Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They started out as roommates, because he didn’t know what Jayce wanted. For a long time he thought Jayce wouldn’t want him at all. Viktor had ruined his life—ruined both of their lives, in a way, even if he wasn’t ready then to consider his life ruined. 

So they slept in separate bedrooms, made pancakes in the morning, understood what pancakes were. Sometimes Jayce took his coffee out to the little balcony and stared over the city, flat fragmented buildings, needles pinning the clouds, and Viktor never followed him there. For the first weeks he kept his distance, until he started to understand that was a mistake. 

They played at pretending to understand their jobs—Viktor was a mechanical engineer, Jayce was an architect, something he should love, the puzzles and sense of scale, the grandeur, the sense of belief in yourself so staggering and practical it can hold buildings up. They worked mostly by muscle memory and something deeper, not quite themselves and not quite these new people either. Certainly Jayce’s leg spoke to that—a car accident, they called it in this world, which everyone seemed to remember, and Viktor was never really sure if the car accident had happened or if the world had moved seamlessly to make sense of a new Jayce Talis appearing in the old one’s place, with a crushed leg and a wheelchair and a crushed-looking face. 

Of course Viktor was a new person too, in ways he wasn’t prepared to deal with yet. 

So they kept half-pretending, playing at it all, like acting out a script except that the script had been written for people exactly like them in all the important ways, and the relief of at least having a script to follow was, Viktor thought, something they both understand. Then he woke up late at night to the sounds of Jayce choking to death in the bathroom and he understood his mistake. 

—

In the cosmos, heads pressed together, Viktor had sought out worlds with a certain urgency, thumbing through them before the two of them could be torn apart. He couldn’t afford to be choosy, and still he was. He wouldn’t touch anything that felt like magic, couldn’t trust himself again with a world like that; he didn’t want a world where Jayce didn’t have his mother; more than anything, selfishly, he didn’t want a world without himself in it, because he never wanted to let go of Jayce again. Even as a stranger on the margins of his life, even as a man standing in the snow with his face pressed to the glass, looking in. 

He could die with Jayce holding him, and almost did. Instead he woke up half-crushed on a futon with Jayce’s head on his shoulder, muttering in his sleep. There was a blue screen flickering in front of them—Hextech, he thought, for a terrified moment, before something in his blood told him they’d fallen asleep watching something together, a movie, which he sort of understood, even if he didn’t think he could explain it. 

In the early morning light and the cold glow of the screen, Jayce looked strangely… exposed. His exhaustion, his badly aged face, the cuts on his mouth. In his sleep he whimpers. 

It was easier to look at Jayce through the beady white eyes of a god, or his soul in the cosmos, than it was to look at what Viktor had done to him now. For a moment he touched their foreheads together—selfish, selfish—just to feel Jayce’s warmth on his skin. The illusion that he had started something instead of ending it, saved someone instead of ruining him. 

He closed his eyes and waited for Jayce to wake up. 

—

Watching Jayce sleep in the hospital brings that moment back again. 

It’s the fluorescent light and the white sheets, casting him into relief, this man Viktor keeps trying to see clearly. His beard is ragged and his hair isn’t clean, and Viktor hasn’t wanted to push him on any of these things, hadn’t wanted to prod and inquire and do the work lovers do, or even friends, because he still didn’t understand what Jayce wanted from him. He hadn’t wanted to assume. In this atmosphere of wonderful delicacy, he sees now, Jayce was being neglected to death. He was not well. Even in sleep his face is creased with pain. 

And so he had to watch Jayce anesthetized, forcibly intubated, a full bottle of Vicodin pumped out of his stomach, and that was his penance, refusing to look away. He wasn’t going to look away again. 

When Jayce wakes up their fingers are laced together. He glances at Viktor, then at their hands, confused. 

“I didn’t think you wanted—” he begins, rasping, and Viktor throws his arms around his neck. 

“I want you,” Viktor whispers, holding him as he starts to cry. “I want you very, very much.”

—

He comes home limping, hospital-smelling, bruised from the IV. He insists on getting up the stairs himself but at the top he leans heavily against the door, the heel of his hand pressed to his eye. 

Viktor calls his name, stops when he sees Jayce’s shoulders shake. For a moment, superimposed, he sees the man he loves standing at the forge, trembling with effort, framed by fire.

And then the fire fades, the image dies, and he sees the man he loves, so thin, diminished. 

“It’s all right, miláčku,” he says, wrapping his arms around Jayce’s waist, face buried in his back. He can feel Jayce’s heart beat madly under his skin, feel the way his body slumps, giving out. “I have you.”

He calls out sick, arranges leave for Jayce. The office manager makes an implication he doesn’t appreciate, something conveyed in low, sympathetic tones. It’s all he can do not to hang up the phone. There’s nothing wrong with Jayce. With any Jayce. 

