Every Atom of You

by hideoustasha

Summary:

“I’m afraid the treatment options are—limited, Councilor,” the doctor had said. “Surgery would be somewhat unconventional, in this case. Given his condition, it may not be advisable.”

“Why not?”

“It would be hard on his body. There’s some risk to the fetus, as well.”

“The…” For a moment, Jayce was sure he’d misheard. “He’s pregnant?”

Chapter 1

Notes:

Click here for notes on the setting:

because I’m a total sap, this is a handwavey canonverse AU where things are much like they are in S2E7, except Vi is alive and Jayce and Viktor created Hextech but haven’t gotten around to creating weapons or the Hexcore.

in this AU, I imagine that Felicia’s death brought Vander and Silco together in their grief, rather than tearing them apart, which set them and the undercity on a different trajectory. Jayce’s lab blew up and landed him in trouble in some other way. he still ended up on the Council, a little more than a year before he did in canon.

Click here for content warnings:

terminal illness; unplanned (male) pregnancy; trans pregnancy; discussion of abortion (including implied disagreement about whether a pregnancy should be terminated)

this fic deals with incurable/terminal illness and disability. while I drew inspiration from the effects of tuberculosis, Viktor’s illness is not meant to directly represent any real-world illness.

The drumming of rain against the windows joined the faint murmur of the radio as Jayce returned to the sitting room after putting away what remained of their dinner. On the couch, Viktor was reading the evening newspaper by lamplight, looking for all the world as if he were winding down from an ordinary night.

He’d been dodging Jayce for a week, ever since he was discharged from the hospital—redirecting conversations in the lab back to their work, declining to sit down together for anything else. It had seemed fair to give him space at first. But tonight, Jayce had invited himself over and brought soup from one of the boundary market stalls that Viktor liked for good measure.

“I can feel you ruminating over there,” Viktor said, without glancing up from his reading. The newsprint crinkled as he turned a page. “Whatever you’ve got to say, out with it.”

At least Viktor seemed to recognize they needed to talk about it.

“I think you should get a second opinion,” Jayce said as he sat beside Viktor, close enough that their bodies brushed. He put a hand on Viktor’s thigh.

“Ah.” When Viktor folded the newspaper in half, Jayce glimpsed a photo of himself, taken yesterday, when he spoke at a public forum on zoning policy in Zaun. A proposal for new, multifamily housing along the entresol had proved controversial in Piltover proper. “I had hoped you were thinking of something more interesting.”

“I’m serious. You could see a specialist. I can get some names.” The Kirammans would know of someone reputable, surely, or their family physician would.

“There are no specialists for this,” Viktor said.

Jayce grimaced. He had gathered as much, in the past week. Gray wasting disease was not well-studied. Linked to long-term exposure to the gasses that billowed out of the fissures in Zaun, it caused lesions to form inside the lungs, which eventually spread to other organs.

After Cassandra Kiramman’s ventilation system was built, nearly twenty years ago now, air quality improved throughout the underground and instances of the disease dropped significantly. But Viktor was part of an unlucky cohort of young Zaunites, the final generation to spend their childhoods breathing in the Gray.

When the disease was more prevalent, the clinics in Zaun could provide little more than palliative care and the Piltovan medical community took little interest. Now that it appeared to be on its way out, there was even less incentive to develop new treatments. But Jayce was unwilling to admit that there was nothing to be done.

“There are pulmonologists in the city,” he said. “Outside the city, too. We can go anywhere we need to.”

Viktor set the newspaper aside. “Jayce,” he said slowly. “At this juncture, it’s important to have—realistic expectations.”

“It can’t hurt to get another set of eyes on your x-rays,” Jayce insisted.

“I am plenty familiar with this disease—”

“And you never told me!” The words came out harsher than Jayce meant them. “All those years, you didn’t say a word. You let me believe—”

“You believed what you wanted,” Viktor said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Jayce huffed. “If I’d known—”

“What?” Viktor’s brow was creased, more in annoyance than anger. His words were clipped. “What do you imagine you’d have done, oh Man of Progress?”

Jayce’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.

To tell the truth, he’d noticed changes in Viktor over the past few months. He’d lost weight, his cheeks hollowing out. He’d seemed unusually fatigued, the bags under his eyes growing heavier by the day. And he’d developed a lingering cough, which he’d assured Jayce was nothing—allergies, maybe, and the remnants of a cold that he took a while to get over. He’d always been private about his health, resistant when asked how he was feeling or how his occasional doctor’s appointments went.

Jayce was kicking himself now for accepting that, for not insisting he see a new doctor two or three months ago. If he had, maybe…

But he hadn’t. And because of that, there was no knowing how things might’ve been different. That was what he hated, more than Viktor’s stubborn secrecy: his own failure to do something.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I would’ve done. But you might’ve given me a chance. I should’ve—” His voice wobbled and he pinched the bridge of his nose, grimacing.

Viktor sighed through his nose and muttered something Jayce didn’t quite catch. “Enough of that,” he said, reaching for Jayce. “Come here.”

Jayce didn’t hesitate. He sank down, stretching his body along the couch and laying his head gratefully in Viktor’s lap. He listened to the low murmur of the radio, focused on the feeling of Viktor’s hand stroking his hair.

He felt like he’d been holding his breath for the past week, since he woke at three bells to an urgent knock at his door. He was the emergency contact on Viktor’s medical forms, so when a guard doing her rounds found Viktor on the floor of the lab, unconscious, his shirtfront bloody, it was Jayce they sent for.

At the hospital, before he was allowed to see Viktor, a doctor spoke with him in a waiting room. She kept using words like “incurable” and “terminal” and “life expectancy,” which Jayce struggled to absorb. He kept thinking that there had been some mistake, that she was talking about someone other than Viktor.

“I’m afraid treatment options are—limited, Councilor,” the doctor had told him, not unkindly. “In some cases, if caught early enough, it’s possible to remove the affected part of the lung. But there are lesions in both lungs and his spine is already affected. There are likely more growths in his abdomen. The disease is advanced.”

More than a year ago, Viktor had surgery to drain abscesses in his spinal column that were causing the bones to deteriorate. The surgeons had cut out the damaged tissue and stabilized his spine with plates and screws.

Viktor had led Jayce to believe the abscesses were a freak occurrence, coincidental, rather than the result of lesions that had spread from his lungs to his spine. It was a natural progression of his disease, Jayce knew now, and would’ve eventually paralyzed him without intervention. To this day, he had some weakness in his legs that wasn’t there before and difficulty standing fully straight.

He’d known Viktor was sick. But he hadn’t understood how serious it was until now.

“There has to be something you can do,” Jayce had told the doctor, struggling to keep his voice steady. The lights in the waiting room were too bright; his eyes were stinging.

The doctor seemed to consider it. “Debulking surgery could be an option,” she said. “It’s more commonly used on cancer that has spread through the abdomen. The idea is to remove as many lesions as possible—not to cure the disease, but to slow the spread and allow for other treatment in the meantime. It would be—somewhat unconventional, in this case. Given his condition, it may not be advisable.”

“Why not?”

“It would be very hard on his body. There’s some risk to the fetus, as well.”

“The…” For a moment, Jayce was sure he’d misheard. The white walls seemed to waver in front of his eyes. “He’s pregnant?”

Somehow, that news was harder to fathom than that of an incurable disease. It seemed impossible. But they had tested for everything when they ran his initial blood work, to get a baseline, and the result came back clear.

It was hard to tell precisely how far along Viktor was because he had no previous cycle to go off, though the doctor said his hormone levels indicated somewhere around fourteen weeks. Make that fifteen weeks, Jayce thought grimly.

Viktor’s voice floated to him, drawing him back to the present. “We need to speak about—the other matter,” he said, still stroking Jayce’s hair.

He always seem to know what Jayce was thinking. “Is it…” Jayce hesitated, shifting so he could look up at Viktor, who was in turn gazing out the window. The rain was coming down harder. “I mean, do you know if it’s…”

At that, Viktor glanced down at him, brows arched. The lamplight made his eyes look molten. “You’re asking if it’s yours?”

“No. Yes. I just—figured you would’ve told me by now if it were,” Jayce said, somewhat sheepishly.

They’d been sleeping together for nearly three years now. They’d agreed at the outset that it was better, simpler, for their public relationship to appear purely professional, so their intimacy had remained private, confined mostly to their apartments or the lab in the darkest hours of the night.

It was, technically speaking, Jayce’s longest and most committed romantic entanglement—even if they never spoke about it in those terms, even if he knew it probably meant more to him than it did to Viktor. He wasn’t sure where Viktor might find the time to see other men, but it was possible and well within the boundaries of their relationship.

“I wasn’t keeping it from you,” Viktor said, sounding faintly offended. “I didn’t know myself. Even if it weren’t—well.” He twisted a lock of Jayce’s hair around one finger, not harshly. “Yours. I would’ve told you.”

“Oh,” Jayce said, on an exhale. So it was his, after all. He sat up, scrubbing a hand over his face and feeling somehow worse than before. “I’m sorry, Viktor. This is my fault.”

Viktor hummed. “I seem to remember participating.”

Jayce didn’t have it in him to laugh. “I was irresponsible,” he said. They’d never worried much about contraception; with Viktor’s regular hormone injections, there seemed to be no risk that something would take. Stupid, in hindsight. He knew better. “This is the last thing you need.”

“I can think of one other thing,” Viktor muttered.

At that, Jayce managed a brief, halfhearted smile. “Is the procedure scheduled?”

“What procedure?”

“The—termination.”

With how far along Viktor was, he expected the process would be somewhat more involved than a termination at an earlier stage. There ought to be someone around to help him at home after, while he recovered. Jayce would be that person.

It would be no different than last year, after Viktor’s back surgery, when Jayce stayed with him for a week to change the dressing on the wound and dole out painkillers on a schedule and make sure he ate. He was qualified to do that much, to care for Viktor in that way. The rest could be figured out later.

“Ah,” Viktor said. “No, it isn’t.”

“Did they give you an idea of when it should happen?” Time was a precious commodity now. The sooner this was taken care of, the sooner they could begin pursuing other avenues—surgeries, other forms of treatment. There had to be something.

“Well, yes. I’m—weighing the options.”

Jayce was momentarily thrown. “What options?”

“There are only the two. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain them to you,” Viktor said, his jaw tightening the way it always did when Jayce asked one too many questions about his health.

Jayce felt his stomach sink to somewhere around his knees. “Tell me you’re not actually thinking about keeping it,” he said. That option had not occurred to him as viable or even worthy of serious consideration. Viktor’s health was precarious enough as it was; his body couldn’t take any added strain. “It’ll kill you.”

Viktor gave a humorless laugh. “That will happen regardless, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, whether I say it or not.”

“People live with this illness for years—”

“I’ve used up those years,” Viktor said, so firmly that Jayce fell silent. “I’ve already exceeded the life expectancy. You know this.”

Gray wasting disease could lie dormant in the body for years before symptoms became obvious—that was what the doctor had told Jayce. Symptoms could flare up and then improve, allowing for intermittent periods of apparent health, until the disease reached an advanced stage and became impossible to ignore.

Lesions spreading from the lungs to other body parts was a bad sign. Coughing up blood was even worse. For most patients, that meant time was short, measured more accurately in months than in years.
Jayce knew that. But he wouldn’t admit it out loud. He couldn’t.

“Nothing’s guaranteed,” he said. “We don’t know what options you have. We haven’t tried anything yet.”

That was the shred of hope he’d been clinging to these past days—the chance, however slim, that Viktor would exceed expectations again, long enough for Jayce to find a more permanent solution.

Six more months with Viktor wasn’t enough. A year wasn’t enough. No amount of time would be enough.

Viktor was quiet for a moment. “When I was a child, there was no treatment,” he said at last. “None at all. It was thought that breathing the clean air up top was the best thing to do—the only thing. Good air and good food were the same as medicine, and most people died before thirty because they didn’t have either one. Do you understand?”

“It’s not like that anymore,” Jayce said, reaching for Viktor. He thought, unbidden, of the Hextech-powered water filtration system that Viktor had pioneered and the Council, at Jayce’s urging, had agreed to fund. The project was near completion but it would be years before they could measure the full impact. He rejected the thought that Viktor might not be there to see it. “You don’t have to accept it. You’ve never rolled over and accepted anything in your life—”

“You’re not hearing me. I know what the end stages look like, Jayce—”

“So you’re giving up?” He squeezed Viktor’s wrist, gently, and fought not to wince at how thin it felt, how bony. “You’ll just—waste away, and expect me to watch—”

“The best your Piltie surgeons can offer is to slice me open, scrape out the tumors and wait for them to grow back,” Viktor said, each word sharp and distinct. “It’s as likely to kill me on the table as it is to buy me a few more miserable months, and—”

He broke off with a sputter, then a cough, one hand fluttering for the handkerchief in his pocket. Jayce moved to touch his shoulder, but Viktor swatted him away with his free hand and pressed the handkerchief to his mouth with the other.

It went on and on—a deep, wracking, painful-sounding cough. When at last it subsided, Jayce saw that the handkerchief was wet with blood.

“Viktor,” Jayce tried.

Viktor twisted away from him, grabbing his crutch from where it leaned against the couch. “I’m going to bed,” he said as he hauled himself upright. “Will you catch the streetcar home?”

“I… sure,” Jayce said.

There was a stop close to Viktor’s building; the convenience of it was part of why he moved here. The other reason was that it was a newer build with an elevator, rather than a narrow, winding set of stairs that was murder on his leg, like his last building had.

“On second thought, you’ve probably missed it already,” Viktor said—his way of telling Jayce he wanted him to spend the night.

That seemed like progress, or something like it. “You’re probably right,” Jayce said.

In the bedroom, he undressed and climbed into bed and tried unsuccessfully to think of nothing as he watched rivulets of rain run along the window, lit by the faint yellow-white glow of the street lamps below.
Viktor was in the bathroom for some time. He turned on the shower to cover the noise, but Jayce still heard him through the wall, coughing and spitting into the sink, until at last he came to bed.

“I’m sorry,” Jayce said as Viktor settled into bed beside him. He rolled over and slotted himself along Viktor’s side, resting his head on his partner’s shoulder, and slung an arm across him. “For what I said. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I don’t want to argue.”

“I know,” Viktor said, the words like a sigh. He pressed a kiss to the top of Jayce’s head, his lips lingering for a moment. “It’s difficult. I know it is. It’s not my intention to leave you with a responsibility you don’t want.”

Jayce lifted his head slightly. “I didn’t mean the…”

The baby. He couldn’t say it.

He was acutely aware of how narrow Viktor’s body felt against his, how sharp. He wasn’t showing at all—a thought that seemed almost fantastical to Jayce as it crossed his mind, a thought he’d never imagined he would have to consider. It had something to do with the shape of the pelvis and the tilt of the organs, he’d gathered, and it still didn’t seem fully real.

He told himself practicality would win out in the end.

“I expect nothing from you,” Viktor said, his breath stirring Jayce’s hair slightly. “Whatever the outcome.”

“You must think I’m a really shitty person,” Jayce said, sinking back down against Viktor’s shoulder. He couldn’t help the sourness that bled into his tone. “If you think I’d abandon you while you’re…”

Pregnant?

Dying?

Jayce wasn’t prepared to face either of those options, so the final word hung in the air around them, unspoken.

“I never said that,” Viktor told him.

“You were thinking it.”

“Never,” he said again, and somehow, Jayce believed him.

The rain had softened to a patter against the window. They lay together for a while, not speaking, Jayce counting Viktor’s breaths.

“We can get a second opinion,” Viktor said at last, so softly that Jayce had to strain to hear him.

“Really?”

“If it would help you.”

“The idea is to help you, actually,” Jayce replied. “But I’ll take it.”

Viktor gave a quiet huff of a laugh that triggered another coughing fit. He rolled over and grabbed another handkerchief off the nightstand, pressing it to his mouth as he hacked.

When at last it subsided, Viktor cleared his throat. “As for—the other matter,” he said, hoarsely.

“We can talk about it in the morning,” Jayce said. He hesitated, just for a moment, before he placed a hand on Viktor’s back, above the place where he knew the old surgical scar stood out.

This time, at least, Viktor didn’t push him away.

Notes:

I haven’t written fic in years, but “Arcane” inspired me to return to my roots (namely mpreg and interpersonal drama).

thank you for reading. feel free to visit on Bluesky or Tumblr.

Chapter 2

Notes:

thank you so much for the warm reception to the first chapter. your encouraging words helped me complete this part.

please note that both the rating and the chapter count have changed. we’re now looking at five chapters in total.

Click here for content warnings:

terminal illness; unplanned (male) pregnancy; trans mpreg; explicit references to dfab anatomy (including words like “cunt” and “clit”); PIV sex; discussion of abortion (including disagreement about whether a pregnancy should be terminated)

They had barely crossed the threshold into Jayce’s flat before Viktor pushed him back against the door and kissed him, hard and open-mouthed. Jayce was surprised, but not unpleasantly so; he returned the kiss with enthusiasm, gripping Viktor’s hips as his partner pressed against him.

At last, breathless, he broke the kiss. “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” Viktor’s hand was tangled in Jayce’s tie. “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“Hold on,” Jayce said, pulling back enough to get a better look at Viktor. “The files you sent over—”

Viktor blinked. “Is that really what you want to talk about right now?”

For Jayce, it had been a long, miserable day. The mixed-use zoning proposal he’d spent months developing went up in flames during this morning’s Council meeting. (It was salvaged, somewhat, by Mel, who suggested they kick the proposal back to the planning commission with an instruction to conduct an impact study.) His afternoon meetings dragged on into the evening, running so late that he and Viktor had time only for a hurried meal at a noodle shop near campus before they caught the streetcar to Jayce’s neighborhood.

Through it all, humming in the background, were the files Viktor had sent to Jayce’s office this morning. He’d shuffled through them between appointments and turned them over and over in his mind when he was meant to be focusing on other matters. He’d figured they would come back to his place tonight and review the files together, the way they would any report.

But here was Viktor: pressed against him, face flushed and eyes shining. If he was feeling well enough—if he’d been thinking about it all day—that could only be a good sign.

“Not really,” Jayce said, on an exhale, and kissed Viktor with his mouth open.

Viktor abandoned his crutch somewhere along the way, but he didn’t need it as much like this, when he had Jayce to lean on as they stumbled together into the dim bedroom and collapsed onto Jayce’s bed.

Jayce stripped off the rest of his clothes fast enough that he had time to kneel at the end of bed, where Viktor was sitting, and go to work on the leg brace while Viktor peeled off his own undershirt. By now, Jayce was well-practiced at unlatching the device and could do it in a few deft twists—thigh, knee, ankle, and the whole thing slid off. The back brace took longer, with its many buckles and screws.

“Oh, leave it,” Viktor said, impatiently, as Jayce reached for his chest.

Viktor shimmied out of his trousers and undergarments, kicking them aside, and leaned back on his elbows against the deep blue bedding, naked except for the brace. He gave Jayce a steady look, dark-eyed, but his pulse was fluttering at his throat, betraying his excitement.

In the low light, Jayce saw the reddened indents that striped Viktor’s leg, where the brace bit into him all day. Even with a good fit, some irritation was unavoidable; an earlier iteration of the device left bruises up and down his leg, like watercolor stains. He rubbed his calloused fingers over the widest band, which curved around Viktor’s upper thigh, knowing the flesh would be sore and sensitive.

At his touch, Viktor sucked in a breath, and his thighs twitched apart, showing his cunt a little. Just seeing a flash of it—the neat, pink slit—made Jayce grip Viktor’s slender thighs and haul them open wider.

Viktor dropped back against the bed, drawing his knees up, like he expected Jayce to mount him immediately, but Jayce was in no rush. It had been weeks since they’d been together. Something always got in the way: Jayce was pulled into some meeting, or Viktor was feeling unwell, and then, more recently—

He didn’t want to think about that. Not now.

Jayce lingered over Viktor’s body, stroking his bare skin, pressing open-mouthed kisses to his softest spots: his throat, the expanse of his belly left exposed by the brace, his inner thighs. Beneath him, Viktor sighed and squirmed.

“Look at you,” Jayce said, his face close enough to Viktor that the warmth of his breath over Viktor’s cunt made him shudder. He looked perfect: slick and glistening, his clit swollen, practically begging to be touched.

“Is that all you plan to do?” Viktor was a little breathless, but still demanding. “Look?”

Jayce ran the flat of his tongue across the slit, from end to end, and grinned at the yelp it earned him—shocked, pleasured. Then he dipped his head again to kiss Viktor’s cunt, as deeply as he would kiss him on the mouth.

“Jayce—” Viktor got one leg over Jayce’s shoulder and arched his back as much as he could, struggling for friction as Jayce stroked with his tongue. “Will you just—”

“Relax,” Jayce murmured, lips moving against Viktor’s clit, making Viktor toss his head back against the mattress with a groan. He pushed one finger inside, then two, scissoring gently; the slide was warm and wet, a little tight.

Viktor’s frustrated noises dissolved into soft sighs and moans as Jayce lapped at him. His thighs clenched; his breath stuttered. He was so wet that Jayce’s chin was soaked, slick enough that Jayce managed to slip a third finger inside.

When at last he took the stiff clit into his mouth, it was like turning a light on: Viktor’s voice broke and he went taut as a wire, his heel digging into Jayce’s shoulder blade. He pulsed and fluttered against Jayce’s mouth, around his fingers, until he melted into the sheets, breathing hard.

While he was still pliant from the orgasm, Jayce nudged at his hip, maneuvered him onto his front with a pillow under his hips—easier on his back—and slotted into place behind him. They both groaned as he pushed between Viktor’s legs, into the slick heat.

“You can—harder,” Viktor gasped, his face half-turned into the mattress, as Jayce began to rock his hips. “You won’t hurt me.”

“Wasn’t thinking that,” Jayce said, his voice wavering as he felt Viktor clench around him. “I know you can take it—”

He snapped his hips, as if to prove it, hard enough that Viktor gasped, and then seemed to choke. He sputtered, and the sound clawing up his throat grew stronger as he tried to hold it in.

Jayce slowed, then stopped entirely as Viktor clamped a hand over his mouth and buried his face against the mattress, coughing. “Shit. Viktor—”

He rolled off Viktor and leaned over to turn on the bedside lamp. In the wash of yellow light across the bed, Viktor sat up, and Jayce’s heart stumbled when he saw the blood leaking between his slender fingers. Each cough pushed out more blood; a thin stream dribbled along the back of his hand. Jayce bolted into the bathroom for a towel.

They showered together after the coughing fit subsided, taking turns washing each other’s backs, and then huddled close enough for the spray to hit them both, bodies pressed together. The air was thick with steam.

At Viktor’s place, there was a stool in the bathroom, presumably so he could sit in the shower. The stool was a recent addition, one that suggested his hip and knee were getting worse again, but he’d said nothing about it, so Jayce pretended not to notice it was there. Here, all Jayce had were non-slip treads on the shower floor and trouble asking about Viktor’s mobility without getting his hackles up, so he just stayed close and dropped his forehead against Viktor’s shoulder.

The shape of Viktor’s body was utterly familiar, and yet, as he stood there with water running into his eyes and his hands on Viktor’s waist, with no clothing or brace to obscure, something was different. There was a gentle swell to his lower belly, slight but visible on his narrow frame.

Jayce felt abruptly lightheaded. From the heat, he thought.

 

---

 

“There are a few more doctors I want to look at your x-rays,” Jayce said, when they were back in his bed. “I requested the consultations.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that,” Viktor said.

“You didn’t have to.”

Viktor was struggling to get comfortable on his left side, facing Jayce. “You read the same opinions I did,” he said, adjusting the pillow between his legs and then pulling the blanket back over himself.

