversations slip between bickering and collaboration like gears clicking into place—unpolished, kinetic. They argue over waveforms, insult each other’s graphing techniques, and occasionally fall into pockets of silence so comfortable it does not need acknowledgment.

At one point, Jayce mutters under his breath, “If this doesn’t work, I swear I’m going to eat my screwdriver.”

“It would be the most nutritious thing you’ve consumed today,”

Jayce snorts. “This is a slander against the sandwich I made for breakfast. I’ll have you know it was lovingly made.”

Viktor notices the slip about the sandwich and decides to use it against Jayce. “Lovingly, was it?”

Jayce pauses mid-reach for the voltmeter. He settles for a shrug instead, eyes brightening with something Viktor struggles to fathom. “Hard to say. I don’t like to talk about my feelings in the lab. Bad for morale.”

Viktor says nothing. But behind his usual impassivity, something flickers—quick and elusive. Not quite fondness. Not yet. Just a shift. A momentary tilt towards something quiet and fragile and absolutely maddening.

The afternoon wears on. They test, rebuild, document. Viktor talks through adjustments while Jayce scrawls notes on the whiteboard in messy, looping script. They debate coil alignment. They argue about thermal thresholds. Jayce manages to blow a fuse. Viktor sighs, rises, and fixes it without even commenting—just a long-suffering look that Jayce responds to with a grin and a sheepish thumbs-up.

And somewhere between the data logs and the burned-out wire, something begins to take shape.

The invention—still unnamed, still a little crude—is no longer theoretical. It’s real. A heartbeat made of circuitry. Still rough, still early. But breathing, nonetheless.

The weeks begin to bleed.

Days blur into each other until time no longer passes in clean, separable lines but in gradients—shifting hues of morning light through the lab’s windows, the soft hum of equipment, the quiet scrape of pencil against blueprint. The lab becomes a second skin. Less a room, more a gravitational pull that tugs Jayce and Viktor back, again and again, as if the space itself remembers them.

They meet more frequently now. Two, sometimes three times a week—depending on Viktor’s schedule, which remains elusive and irregular. Jayce asked about it once, off-tangent, as they waited for a script to finish compiling.

“You mentioned you juggle two jobs outside of class,” Jayce begins, fidgeting with a hexagonal nut with the air of someone pretending to be nonchalant. “Mind telling me about them?”

Viktor’s eyes trace the mechanical movement of numbers in his laptop. “I tutor a few first-years for extra cash,” he says simply. “And I work part-time as Professor Heimerdinger’s research assistant. Part of the terms of my scholarship.”

Jayce stills at how easy the answer was wrung out of Viktor, worn and familiar like a weight he no longer notices. It hits Jayce then, with the force of something obvious he’s never truly seen: just how staggering Viktor’s day-to-day life must be. A third year engineering student balancing a full course load, two jobs, and still managing to show up, every day—not just present, but consistently brilliant. Someone who manages to score only a point or two lower than Jayce in exams, who ranks second against the entire department. All of this, while also inventing a device for one of the most prestigious engineering competitions in the region.

Jayce has always thought he worked hard. But standing there, listening, he realizes how much of his success had been cushioned by privilege—by time, money, the freedom to focus. Viktor has none of it. Yet somehow, he keeps pace. Surpassed him, even, if Jayce were being honest. In his head, there is no doubt: Viktor is more than the student he is.

Since then, Jayce hasn’t asked again. But he notices more—the weight Viktor carries in the slump of his shoulders, the bruised half-moons under his eyes, the brutal efficiency with which he portions out his time. Quietly, and without ever speaking it aloud, Jayce begins arriving earlier for their meetings, if only to prepare the workstations, to set things in order before Viktor appears. He stays later, too—lingering past than he normally would, trying to match Viktor’s quiet, unyielding pace in the only way he knows how.

And every session, without fail, a sandwich waits at Viktor’s seat—always wrapped in the same wax paper, the corners folded with meticulous care. At first, it was just the sandwich. Then came the tea. The same battered thermos each time, still warm to the touch, filled with some herbal concoction Viktor suspects Jayce is experimenting with.

Viktor never comments.

The first brew had been... questionable. Clearly the work of someone unfamiliar with the subtleties of tea. But over time, the taste began to change—less bitter, more balanced. Viktor imagines Jayce in his dorm kitchen, frowning over steeping times, adjusting leaves and temperatures in quiet trial and error. He’s almost certain Jayce watches his expression with every sip, trying to read the verdict in the arch of a brow or the press of his lips.

So Viktor helps him, in the only way he knows how—by being just a little more deliberate with his reactions. A softened blink for something pleasant. A wrinkle of his nose for anything too strong. It becomes a silent conversation between them, played out in steam and subtle glances.

And then, one day, Viktor takes a sip and pauses.

The tea is perfect. Steeped exactly to his preference—just the right warmth, the right earthy undertone, the faintest note of something floral at the end.

He stares at the thermos for a long, thoughtful moment.

Says nothing.

Then takes another sip.

And maybe he imagined it, but Viktor swears, just as the thermos lowers from his lips, he catches the ghost of a smile flickering across Jayce’s face. Not the kind he wears in crowds, all brightness and ease, but something quieter. Fragile. Rare. The kind Jayce keeps tucked away, like something sacred.

The device they’re building grows between them like a living thing—sinewed from trial and failure, refined by every mistake that leads to breakthrough. It shifts shape with each blueprint iteration, every soldered joint and recalibrated node. Their working prototype, once a scattered idea drawn in looping whiteboard ink, now pulses softly on the workbench like it’s breathing.

Heimerdinger checks in from time to time, barely able to see over the lip of the table.

“You’ve gone from hypothesis to reality faster than most of my research assistants,” he remarks one morning, peering at the newest diagnostic shell through two pairs of stacked glasses. “And you’ve done it without setting anything on fire. Remarkable.”

Jayce grins. Viktor wears the perfect mask of nonchalance.

Later, when Jayce’s back is turned, Viktor quietly recalls and basks in his professor’s positive feedback. Twice.

They test modules. They fail. Rebuild. Debug. Laugh. Argue.

Jayce hums when he’s focused, a quiet tune under his breath as his fingers tap out a rhythm on the edge of the table. It drives Viktor mad, but also strangely manages to center him. A beat he begins to associate with momentum, with the work moving forward. With company.

Viktor notices other things, too.

The way Jayce always takes the stool closest to him now. The way his sentences drift, losing their edge, when he’s circling something personal he can’t quite bring himself to say. The way he watches Viktor sometimes—not with idle curiosity, but with quiet intent. Like he’s committing to memory the shape of him in stillness. The way he exists when no one else is watching but him.

Jayce doesn’t like leaving projects unfinished, Viktor learns. Jayce also doesn’t like coffee when it’s too sweet, or the stains blue ink leaves on his uniform. He doesn’t like asking for help, or when his hair refuses to sit right in the morning—but he never says that part aloud.

But Jayce likes sunlight through the lab windows, and sandwiches with too much mustard. He likes the weight of a wrench in his hand and the scent of soldering metal. He likes laughter between calculations, and humming along to old songs he doesn’t quite remember the lyrics to. And most especially, Jayce likes building things with his hands; this, Viktor realizes with so much clarity, how Jayce wholly dedicates himself to shaping potential into something real, something that matters.

One particular starless night, Jayce leans back on his stool, all easy limbs and lazy satisfaction, and says, “You know, we’re kind of good at this.”

There is something tender in the way Jayce spoke the words, his voice softened by hours of quiet work.

Viktor doesn’t look up. “Speak for yourself.”

Jayce elbows him gently. “Admit it. We make a good team.”

“You’re chaos incarnate,” Viktor mutters. “I am a system of refined logic. Our partnership is a statistical aberration.”

But he doesn’t say no.

And Jayce doesn’t stop smiling.

Sometimes, Viktor stays behind after Jayce leaves. He’ll linger in the soft hum of the lab alone, fingers brushing the edge of the device like it might disappear without proof of touch. He watches the steady glow of the interface they built from nothing—built from memory, from intention. A whisper of mercy forged into circuitry.

He places a hand on the table’s edge, grounding himself.

He never thought he’d get this far.

He never thought anyone would walk into his orbit and stay.

And yet—here he is.

And so is Jayce.

Viktor closes his eyes and listens. To the silence. To the hum. As if the room is breathing with him.

Viktor knows something is wrong the moment he steps into the lab and glances at his seat.

No sandwich. No tea.

It shouldn’t matter. It’s absurd that it does. And yet his eyes linger on the vacant stretch of desk where the sandwich always waits, wrapped in wax paper with neat, folded corners. The absence presses into his chest—not sharp, but persistent. A dull tug of something ridiculous and unspoken. He tells himself it’s irritation.

A few minutes later, the door swings open with too much force, the metal frame rattling in its hinges. Jayce enters like a storm barely held together—eyes shadowed, hair still damp from a rushed shower, shoulders hunched with the kind of burden that refuses release. He tosses his bag onto the floor. It lands hard, skidding a few inches, and he doesn’t bother to pick it up.

The exhaustion rolls off him in waves. Like static, like heat.

Viktor doesn’t say anything.

But he stiffens. Doesn’t greet Jayce, doesn’t even dare to glance his way. He turns back to the interface and powers it on with cold precision, fingers moving a little too crisply across the keys. Controlled. Measured.

Jayce notices.

The silence grows thick between them—dense and prickling, burdened with everything unspoken. Finally, Jayce clears his throat, voice quieter than usual.

“Hey. About the, uh… sandwich. And tea.”

Viktor doesn’t look up. “I hadn’t noticed,” he lies, fluid as breath, as if the words cost him nothing.

“Liar. You looked like someone revoked your research funding.”

Still, Viktor keeps his eyes locked on the screen. A faint warmth slithers on the back of his neck then, betraying him with the subtlety of a blush he doesn’t want to have.

Jayce scratches the shell of his ear, sheepish now. “I pulled an all-nighter finishing my capsule proposal. It was a disaster. Formatting issues, corrupted files, last-minute revisions—one of those nights.” He exhales, like he’s been holding the sentence in for hours. “I barely had time to shower, let alone assemble my usual gourmet masterpieces for you.”

That earns Viktor’s full attention.

There’s something—something strangely tender—about it all. Jayce had come in furious, shoulders knotted with exhaustion, every movement brimming with stress. And yet, in all that chaos, the first thing he thought to do was to apologize for a missing sandwich and a thermos of tea.

Viktor feels it then, low and sudden, a warmth blooming in his chest—quiet, unfamiliar. Something he does not yet recognize the shape of. Only that it expands in the space between them, softening the edges of the morning.

Jayce shrugs, voice lighter now. “Anyway. Just wanted to say—I’ve been the Sandwich and Tea Phantom all along. Shocking revelation, I know.”

There’s a pause. Then Viktor, in his usual sarcastic cadence, replies, “Oh, really? I assumed I hallucinated them. Brought on by my starvation and prolonged exposure to your voice.”

Jayce lets out a low snort, half amusement, half relief. He watches Viktor for a heartbeat longer—something unreadable flickering behind his eyes—then turns away, unpacking his tools in silence.

He doesn’t press.

And Viktor doesn’t say thank you.

But later, after Jayce has gone and the lab has fallen into its familiar hush, Viktor finds a small pack of dried fruit resting beside his laptop. Not a sandwich. But close enough.

A peace offering, unwrapped and unspoken.

And when Jayce walks in the next morning, hair tousled, a sandwich in one hand and a thermos of tea balanced in the other, Viktor takes them without hesitation.

Like nothing ever went missing.

Like this, somehow, has always been part of their routine.

On one particularly warm afternoon, when Viktor is certain Jayce isn’t looking, he slips a small note into the front pocket of his messenger bag.

Scrawled in his careful, spidery hand, it reads:

‘Thank you, Jayce — V’

Just that. Nothing more. Nothing less.

But it lingers, like warmth after touch.

Chapter Text

The library is too bright for Viktor’s mood.

All around him, students speak in whispers or in silence. Pages turn like clockwork, time passing in seemingly paper-thin increments. Fingers dance across keyboards in the steady cadence of academic anxiety, a mechanical rhythm, each keystroke a quiet cry before the dreaded exam week. The air is thick with tension—less reverence, more survival. There is no room here for distraction; or worse, for Viktor’s spiraling thoughts.

At the far corner, tucked between the Calculus and Applied Mechanics section, Viktor sits stiffly at one of the long study tables, spine straight, pen in hand, notebook open to a page scribbled with chain rules and integrals. Across from him slouches Giopara—a first-year mechanical engineering student, and currently Viktor’s most frustrating tutoring assignment.

Giopara is all bronzed skin and obnoxious confidence. His smile is bright and toothy, his crisp uniform unbuttoned one too many. The scent of his cologne claws at the air, too loud, too sweet, too present. His hair is slicked into place with something glossy and expensive, glinting beneath the library lights like oil on water.

The boy reminds Viktor, maddeningly, of Jayce.

Only dimmer. Less substance, more volume. As if someone sculpted Jayce from the echo of a memory and forgot to include the equations.

“Okay, so,” Giopara begins, drumming his fingers on the edge of his notes. “If I just cancel the derivative here—” He draws a line across the fraction like a five-year-old slashing at a coloring book, “—then it’s just one, yeah?”

Viktor stares at the page. Then at Giopara.

“No,” he says flatly. “That’s not how derivatives work. You’ve cancelled the variable, not the function.”

“But the x’s cancel.” The boy insists. His brows furrow in utter conviction.

Viktor pinches the bridge of his nose, inhales deeply. “This is not high school algebra, Giopara. You cannot simply ‘cancel’ things because they look similar.”

“Okay, okay,” the boy mumbles, flipping back a page. “But this professor makes absolutely no sense! He talks like a microwave—just, like, beeping formula. I swear he summoned a demon during yesterday’s lecture.”

“That demon,” Viktor says with deadpan precision, “was the chain rule. And it is not your enemy if you try to understand it.”

“You should tutor the professor,” Giopara mumbles, leaning back in his chair. “Bet even he can’t stand that tone of yours.”

Viktor levels him with the expression of someone contemplating arson. “Would you like to fail your exam, then?”

Giopara just grins. “I dunno, man. You seem extra cranky today. I thought tutoring was your thing.”

Viktor doesn’t reply.

His fingers drum a restless rhythm against the tabletop, mind not on Giopara, not really. His thoughts keep circling back to the growing pile of notes festering on his dorm desk, still untouched. To the Advanced Thermodynamics major exam looming in three days—an exam that determines forty percent of his grade.

He hasn’t had time. Not enough. It slips through his grasp like water through cracked glass—lost between the Innovator’s Competition, Heimerdinger’s erratic summons, the relentless churn of tutoring sessions, and the exhausting repetition of lab rotations. He is stretched thin—thinner than his patience, thinner than breath in a cold room.

His thoughts skip like misaligned gears—stuttering, spiraling, seizing under pressure.

With effort, he drags himself back, blinking at Giopara’s worksheet as if emerging from underwater. The ink blurs at the edges, but he forces stillness into his hands, forces quiet into the chaos clawing at the back of his mind.

“Try it again,” Viktor says tightly. “From the top. Don’t skip steps this time.”