The next weeks are just a haze of love and pain: holding Jayce in bed, kissing his temples, his shoulders, the nape of his neck, the hollow of his stomach, every inch of him that Viktor can touch, to compensate for the places he can’t. He kisses Jayce, soft and urgent and searching, like they haven’t seen each other, truly touched each other, in years. 

“It’s all right,” he says, unbuttoning Jayce’s shirt. Jayce closes his eyes, rests his face in the cool palm of Viktor’s hand. “Let me take care of you.”

“I’m so tired,” Jayce says, voice cracking. 

“I know,” he says. Gently he kisses Jayce’s face, his wet eyes. “Rest.”

He cleans Jayce’s thin back with a washcloth as he breaks down crying in the tub, hushes him as he glances up with a cracked-open face. “I love you,” Viktor says, thumb stroking Jayce’s rough cheek. “God, how much I love you.” He climbs in fully clothed just to love him, this wet huddle, and Jayce cries into his damp shoulder. The way he holds himself is lopsided with pain. “You don’t have to worry about anything, lásko,” Viktor says, rocking him, the quiet sloshing of the water. “Nothing, all right? I have you now. You’ve carried that weight long enough.” 

It’s hard for Jayce even to speak about it, the nightmare months Viktor only saw snatches of in the cosmos, still images from a movie whose plot he barely understood. He dries Jayce’s hair and kisses his forehead as he stammers about the ravine, starving and lapping dirty water, dragging himself on his broken leg, pleading with Viktor’s face in the fire and the voices in his head. Cracking his ribs in the fall, wheezing broken on the frigid ground. He breathes too fast just talking about it, like he’s still trying to suck enough air. 

“It’s gone,” Viktor promises. “It’s done. You’re here with me now.”

He works a shirt over Jayce’s head and holds him, still warm as bathwater. He massages Jayce’s bad leg until his fingers cramp, rubs his thin back as he struggles to eat, grounding him. In dreams, over and over, he wipes the soot from Jayce’s face. 

He can be steady. If Jayce needs steadiness, he can be steady. 

At night Jayce clutches him to his chest, almost smothering him, like he needs Viktor to be part of his body, a necessary organ tucked between his lungs and heart. And Viktor feels it too, the feeling of completeness when Jayce is in his arms, even this incomplete Jayce. 

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Jayce gasps. “I thought—”

“How could you bother me,” he asks, “when you’re part of me?” Tenderly he brings Jayce’s shaky hand to his cheek.

The late afternoon light, the wetness of a summer storm outside as he reads to Jayce in bed; late nights folded around him in bed, stroking his hair, damp from nightmares. Every blue shadow is a threat. He spends whole days just holding Jayce close under the covers, threading their fingers together, humming to him—for them both, really, tracing a line they might follow. 

—

Later, explaining those months to himself—the texture of it, the emotion—Viktor would describe it as staggered, witchy. There was a peculiar sense of time, how it ran so slowly in the first weeks, made of so many delicate moments, sharp-edged, particular: sitting Jayce up in bed and undressing him for the first time; the bright sting of lemons under his fingernails, making their morning tea the way Jayce always used to; trimming Jayce’s beard, the nervousness in the way he swallowed, still remembering the last time Viktor had touched his neck; the first time Jayce needed help walking to the bathroom and he just sat on the toilet seat and cried. 

But after that all these brutal, soft moments became something broader, indistinguishable. Days felt like weeks and weeks felt like the same day lived over and over again, meaning dissolved down into routine. It felt like he had always been taking care of Jayce, the way the sky had always been wide, the natural way of things, and it came almost as a relief. 

If he had always been taking care of Jayce, here in this little brick apartment, Piltover never existed. His mistakes could stay buried there, in some self-annihilating box, and he could look in the mirror without straining to see someone worth loving. 

So maybe that’s who he is. 

He’s the person who cuts Jayce’s lemons. 

—

When they first met, those long nights—vivid, underslept—they used to talk for hours about the ways the world worked, what they wanted from it. Jayce always talked with such earnestness that Viktor thought at first it had to be a confidence trick, nothing anyone could really mean, but here he was, days later, sincere and open-faced, shining like a star. 

He can remember everything about those nights: the smell of their dark tea, the calloused shape of Jayce’s fingers, the huff of his laughter, the brightness of Hextech sputtering in patterns, like neon, a sign: your life is here. And still he can’t recall anything, really, of the things they wanted. 

To help people, Viktor thinks. They must have been aligned on this. But hadn’t they wanted more than that? Hadn’t they ever realized that when you only help other people, you become blind to your own needs, invisible to yourself? 

Jayce sipped the tea and sputtered, coughing into his arm. 

“You really drink this stuff plain?” he asks. 

Viktor shrugged. 

“One grows up addressing the world as it is,” he said, perhaps cryptically. But he smiled a little, taking Jayce’s cup. “I see we’ll have to add some sweetness for you.”