Jayce picked at the edge of a blanket, just for something to do with his hands. The past week had been punctuated with medical appointments, scheduled so swiftly only because the requests came from the office of Councilor Talis. The rushing around gave them an excuse to avoid talking about what needed to happen next.

The second opinion—from a pulmonologist well known to the Kirammans’ family physician, one Dr. Whitefield—was much the same as the first: bitterly disappointing. The third opinion, from an internist Jayce sought out himself, was no more encouraging.

The abdominal lesions could be managed through debulking, at least temporarily, though as they grew around Viktor’s organs, excising them would become more complicated. The spine could be strengthened, if it continued to deteriorate: more plates, more screws, a fusion, if it came to that.

The real problem was with Viktor’s lungs. It was possible to cut away the diseased tissue, but Viktor’s illness was so advanced, his lungs so damaged, that doing so would leave him with too little function to survive for long. And while outcomes for organ transplantation had greatly improved in the last decade, no surgeon would put a pair of healthy donor lungs inside a patient who was dying of Gray wasting disease. The new lungs would only become infected and turn to a bloody mush, like the old ones.

Viktor had about a year before his lungs gave out entirely—and that was a generous estimate, not taking into account the strain that other conditions would put on his body. The treatment options available to him were palliative, meant only to make him more comfortable as he died.

To Jayce, this was unacceptable. There had to be something more they could do.

“It would help if we had more imaging,” he said, knowing Viktor would understand.

They needed a clearer picture of what was happening inside Viktor’s body, the size and location of the lesions. The doctors’ opinions were based on the initial x-rays taken at the hospital, before the blood work came back and put a halt to any more imaging. Viktor couldn’t undergo another scan until the pregnancy was terminated, because x-ray technicians were reluctant to expose a fetus to radiation on purpose, however briefly.

Viktor was quiet for a moment. “Dr. Whitefield referred me to a colleague of hers,” he said, looking at Jayce. The low light carved out his face in peaks and valleys. The thin skin under his eyes was lavender—from exhaustion, from illness. There seemed to be no difference anymore. “A perinatologist. There was some concern about… abnormalities, given the circumstances.”

Jayce swallowed. “When’s the appointment?”

“It was four days ago.”

“What?”

“The blood work came back this morning.” Viktor’s words were measured, like he’d rehearsed, like he was giving a presentation to a panel of potential investors, but his voice was a little thin. “No markers for the illnesses they can test for. The heart rate is in the right range. It appears healthy, as far as the doctor could tell. ‘Developmentally normal,’ I was told.”

A sudden rushing sound in Jayce’s ears made it hard to think.

For nearly a fortnight, each time he held the images of Viktor’s ruined lungs to a light and scoured them for some sign of hope, or thought of his ambivalence toward treatment and reluctance to schedule a termination, Jayce fought down the rising panic by telling himself Viktor would see sense. They would agree on this, without issue, without argument, and there would be a path forward—or at least one less thing to worry about.

But there could be only one reason for Viktor to tell him these things about the fetus, when he’d kept the appointment from him. Was this why he’d come over?

“I thought we were going to talk about this,” he said slowly, sitting up, suddenly aware of his own pulse.

“We are talking about it,” Viktor replied.

“You seem like you’ve made up your mind.”

“If you would give me a moment—”

“Don’t I get a say?”

Pushing himself up onto one elbow, Viktor furrowed his brow. “I beg your pardon?”

“This affects both of us.” Jayce felt like his throat was closing. His mind raced, searching for some line of reasoning that might make Viktor reconsider or at least hesitate. “What happened to us keeping things professional?”

“Yes. Well.” Viktor’s jaw tightened as he sat up the rest of the way. His voice was low, but each word was taut as a wire. “I’m sure the thought of getting a bastard child on a trencher is upsetting to someone of your pedigree—”

“Hey,” Jayce said, lifting his hands, as if he could ward off the accusation. “It was your idea not to tell anyone that we—”

“But not so upsetting that you weren’t willing to risk it for three years—”

“You said you couldn’t get pregnant,” Jayce snapped, before he could think to stop himself. He winced at his own words, feeling his face grow warm. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How, then?”

Jayce exhaled sharply. “What do you want me to say? That this is good news? That I’m happy about it?”

Viktor looked like something sharp was digging into him. “If you want me to get rid of it, you should say so, instead of dancing around it—”

“Of course I want you to get rid of it,” Jayce said raggedly, the words burning in his throat. “I don’t understand why we’re even having this conversation. You can’t kill yourself for this, Viktor.”

He reached for Viktor, meaning to draw him closer, but Viktor twisted away and grabbed the robe hanging off his side of the headboard. It was Jayce’s robe, in fact, but he didn’t keep any clothes here, just as Jayce didn’t keep clothes at Viktor’s place. Instead, they made little concessions like this, fitting into the gaps in each other’s spaces.

“For what it’s worth,” Viktor said, reaching for his crutch, “it probably won’t be the thing that kills me.”

Jayce hurried to get up. “We can talk about this,” he said, circling around to the other side of the bed as Viktor maneuvered to his feet.

“You’ve made yourself understood.” Moving with a determined efficiency, Viktor scooped his clothes off the dresser and gathered the leg and back braces from their usual overnight spot on the ottoman. “I appreciate the transparency.”

Jayce trailed after Viktor as he crutched stiffly out of the bedroom and toward the guest bathroom, presumably to get dressed. “It’s the middle of the night,” he said. The streetcars weren’t running at this hour, but he sensed that would not dissuade Viktor, so he changed tactics. “Let me call a carriage.”

“No need.”

“Viktor—”

The only answer was the sound of the bathroom door slamming shut.

Jayce called a carriage anyway, while Viktor got around. Getting the orthopedic devices on took some time, even with a second pair of hands to assist, so by the time Viktor emerged, fully dressed, the carriage was idling outside the building.

Naturally, Viktor refused the ride.

 

---

 

The first time Jayce attended Tobias Kiramman’s birthday was the year he and Viktor cracked Hextech. When the invitation came in the mail, he’d felt like he was really moving up in the world—not just one of several young inventors the Kirammans’ favored, but someone they also wished to socialize with, someone worth entertaining.

It turned out to be pretty stuffy for a party, though at least the alcohol flowed freely and the hors d’oeuvres were delicious. All night, Jayce remembered thinking that he would’ve enjoyed it much more if Viktor were there.

He had the same thought this year, as he endured small talk with merchants and guildsmen who were close to the Kirammans. He knew how to go through the motions at these kinds of events, how to smile and laugh in the right places, but it felt uncommonly exhausting tonight.

In time, he found a place for himself off to the side, where he could watch the partygoers without really seeing them and grab champagne flutes from passing servers. He was near the bottom of his third glass of champagne when he felt a gentle hand on his arm and a presence at his side.

Mel sidled up next to him, resplendent in a close-fitting crimson gown. A ruby necklace winked at her throat, and more decorated her hair, gleaming with each slight movement of her head. “Councilor Talis—don’t tell me you’re still stewing on that zoning vote,” she said, her voice low and playfully disapproving. “It’s really not the end of the world.”

“No, no,” he said, too quickly, straightening his back. “I was just thinking of—the presentation next week.”

It was a plausible lie, he thought. With Hexgates installed in several major ports and negotiations for more still in progress, it was time to explore other applications for the tech. Large-scale passenger transport was the obvious next step. The first meeting to pitch potential investors was scheduled in a few days.

“Will Mr. Novak be joining us?” Mel asked. The gold bangles on her wrist sparkled as she lifted a hand to sip her drink.

Though they’d been acquainted for nearly six years, Mel and Viktor remained on a last-name basis. She referred to Viktor that way out of politeness, Jayce had always figured, though Viktor had mentioned to Jayce that it wasn’t his real last name. Nobody who knew him well called him Mr. Novak.

In Zaun, few people went by surnames, but anybody who wanted to live or work or do much of anything in Piltover needed one for their identification papers. The name on a Zaunite’s papers indicated what part of the undercity they were from. In the neighborhood where Viktor grew up, they were all Novaks on paper.

“Probably not,” Jayce said. Viktor disliked meeting directly with investors at the best of times. “He’s got a lot on his plate lately.”

“I see. Well, I think you’ll manage without him,” she replied. “In the meantime, what about you?”
Jayce paused with his glass half-lifted to his mouth. “What about me?”

“You’ve seemed… distracted, the past few weeks,” she said, dropping her voice to a murmur.

“Have I?”

“You were a million miles away just now.” Mel’s eyes were soft and unavoidable. “Are you quite well, Jayce?”

He swallowed. In truth, he hadn’t felt quite like himself lately—more like he’d been walking around in a fog. But he hadn’t realized it was so obvious. “Busy time of year,” he said. “That’s all.”

She looked unconvinced, but she nodded and gave his arm a gentle squeeze. “All the same, if there’s something that you need…”

Mel’s voice faded as a pair of guildsmen approached them, plainly wishing to speak to her. Jayce took the opportunity to excuse himself. He needed some air.

He wove through the crowd, exchanging as few hellos as possible, and slipped through the ornate double doors on the far side of the room, which opened onto a balcony overlooking the Kirammans’ expansive gardens. Below, a waning moon limned the hedges and flower beds in silver.

A cool wind carried with it a faint floral scent, a welcome reprieve from the warmth from the close, warm air of the party and the competing smells of different perfumes. The music and chatter were like a wall at his back, impenetrable—the sounds of Piltover’s high society. He leaned against the balustrade, idly swirling the glass in his hand, as Viktor’s words floated back to him.

I’m sure the thought of getting a bastard child on a trencher is upsetting to someone of your pedigree…

Since their argument two nights ago, Jayce had turned that comment over and over in his head. How long had Viktor been holding onto it? Where did it come from? Surely Jayce had never done or said anything to make Viktor believe he felt that way. Or had he?

Nobody knew Jayce better than Viktor, or understood him so completely, but sometimes he wondered if the reverse were true. Even after all these years, Viktor surprised him.

Jayce supposed that was by design. They had carefully walled off their personal and professional relationships. There were places they didn’t go, conversations they didn’t have, little intimacies they didn’t share—like talking about whether either of them wanted children someday, for instance.

Until recently, Jayce couldn’t have said with any degree of confidence whether Viktor wanted a family of his own. He’d never given it much thought. Ridiculous, in retrospect. Viktor was right—they had treated pregnancy like an impossibility, and after three years, their luck ran out.

Viktor had always given the impression that he was married to his work; there seemed to be little room in his life for other pursuits, even if he wanted them. Jayce was similar, to the point that his mother spent years subtly probing him about his intentions to settle down and have a family. She gave up on subtlety around the time he turned thirty.

Though he was dragging his feet, in his mother’s view, Jayce had always thought he would have children—eventually, with some as-yet unidentified person, when the time was right. His nebulous idea of that future was nothing like this. He had never imagined it could happen at the cost of someone so important.

What was he supposed to do without Viktor, much less with a baby? It seemed like no future at all. He couldn’t picture it.

“Shouldn’t you be mingling right about now?”

Jayce looked over his shoulder as Caitlyn stepped out onto the balcony, dressed in a deep green gown with a high neckline. Her long hair was pulled up in a knot, though a few strands at her temples had escaped.

He smiled at her, and for the first time in days, it was genuine. “Hey, Sprout.”

Caitlyn edged out of the pool of yellow light that spilled through the double doors, closer to the balustrade. “I’m glad you made it,” she said, placing one hand on the stone rail. “I wasn’t sure if we’d see you tonight.”

“You thought I’d skip your dad’s party? What, and miss out on all the scintillating talk about work?”

She elbowed him lightly. Then she dropped her voice a little. “I heard you talking to my parents the other night about Dr. Whitefield,” she said. “It sounded grim. I was worried something was wrong.”

Jayce felt the smile drain from his face. It didn’t surprise him, exactly, that Caitlyn had been in the vicinity, listening silently, when he sat in her parents’ parlor and asked them to put him in touch with their physician. But he hadn’t expected her to bring it up like this. “I wasn’t asking for myself,” he admitted. “It was for Viktor.”

Caitlyn moved a little closer to him, leaning back against the balustrade. “Is he ill?”

“Yeah.” He took another sip of his drink and squeezed his eyes shut, just for a moment, like he could block the world out. “He’s dying, Cait.”

There. He’d said it out loud, for the first time. Until now, he’d held it in, as if Viktor’s condition would worsen just by speaking about it frankly. It was almost a relief to tell someone, to let the words dissipate into the late summer air, even as he felt his chest tighten.

“He’s…” Caitlyn stared at him, eyes wide. “From what?”

“Wasting disease, from the gasses in the fissures where he grew up. His lungs are disintegrating. His whole body—” Jayce broke off, willing his voice to stay even. “It’s not curable. Barely treatable. What treatment there is, he doesn’t want.”

Her brow was creased with concern. “I don’t understand.”

Jayce shook his head. There was no telling her the whole of it, not tonight. “I don’t know what to do for him,” he said. “I’ve only been making it worse so far.”

“How could you possibly do that?”

He rubbed at his eyes with his free hand. “You’d be surprised.”

For a minute, Caitlyn was silent. She wrapped one arm around herself, looking down at her shoes.

It was no secret that Viktor had a distaste toward Jayce’s former patrons and particular resentment over House Kiramman’s partial ownership of their patents. But early in their partnership, he’d taken a liking to Caitlyn, bright as she was. She used to spend long afternoons in the lab, peppering them with questions while they worked. Viktor occasionally checked over her schoolwork while she was there.

The day Caitlyn joined the Enforcers, he’d lamented to Jayce that her talents would be wasted as a government thug. But he’d never lost his fondness for her, and now that she was seeing that prizefighter from Zaun, Vi, he seemed to have some hope she could be reformed.

“How long has he got?” Caitlyn said at last.

“Hard to say,” Jayce told her. “A year. Maybe eighteen months, if we’re lucky.” When he looked at her, sidelong, her eyes looked dark, almost bruised, and her lips were pressed together in a thin line. “Cait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to ruin the mood.”

“You haven’t,” she said. “Give it some time, though. I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

He managed a weak smile. “I think that’s my cue to call it a night.”

As he turned back toward the ballroom, Caitlyn touched his sleeve. “I know it might not mean much, coming from me, but—give Viktor my regards when you see him, would you?”

Jayce swallowed around the lump in his throat. She was a good kid—that was what Viktor had told him, more than once. “Coming from you,” he said, “it means something.”

 

---

 

Though the streets were nearly empty at this time of night, the carriage ride to the Academy felt longer than usual, as did Jayce’s hurried walk across the desolate campus.

When at last he descended the final set of stairs that led into the lab, in the bowels of the Academy’s main building, he found Viktor at the blackboard, leaning on his crutch as he scrutinized a series of diagrams.

Viktor stiffened at the sound of footsteps. “Don’t you have somewhere to be tonight?”

He didn’t look behind him to see who had come in. There was no need—night guards weren’t yet on their rounds and nobody else was likely to enter the lab at this hour.

“I left early,” Jayce said, crossing the room until he stood close to Viktor.

At that, Viktor glanced over his shoulder at Jayce. Then he frowned and turned to face him, pivoting slowly on his stronger leg. “You look terrible,” he said.

“Do I?”

“Have you been drinking?”

Jayce sighed through his nose. “That’s not why I’m here,” he said.

Viktor brushed past him and walked over to a desk, where a couple of notebooks lay open over a scattering of loose papers. “I don’t want to discuss personal matters at work,” he said, sifting through some of the pages with one hand. His head was bowed, his shoulders stiff.

“We’re way past keeping things separate, don’t you think?” Jayce eased closer to Viktor, until he was near enough to touch. But he held back and lowered his voice. “I don’t think those things about you, Viktor. Not for a second. You know that, right?”

Viktor seemed to brace himself before he turned, slowly, and leaned back against the desk. “It was—unfair of me to say that,” he said at last. His expression was pinched: half defensive, half embarrassed. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t want to spend what time is left saying hurtful things.”

“Neither do I.” Jayce took a breath. “It’s not that I don’t want…”

The baby. The words caught in his throat. In truth, he didn’t want it—not now, not like this—but to admit that would be to drive the knife deeper, into some soft spot he hadn’t realized Viktor had.

What he wanted, deep down, was never to have been in this situation in the first place. He wanted Viktor to be well. He wanted Viktor—no one and nothing else.

There were so many things he wanted that he couldn’t have.

“I’m worried about you,” he said at last, the truest admission he could make. He reached for Viktor’s hand and was surprised when Viktor allowed him to take it. “I want you here as long as possible. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Viktor squeezed his eyes shut, briefly, like he was in pain. “I was sure it couldn’t happen for me,” he said after a moment, his voice soft but earnest. “All these years and it never did. I thought I had tumors in places that made it impossible. I thought my body was too hostile of an environment. But that wasn’t true.” In the dim, artificial light, his eyes looked dark and shiny. “The chances are infinitesimally small, and yet it happened. I should’ve lost it by now, and yet I haven’t. It borders on…” He trailed off, his other hand curling around the grip of his crutch.

“On what?”

Viktor’s shoulders dropped. “Miraculous,” he said, quieter, not quite looking at Jayce. “I know how it sounds. I don’t expect you to feel the same way. I don’t expect anything of you. But I can’t—” He sucked in a breath, uneven. “I can’t end it like this. Do you understand?”

“I wish you’d stop saying that,” Jayce muttered. He skimmed his thumb over the back of Viktor’s hand, again and again, like touching a worry stone. “About not expecting anything from me. It’s insulting.”

“You don’t want this child.” There was no judgement in his voice, only a weariness that sounded as if it could crush him. “You think it’s a terrible idea to have it.”

“I shouldn’t have said those things,” Jayce told him, and he meant it now—but he meant it back then, too. He brought Viktor’s hand to his lips, kissed his knuckles. “I panicked. I was only thinking of you.”

Viktor, meanwhile, had been thinking more about the pregnancy than about himself. Jayce saw that now. He’d gone to see the specialist and heard a newly-formed heart beating within his body and it seemed that was enough. It had become a baby to him, something to be protected, even at the expense of his own wellbeing.

Jayce’s mind turned, unbidden, to holding Viktor in the shower the other night and noticing the small but undeniable bump between his hip bones. Before that moment, the pregnancy had seemed almost theoretical to Jayce. He couldn’t visualize it, and he’d expected it to end soon, almost as if it never happened. Seeing the physical evidence of it had frightened him, more a little, because that made it real.

Jayce was painfully aware of it now, in the narrow space between them: easily hidden under Viktor’s clothes for now, but probably not for much longer.

This was probably where it happened, too, he realized—in late May, when they were under deadline for a project and practically living in this space, on the desk or in the camp bed in the storage room. One more thing they’d made together in this lab. The thought was dizzying.

He kissed Viktor’s hand again. “Say something,” he murmured.

Viktor hesitated. Then he cupped Jayce’s jaw in his hand, firm but gentle. “I don’t want you making any promises you’ll regret.”

Jayce leaned into his touch. There was relief in it: just the feeling of Viktor’s palm against his cheek, when he’d spent two nights worrying that he would never feel this again. “I’m trying to be here,” he said. “Can that be enough, for right now?”

Viktor’s eyes were trained on his face, as if searching for something. “That’s plenty,” he said at last, running his thumb along Jayce’s cheekbone. “It’s just—I keep thinking…”

“What?” Jayce reached up to wrap his hand around Viktor’s wrist, lightly holding him in place.

The look on Viktor’s face was closer to a grimace than a smile. “What are you going to tell your mother?”

Notes:

thank you again for reading! feel free to visit on Bluesky or Tumblr.

Chapter 3

Notes:

thank you so much for your patience while I worked on this chapter! I hope it was worth the wait.

for the sake of clarity, I want to note that some characters use the singular “they” in this chapter to refer to a baby whose sex is unknown. there is definitely only one baby.

Click here for content warnings, which contain spoilers:

terminal illness; unplanned (male) pregnancy; trans mpreg; discussion of parent death; references to police brutality; preterm labor scare

A gust of wind sent a shower of red and gold leaves floating down over the neat rows of graves while Ximena arranged flowers in the built-in vase beside the headstone of Matthew Talis: white roses, snapdragons, lilies.

Satisfied at last, she straightened and stepped back to where Jayce waited at the foot of the grave. They paid this visit together each year, on the anniversary of his father’s death, though he knew his mother tended the grave more frequently than that. The morning had dawned gray and cold, making the rows of polished headstones, wrought iron fences and decorations on other graves look somehow muted under a sullen sky that threatened rain.

Ximena wrapped her arm around Jayce, and he felt her exhale as they stared at the headstone. “He would be so proud of you.”

“I know,” Jayce said, and he did. The thought was hanging in the air all the time. “I wish he could’ve been here for all of this.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “He’s here with us always,” she said, her voice thinning slightly.

Jayce put an arm around his mother, pulling her a little closer to his side. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, he is.”

He remembered feeling almost numb during these visits as a child—numb and guilty about it. Most of the time, it was surreal to stand here, studying the Talis family crest carved into the white headstone, knowing his father’s body was in the ground below his feet but struggling to fully believe it.

He was ten years old when his father dropped dead on the factory floor from a wholly unexpected brain aneurysm. There were times, even years after the fact, when Jayce forgot it had happened—just for a moment, just long enough for remembering to hurt, like pressing on a half-healed bruise.

More than two decades later, there were instances when he turned onto a certain street on the route between his childhood home and the factory, or caught a whiff of a certain cologne at a party, and suddenly the loss was there again, making itself known. It was sore but bearable.

These days, he found that a certain sadness settled over him when he visited the grave, but it was accompanied by a kind of peacefulness. Remembering was more purposeful as he got older.

In time, Jayce and Ximena said their goodbyes to the grave and walked arm in arm through the cemetery and into the nearby park, where paved pathways wound over the brown grass and between fountains that would soon be drained in preparation for winter. 

There was no hurry, and Jayce prompted his mother to tell him more about the goings-on at her civic group, which was focused lately on an early childhood literacy campaign in Zaun. When he was growing up, she had little time for social and volunteer activities, but in recent years, the foundry operations had stabilized enough that she didn’t have to manage them too closely and her world had opened back up.

“And what about your Viktor?” she asked as they passed under the patchy shade of a tree still shedding its leaves.

At that, Jayce nearly stumbled. “What about him?”

“How is he? The last time I saw him, he seemed poorly.”

That was back in July, at the reception following the Progress Day presentation. In hindsight, Jayce recognized Viktor’s general malaise around that time was because the symptoms of his disease had worsened and because he was newly pregnant. He had been so stupid not to notice something was really wrong.

“He’s, ah…” Jayce took a breath, steeling himself. Over the past few weeks, he’d made more than one attempt to tell Ximena about the pregnancy, but each time, he faltered. He was almost thirty-two years old, not a teenager who would be scolded for his irresponsibility. He needed to rip the bandage off already. “Well, he’s having a baby.”

Ximena’s eyebrows arched. “I didn’t realize he was married,” she said delicately.

Jayce made a strangled noise, halfway between a laugh and a cough. All of a sudden, his face felt too warm. “He’s—not. It’s just him. I mean—he’s pregnant. It was unexpected,” he managed, tripping over the words, the back of his neck prickling unpleasantly. Then he cleared his throat. “Actually…”

“I wouldn’t have thought he was well enough,” Ximena went on, her tone more concerned than judgmental. “What with his constitution.”

The wind picked up, sending a few dark red leaves skittering across the path in front of them, and Jayce hesitated. That was the other news he had not quite gotten around to breaking to his mother. She knew about some of his health problems; Jayce had sobbed in her arms the night of Viktor’s spinal operation. But she didn’t know his prognosis. Not yet.

