advanced practical physics (the laws of attraction apply)

by Sinister_Queer

Summary:

Jayce has five months left until he finishes his undergraduate degree. Five months until he could start his real life, until he could start doing what he wanted.

The only thing standing in his way is one group project and the partner he'd slept with two nights ago.

(Jayce and Viktor have a one night stand, then end up as group project buddies.)

Notes:

This is a hard left from my last two fics but! Here we are! I wrote this for myself as self-indulgent nonsense.

As a quick little overview and explanation: Caitlyn is a Social Work student with a criminology minor, who spends her free time volunteering in underserved communities. There's some discussions of things that she does, including working at Safe Injection Sites--there is one implication of drug use and addiction (implied to be related to Powder/Jinx) but it is not explicit.

Additionally, the basis of this fic exists on the premise of two consenting adults having sex while intoxicated, and one party forgetting things he said while doing so. If that makes you uncomfortable or you find it at all triggering - I encourage you to skip this!

Also I don't know how science works, I was a History student.

Five more months.

Five more months then he’s done with college.

Well—five more months and then he’s done with this part of his collegiate career. Five more months of classes, five more months of Gen Ed and tapping his toes in lecture halls just a little too crowded for him, doing whatever it is someone else tells him to do, working on whatever it is someone else tells him to work on.

Five more months and then he can finally do what he wants to do. Five more months and he can get back into creating things, into getting into the gritty mechanics of building and creating.

All he has to do is get through it.

Though, as he hears the distant thrum of music just beyond the well-graffittied door of the dive bar bathroom, step one is to get through tonight.

Jayce splashes a handful of cold water on his face as the thrumming bass of whatever terrible band is playing just beyond the walls of the single-stall bathroom.

His reflection is marred by scratches and the leftover residue of dozens of picked-off stickers, but he thinks he still looks alright. No hint of his rapid-fire pulse or the cold sweat that started to break out at the shove of people around him.

Just this. Just fine. He practiced a blinding, dimpled, smile.

Typically, Jayce avoids places like this. It’s not that he hates the push and pull of a raucous crowd, the infuriating grind of music too loud to follow and understand behind the thump of the bass. He just doesn’t like it.

Give him one of the quiet wine bars in the Academy District over this any day. A place where he can settle into a corner table or at a softly-lit bar, maybe chat with another student or one of the well-read women that come in with their sharp heels and their flawless hair.

Another smile, another practice under the flickering fluorescent that wobbles tenuously with the beat, before he dries his face with a paper towel.

It would be so much nicer than this, with the bathrooms cracked tile flooring and the chipped porcelain sink that is so loose that, quite frankly Jayce thinks if he leaned any of his weight into it, it would collapse.

“Why did Caitlyn drag us here?” He asks his reflection. It doesn’t answer, fortunately.

The last thing Jayce needs going into his final year of college is hallucations. It’s bad enough he has to take chemistry.

And English.

His nose crinkles at the thought as he balls up the paper towel to toss into an overfilled trash. At least Gen Ed credits are easy, he thinks to himself as he shoulders the door open gently.

Almost immediately a gruff-looking man with prematurely thinning hair and a cluster of tattoos up the length of his neck pushes past him.

“Fuckin’ finally. Been waitin’ to piss for a fuckin’ hour,” he grumbles as Jayce side-steps him with a grimace.

It isn’t enough that he feels out of place, a quick scan of the bar happily shows him that he looks out of place, too.

In Jayce’s defense, Caitlyn never suggested a place like this before. She’d said that morning, hurrying to finish getting ready for one of the handful of organizations she volunteers with, that she’d heard about it from a friend. Highly recommended. Fantastic drinks.

Typically, dinner and a few drinks out with his roommate means a sort of sit-down place with ambient lighting and a server who assumes they’re on a date. There’s a wine list, and an endless argument over who’s turn it is to pay that almost always ends with Caitlyn kicking him under the table when he wins and tucks his card into the fold.

It’s your parents money anyway, he’d point out. Kiramman daughter, Kiramman Fellow. It works.

He’d dressed for that, to come home at a respectable nine, check his portal for the syllabi for his upcoming, second-to-last semester at college, and watch a shitty action movie with her on their overpriced and uncomfortable sofa. Jayce at the bracelet tucked under the sleeve of his well-fitted jacket, comparing the lines of his neat dark blue button-down—top two buttons undone, paired with jeans and clean tennis shoes to make it more casual, easy-going, all of the careful math that goes into knowing how to dress in a social situation.

If his quick glance is correct, he might be the only person here not wearing a leather jacket. Or flannel.

Or both.

Another person brushes past him, jerking him out of his own tangled hand space.

The bar itself might not be terrible, but Jayce can’t quite see the whole of it between the rattling music and the throng of patrons who all look like they’ve either come off grueling days of work or just left the most recent punk house show. He wriggles his way through the crowd to the best of his ability, eyes tracking for the slash of blue he’d come here with.

He spots Caitlyn once he finally nears the surprisingly clean bar.

She sits on a worn stool just as delicately as she sits during one of her parents charity events, back straight and legs crossed at the ankles. Her head throws back as she laughs what seems like far too magnanimously at whatever the rough-looking, pink-haired bartender is saying.

Jayce’s brows knit as he steps close enough to hear the sound of her. She’s never laughed that hard with him. And he’s hilarious.

He slides in to lean on the polished wood beside her. “What’s so funny?”

She starts like she hadn’t even noticed him which, based on the chaos around him, it’s fair to think she didn’t.

The bartender shoots him a look that Jayce can feel digging through his skin. One brow raises as her eyes sweep down the length of him. That playful tug to the corner of her lips she’s had before is replaced with an almost bitter scowl. “What can I get you?”

Is that a tattoo? On her face? Jayce clears his throat. “Oh, um. Just a, uh—“

“He’ll have one of these,” Caitlyn says, her cheeks the sort of warm pink that Jayce knows means she’s well into the second of whatever it is one finger is tapping the rim of. “They’re amazing, you’ll love them.”

The last bit was turned to him but Jayce isn’t quite sure it was meant for him. The bartender looks between the two before stepping back.

“Sure thing, cupcake.” And she disappears to fix the drink.

Cupcake?

Jayce glances over at Caitlyn and that is a blush.

And oh.

Yeah, okay.

Jayce turns so he’s facing her properly, one arm leaned against the bar to look at Caitlyn as she pushes one loose strand of hair behind an ear. “Friend recommended this place?”

It comes out all at once as Caitlyn leans in, hand blocking her mouth from whoever may be listening. “Her name is Vi and it’s short for Violet and I met her a few weeks while I was volunteering and she was there because she also volunteers at Haven just on opposite days but she was taking over for someone’s shift and she’s—” Caitlyn’s voice pitches lower. “Don’t be mad? I really do want to spend time with you before courses start properly and I thought because she’s working it would be a neutral place to get your opinion on her without making it seem like I’m seeking your approval.”

He blinks rapidly, taking in the information.

“Um,” is what Caitlyn gets from her parents' substantial yearly stipend for Jayce’s research.

“Well?” She hisses before she drops the hand to wave to Vi as she approaches with a highball glass. It has some sort of layered drink, a pale blue with purple leaking from the topmost layer.

If he knows Caitlyn, it’s going to be sweet, Jayce can feel it. His teeth already hurt.

Before he can pull out his wallet, Caitlyn is beaming. “His drinks are on my tab.”

“Hey,” he tries but Caitlyn just elbows him.

“He got dinner last night, so now it’s my turn.” Okay. That was absolutely aimed at him. Jayce backs down with a slightly sheepish smile

Vi glances hesitantly between them, the line of her shoulders pinning straighter as she just nods and leans her weight back away from them. “Sounds good.” And she’s gone again to tend to someone she knows at the other end of the bar.

Caitlyn is staring at him like she expects a response and Jayce just looks up at Vi, then back over at Caitlyn. “She seems nice,” he tries.

She groans, head slumping into her hands. “She is, Jayce. I promise. When we were at Haven, she told me about her family and how much she takes care of them. And we talked about the stigma of supervised injection sites and how she has this sister who—” Caitlyn cuts herself off, head sinking lower. “I shouldn’t. It’s not my place, but the point is Jayce, she is very nice.”

“That’s…what I said. I said she seems nice,” he points out, taking his drink in hand. He was right. Sweet.

“Right, but you said it after she’d just been a bit rude to you.”

Jayce looks over to where Vi is chatting with a patron twice her size, the sort of warmth and customer service that had been much, much, colder when Jayce had slunk in beside Caitlyn. It hits him pretty quickly. “Cait. Think she might think we’re dating?”

One unpainted but well-manicured hand peels back from her eyes. “Oh. Oh.”

He slides his drink her way, letting her wrap her hands around it with a bit of an apologetic look. “I’ll make sure you get home safe, alright? I’m gonna grab some air.”

Caitlyn takes his drink, and gives him a smile as he sets about moving through the crowd of people. When he’s with her, it’s calmer, he doesn’t taste the bitter rush of adrenaline on the back of his tongue or feel the weight of his own heartbeat in his throat.

She’s like a wave of calm in the chaos, an eye in the maelstrom.

Jayce had known Caitlyn for five years, since the first charity event he was invited to as a recipient of the one of the sought-after Kiramman Institute Higher Learning Scholarships. Each of the winners had gone, received a collective little applause after an announcement from Cassandra Kiramman. Jayce hadn’t known what to do with himself, stuck at a table with a gaggle of other to-be-recent high school graduates. Each one of them seemed unsure and nervous.

Once dinner was over and people were socializing, he’d gone on a bit of a tour around the outside of the well-adorned hall. That was where he found her. A tall, awkward sixteen year old in a dark blue dress eyeing up a plate of white chocolate strawberries.

For the life of him, he can’t remember what they’d talked about, but they’d talked until Cassandra herself had peeled away from a gaggle of other high-powered real adults that made Jayce too nervous to think straight.

I see you’ve met my daughter, Caitlyn, she’d said, with that cool grin that Jayce was already starting to find a touch uncomfortable. You know she’s planning on attending the Academy next year as well. Perhaps you two would get along.

He glances once over his shoulder at where Vi had returned to chat with Caitlyn before a shift of bodies closes off the sight from him.

The outside of the bar isn’t too much calmer than the inside, really, but the open sky above lets the sound of arguments and rowdy drunks singing disperse easier. A cool breeze cuts through Jayce the second the door swings shut behind him. It had looked better when they arrived, he thinks, but the evening glow had since melted into a frigid night. The rain from the afternoon had frozen into grey slush, crunching under Jayce’s feet as he steps out of the way of a cloud of smoke gathered around a decrepit ashtray.

He rubs his hands together to stave off the chill as he rounds the corner to get a bit more privacy for a moment.

And he has it, up until the exact moment a young woman stumbles out of the side door, and judging by the awful retching noise, promptly vomits into an overflowing trash can.

Two others wobble after her, crooning drunken platitudes and reaching to hold back her hair.

Jayce grimaces and takes a half-step back, not realizing until he collides with something solid and warm behind him that he isn’t the only one watching. He jumps, despite himself, whipping around with an apology pre-loaded in his throat.

He didn’t know what he expected, but he’s fairly certain the pale slash of an almost delicate-featured man wasn’t it. He seems about the same age as Jayce, though the darkness makes it difficult to tell for certain. One dark brow raises over eyes that Jayce is fairly certain are gold, but it could just be a trick of the street lamps. He’s dressed…not unsimilar to how Jayce is, really. Jeans and a nice shirt, though the stranger has vest neatly buttoned down the front and a—fuck.

Jayce grimaces as soon as he sees the cane gripped in his hand. Nice going, you almost bowled over someone with a cane, Jayce. Fantastic spacial awareness there.

“Shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there,” he says.

The man shrugs one thin shoulder. “It’s fine.” Oh. Jayce brows knit as he tries to place the lilt of his accent. Before he can even open his mouth to ask without thinking, the stranger tilts his head towards the gaggle of women. “Your friends?”

“Huh?” Jayce…it takes a moment for him to detangle himself from the image of the man before him, suddenly a little caught in the curl of his hair, trying to determine in the low light if it’s brown or black or what. “Oh! Oh, uh. No. I’m…I came to grab some fresh air and it looks like they have that covered.”

A hum. “My apologies, but I recently picked a friend up from this establishment. She was rather, eh, gone by the time I got here. She couldn’t find her wallet so I told her I’d come back to look for it.”

Jayce’s brows jump. “Wow. Uh. That’s really nice. She’s lucky to have a friend like you.”

Another shrug. “I’d hope she’d do the same for me.” He points down the alley. “I’m trying to get past you.”

Goddammit. Jayce feels himself darken in the low light. “Right. Sorry I um.” He steps back. “Did you need help, by the way? My friend’s inside hitting on the bartender who I don’t think likes me very much, so I’ve got a couple minutes.”

His eyes are piercing when they flicker over him. Something shifts across his expression and Jayce can’t quite read it. “If you’d like. I could use a little light, I suppose.”

It takes more than a couple minutes of them searching by the light of Jayce’s phone, but once the girls disperse Jayce finds the wallet abandoned atop a pizza box that neither of them care to determine how old it is. His temporary companion confirms by the ID that it is his friend’s.

“I’ll text her,” he says, fishing his phone out with one hand. “Though judging by the state she was in, I presume she’s, eh, no longer awake.”

Jayce winces. “Hope you left her on her side.”

“I did. And drunk or not, Sky is a smart woman.” He taps out a message before he pockets it again. “Well. This has been an exciting evening but I’m afraid I should be getting back now.”

Something in Jayce’s chest seizes at the idea of him leaving. This smoke-wisp stranger who doesn’t seem to mind the cold that’s been biting at Jayce’s fingers since they started their search leans back with a series of pops and cracks.

He opens his mouth to tell him to have a good evening, or have a safe walk home, or any one of a thousand reasonable, normal things to say to someone he just met. Someone whose name he hasn’t even asked yet. “You came all the way out to a bar, twice, and you’re not even going to go in for a drink?”

Well that wasn’t any of them. He winces at the faint desperation he can pick up in his own voice, but the idea of going back in, and going back in alone sends his stomach into knots. He’s better when he’s like this: people pleasing and managing attention and expectations and keeping someone else in order.

Being alone in public is a different story altogether.

The stranger stares at him for a long moment while the wind whispers around him and, for a second, Jayce can’t hear the muted thrum of music or the sound of a couple bickering by the door. It’s just the wind.

“Are you offering to buy me one?” He asks, lips pulling into what seems like a faint smile.

Jayce’s cheeks darken. “I…yes.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

This is where he’s good, this is what he can do. Flash a smile, wide and bright. “Jayce. Jayce Talis. But I mean…Jayce is…yeah.”

One thin fingered hand extends out and, in the hollow of his shirt’s sleeve, Jayce swears he sees a line of black coiling around his skin. He’s cold to the touch when Jayce takes it in a firm, formal, shake. “Nice to meet you, Jayce. I’m Viktor.”

###

Jayce buys him a drink. Then another.

He trades drinks for stories, drinks for facts, drinks for Viktor to push up his sleeve to show the complicated pattern of galaxies and stars interlaced with binary and coding tattooed into his skin.

He trades a drink for a kiss. Then another.

He loses track by the time one of Viktor’s narrow fingers slips into Jayce’s belt loop.

He trades a kiss to see Viktor’s apartment. He trades a drink for a promise to see the rest of his tattoos.

###

Jayce comes to the next morning feeling a little bit like the time he was eight, running through the house with heavy wool socks on, trying to catch the motorized toy car he’d rigged to run on its own. He’d slipped on the slick tile floor and slammed his head into the side of one of his mothers china cabinets.

Once the frightened tears cleared, he was left sniffling against his mothers chest with the absolute worst headache he’d ever had.

