Chapter Text
There’s something Jayce likes about being the one to break him open.
That’s what the Herald believes, all things considered. He doesn’t have much time, between the window – conveniently left unlocked – sliding open, a man landing hard on tile, and an arm wrapping around his neck.
Jayce huffs in his ear, hot and grinning. “Bad time?” Volatile organic compounds – phenol, naphthalene, furfural – his lungs trigger an immediate intake of air. The Defender of Tomorrow has been smoking, sculking around the outside of his lab for the last hour. The Herald saw him huddled in the dark two hours back, cloak on with a trail of white smoke from his mouth. Jayce must know he always has eyes on him down here, must be aware that he sticks out like a sore thumb.
No, the Herald thinks, coughing as the metal mesh of his oesophageal stent is squeezed in his neck. No. Jayce just doesn’t care anymore about being subtle.
His body is larger, fat and muscle packed on in equal amounts. Viktor rolls his spine back, assessing further. The vent in his throat – a stoma to his trachea opened with a ring of metal - is entirely blocked by the Defender’s arm, forearms flexing against the metal. But he still has his mouth, nose, teeth. Penny tobacco, sweet and chemical. It emerges from his lungs with each exhale, the same smell that wafts up from the miner boys. The cheapest stuff he could get. Flexing his jaw, The Herald flashes his porcelain incisors before driving them into his flesh.
Jolting, Jayce tightens the lock around his neck, warm blood pressing against the metal panelling. There is a stretch of skin underneath Viktor’s jaw, registering the heat at the A-delta nerve fibres and rolling into it like a cat. The Herald doesn’t grunt, doesn’t make a single sound. Doesn’t feel a single thing. Slides a sharp elbow around, but he’s already calculated that there isn’t enough distance between the hot press of his body and the jab. His claw is on his table – mere feet away on the fucking lab table – and Viktor can’t move. Left writhing and immobile against Jayce’s embrace. Laughing, his wrists are pinned behind by Jayce’s heft. The long line of the Defender’s cock presses against his fingers. Jayce punctuates it with a grind.
Already aroused – it’s pathetic. “Last chance V.”
The squeeze is hard. His internal components scream, adrenaline and cortisol flooding his circulatory system. His fucking tracheotomy tube is blocked by the pressure. He couldn’t have spoken anymore even if the Defender decided to let him go – he can feel the internal fenestrated tracheostomy tube twisting unnaturally in his throat. He can barely breathe, can’t get out much else but -
“Okay.” His voice is a stranger, garbled and mechanical against Jayce’s arm. The moment Jayce drops him; Viktor falls to the floor. His throat convulses, once, twice – and now he’s coughing.
It’s bruised him up from the inside, swelling the tissue. The tube is blocked, somewhere between the twisting and the pressure of Jayce’s arm. It needs to come out – fuck the Defender, fuck trying to fight him off because he can’t even breathe, can’t even suck in air from his mouth-
Stars flashing, the world is turning dark around him as his fingers grasp for the tube. A small part of it sticks out of the stoma, a bulbus lip that allows him to replace it to get more oxygen.
His other hand clicks against his chest, artificially lowering his heartbeat. It will be alright – his temporary oxygen stores flood his lungs. Thank Janna for backups. He does not look for the Defender, can’t focus on anything but fixing this before he suffocates.
It takes a mighty twist. There will be blood, he can feel the scrape of metal against his aggravated oesophagus. Then in a fit of desperation, he finally pulls it out. It bounces and rolls across the grey tile, speckled with spit and blood. The stoma hisses with each heavy breath he takes, finally free to take in as much oxygen as possible.
“Fuck V,” Jayce frowns, fingers grazing far too roughly over the irritated stoma, catching the beads of pink blood along the metal rim. “What’d you do that for?” The Herald finally has enough blood in his brain again to concentrate on his face.
Fluid in his lungs. The irreparable damage to his upper airway and vocal cords after years of breathing toxic air. That is the official answer in his medical records.
“You fucked up my throat.” It is barely audible, the little air making it up to his vocal cords emerging as a whisper of a whisper. The rest of it hisses through the stoma, warm damp air between his fingers.