—

There was a point where Viktor believed that if he could just love Jayce enough, he would get better. As the weeks turn into months, he starts to admit that he has, as usual, overestimated his powers. 

Jayce keeps having panic attacks, night terrors. He panics because he feels guilty about taking leave from his job, and then he quits and panics more. He touches his wrist compulsively, where his leather cuff used to be, feels for it in his sleep.

“You’re sick, lásko,” Viktor says, placing a consoling hand on his shoulder. “You can tell them you made a mistake.”

Jayce shakes his head, eyes locked and shining. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he chokes. 

After sleepless nights pacing the kitchen, hair tossled from pulling, hands dragged through it, he looks at Viktor like he can’t remember where he is or who he’s supposed to be—just that glassy look, expectant, like Viktor might tell him who he is. He’d done it once before, hadn’t he, at the edge of a blown-out apartment? 

“Breathe,” he says, taking Jayce into his arms. His face feels hot, delirious.

He should have anticipated this, in hindsight. They had always been their work, both of them, and in a world without magic or work, what were they, really? Bare outlines of people, a few details scribbled in; bare outlines and their love for each other, ragged, desperate. That feeling again he can’t remember from their other life, that if he can’t hold Jayce to his chest at night he’ll die. Something’s gone wrong, or right, or both. 

“You’re the only place that smells like home anymore,” Jayce says softly, hiding his face in Viktor’s neck.

Sometimes, when Jayce is sleeping, Viktor fishes his phone from his pocket and tries to imagine who this Viktor used to be. He reads over his own email correspondence like an epistolary novel, trying to get a sense for the plot, the characters. This Viktor—the old Viktor? the new Viktor?—is always calm, clever, charming. Even after going through months of exchanges, he cannot penetrate to the version of himself he thinks must be there. 

Somehow even in this timeline Viktor is always the one who hides himself so well even Viktor can’t find him. 

Viktor is the one who tells Jayce who he is. But who will tell Viktor? 

—

“You left me in a hole,” he sobs, face pressed into Viktor’s thigh, smothering. “You left me in a hole.”

—

In the mornings Jayce wheels himself out onto the balcony and watches the clouds shift overhead, the sun making them glow. He studies the ground sometimes, the thread of people coming and going, the flat stretch of the plaza with its uneven paving stones. There’s a longing Viktor recognizes, and it worries him; instead of talking he sits at Jayce’s side, touching his shoulder. 

Therapy is out of the question. Jayce has made that clear enough, and Viktor can’t blame him. 

“I don’t need someone else picking me apart,” he says, turning his face away, the line of his mouth wavering. “I don’t need someone else to lie to.”

He would have to lie to the therapist about nearly every aspect of his pain, no use for either of them and unfair to the therapist; and wasn’t that what had brought him to this point, the inability to keep participating in this rolling theater production? For weeks he won’t even speak to his mother. What could he possibly tell her in a language she’d understand? For a guilty moment Viktor is relieved he has no living family, no one left to lie to. 

I don’t need someone else picking me apart. Viktor thinks about it when he can’t sleep, the question lying awake in his mind with him. Is that what he’s done? Pick Jayce to pieces? 

It’s easy enough to lie, when they have to. In every world Jayce has been prone to depressive episodes, vaulting swings and drops; in this world he’s still adjusting to a car wreck that permanently disabled him. Ximena isn’t surprised, or fazed. She comes over with two fat grocery bags and makes asado de bodas, enough to freeze half, and a platter of sopapillas Jayce hardly touches. He gazes at Viktor pleading, stung, cracked open again. He hates this. It’s intolerable. 

It’s easy enough to lie. Easy in all the ways except the most important way. 

“He loved them as a child,” Ximena says, kissing the top of his listless head. “Powdered sugar all over his face.”

“He always had a sweet tooth,” Viktor says, touching his hand softly under the table. 

Ximena stays at their apartment during the day, after Viktor goes back to work. Work, where everything feels theatrical and strange; stranger even than the days after they first arrived here. He looks at the pictures on his desk: family dinner with Ximena; a blurry night out at a club downtown, their faces smeared with glitter; the framed photo of himself and Jayce on a hiking trip, Jayce pressing a kiss to his cheek in the sun. He’s wild with happiness, grinning; he’s someone Viktor has forgotten he knew. 

He should have gone back further, should have erased it all. Should have set Jayce free, should have erased himself from Jayce’s mind, all these memories of suffering and lost innocence, bright and lonely and jagged, like broken glass. 

Selfishness was, as always, his undoing. 

He needed to believe in a world where someone could love him without being destroyed. 

He puts the photos away. 

—

Viktor doesn’t think he’ll ever want children, but he imagines this must be what it’s like: some fragile creature holding his whole heart. While he’s away at work he aches for Jayce, struggling not to text Ximena, who’s already kind enough to give him updates twice a day. Once she texts simply, looks so peaceful when he’s asleep. 