The boy grumbles, reciting under his breath as he scrawls with a neon orange gel pen. “Function of a function... derivative of the outside... multiply by the derivative of the inside... ugh.”

Viktor watches him struggle, equal parts exhausted and empathetic. “Slow down. Stop trying to guess the answer. You need to understand the logic.”

“I don’t get logic,” Giopara mutters. “I get vibes. Numbers should vibe, you know?”

Viktor blinks. And for a moment, entirely against his will, he thinks of Jayce once more—Jayce smirking behind his lab goggles, spinning a pen between his fingers, saying things like "math is just flirting with variables until they give up their secrets”.

“You know,” Viktor whispers before he can stop himself, “you really remind me of someone.”

“Well, that’s a smile on your face,” the boy looks at him with mischief dripping in his eyes. “Can’t help but wonder who I remind you of.”

Viktor opens his mouth to retort—then his laptop pings.

A new email. The notification flashes at the corner of the screen like a curse.

From: [email protected]

Subject: URGENT: Assistance Required in Lab A3

Dear Viktor,

Apologies for the short notice. I need immediate assistance with a thermal resonance stabilization trial in Lab A3. Your previous work on the hex-spatial containment module makes you the most qualified assistant. Please come as soon as you are able.

Professor Heimerdinger

Viktor exhales a ragged, aching sound and folds in on himself, forehead cradled in his palms as if his own hands might keep his skull from breaking apart. The throb at the base of his head has been creeping in for the past hour, sharp and rhythmic—too familiar to mistake. A migraine, blooming like lightning behind his closed eyelids, pulsing in sync with his heartbeat. It makes the overhead lights feel too bright, the air too loud, even the silence pressing in from the library stacks unbearable in its density.

He breathes in, shallow. Then again, slower—forcing calm, forcing stillness, forcing his thoughts into neat columns even as his brain tries to liquefy itself in real time. His fingertips rub slow circles over the hinge of his brow.

“Yikes,” Giopara says, peeking over. “That the sound of a breakdown?”

“I don’t have time for this,” Viktor mutters into his palms.

“Cool. I’ll just teach myself calculus and cry into a bag of chips.”

Viktor lifts his head with a long breath, pushing his chair back. His eyes are ringed with shadows, jaw tight with the stress of too many deadlines and not enough hours in the day.

“I have to go,” he says curtly. “You’ll review problems 3 through 7 and submit them to my inbox by midnight.”

“What am I, your student?” Giopara calls after him as Viktor gathers his things.

“Yes,” Viktor snaps. “Unfortunately.”

Giopara grins, holding up a peace sign. “Later, Professor Doom.”

Viktor doesn’t look back. His footsteps echo across the marble floor as he heads for the lab, every muscle in his body buzzing with tension.

Deadlines. Demands. Equations blurring at the edges of his vision.

If he doesn’t snap soon, it’ll be a miracle.

The familiar hiss of pressurized valves greets Viktor the moment he steps inside Lab A3, followed by the subtle whine of a hex-core generator coming online. Overhead, the lights sputter into brilliance, splitting the shadows and carving a jagged ache behind his eyes. It feels like someone is slowly driving a spike through his right temple, the ache pulsing in time with the thrum of the lab’s resonance coils.

He does not stop to grimace.

Heimerdinger is already by the workbench, half-buried in a mess of exposed wiring and thermal arrays, nose nearly touching a panel etched with miniature hexplates.

“Ah, there you are!” Heimerdinger calls without looking up. “Punctual, as always. Good, good. We’re at a delicate threshold—just nearing stabilization of the hexcore’s thermal buffer, but the interface keeps spitting out irregularities in the containment module.”

Viktor nods silently and moves to the console. He slides his satchel off his shoulder and sets it down with care, ignoring the gnawing emptiness in his stomach. He skipped lunch—no time, no appetite, and the tension knotting his spine leaves no room for food.

He squints at the data. The numbers blur slightly in his eyes before settling, like a stubborn camera lens snapping into focus. He tightens his grip on the edge of the counter until the faint dizziness fades.

“Have you adjusted the coolant regulation node?” he asks.

“Yes, yes,” Heimerdinger replies, wiping his goggles with a microfiber cloth. “But the override temperature keeps climbing past the safe margin. I’ve rewritten the modulation protocol twice.”

Viktor rolls his sleeves up and taps at the controls, each keystroke deliberate, slow—his head is starting to buzz, thoughts drifting like smoke in still air. “Then we’re missing something mechanical. The software’s responding fine. It must be the hexplate—probably a microfracture in the inner hexcore. I’ll recalibrate the relay manually.”

“Excellent,” Heimerdinger says brightly, stepping aside.

For the next twenty minutes, they work in mostly silence, the only sounds the occasional hiss of vapor lines and the tap of metal tools on alloy. Viktor barely speaks. He can’t. He’s afraid that if he opens his mouth, the pressure in his skull might come pouring out in the form of bile or incoherent equations.

Still—he works.

Focus narrows the pain to a point, like a scalpel slicing through the fog. The relay clicks into place. Readings begin to level.

“See?” Heimerdinger says, peering over his shoulder. “Excellent, Viktor. Your calculations are sharp as ever.”

Viktor exhales softly through his nose, resisting the urge to slump. “They’re functional.”

“Functional…” Heimerdinger echoes, before turning to clean his goggles again. “You and Jayce seem more… functional too, these days.”

The comment makes Viktor pause. Just long enough for the migraine to surge again, briefly blinding.

He blinks it back. “Come again, Professor?”

“Oh, nothing scandalous,” Heimerdinger assures with a chuckle. “Only—I’ve observed a certain ease between you two recently. Less shouting. Fewer insults across the lab benches. Eating in the physics lab, too, if my eyes weren’t deceiving me.”

Viktor’s ears heat immediately, but he pretends to be very interested in tightening a few loose screws. “We’re collaborating,” he says stiffly.

“Yes, but you’ve been paired before and I distinctly remember Jayce nearly electrocuting a capacitor out of spite.”

“That was... an isolated incident.”

Heimerdinger chuckles again, and then, with a gentler tone: “What do you think of him, Viktor? Truly?”

It’s such a simple question. Viktor hates it.

He sets the screwdriver down—slower than necessary, deliberate in a way that betrays his unease. His hands are too warm. His head throbs at the temples. But the truth rises up anyway, raw and begrudging, scraped from somewhere he does not often go.

“I used to think he was nothing more than a showman. All noise. No depth. Just charm, and brilliance that came too easily to be taken seriously.”

“And now?” Heimerdinger prompts.

Viktor’s throat feels tight. He’s not used to speaking like this, not even to himself.

“Now…” He presses his palm to the side of his head, thumb at his temple. “Now I know he’s a showman and a scientist. He listens. Jayce—he cares more than he lets on. And he’s not... stupid. He’s infuriating. Loud. But not stupid.”

The professor’s silence is not judgmental. Merely waiting.

Viktor sighs, shoulders sagging like something heavy has been wrestled out of him. “He’s good. Better than I gave him credit for. And he’s trying. I see that now.”

Heimerdinger’s expression softens into something knowing. “Well,” he says kindly, “that’s something, isn’t it?”

Viktor doesn’t answer. He’s already returning to the panel, typing in new data—pretending the moment didn’t happen.

But inside, something small and electric shifts beneath the pain.

Maybe it is something.

The clock reads 02:04 AM.

His desk is a clutter of notes and worn textbooks, ink-streaked problem sets layered over multiple graphs and notes scribbled with formula so densely packed, even he can’t remember writing them. His back is hunched, his legs curled under his desk chair, and he’s been working for so long that the muscles between his shoulder blades ache like they have fossilized.

The remains of an instant cup noodle sit abandoned to his left, the broth cooled into a dull, oily film that clings to the edges like old grease. He prods at it absently with a chopstick, more out of habit than hunger. One bite had tasted like cheap sodium and cardboard. The rest hadn’t been worth finishing.

His eyes burn—overworked and underslept. Each blink feels like dragging sandpaper over skin. His vision tunnels at the edges, clearing only after a slow, deliberate squint. Beside him, the desk lamp gives off a faint, metallic buzz—persistent and grating, like a wasp caught in a jar.

Viktor recognizes the signs. There’s a flu waiting just under the surface of his skin, humming slow and steady behind his eyes. His joints ache like bad machinery.

He refuses to acknowledge it. Viktor does not have time for illness. He barely has time for himself.

He’s in the middle of redrawing a diagram when his phone buzzes once. A soft rattle across the wooden desk.

Jayce.

Of course it’s Jayce.

He sighs through his nose and unlocks it, expecting a meme, or worse, a dumb pun about particle acceleration.

Instead—

(02:07 AM): hey

(02:07 AM): you awake?

(02:07 AM): No. Busy. Studying for Thermo exam.

(02:07 AM): okay okay but it’s kinda important

(02:07 AM): Heimerdinger dropped by the lab earlier

(02:07 AM): i was running our latest diagnostic script and he wanted to see initial results

(02:08 AM): there’s something weird about the oxygen saturation variable

(02:08 AM): the scanner reported inconsistent values when i toggled between simulation and live reading

(02:08 AM): thought it was a latency issue, but it might be an error in the code

Viktor squints at the screen. That variable was his configuration. If something’s wrong, it means he missed something.

It means he has to check it.

(02:08 AM): can we meet in the morning? won't take long

(02:08 AM): just a quick troubleshoot, i promise

(02:09 AM): you can throw a wrench at me after

Viktor stares at the screen. His migraine lingers in his skull. His exam reviewer is only half-read. His notes are a mess. His nose is starting to clog, and his knees ache from being locked in the same position for too long. His exam is in two days. His eyelids feel too heavy.

But—

He pictures Jayce, alone in the lab earlier, confused and stubbornly determined. Thinks about the device—their device—and how fragile progress can be when left to uncertainty overnight.

So, he exhales.

(02:10 AM): Fine.

(02:10 AM): Eight-thirty sharp.

(02:10 AM): If you’re late, I’m locking you out of the room.

(02:10 AM): deal

(02:10 AM): get some rest v, you sound like you’re typing from a deathbed

(02:10 AM): I am typing from a deathbed.

Viktor’s fingers pause over the keyboard. He hesitates—long enough for the cursor to blink thrice, steady and expectant. Then, carefully:

(02:11 AM): And Jayce?

(02:11 AM): yes, v?

(02:11 AM): Bring tea.

(02:11 AM): you need not ask :)

Viktor lets the phone fall face-down onto the desk and presses a knuckle against his lids.

He returns to his notes with a headache resting at the back of his skull, chest tight with the weight of a hundred things unfinished.

“Show me the problem,” Viktor says the moment he steps into the physics lab.

No greeting. No pause. Just the sharp precision of someone running on frayed edges and something that resembles collapse.

His fever is yet to break. If anything, it had burrowed deeper during the night, curling in his bones like a quiet, smoldering parasite. Morning greeted him not with light, but with weight—a dense, invisible fog pressing into his chest, turning breath into labor and thought into syrup. His skin is pale and paper-thin, as though illness had taken a brush to him and painted absence where color used to live.

Jayce blinks at him, momentarily caught off guard by the briskness of it—the coat not even off Viktor’s shoulders yet, bag still slung across one arm.

“Well, good morning to you too,” Jayce mutters, dry, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Don’t strain anything. I’m just so happy you made time in your busy schedule to grace me with your presence.”

Viktor barely glances at him as he moves across the room, scanning the data sheet Jayce left on the terminal. “I don’t have time for this. Where’s the error?”

Jayce frowns. “Okay. Someone’s a bundle of sunshine today.”

He tries to brush it off. Tries to keep it light. But something tugs at him. A slowness in the way Viktor moves, too controlled, too deliberate. The kind of stillness that isn’t calm but effort—an act of preservation.

Viktor’s shoulders are hunched, not from fatigue alone, but from something denser, heavier. And when he leans over the terminal, Jayce can see the tension in his jaw, the pallor of his skin under the fluorescent lights.

“V…” Jayce’s voice gentles, his bravado flickering out like a wet match. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Viktor snaps, too quickly. His voice has an edge that wasn’t there before—sharp and exhausted, like glass stretched too thin.

Jayce stares. “You don’t look fine.”

Viktor slams the terminal keys harder than necessary. “I said I’m fine, Jayce. Just show me the issue so I can fix it and go.”

“You sure? Because you’re a little paler than usual and you’re moving like someone lit your spine on fire.”

Viktor turns to him then—fully, finally—and his eyes are bloodshot, his expression carved from frustration and pressure and some kind of sickness that clearly hasn’t let him go for hours.

“Do you think I don’t know what I look like right now?” Viktor hisses. “Do you think I want to be here looking like this? While you sit around playing technician with problems you could’ve solved yourself if you bothered to think for more than two seconds?”

Jayce takes a step back, mouth falling open. A dagger wedges itself in the empty yawning just beneath his ribs.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I have a dozen deadlines breathing down my neck,” Viktor continues, voice rising with each word. “I have to study for a major exam worth forty percent of my grade, manage Heimerdinger’s expectations, tutor three freshmen who don’t know what a capacitor is, and somehow still produce a functioning prototype that won’t blow up in front of the Dean. So forgive me, Jayce, if I don’t have the patience for your games today.”

“I wasn’t playing games!” Jayce snaps back. “I was worried. I asked if you were okay, not if you wanted to fight.”

Viktor laughs, sharp and humorless. “You were worried? Oh, do spare me your concern. It’s easy to worry when you’re always standing at the top, isn’t it?”

Jayce’s hands curl into fists at his sides. “Where the hell is this coming from, Viktor?”

Viktor turns back to the terminal, muttering something under his breath, and Jayce’s patience snaps.

“What? All this—” Jayce gestures wildly, breath coming fast now, “all this self-destruction just to rank second to me?”

The words are out of his mouth before he can withdraw them. They hang in the space like smoke. Acrid and irreversible.

The silence that follows is heavy. One that refuses release, a repentance.

Viktor’s fingers still over the keyboard. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. The only sound is the quiet, mechanical hum of the lab—a sterile, indifferent witness.

Jayce can feel the regret already tightening in his throat. He hears what he’s said, over and over, like a broken audiotape that plays only to torment his mind. Viktor, who works harder than anyone Jayce has ever known. Who runs on tea and grit and unrelenting will. Who shows up even when it would be easier not to. Who never wishes for recognition, only excellence.

And Jayce—furious, flailing, stupid—has weaponized that effort like a blade and stabbed Viktor straight in his chest.

Viktor exhales, slow and quiet. He looks at Jayce for a long, unreadable moment. There’s no anger in it. No fire. Just something resigned. Hollowed.

“Of course,” Viktor says simply.

And then he turns.

Leaves.

Jayce doesn’t move.

The door swings shut behind Viktor with a soft click. Not a slam. Not a dramatic exit. Just the kind of quiet that feels worse than anything else.

Jayce stands there, alone, heart pounding, adrenaline still spiking in his veins. But there’s no one to fight anymore.

And it hurts.

It hurts more than he wants to admit—not because Viktor walked away, but because they never meant to hurt each other. Neither of them. This, Jayce knows with certainty. That’s the part that breaks him. That beneath the sharp words and the noise of frayed tempers, there’s a knowing. Carving pieces of themselves into the things they believe in, and forgetting—again and again—that they’re still human underneath all that striving.