“Ooh,” his eyes darken, a smile curling up his face. “You know Viktor, I think I prefer this. Try again for me?”
I’m going to kill you. It wouldn’t help.
He is still collapsed on the floor. Still barely getting the oxygen he needs. He can’t fight back, not in this state. No. The smart thing to do is to let the man take what he wants. Wait until he leaves to fix himself, repair, build himself stronger. It wouldn’t help to fight, not went he knows that the man is only here to fuck him.
That man is clearly delighted. He slides his arms underneath his body and hoists him up like a ragdoll. His muscles flex under the weight, hardening beneath the sensitive stretch of skin beneath his knees. It is surprisingly easy for him to lift the Herald. It’s nuptial, but only from the outside. No – he’s grinning like the Herald is a prize of war.
It isn’t hard to find Viktor’s bedroom. He hardly requires sleep, and there was no point in leaving his lab either way. The world spins with his body as the Defender kicks in his door and dumps him on the bed.
The stripping commences unceremoniously, with Viktor throwing a kick every once and a while when he can muster the energy. All Jayce has to do is grab him, shove down his arms and legs with his own, and shove an elbow into his stomach. He doesn’t have to mind a crippled leg, not anymore.
It’s getting him hard, the arousal curling sickly in his stomach. He can feel it with each slow grind the Defender gives him on his hip bone. “Fuck yo-“he tries, bites out, and is rewarded with another laugh that goes straight to his groin.
“Think you better stop trying.” Jayce says, finally grabbing a hold of his underwear. Rubs a thumb against his cock, sending sick shivers up his body. His fingers are never gentle anymore, rough callouses pressing hard enough that the pleasure turns sharp. “Only gonna hurt yourself. I’m still going to fuck you, doesn’t matter if you squirm.”
He needs control. He needs to stop responding, stop encouraging him with his obvious blunt lazy attempt to arouse the Herald. Stilling himself, he relaxes under the pressure of his hands entirely. It doesn’t stop Jayce from yanking down his underwear, the small stretches of human skin catching against the fabric before easily gliding down his metal parts.
“Janna, you like this, huh?” The cool air makes it apparent quickly, the rush of the Defender’s hot breath sending a spasm up his stomach. He’s wet already, clearly, and the Defender is snorting. Running his fingers against the soaked fabric of his boxer briefs. The fingers come up, and Viktor rapidly shuts his mouth tight.
“Open.” He growls, eyes darkening. Then his other hand comes up, traces around the stoma in his neck. “I can make you taste it either way.”
Shaking, he releases his jaw. Opens.
“Tongue out.”
It feels pathetic. He can’t even look properly, not as Jayce pushes his fingers down his throat and forces him to swallow. Salt, sweet musk, and tobacco ash. Fucking his fingers into his throat, Viktor can only focus on breathing through his nose and stoma, thighs clenching around the Defender’s hips. A hand cups his cheek, opening his mouth further.
His fingers pull back, and they’re sopping. Saliva drips across his chin, and he can’t even get a proper breath in before Jayce has his body locked down again, shoving his arms into a tight grip against the bed. “You want to fuck me real bad, huh V?”
Gritting his teeth, he shakes his head. Wet fingers run up his labia, barely touching.
“Or should I fuck this one instead?” Jayce ignores his glare entirely, tapping a thumb over his asshole. “Been a while. Maybe you’ve forgotten what that feels like. I can help you remember baby.” The diminutive sends a sick shiver through him. But he doesn’t protest.
Jayce wouldn’t.
The thumb presses, just a little harder. “I don’t even need lube, you’re making enough for me already.”
He jerks. Uses his knee to jab him in the rib before it can get held down again. “Don’t.” The words grate in his throat - sharp, pulsing, painful – from his gut. He immediately winces with the pain, the noise only worsening the ache.
Jayce’s eyes widen only a fraction before he grins. “Fine.” He says, shrugging. “You want boring? I’ll give it to you boring.” With one hand, he flicks off the button on his pants, and pulls his cock out from his boxers.