Well. The absolute worst headache he’d ever had until this exact moment.

Whatever early morning light is filtering through Jayce’s blinds finds the perfect angle to lay perfectly flat across his eyes. That, combined with a distant buzzing sound that Jayce can’t identify, draws a weak and almost whining groan out of him.

He rolls over on the thin, narrow, mattress, before three realities hit him at once:

1: He isn’t eight with a throbbing bruise on his head. He’s twenty-two with a terrible hangover that also means he’s going to be nauseous for the next day and a half.

2: He’s on the knife's edge of this bed, and rolling over means rolling off it. And, arguably most importantly,

3: This isn’t his bed.

Jayce’s eyes fly open as the world comes into sharp, searing, focus.

The first thing he sees is, well, the wall directly in front of him. Mostly, the number of papers and post-its and note cards pinned and taped up as if the entire surface had been turned into an oversized study board.

Okay that’s actually smart, Jayce finds himself thinking as he tries to let his swarming vision narrow in on one thing over the rest. It looks like pages torn out of a sketchbook, maybe some sort of schematics?

Jayce would need to be far less hungover and far more focused to really be able to piece it together. And right now, neither of those things seem like they’re going to happen.

He sits up gingerly, head seaming and stomach pitching at the sudden not-at-all-sudden shift. It’s a studio apartment, by the looks of it. Jayce is closest to the wall, but on the other side of the bed there’s one of those tall wooden dividers, cutting through the space to carve a small bedroom out of what is likely the living room.

Directly across from the bed, however, he can see the edge of a fridge through the entry to the kitchen.

There’s enough room on either side of the bed for someone to walk, hypothetically, of course. Jayce peers over the edge to find his side is mostly filled with stacks of textbooks and journals, one of which has his underwear draped over it.

He snags that for later, scoping out what else he can quickly find.

It’s almost embarrassingly late when he notices the body in his, well not his, bed. A rail-thin rise to the dusty blue duvet tucked around them both, leading up to a tangle of mused, dark brown, hair.

And, very suddenly, last night slams Jayce with all the force of an eight year old skidding into an oak cabinet.

The bar with Caitlyn, the bartender with the raging crush on her, the stranger in the alley whose name he can’t pull from the depths of his memory. It started with a V, he thinks. Vince? Val?

I’m Viktor, rings out in his mind, a ghost of a memory from the night before. The curl of his accent. Viktor.

Viktor. They’d gotten a sticky corner booth to crowd together in where Jayce could keep an eye on Caitlyn. They’d gotten drinks, proper ones that time. They’d gotten more drinks. And more drinks. Jayce remembers the flash of ink beneath Viktor’s sleeve, remembers tracing a whorling pattern that he can’t recall anymore, the feeling of Viktor’s fingers curling between his own. Caitlyn had stumbled back to them a few hours later, more excited and flushed them she was drunk.

A late night dinner with her new friend, a food truck a few blocks away. Vi would drive her home, no need to worry. No need to stay up.

Jayce wasn’t too far gone that he couldn’t read the look in her eyes, the way she bounced on her toes and kept stealing glances back at Vi who’s shift was clearly up, judging by the red leather jacket she was pulling on.

He’d agreed, because, because—why had he agreed so readily? Normally he’d insist they shouldn’t go alone, he’d be more nervous for Caitlyn out so late at night in such a rough area.

Was it Vi? His brows knit as he thinks, pressing his nails into his lips. She seemed strong, she seemed smart to the area?

Was it—Jayce flushes all at once as a burst of familiar heat strikes him.

Vi seemed strong, she seemed like she could handle both herself and Cait and Viktor’s hand was halfway up the inside of Jayce’s thigh, tracing the seam of his jeans.

Viktor.

Now the world tilts back into focus yet again. Viktor’s hand on his leg, his voice getting lower when he drank, the soft bow of his lips and the lure of his eyes.

Jayce doesn’t remember what they talked about but they talked for hours—his eyes flicker back up to the diagrams.

Oh, I double-major. Engineering and Biology with a Physics minor, it’s all in preparation for the Biomedical Engineering track in the graduate program. No, no, I’m still waiting to hear back. Decisions come out in a few months, don’t they?

Work. Right. Jayce had been starstruck. Jayce had been amazed.

Jayce kissed him in the middle of the grungy little bar and he asked Jayce to come home with him.

The soft burn low in his stomach that comes with the memory of hands in his hair, and his teeth on his throat is doused immediately at the realization that he’s about to face a tremendously awkward morning with someone he barely knows.

The body beside him shifts as, on a chipped side table, a phone starts to buzz with an alarm again. It must be Viktor’s, because before he has the cognizance to do something about it, one spindly arm uncurls from under the pillows to tap the screen to make it stop.

Jayce holds his breath, but there’s only another shift, a faint little groan, and a burrow deeper into the blankets. It’s…honestly kind of cute. It takes everything in him to resist sinking further into the bed and drawing his fingers through the sleep-mused curls, to see what Viktor’s tattoos look like in the warm glow of the morning sun.

And, for a second, he wonders why he doesn’t? What’s stopping him from laying back down and pretending to be asleep until Viktor shifts beside him? What’s stopping him from waiting until he wakes up and kissing him and asking if he wants to get breakfast at that cafe a few blocks from campus that he keeps meaning to go to?

It’s just a one night stand, he tells himself with a wince. Don’t make it weird. Don’t make it awkward.

It takes a few more minutes of searching around the bed before Jayce spots his jeans in a pool near the foot. He wriggles down to nab them, checking his pockets for his phone which is, thankfully, still alive.

If barely.

He winces at the red warning as he dips into the final 7% and quickly checks his texts.

There were a few from Caitlyn, telling him she got home safe, asking him where he was, then asking, a bit more firmly, if he was alright.

She’d called him half an hour ago, and sent another message: I hope you’re having a good time! If you don’t text me back in a couple hours I will start to get concerned though.

He fires off a quick apology, slinking off the bed and into his clothes.

Beyond the divider that made up the little bed nook, the rest of the apartment is, well, kind of a mess. The bedroom wall, it seems, isn’t the only wall of ideas and schematics that this guy has. There’s a tattered and faded maroon loveseat pressed up against one wall, with a lamp half-hidden behind it and a coffee table probably buried under the stacks of books and open notes.

Viktor even has a whole blackboard, the old school kind that flips to another side, covered in equations and diagrams that Jayce…Jayce honestly thinks he can figure out if he thinks about it. He does up his fly as he pads across the carpeting, squinting at the line of equations chalked out in a semi-neat script. The one at the very end is unfinished, with all the smeared markings around it someone who tried and tried and tried again to solve it.

There’s chalk sitting there, like a beacon, as Jayce approaches. It’s the sort of problem that, quite frankly, might have gone over Jayce’s head. The sort of thing that he knows the longer he stares at it the less and less he’ll understand about it. Still, rolling the chalk between two fingers, he follows the lines of brilliant calculations. Jesus, who is this guy?

He finds the error between the third and fourth equation. It isn’t a calculation error, it’s a copying error. The output Viktor had found wasn’t the one he’d inputted into the next—making the last two calculations off. It’s obvious when Jayce thumbs away the problems that Viktor had clearly done this in pieces and he tries not to imagine him, that vest half-buttoned as he rushes to finish between classes, between something he’s hurrying to. Those thin lips between his teeth as he runs the math again and again.

It’s just a few minutes and a couple more percent off the battery of his phone—but he’s fairly certain that it’s correct when he sets the chalk down.

Jayce steps back, that little flint-spark of pride starting to catch tinder in his chest, and immediately spots his shirt tossed over the back of the couch.

And between his feet, is one of it’s buttons.

“Fuck,” he whispers, crouching down to grab it before he collects his shirt. He shoves the button in his pocket and pulls the shirt on anyway, letting it hang open over his chest.

He finds his shoes, double-checks for his wallet, his keys, anything else he might need before he creaks open the front door, just hoping his phone lasts long enough for his Lyft to get here.

###

Jayce stands outside, in a part of town he doesn’t necessarily recognize, with his shirt wrapped around himself, for a good ten minutes before the blue Nissan described in the app arrives.

He catches his reflection in the tinted window before the driver rolls it down, and Jayce nearly blanches at the sight.

From the space just under his jaw down well past his collarbone is a thundercloud of bruises.

Jayce’s fingers catch the edge of one perfect imprint of Viktor’s teeth.

Fuck.

###

Caitlyn doesn’t say anything about it when Jayce gets home, but Vi does. While wearing what Jayce is pretty sure is one of his hoodies that Caitlyn had stolen when she’d caught a bad flu a few years back.

“Jesus, you fight a bobcat on your way back from the Lanes?” She asks, sitting in Jayce’s spot on their uncomfortable sofa with a bowl of cereal in her lap and Caitlyn half-curled beside her.

When Jayce grimaces, Caitlyn shoots her an almost scandalized look. “Vi.”

“What?”

There’s a quiet back-and-forth that Jayce is too tired to actually listen to as he drops his keys on the little table beside their front door. “It’s fine, don’t sweat it,” he says, cutting through their conversation before pointing to the center in a line of three neat white doors. His to the right, Caitlyn’s to the left. “I’m gonna take a shower, if that’s fine?”

Caitlyn scrambles up, circling the couch in—okay that is what Vi was wearing last night. At least Jayce thinks. He hadn’t gotten a close look but he’s pretty sure Caitlyn doesn’t own a ragged MMA tank-top.

And he’s a pretty smart guy most of the time.

“Before you do. May I borrow your car? Just to give Vi a lift home.”

Jayce’s brow raises. “And you can’t use yours because…” He trails off just in time for a cool lance of guilt to pierce through him with Caitlyn’s wince. Realization burns hot in the frozen wound.

“My—”

“Shit, yeah.” Her parents. From the second Cassandra had swooped in over Jayce and Caitlyn at the charity event, Jayce had felt the constant paternal nervousness that absolutely leaks from them. Caitlyn, for all the freedom her wealth gives her, has always been a little locked down. And, as much as it makes him a little queasy to think it, he can’t imagine Vi lives in a part of town where they’d be happy with Caitlyn going. “Keys are on the table and you know where I—oh, fuck me.”

Dark brows knit as she pushes a wayward strand of blue hair back behind her ear. “What?” She squints, those eyes reading him as easily as one of her social work textbooks. “You forgot to pick up your car.”

It isn’t a question, it’s a statement. Cold and hard as if she were telling him he forgot to pick up eggs for the third time.

“I forgot to pick up my car,” he admits, scrubbing a hand over his face. “My phone was dying and it was cold and I’m honestly so hungover, Cait.”

She hums, a sharp little noise. “I’m surprised. Your, erm. Your companion last night assured me he’d remind you to collect it. Though it seems you might have been…” her nose wrinkles and Vi finishes for her with a tactful: “Busy.”

Did he? Jayce tries to remember, the hours between the first and last drink blurry in the haze of the evening.

Viktor’s hand was cold when it landed on Jayce’s wrist, those amber eyes soft with alcohol and arousal. Don’t worry. I’ll ensure he remembers in the morning.

Jayce had laughed, his cheek pressed to one sharp shoulder. He’d laughed and curled an arm around Viktor’s waist to tug him closer, pressed his nose to his temple to breathe him in.

“He, uh, he wasn’t awake,” Jayce says, slow and a little hesitant. “When I left.”

Now Caitlyn’s brows jump. Her cheeks dust pink just a little. “Ah. Well I… erm, Vi and I can certainly go get it, if you’d like?”

Jayce nods, feeling his own face grow a little hot at the confession. He really left, didn’t he. Snuck out the morning after without even a goodbye. Or leaving his phone number.

His fingers twitch to his pocket. Or getting his.

It feels remarkably like getting punched in the chest.

Or colliding with heavy oak.

Or a terrible hangover.

Vi assures him his car would be fine left overnight, and if anything happened she’d handle it personally. She knows the owner, she’d explained, he raised her. He’d be invested in handling it too.

Jayce wants to ask, but he doesn’t. He’s pretty sure he’s been rude enough for one day.

And if, once he hears Caitlyn and Vi leave from behind the thrum of blistering water striking the shower floor, Jayce sinks against the wall with his hand gripped around himself and Viktor’s eyes flashing through his mind—that’s his business and no one else’s.

###

 

Jayce’s first class is at 10:45am on Monday and, by 10:46am, he regrets every decision he’s ever made in his collegiate career that led him to this moment.

Starting with the physics major and ending with leaving the house this morning.

He’d started out overflowing with confidence, fixing his hair in the bathroom mirror and reminding himself that just nine more months. Nine more months of this before he’s done with his undergrad and he can finally, finally, do what he’s been destined for. Do all the things he’s wanted to do.

Everything had gone perfectly that morning, triple-checking that he had his notebooks and his laptop tucked away in his canvas messenger bag, a quick bite to eat and a coffee from his favorite place on the drive to campus.

His first class of the day was even with one of his favorite professors.

Which, well, should have been Jayce’s first warning.

Yes, he adores Professor Heimerdinger. Yes, Professor Heimerdinger is his advisor, yes, he spent the end of last semester helping Jayce figure out graduate programs and schools, and apply to them. Yes, he’s already admitted that Jayce should be anticipating his acceptance to the graduate program at the Academy, even though decisions wouldn’t be out until the later days of February.

And yes, he has taken every other class that Professor Heimerdinger had offered—including what Jayce would, generously, refer to as the most difficult theoretical physics course he’s ever endured.

But this?

Jayce sinks into the creaking auditorium-style seat in the overstuffed lecture hall, watching a dull powerpoint flicker to another slide.

Professor Heimerdinger was a short puffball of a man, contentedly pacing back and forth across the breadth of the lecturer hall. Jayce isn’t very good with other people's heights, but he’s pretty sure Heimerdinger comes in at a little under five feet, though his impressively well-groomed and sizable mustache, combined with an almost equally impressively unkempt tangle of stark white hair, always seems to give him much more of an air of authority and grace surrounding him.

He stands straight as he paces, hands held neatly behind his back.

“The mid-semester due date is because, as this project comprises thirty-five percent of your final grade, it replaces any requirement for a midterm exam,” he says, the red glow of a laser pointer that Jayce honestly can’t figure out how he’s pointing without looking flashes along the screen with their grade breakdown.

One project. Worth thirty-five percent of his grade.

That would be fine, in fact that would be exactly the sort of thing that Jayce lived for. No bouncing his foot in crowded testing rooms or biting his nail as he solved equations in a race against a clock to prove he studied the material. Real, tangible, practical experience. Building things. With his hands! Like Jayce wanted like Jayce has wanted for semester after semester of theoretical classes and reading seminars.

“You and your partner will be graded as a pair, receiving equal shares of the total grade.”

And there it was. Jayce’s eyes flickered across the crowded lecture hall, trying to find someone, anyone, who looked worthy of actually partnering with.

Or at the very least someone who wouldn’t get in his way when he did all the work for them.

He could probably find someone like that, carry the whole project himself and churn out a decent piece of machinery. He muses as his pen drags boxes and lines across the edges of the printed syllabus. If I come up with a great project, and pitch it the second we get our partners, maybe I can just do it alone, he offers himself.

“You’ll decide your partner during whatever lab you’ve signed up for. And as an additional little incentive for putting forth the best project you can, whichever pair has the most impressive functioning prototype by the middle of the term will be given an automatic full mark on their final exam.”

Well, Jayce thinks as he stops adding to a collection of spiral doodles in the margin of his notebook and perks up. At least there’s that.

He’d signed up for the evening lab slot in a valiant attempt to give himself both Thursdays and Fridays free to do work on applications and the ever-growing mountain of personal projects—so once Jayce was able to slip from the crowded lecture hall, he had a solid three and a half hours to consider exactly what wowing and breath-taking project he was going to come up with.