He knows what she means: the way Jayce’s forehead smoothes out, the constant hum of panic in the apartment fading away, the soft noises he makes as he dreams. The storm of him and then the absence of the storm, the shadow of someone who used to be the love of his life. 

Despite himself he still believes that this is the real Jayce, the truest Jayce, that tender sleeping face. 

He comes to Viktor for his pain medication in the morning and night, opening his mouth obediently like a child. Dead-eyed, complacent, looking somewhere slightly beyond Viktor as he swallows, and it's like he's swallowing something else too, some filament of rage, letting it burn in his throat. Viktor hates how undignified this has become, how he can’t trust Jayce with his own meds; but he places the white pill on Jayce’s tongue and makes sure he swallows, not pocketing it for later. He knows Jayce is still tempted, and who could blame him? What has Viktor really offered him that could compete with oblivion?

I tried to make a world for you, he thinks, looking at Jayce’s bleak face. I’m trying still. 

“I’ll see you soon,” Viktor says when he leaves for the office, and the words are like a spell, a prayer. He cradles Jayce in his arms before he goes, tender and lingering, breathing in the smell of his hair.

Then it’s Ximena who makes sure he eats, who heaps the knitted blanket over his shoulders when he curls up on the couch, who runs the bath and reminds him to get in while it’s hot, which sometimes works; he hates waste. Ximena who makes sure he does the hip exercises that keep him mobile, who counters his awful, clumsy, self-loathing thoughts, the muttering like an underground river that breaks occasionally through to the surface, the smallest sense of the filthy water underneath, massive, corroding. That’s the most important job any of them have, not leaving Jayce alone with his own head. 

Caitlyn texts with Jayce throughout the day, sends memes he pretends to understand. Neither of them is sure if he’s supposed to. 

“She’s trying to be supportive,” Viktor says, passing back the phone. 

“She doesn’t even know who I am,” he says softly.

Caitlyn can’t help in the way Ximena does because when she’s around Jayce can’t help but perform for her; he doesn’t want her to see him that sick. He parodies himself all day and then Viktor comes home and Jayce collapses in his arms, overwhelmed, wrung thin. 

“I’m scaring her,” he croaks, “I’m scaring her.”

You’re scaring me too, Viktor doesn’t say. He just holds Jayce closer and performs for him too, someone strong enough to give infinitely without ever falling apart. 

—

A memory:

He remembers seeing Jayce out of the corner of his eye, really seeing him: standing bent at his lab desk, hands splayed, the rigid line of his back.

Even then he knew Jayce was going about it all wrong, the business of enduring. You can’t stand so stiff and strong against the world forever. Viktor had learned as much when he was younger, smart enough to realize it would break him.

But Jayce—soft, tender, incapable of toughness and incapable of bending, mouthing words absently to himself as he reads over a blueprint, looking up apologetically when he’s caught, embarrassed, smiling—

Jayce, who has always been more real to himself than the world around him, burning, built from the substance of his dreams—

Jayce hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

Chapter Text

“I don’t want to put you through this anymore,” Jayce says. 

Another night when he confessed he didn’t want to be here, another night of sitting together on the cramped futon, finishing a crossword together, watching awful movies, anything to keep Jayce company while they wait for it to pass, like a fever. Mostly Viktor doing the crossword, pretending Jayce can help, because he needs to feel like he can help; he needs to feel needed. 

There’s a comforting familiarity to these nights, if Viktor lets himself forget what they’re for. Sometimes Jayce used to work at the lab when he couldn’t sleep, and Viktor would rarely go home—he remembered seeing Jayce slumping against the door, then his startled expression as he saw Viktor still there, the shock mingling with delight. “Viktor,” he’d said, in the way he’d always said it, hoarse, relieved, like Viktor had come to save him. 

He would make Jayce sweetmilk to make him drowsy, sit at his desk listening to him talk about his ideas, his theories, anything except the reason he couldn’t sleep, the nightmares that had scared him so much he didn’t feel safe going back. But Viktor was safe, and the lab was safe, and more often than not Jayce would end up falling asleep mid-sentence, head pillowed on his crossed arms, and Viktor would touch his back with a careful hand, not sure if he was allowed, and think about softly kissing the side of his neck. 

This isn’t so different, if he pretends. 

Jayce’s head is in Viktor’s lap, cheek pressed to his thigh, his warm solid weight, the scratch of his beard. He always breathes like it's hard for him, some heavy weight pulled up his throat. Viktor bends to kiss his ear. If he can just love Jayce enough—

“Eh, I don’t mind,” he says. “Sleep has never been particularly interesting to me.” 

It’s something they might have had playful arguments about before, teasing. Viktor has never been particularly interested in taking care of himself; there was always something better to do with his time. But Jayce doesn’t tease back. 

“That’s not what I mean,” he says. He closes his eyes, curls closer into Viktor’s lap. “I made you into my nurse,” he says. 