Viktor lies back. Doesn’t look. He knows the shape of it, knows how it’ll carve and hold him open, knows the density of it between his teeth. He knows that Jayce doesn’t bother shaving, knows the curve of it will press up into his g-spot, knows Jayce likes pulling his foreskin back before he enters to get the most amount of sensation out of his hole as possible -
It would have punched a sound out of him if his regulators weren’t in overdrive. He can feel them whirring with effort, vents opening along his scapula like lungs expelling air. It burns. He hadn’t even had a finger in him, nothing to ease the way but the sudden hot push of the Defender’s cock.
It carves him out, and the moment the man bottoms out he pulls back. Fucks in again, leisurely, steadily, no time for adjustment against the onslaught. He clenches, practically writhes, but the exhaustion is too much and he can’t fight against it.
So, it takes a moment for the Herald to realise what’s actually happening.
It’s lazy. The man looks bored doing it. He isn’t even really trying, using Viktor’s hole like he had fuck all else to do. Sinking in, sinking out, the sick wet slide of it aching each time – and he has this look on his face. Apathetic pleasure-seeking.
Viktor looks up, gingerly shifting his hips as Jayce thrusts his cock in. The pleasure mounts for a second, just a second as his cock presses upwards into him. But the Defender just frowns. Adjusts him like a malfunctioning mechanism, hips firmly planting into the bed.
He moves, back large and beastly as his muscles flex to accommodate.
“Fuck yeah, baby,” he grunts, shoving himself deeper in, lost in pleasure as he fucks the Herald like a sex toy. It is selfish manifest, dirty and hedonistic. There is no mutuality to this, he fucks at a pace that now is punishing and painful. “Take it- take it – you fucking take it.”
The thing is, Viktor is essentially 68.7% machinery. So, while his pussy is stretched to its absolute limit on the Defender’s cock, the rest of his body is practically unperturbed at his drunk prodding. It doesn’t occur to Jayce, lifting him up at the knees and spanking him hard across the ass, that Viktor is barely feeling it.
Grinning, he sets Viktor back down, staring hard at his face. It twists then in the universal look of ‘what the fuck’, before fucking him even harder.
The Herald doesn’t flinch. He’s turned off his facial muscles.
He growls, spanking even harder against the metal plating on his ass. This time it does register as something. Internally he feels it, pressure and heat, a warning message of damaged wiring across his vision.
“I can’t feel that.” The Herald responds sardonically. It only earns him another. “Nor that.” He is surprised the Defender takes the time to listen, pause and pay attention to his lips and the faint words. That doesn’t stop him from digging his hands hard into Viktor’s thighs, shoving him harder onto his cock.
“Bastard.” He mutters, and a white-hot spark of pain flashes inside him with a particularly hard fuck. “You’re a sick bastard, mutating yourself like this.”
I’m not the sick one. But Jayce already knows that.
“You think it’s alright- “his hips slam, face twisted and hair sticking to his forehead. The pain sends sparks across his vision, a million tiny nerves tingling and sending out the last signals before dying. “You think it’s alright to come into my lab, steal my shit, and fuck me on that couch?” Jayce practically spits at him, shoving him down on his cock like a puppet.
“You left yourself wide open Defender- “it’s as far as he manages to get before Jayce presses a finger in alongside his own cock, physical limitations regardless. Something is shutting down inside him, it is too much, and he can’t help but squeeze down on it. His sensors are screaming, eyes dampening as he trembles.
Jayce’s voice lowers to a dangerous, indifferent purr. “Where is your cock now then?”
“You broke it,” took more than a couple tricks to hold Jayce down, and even then, the wriggling had dislodged the wiring in his cock beyond repair. It earns him another thrust, too wide for him to accommodate. Viktor sobs, eyes squeezing shut.
“You feel anything yet? Huh, V?” There would be tears down his face. Perhaps a year ago, or more. All he is left with is damp eyes that refuse to fill. His voice – he is blabbering something. Everything is loud, each second an endless roar of pure sensation on every sense he has. “Anything at all?
“No,” he gurgles. His mouth is suddenly full, a thumb pressing down on his tongue. His need for air circumvents any desire to bite down. It is sweet from the cigarette, briny. If the Defender nicks himself on Viktor’s teeth, he doesn’t let on.