Though Viktor was plainly unwell, his prognosis wasn’t widely known, and that was how he preferred it. Jayce knew he had spoken with Heimerdinger and Sky personally, and Mel was aware by now—she had to be, for Jayce to get her on board with his project—but there had been little chatter otherwise. (Viktor said Sky took the news well, or at least with stoicism, but Jayce later happened across her weeping in a stairwell outside the lab. Jayce knew the feeling, so he sat beside her on the step for a while, an arm around her shoulders, until her tears subsided. He never mentioned it to Viktor.) It was a small blessing that there had been nothing in the papers about one of the inventors of Hextech facing an untimely demise.

The fetus that had been tucked away within the cradle of Viktor’s pelvis until well into the second trimester seemed to be making up for lost time. At twenty-two weeks along, Viktor was showing, though the bump was still small enough that it was not immediately obvious that he was pregnant. (“It’s either a baby or a tumor,” Viktor joked recently. Jayce did not find this remotely funny.) People were generally too polite to comment or ask directly, however, and so they carried on—publicly, at least—as if nothing had changed.

Jayce opened his mouth, meaning to tell her everything, but the words withered in his throat, like they always did. No matter how many times he rehearsed it in his head, he could never find the right way to explain it—his relationship with Viktor, that he was going to be a father and he might be doing it by himself. There was a hard, tight spot in his chest and he knew it would crack apart if he kept going.

He would tell her soon, he promised himself. But today was not the day. The date was hard enough without him piling onto his mother’s miseries.

“He’s been having problems with his health,” Jayce said at last, and it wasn’t a lie. “Things are going about as well as they can.”

She seemed to consider that. “He doesn’t have much in the way of family, does he?”

“Some cousins.” Jayce knew Viktor used to send money to some of his extended relations—and still did, probably—but he rarely made the trip to the undercity anymore. The downward climb got harder every year. His last visit was for an uncle’s funeral, Jayce recalled, a little over a year ago. “They’re not really close.”

Ximena gave a soft sigh. “It’s a shame,” she said, and Jayce wasn’t sure what she meant—Viktor’s poor health, his lack of close family, his unplanned child. Maybe all three. Then she patted his arm with her other hand. “Well—give him my congratulations. You’ll have to bring him around for dinner soon.”

He swallowed. “Of course,” he said.

 

---

 

When Jayce let himself into Viktor’s flat that evening, he found his partner pulling books from the cases that lined the walls of the sitting room, pushing himself up onto the toes of his stronger leg as he reached for a tome on the highest row.

Lately, Jayce got a funny feeling when he noticed Viktor doing things like that—reaching for things above his head, stooping to pick things up. He didn’t like to see Viktor straining himself in any way. It couldn’t be good for him.

“Did you eat?” Jayce asked, by way of greeting, as he stepped out of his shoes and pulled off his jacket. He was being a pain, probably, but it was never a sure thing with Viktor.

“Yes,” Viktor said, without looking back at him. He sounded only vaguely put-upon. “There’s some left, if you haven’t.”

“It’s fine. The meeting was catered.” Jayce crossed the room and eased close to Viktor from behind, putting one hand on his shoulder and using the other to grab the book Viktor was reaching for.

Viktor sighed a little as he accepted the tome—he was often annoyed when Jayce did things for him—but he made no comment as he turned in Jayce’s arms to face him, pivoting on his crutch.

They were standing close enough together that Jayce felt the brush of Viktor’s rounded-out midsection against his, and the feeling made him tense, just for a moment, before he prickled all over with embarrassment at his own reaction. Strange to think that, six months ago, Jayce could wrap his hands almost entirely around Viktor’s waist, at the narrowest point where it tapered in under the flare of his ribs.

Now that Viktor was showing, Jayce never knew quite where to look or where to touch. He wasn’t sure why he felt so uncomfortable—because of Viktor’s fragile health, maybe. In any case, he avoided the bump as much as possible, even when they were intimate. If Viktor noticed, he made no mention.

Viktor, meanwhile, seemed more at ease with the changes to his body, or at least not outwardly bothered. Sometimes, when they were alone together in the lab or at his place, he skimmed a hand over his belly, typically when he was occupied with something else. It looked like an unconscious gesture.

That little habit was one of a number of changes that had emerged over the past six weeks, as autumn settled over the city. These days, Viktor’s medicine cabinet was full of bottles of vitamins and new prescriptions, the majority of them meant to support the pregnancy. His older medications sat mostly unused, as did his old back brace.

The brace was designed specifically for him and it was adjustable, to an extent, but he quickly outgrew it as his belly rounded out. The need for support remained, however, so it was replaced with a more generic device made for pregnant people: a stiff brace that kept his spine straight, with wide fabric straps that wrapped around the lower and upper curves of his abdomen. It provided decent support, for now, while taking some pressure off his pelvis, but Jayce was unsure of how effective it would be as Viktor got bigger. He worried about the integrity of his partner’s spine.

Jayce, for his part, had added books about pregnancy to his rotation of reading on human biology, along with the few research papers about Gray wasting disease that had been published. Both subjects were increasingly troubling to Jayce as his research continued. The pregnancy would eventually affect Viktor’s already-diminished lung capacity, even as it made his heart work harder and affected his posture and gait.

“How was it today?” Viktor asked.

“Good. The meeting with the glaziers guild went well.” There was also the lunch meeting with Mel, a planning session for their sit-down later this week with a group of executives from Piltover General. But Viktor wouldn’t want to hear about it yet, not the plans had solidified.

“I’m not interested in the glaziers guild,” Viltor said, and Jayce paused.

“Oh,” he said, his mind drifting back to the cemetery. Of course Viktor knew what day it was. He was surprisingly good at tracking things like that—birthdays, anniversaries. He even remembered Ximena’s birthday, if only to ask Jayce if he had made arrangements to send flowers. (Jayce had.) “It was fine. I mean, it was the same as always.”

Viktor tucked a few books under his free arm and crutched over to the sofa, where he sat lengthwise, propped up by several cushions. “Tell me,” he said, beckoning Jayce over.

Jayce sighed as he sat on the opposite end of hte sofa and pulled Viktor’s legs into his lap. “I don’t know,” he said, rubbing the calf of Viktor’s weaker leg. This had become routine in recent weeks, and he was grateful Viktor allowed it, because he felt it was equally beneficial to him. “It’s funny. My dad’s been dead for twice as long as I knew him, but sometimes I feel like I miss him more now than when I was a kid. Or maybe I just think about him more. I keep thinking lately that he wouldn’t have wanted to leave us like that—out of the blue one day. He would’ve hated how hard it was on us.”

Viktor shifted a little. “None of us get to choose when our parents die,” he said.

Jayce’s hands went still, just for a second. “I know that,” he said, and ran his palm along Viktor’s calf, over his knee.

Viktor was a little older when his own parents died, but he had nothing to fall back on when it happened. The spring he turned fourteen, he qualified to sit the Academy’s entrance exam, two years earlier than the average student. The morning of the exam, on their way topside, Viktor’s father argued with the Piltovan ticket-taker who denied them entry to the bathysphere, on the grounds that the reason given for the trip was implausible, and then tried to confiscate their identification. The argument culminated in a group of Enforcers clubbing Viktor’s father to death with batons.

Two years later, Viktor’s mother was among the nearly two hundred Zaunite garment workers who perished in a fire that swallowed two adjacent sweatshops in Factorywood. The disaster was so immense that it even made the news in Piltover; Jayce remembered seeing the death toll splashed across front pages, the numbers climbing daily, shocking and difficult to wrap his head around. There were calls, after the fact, to improve factory conditions in Zaun, but few resources were committed to enforcing the watered-down industrial regulations the Council eventually passed.

Jayce cleared his throat. “My mom wants you to come over for dinner soon,” he said, looking up at Viktor.

“You told her?” Viktor sat up a little straighter, eyebrows raised. “Today?”

“Not… in so many words,” Jayce admitted. He felt like a coward again when Viktor sank back against the cushions. “I’m laying the foundation. I thought we could tell her together.”

Viktor gave him a flat look. “Better that it comes from you,” he said. “Your mother doesn’t like me very much.”

“That’s not true.” His mother had been a little skeptical of Viktor at first, that much was true, but it was because she saw him as an enabler of Jayce’s worst impulses. Over the years, as they got to know each other, Ximena had warmed to him considerably. She knew how much Jayce cared about him—well, maybe not the whole of it. But enough for her to care about him, too. “She asked about you.”

“If she doesn’t dislike me already, she will soon enough.”

Jayce suppressed a sigh. “She’ll be surprised,” he said. “I’ll give you that. Extremely surprised. But she won’t be angry, or whatever it is you’re thinking.”

“Disappointed,” Viktor said. “That’s what I was thinking. This isn’t what she imagined for you.”

“Why are you being so pessimistic?” Jayce asked. “I mean, at what point are you going to be happy about this?”

Viktor gave a little huff. “I might ask you the same question,” he said. “In fact, I thought you had rather cornered the market on pessimism—”

“I’m not—” Jayce stopped himself, just barely. To say he didn’t still have a somewhat despairing view of the situation would be a lie, one he doubted Viktor would let him get away with. But he was trying, so he gave Viktor’s thigh a gentle squeeze. “I’m not unhappy. Are you?”

“No,” Viktor said, but his expression was hard to read. His hand fluttered over his belly, just for a moment. “And I know you’re—making the best of things.”

“With that in mind,” Jayce said. “Will you come over for dinner or not?”

Though Viktor sighed, he didn’t appear bothered. “Fine,” he said. “But I won’t tell your mother for you.”

Jayce smiled. “Deal.”

 

---

 

The Council had held seven seats for so long that, upon Jayce’s appointment, there was a brief scramble as to where to put him. In the end, he was assigned an office that was normally used on a rotating basis by the staff of visiting dignitaries, about half the size of the ones occupied by his fellow Councilors. It was just as well—this side of the building had a nice view of the harbor.

Afternoon sunlight was glancing off the water in the distance when Jayce and Viktor entered the office. With one hand, Jayce pulled out the chair behind his desk for Viktor; with the other, he shuffled some papers around on the polished surface, pretending to tidy up. He slipped a set of schematics into a folder and out of sight as Viktor carefully lowered himself into the chair.

“This needs your signature,” Viktor said, passing Jayce a sheaf of papers.

Jayce perched on the edge of the desk as he looked over the document—a contract. They had recently hammered out an agreement with one of the mining companies to test Viktor’s Hexclaw, on a limited basis, in the field. The tool would be adjusted based on the results.

The ink was drying on the contract when Viktor pulled a second document out of his briefcase.

“This one, as well,” he said as he slid the papers across the desk. “But you’ll want to review it first.”

Leafing through the papers, Jayce frowned. “Viktor, what am I supposed to do with this?”
It was a draft declaration for a trust, prepared by an attorney, meant to go into effect after Viktor’s death.

Viktor had assets, certainly, and they needed to be protected in some manner. He held twenty-five percent ownership over the patents for Hextech—the patents on which all their work was built—while another twenty-five percent belonged to Jayce. House Kiramman owned the remaining fifty percent; that was the deal they struck in the early days of Hextech, in exchange for significant financial support as they got it off the ground.

Functionally, it meant nothing new could be developed or implemented using Hextech unless all three parties agreed or unless Jayce or Viktor threw in with the Kirammans. Over the past six years, the arrangement had led to more than a few bitter compromises when their priorities conflicted. Chief among them was the Hexgates, which Viktor and Jayce had agreed to build first in exchange for approval for Viktor’s water purification system and a few other, smaller-scale projects. There was always a trade-off.

The document in Jayce’s hand outlined how Viktor’s share of the patents were to be held in trust for his child until the age of twenty-five, and how most of his proportional share of any proceeds from existing or future Hextech designs—which were likely to be considerable—would also be held in trust, except for monthly disbursements to cover living and medical expenses, tuition and school fees, childcare costs and other expenses deemed reasonable by the trustee. It would be possible for the trustee to access larger amounts of money for certain purposes, such as buying a home.

“I had hoped you would administer things, as the trustee,” Viktor said. “If you would prefer not to, someone else can be appointed.”

“What? No, I—I can do it,” Jayce said, almost as a reflex.

“Good. That simplifies things. Now, between the disbursements and my existing savings, there ought to be enough to support the child comfortably, without dipping into your own reserves, but in the event that—”

“I’m not worried about the money,” Jayce said, shifting so he faced Viktor more directly. The financial implications hadn’t really crossed his mind, in all honesty. He had the means to raise a child, with or without Viktor’s contributions. “If this thing comes into play, I think I’ll have more pressing concerns.”

“Ah—yes. Of course.” Viktor took a breath, as though steeling himself. “When it comes to guardianship, I’ve given it some thought, but I’ll need your input. There are… arrangements that can be made, depending on the level of involvement you want.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want you to be fully apprised of your options.”

For a moment, all Jayce could do was stare at him. “Viktor,” he said at last. “What are we doing, if you don’t even trust me to take care of it?”

A look of surprise flickered over Viktor’s face. “I trust you. Of course I trust you.”

Jayce huffed and dropped the document on the desk. The papers landed with a soft thump. “Then what’s all this for? You’re acting like you think I won’t do the right thing unless I sign something legally binding.”

“I did this for you,” Viktor insisted, gesturing toward the sheaf of papers. “For your peace of mind. You told me about how difficult it was, after your father died, and I knew you were right—”

“I wasn’t talking about money.”

“What, then?”

At that, Jayce sputtered. “I was ten,” he said. “I was ten and my dad died and it was horrible. That’s all I was getting at. You know what I mean. Your parents—”

Viktor stiffened. “Don’t bring my family into this,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you can’t prepare a kid to lose his dad,” Jayce fired back immediately. “No amount of money makes it easier. That much I know. And so do you.”

Without rising from his seat, Viktor managed to draw back a little, defensively. “People have children in much worse circumstances than these,” he said, his jaw tight.

Jayce fought back a wince. How did he always manage to phrase things in a way that Viktor would misunderstand? “I wasn’t even thinking that,” he said.

“For anyone else, it’s unquestioned,” Viktor went on. “Having children is the most natural thing in the world. But for me to have this one is cruelty, because it’s mine and I have an expiration date—”

“It’s not only yours,” Jayce said, because he didn’t want to think about the other half of that statement.

“Now you say that, when your pride is wounded.”

“Viktor, come on—”

“Is it really so terrible to want what anybody else wants? To have something that lives beyond you?”

That brought Jayce up short. “Is that what you want?”

Viktor’s mouth opened, but before he could speak, there was a knock at the door, polite yet insistent.

“Councilor?” The voice of his assistant, Margaret, reached them through the door.

Jayce hesitated, then sighed. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened and she stepped into the office, clipboard in hand, her heels clicking softly against the floor. She was dressed neatly in a pencil skirt and blouse, all beige and maroon, her dark hair pulled up in a twist.

Margaret had been temporarily assigned to Jayce when he first joined the Council last year, pulled from the typing pool, but they got along well enough—and she was good enough at keeping him on track—that he offered her a permanent job as his assistant.

“Your two o’clock is here,” she told Jayce. Then she glanced past him, toward Viktor, and though she looked faintly disconcerted to find him in Jayce’s seat, she gave him a courteous nod. “Mr. Novak.”

“Miss Baker.”

“Tell them I’ll be with them shortly,” Jayce said, straightening.

Margaret nodded and ducked out of the office, shutting the door behind her.

Awkward silence descended. Jayce extended his arm and Viktor, however reluctantly, used it for leverage as he stood and got his crutch under his other arm.

“I’m going to look this over again,” Jayce said, nodding toward the document on the desk between them. He eased closer to Viktor and, without giving himself time to overthink it, leaned in and pressed a kiss to the corner of Viktor’s mouth: a small peace offering. “I’ll come over tonight and we can talk about it. The other thing, too.”

Viktor shook his head. “Take some time. Sleep on it.”

“I don’t need to. I just—”

“Jayce.” Viktor put his free hand on Jayce’s shoulder, near the juncture of his neck. “It’s time for you to think about what you want.”

“I know what I want,” Jayce said, but as he heard himself, he wasn’t sure.

Viktor just sighed through his nose. “You’re going to be late for your meeting.”

 

---

 

They didn’t talk about it that night, or any night during the next two weeks.

As November settled over the city, bringing with it cold fog and the first dustings of snow, Jayce began to see the toll the pregnancy was taking on Viktor’s body. The weight of the fetus was already pulling at his lower back, putting pressure on his spine and hip and pelvis that the inferior brace could do only so much to relieve. He could no longer take his prescribed painkillers, the ones he reserved for bad pain days, which were getting more frequent even before his other conditions became apparent, nor could he use the medicated ointment he sometimes let Jayce massage into his leg or his back on the days that were more bearable. Both were bad for the fetus, which came first now, in all things.

The cold weather meant Viktor could layer himself in sweaters and overcoats that somewhat obscured his shape, but in private, getting dressed in the morning or undressed at night, Jayce could see he was losing weight even as his belly grew. It showed most in his face—his cheekbones and the lines of his jaw—and narrow shoulders and thighs slim enough that Jayce could nearly wrap a hand around each one. At times, it almost gave the appearance, as Viktor had once morbidly joked, that it really was a tumor growing inside him, taking and taking.

Even without the pregnancy putting more demands on his body’s limited resources, Viktor would’ve struggled to eat enough to maintain his weight. He didn’t have much of an appetite at the best of times and was prone to distraction. On top of that, his illness affected the hormones that triggered hunger cues, making him less interested in food overall. Jayce knew he was trying, if only to sustain the pregnancy, and Jayce was trying, too, if only to sustain Viktor. For Jayce, that usually meant insisting on making dinner when they spent the night together, and breakfast in the morning before they went their separate ways for work, and cooking with copious amounts of butter and oil when he did, because that was the easiest way to get more calories into Viktor’s body.

Meanwhile, between sometimes-frustrating Council meetings and dull talks with investors, Jayce toiled in his office, poring over research papers and drafting schematics. He couldn’t work on this project in the lab or even at his flat in the off hours; for now, he needed to keep it under wraps. Though it felt wrong not to collaborate with Viktor—and, frankly, this would be easier with his help—he wanted the concept to be refined when he unveiled it for the first time. Unobjectionable. Exciting.

He and Mel met with the hospital board members, and though the project was more experimental than what Jayce normally pitched, Mel’s charm—and her family’s recent donation to a new surgical wing—helped win them over. Besides, Piltover General was a research hospital. Where should they be, if not on the cutting edge?

Meanwhile, Jayce consulted with a surgeon in Zaun who specialized in augmentations, an area where Zaun’s medical community tended to advance more quickly than Piltover’s. She had been reluctant to accept a meeting with him, skeptical of a Councilor with unorthodox ideas. But she was intrigued when she saw his designs, doubly so when he explained what the project was for.

They had dinner with Ximena, as agreed, and Jayce did not break the news during the meal, also as agreed. Still, throughout the evening, he couldn’t help but think that telling his mother the truth would’ve been less excruciating than this: exchanging veiled glances with Viktor from across the table as Ximena made polite inquiries about the pregnancy, undeterred by attempts to steer the conversation in other directions. When was the baby due? (Around mid-February.) Did Viktor have a feeling as to whether it was a girl or a boy? (Oh, not at all.) Had he been thinking about names? (He had some ideas but hadn’t settled on anything.)

Ximena pulled Jayce into the kitchen after dinner, while Viktor was in the other room wrapping himself back up in his coat and scarf. “You did not tell me he was so ill,” she whispered, her brow creased with concern.

Jayce’s mouth went abruptly dry. He hadn’t told her about the diagnosis yet, either, and the longer he waited, the more difficult it became. For now, if Viktor appeared weakened or wan, the natural assumption for most people to make was that he was simply having a difficult pregnancy.

“He’s—private about these things,” Jayce managed at last.

She shot him a disapproving look, like she had expected a more satisfying answer. “He needs to eat better,” she said. “He’s skin and bones. His baby—”

“I know. I’m trying,” Jayce said miserably.

Her expression softened and she reached up to cup his jaw between her hands. “Try to keep him from overworking himself, at least,” she said. “And bring him around again soon.”

Later that night, Jayce lay in bed, listening to Viktor’s breathing whistle faintly in his chest as he slept and ruminated on the fact that he had not thought about names at all. He hadn’t even considered whose surname the child would get.

In truth, though its presence was becoming more obtrusive by the day, Jayce still struggled to envision the fetus as something that would eventually exist outside of Viktor. He was more focused on how it affected Viktor’s health now than on what would become of it later.

It was easier to stay at arm’s length than to get in closer. Viktor didn’t usually volunteer information about how things were progressing, like how his biweekly doctor’s visits went, and Jayce rarely asked, because he tended to put his foot in it when he did. He felt disconnected from the pregnancy, like he was observing it from afar, even when he and Viktor were sharing a bed, and so they carried on, week after week, on parallel paths.

No wonder Viktor thought him disinterested. He had been.

He told himself they would have all the conversations they’d been avoiding: what they would name the child, and where they would live after it was born, and who would care for it if the worst happened. But only so much time remained—and anything could happen in the meantime. Viktor was more than halfway to term and they’d hardly made any preparations, and those Viktor had made assumed Jayce wouldn’t participate.

Jayce could do better. He would do better. They would have the difficult conversations and he would be there, present, the way he should’ve been from the beginning.

That was what he told himself as they were getting ready to leave for the gala on the night before the Distinguished Innovators competition, standing in the warm lamplight of Jayce’s bedroom, Viktor’s slender fingers fixing his silk tie, adjusting his collar one last time. (Jayce could manage his own tie, but Viktor seemed to like fiddling with it, and Jayce liked to let him.) He had grabbed Viktor’s hand, kissed his knuckles before letting him go, and Viktor didn’t ask what for.

Held in the grand ballroom at the Crescent Hotel—which had recently come under the ownership of the Medardas—the gala brought together select entrants from this year’s competition and Piltover’s movers and shakers. It was a prime opportunity for student inventors to mingle with potential sponsors of their work ahead of the competition.

Viktor had attended this function only once, when he and Jayce were invited for the first time, the year they won the top prize. But this time, he had made an exception to his rule of skipping most social functions organized for, as he put it, Piltover’s most insufferable. He’d also asked Jayce to see about getting an invitation for Sky, since she’d never had the opportunity to attend these sorts of soirees. Arranging that was easy, but the atypical nature of the ask had troubled Jayce somewhat. It gave him the feeling that Viktor was crossing items off a list, doing things he might not otherwise because he thought the chance wouldn’t come again.

Jayce hated the thought that Viktor had given up. Acceptance, Viktor called it. He said it was supposed to be a good thing.

During past years’ parties, Jayce focused on shaking hands and rubbing elbows with merchants and guildsmen, making admittedly shallow social connections that could benefit his work with Viktor later on. Now that he was on the Council, he found that the merchants and guildsmen were more interested in hobnobbing with him than the other way around—but for once, they weren’t his concern. He was more worried about how long Viktor had spent on his feet.

At twenty-six weeks along, his condition had become apparent. Viktor’s frame was so narrow that there was no mistaking the neat but obvious bump. While the dark, high-waisted trousers and long blazer he wore for the reception minimized his shape somewhat, there was no disguising it. By now, anyone could tell at a glance that he was expecting a baby, though the topic was still outside the realm of polite conversation, at least to his face.

Jayce wove carefully through the crowded ballroom, lifting the glass in his hand to avoid jostling it and delicately begging off conversations with the people who kept flagging him over. He had gone off in search of something Viktor could drink—the servers making their rounds carried nothing but champagne—and came away with a frothy nonalcoholic concoction that he couldn’t say for sure Viktor would like. Worth a shot.

He found Viktor and Mel engaged in conversation with Sybil Edevane, a stately middle-aged woman whose family had made their fortune in machinery manufacturing. Nearby, Sky was chatting with a bespectacled young man who Jayce thought was one of this year’s entrants.

“We were just reminiscing,” Mel told him. She was radiant as ever, all in gold, her hair drawn up in elegant braids. “It wasn’t so long ago that we were toasting your achievements in this very competition.”