Well, so long as no one counted the hour-and-fifteen minutes he had to spend in his English lecture. Or the hour and a half he spent at lunch with Caitlyn, bemoaning the stack of books he had to pick up for it from the campus bookstore.

Or the twenty minutes he spent actually in the campus bookstore, wading through waves of disoriented and starry-eyed first-years struggling to find their way through the organizational system.

Still. Twenty-five minutes was plenty of time.

Definitely.

Absolutely.

And exactly twenty-five minutes later, Jayce decides that was absolutely not enough time, his chest burning as his messenger bag slaps against his thigh at a rhythmic rate.

Really it was twenty-six minutes, and it was an absolutely useless twenty-six minutes because now Jayce is going to be late. He is going to be late to his first lab of his last year of college and if he’s late, then what is Professor Heimerdinger going to think and what if it reflects on his recommendation letters and he knows Heimerdinger is on the Graduate Committee—so how he can expect to get accepted and there goes his career and his ideas and Jayce can feel his future crumbling down around him with the hard smack of his feet against the worn brick walkways leading up to the towering Cecil B. Laboratory Annex.

On a good day, Jayce finds the building a rather stunning show of architectural beauty—brilliant copper paneling reflects the low-hanging sun, the glare of it only broken by rows upon rows of tremendous green-tinted windows.

When he’s already thirty-six seconds late for the start of class, panting at the steps leading into the six-story building, it’s a fucking nightmare.

Jayce groans as he pushes forward, slowing from a dead sprint to a quick walk as he pushes the doors open and takes a sharp right to head for the elevators. He’s pretty sure he could take the stone steps three at a time and make it to the sixth-floor lab at almost the same pace, but he’s pretty sure he’ll sweat through his shirt and show up looking even worse than he already does.

Which, Jayce would admit, he’s not looking great at the moment.

His perfectly set hair has fallen loose, a few stray strands swooping low and sticking to his sweat-dampened forehead. He can feel his shirt sticking to his back as he raises a hand at the—fuck at the closing elevator doors.

“Hey! Hey hold on just—sorry, sorry,” he calls, and he could fucking sob with relief when a pale hand catches the edge of the door to let him in and—

And suddenly Jayce is in the chill of that shitty dive bar in the Lanes, his fingers burning from the cold but unable to look away from sharp, amber-colored eyes. All he can hear is the whisper of the wind around them and somewhere, maybe, the ghost of a bass thumping and a couple having an argument and a girl vomiting on her brand new shoes.

He blinks twice as his mouth struggles to work.

Luckily, Viktor doesn’t seem to have the same problem. His once amused expression is pulled into an annoyed pinch as he says: “I’m nearly late for class, are you getting on or no?”

Like a rubber band’s release—the kinetic potential held in Jayce’s bones is snapped into action. “Fuck,” he says, stepping into the elevator. “Yeah. Sorry. I um.”

He goes to press the button for the sixth floor, but it appears that Viktor already has it pressed. Jayce clears his throat, and suddenly he feels a lot hotter than he did while he was running. He adjusts the strap of his bag as the doors slide closed and they lurch, unceremoniously, into motion.

Viktor is dressed remarkably similarly to how Jayce had seen him at the bar, a cream-colored sweater vest layered over a dark button-down and dark slacks. Everything about him looks well-collected and put together and all Jayce can think about is the inside of his apartment and the patterns of tattoos he couldn’t make out in the darkness.

It’s hard to put Viktor into that place, to take the reality of him here, weight slumped onto a dark red and copper cane and his eyes fixated on a strange middle-distance somewhere between the floor and the button panel of the elevator, and put him into that apartment. A maelstrom of knowledge strewn about, the evidence of brilliance at every chaotic corner.

Someone so neat and so clever. What must it be like in his head? Jayce wonders, before he realizes two things at once.

First: he’s staring.

Second: when Viktor shifts, the skin of his throat pulls just high enough over his collar that Jayce can see the hint of a bruise as the ghost-memory taste of Viktor’s skin plays across his tongue.

He clears his throat immediately and looks away. “I um. Nice seeing you,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Again.”

Viktor hums beside him. “Likewise.”

Jayce squeezes his eyes and stares at the ceiling, hands balled into fists as he tries to keep the nervous energy from bouncing through his legs and into the ground around him. The last thing he wants is to jolt the elevator so hard it stalls. Then what’ll it be. It’ll be him missing the first day of lab, the day when he’s supposed to be coming up with a grand experiment and a day when he’s supposed to be finding a partner who will let him just do all the work and won’t get in his way—it’ll be the end of his great grade in this class and the end of his last chance to impress Heimerdinger before decisions come out next month and—

“You look like you’re about to be sick,” Viktor says. “And if you’re going to, do you mind waiting until I’m off the elevator?”

Deep breath in, deep breath out. “Sorry. I’m just late to a really important class and I hate being late.”

He feels the silence more than he hears it. Eventually, Viktor breaks it. “Which class is it?”

“It’s a lab for Professor Heimerdinger’s—”

“Applied electromagnetic physics course?” Viktor finishes, and Jayce looks at him only to find Viktor staring right back.

Jayce struggles for words as the elevator doors ding to signal their arrival. He steps out and aside, one hand pressed to the doorway to keep the from closing as Viktor follows. “Yeah?”

“I’m in that class too,” he says. “And this lab. And, eh—” he pauses to check a watch, an actual watch. “You’re not late.”

Huh? Jayce watches Viktor start down the hall, the click of his cane almost deafening in the sudden cavernous quiet. “I…class starts at three thirty,” he says, he checks the phone in his pocket, wincing. “It’s three thirty-two.”

Viktor pauses, looking back over his shoulder with one dark brow raised. “Class starts at three thirty-five.”

The fact that he might be right slams into Jayce harder than he’d like to admit. He scrambles for words, for thoughts, for anything that he might be able to say to get himself out of this. But he comes up empty. Absolutely fucking empty.

Jayce rushes up to Viktor’s side and says the absolute stupidest thing he could possibly choose to say: “Do you want to be partners?” (Jayce what happened to the plan. Jayce what happened to the plan? Jayce what happened to the plan?)

Viktor’s cane clicks against the ground as he stops, immediately, in the middle of the hallway. Around them, another student rushes towards the lab room at the end of the hall—where Jayce can see the flutter of movement and hear the low filter of voices and discussions from within.

“I’m sorry?” Viktor says. “What?”

“The project? It’s partner based and I saw your work in your—” his winces, feeling the desperation in his voice. “I saw your work in your apartment when I was um. When I was leaving and you’re…I mean…I wasn’t sure what you were doing but at least I already know you’re smart and I have a couple ideas for things we could do and if you wanted to, I could just work on it while you do whatever it is you want to do.”

Viktor stares at him like he’s a particularly vexing equation.

“I saw what you did,” he says, voice flat. “On the chalkboard.”

“Oh! Yeah it was pretty simple. I’ve made that mistake like, a thousand times. I’m guessing you changed an input after you did the equation the first time, and then changed it in one of the figures but not another, so you were using two different sources of input?”

Viktor blinks twice now. “I…yes? You…I had been working on that project all weekend. It was very close to completion and it still is, I have some more testing to do before I’m ready to build any sort of—” he cuts himself off with a shake of his head. “Why would I want to be partners on a project and have you do all the work?”

Jayce shrugs. “It’s a group project. That’s kinda how they work.”

At that, Viktor actually looks like he agrees. His face pulls into an expression that Jayce recognizes now. Before it falls again, back to that complicated-math-problem look. Like he can’t find what he did wrong with Jayce. What equation was wrong, which input, which output? Where did he fall to pieces? “How much do you remember about Saturday evening?”

Oh? Jayce lets his eyes flicker down the length of Viktor’s body. He smiles, sharp and raises a brow. “All of it.”

Well. Most of it. He remembers what counts. Viktor’s body stretched out under him, the dark lines against tan skin, the feeling of him hot and tight around him. The way he sounded when Jayce’s name broke across his tongue like a prayer.

Jayce isn’t sure what he expects, but the immediate collapse of Viktor’s face isn’t one of them.

“Fine,” is what he says. “Partners. On this project.” And Viktor sticks his hand out to shake.

Jayce wants to say something about how a handshake seems weirdly formal when he’s had Viktor’s dick in his mouth, but he doesn’t. He takes his hand and shakes it once. Firm and classic. “Partners.”

Viktor releases him almost immediately, turning to make for the door at the end of the hall. “Also. Now we’re late.”

 

###

 

Jayce pretends not to be elated when Viktor pours himself into the seat beside him. For the next three weeks, he pretends every time he does it.

They talk. About nothing sometimes, but other times they talk about things that matter.

Jayce learns three things in those there weeks:

1: Viktor’s favorite genre is 80’s science fiction.

2: If he gets him started on it, Viktor can talk about the role of profits and capitalism in science until Professor Heimerdinger has to clear his throat at least three times to get him to focus on the lecture.

3: Jayce still wants to kiss him. A lot.

###

Jayce already knew that Viktor was brilliant. He’d seen it plastered across the walls of his apartment.

He just didn’t see it in action.

He’d asked Viktor to meet him at the Sun Gate, the sort of little out-of-the-way café that Jayce had wanted to go to for some time now. Viktor had hesitated, his grip on his cane tight before he’d suggested, in turn, that they meet at the library instead.

More access to anything we might need, he’d pointed out. And the café at the front is passable, I find.

Jayce didn’t argue.

Not the first time they met at the library or the second time they met at the library. Or the third.

He didn’t even ask the array of nagging questions that tugged at his mind whenever Viktor shut down the idea of grabbing coffee or lunch and replaced it with a quickly-familiar group study room in the far corner of the third floor of the library.

A place where they could splay textbooks and notes and scribble onto the whiteboards with dying markers.

It becomes as routine as the rest of Jayce’s coursework, every Wednesday afternoon, between Jayce’s English lecture and his late-night seminar, they crammed themselves into the freezing little room in the back of the library—pouring over ideas and diagrams and schematics.

For hours.

For hours.

And they have nothing to show for it.

Jayce’s head hits the whiteboard as he groans. “What about some kind of boat? Like a wind-up one?”

Viktor doesn’t look up from the notebook he’s sketching in. Jayce isn’t looking at him, but he can tell by the dismissive noise he makes that Jayce’s idea wasn’t worth the eye contact. “I was making those when I was eight.”

“Well do you have any grand ideas over there?” He asks, thumbing away an errant line on the board from his marker.

This time he looks in time to see Viktor shrug. “I was thinking we could make some sort of working prototype of a prosthetic—”

“Vik, come on,” he says, watching the way Viktor’s eyebrows crease at the nickname. “We went over this. The guidelines say it has to be—”

Viktor waves a hand. “I know what they say,” he says, “I also believe I told you to not call me Vik.”

Jayce blinks. “I…did you?”

“Yes.” It’s deadpan. Almost cold.

Though, Jayce was getting used to that. As far as he’s picked up: Viktor has two temperatures—at one moment he could be relaxed, sitting almost sinuous in his seat as he taps his pen against the notebook. Then he has a sharp tongue, his acerbic wit always digging for the perfect moment, always knocking Jayce just a little askance.

It’s the Viktor you met, he tries not to think. The Viktor that took you home. (No—no, Jayce. Don’t think about that, don’t think about how you know what his skin tastes like under his shirt, don’t think about how you know that he’s tattooed all the way down to the perfect cut of his hip, don’t think about it.)

More frequently than that, Jayce has the other side of the spinning silver coin.

Cold. Careful. The Viktor that sits ramrod straight in his chair with the muscle in his jaw clenched. The Viktor that stares down problems like they’d solve themselves if he intimidated them into it.

The Viktor he met in the elevator, the Viktor that is staring at him right now. (Don’t ask, Jayce. Don’t ask if it’s because of you, don’t ask if he’s always like this or if the sex was that bad.)

“I uh.” Jayce clears his throat. “Sorry. I forgot.”

The eyes drop down to his paper, leaving burning places in Jayce’s skin where they were. “It’s fine. You’re right, anyway there isn’t—we don’t have the time to waste on something we aren’t sure will work.”

He squints at the board, where a collection of ideas are scraped in Jayce’s elegant handwriting and scratched out in Viktor’s sharp one.

Jayce watches as Viktor collects his cane to push himself up (more questions you don’t ask, Talis) and circles the overflowing table to stand beside Jayce at the board.

For what very little it’s worth, Jayce tries his best to not think about how small Viktor is in comparison to him. Jayce can step behind him and eclipse him. He could cover him, engulf him, like it’s nothing.

And he has, hasn’t he?

A shiver, unbidden, drips down the length of Jayce’s spine.

(Not the time, not the time, not the time, not the time.)

Jayce clears his throat. “Right so. Right now we have…” he leans back to read the board. “Crossed off pretty much everything.”

Viktor presses a finger to his lips in what Jayce is steadily coming to realize is a sign for I’m thinking. I’m about to come up with something brilliant, go on, come up with something genius. “Seems like we have.”

Well.

Can’t all be winners.

Jayce deflates with a groan, one hand pushing his hair back. He checks his phone for the time. Still another hour before he has to sit through a seminar on nuclear theory. “I’m starving. We should grab a…late lunch?” It’s pushing four-fifteen now. “Early dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.” Viktor’s eyes don’t leave the board. “But, if you want to leave, I’m not stopping you.”

He doesn’t think he can sink lower, but he does. Shoulders pinning back, Jayce finds a ceiling tile particularly fascinating for a long few seconds. “Viktor, come on. We’ve been at it since noon, neither of us had lunch—at this rate we’re just going to burn ourselves out.”

“I remember,” Viktor says, picking up one of the abandoned markers from the table. He uncaps it with those stupidly delicate hands. God, Jayce wants to suck those fingers, he wants to feel what they’re like gripping into his arms he wants to—holy shit what is wrong with him today? “When you asked me to be your partner you promised you had some fantastic idea. And that you’d do it all yourself and secure us an A.”

Ow? Jayce watches the back of Viktor’s head instead, eyes tracing the soft curls that twist up from behind his ears. “I thought I…I thought I could figure something out. I had half an idea about…tools and making them more efficient. Not remote controlled, but more fine-motor than that. Something that would be capable of doing extremely precise work.”

Viktor hums, cap clicking off the Expo as he starts to squeak out a design. Jayce’s brow knit as he watches. “What—”

“What about a sort of precision tool? One of Heimerdinger’s requirements was whatever we design has to be useful, correct? It’s part of the grading process, and if we can figure out a way to create a precision instrument that responds directly to hand motions and eye tracking that can be used for, say, surgeries or bomb diffusing or any other precise activity that might be done at a distance—I’d, eh, wager it was useful. No?”

Jayce blinks as Viktor steps back, a perfect set of sketches done out across the whiteboard. One has a hand, done so elegantly that Jayce wonders, briefly, if Viktor was ever secretly an artist, donning a sort of glove. The other is a strange claw-machine looking creation, more jointed than a hand but just as graceful in the way it was constructed.

Jayce could kiss him.

Jayce wants to kiss him.

Jayce isn’t sure that if he kisses him, that Viktor won’t hit him.

So instead, he drops a platonic hand to his shoulder, giving him a firm pat twice. “This is perfect,” he says, awe-struck for the thousandth time since he’s met Viktor. His hand drops after a moment, after he feels the way Viktor tenses beneath it. “We could—I mean, I’ll be the first to admit I don’t…really know how to construct a functioning laser, at least I mean I could probably figure it out but I’m not sure it would work with the timeframe—but could you imagine the kinds of things we could do with something like this?”

He goes for his notes, flipping through them before he sets one down for another, then another to find what he’s looking for. “I mean first of all—how would we send the signals from the user to the hand, or, er, claw, I guess?”