“You didn’t make me into anything,” Viktor says. “If anything, I made you.” 

Silence for a few beats, Jayce clinging to his legs, this impossible man, contradictory; he wants Viktor to let him go, can’t even pretend he’s capable of it himself. A little wetness creeps down Viktor’s thigh, salt. 

“Oh lásko,” Viktor says, rubbing his back. 

“You can’t tell me you wanted to live like this, V,” he says, his voice cracking. 

“Like what?” Viktor says. “Loved?” He nudges until Jayce turns over, cups his teary face in his hands, kisses the corners of his eyes. “No, I wanted very much to be loved.” 

“Is that really what I’m giving you?” he says. “Is that most of what I’m giving you and not—suffering?”

“Love,” Viktor says firmly. “There’s nothing you’ve given me that I haven’t wanted. There’s nothing you’ve forced me to do.” 

It’s true, mostly, with one significant exception. 

“And besides,” Viktor says, “you forget. Most of my life I grew up expecting never to live at all.”

—

There’s something painful about all his familiar gestures, his expressions, his tired smile, when the familiarity only reminds Viktor of everything Jayce has lost—and, as little as it matters, what Viktor has lost watching him lose it. It’s like looking at someone through the small and large ends of a telescope at the same time, closer, closer, and further away. 

But he can make them dinner in the evenings, kiss Viktor on the forehead when he comes home from work. “A good little housewife,” Jayce says once absently, and there’s no bitterness in it, but perhaps there should be. He doesn’t have interests anymore. No wild grin, no silly puns, no mumbling to himself as he worked at a problem, tugging at his hair; no mischievous glances or the old feeling of tender physicality, that sense of strength and power barely contained in little touches, affection as soft as Jayce could make it.  

Viktor tries to plan trips to the park, to the bookstore, and Jayce’s eyes are blank. He talks about planning a dinner with Caitlyn and Jayce looks away non-committally. He doesn’t want Caitlyn to see him like this either. It’s still hard for him to eat. There’s nothing that seems to make him happy, or sad, or much of anything. He sits on the balcony and nurses his coffee slowly, like a stiff drink. 

“Just a little burned out,” Ximena had said weeks ago, and Viktor thought then that she meant it the way people tend to mean it in this world, overworked. Now he thinks she was describing something closer to the truth. A fire had passed through him, consumed what it could, and there would be nothing for a while, maybe not for a long time, not until there was good soil again. 

“You’ll come back,” Viktor whispers as he sleeps, stroking his messy hair. In more deluded moments he lets himself believe Jayce never left. 

— 

It’s the anger that comes back first. The pinched look in Jayce’s face, eating dinner, and then the way he lowers his fork, seeming to test it in his hands, how much pressure he can apply before something snaps. 

“I feel like you picked this pretty little world for us, where I’m supposed to be better,” Jaye spits. 

“Jayce,” he says, irritable despite himself, “you weren’t supposed to be anything.” 

“Can we at least pretend we both know that’s the problem?” Jayce demands. “That you look at me with no expectations at all?”

“What do you want me to expect?” he asks. “Just tell me, and I’ll expect it.” He pauses, unfairly, while Jayce says nothing. “Do you want to be an architect?” he goes on. “It’s available to you. A professor? I suspect the academy or its equivalent would have you at a moment’s notice. You’ve done wonderful things here, Jayce, brilliant things, even if none of them involve magic.” 

“But that wasn’t me,” Jayce says. “It’s so… dishonest. I’m coasting on some other guy’s laurels, even if I know how to do the work. I didn’t earn any of it. And you didn’t either.” He flashes Viktor an angry look. “And I’m supposed to be okay with that? It makes me feel so sick, all the time.” 

“What was I supposed to do?” Viktor asks. “Let you die?”

“Yes!” he says. “Maybe! Even the pills, you should have—” he takes a staggered breath. “You should have just let me go. I’m no good to anyone anymore.”

There’s a pained sound Viktor doesn’t recognize until he realizes it’s coming from his own throat. 

“No good,” he repeats, and the words tear at him like acid. The best man he’s ever known and he thinks he’s no good. 

“I’m useless,” Jayce says. “There’s no point.”

“You don’t think it matters, what you mean to me?” he says. “You don’t think it would kill me too?” 

“I dunno,” Jayce says, setting his jaw. 

“Jayce.” 

He’s stubbornly looking down, picking his enchiladas apart with the vehemence of a child tearing the wings off a fly. 

“I won’t pretend to be sorry for picking a world where you didn’t die,” Viktor says. “Or a world where you kept your leg, or your friends, or your mother.” He touches Jayce’s thigh, and Jayce lets him; after a moment he covers Viktor’s hand with his, in a tender squeeze. “The fact of the matter is that even if we’d stayed the world would not have been the same,” Viktor says. “I think you know this. How could we possibly have come back to the lives we left? Particularly since I—”

He cuts himself off; there’s no need to talk about this now, the fact that he almost certainly would have been executed. 