Five years ago, Jayce and Viktor won with the proof of concept for the Hexgates, an achievement that drew the attention of the press and the guilds alike. Jayce remembered thinking then that it was the best day of his life—and it was, by such a huge margin that he couldn’t have imagined that even better days were to come, much sooner than expected. Life changed so quickly after that.

“And still so much good work left to do,” Jayce said with a smile, handing Viktor the drink.

Over Viktor’s shoulder, on the far side of the ballroom, he glimpsed Caitlyn. She wasn’t dressed in finery, but rather in her Enforcer’s uniform; Jayce knew her mother had arranged for her to be assigned to the security detail for the event, much to Caitlyn’s frustration. Her little girlfriend’s sister was an entrant in the competition this year, and apparently there was a corresponding celebration happening in Zaun tonight, which she would’ve preferred to attend instead.

“Councilor Talis has some exciting ideas about the medical applications for Hextech,” Mel told Edevane. “The possibilities are endless—mobility devices, prosthetic limbs, even implants. Imagine the fabrication needs, the machinery to craft these devices at scale…”

Viktor shot Jayce a look over the rim of his glass, measured and brief, as Mel spoke. He was leaning heavily on his cane.

Jayce swallowed. “Do you know what I think is really exciting? That this year’s competition has a record number of entrants from Zaun.”

Edevane looked unimpressed. “Is that so?”

“Oh, yes,” Jayce said. “In fact, for that reason, we’ve chosen this year to launch an endowment to fund scholarships for Zaunite students at the Academy. It’s going to be life-changing.”

“How… novel,” Edevane said. She clearly didn’t want to respond in a manner that was outright rude.

“It’s all my partner’s vision,” Jayce said, putting an arm around Viktor. Even through the layers of his shirt and jacket, Jayce could feel the bones in Viktor’s shoulder.

Indeed, the endowment was Viktor’s idea—one that came up as part of his estate planning process, a term that still made Jayce feel vaguely ill whenever he thought about it. Viktor wanted a percentage of the continuing proceeds from his share of the Hextech patent to fund a self-sustaining endowment, though Jayce was exploring additional funding sources to bolster it. With enough backing and wise investments, the endowment could support a dozen or more students in each graduating class for decades years to come.

“I admit I was surprised to hear about your—background, all those years ago,” Edevane said with a glance at Viktor. “So few Zaunites seem to take any interest in academics.”

Viktor’s mouth thinned. “It was something my parents encouraged.”

“Ah. Well, they must be quite proud of your accomplishments.”

“I’m sure they would be, had they lived to see any of them,” Viktor said, his tone deceptively light. “My father was murdered before I ever set foot on campus. Enforcers beat him to death the morning I was meant to take the entrance exam.” Edevane stifled a gasp—half shocked, half offended—which Viktor ignored. “My mother didn’t want me to wait another year for a chance to be admitted. Anything could happen in the meantime. So she got her hands on a secondhand uniform and sent me topside.”

“A rather creative solution,” Mel said, studying Viktor. From the sound of her voice, it was hard to tell if she approved or not.

Viktor swirled his drink around in the glass. “The uniform didn’t fit. It must’ve belonged to an older student. But my mother made most of our clothes from bits of fabric she brought home from the garment factory,” he said, an almost wistful look crossing his face. “She took it in enough for it to be passable. I attended classes for nearly a full semester before Professor Heimerdinger noticed I wasn’t actually enrolled.” He cast his gaze around, stopping on Edevane, and raised his glass with a tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “All that to say—I’m sure you can see the importance of equal access to education. Better to develop the brains of young Zaunites than to spatter them across the pavement, don’t you agree?”

There was a time when Viktor played his cards close to his chest, rarely sharing details of his personal history in casual conversation. It took years for Jayce to coax out enough stories about Viktor’s family, his childhood, the neighborhood in Zaun where he grew up, to get a full picture of what had shaped him. In recent months, though, he began speaking more freely—like the secrecy didn’t matter anymore, like he wanted people to know.

Jayce opened his mouth to break the awkward silence, but Mel spoke first.

“When Councilor Talis told me about the endowment, I was interested right away,” she said, brushing her hand along Jayce’s arm. “It’s an opportunity to invest in Piltover’s future. Who’s to say where the next Hextech inventors might come from?”

“The Medarda family will have a specific, named scholarship,” Jayce added. “In recognition of their generous donation.”

That got Edevane’s attention. As she turned toward Mel, Jayce placed his hand between Viktor’s shoulder blades and steered him gently toward their table.

“Should you sit down?” Jayce murmured.

“Oh, probably,” Viktor said with a sigh. He was moving stiffly; his back was probably killing him by now, to say nothing of his hip. The fetus was big enough now that it encroached on the space his lungs usually enjoyed; that left him more easily winded and prone to coughing jags.

They were in for another long day tomorrow, between the judging in the morning and the award ceremony in the evening. Jayce usually attended both and Viktor had agreed to accompany him this year. But they could cut tonight as short as possible, and when they returned to Jayce’s flat, he could run Viktor a bath and massage his legs.

“We can leave after the speech,” Jayce said, pulling out a chair that Viktor carefully lowered himself into. Jayce dropped into the next chair. “You and Sky can flag down a car while it’s wrapping up and I’ll meet you outside. Beat the rush that way.”

Viktor nodded faintly and leaned an elbow on the table. “So,” he said. “What did you have in mind—the Medarda Family Fellowship? Or are you still workshopping the name?”

“Recent development,” Jayce said, cringing internally. It came up just this week, in fact, during a conversation with Mel as they filed out of the Council chamber. There was always a push and pull with Mel; she gave, but never for free. That was her way and Jayce respected it. Admired it, even. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Well, it’s not as if I’ll be here to complain,” Viktor said. Then, seeing Jayce’s expression, he flashed a thin smile. Even in the warm light of the chandeliers, there was a pallor to his face. “Oh, come now. Lighten up. It’s a party.”

There it was again—morbid humor. Acceptance.

Jayce really didn’t think he could do it.

He looked out across the ballroom, watching Piltover’s best in all their finery, and thought, not for the first time, that he might not have bothered coming tonight at all. Rubbing elbows seemed less worthwhile the more he did it. The things he really wanted to do couldn’t be accomplished at parties.

“Do you remember the last time we were here?” Jayce asked.

“I remember you getting a little carried away.” There was a hint of fondness in Viktor’s voice. “How much did you drink?”

“Well, I was nervous.” Jayce remembered how badly he had wanted to impress that night, how anxious he’d been. All he got out of it was a hangover that made it that much harder to present the next day. “It’s a social lubricant.”

Viktor hummed. “You threw up in a potted plant.”

Jayce huffed, remembering that, and so did Viktor. It was mortifying at the time, but the years had a way of wearing away the shame. “How’s the drink, by the way?”

“Not bad,” Viktor said, taking another sip. Then he paused, as if considering something. “I do appreciate it—your efforts. I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful.”

“I don’t think that.”

“It’s just difficult. Ceding control,” Viktor went on. He looked slightly pained. “I’m trying to improve at it. I know things have to go on without me and you’ll—you’ll do what is necessary.”

Jayce wanted so badly to reach across the table and take his hand. “Viktor…”

Before he could give in to the impulse, Mel appeared in his peripheral vision, practically glowing in this light. She leaned down and laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s time,” she said, close to his ear.

Swallowing, Jayce rose and joined her and their fellow Councilors on the low stage set up at the far end of the ballroom. The Distinguished Innovators competition was a joint operation, put together annually by the Piltover Chamber of Commerce and the municipal government, so it was only fitting that the Council make an appearance tonight, while Heimerdinger gave the usual speech.

Mel gave a few remarks, as well, since this was her party. She even threw in Jayce’s comment about the record number of entrants from Zaun and briefly plugged the endowment, drawing more applause than Jayce would’ve expected. He glanced out at the crowd, searching for Viktor and Sky. When he spotted them, he saw Sky was murmuring something to Viktor from behind her hand, and Viktor smiled.

After the speech, Jayce filed offstage and began making his way to the exit. It was slow going; he couldn’t take three steps without someone asking to bend his ear for a moment, which always turned into a solid five minutes. A few, at least, wanted to talk about the endowment, and he engaged with them briefly before directing them to send a note to his assistant so they could schedule a meeting.

It was misting rain when he finally stepped outside, into the group of people now congregating outside the hotel as they prepared to leave. He made his way down the wide stone stairs in front of the entrance to the street level, where a line of carriages idled along the curb. He looked up and down the row, but he didn’t spot Viktor and Sky among the mix of taxicabs and private cars being brought around by valets.

He was debating whether to double back—maybe they’d decided to wait in the lobby and he’d passed them—when a voice turned his head.

“Jayce! Councilor—”

He looked around to see Caitlyn hurrying toward him, her mouth pressed into a thin line as she descended the stairs.

“I was looking for you inside,” she said. There was a note of urgency in her voice that made him uneasy.

“Have you seen Viktor?”

She suppressed a grimace. “I’m afraid he’s had an accident—”

Without thinking, Jayce grabbed her arm. “What?”

“I didn’t see it happen,” Caitlyn said quickly. People were moving past them on either side, making their way to the sidewalk. “There was a commotion as people were leaving and I came out to see what had happened. Someone had slipped and fallen down the stairs—”

Blood rushed in Jayce’s ears. He felt as if the pavement were tilting beneath his feet. “Where is he? Is he OK?”

“I offered to call an ambulance, but he shrugged me off. He got into a cab with the woman who was with him,” Caitlyn said, carefully extricating herself from Jayce’s grip. She didn’t know Sky well, but it could only have been her. “They were going to the hospital.”

Jayce wheeled around and practically shouldered his way through the crowd to flag the nearest carriage.

 

---

 

At this hour, the theaters and restaurants in this district were emptying, and soon the streets were clogged with carriages. Traffic was grinding so slowly that Jayce finally overpaid the fare, got out of the carriage and jogged the last five blocks to the hospital, his breath blooming like smoke in the frigid air.

After some back and forth at the front desk, he was at last directed to the labor and delivery ward. He found Sky in a waiting room on the other side of the ward, looking incongruous with her coat pulled over her blue cocktail dress and her hair in slight disarray. She jumped a little when she noticed him, straightening, and pushed her glasses up her nose, but it looked like an excuse to hide her reddened eyes.

“They said they were going to run some tests,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell me much else.”

Jayce did not sit in the chair beside hers so much as he got near it and his legs gave out. “What happened?”

“We were going to hail a carriage and wait for you. He just—he tripped at the top of the stairs. I tried to grab him.” Sky sniffed, looking away from Jayce. “He said it was probably fine, but…”

Jayce’s heart did a slow, painful somersault. He tried to banish the mental image of Viktor pitching down a dozen steps, but it flashed behind his eyelids each time he blinked. “What?”

Sky grimaced. “He fell pretty hard, and he seemed like he was having—pains,” she said, her voice wobbling a little. “I got him up and into a carriage and we came straight here. He was coughing up blood on the way.” She twisted her hands together in her lap and Jayce noticed a few dark flecks on her wrist—a spatter of dried blood. She must have tried to help Viktor clean himself up in the carriage. “He’s very, very sick, Jayce.”

“I know he is.”

She shook her head. “My uncle worked in the mines. He had… what Viktor has,” she said, with a glance around at the handful of other people in the waiting room, as if she were concerned they would hear. The words Gray wasting disease were rarely uttered in Piltovan hospitals. “By the time he started coughing like that, everyone knew he didn’t have long. Six months later, he was gone. He died drowning in his own blood.”

Jayce recoiled. “Sky—”

“I don’t mean to scare you,” she went on, touching his arm. “But I know how Viktor can be. He might not have told you how serious it is, because he doesn’t want to scare you, either. But you ought to be prepared for his—” Her voice caught and she drew her hand back. “His decline. The last few months are… difficult to watch.”

Her words floated to him as if from a distance, echoing in his ears. From the moment he heard about the fall, he’d moved automatically, in a rush, without giving himself time to process. Now that he was forced to hold still and wait, the bigger implications were catching up to him. He felt unpleasantly aware of his own body—the pounding of his pulse in his throat, the slight tremor in his hands, the hard, painful knot in his stomach.

He opened his mouth, but all that came out was, “Thank you for looking after him.”

Sky gave him a sad smile. “What else was I going to do?”

Jayce curled into himself, feeling nauseated as he rubbed his thumb over the gem embedded in the cuff he wore on the opposite wrist. The leather was worn soft around the gem, from years of idle, repetitive touch.

For all he knew, Viktor was down the corridor, bleeding out from some abruption caused by the fall. But, Jayce reasoned, the fact that Viktor was being monitored in this ward seemed to suggest he was not grievously injured or critically ill. It was more likely that something was wrong with the pregnancy. Could the fall have jolted him so hard that he went into labor?

It was much too early for that. If the baby came tonight, Jayce doubted it would live.

The thought made his insides twist. Viktor would be devastated.

More than an hour passed before there was any news.

At last, a doctor pulled Jayce aside and explained that Viktor had received medication to stop the contractions he was having when he arrived at the hospital, as well as fluids and oxygen for good measure. He wasn’t in labor and he was uninjured except for scrapes and bruises and a sprained wrist. Jayce felt strangely unbalanced upon hearing that, his whole body unclenching after all this time winding tighter and tighter. Still, given Viktor’s overall condition, the doctor wanted to monitor him overnight, to be safe.

Sky took her leave then, reddening slightly when Jayce suggested she might see Viktor before she went home. It was late, she said as she waved him off, and she wanted to catch the last streetcar back to the Academy district, where she shared an apartment with a few graduate students.

Jayce’s steps slowed as he entered the dim, single-patient room and saw Viktor propped up in a narrow bed, attached to an array of monitors and an IV drip, a nasal cannula giving him oxygen.

Looking at him, Jayce had the sudden, sinking feeling that he was getting a glimpse into the next year of their lives: a series of waiting rooms and hospitalizations, growing progressively longer and more futile. Beyond all that was a great, yawning void that Jayce couldn’t see past.

“Hey,” Jayce said softly as he took a seat at Viktor’s bedside. “How are you feeling?”

“Eh,” Viktor said, barely lifting his head from the pillow it was resting against. His tone was easy, but he still sounded exhausted. “Sore. Tell me I did not spoil your evening.”

“Who cares? I should’ve left sooner.” He kept turning it over in his mind, feeling responsible. If he’d been there in the first place, if he’d walked Viktor and Sky out instead of lingering to shake hands with people who didn’t really matter, this might not have happened. “I shouldn’t have gone tonight at all.”

“Yes, well, I shouldn’t have tripped over my own feet.”

Jayce’s eyes were burning. “Sky told me you landed hard,” he said, struggling to keep his voice even. He hunched forward, rubbing at his eyes with one hand, and took a shuddering breath. “I thought—I was afraid you were really hurt, or… or the baby—”

“The baby is perfectly fine,” Viktor said quietly. There was a faint uneasiness in his tone. He slid a protective hand over his belly—the one with an IV embedded in the back, his right. His other wrist was in a brace. “Gave me a scare, but nothing worse than that.”

“What do you mean?”

Viktor hesitated, just for a moment. “After I slipped, I was having contractions and the baby wasn’t moving,” he said, not quite looking at Jayce. “Of course, they began kicking as soon as the monitors were hooked up. Punishing me for the shock, I think.”

Jayce gave a watery huff, while Viktor sniffed and turned his face away.

“I was sure I’d lost them,” he said, his voice soft but thin, like a thread unraveling. “All the way here, I thought I’d killed them from stepping wrong on my bad leg—” He broke off, swiping his other hand across his eyes.

“But it’s OK.” Without thinking, Jayce put his hand over the back of Viktor’s, but drew back when he felt Viktor tense at the light touch.

“Yes. Yes, it’s OK,” Viktor said, a slight quaver in his voice.

Jayce folded his hands together on the edge of the bed. His gaze drifted to one of the monitors opposite him. It showed two sets of vital signs—Viktor’s and the baby’s.

He’d never heard the baby’s heartbeat. He didn’t accompany Viktor to his appointments with the perinatologist; it would be untoward for professional associates. But there it was, mapped out in glowing lines and numbers: indecipherable to him, but real.

 

---

 

Viktor was discharged from the hospital the following evening, with instructions to take it easy for the next week or so. Jayce’s place was closer, but Viktor said that if he had to be housebound for any significant period, he’d rather be in his own flat, so off they went. On the ride over, Jayce winced at every bump and rattle of the carriage.

After they arrived, Viktor was in the shower for a long time, while Jayce turned on the radio and puttered around in the kitchen, half listening to the evening news report and half listening for the sound of Viktor coughing. He’d cleared the counters and put some dishes in the sink to soak by the time Viktor emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a robe, and crutched into the bedroom, moving stiffly.

Jayce trailed after him. He opened his mouth to ask a question, but stopped as he leaned through the doorway, one hand on the frame.

Viktor was in the middle of changing into his nightclothes, leg and back braces set aside. His top was on but unbuttoned, slipping a little off one shoulder as he bent over to step into the trousers and slide them up his slim legs. The bruises along his right leg looked like ink stains, purple-black, running from his hip and all down his thigh. His knee was one big garnet scab.

“God, Viktor,” Jayce said on an exhale. “Your leg—”

“It looks worse than it is,” Viktor said as he began buttoning his shirt, the fingers of his left hand moving a little slower than usual, on account of the wrist brace.

Jayce wasn’t so sure about that. Watching Viktor do up the buttons—which were beginning to strain a little across his belly—he thought it was borderline miraculous that neither Viktor nor the baby had been seriously hurt by the fall.

Then he cleared his throat. “If I cook something, will you eat it?”

Viktor hesitated, like he wasn’t sure if he could manage it. “Yes,” he said at last. “Thank you.”

Later, snow was falling outside when they turned in for the night, but the bedroom was warm. White flakes swirled past the bedroom window, illuminated by the glow of the street lamps below.

When Jayce climbed into bed and shut off the lamp, he was a little afraid to get close to Viktor, to press against his back the way he normally did, worried about brushing against his bruised side or jostling him somehow. Viktor, meanwhile, was attempting to get comfortable on his left side, pillows wedged around his body at strategic points. Between his back and his leg, he struggled to find a comfortable sleeping position even when he wasn’t pregnant; it was only getting harder as he grew bigger.

“You said you wanted… something that lives beyond you,” Jayce said after a while, into the still air. “Is that what this is about?”

Viktor sighed through his nose. He lay facing away from Jayce, his expression hidden, still adjusting the pillows. “Oh, why does anyone have children? It’s what people do, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t, not really. Jayce had always assumed he would have children eventually, but he couldn’t say for sure where that assumption came from. Was it just the way of things?

“You know, I thought my work would be the only legacy I had,” Viktor said. “But there isn’t enough time. Not for half the things I wanted to achieve. The work will be yours to finish. As for the rest…”

“What, Hextech?” Jayce shook his head, though Viktor couldn’t see him. “There’s no Hextech without you. Viktor, there’s…”

Nothing. Nothing at all. He remembered the gaping hole in the wall of his old flat, the blue night, the sheer drop. He remembered inching toward the edge and the voice that pulled him back.

There’s no me without you, he wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.

“In any case,” Viktor said, his voice quieter, “if you think I’m being terribly selfish, I suppose it’s because I am. I know how this ends and I’m going through with it anyway.”

“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future,” Jayce said, because he couldn’t tell Viktor he didn’t think he was being selfish.

“But we can plan for different outcomes.”

“Like you’re doing with your contracts?”

Viktor coughed into his elbow. “It wasn’t—I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said, when he’d caught his breath. “It’s funny. I spend more money in a year than my parents handled in their lifetimes. They could never imagine how I live now. But the things we’ve worked for never felt like mine to keep. It feels like it could all disappear in a moment.”

“Viktor…”

“What you told me, about your father,” he went on. “I understand what you meant. But if you had seen the way people are forced to live—the way we lived—the money would not seem so unimportant.” He took a breath. “I just want things in place for when I’m no longer here. Secure.”

“You think I can’t manage it by myself?”

Viktor shook his head. “I know you can. When the time comes, I trust you to do what is best for… everyone involved,” he said. “I want the transition to be as smooth as possible. I want you to have options.”

“Yeah, including an option to walk away,” Jayce muttered. “I thought we were past that. Why do you keep trying to talk me out of it?”

“I told you—I don’t intend to leave you with a responsibility you don’t want,” Viktor said. “It wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

In truth, it was hard for Jayce to imagine raising a child by himself, if the worst happened. He wasn’t totally convinced he was capable, and he was more than a little afraid that he would grow to resent the child—for being there while Viktor wasn’t, for mattering more to Viktor than his own life and cutting his time shorter.

But it was even harder to imagine handing the child—Viktor’s child—off to be raised by someone else, while he stayed at a distance and approved the release of funds for housing and school fees and sundries.

“Well, I want it,” Jayce said, with more confidence than he felt, shuffling a little closer. He wanted Viktor’s trust, if nothing else, and to give Viktor some peace of mind while he was being crushed under the weight of his worries. He wanted the responsibility, and if he squinted, that seemed almost like the same thing as wanting the child. “Can you at least try to believe me?”

“Jayce, you know how much I—” Viktor broke off with a huff. He shifted again, as if in discomfort.

Jayce’s heart leapt into his throat. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. They’re just kicking.”

“Oh.” For a moment, Jayce watched in silence as Viktor touched a hand to his belly, rubbing at the spot where he must feel the baby moving. He swallowed. “Can I feel?”

Viktor didn’t react at first, like he was waiting for Jayce to take it back. Then, with some effort, he rolled onto his back and cautiously took Jayce by the wrist, guiding his hand to his belly. “They might not do it again,” he said.

It felt strangely intimate to touch Viktor like this, when Jayce had spent long weeks avoiding his midsection. But he had promised himself he would do better, be more involved. He was keenly aware of the warmth of Viktor’s skin through the soft, thin fabric of his nightshirt.

Something stirred gently—the baby, or Jayce’s imagination. Then he felt two soft but distinct thumps beneath his hand.

“There,” Viktor said, pressing Jayce’s hand more firmly against his belly. “Did you feel that?”

Jayce sat up halfway, shocked. “Was that the baby? You’re sure it wasn’t you?”

“How could it have been me?”

“I don’t know—” Jayce stopped short when he felt it again: a hand, or maybe a foot, jabbing outward. There was no doubt—it was the baby, moving independently. A quiet, astonished laugh escaped him. He turned over, scooting close enough to Viktor that he was nearly pressed against his side, his face close to Viktor’s on the pillow. “Oh, wow. Viktor, this is amazing.”

“I’m sure it seems that way when it’s not kicking you in the ribs,” Viktor said.

“I had no idea...” Under Jayce’s hand, he felt a kind of sliding movement, so sudden that it made him jump a little. “What was that?”

“It rolled over, I think.” Viktor didn’t sound especially enthused.

“Huh.” It was the oddest sensation, even from the outside. Jayce sort of wanted the baby to do it again; he needed more data points, a better understanding. He placed his other hand on Viktor’s belly, and Viktor let him. “Is it weird for you?”

“Extremely.”

“So you don’t like it?”

Viktor didn’t answer right away. “It was unsettling at first. I don’t care for it all the time. Especially when I’m trying to sleep,” he said, looking down at himself with a slight frown. Then his expression softened. “But… it lets me know they’re all right in there. That’s something.”

All at once, Jayce was glad to have this, too. It was one thing to know about the pregnancy and watch it progress while remaining at arm’s length; it was another thing to feel the baby kicking under his hands.

Their baby, he thought, for the first time.

“Yeah,” Jayce said. The baby’s feet thumped against his palm again, and he looked up at Viktor with a grin. He leaned over to kiss Viktor while the baby was still kicking. “Yeah, it really is.”