Viktor is staring at him again. And this time, like all the rest, Jayce has no idea why.

“For the time being, could it be connected to the user?”

“Like a third arm. We could have it—if we use aluminum or titanium it might be lightweight enough to attach to the back, right? We could have a, uh I mean.” He feels his cheeks start to burn against his better judgment as that stupid sense memory collides with him at full force. Smooth metal buckles and soft worn leather under his fingers, Viktor’s skin slowly exposed beat by beat as he untangled him from the complicated back brace. “It could attach to the back, as long as there is a strong enough support to the user's body.”

Viktor is staring at him. “Like a brace.”

“Like a brace,” he echoes. “It’s not a bad idea, right? It’s…that way we could have a direct connection between the glove and the arm, which would also help prevent any sort of accidental lag or interruptions that might come from any kind of wireless connection.”

Jayce skips his seminar and they work.

They work through the setting of the sun they can’t see from their cramped little room, they work through the hours of their booked study room until they’re left re-booking it to prevent disruption, they work until they’ve covered every inch of whiteboard and the scent of the Expo is thick enough to make Jayce a little woozy without the benefit of decent circulation.

They work until the PA system croons above them, an unwelcome warning that the library is closing in less than twenty minutes.

And, well, that can’t be right.

“I thought the library was open until ten?” Jayce grumbles, flipping closed one of the books he’d found on structural engineering for prosthetics.

Viktor doesn’t look over from where he’s diligently copying down their notes from the board. “It is.”

Jayce looks at the speakers wedged up in the corner of the room. “They just said the library is closing in twenty minutes.”

“It does.”

“No.” Is what he says, elegantly in response. “No.”

“Because denying the fact that it is nearly ten at night will certainly prevent it from being so,” Viktor says, extending out his left hand so Jayce can read his watch. 9:41pm.

Jayce doesn’t want to check his phone. He doesn’t want to check his phone.

He checks his phone. He has a handful of unread texts from Cait, a few from some other friends around campus, and a missed call from his mom.

His chest pangs with a flicker of guilt as he quickly taps his phone open to shoot her a quick text.

I’m sorry I missed your call! I was busy with a group project meeting that went long. Can I call you back tomorrow? Love you.

Viktor flips a page in his notebook. “Is Caitlyn concerned for your wellbeing?”

Jayce’s head whips back around to Viktor before he can stop himself. “You know Cait?”

This gets Viktor to stop, pen pausing in it’s constant swoop across the page. Jayce can see the ink bleed from here, the pressure his hand is keeping to the paper.

“We met. She and her girlfriend talked to us for a while at the bar,” he says, slowly.

Jayce feels his face burn again. “Oh. Uh…I mean Vi, wasn’t her girlfriend. I think they might be dating now, she’s like always at our apartment.”

The pen resumes its trail across the paper. “My apologies. We haven’t discussed that night since we started working together.”

Immediately, Jayce turns in his seat, moving until he’s facing Viktor. “We can talk about it! We should talk about it, right? I mean…we had sex. Not really the norm for project partners, but it’s just sex, right? I mean we’re not letting that get in the way of this.”

“I suppose we’re not. I’m willing to let it go and pretend it didn’t happen if you are, Jayce.”

And Jayce…should be happy, right? He should be happy that Viktor is willing to forget it. It makes things less awkward, it makes this less weird, it makes things…better.

Right?

Something deep in Jayce’s stomach twists violently, like a cold, thin, hand digging into his intestines and wrenching them around until he feels, suddenly, like he’s going to be sick. And maybe if he’d remembered to eat since breakfast, he might have.

“Totally,” is what he says, despite the screaming in his mind telling him otherwise. “Absolutely.”

“The library will be closing in ten minutes.”

Jayce starts at the abrasive sound, his heart jackrabbiting in his chest as he immediately starts to pack away his laptop, his notes.

“We should grab some food,” he says, trying to figure out the best way to Tetris his chargers and his rented library books into his messenger bag.

Viktor finishes another page before shutting his notebook with a loud enough snap that Jayce jolts a second time. “I’m going to go home and work on this some more.”

“You haven’t eaten in like, twelve hours,” Jayce points out, standing to snap some quick pictures of their boards before he starts to erase them. “Come on. There’s that weird little food truck that always parks in the lot behind the library. If you want, we can eat in my car then I can drive you home.”

Viktor waves it off. “I live close enough to walk.”

And…and that’s a lie, isn’t it? Jayce pulls back, snapped from his erasing to look back at Viktor. It’s a lie. Viktor just lied to him. His mouth moves before his brain can process it. “No you don’t? You live like five miles from campus?”

And this time, it’s Viktor who burns a bright, attractive, red. He shoves his notebook into his bag. “It’s not that far.”

“Yes it is,” Jayce points out. “We…look we can forget about the sex all we want but I was in your apartment, Viktor. I know where you live. It’s like five miles from here, if not more. Let’s just…go to one of those diners, I have some decent CAD software on my laptop, we can get started on some designs and get burgers.”

Jayce isn’t sure what he’s watching when the taut line of Viktor’s shoulders pin down. It isn’t like someone crumpling, it isn’t like someone giving up or giving in. It’s…a strange sort of resignation that pulls over Viktor’s posture, that tugs in the way he grips his cane.

He watches Viktor contemplate, he watches him mull over a thousand things all at once, before he simply…stops. “Have you been to that twenty-four hour diner down by the Alleys?” He asks, heaving a filled bag onto his shoulder.

Jayce tries not to pull a face at the thought of going so far south. “Uh, no? Is it good?”

“Very. Dinner there, then you can drop me off.”

###

 

It’s entirely possible that if Jayce had eaten anything since breakfast, his over-greasy burger and under-salted fries would be far from the best thing he’s ever had.

But he hadn’t, so it is.

He groans as he bites into it, head sinking forward as Viktor watches him from the other side of a sticky diner table.

The entire place reeks of kitsch and burnt coffee. It’s the sort of diner that’s very much like every other diner in the world, the menus are uncomfortably tacky and the vinyl in the booths are ever-cracked. But Jayce doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now.

They’d come here from the library, and Jayce had almost suggested something else. He’d nearly walked into what looked like a half-abandoned restaurant with the too-bright buzzing of the fluorescent lighting and offered his place, where he has an espresso machine and probably a carton of eggs, or at the very least access to UberEats and a couch that isn’t comfortable, but it would probably be more comfortable than this.

But Viktor had steered them to a neat little corner booth, far from the gaggle of students near the front who seemed to be too high for their own good. “The coffee is decent,” he’d said, “and the food is alright.”

A far cry, Jayce thought, from the very Viktor had given him in answer to if it’s good or not.

But, with a half-drained cup of coffee in front of him and food in his stomach, Jayce is perfectly content to be exactly where he is. In a mediocre diner with Viktor across from him, with two plates and two baskets of fries between them.

“So,” Viktor says, picking a bottle from the caddy of condiments in the furthest edge of the table. He carefully pours it over his fries. “We could use my back brace as a model for potential ways to distribute the weight of the arm. It’s construction is remarkable.”

Jayce squints at whatever Viktor is holding. “What is that?”

Viktor looks at the bottle like it’s his first time seeing it. “Vinegar? This is the only diner in town that actually keeps it on tables. That's why I like it.”

“You put vinegar on your fries?”

Viktor looks baffled at the response, blinking rapidly before he sets the bottle down and pushes the basket towards Jayce. “Try it,” he offers.

Jayce wants to kiss that furrow between his brows more than he wants to reach across the table and pick a fry out of Viktor’s basket, but he, in all his marvelous restraint, does not immediately lean over the table and pull Viktor in by a skinny wrist and kiss him absolutely stupid.

Instead, he takes a fry.

Remarkably, it isn’t actually gross. “Hm,” he says, chewing thoughtfully as the acid cuts through the weight of the grease just a little. It adds something different that the salt can’t, an almost complimentary flavor. “That’s actually not bad.”

Viktor shrugs. “I know what I’m doing.” He slides the bottle towards Jayce who, after a moment of contemplation, sprinkles some over his own basket. “Now. The brace?”

Huh? Oh—right what Viktor had actually asked about. “Right. Yeah. I mean, I’d worry about using it as an actual pattern. Not that we’re planning on patenting this, of course. Heimerdinger said it had to be unique but I don’t think he’ll mind if we use a mount with an established design, right?”

“My back brace isn’t a proprietary design,” Viktor says. “We can use it.”

He pops a fry in his mouth while Jayce tries to consider what that even means. “I mean the manufacturer—”

“I made it myself, Jayce. I designed it.”

Oh. Oh. Jayce tries not to balk, but based on the look on Viktor’s face, he fails miserably. “You—you designed it yourself?”

“And built it. I wasn’t a fan of the ones on the market. They didn’t provide the rigidity I needed while maintaining a certain level of flexibility that I wanted.” Viktor pauses, takes a sip of his coffee (cream, no sugar). “And I wanted a particular aesthetic. So I created my own. Under the guidance of my physical therapist, of course.”

“You designed and built your own medical device?” He asks, pointlessly. “Seriously?”

“I considered it practice,” Viktor says—though this time, Jayce can tell when something is starting to nag at him. He tries to keep it as airy and breezy as he always does, but he can spot the way the tips of his ears start to turn a delicate pink. “My life’s ambition is to help people, Jayce. And I want to do so in a way that can help everyone. After I finish graduate school, I want to design medical devices that are durable, affordable, and well-designed.”

“Seems like you’re already doing that,” Jayce points out.

Across the table, Viktor flushes. His fingers twist over themselves before he settles back in his seat. “Yes. Well. Thank you.” Viktor eats his own greasy mess of a burger delicately, like he’s trying not to make much of a mess of himself.

Jayce doesn’t have so much of a problem, the sudden and overwhelming realization of how absolutely starving he is far outweighing anything else.

They eat in relative silence for a few moments before Jayce’s mouth runs off without his head again. “Can I ask you a question that might be kind of rude? It’s fine if you don’t want to answer, I’m just curious.”

Viktor looks up from his dinner, holding a stray bit of onion. “It was a neonatal birth trauma,” he says. “An incomplete spinal cord injury—meaning I suffer some paralysis and pain in my leg, and pain in my back. It’s made worse by a degenerative joint condition.”

Jayce blinks twice, feeling remarkably stupid and mortified all at once. “I um.” He adjusts his coffee mug. Great, now he thinks you’re rude, now he thinks you’re a jackass—you look like one from here. “I was going to ask where you’re from. I um. I like your accent, is all.”

“Oh.” Viktor goes a remarkable shade of pink. “I’m Czech. My family immigrated when I was six.”

Jayce picks up a fry to tear into pieces. “That’s cool.”

There’s an awkward pause before Viktor shatters it with, what Jayce would think is a more awkward: “There’s no need to pretend you weren’t also curious about my limp.” For fucks sake. “It’s fine. Everyone is. I’m not particularly sensitive about it.”

Jayce buries his face in his hands for a long moment. “I mean…thank you? For telling me? I just don’t want you to think I was going to ask out of nowhere because it seems kind of rude.”

Viktor shrugs one narrow shoulder. “I think it’s more rude to pretend like I don’t know. I’m well aware that people are curious as to why a seemingly healthy young man relies on a cane and multiple forms of leg braces to walk. Humans are naturally curious animals. It’s part of what makes us want to do things like become scientists.”

Now, well now Jayce doesn’t know what to think. He hopes, he prays, the waitress is planning on coming by soon, just to have someone else to make eye contact with and give a polite smile to.

It doesn’t seem like his savior is en route, so Jayce just pushes his hair back. “So, do you remember much about the Czech Republic? If it—it was when you…right?”

“We left in 2005, it was,” he says, nose wrinkling. “How old do you think I am?”

Jayce…honestly doesn’t know. “You seem kind of ageless to me,” he admits, and holy shit Jayce can you please filter yourself? Please stop saying weird shit?

But Viktor’s lip only pricks into a faint smile. “I’m twenty-two.”

Jayce perks almost immediately. “Oh? So am I! When’s your birthday?”

The topics weave effortlessly from birthdays to school years to the time that Jayce once got detention for two weeks because someone dared him to climb to the very top of the gymnasium in high school to get a basketball that had been stuck there for years. To the time that Viktor once spent four months trying to create a worm colony in his closet, only to end up with a terrific amount of mold so invasive that his father ended up having to cut sections of the carpeting with a pocket knife.

Or the time Jayce lit his mother’s kitchen on fire or the time Viktor set the sofa on fire.

Jayce learns that Viktor moved from the Czech Republic to a city not that far from where Jayce grew up just, well, not exactly the sort of place Jayce would have ever gone. Or, he considers, embarrassed, that he would ever go.

But he doesn’t say that, he tries not to think about how much time Caitlyn spends in Zaun, how worried her parents get, how much time she spends trying to clean up that various messes the cut through that city.

They talk about better things instead. Like chemical spills in garages and trying to unbury treasure in backyards.

And, for Viktor, building a boat, apparently.

“I would go out early on trash collection day to see if anyone was throwing away anything I could use to finish it and one day, this old lady who’d lived in the house on the corner had passed away and her children were going through her things. She had one of those big ugly clocks, the kind that did songs on the house? They threw it away. It was far too big for me to carry so I dragged it.” Viktor’s face contorts and an adorable wince. “The racket it made? I’m not sure how I didn’t wake up the entire town. But I took it apart the second I got back home.

By the time my mother woke up and came looking for me, I was begging her to let me go down to the canal to test out my new boat.”

The rest of Jayce’s food is long-cold, his coffee refilled but untouched beside his elbow as he balances his cheek in his hand. “You built a working little boat.”

“It was just a wind-up toy.”

“You were eight.”

Viktor flushes again as the waitress circles back. She’s an older woman, her once-dark hair mottled with grey as she approaches. She’s wearing a polite smile that hides a thinely veiled annoyance. “Do you two need anythin’ else or are you good with the check? Shift’s about to change over soon so this is the last time you’ll see me, but we can make sure you’re still taken care of.”

Jayce blinks and—oh not again. His phone lights up as he looks down at it.

“How the fu—” his eyes flicker to the woman. “How is it almost one?”

This time, Viktor starts with the knowledge. “One in the morning?”

It takes everything in Jayce not to swear as he tilts himself forward to draw out his wallet. “Can we just get the check? One’s fine.” He can hear the squawk of protest from across the table as he hands over his card without a second thought.

Viktor is still indignant when the waitress leaves. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“It’s faster,” Jayce says, shrugging it off. There’s something about the way that Viktor’s face twists, not in annoyance or anger but in something else, something Jayce can’t quite read. He tacks, pointlessly, onto the end: “If you really want, you can just buy me coffee next time we’re in the library.”

Viktor folds his hands into his lap.

It’s freezing by the time they step outside, the mid-February breeze cuts through Jayce with a vengeance. He suppresses a shiver and glances to his side where Viktor apparently doesn’t.

Jayce is wearing a heavy pea coat to ward off the wind, and quite frankly, how Viktor is still standing in just a sweater vest and a button-down is beyond him.

“How are you not dying?” He asks as they step off the curb and into the black sea of the parking lot.

“Hm?” Is Viktor’s elegant reply. “Oh. It is cold, isn’t it?”

“Do you not feel cold?” Jayce says, and it would sound better, it would sound fantastically teasing if Jayce’s teeth weren’t about to start chattering. He didn’t even park that far, but the short distance from the entrance to his car feels like miles.

Viktor gives him a hard look. “I told you I had a spinal cord injury.”

And Jayce stops, dead in his tracks. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry—”

Viktor’s expression breaks immediately. He doesn’t even miss a step. “I’m fucking with you, Jayce. Come on, I’m freezing.”