They were both just exhausted. Too wired and stretched thin and aching from places they never talk about. And instead of reaching, instead of resting, they bled all that anger into the person closest to reach.

Jayce drags a hand through his hair, jaw clenched.

‘Hurt people hurt people’, his mother once whispered to him; his small, trembling body swathed in the familiar warmth of her arms.

And god, do they know how to hurt.

The tea Jayce steeped earlier sits atop Viktor’s workstation, silent, growing colder by the minute.

Jayce sends the first series of messages that same night. It's quiet in his dorm, the only sound the hum of the heater and the sporadic, distant bursts of laughter slipping from the paper-thin walls.

His thumbs hesitate over the keyboard only briefly before he types:

(10:52 PM): hey.

(10:52 PM): i’m sorry.

(10:53 PM): i shouldn’t have said what i said.

(10:53 PM): i was angry and stupid and you didn’t deserve that.

(10:53 PM): not even close.

(11:08 PM): i know you’re probably still pissed.

(11:08 PM): or tired. or both.

(11:08 PM): just wanted to say that i meant what i said before, the good parts.

(11:08 PM): i think what we’re building is brilliant. and i still want to finish it. with you.

The reply never comes.

But Jayce tells himself that maybe Viktor just hasn’t read it yet. Maybe he’s buried under his Advanced Thermodynamics notes, or asleep, or just too drained to care. It’s not personal.

The next morning, he checks the lab. Still no Viktor.

The chair where he usually sits is empty. His notes gone. The whiteboard untouched.

Jayce leaves the lights on anyway.

That night, the silence weighs too much.

(09:21 AM): good luck on the thermo exam

(09:21 AM): you’ll do great

(09:21 AM): i hope you kick my ass

The typing bubble never appears.

Jayce throws himself into other things: organizing their shared research folders, updating the project log, labeling wires he knows Viktor would redo out of spite just to correct him. He stays in the lab long after the city begins to fold itself into night, as if his lingering might summon something—someone—back.

Then, two days later, he sees him.

Across the courtyard, framed by the cold blur of mid-morning light, Viktor stands before the campus café, scowling at the automated tea dispenser as though it had personally wronged him. His coat is pulled too tightly around thin shoulders; his eyes, those restless, sharpened things, flick over the screen like he’s solving a problem no one else can see.

He looks exhausted. But he is moving. Breathing. Still stitched into this world by some stubborn, threadbare grace. Still… Viktor.

Jayce doesn’t approach. He stays rooted on the other side of the square, hands deep in his coat pockets, heart thudding against the silence. A thousand words rise like steam in his throat—warm, fragile, evaporating before they ever reach the air.

When he reaches his dorm, he texts:

(06:03 PM): saw you on campus earlier

(06:03 PM): you were at the cafe by the east hall

(06:03 PM): you looked like you were arguing with the tea machine

(06:03 PM): was that chamomile?

(07:18 PM): anyway

(07:18 PM): you looked okay

(07:18 PM): i was glad.

That night, Jayce doesn’t sleep. He lies awake under the sterile blue light of his desk lamp, watching shadows stretch along the ceiling. The sheets twist beneath him like wires. Every few minutes, he glances at his phone, half-expecting something to change.

It never does.

But still, at 2:26 AM, he sends:

(02:26 AM): i miss working with you.

(02:26 AM): the lab’s too quiet without you insulting my code.

(02:26 AM): feels wrong.

The days blur, like watercolors left too long in the rain. A lecture. A lab rotation. Jayce moves through them all with that same hollow rhythm, like a wind-up machine solely running on gasoline. He keeps checking the chat. Nothing.

A day later, he tries again.

(04:20 PM): i know you’re probably drowning in work and exams

(04:21 PM): but take care of yourself, alright?

(04:21 PM): even if that means ignoring me forever

(07:02 PM): also

(07:02 PM): if you’re eating nothing but vending machine sandwiches again or those unhealthy instant cup noodles i swear to god i will find you and drag you to a real meal

(07:02 PM): just kidding, you can eat whatever you want

(07:02 PM): you don’t owe me anything

Jayce finds the note Viktor left on the front pocket of his messenger bag one late afternoon.

Folded once, clean and deliberate. He doesn’t open it right away. His thumb presses the fold, breath held in the way one braces before stepping into memory. Then, slowly, carefully, he unfolds it.

Viktor’s handwriting. That strange, elegant slant. Jayce knows it immediately, the way one knows the shape of an old scar.

Thank you, Jayce — V

Jayce sits down. He reads the note again. And again. Each time it sinks a little deeper, like a stone dropped through still water.

And he laughs, softly. Because of course Viktor would leave this quietly and without ceremony. Of course he would tuck gratitude into the smallest pocket, certain Jayce would find it only when he was ready.

Jayce folds the note back up. Slides it into his palm and presses it to his chest, just for a moment.

Outside, the light begins to fade. The shadows grow longer, reaching like hands toward the past. And in the quiet, the lab breathes with him—grieving gently, faithfully, as if it too remembers the sound of Viktor’s voice.

The silence stretches on.

Jayce sits on the edge of his bed that night, bent forward, elbows on his knees. The air in his dorm feels heavy, thick with the weight of everything he cannot say. The clock ticks past one in the morning.

There is no logic to the message that sits at edge of his fingertips. It isn’t timed. It isn’t calculated. It just spills out of him—honest and bare.

(01:43 AM): i miss you, viktor.

The hallway is already crowded when Jayce arrives—students pressed shoulder to shoulder, necks craned, the air buzzing with nerves and half-held breath. The results have been posted on the board outside of the Advanced Thermodynamics lecture hall, the final ranking typed in bold, daunting font.

Jayce exhales slowly through his nose and joins the crowd, letting the low murmur of chatter wash over him. He hears someone celebrating. A couple of steps from him, someone else is groaning into their hands. A girl near the front curses under her breath, her friend rubbing slow, sympathetic circles on her back.

Jayce searches the space automatically—scans the heads, the huddled shoulders, the worn-out backpacks slung low. Nothing. No sharp profile leaning against the wall with a scowl and a pencil in hand.

Viktor isn’t here.

Jayce’s stomach twists, just a little.

He moves closer.

The sheet is creased at the corners, already smudged from the brush of too many hands. His eyes find the top of the list before anything else.

#1 — Jayce Talis

It should feel good. It usually does. The brief surge of relief, the quiet, smug kind of satisfaction that says you earned this. But today it rings hollow. Pointless. Without Viktor to rival him, victory does not mean anything.

His gaze moves immediately down the list, searching—not for his name, but the other one. The only other one that ever really mattered.

Viktor—

He stops reading.

#9 — Viktor (Surname Unlisted)

Ninth.

Jayce’s heart splinters, violent and breathless, as if something has just dropped from a great height and shattered inside his chest.

Ninth.

No matter how many times he reads, the name stays where it shouldn’t—fixed, final, irreversible. Viktor, printed cleanly beside a number that doesn’t belong to him. It feels wrong in a way that language can’t soften.

Viktor, who sharpens equations like blades. Who treats precision like prayer. Who has never placed below second in anything, ever. Viktor, who builds miracles with one hand and balances two jobs with the other, who works until the bones in his spine protest and still shows up with unyielding brilliance—he’s ninth.

The number rings in Jayce’s head like a warning bell. A crack in something sacred.

Jayce takes a step back from the board, the hallway noise dulling to a low, indistinct buzz around him. Someone claps him on the shoulder, congratulates him on placing first. He nods, automatically, blindly. His thoughts are somewhere else—spiraling through late nights in the lab, the strain in Viktor’s voice, the way his shoulders never quite relaxed, the silence that followed him out the door when they last spoke.

Because this—this drop in rank—it’s not just numbers. It’s not just a bad day. For Viktor, this is the consequence of something breaking. Something giving out beneath the weight of everything he’s been trying to carry.

Jayce suddenly feels sick. He can’t stop picturing Viktor sitting at his desk, head pounding, hands shaking, unable to concentrate. He sees the missed meals, the sleepless nights, the too-tight grip on a pencil as he studies at three in the morning. He sees himself, too—snapping, yelling, hurling words he didn't mean like weapons. And now all that pressure, all that pain, has finally tipped.

Ninth.

Jayce swallows hard against the thickness rising in his throat.

He turns from the board, the paper still burned into his mind. And all he can think—over and over, like a prayer—is that this isn’t victory.

It’s a wound. One he helped open.

Chapter Text

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Sincere Apologies, A Bulleted Proposal, and Science

Dear Viktor,

Greetings! I hope this email finds you well.

I wanted to extend a formal apology for what happened between us in the physics lab. I realize now that texting you incessantly at strange hours was perhaps not the best medium for sincerity, so here I am, writing like a scholar in exile.

The truth is: I said things I didn’t mean. Harsh things. Unkind things. Things that used your strength against you, when it’s that very strength that inspires me most.

And I think (no, I know) you didn’t mean your words either. Or at least, not all of them. I think we were both just tired. And instead of leaning on each other, we collapsed inward. It was pain, disguised as anger. And I’m sorry for letting mine cut you.

That said, I don’t want this to be how our story ends. Not when we’ve built something good together. Something real.

So I propose the following:

Meet me at the physics lab tomorrow, 10:00 AM sharp. No pressure.

Should you come, you’ll find:

• One (1) freshly made chicken sandwich, carefully constructed with what I assume are your preferred sandwich specifications,
• One (1) perfectly brewed, piping-hot thermos of chamomile tea,
• And one (1) deeply remorseful co-inventor who promises to shut up and listen.

No code debates. No schematics. Just a proposal to reconcile.

Whatever you decide, you don’t owe me anything. But I hope we get to fix this—maybe even make it better.

Sincerely,

Jayce Talis

Head Idiot in Charge™

Co-creator of cool things | Breaker of fragile hearts | Former sandwich skeptic, now sandwich devotee

P.S. I fixed the issues with the oxygen saturation variable. You might want to see.

Viktor doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until his migraine jolts him awake.

It’s sharp, visceral—burrowing deep and gnawing without pause. This relentless headache, the one that began the morning he walked out of the physics lab and left Jayce alone, doesn’t just linger. It pesters, constant and insistent, like a gnat trapped beneath his skull, buzzing at the edges of thought. It pulses at his temples, presses down the nape of his neck, and coils around the base of his spine like wire drawn too tight to breathe.

Viktor’s breaths are shallow. He presses his fingers against his brow, willing the pressure away. But nothing helps. Not the tea. Not the sleep he’s not getting. Not even the silence, which used to be his refuge but has now turned traitorous—too still, too loud, too empty.

(01:52 AM): Mel, do you know where I can buy a gun?

(01:54 AM): sometimes i can’t help but wonder if you’re studying to be a scientist or piltover’s most wanted convict

(01:54 AM): I have a migraine that will never go away. I’d rather shoot myself in the fucking head than endure this.

(01:54 AM): you’ve had that headache since what?

(01:54 AM): a week or two?

(01:54 AM): coincidentally since that big fight you had with talis

(01:54 AM): how much are you willing to bet half that headache is from carrying the weight of your pride?

Viktor rolls his eyes—albeit slight gingerly, because even such a brief gesture sends a pulse of pain behind them. Of course Mel went there. Of course she immediately cut straight into his pride, without mercy nor hesitation.

He exhales through his nose, frowning as he types:

(01:55 AM): Not everything is related to Jayce, Mel.

(01:55 AM): oh, for sure

(01:55 AM): is he still texting you?

(01:55 AM): Not as much the past few days.

(01:55 AM): Although he just sent me an email earlier.

(01:55 AM): One of those overly formal, convoluted ones he loves to make to piss me off.

(01:56 AM): i can’t decide whether i should be impressed or embarrassed for the guy

(01:56 AM): Imagine how I feel.

(01:56 AM): what did he say?

(01:56 AM): The usual. It’s nothing, really.

(01:56 AM): Just an apology and a bulleted proposal to reconcile.

(01:57 AM): who in their right mind refers to “talking” as a “bulleted proposal to reconcile”?

(01:57 AM): god, what do they feed you over there in the engineering department

(01:57 AM): I don’t know, crippling depression and life-long academic trauma?

(01:58 AM): what else did he say

(01:58 AM): That he misses me.

(01:58 AM): Like I said, it’s nothing much.

The typing bubble lingers longer than usual. Viktor recognizes that pause. Mel is thinking, preparing for her next strike.

He leans back in his chair and braces for impact.

(02:00 AM): viktor, let me ask you a question

He sighs.

There it is.

The prelude to doom.

Viktor does not respond yet—just stares at the screen, dreading.

(02:00 AM): between you and talis

(02:00 AM): don’t you think there’s something more going on

(02:00 AM): Don’t start.

(02:00 AM): frankly, i don’t think talis is willing to go through the ends of the earth for someone he just sees as some random classmate

(02:01 AM): Well, we’re not just “some random classmates”.

(02:01 AM): ?

(02:01 AM): We’re lab partners, Mel. We’re literally forced to team up for the Innovator’s Competition.

(02:01 AM): i still don’t think talis will do all the things he does for someone he does not genuinely care about

(02:01 AM): i hate that you’re making me say this

(02:01 AM): surely, even you can tell there’s some feelings involved

Viktor’s eyes dwell on the last message. The words glow faintly on his phone screen with a brightness that aches.

He sits in silence, eyes fixated on the scattered pages across his desk. Diagrams marked with a familiar hand—Jayce’s handwriting, bold and impatient, looping through the margins like it had somewhere else to be but stayed regardless. Notes like: “check this line again, V—might work better if we reroute power here” and “careful here—fragile resistor”.

Little things. But always careful. Always considerate.

Viktor thinks of the sandwiches—homemade, wrapped meticulously in wax paper, each corner folded with a particular edge of attentiveness. The tea, too, brewed differently each time, each blend inching closer to perfection, like Jayce had been studying him through every sip. He thinks of the quiet routine stitched into their days, the unspoken ways Jayce reaches out.

He thinks of the way Jayce lingers after their shoulders touch. How his fingers sometimes graze Viktor’s wrist as he passes a tool—just long enough to notice, never long enough to name. Of the way he looks at him, not like a problem to solve, but something worth learning by heart.

(02:05 AM): how can you be a genius and painstakingly dense at the same time?

(02:07 AM): I don’t want to talk about this.

(02:07 AM): i can’t believe reality consists of piltover’s golden boy having feelings for the exact person who absolutely hates his guts

(02:07 AM): i’ll pray for your heart, viktor

He does not write back. There’s no point.

Because Viktor isn’t dense.

He sees it—every glance Jayce thinks goes unnoticed. The way his expression softens when Viktor forgets to hide his exhaustion, when his spine curls inward and his hands won’t stop trembling. He hears it, too, in the offhand jokes that always land a little too gently, the teasing laced with something steadier. Something that resembles affection.

He knows.

God, he knows.

But knowing doesn’t soften the ache. It sharpens it.

Because no matter how many probabilities Viktor conjures in his mind—no matter how many variables he adjusts, how many versions he imagines—none of them end well. Not for someone like him. Not with the undercity smog in his lungs and the ruin in his blood. Not when every morning begins with a stiffness in his spine and ends with another part of his body gradually failing him. Not when the world already demands so much of them both.