“You wouldn’t be the Man of Progress anymore,” he says instead. “And I wouldn’t have been—” he makes a gesture— “whatever I was. We both would have had to live with that. I don’t see how it’s better than the lives we’re living now.” 

“I don’t want to be unfair to you,” Jayce chokes. “I don’t want—but I’m so mad, Viktor. I feel like you didn’t give me a choice.”

“There was no time.” 

“I know,” he says. “I know that. It’s the same decision I had to make when I saved your life.” He smiles, mouth trembling. “I got what I deserved.” 

“The point of this isn’t to punish you,” Viktor says, hurt. 

“I know,” he says.” It just feels that way sometimes. I’m so… homesick. Timesick? Worldsick? Are those words? I feel like an imposter.”

His voice cracks on that word, and something in Viktor cracks too. I am an imposter, he wants to admit. Even in my own life I have always been an imposter. In little moments sometimes I feel real to myself. 

“I think everyone who has survived something terrible becomes an imposter,” Viktor says instead. “To one extent or another.” He sighs, resting his face in the crook of Jayce’s shoulder, breathing him in. He still smells the same, even now, something about the warmth of his skin.

And he doesn’t know why it hurts more, these snatches of the familiar, the old Jayce, his safety, his smell. Viktor presses his mouth against his neck. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry the options were, eh. Shit. I’m sorry I hurt you so much. But I can’t lie to you and say I’m sorry I couldn’t let you go.” 

“I can’t blame you for it,” Jayce says roughly. “Not without being a hypocrite.” He kisses the top of Viktor’s head. “If I have to be an imposter,” he says, “there’s no one I’d rather do it with than you.” 

And Viktor knows that, he does. It’s just that he also knows Jayce’s first choice is not to be an imposter, even if that means not being at all. 

—

After that he campaigns, unsubtly, to make Jayce feel at home. 

He tries to make Piltovan dishes—never his strong suit—and samples five kinds of hot pepper until he finds something close to the ones Ximena used in their world. He buys wildflower honey and spreads it on Jayce’s toast, a hint of sweetness for the person he wants sweetness for the most. He goes to Yankee Candle and sniffs until he finds something that smells vaguely like his old office at the academy, cedar something or other, and lets it burn in the kitchen until the sprinklers in the ceiling hiss on. They try Skittles and spit them out. 

“What,” Jayce coughs, “was that?” 

“Purple,” Viktor says, grimacing. 

When Jayce is having night terrors and doesn’t want to go back to sleep, they stay up trying to reconstruct the records of their youth, even the terrible ones, cobbling together a melodic line and a few stray lyrics. That’s the first time he hears Jayce laugh in months, a soft huff. 

“Is it really baby baby?” he asks. “With two babies?” 

“Of course,” Viktor says. “You don’t think I was subjected to it enough to know?” 

“I always kind of liked it,” he says, rubbing his neck. “I guess if I’d paid attention I would’ve had other feelings on it.” He laughs again, a little sadder. “It’s a paradox, I guess,” he says. “If I’d paid attention I’d be able to sing the whole song for us now, but if I’d paid attention I might’ve hated it so much I wouldn’t have bothered. Baby baby…”

He hums a little of it, wistful. 

“Maybe it’s like that with everything,” he says. “Just wishing you’d paid more attention later. I know I feel that way about you, and Hextech.” 

“I could have been your baby baby,” Viktor teases, but Jayce averts his eyes, going quiet. 

“You would have been,” he says. 

—

An experiment:

There’s something about him, standing bent at the counter—handsome, haggard, his hair touched with silver. Viktor traces his temples lightly with his fingertips, observing the way his eyes flutter shut, his incredulous huff of pleasure.

“You’re beautiful,” Viktor says, catching his face in his hands, nuzzling at his ear.

Jayce groans, head tilting back, neck exposed.

“Vik,” he breathes.

“Beautiful,” Viktor repeats.

There’s something coming back to him—not Jayce, not Jayce entirely, but the shape of something coming up through the water, a little distorted still by the depths, an image carried all this way.

“I missed you,” he says softly, watching Jayce’s fingers curl on the counter.

—

They sit out on the balcony sometimes, as summer comes. Viktor always keeps a hand on Jayce’s knee, nervous despite himself. The hand won’t help if he really wants to jump, but the absence of the hand would make Viktor sick. He watches the blank way Jayce stares out at the skyline and moves his chair a little closer. 

“I don’t want to do it if it’s without you,” Jayce says finally.

“Meaning…?” he prompts. 

Jayce turns his head, the gold in his eyes catching in the mild light. “This,” he says. “Work. All of it. I don’t know what the hell we were thinking, not going into this together. I should’ve become an engineer.” 

“You loved your work,” Viktor says. 