“I—you—” At least the embarrassment keeps him from feeling the cold as Jayce fumbles in his pockets for his keys. He uses the fob to unlock his car from a distance. It’s a dark, subtle, ES—a few years behind new. Nothing too fancy. “You’re kind of an asshole, has anyone ever told you that?”

Viktor shrugs as he tugs the handle to open the passenger side. “I found the amount of people willing to call a poor cripple an asshole are incredibly low.”

Jayce hesitates at the driver's side before slipping in, immediately starting the car to blast the heat. “...Can you say that?”

“I can,” comes Viktor’s easy reply. “It’s about me.”

Jayce’s lips purse for a moment as he holds his hand in front of a vent in a desperate ploy to warm them. “Yeah I guess that makes sense.”

Slowly the heat starts to creep in and Jayce sighs as he sinks back into the dark leather of his car. It strikes him all at once that, if this were any other night, if this were any other person, he’d turn his cheek to the headrest and slink a hand over the center console to brush his fingers down Viktor’s hand. If it were any other night and any other person, he’d say it’s getting late, we don’t really need to go to two different places, do we?

He’d say why don’t you stay at mine? Or you know I have plenty of room if you wanted to crash with me. Or do you want to come home with me?

(He tries not to think about Viktor’s voice, he tries not to think about the way Viktor asked him, the soft lilt of his voice and the curl of the question. He tries. He fails.)

Instead, his eyes catch on Viktor’s fingers, tracking as they pop the buttons on his cuffs and push the sleeves up his forearm.

And suddenly Jayce is gone again. In the bright glow of the car’s overhead light, Jayce can make out the patterns of Viktor’s tattoos once again. His eyes follow the elegant curve of the lines over the wrist closest to him and the sketchbook style that Jayce immediately recognizes as Viktor’s own. It traces a pattern that circles and twists between one another in a system that is almost familiar.

It’s geometric and elegant and Jayce wants to put his mouth on it.

“What is that, anyway?” He asks, because if he doesn’t do anything with his mouth right now, he might start drooling.

Viktor glances down, thumb swiping over one line. “It’s a pulsar map? Combined with a few other depictions of our solar system. I used to be very interested in astronomy, and…part of me finds it both humbling and enthralling to consider where we are in the grand scheme of things. Where does our legacy fit into an existence that is as endless and finite at the same time?”

Jayce sits there, his car in park and his hands at ten and two and says: “That’s…” his hands fall into his lap and Jayce sinks a little bit further into his seat. “I think about my legacy all the time. My family’s name is imprinted on this town.” It feels more like a confession than anything else, here in the quiet carriage of his car in the quiet blanket of a dimly lit parking lot. “I can walk into pretty much any building on campus or around Piltover and point out something that was made in one of my family’s factories, or on their production lines, or couldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for something they created.

They got started making hammers and now they make construction material and cement mixers and you can’t throw a rock without hitting something built using Talis family tools. And…” his hands flex in his lap. “I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really living up to that? Am I creating things to build or what?”

He can feel the weight of Viktor’s eyes on him, twin amber lights pin-pricking through the darkness. “I think about my legacy too.” Viktor’s voice filters through the quiet. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever do enough. If I’ll ever help enough people or if…if when I die, no one will remember my name.”

I will, Jayce wants to say. I’ll remember you because you’re impossible to forget. Forgetting you would be like forgetting the color of the sky or forgetting how to breathe. Forgetting you would be like forgetting who I am.

The words, the sentiment, brands itself at the root of his tongue as he turns to look at Viktor, lit by the dome light of the car with the endless haze of the city behind him. How could anyone forget you?

He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say it because that’s an absolutely insane thing to say to someone he barely knows. Instead, he looks at Viktor, at the shape of him here in his car, and says, “I think the world is already lucky to have you.”

Which, frankly, probably isn’t much better.

“Only as lucky as she is to have you,” Viktor echoes. There’s a beat. “We’re lucky for the coffee otherwise I’d have fallen asleep in your car.”

Jayce laughs, a little hollow in the wake of their conversation. He shifts the car from park. “Maybe I should get you home.”

Viktor looks at him. “Maybe.”

And Jayce tries, he tries to not read too deeply into the spaces between the star-stuff on his arms. It isn’t as far a drive back to Viktor’s apartment as Jayce thought it would be. Maybe it’s the comfortable silence or the calmness of a night starting to creep steadily towards morning, but Jayce finds himself in almost a meditative state by the time they slow to a stop outside the cracked brickwork of Viktor’s apartment building.

Viktor muffles a yawn into a shirt sleeve. “We never did start those designs,” he says, gathering his cane.

Jayce blinks. “Oh. No you’re right I guess we didn’t.”

There’s another pregnant pause as Viktor’s hand finds the handle. “Sleep well, Jayce,” he offers.

And Jayce can see himself doing a thousand things at once. He can see himself reaching over and dipping his hand into the patterns of the galaxy, using the map inked in Viktor’s skin as a guide, to pull him closer until the gravity of them is too much and they collide once again—a slick mess of lips and hands and breathless gasps.

He could get out, he could circle the car and open the door and walk Viktor up to his building. He could press him up against the gate that separates the outside world from that strange internal one. He could get his hands on the narrow cut of Viktor’s hips and hold him that as he kisses him and kisses him and kisses him.

He could take his hand, he could give him his jacket, he could tell him how beautiful he looks in the dull glow of the street lights and ask him to say fuck it and come home with him, who cares what else is going on, who cares if they have in the morning, just one more night. One more chance.

Jayce swallows. He swallows because if he doesn’t, he’s going to do it.

Deep breath in. Deep breath out.

Lab partners. That’s it.

“Have a good night, Viktor. I’ll see you in class?”

The door clicks open as Viktor leaves. “Right, Jayce. I’ll see you in class.”

Jayce waits until the gate clatters shut, until he can hear the sound of the door beyond it opening under Viktor’s key.

Fuck.

He hits his steering wheel. “Fuck.”

###

It can’t get worse. It literally cannot get worse than this.

Jayce shoves his key into the lock of his own apartment, feet dragging under the sudden weight of exhaustion that comes between whatever just happened in his car and the fact that it’s almost two in the morning.

It can’t get worse.

He creaks the door open as quietly as he can, careful not to wake Caitlyn—”Jayce. It isn’t—” And there’s skin and blue and pink and skin on the sofa and— Jayce slams the door so quick he winces.

He mouths a useless apology to his hallway as he stands, corrected, in front of his own apartment door. Somewhere, on another floor, he can hear one of his neighbors' yappy dogs starting to bark.

You’re going to get such a phone call.

There’s a long second, then two, where Jayce tries to forget everything he just saw. Everything he just saw.

Everything.

Eventually, after a few more breaths, the apartment door opens slowly. Caitlyn, stained pink from ears to collar, and wearing (thank God) that ridiculous fluffy bathrobe she loves, opens the door.

“I wasn’t sure you were coming home,” she says, voice tight. “I, erm, well Vi was over for dinner and—”

Jayce holds up a hand. “Yeah. I can,” he makes a noise of disgust. “I can tell. I had a really weird day, Cait.”

She steps aside to let him in, gently pushing the door shut behind him. “I’m so sorry Jayce I promise I never—you know I’m not usually—I’m never one to—you hadn’t answered your texts in several hours and the last thing you told me was you were with Viktor. Vi and I both presumed you were, well, occupied for the evening. Not that that is any excuse.”

His face twists into a curious expression. “I was…Viktor and I were studying. Working on that project for Professor Heimer I told you about.”

Caitlyn blinks, draws her robe tighter around her body. “It’s two in the morning, Jayce.” And she both looks and sounds remarkably like his mother in this moment that he almost, in a point of exhausted and confused delicious, laughs.

Almost. Almost.

“We got dinner afterwards.”

“It is two in the—did you leave again?” Her voice isn’t sharp, but it isn’t soft either.

Now it’s his turn to pinch his brows. “Leave what?”

“Viktor,” she presses. “Last time you said you left before he woke up, and it’s one thing to do that to someone you’d only met the night before, but you’re working with him now, Jayce.”

“We didn’t—we’re not sleeping together, Cait,” he says, voice pitched low as if Viktor could hear him all the way across town. “He’s…he doesn’t seem interested. And that’s fine, we work very well together. We had a great session working on our project today and that’s all that matters. We stayed out at a diner in the Alley’s after the library closed.”

If Caitlyn’s flush could deepen, it would. Jayce walks past her through to the kitchen, unsure of what he’s doing besides just walking out the pent up restless energy. Like a pacing hound in a living room, nervously wearing a trench in the space in front of the door.

She follows on soft feet. “May I ask?” She starts, leaning against the counter as Jayce decides on making a cup of tea.

The sort that Caitlyn keeps in a box in the cabinet for when she can’t sleep. That’ll help. Certainly.

“Ask what?” He replies, voice flat.

“What happened?”

“I thought I told you. We worked, we got dinner. You’re not my mom, Cait, I don’t think I need to update you on my whereabouts constantly.”

He can’t see her as he fills the little silver-and-blue kettle, but he’s fairly certain she doesn’t wince at the sharpness. Cait doesn’t wince. She never does. He turns the heat up to start it boiling.

There’s the sound of two mugs being set near him. “I meant before. You seemed like you really liked him at the bar.”

“It was a one night stand.”

“You seemed like you really liked him at the bar.” Jayce hates it when she does that. He hates when she repeats part of her statement like it means something else the second time. And he hates that it always does.

His nose crinkles and he feels himself pinch his expression again. “I did. I do…he’s a great guy, Cait. He’s smart and he’s funny and he’s attractive. He’s just…” One shoulder shrugs. “I mean it was a one night stand. If you’re there when she, or he, I guess, wakes up then it gets awkward. And weird. And uncomfortable.”

The kettle starts to edge towards a whistle that Jayce cuts off with a twist of the stovetop’s dial. Behind him, Caitlyn makes another one of those contemplative little noises. In another life, she should have been some kind of detective, he thinks.

She nods, like she understands. Jayce looks at the pair of cups down beside him.

“Does your girlfriend not like tea?” He asks, one brow raised.

Caitlyn’s cheeks burn anew. “No,” she says, as evenly and carefully as she can. “She…doesn’t.”

Jayce offers the faintest slip of a smile in return, filling her cup, then his. “Go make sure she isn’t slipping out the back window.”

A deeper flush, this time, paints her cheeks.

“Oh. And Cait?”

“Hm?”

“You’re getting the couch steam cleaned.”

There it is. She goes a proper red, burning almost purple with mortification as she disappears back in through a crack in her door. His smile fades all at once as he fills his own cup, staring down into the slowly bleeding yellow-brown.

Why did you leave?

The lack of an answer sits strangely in his chest. Jayce lies there, letting his tea cool on the bedside table as he waits for sleep that, quite simply, will not come.

 

###

 

The following week, Jayce is sicker than he’s ever been.

He blames Caitlyn. She’d come home after one of her late evenings volunteering at whatever place down in Zaun needed a helping hand—soup kitchens, women’s shelters, safe injection sites, whatever she could do, she’d do between her courses and her studying.

She’d said once it made her feel better about her life, about the things she was born into.

Which is a sentiment Jayce supposes he can understand. What he can’t forgive is her faint sniffle and mild cough translating onto him as an absolute hell storm of snot and phlegm. He’d spent the early hours of the morning sitting on the floor of the shower, letting the steam and hot water loosen up whatever gunk was still coating the inside of his lungs and hoping that maybe, just maybe, it would ease the throb of a headache he could feel building behind his eyes.

Jayce had made it through Heimerdinger’s lecture by the skin of his teeth, Viktor watching him with those rapt, clever, eyes.

Are you alright, Jayce?

I’m fine. Just a, uh, maybe allergies or something?

But by noon, Caitlyn had threatened to have someone drag Jayce back home by brute force if necessary.

Jayce’s bones hurt by the time he gets into his bedroom, the sun glaring down through the cracks in his blinds. He groans as he lands, fully clothed, into the center of his bed, one hand pulling a pillow down over his eyes to block out any of the residual light. The tissue box he’d only barely remembered to grab on his way through the empty apartment lands beside his bed as he feels himself start to bleed out into every corner—a slow, viscous sprawl of his body.

Sleep. Sleep is what will help.

His phone buzzes once. “No.” Then again. “No.”

Incredibly, the texts continue to come through despite Jayce’s insistence.

Throwing his pillow off, Jayce paws his phone out of his pocket and squints at the incoming notifications, each of them from Viktor.

I know you said you were suffering from allergies, but are you sure you’re alright?

If you’re sick, I have a few remedies that I think can help. I also tend to keep ginger tea on hand just in case.

And a few old family recipes, but I’m not sure how much you enjoy vinegar and brine.

I could always bring you soup, if you’d like.

He blinks, a little bleary-eyed at the messages and…maybe sleep won’t help.

Maybe it’s the fever burning out under his skin, but Jayce slides his phone closer to himself, dragging it under the burrow of the pillow he’s made, to tap out a few replies back to him.

Viktor responds and somehow, the weight in his chest feels a little lighter. Jayce chats with him until he falls asleep, his phone slipping inches from his fingers with a half-finished reply.

He has time to nap for almost an hour before the soft knocking at his door rouses him. The effort it takes to lift his head is tremendous, the sudden shift within his sinuses makes his brain feel like it’s sloshing. Suddenly woozy, Jayce scrubs over his face before he manages to get his feet onto the shifting floor beneath him.

“M’comin’,” he mumbles, gently kicking his abandoned bag out of his way as he crosses the seemingly endless desert of carpeting and abandoned t-shirts in order to escape just the confines of his bedroom.

And then, he has to tackle the living room? Fucking impossible.

Jayce groans once he’s past the door frame of his bedroom, the soft knocking getting just a little louder. Without the heat of the blankets beneath him and the bed around him, Jayce was absolutely fucking freezing. (Or is that the fever?)

His weight lurches forward once he makes it all the way to the other side of the world, it seems. He can feel the start of a small celebration when his hand closes around the doorknob.

Jayce blinks rapidly as he opens the door to find Viktor, standing almost stiffly in the middle of Jayce’s hallway. He’s dressed in the same thing he’d worn to class just a few hours ago, messenger bag included, except there’s one of those white plastic bags with the layers of an all-caps red Thank You printed down the side of it.

“Hi,” he says. “You um. You seemed pretty out of it when we were texting, but you agreed to permit me to bring you some soup. So.” Viktor holds up the bag. “Soup.”

Jayce unpeels his tongue from the roof of his mouth in time to ask: “You made me soup?”

Viktor’s face pulls a little. “I don’t cook. I picked you up soup from a deli I like. It’s chicken and matzo ball.”

His brain lags a bit behind his fever, whirring and buzzing like overheated fans. “I…thank you?”

Viktor holds the bag out and Jayce stares at it because all of a sudden he cannot remember what his arms are supposed to do or what his hands are supposed to do or what anything is supposed to do.

All he can focus on through the overheated haze of his own body is the sight of Viktor there in the doorway—for no real reason other than because it’s him and he’s standing in the doorway.

He blinks again. “I um. Do you want…to come in? I mean I know I’m sick but…” He clears his throat. “Do you want to come in? I’ll stand super far from you.”

Viktor watches him, bag-laden hand lowering a few inches. “Jayce?”

Did he forget something? He forgot something, didn't he? Why is he so fucking stupid all the time? “Hm?”

“You look like you’re about to pass out. You should sit down.”

Is that why the walls keep moving? That sounds like it might be why the walls keep moving. Jayce doesn’t respond verbally, he just nods and shuffles backwards, scrubbing his face again to try to stabilize himself. The second his hand passes over his own face, he can feel the floor beneath him pitch ever so faintly and for a breath, it seems like the world is about to tilt and go.