And certainly not when Jayce shines like he was born of constellations—too bright, too good, too much.

Viktor has never known how to live gently. But he’s learned, over time, how to brace for endings.

And this—this thing between them, however fragile, aching it is—it will inevitably end. It always does. And Viktor is tired of burying the pieces.

So he turns off his phone.

Draws a breath that scrapes like gravel.

And turns back to the silence, to the migraine pulsing at his temples—because at least pain is something he knows how to carry. Something that doesn’t ask anything of him.

Jayce has been here since nine in the morning.

The lab is too quiet, the air too still. Even the familiar hum of the fluorescent lights overhead feels like a countdown, each flicker of light reminding him of the silence he sits in—how long he’s been waiting, hoping, regretting.

He checks his phone. Nothing. No reply to the email he’d sent the night before. No “Okay,” no “Leave me alone,” not even one of Viktor’s trademark passive-aggressive corrections.

Just silence.

The kind that doesn’t sit beside him so much as press its full weight into his lungs. The kind that seeps into his bones. The kind that starts to feel like an answer all in its own.

Jayce has lived with it for almost two weeks now, and still it finds new ways to hollow him out.

Slowly, he leans back against Viktor’s chair, which he had wiped clean this morning out of some stupid desire to make it feel like things could still return to how they were.

He keeps glancing at the door. Hope flickers in short bursts, then collapses.

10:02 AM.

10:08 AM.

He exhales through his nose, jaw tightening. Viktor is never late. Of course he is not coming. Not after everything Jayce said. Everything he weaponized in that awful, exhausted moment—they’d burned that bridge and watched the ashes drift quietly to the floor.

Jayce drags a hand through his hair, defeated. He shifts to stand, to leave, to perhaps punch a wall on the way back to his dorm—

The door opens.

He freezes.

His heart stutters in his chest, caught between disbelief and something painfully raw.

And there, standing in the doorway like a breath pulled too sharply into aching lungs—

Viktor.

Not some dream or a trick of the light.

Real. Tangible. Unmistakable.

His coat still clings to him. His bag slung over one shoulder like it’s weighed down with more than just notebooks. He does not meet Jayce’s eyes. Does not move further in. He just stands there. Worn. Pale. Brilliant. As if time has folded in on itself only to spit him out again.

And then, he speaks. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

The words are not angry. Not sharp. They arrive quieter than Jayce expects, almost brittle—like a confession that had to be pried loose from his chest.

Jayce stands before his mind even realizes the motion. “I’m happy you’re here.”

It is all Jayce can say. It’s the only thing he knows to be true.

For a long moment, nothing moves. Viktor does not cross the room. Does not take off his bag. Does not sit. He just… stands, on what seems to be an invisible precipice, unsure whether to enter or vanish.

And then he starts talking.

“Do you know what it’s like,” Viktor begins, low, “to know that one misstep—one project that doesn’t land, one exam where you slip—is enough to lose everything?”

His fingers tighten around the strap of his bag, knuckles white.

“I came from a place that doesn’t forgive mistakes. I didn’t get here because someone saw potential and opened a door for me. I got here because I clawed my way through it. I had to be twice as good for half the opportunity.”

Jayce says nothing. His pulse drums in his ears.

“To you, this academic rivalry we have—it’s something you enjoy.” Viktor’s voice strains. “A challenge. A game. You joke about it. You placed bets on our rankings. You talk about it like it’s some kind of entertainment.”

Jayce’s brow furrows. “Viktor, that’s not—”

“But to me,” Viktor cuts in, “it’s survival.”

He finally lifts his eyes, and Jayce nearly staggers at the look in them. So much hurt. So much history. A quiet, storming desperation held together by willpower alone.

“I’m on scholarship,” Viktor continues. “If I fall behind an inch, I lose it. I lose everything. I lose my place in this school, in this city. I lose the right to be taken seriously.”

Jayce swallows—and it burns going down. The guilt builds like pressure behind his ribs, like something breaking open.

“So when you joked about how willing I was to self-destruct only to rank second to you, I want you to know what that meant to me.” Viktor’s voice carries the dangerous edge of a dagger. “I can’t afford to lose. Not because I’m afraid of failure, Jayce, but because failure means I disappear.”

Something in Jayce surrenders, sharp and sudden. He steps forward, carefully, as though the wrong move might scare Viktor back into silence.

“I’m sorry for everything I said. It was a moment of anger—but that is not an excuse. You didn’t deserve any of that.” Jayce draws a long breath, then says, “Viktor… I know I messed things up. I hurt you. And I sincerely apologize for that. The truth is, I only leaned into the rivalry because it was the only way I knew how to stay close to you.”

Viktor stills.

“Close to me? Why?” His voice lifts in disbelief. “You’re the golden boy. The one people always believe in. You don’t need me—you don’t have to convince anyone of your worth. You walk into a room and people already know your name. I had to build mine from dust.”

“That’s not fair,” Jayce says, shaking his head. “I never asked for any of that.”

“No,” Viktor says, voice low but unrelenting, “but you benefit from it all the same. Watching you pretend like we were ever standing on equal ground—like this ‘rivalry’ meant the same thing to you as it did to me—it’s exhausting.”

“I never meant for any of this to feel like a game,” Jayce whispers. “I never meant to make you feel small. God, Viktor, you were never small to me.”

Viktor looks at him, breath hitching faintly.

“You are the most brilliant person I have ever worked with. You challenge me in ways no one else ever has—you make me want to be a better person. You—” Jayce swallows, voice dipping, “you matter to me.”

Viktor’s expression flickers. Trembles at the edges. His mouth opens like he wants to argue, but the fight falters.

Jayce steps closer, now only a few feet between them. “This project, the one we’ve been building—it’s not just another prototype to me. I don’t care about winning the competition. I’ve been holding on to it because it means something. Because you mean something. Not just as a partner. Not just as a rival—not even just as a friend...”

His eyes search Viktor’s, as if trying to find the right version of the truth tucked somewhere in the silence between them. “I don’t know when it stopped being about the project. I just know that somewhere along the way, it started becoming about you,” Jayce’s breath trembles slightly, his gaze dropping to the floor. “Viktor, I—”

“Don’t,”

Because the truth is, Viktor knows what Jayce yearns to say. That particular tenderness in Jayce’s eyes, every time he looks at him—all of the emotions they were too stubborn to realize until it splintered them apart—he could not allow himself to hear it, not now. Not when the foundation beneath his feet already feels unstable, when every day is a delicate equation of exhaustion and compromises, when wanting more—wanting Jayce—might tip the balance he’s fought so hard to keep.

Because if Viktor lets the words in, then it becomes real. And if it’s real, it can be lost.

Jayce falters. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t know what to do with it,” Viktor confesses. “Because I can’t afford to carry that weight too.”

Jayce steps even closer. Quiet. Gentle. “Then let me carry some of the weight,”

“That’s the thing, Jayce. I don’t believe I’m allowed to want that.”

“You don’t need permission to want something. Not from me, not from anyone.” Jayce’s throat tightens. He reaches out—not to touch, not yet—but just to be near. Just to be present. “If you want it, that’s enough.”

Viktor doesn’t answer.

Not for a long moment.

Then—slowly, as if the choice itself hurts—he shrugs his bag from his shoulder. It lands at his feet with a dull thud.

He doesn’t sit. Not yet.

But he stays.

Still upright, still unsure, still trembling like he’s trying to decide whether to run or stay.

Jayce doesn’t move either.

They remain like that, two halves of something broken, not yet whole. Only suspended between breath and truth. Between pain and salve.

Until Viktor, barely above a whisper, speaks, “I’m sorry for the things I said to you.”

Jayce gives him the softest smile he can manage. “That’s okay,” he says. “I’m sorry, too. We’ll figure it out. Together.”

And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, the migraine that had shadowed Viktor like an unwelcome ghost softened—no longer gnawing, merely humming—quiet as surrender.

When the afternoon comes, they work in tandem. Not quite as they used to, but close.

The silence between them is softer now—like the hush after a thunderstorm, everything damp and tender. Viktor keeps his eyes on the interface display, fingers moving with methodical purpose as he recalibrates the sensor nodes. Beside him, Jayce is laying out the toolkit, sorting screws and soldering wire into neat rows with a concentration that borders on penance.

They don’t speak much. Not yet. But it’s enough that they’re here.

Together.

It’s awkward in the way healing often is—slow, unsure, almost too delicate to touch. Every movement seems laced with tentative awareness, like both are afraid to say the wrong thing and undo the fragile thread that binds the moment.

Still, Viktor finds himself watching Jayce when he thinks the boy is not looking. The furrow between his brows as he works. The way he chews the inside of his cheek when focused. The faint edge of worry that still clings to him now, like he hasn’t quite forgiven himself.

“I ranked ninth,” Viktor says abruptly, voice low but clear.

A beat. Then, Jayce finally says, “I saw.”

Viktor doesn’t look at him. His hands remain steady on the terminal. “It’s the lowest I’ve ever ranked since I arrived here.”

Jayce sets the pliers down slowly, attention fully on him now. “Viktor…”

“I thought it would ruin me,” Viktor continues, his tone deceptively calm, but there’s a tremor beneath it. A fault line. “I thought… if I didn’t excel—if I wasn’t the best—then what was the point? Who would I be if I wasn’t perfect on paper?”

He presses a key too hard. The screen flickers.

“I’ve spent so long tying myself to numbers,” he says, softer now. “To percentages. To letters. To my place on a list that no one else even sees. And when I ranked ninth… I felt like I had failed something fundamental. Like I had fallen out of orbit.”

Because getting high marks—being top of the class—that’s what was supposed to save him. To carve his name into the concrete of Piltover’s memory. To make sure that even someone from the Undercity had a place here, not by invitation but by force of merit. It was the only currency he trusted, the only thing that had ever paid off.

But even now, after the stumble, after the fall, he is still standing.

And in that brutal clarity, Viktor finally sees it: his grades may open the door, but they are not the only thing that makes him walk through it. They are not the whole of him.

Jayce doesn’t interrupt. He moves closer, quietly, until they’re standing shoulder to shoulder.

“I didn’t break.” Viktor says, “I woke up the next day. I ate. I went to class. And nothing shattered.” His voice trembles despite himself. “It was strange. It was… liberating.”

He finally looks at Jayce. His eyes are ringed with fatigue, but clear.

“I think it had to happen,” Viktor admits. “So I could learn how to stop bleeding for a standard I didn’t choose. So I could… evolve. Stop seeing myself only in terms of output. Of metrics. Of how well I am perceived by people who will never understand what it cost to get here.”

Jayce stares at him for a long moment, “Viktor.”

The way he says his name—soft, steady—almost undoes Viktor.

“Viktor… you’ve spent so long tying your worth to what you can build, prove, fix. But you are not merely the sum of your achievements,” Jayce’s voice is full of something Viktor isn’t used to. Not pity. Not guilt. Just pure, blinding, unabashed care. “You are the most brilliant person I have ever known. But brilliance isn’t the reason you matter. You matter because you’re you, Viktor.

Viktor’s throat works around the weight of that.

“I don’t know how to be anything else other than perfect,” he admits, quiet.

“You don’t have to strive for perfection, Viktor,” Jayce says gently. “There is beauty in imperfections... They make you who you are. An inseparable piece of everything I admire about you"

A silence falls between them again, but it’s not awkward this time.

It feels like understanding.

When Jayce reaches for the prototype, their elbows brush. Viktor doesn’t pull away.

Instead, he breathes easier.

The campus is flushed in amber light. Long shadows stretch over the stone paths, trees rustling faintly in the wind. Jayce walks with one hand in his pocket and the other on his phone, occasionally glancing up to avoid running into yet another lamppost.

There’s a sharp chill in the air that smells like wet earth and the promise of rain. He tugs his coat closer around him.

His phone buzzes—twice.

Vi (05:52 PM): yo golden boy

Vi (05:52 PM): hows ur divorce era going

Vi (05:52 PM): any custody battles over the lab yet

Caitlyn (05:53 PM): Vi, for all the love of things tactful…

Caitlyn (05:53 PM): Jayce, seriously though. How are things with Viktor?

Jayce smiles, thumb hovering over the keyboard. He walks past the courtyard, where a student is struggling to carry five rolls of copper wire. Jayce briefly considers helping—then remembers the last time he did that, the student squealed and asked for an autograph.

He keeps walking.

Jayce (05:54 PM): we talked

Jayce (05:54 PM): like, really talked

Vi (05:54 PM): ooooo juicy

Caitlyn (05:54 PM): Define “really”

Caitlyn (05:54 PM): Did you cry? Did he cry?

Caitlyn (05:54 PM): Did someone throw a wrench?

Jayce snorts.

Jayce (05:55 PM): no tears

Jayce (05:55 PM): well, almost

Jayce (05:55 PM): no wrenches

Jayce (05:55 PM): but i kinda maybe confessed my feelings? haha

He doesn’t see the curb until his toe slams into it. He mutters a curse under his breath, hopping once, phone still glowing in his hand.

The typing bubbles appear instantly.

Caitlyn (05:55 PM): WHAT

Vi (05:56 PM): YOU WHAT

Caitlyn (05:56 PM): You confessed???

Caitlyn (05:56 PM): As in, “I have feelings for you” confessed???

Caitlyn (05:56 PM): Jayce, what did you say???

Caitlyn (05:56 PM): What did he say???

Jayce (05:57 PM): i mean, it was heavily implied with what i said but he didn’t let me finish what i was saying

Jayce (05:57 PM): he didn’t really say no

Jayce (05:57 PM): he just… he seemed scared

Jayce (05:57 PM): scared of what could happen if it did go somewhere

Jayce slows his pace now. The crowds have thinned. Students rush toward dorms and dining halls, their voices distant and blurred. The lamps flicker on one by one, casting honeyed halos over the stone walkways.

He reads the messages he’s written again before continuing.

Vi (05:58 PM): oh no

Vi (05:58 PM): not the “im scared of my own feelings” route

Vi (05:58 PM): he’s gone full tragic genius

Caitlyn (05:58 PM): Jayce, how are you feeling about it?

Jayce (05:59 PM): we’re in this weird in-between

Jayce (05:59 PM): i think we both acknowledge that there’s something more

Jayce (05:59 PM): but viktor is scared, i don’t think he’s ready

Jayce (05:59 PM): but it’s okay, and i'm okay

Jayce (05:59 PM): he came back to the lab and we’re working again

Jayce (06:00 PM): that’s enough for me right now

He presses send, then shoves his phone into his coat pocket, exhaling a long breath that clouds in the cold air. The ache in his chest feels… quieter tonight. But soft. Tender in its aching.

The phone buzzes again.

Vi (06:01 PM): soooooo

Vi (06:01 PM): is the marriage still on or what

The days begin to stitch themselves into something whole again.

Jayce takes to the lab first, most mornings. Viktor still arrives precisely on time, coat clutched in one hand, the faintest ghost of sleep lingering in his eyes. The quiet between them no longer bristles, but gentle. Companionable. A quiet made of wires being stripped, of code being typed, of coffee and tea being shared from mismatched thermos and cup.

Without fail, there’s a homemade sandwich waiting on Viktor’s usual seat.

Wrapped neatly in wax paper. Simple. Familiar.