Jayce waves a hand like he’s bothered by some small insect, negligible. 

“I love you,” he says plainly. “I love you. I don’t give a fuck about the job, I just want to be with you.” He takes Viktor’s slim fingers and presses them to his mouth, kissing each knuckle. “I miss working with you,” he murmurs. “I miss coming up with ideas with you. I miss watching you fall asleep at your desk after we’ve been up for some ungodly amount of time and I could just cover you with my coat and watch you dream.” He exhales sharply. “I miss dreaming with you, Vik.”

Viktor doesn’t know what to tell him. He misses it too, misses Jayce badly every moment he’s alway, but he’s also afraid that if they worked together they would find some other way to ruin the world. He’s tired of ruining things with Jayce. 

“I don’t think it can be undone, the choices we’ve made,” he says instead. 

“I’m used to living with my mistakes,” Jayce says. “Believe me, I am.” He drags his hand down his face. “What I can’t stand is living with other people’s mistakes. Some idiot who didn’t know what he had when he threw it away instead of working with you. Or drove drunk.” 

Viktor startles. 

“You think that’s what it was?” he asks. “The accident?” 

“Yes,” Jayce says. “Maybe. It’s just a feeling, I don’t know. I think he was lying to you. The other you. I think he was just as fucked as I am.” 

“Jayce,” he says. 

“I’m sorry,” Jayce says wetly. “You’re doing such nice things for me, with the old songs and the candles, and all I know how to do is be resentful. I want more and I want it so bad, Vik.” 

He’s hunched, elbows on his knees, breathing hard. Viktor places a hand on his back. 

“I know you do,” Viktor says. “It’s part of what I always admired about you, as little as I understood it.” He rubs a soft pattern into Jayce’s shoulder. “I think all I really want is for you to want things again.” 

“I want you,” he says forcefully. “I’ve always wanted you.”

“You used to want more than that, Viktor says. “You used to be… happy.” He keeps his eyes down, studying the back of Jayce’s head. “I can’t be your entire reason for living,” he says, wary. 

Jayce huffs again, that soft laugh. 

“God, V,” he says. “Don’t you know you always were?”

—

This is, of course, terrifying. 

—

In bed a few days later, Viktor reaches for the novel on the nightstand and Jayce stops him. There’s a strange look in his eyes, furtive, guilty, yearning.

“You said I get to keep the leg,” Jayce says, after a moment. “That you wanted a world where I… he trails off. What if I don’t want to keep the leg?” 

Viktor presses his thigh against Jayce’s, a line of warmth to keep him steady. 

“Then I would understand,” he says. 

Jayce leans forward, covers his face with his hand. 

“Jayce,” Viktor says, touching his back. 

“It hurts so much and I can’t do anything with it,” he says. “But I feel like a failure because—” he chokes. “You wanted this for me, you were trying to do something nice for me, and it just didn’t—”

Viktor holds him, feeling the tremor of his body, all the words and emotion he’s trying to suppress. 

“You could never disappoint me,” he says. “Do you understand? You simply can’t.” 

“Viktor—”

“You can’t,” he repeats. “I’d love to help you. We can design the prosthesis together, make it feel like yours. I’ll sit with you at the doctor’s, wait for you at the hospital, take you home and get you well.” He presses a kiss to the nape of Jayce’s neck. “And I will be so proud of you, Jayce. So proud that you were unafraid to take care of yourself the way you deserve.” 

He can feel Jayce’s shoulders shaking. He doesn’t push. For a long time he keeps rubbing Jayce’s back, kissing the back of his head. 

“I think I thought you’d think less of me,” Jayce says finally. “Because you live with the pain and I can’t.”

Viktor is at a loss for words. 

“Jayce,” he says, “I would never—”

“You’re so strong,” Jayce says, and laughs, pushing his hand through his hair. “God, I wish I was half as strong as you, but I’m not.”

“You can’t compare these things,” he says. 

“But I do,” Jayce says. “You know I do.” 

Viktor rests his head for a moment on the slope of Jayce’s back, lingering. 

“Yes,” he says simply. “I do.” 

“I keep trying to be the person you want me to be,” Jayce says, his voice hoarse. “The one you deserve.” 

“You are exactly who I want you to be,” he says. “By definition.” He threads his fingers through Jayce’s, squeezing, a soft pulse like a heartbeat. After a moment, Jayce squeezes back. 

—

He’s more loving after that, playful, trying. They make an appointment with a surgeon and Viktor sits with him at the kitchen table as he makes the call, holding his hand. When Viktor gets home from work Jayce kisses him at the door, soft and nuzzling, takes his hand and leads him to the couch, where he opens Viktor’s braces slowly, kissing the tender skin underneath.

“Jayce,” Viktor protests. 

He wraps his arms around Viktor’s leg, resting his cheek on the knee. “‘Snothing,” he murmurs, looking up at Viktor with dreamy eyes. “Just love you, V.”