For a breath Jayce thinks this is it, that he’s about to pass out in front of Viktor. And if he passes out in front of Viktor he’s going to die, he’s going to die and he’s going to die and—

—and a narrow slash of cool pressure finds its way to the small of his back. A single grounding force, rooting him in place. And he can’t hear anything, not the sound of planes overhead or the sound of one of his neighbors dogs yapping mindlessly.

It’s just his own heartbeat and the feeling of Viktor’s hand pressed against him.

“Come on,” Viktor says, and Jayce doesn’t know when he set the bag with the soup down, but he’s very glad that Viktor did because he keeps a guiding hand on his back the whole track to Jayce’s uncomfortable couch that if he wasn’t so sick he’d never sit on in a million years again.

Viktor’s voice filters through his internal monologue, delicately amused. “Well, my apologies for forcing you to lie on such an uncomfortable couch.”

Jayce has the presence of mind to think that he is not lying on it, just sitting on it. And it’s probably for the best that Viktor doesn’t know exactly what happened on this couch just last week. As far as he knows, Caitlyn hasn’t gotten around to hiring someone to clean it.

Viktor snags a pillow from the other side of the couch just in time for Jayce to sag against the arm, tucking it up beside him. “I’m not going to ask what happened on the couch,” he says, simply. “Stay here and I’ll get your soup, alright?”

Jayce hum, his eyes feeling remarkably heavy. He blinks once and Viktor is gone. Twice and Viktor is back, holding a plastic container—like the tall cylindrical sort. He groans, shifting upright from…oh. He was laying on the couch. He shifts upright, giving Viktor plenty of space to sit beside him. There’s a second container on the coffee table, where a few of his and Caitlyn’s books have been stacked together with the women’s wrestling magazines that surreptitiously began cropping up around the time Vi kept swinging by.

“Drink,” Viktor says, his voice distant and soft. “If this form of medicine doesn’t help, I also brought tea and, eh, some DayQuil. In case you were in as bad a shape as you are.”

Jayce murmurs his thanks as he collects the soup in hand. He inhales deep and almost melts from the scent. “Holy shit,” he exhales, already taking a long, content, sip. “This is so good. Thank you so much.”

Beside him, Viktor hums. A freezing hand lands on Jayce’s forehead a second later, then slides down to his cheek. “Jayce.”

“I think I’m in love with this soup.”

“Jayce.”

And I think I could be in love with you.

The hand snaps back at once. “Jayce!”

He looks over at Viktor, teeth caught around the plastic edge of the soup container. “It’s good soup and…and your hand feels really good.”

“That’s because you absolutely have a fever. Where is your thermometer?”

Jayce blinks rapidly. “I um. I think Cait does? It might be in the bathroom. She has like…a basket of medical stuff.”

Viktor pushes himself up with his cane, squeezing Jayce’s shoulder as he passes. “Eat. You’re clearly very sick.”

And Viktor is gone again. (Like you did to him). Jayce tries not to let the sudden rush of bile churning in his stomach upset the frankly fantastic soup he’s been consuming. He takes another long drag of it, feeling the warmth seep into the limbs he hadn’t noticed were shivering.

He sinks forward a little, searching for his phone before he remembers he’d fallen asleep texting Viktor in his room and…well, frankly he’s pretty sure if he stands up, Viktor is going to find him in the wreckage of the coffee table and the soup. So, he stays sitting.

And it feels like it’s another hour before Viktor comes back, inspecting the unopened box that Caitlyn had bought when they first moved in together.

“Do you not get sick?” Viktor asks, perching closer than Jayce thinks the couch really requires. “This thing hasn’t even been opened?”

Jayce blinks slowly. “I uh…Cait gets sick but she gets over it like…instantly. It’s kind of bullshit. I don’t really get sick.”

Viktor pops the box open and shakes the thermometer out. It’s one of those forehead scan ones which Jayce has belatedly decided to stop blaming Caitlyn for getting him sick because he’s never been more thankful about her forward thinking skills than he is in this moment. Something about having to stick a thermometer in his mouth in front of Viktor made him almost queasy with mortification.

“Let, eh, let me figure this out, hm? Eat.”

Jayce’s eyes fixate back down on the container. There’s one of those plastic takeaway spoons tucked on a brown napkin that completely escaped Jayce’s notice before. He takes it up to prod delicately at one of the matzo balls. He tries it as delicately as he can, giving a pleased hum.

From his place wrangling the batteries into the thermometer, Viktor raises one dark brow. “Did it pass a test?”

“I’ve never actually had it before. I’ve heard of it but…it’s good.”

Viktor blinks, slowly. “What do you eat when you’re sick?”

Jayce shrugs. “Other kinds of soup?”

“Weird,” is what Viktor says, as if his side of the conversation is the normal one. He makes a sound of triumph that Jayce would pay every last cent to his name to hear over and over and over again, and wields the thermometer like it’s some beautiful invention.

Jayce can thank Caitlyn later for getting one of the forehead reading kinds, but it’s still a little weird to sit there while Viktor holds it close to him. His hand is close enough that Jayce can see the twisting lines of the tattoo he’s memorized from that night almost a week ago. The sketchbook lines of galaxies and planets overlaid against the map of the stars.

A way to find us, for all the things lost in the stars.

And for a moment Jayce feels lost and he can’t explain why. For a moment he’s adrift in a sea of starstuff, his chest aching with every pulse of his heart and every shattering breath in his lungs. His eyes focus and unfocus on the slash of black that he’s pretty sure links Charon and Nix to the pen-flick of Pluto that Jayce knows that Viktor has on him because he hates the idea that something could be too small to be important.

Because Viktor thinks in rights and wrongs as a wash of morality and color that Jayce sometimes feels lost in anyway. Because Viktor can fill the entire space between the moment he’d sit down beside Jayce in the lecture hall on a mini-lecture of his own about the poster he saw walking through the halls of the Progress Learning Center, and transition it almost immediately to what defines progress and what does progress even mean in science and technology.

Because Viktor thinks that little things should be given just as many opportunities to succeed as the giants of Jupiter and Saturn.

Because Viktor is Viktor and staring at him like this, close enough that Jayce can see the chapped cracks of lips he’s felt under his own and see the crease between his brow as he focuses on the number on the little machine pressed to his forehead—is overwhelming all at once.

Because Viktor is Viktor and Jayce wants to kiss him and Jayce is pretty sure he has a fever and his body moves faster than his mind and Jayce kisses him.

And Jayce kisses him.

And Viktor does not kiss him back.

He goes stock-still under Jayce’s touch. Jayce pulls back in time to hear the thermometer beep.

And beep. And beep.

Viktor checks it. “You have a hundred and three degree fever,” he says, voice flat. “I’m going to put you to bed. Which room is yours?”

And Jayce hallucinated that, right? Jayce imagined that, he imagined kissing Viktor and he imagined kissing Viktor and it didn’t happen and it didn’t happen because there’s no way that happened. There’s no way that Jayce kissed Viktor and there’s no way.

There’s no way.

“Um. Left side.”

Viktor nods, setting the thermometer down. “Come on,” he says, standing with a low grunt. “This couch is terrible, by the way.”

Jayce stands, wobbling a little on his own. “Yeah, I know.”

He imagined it. Just like he’s imagining the faint warmth and tingle that washes over his lips. One hand rises to touch them, tracing the line of Viktor’s lips over his own.

He imagined it.

He imagined it.

Jayce follows Viktor to his own bedroom, the ghost of some past sensation lurking up and churning around him. It follows him like a lost pet across the threshold and suddenly Jayce’s mind is ablaze again.

A siren of nothing but Viktor in his bedroom and Viktor in his bedroom.

Jayce lets himself be guided down into bed as a wave of exhaustion threatens to overtake him all at once. He lets an empty mug that once held the now necessary nighttime chamomile tea be cleared away in favor of the plastic tub and a glass mason jar.

Viktor taps the metal lid, nail clicking softly. “Ginger, honey, and lemon tea. It’s very strong but it will help shake a cough.”

All Jayce can do is grunt as Viktor stands and adjusts a few more things.

The blanket Jayce keeps half-kicked off the foot of his bed unfolds and lays over his shoulders. The cold hand comes back to bleed through the blanket down to his shoulder.

Don’t worry, comes a voice inside his head. You’re very sick. You won’t remember it.

 

###

 

Jayce wakes up with a broken fever and the ghost of a terrible dream.

But luckily it was a dream. Just a dream.

A dream that left a mostly drunk plastic Tupperware of soup on his nightstand and a jar of orange-brown liquid sloshing around chunks of ginger and lemon.

A dream that left a washed mug in his sink.

A dream that won’t stop buzzing on his lips.

A dream.

###

 

Jayce texts Viktor the night after his fever breaks.

Thanks for the soup and for taking care of me. He tacks on a smiling emoji.

Viktor responds a little past midnight. Of course. I hope you’re feeling better.

Much! I think it was the soup.

Jewish penicillin.

Jayce’s brows knit as he reads it. There’s a tone that he can’t quite pick up. Are you Jewish?

Normally Jayce would gauge the length of time it takes someone to reply by how nervous he should be based on how much he sees the never-ending typing bubbles. But Viktor’s green text bubbles don’t offer up such a nicety so Jayce is left floundering instead.

Anxious all the way down.

Eventually, when Jayce is almost certain that Viktor must have fallen asleep, he gets a soft buzz in response. Yes. I’m not particularly religious but my mother is.

Jayce feels almost light with the information it provides. Just another fragment of Viktor’s life, another piece of the complex internal puzzle.

Viktor sends a second text: You should take Wednesday off to recover. I’ll email you my notes.

Jayce responds with another round of thanks, and watches his phone until the hours tick past and sleep starts to overcome.

 

###

 

Jayce tries again come Friday. I’m pretty much back at 100% if you wanted to meet up this weekend? Maybe grab a couple drinks and work on the project?

And then on Saturday. Hey! I hope I didn’t get you sick. I really appreciate you taking care of me, V.

And again on Sunday. I know you didn’t like me calling you Vik - I hope V is okay. If it’s not let me know?

And then one last time, as sleep was starting to overtake him that evening. I just wanted to check, because I was pretty feverish last week, did I say or do something stupid?

It’s the only one Viktor responds to. No, it reads. You’re fine.

 

###

 

Viktor isn’t in class on Monday. Jayce keeps a keen eye out for him, keeps the usual seat beside him open and waiting for him. But as Professor Heimerdinger opens his lecture, Viktor still isn’t there.

 

###

 

When Viktor misses their morning class on Wednesday, Jayce starts to worry.

Jayce wriggles his phone out as best he can under the tiny fold-down writing surface they’re given and shoots him a quick Hey! Are you feeling alright?

He doesn’t respond by the time the lecture is over.

And he isn’t at the lab, either.

Jayce stares at the conspicuously empty space, tapping his fingers against the steel-topped surface of the table as he watches his laptop load the design software. He tries another text, then another.

Each of them unanswered.

Jayce starts to get worried by that evening, chewing his thumbnail as he paces his bedroom. They don’t text often but when they do Viktor is usually quick to reply, never leaving him hanging. Especially when it comes to things like class.

Jayce’s bedroom isn’t particularly large, isn’t particularly good for such a nervous tick. It was crammed with bookshelves, his bed shoved into one corner to make room for his guitar and his desk and his computer. He kicks a few books out of the way to make room for the tight circles he does as he waits for Viktor to respond.

And he doesn’t.

And he doesn’t.

And he doesn’t.

Jayce doesn’t hear from Viktor until Wednesday, a full week since he’s last heard from him, right before he’s about to step into his morning class.

I’m relatively under the weather. I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet this afternoon. I’m emailing you some things I worked on this past week.

Immediately afterwards, an email notification pops up.

He tucks himself into the furthest back corner, opening his laptop and settling in behind it to respond.

Fuck, I’m so sorry, did I get you sick? Are you okay? Do you need me to bring you anything? I make a mean soup. Jayce doesn’t know why he sent that.

Jayce can’t make a good soup.

Jayce can’t cook.

At all.

He winces as a response comes through from Viktor almost immediately: You didn’t get me sick. Your help isn’t necessary, I promise.

His fingers move faster than his head does. Are you sure? It was a pretty nasty cold and now it seems like everyone has it?

Another quick reply: It isn’t.

Jayce’s brows knit as he glances over the top of his laptop. The professor wasn’t here yet. In fact, there were only a handful of students gathered in the weird little chairs around the classroom. Slowly, Jayce shuts the top of his laptop.

Do you want me to come over to work on the project?

Viktor doesn’t respond by the time Jayce shoves his laptop into his bag, knocking against his notebooks and his pen case.

And if Jayce doesn’t check his phone as he leaves the classroom behind him and heads down to the parking lot—well, it’s not his fault.

Not at all.

Not even a little bit.

And it’s good, safe, driving to not check his phone when he’s in the car, or when he’s stopped at the deli he passes every day on the way to class and back, the one that he’s pretty sure that Viktor must have stopped at because a quick Google check told him it was the only one within a couple miles that even sold matzo ball soup. And it’s rude to use your phone when picking up a couple orders of soup and a few sandwiches and some water and Gatorade and a handful of cold medicine just in case Viktor really wasn’t feeling well.

It isn’t until he’s outside Viktor’s apartment building, into the same spot he’d been just a week ago, that he actually stops to check his texts.

There’s quite a few of them, to say the least. Ranging from: You don’t have to to Really, I’m fine to Jayce to If you come over I’m not buzzing you in.

He could text. He could call.

Or he could test that last text message, squinting at the cracked box of out-dated and yellowing slips of paper. None of them have Viktor’s name, but Jayce remembers that worn, brassy little D14 hanging on the door he shut behind himself the morning he really, really shouldn’t have left.

His finger digs into the worn button, the sound of it grating from this end.

And he waits. And waits.

After the first second, Jayce starts to panic properly.

What did you do, what the fuck did you do? Oh my God are you a stalker? Is that it? Holy shit he’s going to be so fucking freaked out, he’s never going to want to talk to you again, he’s never going to want to see you again you dumb fucker, you absolute idiot. He’s going to file a complaint with the school and you’re never going to get accepted into the program and—the sound of the lock on the door catching snaps him from his reverie immediately.

He blinks, rapid-fire, before his body catches up with his head and he tugs the door open with one hand, laden white plastic shopping bag from the deli in the other.

Jayce takes the steps two at a time, his lungs burning by the time he reaches fourth floor landing. He’s panting, harsh, by the time he skids to a stop in front of Viktor’s door and—and he can remember it. He can remember the feeling of it, cool, beneath his hands with the hot slash of Viktor pressed against his chest.

Lips sliding over lips, hands sliding over his jeans, tugging at his belt, at his shirt, freezing up the length of his skin. He shudders as he knocks twice and—and—and what is he going to do?

What is his plan? What—what is he going to do? He wants to grab Viktor the second he opens the door he wants to drop the soup and the sandwiches and grab Viktor and push him up against the door and kiss him until both of them are breathless. He wants to take the sharp edges of him into his hands, hold him there until his palms have memorized the cut of his cheekbones and the point of his chin.

He wants to push those little sweater vests off his narrow shoulders, he wants to pull open the buttons of one of those jewel-toned shirts he loves so much. He wants to bite into him like a fucking fruit, leave his marks behind on the fragile stretch of Viktor’s skin—he wants to taste him, he wants to hear the sounds he makes when Jayce kisses the tattoos that line his chest.

He wants to encapsulate him, he wants to hold him, he wants to have him again and again and again every way he can possible imagine all at once—

“Jayce,” Viktor says, like it isn’t his first time saying it as he leans in the doorway of his own apartment.

Oh, God. He might be stupid.

Jayce opens his mouth once before shutting it with an audible click of teeth. What’s the plan, what’s the plan, what's the plan. “I brought…soup. From the deli you like.” He’s still panting, still breathing a little harsh.