But now, they come with handwritten notes.

The first is scrawled in blue ink and stuck right on top:

"Not bribery. Just lunch. Don’t starve, you stubborn gremlin."

The second is tucked inside the fold of the wrapper:

"Your hair’s doing the dramatic swoop thing today. Unfair. Please warn others before they fall in love."

The third comes the following Monday, attached with a piece of tape to the thermos beside the sandwich:

"I think you should smile more."

The fourth is the smallest yet, barely a torn scrap of paper wedged under the sandwich like a secret:

"Your hands are really, really beautiful."

Viktor thinks they’re stupid.

He reads each one in the privacy of his seat, rolls his eyes, mutters something acidic under his breath—“sentimental idiot,” or “unbelievable”—but his hands are steady when he folds the note and tucks it between the pages of his private journal. No one knows he keeps them. No one asks.

Jayce never brings them up.

Not even once.

They fall into rhythm again. Wiring. Testing. Viktor hunched over the interface, eyes sharp and calculating. Jayce at the board, sketching diagrams with a blue marker chewed halfway to death. They talk. Sometimes too much, sometimes not at all. Jayce bickers over syntax. Viktor ridicules Jayce’s coding. It’s all familiar again.

The prototype sits on the table, breathing with soft pulses of light. It’s close now. Every test yields cleaner data. Every revision trims the noise. The pieces have begun to speak to each other.

They are a few days, maybe a week, from calling it finished.

Until—

It happens one afternoon, when the light outside the lab windows starts to lean toward the heather glow of dusk. Jayce is cross-referencing data output on the monitor. Viktor is adjusting the sensors on the prototype.

Then the screen glitches.

A new test run finishes—but the numbers don’t make sense.

“Wait,” Jayce mutters. “The input source isn’t stabilizing.”

Viktor’s head snaps up. “What?”

“The readings just jumped by a factor of ten.” Jayce scrolls rapidly through the data logs, fingers moving faster now, a hint of dread creeping in.

“That’s not possible,” Viktor says sharply, already moving towards the monitor. “Nothing changed in the configuration.”

“We already optimized those values yesterday—”

The door swings open.

“Ah!” Heimerdinger exclaims, stepping in with a clipboard nearly the size of his entire torso. He’s beaming, as always, oblivious of the growing storm inside the lab. “Good, good. You’re both here.”

Jayce straightens instinctively. Viktor only offers a vague nod, half of his attention still on the frozen screen.

“I just wanted to let you know,” the professor continues, “that beginning tomorrow, all labs will be closed for one full week. Annual inventory, deep cleaning, pest fumigation—the whole ordeal. You’ll need to clear out your personal items by tonight.”

Jayce blinks. “Wait, an entire week?”

Beside him, Viktor rises a fraction straighter, as if preparing to argue. “Is this posted somewhere?”

“Posted?” Heimerdinger repeats. “Yes! Certainly. On the bulletin board outside the east stairwell. Always a good idea to check the bulletin board, yes? Well then. Good luck, boys!”

He hums a cheerful tune as he totters back out the door, the silence behind him landing like an echo.

Jayce turns slowly to Viktor. “We can’t afford to lose a week.”

“No,” Viktor agrees, already calculating, already plotting a new course. “We can’t. The prototype’s nearly finished, but we still haven’t isolated the error in the input readings. If we wait, we risk forgetting what variables we tweaked.”

And then, in a tone far too casual for the weight of the question, Jayce says:

“Want to continue this in my dorm, then?”

The words hang in the air like static—light and dangerous. Not a dare. Not a joke.

An offering.

Chapter Text

The door clicks softly shut behind Viktor as he steps into Jayce’s dorm.

It’s smaller than he imagined. A desk sits near the window, papered with notes and scratched schematics. A chipped ceramic mug, long emptied of coffee, now cradles pens and screwdrivers in its hollow. The chair in front of the desk bears the imprint of constant use—the back cushion slightly frayed, the seat turned just slightly to the left, as though someone always sits cross-legged.

Viktor’s gaze drifts to the kitchen. Small, too—narrow and a little worn, but neat in a way that feels intimate rather than rigid. A loaf of bread sits on the counter, half-used, the plastic sleeve folded under the end like someone left in a hurry. Beside it, a glass jar of loose tea leaves and flowers—chamomile, judging by the soft golden tint—sits beside a tin of dried lemon peel. The electric kettle is old, its base dulled with years of use. There’s a box of honey sticks nearby, the kind sold in bulk, one of them used and folded beside the sink.

Viktor swallows, amber eyes lingering on the bread.

He sees it clearly—Jayce in the early morning, hair still damp from the shower, wearing a shirt that hangs too loosely off his frame. Yawning into the crook of his arm while buttering slices of bread with one eye still half-shut. Reaching for the tea with that same sleepy reverence he shows toward their inventions—gentle, but focused. Heating water to a precise temperature, muttering about steeping times, tasting it first before pouring it into a thermos meant for Viktor.

No spectacle. No grand gesture.

Just quiet effort, repeated day after day. The same hands that wield a soldering iron, steady and unrelenting, now folding wax paper around a sandwich with delicate fingers. Viktor thinks of the sandwiches, wrapped with near absurd neatness, and those awful, ridiculous notes stuck under the wrapper.

“You’re early,” Jayce says softly from the corner of the room, where he’s standing barefoot near the desk, holding a mug. “Didn’t expect you until ten.”

Viktor shrugs out of his coat, folding it over the back of a chair. “I woke up early.”

Jayce gestures toward the kettle. “I made some tea. You can have the rest.”

“Thank you,” Viktor murmurs.

He pours himself a cup in silence. The moment stretches—warm, not tense. The air smells faintly of coffee and chamomile tea. Viktor watches the steam curl from the surface of the tea, not quite ready to speak. Not yet.

Jayce, mercifully, lets the quiet breathe.

Viktor’s gaze lingers around the room again. “Your dorm is… peaceful.”

Jayce snorts into his mug. “Yeah, well. I spend more time in the lab than I do here. I don’t really need much.”

Viktor nods once, sipping the tea. It’s steeped perfectly. Jayce has become better at brewing tea than him, if Viktor dares to be honest.

After a moment, Jayce speaks again—quieter this time. “You want to sit?”

Viktor doesn’t move to the chair. He stays standing, fingers still wrapped around the warm porcelain. “You didn’t have to make all those sandwiches,” he says, tone soft.

Jayce shrugs, like it’s obvious. “I wanted to.”

“You put notes in them.”

“I wanted to do that, too.”

There’s a pause.

“‘Your hands are really, really beautiful’?” Viktor raises an eyebrow.

Jayce laughs, easy, a little sheepish. “They are. I just… wanted you to know. I wasn’t really trying to be clever about it.”

Viktor looks away. He doesn’t know how to carry that kind of gentleness. It always feels like a weight, not a gift. Something too precious to be handed to him. Something that makes his fingers burn every time he touches it.

He sets the mug down.

Jayce’s eyes follow him, gentle, careful, like he knows Viktor’s on the edge of something.

“Is everything okay?” Jayce asks him.

“I thought your dorm would be flashier,” Viktor says finally, glancing around. “You know. More gold, for the golden boy. A chandelier, too, perhaps. Maybe a Hextech fountain that plays classical music.”

“Yeah,” Jayce says, a strange cadence to his voice. “I like it quiet. Means I can hear myself think.”

He crosses to the bed and sits slowly, setting his mug on the nightstand. His spine remains straight; his posture is practiced, even in rest.

Then he speaks, not looking at Viktor at first.

“You know… I think people assume that because I smile a lot, and because I make things look easy, that it is easy. But it’s not. It’s work. It’s all work. And it’s exhausting. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. Isn’t that ironic?”

Viktor waits, figuring that was an empty question Jayce did not want answered.

“My family—” Jayce continues, voice more distant now. “People expect a lot from me. My father was a renowned toolmaker. Built half the city’s skylines around the idea of stability—symmetry, polish, function without flaw. My mother… she reminds me, every time we speak, that I’m meant to inherit the name. Keep the legacy tidy. Controlled. Public-facing. The expectations—they weigh on me, Viktor.”

His fingers curl together in his lap. “So I learned to smile. To joke. To keep everything on the surface looking perfect. Because if I didn’t… people would start being disappointed.”

Viktor lets the words settle—feels them mark the quiet in the room.

“Since I was a kid,” Jayce continues, “everyone told me I was born to succeed. And I tried. God, I tried. But it never felt like it was my success. It felt like I was just running a race someone else drew.”

He laughs under his breath—bitter, exhausted. “And then they called me the Golden Boy. Like it was a compliment.”

Jayce finally meets Viktor’s eyes. There’s no fire in them. Just a distant ache. “But it felt like a disgrace.”

Viktor’s brows furrow, quiet and still.

“The name—it stood for everything I wasn’t. Everything I pretended to be. Polished. Consistent. Always enough. Always perfect. But being consistent… people undermine just how much it takes from you. How much it costs. You can’t slip. You can’t rest. You can’t fail, even a little, because if you do, it confirms everything you fear they secretly believe about you: that you never deserved success in the first place.”

Jayce’s voice falters, raw at the edges now. “I kept thinking—if I just kept smiling, if I just kept doing everything right—eventually I’d feel like I’d earned it. But it never came. I just got tired. So damn tired of being what everyone needed me to be.”

Jayce breathes in slowly, like it hurts to keep speaking. “I’m trying to rewrite the course now, Viktor. Not the one they drew for me. One that’s mine. That actually feels like mine.”

“So if I look effortless, if I seem like I just glide through everything—it’s because I trained to glide.”

Viktor takes a moment. He sets his mug beside Jayce’s, careful and deliberate. With all the softness he can muster in his voice, he says, “I’m honored you trusted me enough to let me see this part of you.”

Jayce gives him the smallest of smiles. “Thank you, Viktor.”

There’s a stillness between them—not heavy, but full. The kind of quiet that listens.

“I think...” Viktor takes a breath, “there’s a kind of strength in deciding to stop performing. In letting someone see the unpolished version of you. You don’t owe the world a perfect mask, Jayce.”

“I don’t know who I am without the mask.”

Viktor continues, quieter now. “You’ve been performing so long, for so many people, you think the mask is what makes you worthy. But it isn’t. You’re not the smile. You’re not the reputation. You’re not the name they gave you or the future they planned for you.”

He leans forward slightly, gaze steady. “You’re the one who chose to build. To stay. To care. That’s not a mask. That’s you, Jayce.”

Jayce swallows hard.

Viktor pauses, his gaze shifting to the distant view from outside the window. From nowhere, he whispers, “There is no prize to perfection. Only an end to pursuit.”

“What do you mean?”

Viktor tilts his head slightly, voice low. “I mean that perfection doesn’t reward you. It doesn’t hold you when you break. It doesn’t tell you when enough is enough. You chase it, and chase it, until it takes everything from you—and then it just leaves you with the silence.”

Jayce blinks hard, shoulders shaking with a breath he doesn’t release.

Viktor inches closer, his voice even more tender now, steady in the way soft things sometimes are. “Jayce, you don’t have to earn being cared for.”

Jayce meets his eyes, wide and aching.

And Viktor finally sees it—

He used to think Jayce glowed because even light itself could not help but fall in love with him. That the sun, hopelessly smitten, clung to him by instinct—casting him in brilliance he hadn’t earned. That radiance was something borrowed, not born.

But he was wrong.

Jayce glows from within. Not with arrogance, not with ease, but with a conviction so fierce it trembles at the edges. With a stubborn, reckless hope that refuses to dim. With a warmth that seeps quietly into a room and makes a home there, asking for nothing in return. He gives until there’s nothing left to give—calls it nothing, shrugs it off like kindness isn’t a cost. He moves through the world like a flame wrapped in flesh, burning through his days with an open hand, always offering the fire to someone else.

Jayce burns unabashedly and doesn’t notice the warmth he leaves behind.

And Viktor, basking beside him in the soft glow of the morning sun, thinks that Jayce is the brightest thing he has ever laid his eyes on.

The shuffle of footsteps pause mid-stride as soon as Viktor steps into the lecture hall.

It's subtle at first—the shift of posture, the drag of attention—but then come the sound of delayed whispers, half-masked behind a textbook or the flick of a phone screen. Someone whistles a faint sound. Another leans in too obviously to nudge a friend, eyes never leaving him.

Viktor feels it before he hears it. The ripple moving through the room like a dropped stone in water—concentric, full of tension.

A breath caught. A stifled laugh.

His name, hissed like static behind cupped hands.

The rest of the room watching him.

Viktor’s body responds before his mind does. Spine taut. Muscles braced. The burn of too many eyes crawling across his skin like insects.

He keeps walking.

Doesn’t flinch when someone mutters his name, doesn’t look when a pair of girls glance at him and immediately pretend they weren’t staring. But something acidic blooms in his chest.

Not again.

It drags him back to his first semester in Piltover: stepping off the transport in a coat too thin for the cold, accent too sharp for the ears of the city, eyes too wary for its polished marble. They had whispered then, too. Back when he was the kid from the Undercity. Back when pity and suspicion came in equal measure.

He moves to his usual seat, ignoring the quiet swell of chatter that follows.

And then the door opens.

The room stills in an instant—breath caught mid-laugh, gestures paused midair. The silence isn’t complete, but it pulls tight like a held thread.

Jayce walks in.

There’s a shift in the air. Quick, electric. Eyes flick to Jayce, and for once, away from him. Jayce scans the room swiftly, expression sharpening when his gaze lands on Viktor.

His steps are purposeful.

Jayce stops beside Viktor’s desk and leans down slightly, voice low but urgent. “Can we talk?”

Viktor blinks. “What—now?”

“Yeah. Now. Please.” Jayce’s tone isn’t teasing. It’s concerned. That alone unsettles Viktor.

The whispering resumes behind them, louder now. Emboldened. A small group of girls tilt their heads in obvious curiosity. Someone leans in, murmurs something sharp, and a ripple of laughter follows. High-pitched. Grating. The kind that digs beneath the skin like grit under fingernails.

Viktor’s jaw tightens. He stands and follows Jayce.

No words exchanged, just motion. The soft scrape of his shoes against the floor. Jayce already ahead, cutting a line through the tension like hot knife through butter.

The door clicks shut behind them.

But the weight doesn't lift. The pressure lingers, as if the hallway itself is still watching—walls full of eyes, silence packed with judgment. Viktor breathes in, but the air feels no lighter here.

Jayce stops near the end of the corridor, where the light spills through tall windows in slanted gold. The sun sketches across his cheekbone, catching in the strands of his hair, gilding him in a way that feels almost too perfect.

Viktor thinks it’s cruel.

“So,” Jayce begins, “um. Before you hear it from someone else… there’s a rumor going around.”

Viktor’s arms cross automatically. “What kind of rumor?”

Jayce scratches the back of his neck. “That we’re… dating.”

There’s a beat of silence.

Then Viktor exhales sharply through his nose. “Of course there is.”

Jayce winces. “Apparently someone saw you leaving my dorm last night. It was late. And, well… people talk.”

Viktor turns away, lips pressed thin. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Obviously,” Jayce says. “But you know how the campus is. One hint of something remotely interesting and suddenly half the student body’s playing detective.”