Notes:

thanks again for reading. I’m having a lot of fun writing this fic, and I hope you’re having fun, too.

feel free to come visit on Bluesky or Tumblr.

Chapter 4

Notes:

this is an accurate visual representation of my creative process while drafting this chapter. I thank you for your patience and hope you enjoy the end result.

Click here for content warnings, which contain spoilers:

terminal illness; unplanned (male) pregnancy; trans mpreg; explicit references to dfab anatomy (including words like “cunt”); vaginal fingering; PIV sex; frank depictions of labor and birth (including a vaginal birth scene); allusions to “baby blues” or possible postpartum depression

Between his Council responsibilities and the year-end crush of project deadlines, Jayce had fewer and fewer moments to spare for the augmentation project, much less his personal obligations. He told himself it would get easier with time—after the baby was born, after his work was complete, after some nebulous point in the future that was getting harder to envision all the time.

The years used to spool out before him in a straight line, full of possibilities, with no fixed end point, but lately, he couldn’t see past the estimate Viktor’s doctors had made: twelve to eighteen months, generously. Nearly a quarter of that time was already gone.

Whenever Jayce saw his mother, which he made an effort to do a few times a month, she never failed to ask about Viktor, and Jayce never failed to mince delicately around the truth. He didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to tell her that Viktor’s overall health was worsening, so he focused on how, despite everything, the pregnancy appeared to be progressing normally.

Ximena’s consideration went beyond mere words. Ever since she had them over for dinner, she’d sent meals to Viktor’s flat via bicycle courier once or two nights a week, with a little card that Jayce wasn’t allowed to read. Though Viktor didn’t know what to make of this, he sent the tins back with thank-you notes—a topside affectation, he said, drilled into him over the years—and ate as much of the food as he could stomach. Most days, that wasn’t much.

It was just as well. The baby would take what it needed from Viktor’s body, or so Jayce had gathered from his reading, leaching nutrients to sustain itself. It would take until he lost what little flesh remained on his body, until his teeth fell out, until there was nothing left to take. But Jayce couldn’t say that to his mother, so he told her that Viktor’s doctor said the baby was healthy and left it at that.

“How will he manage after his baby comes?” Ximena asked one afternoon, when they met for lunch at a downtown bistro.

They were seated near a wide window with a view of the snowy street, where carriages trundled along and people hurried up the sidewalk with their heads bowed against the wind. The icy gales that swept in from the north in early December had carried with them record snowfall that blanketed Piltover in glittering white.

Jayce hesitated, glancing up from the menu. “Well, he’ll take time off. Extended time off.”

“Will he have help at home?”

“He’s—making arrangements, I think.”

Jayce had two weeks of leave planned in February, around Viktor’s estimated due date. He hadn’t told Margaret what it was for, only that she should not schedule any meetings during that period and should rearrange anything already on his calendar. After his time off was over, balancing his Council obligations with helping Viktor with the baby would be a challenge, but he was confident he would manage.

“And then?” Ximena prompted. “Does he plan to return to work full time?”

Jayce blinked. Everything hinged on Viktor’s health and the treatment options available after the baby was born, but in a world where Viktor recovered, it was difficult to imagine him doing anything else. “Why wouldn’t he?”

“Oh, Jayce,” she said with a sigh.

“What?”

She paused, mulling something over. “I think you are accustomed to taking up a great deal of his attention,” she said, and though her tone was mild, her words rocked him back in his seat. “But you cannot expect him to spend all hours in that lab with you anymore. Things will be very different for him.”

“I know that,” Jayce said, feeling a pang of bitterness that surprised him.

“Having children changes your priorities,” Ximena went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “You’ll understand when you have children of your own—and you could stand to get a move on, I think.”

“Mom—”

“I’m not getting any younger.”

He fought not to wince. “Mom,” he tried again.

“Mrs. Armstrong asked again if you would like to meet her granddaughter,” Ximena said. “The opera singer. Very accomplished—and very pretty, from what I’ve seen in the papers.”

“I remember,” he said with a sigh. Mrs. Armstrong was the head of his mother’s civic group, a wealthy matriarch, forever angling for good marriages for her grandchildren. There was a time, not so long ago, when Jayce would not have been considered a good prospect. He’d spent most of his life as a working-class heir to a lower house, better suited to academics than business or politics. Now he was somebody else, though that person still seemed a stranger to him at times. “And I’m not interested. Actually, Mom, I’ve been meaning to tell you—”

“Pining away is no good, either,” Ximena added, fixing him with a look that pinned him in place. “Though I’m sure you realize this by now.”

“Excuse me?”

She waved off the question. “What is it you need to tell me?”

Jayce opened his mouth, feeling as if the words were lodged in his throat, and was rescued when the waiter reappeared to take their orders. He chose something random and gave the menu back, his hands suddenly clammy.

When the waiter had gone, Ximena folded her hands together on the tabletop, watching him in silence.

He wilted under her gaze, feeling cowardly. “The next time one of your friends tries to set me up with somebody, just—tell them I’m unavailable, please.”

She seemed skeptical. “For what reason? I know you’re a busy young man, but—”

“What if I’m seeing someone already?” Jayce said, before he could think better of it. “Did you consider that, when Mrs. Armstrong was showing you newspaper clippings?”

It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Jayce used to date around, albeit casually; he worked too much to form a more serious relationship. After the first public demonstration of the Hexgates, three summers ago on Progress Day, lifestyle columnists turned him into Piltover’s most eligible bachelor, practically overnight.

All of a sudden, he couldn’t so much as take someone to dinner without it ending up in the society pages. The most regrettable episode was one in which he and Mel were spotted leaving the opera house together, mere days after they had a business lunch at a trendy restaurant. Their rumored affair turned into a month-long news cycle, one that greatly excited—and then greatly disappointed—his mother. The whispers picked up again, briefly, after Jayce was appointed to the Council.

He would be lying if he said he’d never felt drawn to Mel or sensed that she felt similarly. There was a time, certainly, when something more might’ve blossomed from their professional relationship, moments when it came close. But it never happened and Jayce could no longer picture it. Six years in, Mel was a political ally and a benefactor, as well as a friend and confidante. She was unlike anyone else Jayce had ever met.

When Jayce’s relationship with Viktor became intimate, it didn’t take him long to stop seeing other people—at first because it was preferable to have his private affairs be truly private, and then because he found that he didn’t want to pursue anyone else. Other relationships seemed like a waste of time in comparison, when he had everything he wanted in one special person.

Ximena drew herself up a little straighter. “No,” she said, with dignity, “I did not consider that, because surely my only son would tell me about such an important thing in his life.”

She didn’t know the half of it, Jayce thought despairingly, and the middle of a restaurant was not the place to explain.

It wasn’t the thought of her reaction that made him hesitate. He’d meant it when he told Viktor that he didn’t think Ximena would be angered by the news. Shocked, certainly. Wounded, probably, by Jayce’s many lies of omission. These weren’t the circumstances in which she’d imagined becoming a grandmother—Viktor was right about that much. But even if it took time for her to adjust, Jayce was sure she would come around.

No matter how she felt about the baby, telling her would change things. It would upset the delicate balance they’d maintained these past months, open their private world to new forces. The pregnancy, Viktor’s illness, the future ahead of them—none of it had ever been within Jayce’s control. When and how he shared this part of their lives with Ximena was the only thing he still held in his grasp. Selfishly, he was reluctant to give it up.

“I’m just not looking to get a date right now,” he said finally.

She sniffed. “Suit yourself,” she said. “Now, tell me—are you bringing Viktor over for Snowdown?”

---

After the accident at the gala, Viktor spent about a week resting at home, as the doctor had recommended. From there, he dialed back the time he spent in the lab, though that mostly meant he brought his work home with him instead of staying late. He still worked in the lab daily, directing the work and preparing Sky to take on more responsibilities, determined to make the most of the time that remained before he commenced a kind of joint parental and medical leave after the holidays.

That meant Jayce knew exactly where to find him after saying goodbye to Ximena.

“I think we should live together,” Jayce said, leaning around Viktor to get a better look at what he was writing on a chalkboard. The lab was quiet except for the scratching of the chalk in Viktor’s hand, with Sky busy in the adjoining room. “After you have the baby, I mean.”

The chalk stuttered and then picked up again. “This is not the place to discuss such things,” Viktor said, without looking over his shoulder at Jayce.

“Hear me out,” Jayce said, undeterred. “You’ll need help and it’ll be easier if we’re together. I spend enough time at your place as it is.”

“We don’t have to live together for you to—assist,” Viktor said stiffly. “You have your leave planned.”

“Yes, but what am I supposed to do? Go home at night and leave you alone?” The more he thought about it, the more untenable that arrangement seemed, and not only because the baby would need a great deal of attention. Jayce’s reading suggested Viktor would need a fair amount of support himself as he recovered from the delivery.

“If you prefer, I could go home at night and leave things in your capable hands. It would be good practice for you,” Viktor said gamely, even as he stopped writing again to knead at his lower back, his expression tight. “And I’d get better sleep that way, I expect.”

“Very funny,” Jayce said, unsmiling. Watching Viktor, he wanted nothing more than to usher him to a chair. If it were up to him, Viktor would be on leave already. Thirty-one weeks seemed plenty far enough to justify it, all things considered. “Should you sit down?”

“Shouldn’t you be in a meeting right now?” Viktor complained.

“Not for”—Jayce consulted his timepiece—“another thirty minutes.” It would be tight enough to make Margaret nervous, but he was fairly sure he would make it on time. He stepped closer, behind Viktor, and touched his side, his hand lingering.

“Jayce,” Viktor said, without heat. “Not here.”

“It’s just us,” Jayce told him. “When you had your operation, I took good care of you, didn’t I?”

Viktor’s bad hip and abnormal gait caused a cascade of problems throughout his body, from his ankle to his back. When he noticed his back pain worsening two years ago, he thought little of it for months and said nothing until the day came that he sat down with Jayce for a meeting with Heimerdinger and was unable to stand after.

Jayce knew it was an emergency when Viktor told him, in an uneven voice, that he needed help to get downstairs to the carriage. Between the searing pain all down his back and the numbness in his legs, which Jayce only learned the full extent of later, he had to lean so heavily against Jayce that it would’ve been easier to carry him.

At the hospital, a series of scans revealed lesions that were causing Viktor’s spine to deteriorate. He was soon carted off for a lengthy, gruesome operation that preserved his ability to walk but could not fully restore his function and range of motion. While the surgeons worked on him, Jayce lingered in the waiting room, nauseated.

Jayce had stayed with Viktor for a week after he was discharged from the hospital, changing the dressing on the surgical wound and managing the heavy-duty painkillers and feeding him. He’d even helped Viktor bathe for the first time after the operation, when Viktor was still weakened from his ordeal and everything was stiff and sore and hard to move.

“You did,” Viktor admitted.

“So I can do it again,” Jayce said, putting his other hand at Viktor’s waist. In the back of his mind, he worried that he’d been so distant for so long that Viktor wouldn’t give him a chance now. “I know I’ve been—focused on other things. But I want to be there, if you’ll let me.”

Viktor was quiet for a moment, contemplating, but he didn’t shy away from Jayce’s touch. “It’s… practical,” he said at last, with a glance over his shoulder at Jayce.

Jayce raised his eyebrows. “Is that a yes?”

“Yes,” Viktor told him.

When Jayce leaned in to kiss him, Viktor allowed it, even kissed back, reaching to touch his face with the hand that still held a nub of chalk.

For a moment, holding Viktor, Jayce was unconcerned about the timing of his next meeting. If he arrived late—well, it wasn’t the end of the world.

---

The week before Snowdown, Caitlyn and her girlfriend came around for dinner and drinks.

Viktor was the last to arrive at the small gathering at Jayce’s apartment. Jayce had worried how he would manage in the snow and had offered to pick him up or at least send a carriage. Viktor had declined, naturally, so it was a relief to open the door and see him none the worse for wear, his face faintly pink from the cold.

Caitlyn hurried over as Jayce was taking his coat. “Viktor! Look at you,” she said warmly. It was as close as she could get to acknowledging how big he was without being impolite. When she embraced him—carefully, mindful of his belly—he allowed it, putting one arm around her shoulders. “How are you feeling?”

“Perfectly fine,” Viktor told her, gently extricating himself from her arms. He was leaning heavily on his crutch.

She drew back, and though she was smiling, Jayce noticed a flicker of concern in her eyes as she took in Viktor’s appearance. The baby was growing, but he was thinner now than the last time she’d seen him, wearier around the eyes. Even his bulkier winter clothes couldn’t hide the fact that he was still losing weight. She’d probably felt it when she hugged him: the slightness of him.

“Well, it’s good to see you,” Caitlyn said, squeezing his arm.

They ought to have met Vi for the first time back in November, during the Distinguished Innovators award ceremony, where her younger sister received an honorable mention for some kind of energy-storing device. But after Viktor’s accident, Jayce never made it to the judging in the morning, much less the ceremony.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t make it,” Vi commented as Jayce poured her another glass of wine. She was sitting beside Caitlyn on the far end of the sofa, one arm draped around her shoulders. Across the room, a holiday music program was playing on the radio. “Powder was all excited about meeting the creator of Hextech.”

Truth be told, Jayce was beginning to regret breaking out the more expensive wine for this evening, since it appeared to be wasted on Vi. She and Viktor, who could not even partake, kept making unfavorable comparisons between Jayce’s offerings and the stronger liquor that could be had in Zaun. Viktor claimed to be joking, mostly, but with him, it was hard to be sure. Jayce topped off his own glass, lest it go to waste.

“Who knew teenagers had such admiration for the Man of Progress?” Viktor asked.

Vi shook her head. “Oh, no—she wanted to meet you,” she said to Viktor. Then she glanced over at Jayce. “No offense.”

Caitlyn coughed into her hand to hide her laugh, but Jayce took it in stride.

“Of course she wants to meet Viktor,” he said, giving Viktor’s knee a squeeze. “He’s got to be the most successful scientist Zaun’s ever produced. Piltover, too.”

“Eh, an argument could be made,” Viktor said into his own mug of tea.

“If your sister’s interested, we could schedule a walkthrough of the lab after the holidays,” Jayce said. “Give her the tour.”

“Not for a while yet,” Viktor reminded him.

“Right,” Jayce said. Viktor was poised to begin his leave around the end of the month, coinciding with the winter holidays. For once, the timing of this pregnancy was convenient. “We’ll do lunch or something. Save the tour for the spring.”

By the time the conversation wound down, it was late enough—and everyone but Viktor had been drinking enough—that it made more sense for Caitlyn and Vi to stay overnight in Jayce’s guest room than to venture out into the cold and make their own ways home. Viktor, meanwhile, was too heavily pregnant to be sent out into the snow at such a late hour, so it was only natural that Jayce offered him the master bedroom and, for the sake of propriety, slept on the couch himself. There was no need to advertise that they were accustomed to sharing a bed.

Jayce woke with a crick in his neck and the threat of a headache throbbing dully behind his eyes. A glance at the clock told him it was half past seven. The apartment was silent and chillier than he’d like; in the kitchen, someone was brewing coffee.

In Jayce’s darkened bedroom, the only sound was the faint but steady rattle of Viktor’s breathing. It was familiar by now, half painful and half comforting to hear.

Viktor wasn’t an early riser. Left to his own devices, he tended to stay up until the wee hours and sleep late, and at this stage of his pregnancy, he needed more rest than ever. It would probably be a few hours before he stirred. When he did, he would be in pain, stiff all over.

It had become routine for Viktor to ease himself slowly out of bed in the morning and then spend thirty or forty minutes in the shower, letting the hot water relax his muscles as he gathered the willpower to face the day. Jayce had finally purchased a shower stool for his own bathroom, to better facilitate this process when Viktor stayed over.

Just now, the bed looked warm and inviting, with Viktor deeply asleep beneath a pile of dark blankets. Jayce would’ve liked nothing more than to climb into bed, bury his face against Viktor’s neck and drift off again. But they had guests, so he ducked into the adjoining bathroom to perform his ablutions, then pulled a robe over his pajama pants and undershirt and left Viktor sleeping.

He found Caitlyn in the kitchen sipping a cup of coffee. She was barefoot, wearing last night’s clothes, her hair drawn back in a loose bun. The light coming through the windows above the sink was muted by a layer of frost on the glass.

“Will you stay for breakfast?” Jayce asked as he poured himself some coffee. In the back of his mind, he was considering what he had in the refrigerator and what Viktor was most likely to eat. It was a daily struggle to get more than a little food into him, though they were both still trying.

“If it’s not too much of an imposition,” Caitlyn said. “You know, when you invited us over, Vi wasn’t quite sold on a little get-together with the Man of Progress. But she had a good time last night.”

“Well, Viktor likes her.”

“Ah, the seal of approval. Does that mean you like her, as well?”

“I can decide for myself if I like somebody, you know,” Jayce said. “It’s not dependent on whether Viktor likes them.”

“No, of course not.” Caitlyn lifted her cup to her mouth to hide her smile. Then she paused and took a breath. “Jayce… I’m going to ask you a question, for my own peace of mind. You musn’t get upset.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Shoot,” he said and took a sip of coffee.

She glanced at the door, as if worried someone was about to step into the kitchen. Then she dropped her voice. “Viktor’s baby,” she said. “You’re not responsible, are you?”

He choked, then sputtered, “What kind of question is that?”

“You’ve got baby things in your guest room. It looks like a blooming nursery in there.”

“It doesn’t look like—” Jayce broke off, knowing that was a losing argument.

The baby would stay at Viktor’s place full-time for at least a few months after the birth, but Jayce wanted to be prepared for the inevitable overnight stays in his own apartment. If Viktor were hospitalized—well, it didn’t bear thinking about. But in any case, Jayce was readying a room.

It was possible to order any number of useful items through catalogues and have them delivered to his apartment in discreet packaging, so over the past few weeks, he’d done just that: a crib here, a baby carriage there, and so on. Everything was still in boxes, shoved into a corner of the guest room, waiting for him to take a day put them together. Caitlyn would’ve had to inspect the boxes closely to see what they were.

“Why were you rummaging through my things?” he demanded.

She gave him a flat look. “Jayce,” she said in a low voice.

For a moment, he just stared back at her, his pulse racing like she’d asked him to confess to a crime. Then he scrubbed a hand over his face. “What do you want me to tell you, Cait?”

“The truth. Is it yours?”

Jayce hesitated, more out of habit than anything else. “Yeah,” he said at last, on an exhale. To say it out loud felt like it cost him something. The quiet admission seemed to hang in the air for a moment before dissipating like smoke. “It’s mine.”

Caitlyn exhaled sharply. “I can’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve had a hunch since the gala, but I’d hoped I was wrong. You’re supposed to be a genius. I thought you had more sense.”

“Hold on a second,” Jayce said, lifting a hand defensively. He wasn’t prepared to be lectured on this topic by a twenty-two-year-old.

“I’ve suspected something was there for years, obviously, with the way you moon over him—”

“What? Cait—”

“But I didn’t think anything actually happened between the two of you. Or if it did, I didn’t think it was serious.”

“It’s…” Jayce trailed off, unsure how to explain to her that whatever was between him and Viktor wasn’t like she imagined.

Really, it wasn’t. By now, he’d come to understand that Viktor wanted a child, badly—but he had not particularly wanted one with Jayce. This was just how things happened to work out: Viktor’s only chance at parenthood coming at the worst possible time and with the most inconvenient partner.

“We’ve been keeping it to ourselves,” he told Caitlyn. “It’s nobody business.”

At that, Caitlyn smacked his arm. “How could you do this to him? With him so ill—”

“It’s not like we planned it,” he shot back, leaning out of her reach.

That seemed to throw her. “Why keep it, then?”

Jayce leaned back against the counter. “It’s what Viktor wanted,” he said.

“You don’t want it?”

“I didn’t say that. It’s complicated.” The throbbing behind Jayce’s eyes was getting stronger. “We found out about the baby at the same time we found out how sick he was. He was far enough along by then that he couldn’t—well, he didn’t want to—” He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “It’s bad timing. But it’s happening, so we’re just… taking things as they come.”

Caitlyn watched him in silence for a moment, her lips pressed into a thin line. “What are you going to do?”

He heard the question she didn’t quite ask, the same one he asked himself daily: What are you going to do without Viktor?

“I wish I knew,” he said, his voice a little strained.

A pensive look crossed Caitlyn’s face. “It’s strange,” she said. “To think of you being… somebody’s father.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that this is so unexpected. You always seemed more interested in work than family life.”

“That’s… probably fair,” Jayce admitted. Six weeks or so, at most, and the baby would be here, but he didn’t feel ready.

“In any case,” Caitlyn said, leaning her hip against the counter. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

He suppressed a sigh. “It’s not funny, Cait.”

“Who’s joking? As you said, it’s happening, so…” She lifted her mug. “Congratulations on the impending arrival.”

He didn’t react at first, wondering if good manners had really been drilled into her that deeply. Then he allowed himself a small smile. “You know what?” he said as they clinked their cups together. “I’ll take it.”

---

With government business practically shut down for the last two weeks of the year, there was a certain expectation that Jayce would spend much of his down time attending opulent holiday parties.

Instead, he instructed Margaret to decline whatever invitations came his way, citing family obligations—an inoffensive excuse that could mean anything from spending time with his widowed mother to managing affairs at the foundry—and to send a nice bottle of wine with his compliments. Mel, he sensed, was somewhat puzzled when he declined her invitation along with all the others, but other matters needed his attention.

Purchases for the baby had also arrived at Viktor’s flat, but he was in no condition to unpack and put together the furniture, so the task fell to Jayce. Under Viktor’s supervision, he assmbled a crib and a cradle and a changing table, then shuffled it all around in what had been, until recently, the study. The baby would sleep in the bedroom with Viktor for at least a few months, but Viktor appeared relieved to have it all squared away.

Jayce, meanwhile, felt truly useful for the first time during this pregnancy. It took them both by surprise. Viktor seemed skeptical of Jayce’s interest at first, hesitant to engage with him in more serious conversations about the baby. Jayce didn’t blame him; he’d been hands-off for so long that it must seem odd for him to step in now. But he wanted to show that he was serious about being there for Viktor and their child. At least, he was trying.

“It doesn’t have to be decided now,” Viktor said one afternoon. He was propped up lengthwise on the couch, reclining against a mound of pillows while reading the business section of the newspaper.

“We’re just brainstorming,” Jayce replied from his seat in the armchair. “I like Sofia. Or Rosa.”

To his embarrassment, Jayce had put little thought into names until recently, and it was proving to be a more daunting task than he’d anticipated. Just keeping a mental list, adding to it now and then when he came across a name he liked, made their baby seem more real to him: a whole person, someone who had to live in the world with whatever name they picked.

Viktor’s face was hidden by the newspaper. “I’ve been considering Elena for a girl,” he said eventually. “Or Mila.”

Jayce imagined a dark-haired girl with a scattering of moles across her face. Her other features were nebulous in his mind’s eye, hard to picture. Elena Novak, he thought. Or Elena Talis.

“Elena’s pretty,” he said.

“It’s just a thought.”

“What else?”

“Zoya, possibly,” Viktor said. Then he folded the paper down so he could glance at Jayce. “Sofia is a nice name.”

“You think so?”

“Well, don’t set your heart on it.” Viktor returned to his reading, but it seemed to Jayce that he was warming to this conversation. “For a boy, maybe Nicholas or Maksim.”

Jayce hadn’t spent much time wondering whether the baby was a boy or a girl. He didn’t think it mattered much to him. But the sudden, idle thought of a little boy with Viktor’s smile was a pleasant one, easy to envision.

“I like Dmitri, as well,” Viktor went on.