Viktor…Viktor doesn’t look well. He’d lost the button-down-and-vest combo for just a tremendous cream sweater. His already pale complexion is nearly translucent, the ever-present bruises of sleeplessly under his eyes somehow darker in comparison.

And something aches in Jayce’s chest.

“What are—” Viktor pauses to gesture. “What are you doing here?”

“Are you—” Jayce steps forward, one hand sliding up to the now-familiar curve of his shoulder. “You should be lying down Viktor what are you doing up?”

“Letting you in,” he shoots back. “You showed up here, despite me telling you not to, what was I supposed to do?”

Jayce gestures around, white plastic bag swinging wildly around him. “Go inside, go lie down,” he says. “You should be resting.”

In the doorway, Viktor’s face pulls into something almost embarrassed. “I’m not sick.”

Oh, well, that’ll do it.

Jayce takes in Viktor’s pallor, the weight of his shoulders. Despite himself, doubt creeps into his voice. “I’m sorry?”

Viktor drags a hand down his face. “I’m not sick, Jayce. I lied to you. I said I was sick because I did not want to meet with you today because I…because I don’t. Happy? Fantastic, goodbye and goodnight.” Jayce’s body moves faster than his mind does, the hand not laden with soup whipping out to grab hold of the door before Viktor can shut it on him. “Viktor,” he starts, fully unaware of where the conversation is going. He tries to think of something, tries to come up with any way to end this sentence—but it all falls short and he settles on a rather elegant and graceful, “Viktor.”

The rigidity returns to Viktor’s body all at once as the door stops halfway through shutting. “Jayce.”

“Viktor.”

“Do you want me to just say your name again because we can do this all night but my neighbors will eventually begin to complain.”

Jayce holds up the bag. “I brought you soup. The same kind you brought me.”

Viktor’s eyes track the swing of the bag and Jayce is suddenly reminded of felines and lasers. “I said it was unnecessary.” Or maybe birds or mice, or some other kind of prey caught in the gaze of the creature in the tall grass.

Jayce’s head rolls back as he sucks in a deep breath (I want to kiss him, I want to kiss him, I want to kiss him so bad right now) “Why?”

“Why what?” “Why did you lie to me, Viktor? Why didn’t you just say, I’m actually really tired and I don’t want to work on the project right now—but I sent you a bunch of stuff to look at anyway.”

Viktor’s mouth works like it does when Jayce knows he wants to say something, but he isn’t sure how Jayce will respond. “I’m very tired and I don’t want to work on the project right now. But I sent you a bunch of things to look at anyway.”

“Clever,” Jayce says before he can stop himself. “What is your problem anyway? You know I’ve tried to be nice. I…I keep offering to meet in places that aren’t the library because I like to hang out with you, Viktor. Because I think you’re smart and I think you’re funny and I like to talk to you about science and I like talking to you before class starts and when we’re walking. There’s no one in the world I want to talk to more about science and technology and all the ways we could be saving the world except you and every time I do you just… you do this. You helped me and you took care of me when I was sick and now when I try to return the favor, you shut down and you go cold and it isn’t—”

Deep breath in, deep breath out. What the fuck are you doing, Jayce? This isn’t any of the things, this isn’t anything you wanted to do.

“I’m trying to be your friend.”

Viktor’s face is hard, the firm line of his mouth unchanging and unmoving as those molten-gold eyes cool and solidify into something hard and heavy. “Do you remember what you said as you were falling asleep?” He asks, taut voice under-pinned with the faintest tremor. “Do you remember what you said when you were sick? What you did?”

Jayce swears under his breath. “I don’t…what?”

“I’ll start from the beginning. The night we had sex. Do you remember what you said before you fell asleep?”

“Why does it matter, Viktor? We agreed not to talk about it, we agreed not to bring it up again.”

“Do you?”

Jayce groans. “I…” he racks his head trying to come up with whatever he might have said but all he can recall is the blur of sensation and heat and lips and the sort of giddy, ephemeral, and all-consuming joy that came with being with Viktor. “No, okay? I don’t.”

Viktor releases the door, letting Jayce’s residual strength push it back open as he stalks forward (Cats and birds and mice and the tall grass)

“You said you couldn’t wait to take me out on a proper date. The whole time we were cleaning up it was all you could talk about. How beautiful I was, how smart and clever I was. How you loved talking to me, how we were made for each other. You wanted to take me to that café you keep talking about in the morning, you wanted to take me to lunch after. You said you wanted a real date. You said you wanted something.”

Jayce’s heart drops to his stomach, pounding away with a cacophonous rhythm that makes him seasick all at once.

Viktor barrels on, raging storm water and violent winds. “And you left. You were gone before I woke up. I should have expected it, I should have…I would have understood if you’d had the decency to pretend like you were embarrassed the next time I saw you.

And what makes this worse, Jayce, is that I could have let it go. But you kept insisting on taking me places, you wanted to forget it ever happened and that was fine. It was fine for me, Jayce. But then you would look at me, and you would stare at me in your car like you wanted to do something and then you wouldn’t do it. And worst of all, worst, of all—” The handle of Viktor’s cane prods Jayce’s still chest. “You have the audacity to kiss me and tell me you could be falling in love with me. So if you could do me a favor and stop jerking me around all the fucking time, I would greatly appreciate it.”

When he finishes, Jayce is left shell-shocked. He tries to summon something, anything to say in the whirlwind of thoughts cascading around in his head. “I…” is what he starts with, before his throat closes around a horrified, nervous, stone.

This is what you’re good at, Jayce. This is what you excel at. People, one-on-one. Small groups.

It swells inside him, this seed threatening to burst because he can, he can remember it.

He remembers sitting there, watching the way the moon crept through the windows and bathed Viktor in the cold cast of its light. He remembers his thumb tracing the mole beneath his eye and the line of his cheekbone as if he could keep him there in his hand forever. He remembers thinking, endlessly, how beautiful he was.

How beautiful he is. Except—”I didn’t…” He really didn’t think he'd said that out loud.

The shattered-stone edges of Viktor’s eyes soften just faintly as Jayce begins to crumple in their reflection. “I’m so sorry,” he tells Viktor. “I’m so so sorry. I didn’t—I had no—I liked you.”

It comes out pathetic and squashed up in his chest, like his heart pressing itself through the gaps in his ribcage. “Viktor I didn’t want to be the guy who got weird after a one night stand and I didn’t want—you were so interesting and smart and I wanted you to like me and I wanted you to work with me and not feel weird about the sex and I wanted—”

The noise that tears from him is somewhere between wounded and scared, caught in the middle like the bird in the cat’s claw. And all the things he couldn’t say before spew up from the bottom of his churning stomach. “I spent the last four weeks wishing I could kiss you every single day and wishing that I didn’t leave. I spent four weeks thinking about what would have happened if I didn’t panic and if I stayed and I can’t believe I kissed you when I had a really bad cold that was so irresponsible of me and—”

Viktor cuts him off.

With his mouth. On Jayce’s mouth.

Kissing him.

And Viktor is kissing him.

And Viktor is kissing him.

And Jayce is kissing him back. He stoops low to set the bag down and sweep Viktor up in his arms in one movement.

Immediately, Jayce can feel himself become obsessed with the weight of Viktor in his arms, the tangle of elegant fingers in the front of his worn-in hoodie, the press of lips against his own. It’s right, it’s good.

They fit together perfectly, the click of two gears slotting into place within a machine. It’s like the last four weeks had been a hand at the bottom of the music box, cranking again and again and again before it releases with a flourish. And thus begins an effortless and fluid cascade dance, clockwork and beautiful.

The door clicks shut behind them as the pair surge, Viktor a step back and Jayce a step forward, through Viktor’s doorway and into his apartment. It’s the maelstrom it was before, though maybe worse by now.

Parts are strewn about the living space, like the collection of metal and bits that comprise them in the moment. Just pieces, thrown together haplessly and carelessly—a mess of intent not yet seen through.

Viktor’s hands push up the front of his shirt as he tears back from the embrace long enough to gasp, “Off.”

And Jayce complies immediately.

It’s a dance, of sorts. Like falling into time with one another after weeks of being out of sync. Viktor’s fingers run up the planes of Jayce’s chest and all Jayce can feel is the thrumming of his heart beating out in time with the sweep of his fingers. Viktor’s livewire touch skims across him, leaving gooseflesh rising in his wake as the electric-sharp feel of him ignites the whole of his nervous system in a single wave. All Jayce knows is the sensation of coming alive beneath the delicate touch.

“Say it again,” Viktor whispers in a shared breath that washes hot over Jayce’s lips. “Say you wanted me.”

“I want you,” Jayce echos, because it’s only natural, because it’s only right.

A step back, a step forward, like some strange waltz across a crowded living room floor. Viktor’s cane lands, abandoned, at their feet as Jayce’s hands find his hips to haul Viktor up against him, pulling them flush together in a single, fluid, movement.

Maybe it isn’t as elegant, or maybe it isn’t as neat, but to Jayce it’s art as they fumble over piles of books and half-abandoned projects. Jayce’s handwriting is still on the chalkboard in the corner and Jayce’s shirt is tossed over the wooden divider that cuts through the room and Viktor is splayed across his bed.

It’s light, this time. Daylight seeps through the window just over Viktor’s bed, a warm spread tangling in supernova eyes and melting down the peaks and mountains of his soft-snow sweater. Jayce knees between his legs, one hand curling up into the fabric of Viktor’s shirt.

Each inch of skin revealed is a dream in and of itself. It drags the breath from Jayce’s lungs as he pushes and pushes and pushes. Viktor’s sweater joins Jayce’s shirt somewhere in oblivion and the pair find easy harmony working the buckles of his leather-and-brass back brace.

Viktor’s hands rush all at once and Jayce stills them just as quickly. “Can…can I?” He asks, feeling suddenly bashful in his fervor.

“If you’d like. I certainly won’t complain.” There’s a beat. “As long as you don’t break it.”

“I’m not going to break it, V,” he huffs, leaning down as his fingers find purchase on the first buckle. Jayce ducks his face to Viktor’s sternum, placing a delicate kiss to the flush-warmed skin he finds as he gently starts to unwind the complicated wraps and buckles of Viktor’s brace.

Each one reveals a new piece of skin. Each one reveals a new piece of the mystery of Viktor’s tattoos.

From Viktor’s hips, now in the telling light of day, Jayce can follow the patterns of what look like wires curled into the divots and shapes of his body. For a moment, it’s like Viktor had turned himself into the blueprints of his own design. Wires run parallel to the muscles of his abdomen, cutting out the shape of his stomach and following the dip of his hip bones. Across them are lines, notes marking measurements like Viktor could stand in front of a mirror and use his own body as reference to create himself anew in steel.

Jayce’s fingers follow the black-and-white contours of Viktor’s tattoos, tracing them to the places where bolts are inked into the skin above his hips. He pushes up Viktor’s shirt like he’s unveiling the most cutting-edge work he’s ever been graced with, like Viktor’s skin is presenting the artful lines etched into his skin.

The further up Viktor’s body they go, the more concrete they become. The schematic style stays curling up the left side of his body, but as it bleeds to the right it becomes more and more carefully designed. Instead of blueprints and sketches, Viktor’s tattoos become the hypothetical reality imagined by the sketch. It bleeds into the image of a fully robotic arm inked down the length of Viktor’s right arm, realistic enough that when Jayce’s fingers skate the warm skin in awe and reverence, he’s nearly surprised by the give of Viktor’s flesh-and-blood body.

It isn’t until he has the brace fully off, set carefully to the side of the bed, that he can see the story Viktor tells with his skin.

The alignment of planets up the left arm, the pulsar map guiding strange creatures from beyond the stars, to the sketches and outlines of Viktor’s body to the realized potential. Jayce’s mouth goes dry at the sight of Viktor, a splayed out wonder on the bed beneath him.

Pinned up like a painting.

“It’s creation,” Viktor says, propping himself up on his hands.

Jayce is breathless, fingers drawing across the place where images of Viktor’s lungs are shaded out between cybernetic and organic. “It’s beautiful,” he says, struck almost mindless by the work of it.

“I designed it myself,” he says, as one narrow, thin, hand comes to rest atop Jayce’s. Has he always been this small? This un-delicate despite the appearance?

Something about Viktor has always felt strong.

The hand atop his guides Jayce’s touch over to the peak of one nipple and how, how, how in the darkness of the first night or in the distraction of the tattoos, Jayce somehow managed to miss the dark barbell that pierced through Viktor’s nipples he will never fucking know.

His mouth goes dry all at once. “Viktor,” he breathes, like the desperate prayer of souls adrift. He bends to him, in the gravitational pull of the star-stuff around them. A kiss beneath it, a kiss above, taste the faux-steel inked into warm skin, an offering before he can taste the metal that Viktor’s tattoos promise. The first drag of his tongue over Viktor’s pierced nipple is like a whisper of truth bleeding from art.

Beneath him, Viktor’s breath catches a faint glimmer before Jayce pulls back and does it again.

“Shit,” Viktor breathes, the last coherent noise he makes for the moment before Jayce can’t do anything but wrap his lips around the peak of his nipple and suck.

Viktor cries out, a sharp noise caught in the apex of his throat and Jayce would give it all up, he’d give up the degree he doesn’t have yet and every last dream he’s ever clung to if it meant making Viktor make that noise a hundred different times.

One warm, build-calloused hand sweeps around Viktor’s back as he arches, following the hills and valleys of his knobby spine, to hold him closer.

Jayce traces down, seeking the curve of Viktor’s ass when a sharp intake of breath from beneath him tears him from the moment. His hand freezes just above the small of his back. “Did I?”

Viktor shakes his head. “Scar tissue. It’s…it’s sensitive. Not painful just—”

Jayce nods immediately, hand’s moving to his side instead. He finds the patterns of Viktor’s ribcage, the dip just before the jut of his hipbone and the stretch of pale, tattooed, skin over it.

“Better?”

Viktor hums. “Much.” And a set of delicate fingers rise up to brush along the length of Jayce’s chest. He feels himself bend to the touch, yielding to Viktor’s gravity like a moon drawn to a planet. Stuck in his orbit and constantly watching.

It’s like a tidal pull when Viktor’s fingers brush over a nipple, sending waves of sensation sparking across Jayce’s nervous system. He tries to bite back the whimper that threatens to escape, tries to bury it in the center of Viktor’s chest as he drops his face to him.

And the fingers are gone for a breathless flicker before they return again in full force. Thumb and forefinger giving an affectionate tug that leaves Jayce swearing into Viktor’s skin.

“They—s—” He tries to echo, the electric burn of lightning striking water already starting to crackle over his skin. “Sensitive.”

And it smells like ozone, like the moments after a transformer blows in the thunderstorm. A gentle hand lands on Jayce’s shoulder, giving him the slightest push.

“Roll us over,” Viktor breathes.

And Jayce complies, because what else does a moon do in the wake of a planet, or a planet in the wake of a sun? His hands tighten at Viktor’s hips as he dips onto the bed, pulling Viktor over his chest and this…this is…

The light of the sun filtering through the window tangles in Viktor’s hair, reflects in the gold of his eyes and shines out around him like a burning halo and Jayce has seen beautiful things.

But he’s never seen something quite like this.

Kiss-bitten lips part as Viktor shifts to adjust so he isn’t kneeling above Jayce but lying, sprawled, across him. They’re seamed together like this, each inch above their jeans skin to skin to skin to skin. Warm lips land at his collar, his shoulder, right above his heart and if Jayce were anyone but himself he might agree that the sound ripped from his throat by the feeling of Viktor’s tongue laving, hot and slick, over one nipple, is a sob.