Viktor doesn’t answer. He stares out the hallway window, down at the courtyard below where students meander between classes. “That’s generous of them. I’m sure it was entirely innocent and respectful speculation.”

Jayce huffs. “Well, to be fair, it’s not the most insane conclusion. You did leave my room at eleven pm.”

“And here I thought academic collaboration was a noble pursuit,” Viktor mutters, voice rich with sarcasm. “Next time I’ll make sure to leave through the window.”

Jayce raises a brow. “You’re not denying it very hard.”

Viktor gives him a flat look. “What is there to deny, Jayce? That we exist in the same room sometimes? That I leave your dorm in the middle of the night?”

“You’re not that mad, are you?”

“I’m not mad,” Viktor says, adjusting his coat. “I’m just perpetually exhausted and now apparently embroiled in some campus romance subplot.”

Jayce softens a little. “Seriously, though, I get it. If it’s too much, I’ll go talk to them. Or I’ll start some counter-rumor. Like I’m actually in love with Professor Ambessa from Fluid Mechanics.”

“Please don’t,” Viktor says. “That woman will punch you in the face.”

Jayce tilts his head. “But are you okay?”

Viktor hesitates. Just for a second.

Then, with a sigh, “I’m… fine. Just wasn’t expecting to walk into a room and feel like a character in some ridiculous drama. You know how it is. One wrong look, one badly timed exit from a dorm room, and suddenly I’m starring in the campus tabloid.”

“You are very dramatic for someone who pretends to hate drama.”

“I contain multitudes,” Viktor deadpans.

Jayce grins. “Of course, you do.”

They fall quiet for a moment. The hallway is calm now, light stretching long across the floor.

From nowhere, Jayce nudges him with a shoulder. “So… want me to make it official?”

“What, the relationship we’re not in?”

“Yeah,” Jayce says, smile crooked. “Might as well. Let’s give them something to talk about.”

Viktor rolls his eyes. “You’re insufferable.”

“But you’re smiling,” Jayce points out.

“Barely.”

“I’ll take it.”

Viktor exhales. “You’re impossible.”

“And yet, here we are.”

They start to walk back towards the classroom, the ridiculousness of it all softening the sting. The whispers will still be there, but they’re not quite as loud now. Not with Jayce beside him. Not when the air is light again.

As they reach the door, Jayce says quietly, “Just in case, Viktor—I don’t care what they think. I care what you think.”

Viktor glances at him, then opens the door.

“Well,” he says with dry calm. “How about you stop giving me homemade sandwiches and tea? It might give them the wrong idea.”

Jayce grins. “Noted. I’ll start bringing flowers instead.”

Viktor groans audibly as the class turns to look. Again.

But this time, the smile does reach his eyes.

The cafeteria is unusually loud for a Wednesday—laughter echoing off tiled walls, trays clattering, the metallic clash of utensils ringing out in bursts.

Jayce sits across from Viktor at a corner table, listlessly spearing a sad, overcooked tangle of pasta that tastes more like disappointment than nutrition. Before him, Viktor barely touches his food. A half-eaten salad sits forgotten at the edge of his tray, the greens already wilting beneath the harsh glow of the afternoon sun. His brow is furrowed, lips pressed thin as he pores over a stack of notes spread out between them. Equations scrawl across the pages like restless thoughts, ink smudged in places where his fingers have lingered too long.

Jayce watches him for a moment, fork paused mid-air. Then his phone vibrates on the table, cutting through with a soft, insistent hum.

He doesn’t check it at first.

Then it buzzes again. And again.

He unlocks his phone.

Vi (12:14 PM): @Jayce

Vi (12:14 PM): BRO

Vi (12:14 PM): BRO DID U HEAR THE RUMORS

Caitlyn (12:14 PM): Vi, for god’s sake, don’t start it like that…

Vi (12:14 PM): word on the street is piltover’s golden boy and viktor are dating

Vi (12:15 PM): and are also planning to elope next month

Jayce snorts into his pasta. A rogue noodle flies off his fork.

Viktor raises a brow. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” Jayce says quickly, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Just—my friends. Vi and Caitlyn. Go eat.”

Viktor narrows his eyes suspiciously but does not ask further. He takes a forkful of the salad.

Jayce’s phone buzzes again.

Vi (12:16 PM): the rumor mill is UNHINGED lately

Vi (12:16 PM): someone saw u holding open the door for viktor and suddenly u’re his doting househusband

Caitlyn (12:16 PM): The campus will absolutely combust when they learn that the same househusband also makes tea and writes love notes on sandwich wrappers

Vi (12:16 PM): LMAO CAN U IMAGINE

Vi (12:16 PM): @Jayce i’m actually rooting for yalls happy ending but also 110% going to clown u at ur wedding

Caitlyn (12:16 PM): I call officiant

Vi (12:16 PM): dibs on the speech: “I knew he was down bad when he started slicing the crusts off the bread”

Caitlyn (12:17 PM): “May your love be as strong and inspiring as your combined GPA”

Jayce hides a grin behind his cup.

Viktor eyes him again.

Jayce (12:17 PM): you’re both insane

Jayce (12:17 PM): but also, yeah

Jayce (12:17 PM): apparently everyone’s talking

Vi (12:17 PM): GOLDEN BOY AND MR DOOM AND GLOOM

Vi (12:17 PM): THE A-LIST CELEBS OF PILTOVER ACADEMY

Vi (12:17 PM): @Caitlyn cupcake u’re the PR rep

Caitlyn (12:18 PM): Absolutely not

Caitlyn (12:18 PM): I’ll be in the background sipping wine and pretending I’m not associated with this nonsense

Jayce glances up again. Viktor is watching him, chewing slowly, unimpressed.

“Do I even want to know?” Viktor asks, voice dry as ever.

Jayce shrugs. “Well, according to Vi, we’re eloping next month.”

Viktor blinks. “Are we?”

“Not unless you want to.”

Viktor looks at him for a long, quiet moment. Then rolls his eyes and returns to his salad. “You’d forget the rings.”

“You have soy sauce on your sleeve,”

Jayce blinks down at his arm. “Oh, sorry.”

Viktor watches as he fumbles for a crumpled napkin, leaning precariously over the takeout containers scattered across the floor. Jayce’s dorm still smells like the remnants of their dinner—soy sauce, ginger, something faintly sweet from the half-melted tub of vanilla ice cream now sweating on the cluttered desk. The scent hangs in the air, warm and chaotic, like the evening itself.

It’s nearing midnight. The window is cracked open just enough to let in the chill of the Piltover night, the breeze threading its fingers through the room, cooling their flushed skin and curling around the warmth of their laughter.

Their shoes are off. Their legs stretch across the carpet, tangled and careless, like they’d stopped trying to keep distance somewhere between the third datapoint and the last dumpling. Empty cartons, scribbled-on napkins, and half-filled notebooks litter the floor between them—evidence of a night spent somewhere between brilliance and indulgence.

Viktor exhales softly, nudging the eyeglasses he sometimes wear back into place.

They could’ve gone to the lab tonight. The building is finally open again—clean and sterile, perfectly optimized for their use. But somehow, Jayce’s cluttered little dorm with its tiny kitchen, flickering desk lamp, and walls covered in sticky notes feels more real. More alive. Less like a workspace, and more like a world they built for themselves without even meaning to.

“The problem could be a delay in how the readings are logged,” Viktor murmurs, once again pushing his glasses up his nose.

Jayce hums in thought beside him, chin propped on one fist as he types with the other. “You said the error doesn’t occur consistently.”

“Right. Which is why it’s not hardware. If it were faulty wiring or a corrupted module, the error would be more predictable.”

Jayce leans closer to the laptop, his brows furrowing in that way Viktor knows too well—equal parts frustration and spark. “Then we’re missing something.”

“You’re always missing something,” Viktor mutters, the jab more out of habit than meanness.

Jayce grins. “Yeah? Good thing you always find it.”

“I’m starting to believe I need hazard pay for this partnership.”

Jayce barks a short laugh, then falls quiet again. The soft tapping of keys fills the room. Their rhythm, long familiar by now, settles between them like a heartbeat.

Time bends. Minutes blur.

And then—

Jayce stills. His eyes catch on something in the wall of code.

He straightens. His expression shifts, gradually, like the sky tipping before a storm. “Wait.”

Viktor glances up. “What?”

Jayce doesn’t answer. He’s already typing again—faster now, fingers flying, eyes bright with the kind of reckless hope that usually precedes either a breakthrough or an explosion.

“Jayce,” Viktor warns, “what are you—”

“I think—” Jayce’s voice is low, urgent. “I think the error is in the process the device compares the readings against measured standards.”

“So the calibration function?”

“Look,” Jayce spins the laptop towards him.

“Every time the device registers an erroneous data, it doesn’t just log the anomaly—it reroutes it through an auxiliary correction protocol. But that delay we kept seeing? It’s not lag. It’s error compensation.”

Viktor’s eyes scan the lines. His breath catches. He sees it now, the buried function. The cascade of unnecessary processing steps. All of it hidden beneath what looked like clean output.

“Jayce,” he breathes. “It’s preprocessing the values. Modifying the numbers before we even see the output.”

“Which is why the data always seemed delayed,” Jayce says. His voice is quiet, reverent. “It wasn’t late. It was the system masking corrupted input as sanitized data.”

The cursor blinks at them, the screen pale and glowing. Viktor reaches forward with trembling hands and runs the correction.

The result appears almost instantly.

Clean. Flawless. Stable.

A perfect readout.

A perfect breakthrough.

A beat of silence passes. Then another.

And then—Jayce laughs. It spills from his throat like a tide breaking against the shore, loud and startled and utterly victorious. The sound fills the room, shakes the walls of their exhaustion, and lingers in the air like the scent of rain after a long drought.

The device is finally complete.

“We did it, Viktor!” Jayce yells, eyes wide with disbelief and wonder.

Viktor exhales, stunned. “You fixed it.”

Jayce looks at him then, and it’s like the entire world collapses into the tiny space between them. The hum of the laptop. The stillness of the night. The leftover food cooling around them. The echo of everything they’ve poured into this invention—sleepless nights, silent arguments, too many cups of tea and coffee.

Unbidden, Jayce inches closer. There's a particular tremor behind his eyes—not quite joy, not quite fear, but something tender and raw, flickering with the audacity of hope. Something daring.

And then he reaches for Viktor.

His fingertips ghost along Viktor’s jaw, a silent caress that traces shivers against his spine. They trail along the sharp line of bone with aching reverence before settling—his palm coming to cradle Viktor’s face with a gentleness so maddening it borders on unbearable. His thumb brushes the corner of Viktor’s mouth, slow, almost cautious, as if Jayce is still learning the shape of something sacred.

Warmth blooms instantly beneath Viktor’s skin. Sudden, searing, like sunlight catching on frost. Jayce’s palm is large, steady, calloused at the base of his fingers but soft where it matters.

Viktor stills. Every part of him. His thoughts scatter as if leaves on wind, helpless and weightless.

He wants to scream.

He wants to run.

He wants to punch Jayce where it will bruise in the morning.

But he realizes, with dread coiling in his bones—

He wants this.

Wants this fire, this dangerous proximity, this recklessness in Jayce’s eyes like he's standing at the edge of a cliff and still daring to jump.

Wants to know, if only just this once, what it feels like to be held without being braced for the fall.

Jayce leans in. Not rushed. Not hungry.

Just close.

The space between them thins to the width of a shared breath. Viktor can taste it—sweet, mint-laced, still carrying the faint memory of ice cream and laughter.

His heart stutters. Catches.

Jayce’s thumb brushes against his cheekbone, gentle to the point of benediction.

And then Viktor feels it—

Jayce’s lips, almost touching his. Hovering. Warm and trembling with the weight of the three years they’ve circled each other in orbit.

So close he could breathe him in. So close it almost hurts.

So close Viktor almost yearns to reach—

Beep.

The laptop chimes, clear and mechanical. “All data saved. Test complete.”

The moment shatters like spun glass between clenched teeth.

Jayce exhales slowly, eyes fluttering closed as if waking from a dream he didn’t want to end. His hand doesn’t fall. Doesn’t falter. Still warm against Viktor’s cheek. Still trembling with everything he didn’t say.

Then—gently, like breaking something sacred—he shifts.

He leans forward. Closer still.

But his lips don’t claim Viktor’s mouth.

Instead, they press to his forehead.

A kiss of reverence. Of restraint.

It lands like something holy. Like apology.

Like promise.

It’s devastating.

Viktor doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. That single touch brands him more deeply than any bruise. The kiss is brief—soft as steam, fleeting as sleep—but it leaves behind a ghost of heat that lingers, pressed into skin and memory.

When Jayce pulls away, it’s with reluctance. As though he’s leaving behind a piece of himself in the space they once touched.

Jayce turns to the laptop. The blue glow from the monitor flickers across his face, painting his features in soft, uneven strokes. And for one breathless second, Viktor sees Jayce—not as Piltover’s golden boy, not as a rival or a partner or even a friend—but as a boy aching to reach something just beyond his grasp. Something fragile. Terrifying.

Him.

Neither of them mentions what almost happened.

But the air between them is no longer the same. It’s shifted—charged, precarious, trembling on the cusp of what could be. Tilted into something reckless and impossible and burning.

The breakthrough glows on the screen, perfect.

And Viktor knows—with a sinking, terrifying certainty—that some things, once discovered, cannot be undone.

Chapter Text

On the center table rests the completed device. No longer a rough prototype. No longer a twitching nest of exposed wires or a dream half-stitched together in exhaustion.

A finished invention.

Its sleek frame thrums with a soft, rhythmic glow—like heartbeat behind glass. The brushed metal surface catches the sterile fluorescence of the lights, throwing back glints of dull gold and tempered steel. Wires disappear into seamless grooves. The interface of the wristband pulses steadily, scrolling lines of data like breath exhaled in even measure. Calibrated. Complete.

Viktor stands beside it, a pencil in hand, fine-tuning the final parameters with a meticulous calm. His right leg aches with the deep, bone-heavy throb of overuse, but he remains standing. He wants to see it through, every line of code, every flicker on the display screen, as if he’s trying to immortalize it in memory.

This is their triumph. Quiet. Hard-won.

Across from him, Jayce leans against the edge of the workbench with half an apple in one hand, the other braced casually behind him. He doesn’t eat so much as he watches Viktor—eyes soft, a small smile playing on his lips. There’s something in his gaze that reminds Viktor of sunlight catching on still water: warm, fleeting, unshakable. Something like pride—no, something gentler than that. Admiration, maybe. Love wearing its work clothes.

“So,” Jayce says at last, breaking the silence with a lilt in his voice, “how does it feel?”

Viktor doesn’t look away from the screen, but something in his posture eases. “How does what feel?”

“You know,” Jayce gestures vaguely at the device. “The culmination of sleepless nights, caffeine poisoning, and an emotional breakdown or two.”

“You had two breakdowns. I had one.”

Jayce flashes a toothy grin. “I’m generous like that.”

The teasing lands like a soft knock on a familiar door—routine, but wrapped in affection.

Jayce pushes off the bench and crosses the small space between them. His shoulder brushes Viktor’s, the contact brief but grounding, before he slips a hand against the small of his back. His voice dips low, full of something earnest.