They kiss in the kitchen; Jayce lifts him up to the counter, stands between his legs and trails his lips down Viktor’s slender neck. 

“Missed you,” he says quietly. “Missed my Viktor, my baby.” 

Viktor thinks he’s dreaming, and when he realizes he isn’t, he presses his forehead to Jayce’s, to this fugitive piece of the man he loves so much, and starts to cry. 

—

“What else do you know about him?”

They’re sitting on the balcony, a soft foggy day with a clamminess they fought off with a thermos of tea and a couple blankets. There was something that drew them both to that kind of landscape, the way it teased them by closing itself off, something they could never really have. The feeling of science again. 

“Smoker,” Jayce says immediately. 

“Really?”

“Covert smoker,” he says. “First day here I found a pack of Camels in his jacket. But the apartment doesn’t smell like smoke, obviously. So I think you told him not to and he started sneaking it at work.” He smiles oddly. “Man, this guy was just burning himself out with all the little fires he could, huh? Probably gave us lung cancer.” 

“Jayce.”

He reaches out and wraps his pinky finger around Viktor’s. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Just frustrated with him.”

“You burned yourself out in your own way, you know,” Viktor says. 

“Oh I know.” He laughs. “Believe me I know. If I smoked, smoking would be the least of my problems.”

There was a dry wind stirring the tops of the trees, scattered leaves whistling into the street. Viktor followed the tops of the buildings up until they disappeared into the fog. It reminded him in a way of that other self, this hidden part of him, not superseded but submerged. 

He knows absolutely nothing about Viktor who lived here before, because he lived the way Viktor had always lived, anywhere, covering his tracks. 

“You know, I was a smoker too,” he says. 

“Before we met?” Jayce says absently. 

“While we were, ah. Together.” 

“Really?” Jayce says, looking at him. 

“Never in front of you, obviously,” he says. “I didn’t want to, eh. Distress you. There was enough going on with my health that I thought it was best not to let you see.” 

“But not to quit,” Jayce says. 

“Not to quit,” he agrees. There was a context for these things. “The air down in the Fissures was so bad when I was growing up, a cigarette was practically like sucking on an air filter.” 

Jayce chokes. 

“Air filter my ass,” he says. 

Viktor smiles crookedly, not taking it back. “And besides, you had a tendency to nanny me.” He glances down at his lap, holds his fingers together just right, the old familiar shape of holding a little catastrophe in his hands. “I suppose I’ve nannied you here. This other me too.”

“You didn’t make me do anything,” Jayce says. “I forced your hand.” He takes Viktor’s fingers in his, molding them gently, until it doesn’t look like he’s holding a cigarette anymore. “I think you’ve been trying to take care of me,” he says. “This other me, I mean. But I didn’t want to hear it. We grew up so different. And I’m—”he laughs—“an asshole.”

“You’re not an asshole.” 

“Maybe,” Jayce says. He looks away. “I just get the sense he wasn’t a good person,” he says, and shakes his head, a little smile playing on his lips. “Maybe I just don’t like myself very much.” 

“I wouldn’t be too hard on him,” Viktor says, touching his shoulder. 

—

It isn’t until they’re in bed and Jayce takes him into his arms that he starts to cry. 

“Hey,” Jayce whispers, cupping his face. “Hey, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”

He does, doesn’t he? For the first time since they arrived here Viktor knows it’s true. He falls apart then, utterly, and stricken by grief for his world. 

“I’ll never see that dirty river again,” he gasps. “Or that fucking bridge.” 

“I know,” Jayce says, kissing his forehead tenderly. “I know, baby.” 

“No one there will ever know how much you meant to me,” he says. “Or the city, the city won’t—” He breaks off, confused. Something about the streets never witnessing it, the plaza, the places where they fell in love unmarked by them, completely. The only thing they’d ever done that lasted, that wasn’t—results still inconclusive—entirely annihilating. 

Nothing else has survived. Not Hextech, not his heady love for science; not his confidence in himself, wild and unearned. Not his mother’s simple folk songs and her lisp, not his father’s crooked smile, not the way he used to sit at the docks and watch the boats go by while his classmates went to the theater, because the river was free. For a while Viktor was too. Now that freedom is too much. He wants to feel tethered to something, anything at all. 

“I want my mother’s flatbread,” he murmurs into Jayce’s chest. “There were herbs like mint she would sprinkle on top—I want to smell them again. I don’t even need to taste them, just smell them baking. Or stand by the rocks again, in the river.”

“I know, baby.” Jayce’s warm hands pushing up the back of his shirt, caressing his bare skin—the heat turns his mind off, just for a moment, a warm glitch. “I wanna make bread for you. Wanna give you everything.” He kisses up the line of Viktor’s shoulder. “I hate that I can’t. But I can make you something new.”

“Please,” Viktor says, holding on. “I need something new.” 

Chapter Text