The hand not holding Viktor flush against him claps over his own mouth to muffle the noise but Viktor only gathers himself to bite the muscle of his pectoral right beside it. Jayce’s hips buck against Viktor's and—and he can feel him. A hard, eager, line pressing hot against his thigh.

“Fuck,” Jayce pants behind his hand.

Viktor clicks his tongue as he noses along the slick patch he’s just left behind. “Would you let me hear you?” He asks. “I know the kind of noises you make. I couldn’t stop thinking about them while we worked together. How when you get a cup of coffee you really enjoy, you groan the same as when I swallow your cock.”

“Fuck,” comes Jayce’s elegant whisper in turn. He drops the hand from his mouth to ring his arms around Viktor’s waist. “Would you—do you want to—”

Jayce doesn’t ask for this often.

In fact, Jayce can count the amount of times he’s asked for this on one hand.

Viktor pulls back to look down at him, brows knitting as his eyes search Jayce’s face. “You want me to fuck you?”

Jayce nods. “If you wanted to, I mean you don’t, you don’t have to.”

“Do you think there is a world in which I don’t want to fuck you?” Viktor asks, like it’s obvious.

Whatever Jayce was going to respond with is locked in his lungs, frozen in time as Viktor’s clever, beautiful, hands find his fly and it’s like the dance continues.

It’s Jayce catching Viktor in his arms, pulling them closer to kiss him like he’s the only anchor left in a desperate sea. It’s the slide of lips on lips and the taste of Viktor’s tongue licking past his teeth, like he’s trying to memorize the feeling of Jayce’s body inside and out—a searing thing, twisting and curling between them soldering them together like perfect cogs in the same machine.

It’s the constant movement, the shifting positions so Jayce can slink down the bed until his knees hit the soft carpeting. It’s the way Viktor looks at him, pupils blown to eclipse the sun caught in his eyes. (Something dangerous to look at, easy to get lost in)

Jayce watches, dutiful and eager, as Viktor shifts to sit up in the bed. It’s his voice, gentle and patient, guiding Jayce through the buckles and the clasps of his leg brace. The clatter of metal against metal as Jayce strips him with reverent hands.

Taking him apart to put him back together to take him apart again. Taking him apart to see where they fit, to understand the mechanisms of the things Viktor made, to understand the way his mind works, the way his body meets the constant tick-tick-tick of firing synapses.

He lets himself feel the weight of Viktor’s leg brace, feel the lovingly carved and crafted metal in his hands before he gently sets it aside and pulls himself higher to press a kiss to Viktor’s stomach. Then the inside of a clothed thigh.

Jayce helps him strip, not because he feels he needs to, but because he wants to. Take him apart to put him back together. The engineer's way.

Viktor’s tattoos extend partially down his right thigh, ending at a sharp and sudden ending. A set of dotted lines with a little pair of scissors. Cut Here.

Jayce’s fingers touch the line inked into his skin, a question rising in the hollow of his throat. It’s lost in the sensation of fingers dragging through his hair.

Viktor shrugs as his nails gently scrape across Jayce’s scalp, drawing shivers from across his skin. “Macabre, but I’ve known for a few years now that the degradation in it will only worsen. Eventually, I’ll have it amputated. Ideally by then I’ll have perfected my plans for an improved and affordable prosthetic. Also it eh, it felt a bit like a waste of money on a tattoo lower.”

He doesn’t know what to say in response. Everything feels, rather suddenly, like a pointless platitude. So he bends his head instead, pressing a warm kiss to the warm skin between his knee and that tattoo. A dip in their endless dance. “You’re going to create something beautiful.”

Another kiss, higher this time. “And I’ll be there with you. As long as you let me.”

Viktor’s fingers drop from Jayce’s hair, the nimble and precise touch of an inventor’s hand brushing down the line of his cheek. It dips, catches his chin, and tilts his face back up. Viktor holds him there like he’s considering him. One thumb sweeps out over kiss-slick lips that part, without hesitation, for him. Jayce lets his tongue slip out, lets himself bask in the saltsweet taste of Viktor’s skin as his eyes close with a content groan.

“Come back up here,” Viktor says, “and show me how you like to be fucked.”

Jayce clambers back onto the bed, and, after a moment of hesitation, folds himself down onto his back, pulling Viktor close beside him. “I um. I want to see you. But if it’s easier I can ride you.”

The lines of Viktor’s face soften immediately, and they meet for another lingering, slow, kiss. “I can adapt to most positions. Stay on your back.” And then, once again, it’s Viktor. It’s Viktor pulling at Jayce’s jeans until he can kick them off, leaving him nude within the starkness and vulnerability of Viktor’s apartment. Bare among the plans and the schematics, all the places where Viktor’s mind was left exposed.

They move, adjust, so Viktor’s leg can lie comfortably against the bed, slotted up against Jayce’s as Viktor urges Jayce’s other leg to bend up and out with gentle hands.

“Pillow?” Viktor asks, nodding up towards the stack up at the head of the bed. Jayce picks one at random and passes it down and he thinks, for a moment, that Viktor’s going to use it for himself—that it would make it easier for himself to kneel on or shift the weight of his leg. But two clever fingers tap at Jayce’s hip. “Lift.”

Oh.

Oh.

Jayce flushes and lifts them for him, body arching in one fluid motion so Viktor can tuck the pillow back behind them. He opens his mouth to tell him he’s pretty sure no one he’s ever let fuck him has ever even asked if he wanted one. (Don’t even think about it, what a way to kill the mood—)

But he doesn’t. Because he’s pretty sure that’ll kill the mood and the last thing he wants is for anything about this to change. He’s fallen into patterns with the tidal-pull and gravity-wave of Viktor’s fingers, the way he traces patterns onto Jayce’s skin like he’s trying to map out the internal mechanisms that keep his blood moving through his veins, like Jayce is something he’s going to create and recreate again and again.

Instead, he lets Viktor touch him, he lets him drag his fingers to trace patterns over the line and length of his chest, moving delicately with the rise and fall of his breath until there’s a feather light touch sweeping over him again and again.

Jayce is already painfully hard, his cock flushed against his stomach. Viktor hums an unfamiliar tune as he leans over to tug his nightstand open and returns with a half-empty bottle.

“Do you have any idea how pretty you are?” Viktor asks and Jayce is struck for a long moment, cock leaking as Viktor smears the pad of this thumb over a nipple.

Jayce’s brain struggles, clicks and whirrs like an overheated machine. “I…what?”

Viktor’s voice is low, a little rough with arousal as he dips his face to kiss the center of Jayce’s sternum. “You’re pretty.”

Again. It doesn’t quite make it past the start-up phase. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me pretty before. Mostly what you call girls, right?”

It’s said with a laugh but Viktor’s head only tilts from where he’s watching Jayce with a feline grace. “You are a very pretty boy.”

The rush of heat that gives him is mortifying. His cock twitches against Viktor’s thigh, head smearing sticky between them. Pretty boy. “Thank you?” He tries, face burning.

The curl of Viktor’s lips teeters on the edge of hungry. Viktor surges up to meet him, crashing together in the maelstrom of blankets and bedsheets and skin and limbs.

Viktor kisses, Jayce finds, like he does anything: headfirst and without abandon. It’s wild and reckless, electrifying and heart-felt and Jayce doesn’t think he’s ever been kissed like this before in his life. Viktor kisses like he’s wild, he kisses like he’s controlled, like everything he’s ever done has been so meticulously and calculatedly uncalculated.

They fall together, messy and precise in the same moments, the slick slide of lips over lips and tongues against tongues is only ever interrupted by a distant click of a plastic cap and the faint tightness of Jayce’s hamstring as Viktor keeps him spread.

The lube is cold on Viktor’s narrow fingers as he teases him, toys with him, between hard and starving passes of lips and the breathless shared pants that wash, hot, over Jayce’s mouth—but Jayce doesn’t care. He doesn’t mind the cold if it means Viktor’s sinking a finger into him, if it means he can feel the stretch of his body adjusting to accept him, making space inside himself for Viktor.

For Viktor.

One finger becomes two, and Viktor distracts from the growing burn with an absolutely vicious clasp of teeth to skin, latching onto the place where Jayce’s shoulder meets his neck to leave an imprint that Jayce doesn’t need to see to know it’ll bruise. He distracts from the ache in the bruise with another and another and another, until all Jayce can think of is the way he looked at himself in the mirror the morning after.

A piece of art, signed by Viktor.

“Please?” Jayce pants, chest glinting with a sheen of sweat and the smears of Viktor’s saliva. “Please, Viktor. I—hh—I need you inside me.”

Viktor answers with a curl of his fingers into that place inside Jayce’s body that makes him keen with a growing desperation. And Jayce’s voice breaks on another harsh cry.

“Drawer beside you,” Viktor says and Jayce can’t think about anything but his voice. Anything but the careful and precise directions. He scrambles for it, careful not to dislodge Viktor’s carefully working fingers.

Jayce doesn't think Viktor is asking for the empty orange bottles or the loose pens and scribbled-on note pads that populate his bedside drawer—but the second he spots the box, he snags it to hand to Viktor.

“Good,” comes the response and Jayce shivers.

Normally, in the scant few experiences Jayce has had bottoming, it’s been fine. He never felt the shuddering loss that came whenever someone drew their fingers out of him, whenever he was waiting for the press of a cock inside him. It had been more of an exchange, in a way, rather than an itch under his skin he couldn’t cope with.

But the moment Viktor’s fingers leave him, he’s whining. He twists his hips towards him like he can chase down the feeling of Viktor’s skin against his own, the feeling of Viktor inside him.

“Don’t worry,” Viktor hums, folding himself over him once he’s rolled the condom down over the, not insubstantial, length of his cock. Jayce shivers at the sight of him, at the feeling of him sliding up against his entrance. “I’ve got you.”

Jayce’s arms ring around Viktor again, pulling them down together and, with another kiss and another shared breath, Viktor is pushing inside him.

It’s a slow and careful, but ceaseless and controlled, push. Jayce feels himself tense, feels the heat of Viktor surging through him as his body bends and shapes itself around him. Unmaking to be remade around him.

Like two pieces made to fit together.

Viktor is trembling in his arms by the time they slot in place, skin flush to skin flush to skin and flush to skin. He wants to say something, he wants to say anything.

(He wants to say it all, he wants to say how beautiful Viktor is, he wants to say how perfect he looks in the light, how perfect he feels, how the weight of him in his arms is like he was made to be there, how he never wants to spend another moment without the feeling of their chests pressed together, hearts beating out a rhythm only they can dance to. He wants to say all the stupid things you shouldn’t ever say to a man you’ve known for less than a semester.

He wants to say it all, right there.)

“I—” And his throat closes around it as Viktor pushes his face to the hollow of his throat and rolls his hips against Jayce’s in a long, sinuous, movement.

The breath gasped against him is slick and fevered. “I know.”

I know.

I know.

I know.

Jayce’s fingers dig into the cut and curve of Viktor’s shoulders as he pushes his hips to meet the grind of his hips.

And all it is is tidal waves and gravity. The rise and fall of the ocean at rest and at a wrathful swell, the constant push and pull and dance across the cosmos. Jayce feels like he’s nothing and everything at once under Viktor’s hands and the movement of his body within his own. They’re one, at once, two disparate parts welded together at every insistant point of contact, into a new and spectacular invention.

Viktor gasps his name as the movement of his hips begins to pick up intensity, flooding the room with the slick sound of skin on skin and the harshness of Jayce’s breath as all he can manage is an endless prayer of Viktor’s name again and again and again. Like if he says it enough times he’ll burn it into the roof of his mouth so he can run his tongue over the shape of him whenever he’s alone.

“I need—” Jayce manages, somewhere between a sharp cry and a desperate whine. And Viktor’s hand wriggles between them. He surges up to meet him, his own body working between the hand on his cock and Viktor inside him.

Again and again and again and again and it’s tidal pulls and gravity and the planets and the sun and Viktor and Viktor and Viktor.

The white-hot burn inside him swells and swells and swells until all at once Viktor drags him to the brink of oblivion, to the place where he can unmake him and remake him. Like dipping his hands into springs of starstuff and crafting machinery from nothing. And he unmakes him, and he unmakes him.

When Jayce comes, it’s with Viktor’s name shattering over his tongue and the stuttering of hips pressing against his own. Somewhere, disconnected from his body but connected in the same way, he can feel the slam of Viktor against him, he can hear the shape of his name as it presses into his sweaty collar, he can hear the sound he wants to commit to memory above all else.

Again and again and again.

Neither of them speak as sweat and come cools between them. It’s a comfortable quiet, filled with just the softness of their breath and the twin-beats of their hearts.

When Viktor withdraws from him, pulling back to peel off his condom and bin it, Jayce feels a distinct part of himself vanish with him. And he feels whole again when Viktor returns, tucking himself under Jayce’s arm and pressing his cheek to his chest.

“That was amazing,” Jayce says, in part because it’s true and in part because the comfortable quiet can only last so long before his mind starts to fill in the gaps with whatever it pleases.

Viktor only hums into his skin for a long moment. “I enjoyed it. Clearly.” There’s a mirthful edge to it.

Jayce doesn’t expect the exhausted laugh to bubble up from him, but it does. “Yeah. So did, uh, so did I.”

Viktor’s breathing evens out slowly against him. “Jayce?”

“Hm?”

“If you leave this time, I won’t forgive you again.”

His chest seizes at the idea. “I don’t…I don’t want to leave.” Ever, goes unsaid.

Another long beat. “We can take a shower in a minute,” he slurs, muffling a yawn into Jayce’s chest shortly before Jayce feels him go slack.

 

###

 

Jayce doesn’t know when he falls asleep, but when he wakes up the sun has long since finished her stretch across the sky and left Viktor’s apartment in the cool wash of night.

One hand stretches out, seeking Viktor in the space beside him—but he only hits cool sheets and no, no, no no it cannot have been a dream. No way it was a dream, no way it was a dream.

He bolts upright and that was not a dream. The tacky come on his stomach might not be proof otherwise, but the ache between his hips and his thighs certainly is. Wincing a touch, Jayce starts to pull himself to the edge of the bed when he hears the faintest click and clang from just beyond the wooden divider.

Followed immediately by a soft. “Shit. Quiet.”

Viktor’s back and leg braces are conspicuously missing from the places Jayce had left them as he peels himself from the bed and pokes his head around the division.

He can see the shape of Viktor in the low light of a single reading lamp, shirtless and hunched over the pile of loose parts and what looks like scrap metal. One long arm reaches out and pulls an oversized cog closer to himself before he freezes, like a cat caught on the counters in the dead of night.

A single speck of warm gold appears over Viktor’s shoulder as he looks back at Jayce. “Did I wake you?”

“No, no I…are you working on something?” He crosses the room, trying to make something out of the half-gutted clocks and machines that look, quite frankly, like trash in the center of Viktor’s living room.

Viktor gestures down. “Recycling. I like to keep some spare parts around. And I thought I might find some good things to use for the claw in here.”

Slowly, carefully, Jayce sits beside him. “Oh?”

“Mmm,” Viktor hums in agreement, grabbing what Jayce is pretty certain used to be a piece of hospital machinery. And frankly he doesn’t want to ask where Viktor got it. “We’d need a stable central form for it, and I think we can find one in here.”

Jayce extends a hand to Viktor, eyes flickering to the toolbox splayed open beside him. “Mind if I?”

And there, between a chalkboard with two sets of handwriting and the abandoned deli bag, two young minds set about unmaking.

Notes:

I hope you enjoyed it! Soon I'll be back to writing tragedy and divorce era, worry not. Just wanted a bit of fresh fun. There was a Mountain Goats reference in this fic. As per tradition.

I'm on twitter (where I mostly talk about dnd and share jayvik nonsense)