“In all seriousness, Viktor,” Jayce says, his gaze warm as he traces the outline of the device. “We built this. You and me.”

Viktor lets his gaze drift over the interface—so many variables, equations, pulses of code he can still recite from memory. It’s all familiar. All theirs.

“It’s strange,” Viktor murmurs. “To look at something and see yourself in it. All the worst parts, and all the best. And know that every part of it came from our hands, our minds.”

Jayce nods, a rare moment of stillness taking over him. “Terrifying, too. Makes it feel real.”

“It is real.”

Jayce smiles softly. “It really is.”

They work in silence for a few minutes—tightening screws, running the last set of mock trials, checking stability logs. Every motion feels suspended, golden. Like this isn’t just the end of a project, but the end of something long burning and unnamed inside them.

Then, as if on cue, Jayce squints at the screen and says, far too casually, “So, what are we naming it?”

Viktor looks up, wary. “Naming it?”

Jayce grins. “Every great invention needs a name. You can’t just call it the device, Viktor. That’s like naming your cat, Cat.”

“Well, I don’t have a cat.”

“You’d name it Cat if you had one.”

Viktor sighs. “Jayce,”

“Fine, fine.” Jayce raises his hands in surrender. “Just hear me out. What about... jayvik? It's the combination of our names. Rolls right off the tongue, don't you think?”

There’s a long pause.

Viktor turns to him slowly, the look on his face so flat, so unimpressed, it almost makes Jayce choke on a laugh.

“Absolutely not.”

Jayce snorts, half-choked with laughter. “Worth a shot,”

Viktor shakes his head and turns back to the screen, but there’s the faintest glimpse of a smile tugging at the edge of his mouth. Only a flicker, but undeniable.

A beat of silence stretches thin. When Jayce speaks again, his voice carries a quiet edge. “You know… I used to have this recurring dream when I was a kid.”

Viktor lifts an eyebrow but does not interrupt.

“It always started the same. Just me and my mother, stranded in the middle of an endless snowstorm. No sky. No horizon. Like the world was nothing but white, and we were crawling through it. She was dying. I knew it. Even in my dream I could feel how close she was to slipping from me.”

Jayce’s voice lowers further, the words curling gently into the space between them.

“And then—there was this light. Soft and flickering at first, like something alive. Blue. Bright like lightning, but gentler, as if it was moving underwater.”

His voice is almost a whisper now. “A man appeared. A mage, I think. He didn’t say anything. Just touched my shoulder, and suddenly we weren’t in the snow anymore.”

Viktor listens, still.

“We were in a field. There were wildflowers everywhere. Gold and green and purple and blue. The wind was warm, and it smelled like honey and rain. My mother was okay. She wasn’t dying anymore. She was laughing. Like the mage made the world gentle again.”

Jayce exhales. “And I remember thinking, even when I woke up… whatever that was, I wanted to build it. That feeling of hope. That kind of magic.”

“Like arcane,” Viktor says softly.

Jayce nods. “Yeah. Like arcane.”

Their eyes drift back to the device. The soft blue light of the interface pulses once—not mechanical, but alive, as if it hears them. As if it’s responding to the name.

“We’re not like the mage in my dream,” Jayce says, “but maybe… maybe we made something close. Something that could help. Especially the sick people in the Undercity. This device will help heal them—people like you, Viktor. It will give your pain a voice, as well as the other children who perished, who don't get that kind of magic.”

Viktor is silent. His throat tightens, chest pulled taut with things too old, too deep, too hard to name.

Jayce looks at him. “So what do you think?”

Viktor studies the device. Then looks at Jayce. Then back again.

He nods once, certain. “Arcane.”

They stand before Heimerdinger and the Dean two hours later.

The office is dim, the harsh fluorescents above replaced by a single overhead light that casts everything in soft shadows. It lends the space a sense of hush—an intentional quiet that amplifies every sound: the click of a boot heel, the shift of fabric, the faint whirr of the terminal warming up. Even heartbeat seems louder in this silence.

“Professor Heimerdinger, Dean,” Viktor begins, offering a polite nod. “Jayce and I present to you—Arcane.”

The device stirs.

First, a flicker. A muted, pulsing glow, like the stillness before a curtain lifts. Blue light slithers across the ridged alloy surface like silk catching moonlight, running through the filaments embedded within the shell. It illuminates the room in cool brilliance.

The portable diagnostic interface activates its scan: a small, wearable band—no larger than a wristwatch—connected to the central module. A simulated user’s vitals blink to life on the screen: pulse, blood pressure, cellular activity, neural rhythms. Then, with seamless clarity, it begins cross-referencing. Checking abnormalities. Running predictive analysis based on real-time biometrics.

An alert flashes briefly: minor inflammation in simulated lung tissue. The software flags it, logs it, recommends action. Sends a ping to a theoretical connected database—“seek medical attention within 48 hours”.

The device does not cure. It does not pretend to. It prevents. It watches. It listens. And it warns before the damage becomes irreversible.

It does exactly what they built it to do.

And it works.

Not flawlessly. There’s still a fractional delay on one of the signals. One of the interface lines flickers slightly under certain temperatures. There’s still little refinements to be made, a few calibrations to revisit.

But it's alive. It's real.

The Dean exhales first, then claps—three short, clean bursts that slice through the silence like punctuation marks. Heimerdinger, standing just behind him, lets out a low, satisfied hum. His mustache twitches, his eyes shining with the kind of pride that’s rarely vocalized.

“Excellent work,” the Dean says, already turning to speak with Heimerdinger about practical applications, about potential funding, about where it could go next.

But Jayce and Viktor don’t hear any of it.

They’re no longer listening.

Their focus is elsewhere—

Each other.

There’s no roaring celebration. No wide smiles. No triumphant backslaps or celebratory outbursts. Just a long, quiet gaze shared between the two of them, and across the machine that started it all.

Jayce’s hand drifts from the edge of the console, hesitant at first, then finds Viktor’s—fingers slipping between his as if such intimate gesture is a typical thing they shared.

Viktor startles at the touch. A sharp inhale. But he doesn't pull away.

There’s a stillness there. A soft recognition that doesn't need to be spoken aloud. The kind that says: We did this. You and me. Together.

They've bled for this project. Starved, yelled, fractured—nearly lost each other over it.

And still, they chose to stay.

Still, they chose this.

And in this moment—lit by the blue glow of their invention, hands intertwined in the vague shape of a heart—they both understand:

This isn’t just the end of their journey, nor their invention.

This is the beginning of something that matters.

Of everything that matters.

Jayce lies sideways across his bed, legs tangled in the sheets, one sock missing. The only light in the room comes from the cold glow of his phone screen, casting sharp angles across his face in the darkness.

He should be asleep.

The Innovator’s Competition is in less than twelve hours. Their device is done. Their presentation slides are polished. For the first time in months, there is nothing left to tweak, rewire, or rewrite.

And yet he lies awake, waiting for one person to text him back.

His phone buzzes. It’s a message from Viktor.

(01:11 AM): Don’t forget to sleep. You’ll need at least three functioning brain cells tomorrow, yes?

Jayce grins, thumbs already moving.

(01:11 AM): that’s three more than you, then

(01:11 AM): i’ll be fine

(01:11 AM): Eh, debatable. I at least have logic. You just have charm and eyebrows.

(01:11 AM): you say that like charm and eyebrows aren’t half our presentation

(01:11 AM): Terrifying, but true.

Jayce shifts onto his back, the phone balanced against his chest. He imagines Viktor typing with one hand, a mug of tea in the other, brows furrowed and expression unreadable. Probably still at his desk, half-lit by a desk lamp. Jayce’s thoughts wander to the image of the slight downward curve that must be on Viktor’s mouth.

(01:12 AM): are you still revising?

(01:12 AM): Unfortunately.

(01:12 AM): I saw your edits on our notes. They were just color-coded labels and a little doodle of you in the corner that said “Trust the process”.

(01:12 AM): first of all, that was motivational

(01:12 AM): second of all, you’re welcome

(01:12 AM): You drew yourself flexing your biceps, too.

(01:12 AM): it’s called cultivating morale, v

(01:13 AM): Don’t mess with your hair too much tomorrow. Don’t want to scare potential investors away with that thing on your head.

(01:13 AM): you sure pay a lot of attention to my hair ;)

(01:13 AM): Hard not to when it defies good taste.

(01:13 AM): must be love

There’s a pause.

(01:13 AM): Don’t flatter yourself. It just comes across as desperation.

(01:14 AM): do i look desperate to you?

Jayce flips the camera to selfie mode. The screen reflects a tired version of himself—he wears an old hoodie, his hair a sleep-mussed mess. The collar of his sweater is a little loose, drooping just enough to expose the line of his neck, the curve of his throat. He tilts his head slightly. No filters, no unnecessary posing. Just tired eyes, tousled hair, and a crooked half-smile that walks the line between self-deprecating and shameless.

He snaps the photo and sends it.

(01:15 AM): rate me out of 10. be honest.

(01:15 AM): actually, don’t be too honest

The typing bubble appears. Pauses. Flickers again. Then disappears entirely. Jayce waits, phone balanced over his sternum, pulse just a little faster than it should be.

Then, finally—

(01:17 AM): 7.3. I’m deducting points because that hair is horrendous.

(01:17 AM): harsh, i was hoping for a pity 9

(01:17 AM): Fine, 8.1. Please crop out your neck next time.

Jayce reads it twice, grin spreading stupidly fast across his face.

(01:17 AM): oh? distracted by my neck, huh?

(01:17 AM): You’re so delusional.

He laughs under his breath, eyes falling half-closed as his fingers hover above the screen.

(01:18 AM): hey... thanks for staying so late today

(01:18 AM): i know we didn’t have to recalibrate everything twice, but you didn’t leave, and… that meant a lot

(01:18 AM): sorry you had to go home super late again

(01:18 AM): should we expect another steamy tabloid tomorrow?

The typing bubble lingers for a few seconds. Eventually, another line appears:

(01:19 AM): Go to sleep, golden boy. Save your neck for the judges tomorrow.

Jayce chuckles, sleepy now.

(01:19 AM): you’ll be thinking about my neck all night, won’t you?

(01:19 AM): I hate you.

(01:19 AM): sweet dreams, v

There’s a pause. Then, soft and simple:

(01:19 AM): You too, Jayce.

Jayce sets the phone down, face-first against his chest. His smile lingers, soft, unrepentant, even as sleep gently pulls him under.

Written in bold, meticulous calligraphy, Viktor reads the banner overhead: The Innovator's Competition.

Once, even the name alone could carve a shiver of yearning down Viktor’s spine—cutting, precise, full of hunger for something brighter. It had shimmered like a distant star for years. A symbol of escape, of recognition, of change. It was hope, forged into form. A promise.

But today, that sharpness carries something else. Not fear. Not entirely.

Today, it feels like possibility.

Like the edge of something about to begin.

The venue itself is carved into the center of Piltover’s Hall of Innovation—a massive atrium shaped like a blooming flower, glass and steel folding together to create a crown of light. Overhead, a high dome of stained glass and latticed iron catches the sunlight. Mirrors fixed to its panels turn gently with the movement of the sun, scattering shifting patterns of color across the floor like drifting mosaics.

Booths and kiosks line every curve of the chamber. Each one boasts a different invention: kinetic gloves that respond to neural impulses, a levitating transportation model made from zero-gravity tech, even a programmable soundwave barrier that reacts to voice commands. The air hums with static and the weight of progress. A symphony of polished brass, circuitry, and ambition.

Viktor exhales slowly beside Jayce as they step inside. His heart is drumming, but his steps are measured.

Jayce’s hand grazes his shoulder, grounding him with a quiet touch. A warmth that hums through cloth and skin.

“You ready?” he asks.

Viktor nods once. He does not trust himself to speak, not when the words are splintered against his ribs, caught like birds in a cage.

Beside them, Mel glides ahead in polished heels and a razor-sharp blazer, surveying the hall with detached interest. “I suppose there is a lot of potential investments to be gleaned here,” she murmurs, more to herself than to anyone else.

Vi, already stuffing a free sample slider into her mouth, snorts. “Who cares about investments? I’m mad they’re not serving champagne.”

Caitlyn, ever patient, loops an arm through Vi’s with familiar ease, offering Viktor a nod and a smile touched with sincerity. “We’re here to support you two. No matter what happens.”

Jayce nudges Viktor lightly. “Our friends may be ridiculous, but they’re ours.”

Viktor lets out a breath that untangles the knot in his chest. For the first time since stepping into the hall, the corners of his mouth lift. “I suppose ridiculous is better than alone.”

Mel’s voice cuts in, dry and amused. “Careful, Viktor. That almost sounded like affection.”

“Did Jayce actually manage to soften Mr. Doom and Gloom?” Vi snickers. Caitlyn rolls her eyes in immediate protest.

Viktor’s expression dissolves into shock when he hears the nickname. “Excuse me—Mr. Doom and Gloom?”

The host clears her throat and leans into the mic, voice crisp and rehearsed.

“And now,” she announces, “our next presenters this morning—Jayce Talis and Viktor, with a proposal submitted jointly with the Department of Engineering. Representing the Academy’s collaborative initiative between Hextech Development and Humanitarian Design.”

The crowd stirs. Heads pivot like wildflowers drawn towards heat. Drifting cameras swivel and click into place, mechanical eyes trained on the ascending stairwell that leads to the center stage.

“Showtime,” Jayce murmurs beside him.

Together, they walk towards the main stage.

It rises like a shrine at the heart of the symposium, framed by banners bearing the crest of the Council. Light gleams across polished floors, seemingly reflecting every face turned towards them—panelists, professors, spectators, visionaries. The auditorium is massive, the audience endless.

And for a moment—Viktor falters.

The sound fades into a dull thrum. The crowd becomes a wall, the lights a judgment. His throat tightens. His hands quiver in the familiar rhythm of his anxiety.

He stares ahead, unblinking. Viktor feels like a child once more, small and breakable, drowning in a silence that never once made room for his voice.

Jayce notices.

He leans close, his voice a tether. “Hey. I’ve got you. We’ve got this. You’re not alone anymore.”

Something catches in Viktor’s chest, delicate and fleeting. He nods once.

Together, they take their place.

A hush falls as the lights dim. The prototype floats upward from the stage’s center pedestal—a sleek, curved frame, shimmering with soft arcs of blue energy, as if lightning trapped in glass.

Viktor speaks into the mic, “My name is Viktor.”

The mic crackles with his first word, startling him—but he steadies his grip, breathes once, twice.

“I’m from the Undercity.” He continues, voice low but gaining strength. “I grew up sick. Not just me—many of us. Hundreds. Children with no names, no records. Our bodies broke down faster than the city could forget us.”

He pauses. Allows the silence to swell.

“There were no diagnostics. No medicine. Only rusted beds, short-staffed clinics, and long waits in rooms that smelled like mold and blood. Time was our only treatment. And time is cruel when your body is already failing.” Viktor says, his mind no longer in the stage, but in the memory of the pain he’s since carried. “Back then, I used to think that pain was meant to be endured quietly. That no one would care. That even if I screamed, it wouldn’t echo far enough to reach Piltover.”

He gestures towards the device behind them. “This... is Arcane.”