That snapped Jayce back into the moment. “Not Dmitri,” he said quickly. When Viktor folded the paper down again and shot him a questioning look, he cleared his throat. “How about David?”

The holiday break made it impossible for Jayce to maintain any illusions he’d had about Viktor’s condition. He stayed over nightly, and being together at all hours forced him to see how much Viktor’s health had deterioriated, in just the past month.

His breathing was getting worse, not only because the baby took up so much space in his body, pressing on his diaphragm. Early one morning, Jayce found him bent over the bathroom sink, gripping the edge of the counter with white knuckles just to hold himself upright.

For a moment, Jayce thought he was vomiting blood—but he was only coughing, hard enough that his eyes watered and his face turned red. What he eventually spat into the sink was a thick spray of blood and mucus and a few small chunks of flesh.

Before Viktor turned the faucet on full blast and swept it all down the drain in a swirl of crimson, it was impossible to tell whether he had expelled pieces of a tumor or bits of his lungs. There seemed to be no difference anymore. Everything had grown together.

Bad pain days, when it was all Viktor could do to get out of bed in the morning, were more frequent than ever. There was no medication strong enough to touch his pain that wouldn’t also harm the baby, so he turned to hot showers and cold compresses that provided little relief from the pain that radiated across his back or shot through his hips. He let Jayce massage his aching legs and swollen feet, but sometimes Jayce suspected Viktor was only humoring him, allowing him to believe he was helping more than he really was.

At this late stage, Viktor’s body was also releasing hormones that loosened his ligaments in preparation for the birth. With his joints more unstable than usual, just standing up and hobbling across the room was getting harder for him all the time.

That was why he ultimately begged off joining Jayce and Ximena the night before Snowdown. He had accepted the invitation when Jayce sheepishly passed it along a few weeks before—both of them keenly aware that Jayce had yet to break the news and was running out of time to do so before the birth—but when the day arrived, he was eight months pregnant and so exhausted that the idea of making himself presentable and going halfway across the city for anything but a doctor’s appointment was unthinkable.

When Jayce made Viktor’s excuses, his mother tutted knowingly. “I wondered if he might not feel up to it,” she said. “He must be miserable.”

“I don’t know about that,” Jayce said delicately. She was right, of course, but he knew Viktor tended to downplay his physical complaints to others and didn’t want to contradict him.

“Precisely,” Ximena replied. “You don’t know. Having a baby is hard enough without being ill on top of it. I was plenty miserable with you and I was perfectly healthy. Of course, you weighed nearly eleven pounds when you were born…”

Jayce coughed. “I’m—sorry,” he bleated.

She waved him off. “Has he been eating enough?”

In the end, she sent Jayce off with several containers of food, as well as a neatly-wrapped gift box and instructions to deliver it all to Viktor’s place on his way home. Convenient, then, that he was going there anyway.

Huge, soft snowflakes were spiraling from a black sky when Jayce got back. He crept through the quiet apartment and found that Viktor had turned in for the night.

“How was it?” Viktor murmured from the bed as Jayce got undressed. The bedroom door was half open, a slice of yellow light falling across the door and onto the bed.

“Would’ve been better if you were there,” Jayce said. “Did I wake you?”

“Mm, no. I’ve been awake all night.”

“I can run you a bath,” Jayce said, climbing into bed. If it was body aches keeping Viktor up, as was often the case, soaking in the tub for a while sometimes helped.

“No, I think—” Viktor stiffened as Jayce got settled and their bare legs brushed, twisting his legs away as much as he could. “Your feet are freezing.”

“It’s cold outside.”

Viktor huffed a laugh. “Oh, is it? You’d better get warm, then.”

Jayce slotted against his side and draped an arm across his chest. He tucked his face against Viktor’s neck and kissed him there, out of habit. Then he pressed his lips to the corner of Viktor’s jaw, where he knew there was a mole: small and light brown, easy to miss.

Viktor shifted against him and tipped his face down to kiss Jayce on the mouth. The first kiss was brief, but the second was longer, sliding into a third, open-mouthed. He slid a hand through Jayce’s hair.

“You want to?” Jayce asked, between kisses.

When Viktor hummed, Jayce felt it in his teeth. “Can’t sleep,” he said, against Jayce’s lips. “It’s worth a try.”

A little thrill shot through Jayce at the thought. There was a window in the middle of the second trimester when Viktor was wet and excitable and got off easily, but as he grew bigger and more uncomfortable, sex turned into a kind of puzzle, the two of them struggling to fit together. They hadn’t been intimate for a few weeks. Few positions were possible anymore, between Viktor’s bump and his many aches and pains, and truth be told, Jayce worried a bit about Viktor overexerting himself.

But Viktor was under him now, wanting, winding an arm around his neck to draw him down, and Jayce followed. For a spell, they simply kissed and stroked each other in the dark, hands moving over fabric and slipping under hems, lips dragging over exposed skin. Jayce read Viktor by touch, his eyes half shut: the distance from his collarbone to the corner of his mouth, the circumference of his wrist, the angle of hips propped up by a pillow.

Jayce kicked off his sleep pants beneath the sheets, losing them somewhere around the foot of the bed, while Viktor laboriously wriggled out of his undergarments, puffing and struggling so much that Jayce moved to help him slip them over his hips and away. They shifted, sheets rustling as they rolled over. Viktor had to maneuver around his belly as he eased himself onto his side, holding it with one hand.

“You OK?” Jayce asked, rubbing at Viktor’s hip.

“Yes, fine.” Viktor was breathing heavier now, but he didn’t sound distressed. He twisted a little, craning his neck to find Jayce’s mouth again.

Reaching between Viktor’s legs, Jayce found him so wet that even his inner thighs were slick. He swore under his breath, tempted to put his fingers to his mouth and taste. “Viktor—”

Viktor’s thighs twitched together, seeking friction. “Will you just—”

He broke off with a gasp when Jayce began to stroke him, fingers sliding easily through warm, wet folds. His labia were swollen and sensitive, engorged with blood, and his clit was a hard knot, begging to be touched. Jayce pushed one finger inside, then two, scissoring gently, biting the inside of his cheek when at the soft sound of Viktor’s moan. By the time he worked a third finger inside, Viktor was squeezing around him, hot and close, rocking his hips back against Jayce’s hand.

When at last Jayce slotted into place behind Viktor, he felt feverish, his back tacky with sweat from the shared warmth of their bodies, trapped under the covers. They both shuddered when Jayce dragged the head of his cock against Viktor’s slit and pressed it against his opening.

He pushed into the slick heat, leaning his forehead against Viktor’s shoulder, breathing in the good smell of his skin. He wished he could see it, all of a sudden: the neat, glistening slit, framed by damp, dark hair, opening for him like the petals of a damp flower. It was a tight fit, despite Jayce’s efforts.

“You feel so good,” Jayce mumbled, mouthing at Viktor’s shoulder as he rocked his hips. He loved Viktor’s cunt: molten, fluttering around him. Just getting to brush against it felt like a privilege. “You have no idea.”

Jayce pawed at Viktor’s side, his hip, his chest. He slid his hand over the curve of Viktor’s belly, unthinking, and remembered himself abruptly, drawing his hand back. He’d touched the bump only a few times, never without asking. Touching Viktor there felt somehow more intimate than stroking his pussy, closer than being inside him.

Viktor fumbled for Jayce’s wrist. “You can—you can touch,” he said breathlessly. He pressed Jayce’s hand to his belly, holding it there. The baby was kicking, as though perturbed. “Do you feel that?”

“I feel it,” Jayce said, nuzzling into the juncture of Viktor’s neck.

“We made this.” Viktor sounded delirious, his breathing ragged. He was pushing his hips back against Jayce’s, moving into his thrusts as much as he could. “You gave this to me. You—”

Jayce kissed him with his mouth open. He couldn’t help it.

He felt Viktor’s body tensing, back arching a little as they moved together. He slid his hand lower, between Viktor’s thighs, and Viktor let him this time, reaching back instead to cup Jayce’s jaw. He was close; it took less than a minute of steady rubbing before he went taut as a wire.

After that, Jayce managed only a few more stuttering thrusts. He came deep inside Viktor and stayed there, an arm wrapped around him, kissing his shoulder, his neck, the reddened shell of ear. Viktor had gone practically boneless against him, his head lolling back.

They lay curled together in the dark, later, as close as they could get with the bump in the way. Viktor’s body was narrow and sharp, but also familiar and warm, and Jayce basked in the nearness of him, the rise and fall of his chest, the feeling of his long fingers carding absently through Jayce’s hair.

The baby stirred between them—their little creation, Jayce thought drowsily, brought into being by their intimacy. Their affection. It was usually more active at night, Viktor mentioned once, when he was trying to rest. During the day, the motion of him walking around rocked it to sleep.

The first time Jayce heard that, he found himself strangely affected by the idea that the baby woke and slept in cycles. Possibly, it dreamed. If it did, surely it dreamed of nothing but Viktor: the gentle lilt of his voice, the push-pull of his breathing, the patter of his heart. Jayce had the same kinds of dreams.

There were moments, now and then, when Jayce resented the baby for the pain it caused Viktor, flashes when it was hard to envision the thing growing in Viktor’s belly as anything but another tumor, sucking the life out of him.

But there were moments, too, when Viktor invited him to feel the baby kick and Jayce was as astonished as he’d been the first time. Sometimes, when he pressed gently against Viktor’s belly, a little hand or foot pressed back, as if responding to him.

Miraculous, Viktor had called it once, and sometimes, for a heartbeat or two, Jayce thought he understood what that meant and a surge of tenderness flowed through him.

They spent most of Snowdown lounging in bed, eating the baked goods that Ximena had sent over. White winter sunlight flooded through the bedroom window and spilled across the sheets to warm Viktor’s bare legs. He was propped up against a mound of pillows, book in hand, wearing nothing but one of Jayce’s pajama shirts. He had long since outgrown his own nightclothes and had taken to wearing Jayce’s, but even those were getting tight across the middle.

“Somebody’s active today,” Jayce commented, smoothing his hand over Viktor’s belly while the baby squirmed. It was big enough now that its movements could be seen from the outside. Though the novelty of that had worn off somewhat for Viktor, Jayce remained fascinated.

“It’s the sound of your voice,” Viktor said, turning a page. “They move around when they hear you.”

“Can it really hear that well in there?” Jayce had read that babies could hear sounds outside the womb, but he’d imagined that meant louder noises than him speaking with Viktor at a normal volume.

“Lower frequency sounds, yes.”

Viktor would know—he talked to the baby all the time, almost always in his first language. In six years, Jayce had picked up only a few words here and there, a handful of phrases, not enough to discern what Viktor was saying to his bump as he puttered around the apartment or the lab.

Jayce scooted down the bed so that his face was level with Viktor’s midsection. “When you talk to it, what do you say?”

Viktor peered at him over the top of his book. In the clear daylight, harsher than the lamps that illuminated their nights together, it was hard not to focus on the thin, lavender skin under Viktor’s eyes, the hollows of his cheeks. “They cannot understand you, Jayce,” he said.

“I know that,” Jayce replied, feeling foolish.

“What I mean is that it does not matter what you say. The result is the same. So if you want to talk to them, you can talk about anything.”

Jayce cleared his throat, but he found himself at a loss. Instead, he spoke to Viktor again. “What about Tatiana, for a girl?”

“Still thinking about that, are you?”

“Well, yes,” Jayce admitted. “That and how we’re going to tell people.”

“Tell people what?”

“About the baby.”

Viktor hummed. “Mm, I think most everyone has figured out there is a baby by now.”

“I mean that it’s—ours,” Jayce said delicately. He tensed a little when Viktor shot him a look. “It doesn’t have to happen right away. We can wait until after it’s born.”

“To do what?” Viktor shifted, as if disquieted. “Run a birth announcement in the Gazette? Hand out cigars to your esteemed colleagues on the Council?”

“I’m not joking,” Jayce said.

“Nor am I,” Viktor replied. “Do you imagine your peers will congratulate you?”

Jayce bristled a little, despite himself. “What does it matter? I’m not—I’m not ashamed of this, or whatever it is you’re implying.”

Even in daylight, Viktor’s eyes were unreadable. “Jayce,” he said. “You have not even told your mother.”

This morning, he’d opened Ximena’s gift. It turned out to be a swaddling blanket, a pair of sleep suits and a book for recording milestones and memories about one’s baby. Abashed, Jayce had explained that his mother knew Viktor had no relatives to give him such things, but Viktor remained at once baffled, touched and strangely upset by the gift, in a way he couldn’t fully articulate to Jayce.

Viktor had always left it up to Jayce to tell his mother about the baby, never pushing him to do it. There were moments when Jayce suspected this was because, deep down, Viktor feared him telling his mother almost as much as Jayce did. Whatever kindness she had extended to Viktor as her son’s dearest friend, he was half convinced that her goodwill would evaporate the moment she realized it was her grandchild he was carrying and not some pitiable, fatherless child of Zaun.

“There are… considerations to be made, before anything becomes public,” Viktor said. “For you, mostly.”

Jayce thought of Caitlyn: the pained look she’d given him when he admitted the baby was his, the awkward congratulations she’d offered. Hers was likely to be the least mortified reaction when word got out—and it would get out, inevitably, if Jayce raised the child as he planned.

Even if Ximena accepted their child, as Jayce believed she would, others in her social circle would see the baby’s existence as a scandal. It would be in the papers; Jayce dreaded the headlines about Piltover’s Man of Progress and his Zaunite partner of lesser renown.

There were other terms that would undoubtedly be used, in private rooms, if not in print. Jayce had never forgotten how Viktor put it, months ago: that he’d gotten a bastard child on a trencher. That sentiment wouldn’t be uncommon topside. Jayce wasn’t ashamed to have a child with Viktor, but he hated the thought of exposing Viktor or the baby to slurs and public ridicule.

That was precisely why Viktor had proposed at the outset that they keep their intimate relationship between them, and why Jayce had agreed: to avoid intrusions and insinuations, to let their work stand on its own and prevent their private lives from becoming a distraction, to them or anyone else.

But they made that deal more than three years ago, when all they were doing was sleeping together. Circumstances had changed. Viktor was gravely ill. They were expecting a baby. The nature of their relationship couldn’t remain secret forever. Could it?

“Listen,” Jayce said. “I’ll tell my mom. I’ll go see her tonight and tell her, if that’s what you want.”

“That isn’t…” Viktor suppressed a sigh. “I have not asked you to do that.”

“So ask me,” Jayce said, moving back up the bed so he was close to Viktor.  “Ask me for that. For anything. I said I want to be there for you, and I’m trying to show you, but you won’t let me. If you would just tell me what to do, I could—”

“Jayce,” Viktor said, and the weariness in his voice made Jayce’s words catch in his throat. “There is no need for you to—make gestures that will complicate things.”

Jayce just watched him for a moment, focused on the light that shivered in his eyes. “Is that all you think it is? A gesture?”

“No. I only mean that—” Viktor hesitated, then lifted his hand to cup Jayce’s jaw with one hand, a light touch that might’ve been an apology or forgiveness. “You are here.”

Jayce leaned his cheek into Viktor’s hand, feeling a dull pain under his ribs. “I know I’ve been an ass about this,” he said. “But Viktor, you have to know I…”

He trailed off, sensing that Viktor would not welcome the thing he really wanted to say.

“I want to do the right thing,” he said instead.

“I know that,” Viktor told him. “You always do.”

---

Halfway through the first week of the new year, Jayce was already up to his eyeballs in administrative tasks and meetings. Indeed, there was a Council meeting in twenty minutes, and he had barely glanced at the agenda, occupied instead with the materials he’d prepared for his sit-down with the Piltover General board later today.

“This project is taking up a great deal of your time,” Mel said when they were alone in his office. There was no judgment in her tone, but Jayce sensed it there all the same—or maybe it was his own worries about her judgment, reflected back at him.

“You wanted to push the boundaries of what Hextech can do,” he said, looking up at her from the handouts and schematics arrayed on the desk in front of him. “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Naturally,” Mel said, without hesitation. She circled around the desk and leaned back against it, close to him. “I campaigned for your appointment to the Council because I want you at the helm, guiding this creation of yours. But you’re putting significant resources into the development of a single product that won’t be profitable for years while there are other ventures that need your attention.”

“I remember you saying the applications are endless.”

“I said that because it’s true,” she told him. “I also said it because the Sybil Edevanes of the world will have no serious interest in a device such as this one unless there’s money to be made.”

Jayce knew she was right. He’d already foreseen debates about the price point for the eventual commercial product and was dreading them. “It shouldn’t be about money,” he muttered.

“Everything is,” Mel said. “Platitudes about saving lives will only get you so far, even when you really believe in them. Perhaps especially then. But aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?”

“How so?”

“The Kirammans have yet to sign off on this,” she reminded him. “You can’t so much as build a prototype without their say-so. Not to mention—”

“There won’t be a problem,” Jayce said, his voice firm. “On either end.”

He had repeatedly held off on bringing this project to Cassandra because there was no way to do it without also involving Viktor. Any decision making about new uses for Hextech had to include all three stakeholders. It was in the contract.

The way the patent ownership was divided, Viktor’s approval wasn’t strictly necessary for this project to move forward, though Jayce was sure he would agree. Of course he would. Jayce just needed a little more time to iron out the details before he presented it, as he would to a skittish investor.

“You sound awfully confident,” Mel said.

“The Kirammans will give their approval,” he replied.

If they didn’t and the worst came to pass, Jayce would make sure Hextech was never used again. But he couldn’t explain that to Mel.

“As you say,” she told him. “In the meantime…”

“There have been some minor setbacks,” Jayce said, feeling suddenly as if he were back at the Academy, asking a professor for an extension. “That’s why it’s taken up more of my time than expected. But we’ll be back on track soon.”

It was funny, almost. When he joined the Council almost a year ago, he was sure his days of begging for approval were behind him. Then again, Mel had helped him so much with this endeavor. The least he could do was offer her some assurances.

Mel studied him for a moment, her expression hard to read. “How is Mr. Novak, if I might ask?”

Jayce sat back in his chair. “He’s, ah…”

He hardly knew where to begin. Mel was one of a handful of people who knew about Viktor’s diagnosis—telling her was necessary to explain the importance of the augmentation project—but he didn’t keep her regularly apprised of his health, and she’d seen Viktor only once or twice since the gala, briefly.

“He’s doing about as well as can be expected,” Jayce said at last.

“I imagine his condition complicates matters somewhat.”

“You could say that.” Jayce was a little surprised to hear her mention it. Obvious as it was, Viktor’s pregnancy was an inappropriate subject for public settings and had also gone mostly unacknowledged in Jayce’s private conversations with Mel. As far as she knew, it had nothing to do with Jayce, so there was nothing to say, really.

“I understand he’s taking an extended leave of absence, to manage his—personal situation,” Mel said. “He hasn’t set a date for his return.”

“It’s hard to say when he’ll be well enough,” Jayce replied.

“Of course. I trust that you two have planned for how you’ll manage in his absence.”

Jayce’s shoulders stiffened. “Not much will change while he’s on leave.”

“Ideally, yes. But what about less than ideal circumstances?”

“Meaning?” Jayce asked. He knew perfectly well what she meant, but admitting it felt too much like acceptance of the great and terrible thing he’d been pushing away for months.

Mel paused. “Jayce,” she said, tracing her fingers over a schematic laid out on the desk. “I have every confidence that your project can succeed, but the alternative has to be considered. I know Mr. Novak has considered it, what with the endowment.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s going to…” Jayce couldn’t manage the last word.

“I don’t mean to be a pessimist. I only want to see your work safeguarded,” Mel said. “Better to do it before a crisis. If you need assistance, my attorney—”

“We have plans,” Jayce admitted. It was true. Viktor had completed the arrangements with his own attorney, and Jayce had agreed to administer the estate and the trust for the child. “If it comes to that.”

Her eyebrows arched slightly. “That must give you some peace of mind,” she said.

“It does for Viktor.”

“I see.” Mel hesitated, looking as if she wanted to say something more, but was interrupted by a polite rapping at the door of Jayce’s office.

“Councilor,” Margaret called. “You asked for a ten-minute reminder.”

Jayce rubbed a hand over his eyes. “I did, didn’t I?” He muttered. Then he raised his voice a little. “Thank you, Margaret. I’m on my way.”

Mel straightened then, stepping lightly around to the other side of the desk. “Shall we?”

Jayce let out a breath. Then he rose and followed her.

---

After the Council meeting, Jayce rushed across town for a sit-down with the hospital board. The trustees had expressed interest in facilitating a breakthrough procedure like the one Jayce had pitched months ago, but there was a major wrinkle. Piltover General wasn’t in the practice of granting surgical privileges to Zaunite doctors, even ones with a topside education.

There was nothing in policy that allowed for such a thing—but, Jayce had argued, neither was there anything in policy forbidding it. He walked away from the meeting with nothing but an assurance that the board would take the matter under consideration and put it on the agenda for discussion in the near future. Realistically, that could mean any time in the next six months.

He went directly to Viktor’s apartment from the hospital, his head so full of worries about what would happen if hte board refused his request that he didn’t think to unpin the visitor badge from his jacket and stow it away before he took off the jacket and laid it over the back of the sofa.

After dinner, Jayce returned to the sitting room and nearly stumbled when he saw Viktor on the sofa, turning the badge over in his hand.

“Jayce,” Viktor said slowly. “What were you doing at the hospital?”

“What?” Jayce’s heart did a slow somersault as he joined Viktor. “Oh. I had a meeting.”

“I thought Ms. Medarda was the Council liaison to the hospital.”

“She is.”

“You accompanied her?”

“No, it was—just me today.” Jayce’s neck felt warm. “It was a preliminary talk with the board about integrating Hextech with medical devices. There’s some interest from Piltover General.”

“Ah.” Viktor’s tone was not encouraging. His eyes moved from the badge to Jayce. “Yes, I remember now. Ms. Medarda mentioned something about your—exciting ideas in that realm.”

“Did she?”

“Mm, yes, at the gala. I wondered what she meant.”

There was nowhere to hide from Viktor’s gaze. “Well, it’s an area we haven’t really explored,” he tried.

“Evidently, you have, and said not a word—”

“Viktor,” Jayce said, willing his pulse to slow. “I can explain.”

In the end, Jayce withdrew from his briefcase a copy of the handouts he’d prepared for the trustees. He spread them out on the coffee table, watching Viktor’s brow knit and his mouth thin as he looked them over.

This wasn’t how he’d envisioned unveiling this project to Viktor. He had wanted to wait until all the moving pieces were in place—the designs close to finalized, the permissions acquired, the baby born—so he could present a clear and actionable plan, one they could move quickly to enact.

“It’s something I’ve been working on, the last few months,” he said. “Unofficially. It’s nowhere near ready. I was going to share it with you as soon as—”

“Oh, Jayce,” Viktor said. “This is…”

“For you,” Jayce said.

The pages fanned out on the table in front of Viktor showed designs for a set of artificial lungs, as well as diagrams illustrating how the device might be implanted into a human chest cavity.

“It’s not really a new concept,” Jayce said, drawing from the pitch he’d given the hospital board. “Some medical researchers at the Academy prototyped an artificial heart years ago, and that was modeled off existing Zaunite augmentation tech. But it didn’t go anywhere. It was too bulky and there was no way to power it without a constant risk of catastrophic failure, so the project stalled. All the grant funding was in organic transplants, anyway, since that seemed more promising. But if there were a safe power source—”

“Like the refined gemstones,” Viktor said, tracing his finger over a schematic showing how the gemstone would be embedded in the device. “Compact, lightweight, stable. The weight you shave off there can go to more durable materials elsewhere.”

Just then, Jayce saw it: the light in Viktor’s eyes, that gleam of excitement he got when they were bouncing ideas off each other for how to solve some problem. The gears were turning. He saw the potential in this device.

Bolstered, Jayce put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder as he pointed out different elements of the design. “A heart’s simple,” he said. “It’s just a pump, really. Lung function is more complex, but it can be replicated. There’s already a device that does something like this. They use it for patients who are eligible for lung transplants but too sick for the surgery, to get them in better condition. It’s an external device—a catheter goes into the jugular vein and passes the blood through a circuit, removing carbon dioxide and delivering oxygen to the blood.”

“But it’s only used on a temporary basis,” Viktor said. “Correct?”

“Five days at a time, and only in a hospital setting. It’s meant to be a temporary alternative to full mechanical ventilation,” Jayce said. “It’s been tested for up to thirty days of continuous use, though.”

“In humans?”

“In sheep,” Jayce admitted. “But the sheep did very well.”
 
Viktor gave a quiet laugh. Then he looked at the plans again. “Who else worked on these designs?”

Jayce had no background in medical science, which Viktor knew very well. His primary contribution was integrating the refined gemstones as a power source. “I consulted with the surgeons guild,” he said. “But for a permanent implant like this, what I really needed was an expert in augmentations.”

“Not many of those in Piltover.”

“I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Lenore Barrow,” Jayce said. “She runs a surgical clinic in the undercity that specializes in augmentations. Artificial limbs, mostly, but she’s done plenty of ocular implants and neobladder reconstructions—things like that. She’s implanted a couple of artificial kidneys in the last few years.”

Viktor hummed. “A rudimentary system, compared to this.”

“But it works.” Jayce took a breath. “Viktor, she’s willing to do the surgery.”

“Out of her clinic?”

“Piltover General, ideally.” Jayce had been to the clinic in Zaun multiple times. While clean and well-maintained, he was unsure if the surgical facilities were adequate for a multi-hour operation like this. “I met with the board today to discuss granting her surgical privileges, when the time comes. If the trustees go for it, the transplant team at the hospital would assist.”

At that, Viktor’s eyes narrowed a fraction. Jayce could practically see him running assessments in his head. “That would be a most unusual arrangement,” he said.

“It’s—unorthodox, yes. But it’s a research hospital,” Jayce said. “The board wants to be part of this. If it’s a success, it’s a feather in their cap, too.”

Viktor looked unconvinced. “What is Ms. Medarda’s involvement in this exciting idea of yours?”

Jayce hesitated, just for a moment. “It would normally take years to get to human trials for this kind of augmentation,” he said. “Mel helped me cut through some of the red tape with the surgeons guild and the hospital board.”

At that, Viktor went very still. “What did you tell her about my—illness? About me?”

“Just enough for her to understand the nature of the project,” Jayce said hurriedly. “Viktor, please. I wouldn’t have gotten a foot in the door without her.” He ran his tongue over his teeth, anxious, while Viktor’s eyes turned back to the designs. “We can get authorization within a year. I’m sure of it. But for that to happen, we need the right subject.”

“A… subject,” Viktor echoed.

“You know what I mean. A volunteer. Someone with an urgent need and no other options for treatment—the kind of case they make exceptions for.”

Desperate cases, Jayce thought, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. They both knew.

Viktor looked up, and in the space of a moment, that light in his eyes was gone. “I can see your vision,” he said, after a moment, his words measured. Something in his tone, the way he angled his body slightly away, made Jayce’s insides twist. He sounded like he was trying to break a piece of bad news. “This is a promising design, Jayce, but I—”

“Don’t,” Jayce said immediately, but he already sensed Viktor pulling away, withdrawing inside, the way he did sometimes when he felt Jayce would not understand him. He squeezed Viktor’s shoulder, as if he could keep him from retreating. “Don’t say no. We’ve barely talked about it.”

“I rather think that was your decision.”

Jayce grabbed Viktor’s hand between both of his. “But you know now,” he said. “You know this can work. I waited too long to tell you. I realize that. I thought it would be better to hold off until things were more solid, but—”

“You were waiting because I am the last person you think to consult on anything to do with my body,” Viktor said quietly, pulling his hand out of Jayce’s grasp.

“That’s not true,” Jayce said immediately.

“No? How else can it be that Mel Medarda knew your plans for a Hextech-powered augmentation meant to be installed in my body months before I knew it existed? You went to the surgeons guild before you came to me. You went to the undercity—” Viktor let out a disbelieving huff that turned into a cough. He turned his face away, coughing into a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket while he wrapped his other arm around his belly.

When at last he lowered the handkerchief, Jayce saw splotches of blood on the fabric.

“If you would hear me out,” Jayce said.

“I heard you,” Viktor said, his voice thick. “I understand perfectly. I don’t want to be an experiment, Jayce.”

“You’d rather be dead?” The words spilled out before Jayce could think to stop them.

Viktor didn’t flinch, though his grip tightened on the bloody handkerchief. “I’m afraid I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“But you do,” Jayce shot back, feeling his pulse kick up. Though he’d expected Viktor to have reservations, he’d thought they would at least have a chance to talk it through. It hadn’t occurred to him that Viktor might reject the idea outright. “You have a choice, and you’re dismissing it out of hand without even—”

“You don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“I’m asking you to go to the Kirammans with me and get approval for a prototype,” Jayce said, exasperated. “Isn’t it worth that much? Aren’t you?”

Viktor shook his head. “You’re asking if I’d like to bleed out on a table with my chest split open, or if I’d like to linger for a few days, full of tubes, until somebody pulls a plug,” he said. “A body with no integrity, no dignity at all. Someone else’s project. Would you like to die that way?”

“That’s not—Viktor, you know I—” Jayce felt abruptly cut adrift as he looked at Viktor. Acceptance was one thing. This was another.

Viktor took a shaky breath. “What you have is a brilliant design,” he said. “A beautiful dream. It will help many people, I’m sure. But it will take more time than we have, and for the time that remains—”

“I don’t want to help other people,” Jayce cut across him. His pulse was slamming so hard that he felt it in his throat. “I don’t want to save anybody else. I want to save you.”

Viktor looked pained, his jaw tight. “Jayce…”

“I’ll shred those designs before I use them on someone else,” Jayce said, raggedly, reaching for Viktor’s hand again. His thumb rested over the pulsepoint at Viktor’s wrist and he imagined he could feel it beating there, the hum of his blood. “I mean it. They’re for you. If you won’t—”

He faltered. If Viktor didn’t want this, then Jayce really was lost.

For a moment, Viktor was silent. “Perhaps you should go home tonight,” he said.

Jayce didn’t wince, but it was a near thing. He shook his head. “We don’t have to talk about it,” he said. “But I’m not going anywhere.”

He squeezed Viktor’s hand, and when Viktor squeezed back, he was grateful.

When Viktor took a bath before turning in for the night, it appeared to Jayce as a kind of concession. A long soak at the end of the day relaxed his muscles and eased his pain more than almost anything else, but he could no longer get into or out of the tub by himself, so it only happened when Jayce was there to help him.

It meant something, Jayce knew, that Viktor trusted him enough to see him like this, wholly vulnerable, and to handle his weakened body. He wound his arms around Jayce’s neck while Jayce held him close and lifted him—slowly, gently—out of the tub, water streaming off his body.

Each time Jayce pulled Viktor to his feet, and steadied him on the wet tile, and wrapped him in a towel, there was less of him. The harsh white light in the bathroom showed all the familiar landmarks Jayce had memorized—the smattering of moles across his body, the thin scars on either side of his chest. But it also betrayed the shape of his ribs through pallid skin, the jut of his hip bones that made his swollen belly look obscene, like a sign of illness. Jayce could count the knobs of Viktor’s spine amid the visible hardware that held it together, like a ladder running along his back.

“I know how it looks,” Viktor murmured later, as they lay in bed together. Their faces were close enough that Viktor took up the whole of Jayce’s vision, his eyes dark and wet and bruised in the dimness of the bedroom. “I know it’s hard to watch.”

“It’s just you,” Jayce said, because he couldn’t say it wasn’t hard to see Viktor like this, disappearing in front of his eyes. That didn’t mean he wanted to look away.

For a moment, Viktor was silent. “I’ve never trusted my body to do anything,” he said, softly, like a confession. “It twists in on itself. Breaks down. Gets sick. I could never rely on it. All through this, I’ve been waiting for it to fail. But it’s done this thing for me. This single thing.”

Jayce recalled something Viktor had said to him months ago, in the lab: that he never should have managed to conceive in the first place, all things considered, and that he should’ve miscarried early. But his body had sustained the pregnancy, somehow, even with so few reserves to offer up. Protected it, even, when he had his accident.

If Viktor took these occurrences as signs, Jayce found it hard to blame him, even as he found it hard to understand. He knew what it was to chase an impossible dream, to let the thing he wanted so badly draw him to the edge of ruin because he’d felt it and he knew it was real.

---

Jayce woke to the now-familiar sounds of Viktor maneuvering out of bed. He huffed and stifled a cough; the mattress creaked and dipped. Then Viktor paused, as if bracing himself.

“It’s early,” Jayce mumbled, without peeling his eyes open. He had to be up by seven o’clock, an hour that was probably swiftly approaching, if he wanted to make his first meeting on time, but that wasn’t the case for Viktor. “You should sleep.”

“I can’t with this baby wedged under my ribs.”

Jayce rolled onto his back with a groan, rubbing at his eyes. “Still?”

The baby had gotten comfortable in that spot, apparently, making it even harder for Viktor to breathe. When it kicked, the pain lanced all the way through his back. Jayce kept waiting for it to drop lower in Viktor’s pelvis, as his reading suggested it ought to do before the birth, but in his thirty-seventh week, Viktor was still carrying high.

“They’re being stubborn,” Viktor said wearily.

“Want to try the cold pack?” Sometimes applying cold to Viktor’s belly made the baby wriggle away from the source of discomfort.

Viktor sighed in what sounded like resignation. “No point,” he said. “They’ll move right back. I’m just going to—” He broke off, touching a hand to his belly.

Jayce reached for him. “Are you OK?”

A moment passed before Viktor answered. “Just a cramp,” he said at last, his voice taut. “It’s nothing.”

“That didn’t look like nothing.”

“Practice contraction. That’s all.”

“It stops being practice at some point,” Jayce said.

“But not today,” Viktor replied.

For weeks, Viktor had been having practice contractions, intermittent pains that tapered off into nothing. It was normal for how far along he was, the body’s way of preparing for labor, and nothing to worry about. The false contractions were more uncomfortable than painful, Viktor claimed.

Jayce sat up, stretching a little, as Viktor eased himself to the edge of the bed and planted his feet on the floor—carefully, an inch at a time, one hand braced against his lower back and the other against his belly. He reached for his crutch, which leaned against the wall, got it under his arm and finally swayed to his feet with an audible huff.

After Jayce readied himself for the day, he found himself reluctant to actually leave, loitering around the flat until Viktor practically shooed him out the door.

Viktor was probably right that there was no reason for concern. The baby probably wasn’t coming today or any time in the next week or so. It was only the third week of January, and the baby wasn’t due until mid-February. First pregnancies tended to last longer than subsequent ones, or so Jayce had read, and Viktor insisted that he’d had no real signs that labor was imminent.

Still, Jayce felt like he was sleepwalking through his early-morning sit down with the head of the glaziers guild, as well as the Council meeting that followed and the status update with the planning and zoning commission that came after that. Hearing about contract negotiations, approving payables, getting a breakdown on the impact study—none of it seemed very important today.

Jayce felt he’d made strides in accepting the baby’s inevitable entrance into their lives, at least conceptually, but he was dreading the birth more with each day that passed. He had inquired, delicately, about whether a surgical delivery should be considered, only for Viktor to tell him that it wasn’t recommended. Viktor’s condition was stable—for now, anyway—and the baby was well-positioned, so unless something changed in the near future, there was no reason not to attempt a vaginal birth. It was preferable to a major abdominal surgery that came with a longer recovery time and greater potential for complications.

But whatever Viktor’s doctors said, Jayce remained concerned about the strain that hours of laboring and pushing would put on Viktor’s body. He’d spent long hours reading about childbirth and the many ways it could go horribly wrong, even for a healthy person, and the knowledge rattled around inside his head at all hours.

Eclampsia. Cord prolapse. Uterine inversion. The list went on. What if the baby’s shoulders got stuck? Viktor had such straight, narrow hips. What if he tore badly or hemorrhaged after the delivery? Could a planned surgical delivery really be harder on him than that?

“Councilor,” Margaret said, her voice floating to him from the other side of his desk.

Jayce looked up at her, unsure what he was meant to be  thinking about instead of Viktor. “Come again?”

“Mr. Kellar needed to reschedule the meeting with you and Councilor Medarda,” she told him. “You had an opening at nine tomorrow and that worked for everyone else, so I squeezed them in.”

“Right.” The meeting had to do with securing mineral rights for one of Kellar’s properties outside the city proper, a deal Mel was eager to seal. “Thank you, Margaret.”

When at last Jayce let himself into Viktor’s apartment, it was just after six in the evening—fairly early, actually, considering Jayce’s usual schedule.

He was pulling off his coat when Viktor called, in a strained voice, “Jayce, is that you?”

Jayce found him in the kitchen, leaning against the back of a chair, almost doubled over. He was pale and breathing hard through his nose.

“What’s going on?” Jayce hurried to his side, searching for the cause of his distress.

“Baby’s coming,” Viktor managed.

“What?” Jayce bleated, feeling his stomach drop to somewhere around his knees. “Now?”

Viktor squeezed his eyes shut. “No, no. There’s some time yet, I think—”

“You said you weren’t in labor—”

“I didn’t think I was!” Viktor said through clenched teeth, just before his body tensed with another hard cramp. “I thought the contractions were practice, but they’ve been getting stronger all day and they’re getting close together.”

“We’re going to the hospital,” Jayce said decisively. “Right now.”

---

The prospect of giving birth in a Piltovan hospital did not thrill Viktor. Hospital births were common topside, even among upper-class families who were usually attended by private physicians in their homes, but in Zaun, most babies were born at home. This was largely out of necessity, Jayce suspected, though he knew better than to mention that theory to Viktor. In any case, Viktor’s health was such that delivering in the hospital made more sense than the alternative, much to Jayce’s relief.

By the time Viktor had been examined at the hospital and admitted, it was half past eight. He was five centimeters dilated—halfway there, Jayce thought, feeling abruptly seasick. He’d probably been in early labor since this morning, despite his protests to the contrary.

The private delivery suites at Piltover General were nicely appointed, done up in neutral colors and gentle lighting. The room had an attached bathroom, where Viktor disappeared to change out of his clothes while Jayce set his hospital bag down on the sofa and a nurse made a few more notes in Viktor’s chart.

“What’s your relation to Mr. Novak?” she asked Jayce. He was listed on the forms as the next of kin, so he could make decisions in the event that Viktor was incapacitated.

“I’m his partner,” Jayce said, without hesitation. The words came easily; he’d been saying them for years.

She glanced up from her clipboard, and something like recognition flickered in her eyes, making Jayce wonder how closely she followed city affairs. Then she jotted something down, without comment.

Viktor had been advised to try to sleep while he still could, but he was restless and uncomfortable, moving around between contractions, his focus inward. Jayce, meanwhile, found himself at a loss for what to do, except hover anxiously around the room.

Some weeks ago, they had tentatively agreed that Jayce would be present for the birth, though Viktor seemed somewhat skeptical of the idea and reserved the right to change his mind. Jayce’s primary responsibility was to communicate Viktor’s wishes and make decisions if he became incapacitated, but as it was, Jayce felt fairly useless, with Viktor waving him off whenever he drew close, not wanting to be touched.

Viktor was accustomed to suffering, Jayce knew, but it was still hard to see him in pain when there was so little he could do to help. The hardware in Viktor’s back meant administering an epidural would be a challenge, one he didn’t want to attempt because he disliked the idea of being unable to move around under his own power. He’d also refused the gas and air.

After a couple of hours, a nurse came around to examine Viktor’s cervix, and Jayce took it as an opportunity to stretch his legs a bit and give Viktor space.

The ward was quiet at this time of night, the corridors empty except for a few staff members going in and out of rooms. The waiting room, too, had no one in it, and he found himself too tense to sit down.

His mind wandered back to the other times he’d been in rooms like this: after Viktor’s collapse in the lab, his accident at the gala. Those were emergencies, and this wasn’t, but the roiling anxiety that bordered on nausea felt the same to Jayce. He paced for a few minutes, worrying at the worn spot on his bracelet.

Jayce was approaching Viktor’s room just as the nurse was leaving. Before he entered, she put a hand on his elbow and guided him a few steps away, out of view from the door.

“You’re not going to faint in there, are you?” she asked. Eleanor G., her name badge said. She was dark-haired and middle-aged.

“What?”

“I know an anxious father when I see one, and that’s you,” Eleanor said, not unkindly. “If you’re squeamish, it’s best to tell me now, so I can be ready for you to fall over later.”

“I’m not going to pass out,” Jayce said firmly.

She seemed to take him at his word. “That’s good,” she said. “But you seem very tense, which is no help to your partner in there. You being so worried is making him worry about you.”

“Did he tell you that?”

Eleanor ignored the question. “He needs you to be a calm, encouraging presence. Can you do that?”

“Of course. I just—” He hesitated, then dropped his voice. “I keep thinking something will go wrong.”

Childbirth was a natural process; Jayce knew that. Humans had been doing this for millennia and the species hadn’t died out. But this was Viktor, not some case study in a textbook. Seeing him suffer through this ordeal was terrifying.

“Near as I can tell, he’s had an uncomplicated pregnancy,” Eleanor told him. “Baby is in an ideal position. Labor is progressing normally. There’s no cause for concern.”

Jayce let that sink in for a moment. “You’ve done this before,” he said.

“More times than I can count. Is this your first child?”

Jayce nodded.

“Well, that explains the nerves,” Eleanor said. “But you’re about to be a father. This is a happy time, isn’t it?”

As Jayce opened his mouth to answer, he realized he’d never really allowed himself to think of it that way. Maybe he could believe it—for a few hours, if only for tonight. He took a breath and straightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”

Jayce knew that Viktor disliked letting others see his pain; he preferred to pull away, to draw into himself and curl protectively around whatever he was feeling. But it meant something that he hadn’t sent Jayce away, even as his pain worsened.

He tensed when Jayce got close to him, like a wounded animal that knew it couldn’t defend itself, but Jayce found that when he persisted, Viktor relaxed a little, enough to be touched.

Hours passed at a floating pace. Eleanor came around periodically to check the baby’s heartbeat and Viktor’s vitals, while Jayce encouraged him to drink water and accept a bite of food now and then, to keep his strength up.

Many of the things Eleanor suggested Viktor do to open his pelvis and help the baby descend, like pacing and squatting, were impractical at best and impossible at worst. But he could stay upright and lean against a chair, or the bed, or Jayce. He could let Jayce help him into the bath, where he leaned over the side for an hour, breathing through contractions while Jayce held his hands. He could let Jayce rub his back or squeeze his hips together.

Around three in the morning, Jayce dimmed the lights so Viktor could try to rest before it was time to do the hard work of pushing, but at this stage, it was no easy task.

Viktor was increasingly restless but had at last settled on his side, using a pair of pillows to prop his weaker leg up and slightly forward. While the position eased some of the pressure on his pelvis, it also made the contractions sharper, more intense.

“I can’t do this.” Viktor was shaking, sweating through his flimsy blue hospital gown, skin radiating uncomfortable heat. “I can’t. I mean it.”

Twice in the last hour, he’d vomited, which Eleanor had cheerfully assured them was normal during this part of labor. Not long now, allegedly.

“You’re doing great,” Jayce said in what he hoped was an encouraging tone. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding a cold compress to the back of Viktor’s neck. It seemed to help the nausea. “I know it hurts, but you’re getting so close.”

Jaggedly, Viktor said, “You don’t know what pain is. When this is over, you’re never touching me again.”

That was the pain talking, Jayce sincerely hoped. “OK,” he said. “In the meantime, you need to relax.”

“Oh, do I?” The labor had gone on long enough that Viktor was fraying, the pain making him snappish, despite his exhaustion. “What a brilliant idea. It would never have occurred to me—” He broke off with a choked noise when another contraction hit, then pressed his face into the mattress and moaned. The sound was miserable.

“Do you want to get on your hands and knees again?” Jayce asked. Viktor had been able to tolerate that position for a few minutes at a time, with Jayce’s support, and it had seemed more comfortable.

Viktor jerked his head back and forth, breathing hard through his nose. “I can’t—”

The contractions were rolling together, with barely a break in between. Jayce couldn’t help but feel responsible. “Let’s try something else,” he said. “Distraction is supposed to be helpful.”

Viktor’s scoff turned into a groan as a contraction peaked, his whole body seeming to clench around the pain. “That seems—dubious,” he managed.

“I read a paper about it.” Really, it was a chapter in a book about so-called natural childbirth, but that distinction seemed unimportant just now.

A moment passed, and Viktor let out a breath. “Oh, all right,” he said, eyes screwed shut.

“Remember the trip we took to the coast?” Jayce’s family used to spend a week or two in the summers in a quaint coastal town beyond the city proper. Viktor had never visited the place until they conspired to spend a few days at the seaside in the off season, the beaches cold and the water steely under a dense cloud cover. That time together was satisfying because it felt like they had stolen it, slipping away from their obligations for just a little while. “We stayed in that cottage built into the hillside, looking over the sea.”

Jayce still held that brief, shining period dear: after their relationship became intimate, but before Viktor’s health began to decline noticeably, when they were riding high on the recent success of the Hexgates and it felt like the world was at their fingertips. He recalled the cold briny air, the crackling of the fire in the grate at night, the texture of the blankets on the bed they’d shared.

“I remember,” Viktor said, his eyes still closed.

“Deep breath in,” Jayce said, trying to remember the details of what he’d read. “From your belly, not your chest.”

Viktor complied, and Jayce winced when the inhalation triggered a sputtering cough.

“Slow breath out,” he said, quieter, when the coughing subsided. He ran his hand up and down Viktor’s back. “We could hear the sea all the time. At night, we played those records we found on the shelf.”

Jayce remembered getting wine-drunk and dancing Viktor around the little kitchen, clumsily, before they collapsed into bed together, laughing.

Little by little, he felt Viktor responding, allowing his muscles to unclench. But as the contraction peaked, his body tightened again, and his breathing stuttered. He tensed instinctively at the pain, resisting.

“Breathe out,” Jayce reminded him, and Viktor did—with effort, and then more naturally. The book had suggested imagery like a flower blooming, but he didn’t think that would be effective for Viktor, so he improvised. “Your body is working perfectly. Everything is working perfectly. The contraction is pushing the baby lower, that’s all. Let it happen. I’m right here. A few more seconds, deep breath in…”

They kept at it for what felt like a long time, Jayce speaking softly, embroidering the memories with little details that he recalled to hold Viktor’s focus, sometimes fudging them a little so Viktor would correct him.

Eventually, though, Viktor became restless again. It seemed to happen between one contraction and the next. Jayce wasn’t sure what had changed until Viktor pushed himself up onto one elbow and said, sounding harried, “Get the nurse. And the basin.”

“What’s wrong?” Jayce was already reaching for the shallow metal tub.

“I think my water broke,” Viktor said with a grimace. “And I’m going to be sick again.”

---

The next time Eleanor examined Viktor, whatever she saw when she checked between his legs made her look up with an encouraging smile. Then she called for the doctor.

Eleanor repositioned Viktor so that he was on his back, semi reclining, the gown rucked up around his thighs, and took hold of one of his legs. Somehow, Jayce ended up holding the other, careful of how he lifted it, his hand behind Viktor’s knee.

“I want you to bear down and push with the next one,” the doctor said to Viktor.

He dropped his head back, breathing hard through his nose. Jayce could see how exhausted he was, the skin under his eyes looking bruised from lack of sleep. But when the next contraction came, he pushed with it, tucking his chin against his chest.