The screen flickers to life, casting soft waves of color, displaying a ripple of biofeedback in motion. It shifts as Viktor speaks, seemingly translating his voice into energy and signal.

“It translates neurobiological signals—pain, discomfort, stress—into measurable, visible feedback. It can identify patterns in symptoms too subtle to detect. It gives the body a voice when words fail.”

Jayce steps forward, taking his place beside Viktor. His voice, when it comes, is lighter.

“When I was younger,” Jayce begins, “I had this dream. Of snow. Of loss. And then—a pulsing, blue light. In my dream, a mage appeared. He merely reached out to touch my shoulder, and suddenly, the world became gentle again. It was flowers and wind and hope.”

Jayce looks out over the crowd, then at Viktor. “I want to build that feeling of magic. Not with spells, but with science. With tools. With someone who believes the world can be more.”

He smiles, and the entire room tilts with it. “I found that someone.”

The crowd stirs. The restless movements quiet. Now, the audience leans in—anticipation etched into every motion, breath suspended just below the surface. A ripple of murmur rises, faint and hallowed, a sound closer to wonder than noise.

Viktor’s fingers brush the podium. His voice is quieter now, but clearer than ever. “An important person once told me that with Arcane, my pain had a voice. That all the children like me, who perished before they were seen, before they were understood—they, too, would be remembered. Heard. That this device could give purpose to what once felt like senseless suffering.”

He turns towards Jayce. Their eyes meet, and in that brief, charged stillness, the rest of the world falls away. No crowd, no stage. Only Jayce. That quiet belief behind his eyes.

“This is what we built,” Viktor says. “Not just a device. Not just an invention. But mercy. Hope.”

Jayce steps forward again. “We’d like to show you what that hope looks like.”

The demonstration begins.

Jayce pulls on and wears the wristband lined with receptors. Viktor activates the interface. The machine hums, polished and alive. It reads Jayce’s vitals and displays them in real time. Then Viktor simulates a stress pattern through the wristband: a slight aberration in the cardiac tissue. Instantly, the device responds—highlighting fluctuations, flagging subtle irregularities, generating an automated diagnostic suggestion.

“In real-world use,” Viktor explains, “this would alert nearby medical stations. It requires no prior medical training. It learns with the user. And it costs less than a textbook.”

Jayce adds, “It’s wearable. Durable. And most importantly—portable. Designed for the places too often left behind.”

The demonstration ends.

Silence reigns.

And then—applause.

It starts as a murmur, tentative. Then it swells.

Rises.

Roars.

Louder than Viktor had ever dared to imagine. A tide of hands, voices, motion, rising all at once. The kind of applause that feels tectonic.

From the stage, he watches it all: a few panelists exchanging glances, wide-eyed, disbelieving. He glimpses as professors lean towards one another, whispering in hushed tones. A woman in the second row dabs her eyes, lips trembling.

Heimerdinger, lost somewhere in the sea of faces, is sobbing openly, pressed deep into a handkerchief.

“Damn right!” Vi bellows from the back, voice cutting clean through the noise.

Caitlyn claps with the quiet pride of someone who expected nothing less. Mel tries to appear unmoved, arms crossed—but the smile she fails to suppress tells the truth.

Jayce exhales sharply. There’s a fire that burns in his chest. His throat tenses around the sheer weight of it all—of months without rest, of risk and rejection, of something they refused to let die. His hands tremble, no longer from fear, but from release. Relief.

And Viktor—Viktor only stands still.

The lights flash across the auditorium like scattered starlight. It catches in his hair, his eyes, bathes him in its gentle embrace.

Deep in his chest, a weight begins to lift, not all at once, but slowly—like smoke unraveling after years of being trapped. Something dark that has lived in his lungs for years, tightening with every breath, every dream stifled before it could take shape—now, it loosens.

For once, it lets go.

They step down from the stage together, shoulder to shoulder, the thunder of applause following them like a tide.

Each step forward feels like a door unlatched. A wall breached. A beginning rewritten.

Viktor does not look back.

He doesn’t have to.

Because this time, the world is listening.

When the winners are announced, it is not their names that echo from the speaker’s podium.

“And the grand prize of this year’s Innovator’s Competition goes to… SkyTech System, for their revolutionary Cognitive Sync Network, enabling high-speed connection between Piltover’s Council-grade infrastructure and personal devices.”

A wave of applause rolls through the auditorium like a tide on command. Viktor barely hears it.

Beside him, Jayce lets out a quiet breath through his nose. Not in bitterness, not in anger. Just a breath gently let go—the last flicker of a hope he had already made peace with.

Viktor swallows, throat dry.

He knew they were the outliers in this competition. The anomaly in a sea of political ambition and calculated prestige. Their invention wasn’t lavish or gold-trimmed, didn’t sparkle with commercial appeal. It wasn’t designed to charm investors or please the Council elites. It didn’t promise profit margins or strategic gain for Piltover.

No.

What they built was fragile in its audacity. Gentle in its defiance.

Which, in Piltover, didn’t always mean progress.

He turns his gaze to Arcane, resting quiet on its pedestal. Its smooth, silver casing gleams beneath the soft stage lights. The biometrics shimmer faintly across its interface—subtle waves pulsing like breath. It is beautiful. Not because of polish, but because of purpose.

It was built from callused hands and sleepless nights. It was soldered together with grief and hope, and every quiet, stubborn conviction they refused to abandon.

He turns—and finds Jayce watching him.

Jayce is smiling.

The smile on his lips is small, unshaken. Not out of pride or showmanship. But something quieter. Like he’s seeing Viktor and only Viktor, as if the stage lights have all dimmed and the crowd is gone and this, right here, is what matters.

“We didn’t win,” Viktor says.

Jayce glances towards the stage, then back; eyes steady, voice sure. “No,” he agrees. “We didn’t.”

There’s a beat of silence between them.

And then Jayce adds, softer, “But we built something that matters.”

Viktor lets the words land like a seed in his chest. Feels it as it slowly takes root.

“You remember what I told you,” Jayce says gently, “about the dream with the mage in the snow?”

Viktor nods. He could never forget.

Jayce’s gaze lingers on him. There’s something warm in it. Reverent. “We made a green field, V. Maybe just a small one. Just enough.”

Viktor’s eyes flick to the back of the hall—where students had gathered earlier to ask about their device. Where a professor from Piltover Medical Center requested a copy of their research. Where a girl from the Undercity, no older than fourteen, had shaken Viktor’s hand and whispered thank you like it weighed her whole future.

He closes his eyes.

When he opens them, he feels lighter.

Onstage, the winners are already posing for photographs. Flashbulbs burst like fireworks. Contracts are already being written behind the scenes. Laughter rings out. Gold ribbons shine beneath glass spotlights.

But here, in the shadow of celebration, Viktor and Jayce stand in the quiet aftermath of not winning.

And for all the brilliance around them, for all the glitz and celebration—Viktor smiles, and knows: they’ve already won something far more enduring.

They built something no ribbon could define.

A voice for pain.

A name for hope.

And a future that, finally, looked back.

Through the wide-paneled windows of the physics lab, the last light of day filters in like distilled gold, heavy and quiet. It pools across the floor in long ribbons, casting slow-drifting shadows over worn tables, chipped linoleum, and the scuffed legs of empty chairs that once held the weight of long nights and stubborn brilliance. Outside, the world continues without them—vendors fold up carts, laughter echoes down cobbled steps, the city breathes into dusk.

Jayce exhales slowly as he sets the prototype down on their workstation. Arcane hums gently in its casing, the interface pulsing with quiet life, as if aware its creators are nearby. Its glow flickers across the metal frames of their tools, the notes still pinned on the wall, the leftover coffee cup with his name scribbled on the side.

It feels strange, almost dissonant, to be here again. After everything. After applause, and silence. After victory that felt like loss and loss that felt like clarity.

They won’t be returning tomorrow. Or the day after that. There is no more deadline looming. No more tests to run. No more sensors to recalibrate, or arguments to ignite just for the sake of it.

No more reason.

Jayce finds himself moving with restless hands—clearing the table, folding data sheets that he knows will be archived later. Pointless tasks. Repetitions. Movements to fill the space where momentum used to be. He hears Viktor behind him, settling the case inside the storage locker with precise care, like he always does. Methodical. Gentle.

The silence between them isn’t strained. But it is full—burdened by the echo of all the words that got caught in the undertow of their invention.

Jayce turns.

Viktor is bathed in the last golden light of a sun sinking, framed by the edge of the lab cabinet like a portrait rendered by accident—so precise in its beauty it aches to look at. The sun catches in his hair and threads it with dying copper, like flame woven into silk. There’s a curl of concentration in the shape of his mouth, in the slant of his brow as he inspects a cable one final time.

He looks tired.

He looks beautiful.

Jayce watches him for too long. Watches the fall of his hair over one eye. The curve of his back. The slim focus of his fingers.

His heart aches.

“I don’t know what will happen to us now that all of this is over…” Jayce says, voice a little too loud in the hush of the room.

Viktor does not flinch. He simply lifts his head, waiting.

Jayce forces himself to meet his gaze. He crosses the room slowly, each step heavier than the last. “There’s no more project tying us together. No more reason to stay late at the lab. No more tea, no more sandwiches to leave at your desk. No more excuses to linger.”

A breathless laugh escapes him—half-choked, quivering at the edges.

“I know it sounds ridiculous. But I keep thinking about how all of this started. And how it felt.” His eyes sting, but he pushes on. “Working with you… it was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Viktor’s gaze sharpens slightly—but he does not speak.

“I know we didn’t win. But it never felt like it was about that. Not really.” Jayce’s voice falters, “What mattered to me—what still matters—is that I got to build something with you. That you let me see you. That I got to know you. Getting to see the way your mind works. Watching you get frustrated when your code loops back on itself. Watching you drink the tea I brew you every morning like you never realized you were becoming my habit.”

Jayce smiles, small and raw. “Viktor, you changed how I see things. You made me want to be better. You made me question who I am—who I want to be.”

A pause.

Jayce’s voice drops into something ragged.

“You make me want to deserve you.”

The light curls around Viktor’s silhouette like a second skin; as if it, too, longs to hold him. Jayce yearns achingly—to reach, to draw the distance, to touch. To smooth a thumb over the pink skin of Viktor’s lips and not have it burn him. To press his forehead against Viktor and ask, with no words, Do you feel it, too?

But he doesn’t move. Instead, he lets the silence stretch out.

Lets it linger, heavy and honest.

And then—

Viktor kisses him.

The kiss is slow. Soft. The kind of kiss that trembles just beneath the skin. The kind of kiss that doesn’t ask permission, because the answer has long been written into every touch, every glance, every sandwich wrapped in wax paper and left like a secret offering.

Viktor’s hand rises to rest lightly against Jayce’s collar, the pressure so impossibly soft. Jayce stills—heart stuttering. And then the heat hits him all at once.

Jayce groans low in his throat, something deep unfurling within him like a fuse catching light. His hands move—instinct, desire, relief—and grasp at Viktor’s waist, pulling him close. Their bodies collide with a gentle thud, nothing sharp, only the soft urgency of contact, all tension and breath and gravity.

Jayce’s fingers slither into the tangle of Viktor’s hair. He yanks just firmly enough to tilt Viktor’s face and deepen the kiss with breathless devotion.

Viktor melts into it.

Their mouths part and press again, open and searching, breaths intermingling, tongues brushing in sync. Viktor’s lips are impossibly soft, a little cool at the edges, tasting of chamomile tea and something earthier—something him. Jayce kisses him like he’s starving.

He drinks in the shape of Viktor against his palms—the taste of danger and fire, the way Viktor’s breath stutters when Jayce’s hands grip at his hips with a force that will bruise in the morning.

Jayce pushes Viktor slowly back—gently, deliberately—until his spine meets the edge of the workbench. There, he pins him, with nothing more than his hands, fingers tightening through fabric, grounding them both.

Viktor’s hands shift, slipping beneath the hem of Jayce’s shirt to caress the small of his back. Then, his fingers trace the soft protrusions of Jayce’s spine, anchoring himself, returning every movement with quiet, hungry precision. Viktor kisses like he’s trying to memorize the moment, to carve it somewhere sacred inside him where nothing else can reach.

­Drunk in this heat, Jayce leans in, breath trembling between them like a held confession, and lets his hands drift lower until they slip beneath the back of Viktor’s thighs.

With a breath and a shift of muscle, strength tempered by tenderness, he lifts him. Viktor exhales a soft, surprised sound—a gasp caught somewhere between hunger and longing. But his legs come around Jayce’s waist instinctively, pulling him close, holding him in place. Jayce sets him gently atop the workbench and slips into the space between Viktor’s legs like he’s stepping into a memory. Like he’s coming home.

Jayce fits in the space perfectly; hands braced on Viktor’s hips, foreheads nearly touching. And when their mouths find each other again, it’s not with caution. It’s not with control. It’s with need—years of unspoken words crashing to the surface in the shape of a kiss.

He kisses him until Viktor’s breath breaks apart in shivers, until his fingers curl against Jayce’s spine with a desperation that borders on pleading. Until Viktor’s head falls back, exposing the long, pale line of his throat in surrender—offering, open, a kind of silent vow.

Jayce follows. His mouth trails over skin gone too warm, too sensitive, exploring the delicate slope of Viktor’s throat with devastating care. He kisses beneath the jaw, along the tendon that tightens when Viktor swallows. His tongue lingers in the hollow just above Viktor’s collarbone, where his heartbeat flutters fast and frantic, like wings trapped beneath bone.

And Jayce’s hands roam with care, not haste—fingertips mapping the shape of Viktor’s waist, the dip of his back, the narrow strip of skin just beneath the hem of his shirt. And then, slowly, he slips his fingers beneath the fabric.

The touch is tentative at first, almost devout. His palm brushes the warm plane of Viktor’s stomach, then slides upward—dragging the shirt with it in a soft, silent ascent. His thumb grazes the subtle ridge between ribs, and Viktor breathes in sharply, the sound catching in his throat like a prayer.

Jayce does not speak. He only watches, hazy eyes solely fixated on Viktor—his amber eyes fluttered half-shut, swollen lips open—and keeps going. His hand finds the center of Viktor’s chest, resting flat against his heartbeat like he’s trying to feel more than skin. Like he’s trying to write in his memory the rhythm of it.

This rhythm of something fragile and known. Something that has always been his.

And in every kiss, there’s something spoken—not in words, but in the press of their lips, in the way Jayce consumes Viktor like he's something holy. As though he’s trying to recognize the shape of his body with his mouth, to brand this moment into both of them—not out of possession, but devotion.

“I meant it,” Jayce murmurs, lips brushing skin. “Everything I said.”

Viktor exhales like he’s been holding the same breath for hours. “I know.”

There’s another pause.

Then Viktor draws the distance once more and chases him into another kiss.

Jayce huffs a laugh, muffled between kisses. “Hmm, so eager, V. No long speech about logic and sentiment?”

Viktor doesn’t pull away. “Not today.”

Jayce smiles against his mouth. “Good.”

They stay like that. Pressed together between memory and the touch of fire. No prototype. No clock ticking down.

Only the golden hush of a room they’ve made sacred. Only the soft hum of Arcane, purring contentedly in its cradle.

Only each other.