Viktor’s thighs tensed and trembled as he pushed, low noises escaping him. He gripped the bed rail with one hand and Jayce’s free hand with the other, hard, using it for leverage. The pain felt muted to Jayce, unimportant.

Time spiraled out around them. Eleanor kept reminding Viktor to breathe as the doctor counted to ten with each contraction, over and over. More than once, they had to take a break when Viktor had a coughing fit that rendered him unable to push effectively at the same time.

Viktor had been straining for more than an hour before he made any visible progress. He pushed, and this time, Jayce watched in amazement as his cunt bloomed around the top of the baby’s head. There was considerably more hair than he’d expected, wet and dark.

“Baby’s head is crowning,” the doctor said. “Would you like to feel?”

“What?” Viktor sounded a little dazed, his breath coming in gulps. A few strands of hair were plastered to his forehead with sweat.

She guided Viktor’s hand between his thighs. When he felt the baby there, he gasped, in shock or astonishment.

“Oh,” he said, on an exhale. His eyes looked shiny. “Jayce—”

Jayce brought Viktor’s hand to his lips, kissed his knuckles. “You’re doing so well,” he said, chest aching. “Almost there.”

Eleanor was encouraging Viktor to push again. Grimacing, he did—once, twice, three times. Jayce’s eyes were fixed on Viktor, the harsh light of the lamp that had been wheeled in along with the doctor limning his features in white, catching the sweat at the hollow of his throat.

As if from a distance, heard Eleanor telling Viktor to push push push that’s it keep pushing and saw Viktor clenching his jaw, curling around his belly—and then, in the space of a moment, the baby was born into the doctor’s hands.

Viktor collapsed back against the bed, chest heaving, and Jayce saw the baby for the first time: gray-tinged, covered in blood. There was a second of silence before the baby shuddered and began to scream.

“A girl,” the doctor said.

Viktor hurried to unfasten the snap closures at the shoulder of his gown, hands trembling, and pulled the garment aside, reaching for the baby with his other hand. He was sweaty and red-faced and bleeding, but the moment the doctor placed their daughter on his chest, against his skin, he seemed to forget all that.

He kissed the top of her head, careless of the blood, and Jayce heard him murmuring one of the few phrases he knew in Viktor’s first language: thank you, thank you, thank you…

There was a wobbly feeling in Jayce’s chest. He felt his eyes welling up. “God, Viktor,” he said, and kissed Viktor’s hot face, his damp temple, unthinking.

Viktor sniffed. “What are you crying for? She’s perfect.”

“She is,” Jayce said, his voice thick. He laid a hand over the baby’s back; his hand was big enough, or her body small enough, that he covered her almost completely. He could feel her breathing, the vibration of her cries. She was already pinking up.

By the time they were left alone with the baby, she seemed to have worn herself out, her cries tapering off into soft little snuffles and whimpers. Viktor fed her a few ounces of formula, and Jayce leaned in close to them, watching the baby for what felt like a long time: her chubby hands flexing experimentally, her cheek squished against Viktor’s collarbone, her little rosebud mouth opening and closing.

Viktor was reluctant to set the baby down, even to get cleaned up, so a little more than an hour after the birth, Jayce offered to hold her while a nurse helped Viktor ease out of bed and shuffle into the attached bathroom for a shower.

She whined and scrunched up her face as Viktor placed her gently in Jayce’s arms—slowly, carefully, both of them afraid to jostle her—as if she missed Viktor already.

“Hi, baby,” he said softly, as he got her head settled in the crook of his elbow. Being held against Viktor’s skin was enough to keep her warm at first, but without him, she was bundled in a hat and the little blanket Ximena had given Viktor for Snowdown.

The baby had freed one arm from her swaddle, her little hand curling and uncurling like a starfish. Jayce was fascinated by how tiny and delicately-formed she was, a subject painted in miniature. He moved to touch her hand and froze when she reflexively grasped his finger.

“Oh,” he said, as the baby made a contented little noise. “Hey. I’m your dad.”

It felt strange to say it, and stranger still to know it was true. Yesterday morning, he’d put his hands to Viktor’s belly and felt her moving. Now she was in his arms, looking up at him sleepily with dark, liquid eyes. His daughter.

His and Viktor’s. How could they have made something so perfect and complete without even trying?

For a while, Jayce just studied her face, rocking her a little. He was a blurred shape to her, just light and motion, but she seemed strangely aware of him.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he told her. He remembered Viktor saying she used to kick when she heard his voice and wondered if she recognized the sound of it, even a little. He hoped so. “You don’t have to worry about anything. OK?”

The baby yawned, her eyes drooping.

When Viktor returned, he was dressed in a loose pair of pajamas he’d brought from home. He moved slowly and stiffly as he crossed the room, his crutch under one arm and the nurse hovering close to his other side.

Jayce handed the baby back to him once he was settled in bed. She stirred a little at the motion, and Viktor opened his top so he could tuck her against his skin again, a blanket draped over them both. She snuggled into the warmth of his body, her tiny hands relaxed against his chest.

“I can hold her, if you want to get some sleep,” Jayce said, sitting on the edge of the bed. He dropped his voice, so as not to disturb the baby.

“In a little while,” Viktor said, his eyes never leaving her face. He watched her with a look of utter contentment, despite his exhaustion. He was glowing, almost, Jayce thought, through his pallor.

“She’s beautiful,” Jayce said.

“She looks like you.”

“You think so?”

“She’s got your ears.”

Jayce felt his eyes welling up again. “That’s a shame,” he said with a smile.

“I happen to like your ears.” Viktor’s voice wavered a little. He sniffed and blinked hard.

When Jayce wrapped his arm around Viktor, he felt him trembling. “Viktor…”

“I’m not crying,” Viktor said tearfully, pressing his face to the top of the baby’s head to hide his eyes. She squirmed a little against his chest and he gathered her more closely against him. “It’s the hormones.”

“Right,” Jayce said. “But if you were—it’s normal to feel emotional. You just had a baby.”

Viktor huffed a weak laugh. “I did, didn’t I?”

He was sobbing, but he was smiling, too, as Jayce leaned in to kiss his cheek, wet with tears, and then their baby’s soft, wrinkled forehead.

---

Jayce spent the night on the sofa, though he only managed to drift off once or twice, and briefly at that. Nurses cycled in and out of the room, almost on the hour, to press on Viktor’s abdomen and make sure his uterus was contracting as it should or to remind them to feed the baby. They could’ve sent her to the nursery so they could get a few hours of uninterrupted rest, but Viktor was happier with the baby in his arms or in a raised bassinet beside the bed, and Jayce was happier when he could look at both of them.

They were in the middle of filling out a stack of forms, among them the acknowledgement of paternity, when Jayce realized it was half-past nine on Tuesday morning and he was missing his meeting with Mel and Mr. Kellar. His stomach lurched, but he pushed the thought from his mind and refocused on the task at hand. He would smooth things over later. Mel would—well, maybe understand was pushing it. But she would forgive him, eventually.

They named the baby Alexandra Talis. It was Viktor’s idea to give her Jayce’s surname.

“If you’re amenable,” Viktor said, carefully. The baby had recently eaten and was tucked against his chest again, drowsing, while Jayce filled out the paperwork. “It will be easier, I think, if she has your name.”

Jayce glanced up from the form. “What’ll be easier?”

“Legal matters. Social matters, too. When you enroll her school—”

“I see what you mean,” Jayce said, quickly, so Viktor wouldn’t continue that train of thought.

Viktor’s expression was hard to read. “You don’t have to,” he said.

“No, no,  I want to.” He really did. Though he wouldn’t have argued if Viktor wanted the baby to be a Novak, he knew the name held no sentimental value for Viktor, and Jayce had quietly hoped they would settle on Talis. It would also make his mother happy, which could only help.

What he didn’t want was to discuss the practicalities of sharing a surname with their daughter after Viktor’s death. She was barely eight hours old. He couldn’t picture registering her for school five years from now without Viktor there.

Around noon, Jayce rushed to his office to tell Margaret to make his apologies to Mel, through Elora, and to clear his schedule for the rest of the week. It wasn’t enough time, he thought, but his leave wasn’t set to begin for almost three weeks and his Council obligations were many. A few days might provide enough of a buffer for him to get Viktor and the baby settled before he returned to the office to square away a few urgent matters and then begin his leave in earnest.

Margaret’s reaction to seeing him was mixed: relieved because she assumed he’d been in a wreck or fallen down a manhole on his way to the meeting, and alarmed because he was unshaven and his clothes were rumpled from sleeping on a sofa where he didn’t really fit.

“What should I tell the Council?” she asked, dismayed.

“Family emergency,” Jayce replied, swapping his suit jacket for the spare he kept in his office. “Or something different. It doesn’t matter.”

She furrowed her brow. “Councilor, are you having a family emergency? Because if you are, I can—”

“Tell them whatever you want,” he said. It didn’t really matter to him what the rest of the Council thought he was doing. “Whatever’s easiest for you. Do you have Viktor’s address?”

“Mr. Novak’s? Yes, but—”

“If there’s correspondence that can’t wait, forward it to him.” Jayce would have time to read his mail, probably.

“Councilor,” Margaret tried.

“You’re a life-saver,” Jayce said, before ducking out of his office. “I’ll see you next week.”

The hospital stay lasted another night and day, more for Viktor’s sake than the baby’s. By Wednesday evening, the three of them—and that number was still strange to Jayce—were settling in at Viktor’s flat.

The early days were a blur as they worked out how to care for Alexandra. Somehow, none of Jayce’s reading had fully prepared him for how tiny and helpless and dear she would be, how much she would need him.

The housework fell to the wayside immediately, but Jayce managed to wash enough bottles and cook enough meals to keep them all fed. He changed and bathed and fed Alexandra at turns, and held her so Viktor could attend to his own needs, however reluctant Viktor was to give her up even to shower or sleep. He didn’t have to manage the mounting piles of laundry, at least, because Viktor had it sent out weekly. The frequency might need to increase; the three of them generated significantly more laundry than Viktor ever did while living alone.

Chief among Jayce’s duties was steadfastly pretending to be unaware of the blood and other substances coming out of Viktor’s body, no matter how frequently he needed to change the disposable underwear that kept him from bleeding through his clothes.

It was a perfectly natural process, Jayce had read, but Viktor was unreasonably embarrassed about the whole thing, so Jayce made no comment. He just supported Viktor’s arm while the two of them shuffled to and from the bathroom. In between times, he made sure Viktor had a cold pack to put between his legs, where he was apparently swollen and sore and healing from a tear that had required stitches.

Then there were his other pains, the ones he’d lived with for years, exacerbated by carrying Alexandra. Viktor could take his prescribed painkillers again, but he hesitated to do so because the pills made him feel too groggy and dull to mind the baby. He let Jayce rub a medicated ointment into his hip, at least, though it didn’t seem to help as much as it used to. Jayce had to wear gloves each time and wash his hands for good measure, to eliminate any chance of getting residue on Alexandra’s sensitive skin.

The Monday after Alexandra was born, Jayce went to work, for the purpose of rearranging his calendar with Margaret to account for the earlier leave. It didn’t feel right to leave Viktor with the baby for an extended period—she needed so much attention—but Viktor insisted he would manage for a single day.

By the time Jayce returned, just after five in the evening, having bowed out of a Council meeting in order to beat traffic, Alexandra had been crying inconsolably for more than an hour and Viktor seemed at a loss for what to do with her.

Over the last few days, Jayce had noticed a change in Viktor. He was restless, distracted, prone to tears that he couldn’t explain and didn’t like Jayce to see. The strange moods came and went, descending more often at night.

Whatever he said, Viktor was so obviously coming apart at the seams after being without help and in pain all day that Jayce knew he couldn’t leave like that again. There was still a mess awaiting him at work, but matters at home were more pressing.

A few nights later, Jayce was up to his elbows in dishes and wondering if an autoclave could be used to sterilize bottles. It was hard to think clearly through the sound of Alexandra wailing in the next room. He knew Viktor was trying to soothe her, to no avail; she’d been at it for thirty minutes already and could keep it up for much longer than that. She’d been inexplicably fussy lately.

Viktor raised his voice enough to be heard over the relentless crying. “Will you take her?”

“I’m almost finished with this,” Jayce called, setting another bowl on the drying rack. “Two minutes.”

“Jayce,” Viktor said, more insistently. “I need you to take her.”

There was a worrying note of tension in his voice. Jayce toweled his hands dry and hurried into the sitting room, where Viktor was on the couch, grimly bouncing Alexandra against his shoulder. He held himself stiffly, like his back was bothering him.

“You all right?” Jayce asked.

Viktor pushed the baby into his arms. She was red-faced, her cheeks wet with tears. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’ve tried everything. She wants you.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Jayce said, adjusting his hold on Alexandra. 

“Well, she doesn’t want me.”

Jayce winced as the baby’s cries intensified. “Why don’t you lie down for a while? I’ve got her.”

After Viktor shut himself in the bedroom, Jayce walked around the flat with Alexandra in his arms. Pacing helped, sometimes, when she was fussing and nothing else worked. He wondered if the motion was familiar to her, the same repetitive movement that had lulled her to sleep when she was still inside Viktor.

She calmed, by and by. Jayce suspected she had simply worn herself out, but he doubted he could convince Viktor of that.

It would be time to feed her again soon, so Jayce carried her into the kitchen and held her with one arm while he warmed a bottle of formula with his opposite hand. Then he slipped into the bedroom.

Viktor was awake, lying on top of the blankets with the bedside lamp on. It wasn’t really a surprise. They traded off getting up with Alexandra throughout the night, but even when it was Viktor’s turn to sleep, he seemed to struggle with it, often waking up drenched in sweat. The fatigue was getting to him, Jayce thought. That was it.

The mattress dipped a little as Jayce sat on the other side of the bed. “I was about to feed her,” he said. “Unless you want to.”

Viktor hesitated. Jayce could see in his eyes that he was afraid the baby would begin crying again if he held her. But in the end, he sat up and put out his arms, allowing Jayce to hand her over, along with the bottle.

“Thank you for getting her,” Viktor said quietly. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing. You’re just tired.”

“So are you.”

“That’s different.”

Viktor shook his head. “Before she was born, I was so worried that something would happen,” he said, his eyes never wavering from Alexandra’s face. “I thought it would be better after she came, once I could hold her. But now that she’s here, I can’t do anything right with her.”

“Hey,” Jayce said reflexively. “That’s not true.”

“I can’t even comfort her properly. You have to do everything.”

Something in his tone made Jayce’s chest feel tight. He moved across the bed, closer to Viktor. “Where’s this coming from?”

Alexandra, still feeding, squirmed a little in Viktor’s arms, as if sensing the tension in his body, and Viktor’s expression crumpled. In the low light, his eyes were shiny and dark. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted her so badly. I dreamed about her—”

“You have her,” Jayce said. “She’s right here. It’ll get easier.”

The look Viktor gave him was almost pleading. “What if it doesn’t?”

“It will,” Jayce told him again.

That was the only assurance he had. It would have to be enough.

Jayce got up with Alexandra that night. In the morning, after Viktor had fed her and rocked her while she looked up at him with her big, dark eyes, Jayce convinced him to take a painkiller and go back to bed. Viktor was reluctant at first, but he was exhausted and in pain. He needed to rest, badly.

Before he lay down, Viktor placed Alexandra in the bassinet and pulled it close to his side of the bed, so he could look at her as he drifted off. When Jayce checked on them later, he found her awake and whimpering, her face scrunched up in displeasure.

Jayce bent immediately to scoop her up, kissing the top of her head. At two and a half weeks old, they were still getting acquainted, but he was more affected by her cries than he’d expected. He padded out of the bedroom and into the next room—Viktor’s study, once, and now her nursery.

It only took him two tries to get the fresh diaper on properly; he was improving. Then he dressed her in one of the little sleep suits Ximena had given Viktor for Snowdown. He was careful when he threaded her tiny limbs through the sleeves and leg holes. He knew babies were sturdier than they looked, but he still worried he’d accidentally hurt her somehow.

She was a chubby little thing, he thought as he hefted her back into his arms, and quite long. Perfectly healthy, the doctor said. For all Viktor’s worries, Jayce knew he was pleased that he’d been able to give her what she needed to grow.

“You should go easy on your dad,” he told Alexandra as he walked her around the flat again. His eye sockets felt like they were full of sand. “He’s new at this. Me, too.”

Jayce was contemplating whether the three of them could take a stroll through the park near Viktor’s building—sunlight would do them all good, he thought, but the cold air irritated Viktor’s lungs—when someone knocked on the door.

He stiffened. They weren’t expecting anybody today and Viktor didn’t get unexpected visitors, as a rule. If this were Jayce’s apartment, the front desk attendant would’ve buzzed to see if the caller should be admitted, but Viktor’s building, although new, offered no such service.

The rapping came again, soft but insistent, and Jayce worried that the sound would wake Viktor. Alexandra squirmed against his shoulder as he crossed the room, and he shifted her so he held her in one arm, his other hand steadying her. Then he opened the door.

Ximena stood in the corridor, in gloves and a long burgundy coat.

For a moment, she and Jayce just stared at each other. Jayce knew he looked a mess, barefoot in the pajama pants and undershirt he’d been living in. He hadn’t shaved in three days; there never seemed to be time.

Ximena’s gaze traveled from Jayce to the baby in his arms, her eyebrows arching, her mouth opening around some question.

“Viktor’s sleeping,” Jayce whispered, before Ximena could speak.

Her eyes were still fixed on the baby. “I imagine he needs it,” she said, sounding faintly disconcerted. “Who is this little one?”

The back of Jayce’s neck prickled with heat. “This is Alexandra,” he said, the words clumsy in his mouth. “She’ll probably scream if I set her down, so…”

Ximena made a quiet sound, not quite a gasp, and touched a hand to her chest. “So he had a little girl,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” Jayce felt impudent asking his mother such a question, but his head was spinning. This wasn’t how he’d imagined introducing the baby to her.

That pulled her attention away from Alexandra, if only for a moment. “I might ask you the same question,” she said. “I waited for an hour this morning. You never showed.”

Jayce’s stomach dropped to somewhere around his knees as it hit him. He was supposed to see his mother today. He’d had it on his calendar, one of their regular visits, but it got swept to the side, along with a jumble of other social obligations, after Alexandra was born. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling himself beginning to sweat. “I can’t believe I forgot—”

“No note, no nothing,” Ximena went on. “I thought you’d been in an accident. I went to your building, and the doorman said he hasn’t seen you in two weeks.”

“So you came over here?”

Ximena sniffed. “Viktor seemed likely to know your whereabouts, and I’ve been meaning to pay him a visit, anyway,” she said. “I see now that he’s been preoccupied. You’ve been helping him, I take it.”

Jayce shifted from foot to foot. He swallowed. “Would you come in for a little while?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly,” she said with a dignified wave of her hand. “But give Viktor my congratulations.”

“You’ve been all over town today.”

“I wanted to set eyes on you, that’s all. Now that I have, there’s no need for me to impose—”

“Viktor won’t mind,” Jayce insisted. “Please.”

In the end, she relented and followed him inside, stepping carefully across the wooden floor. The lamps were off in the sitting room; Jayce had pulled the drapes open to let the sunlight in. Now that his mother was here, he was acutely aware of the mess. He’d left the overspilling laundry bags in the sitting room, so he would trip over them and thus remember to send them out. Dirty dishes and bottles cluttered the coffee table. He would hate for Ximena to see the kitchen, much less the bathroom.

Ximena removed her gloves and coat, folding the garment over her arm. Then she leaned closer to Jayce, so she could study the baby drowsing in his arms. “How old is she?”

“Three weeks on Tuesday.”

“She’s a beauty,” Ximena said with a smile. A wave of guilt washed over Jayce, like nausea. “Viktor must be so proud. How is he?”

“He’s—fine,” Jayce said, belatedly. “I need to talk to you about something.”

Ximena glanced up at him. “What is it?”

“I meant to tell you sooner,” he said, the words rushing together in his haste to get them out before he lost his nerve. “I kept thinking the right moment would come, but it never did, and then I’d left it too long—”

She touched his arm, stopping him. “Jayce,” she said, in the tone she used when she thought he was getting too worked up about something. “Let’s sit down together and then you can tell me.”

He nodded, letting her put a hand on his back and steer him toward the sofa. He sank down beside her, moving slowly, so as not to disturb Alexandra. “You know how you keep telling me to settle down already?”

“I’ve encouraged you, yes,” Ximena said.

“And you’d like it if I did that.”

She looked at him sidelong. “I would,” she said slowly. “Given that you were happy.”

“Right. Good. Well.” Jayce took a gulping breath. “Viktor and I—we, ah…”

While he wavered, Ximena placed a hand on his knee. “Jayce,” she said. There was a tightness around her eyes. “I realize you and Viktor have a… very special friendship. If you’ve grown closer, I can’t say I’m surprised. But I wish you would be cautious.”

Jayce looked at her in confusion. “What?”

“He’s just had a baby,” she said with a sigh. “This is a very vulnerable time. I hope you haven’t jumped into things too quickly, that’s all.” Her eyes moved to Alexandra again. “Look at this little girl. Caring for a child is such a responsibility, Jayce, and if you’re not ready—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ever since you were a little boy, you’ve never been able to hide how you feel,” she said. “I can see how you care for Viktor. I thought you would tell him eventually. But I didn’t think you would wait until he was having a baby with—well. By himself.”

Jayce let out a breath, feeling like it had been punched out of him. “It’s not like that,” he said.

When Ximena looked at him, her eyes were dark and soft. “I saw how you struggled with the idea of him expecting, like it was breaking your heart,” she said. “And now I see you practically living with him and minding his baby. What am I meant to think?”

He grimaced, feeling a pulse of pain under his ribs. “Viktor and I have… been together for a long time,” he admitted. “Nobody knew. Just us. We didn’t plan any of this—”

“Jayce…” Ximena’s voice was low and unsure. Her hand squeezed his knee, like a reflex.

“She’s ours. Viktor’s and mine.” Jayce struggled to keep his voice even as he spoke, the words pouring out of him now. “I should’ve told you. I just—I didn’t know how. It’s my fault. Everything was a mess. Viktor’s been so sick. I thought having her would kill him. I don’t know what I’m doing at all—” He broke off when Alexandra began fussing, her little nose crinkled. He bounced her a little as she whined, shushing her. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I’m sorry—”

When he looked up at Ximena, she was staring at him with one hand covering her mouth.

“Mom,” he said plaintively as he rubbed Alexandra’s back.

“You mean to say this is my granddaughter?” she asked, through her fingers.

“She is.”

Ximena sucked in a breath. “All that time! Months and months, you let me go on thinking—” She squeezed her eyes shut, looking pained. “If you needed help taking care of him, you should’ve let me—”

“I know,” Jayce said, ashamed.

“Jayce Talis, how could you be so…”

Shortsighted, he thought. Selfish. Scared.

If she was thinking the same, she didn’t say. She just stretched out her hands, her eyes shiny.

Alexandra whimpered when Jayce placed her carefully in Ximena’s arms. She shushed the baby gently, holding her against her shoulder. “Well, I’m here now,” she told Jayce. “And I think you have some more explaining to do.”

Notes:

the word count got pretty out of hand this time, though I hope it made up for the long wait, at least a little. I considered splitting the chapter into two, but I really wanted to resolve some of these story beats and decided to just go with the flow. I expect the next chapter won’t be quite as long as this one.

thank you very much for reading. your comments on the earlier chapters gave me the encouragement to push through and complete this chapter when I was really struggling and doubted whether I should continue at all.

I remain a slow, unpredictable writer. I recommend subscribing to the fic so you get an email when the next chapter is posted.