He whispers, poison in his ear. “Fuck you, V. You feel that?”
The air thrums. The Herald doesn’t hear him after that, not under the alarms ringing across his body, not under the crushing pleasure of his cock pressed against the Defender’s stomach and his cock slamming against his cervix.
But he does feel it. The breath turning shaky, hot pulsing against his pubic bone, the rumbling heart against his metal chest cavity. He comes to, sweat drenched and aroused to a sharp, bitter point.
The Defender trails a blunt finger down his thigh, pressing a thumb against his puffy vulva. “Got a little rough with you there, V.” His voice muffles, whispering into the Herald’s knee as he pulls his legs together.
And then, a kiss against his stomach.
“Don’t. I don’t want your mouth on me.” It vibrates, painful and sick down his throat.
“You need it.” The Defender says, simply. Pulls his legs carefully apart, wedging himself between Viktor’s thighs. The artificial muscles twitch at the contact, the gentle sensation almost numb until his body dials up his skin sensitivity. “And you deserve it.”
The softness is almost more violating than the violence.
“I’m going to suck you off.” He whispers, beard rough on his hip. “You’re going to cum in my mouth, because I know you need it.”
And the man keeps fucking talking.
“Must have been a while for you, huh.” His thumb carefully toys with the base of his cock. Both his and Viktor’s cum has left him drenched, his cock slick to the tip with it. “You’re never this desperate.” His breath is warm, blood emptying from his brain straight to between Viktor’s legs.
Shut up. Jayce taps his cock, the feeling shuddering up through him, his body a stethoscope for pleasure and pain. And still, the man barely brushes against his bruised pulsing lips. Doesn’t even try to touch, just endless soft caresses against Viktor’s cock.
“Never asking for what you actually want. Wanting me to infer everything like you think I can read your mind.” He laughs a little. The smell of his cigarette has already faded, soaking into his skin and sheets. “No, no actually. You don’t even know what you want, do you?”
I want you to leave. I want you to get out of my lab. I want to live without you haunting me every time I feel something-
“You never let me touch you. Not unless I’m making some excuse for it.” He fixes him a look. The Herald can’t hold it, can’t look into his eyes. Not like this, with his voice this soft. “It’s always the hard road with you V. I want you to want this,” his lips press a kiss into his pubic bone. “Not because I want it from you.” Another, gently on his cock. A sob rocks his chest, unaired. “But because you know you deserve to feel good.”
His vents flare and even kicking he can’t escape the iron grip on his thighs. The Defender wraps himself around him, cradling his body, and sucks the tip between his lips. Toys at it with his tongue, delicate licks.
Somewhere in it is a relief. A permission to abandon the pain between them for these brief precious moments. He can be back in their apartment.
Back in the heat of the summer, light streaming through their circular windows. Morning breath and chalk, ink on their hands as they work through the problem of the day. There is a lightness there, easy touch, easy giving. Jayce passing him a cup of coffee, and kneeling between his thighs.
Reverence. Worship. Devotion.
He curls around the Defender, rocking into his mouth, oversensitive – pain feeding pleasure and pleasure feeding pain. The treatment is too gentle, too earnest, and he can’t handle it.
Only managing to hold back a sob as his body fucks into a mouth that knows it too well. He falls apart without a word, thrumming like a bowstring as the man licks up everything Viktor gives him. Takes it for him, swallowing like he’s been deprived.
His eyes close. His systems are done.
“Here,” Jayce suddenly appears, back from not-existence. He fixed his hair, curls brushed back, beard dried. It takes a moment for the Herald to focus, blink, look at where the man is indicating.
He fumbles with the metallic tube in his hands. It looks smaller there. Somewhere, he had found cleaning solution, dunked and swapped it to remove the blood and spittle. “Your voice thingy. You need it to speak now, right?”
Only until he finished his actual voice modulator. Something that couldn’t be so easily tampered with. Viktor’s fingers shake as they reach for the fenestrated tracheostomy tube, and the Defender frowns.
“You’re going to hurt yourself.” You already hurt me. He doesn’t say that. With a tired glare, he reaches up. Twists it to demonstration the downwards orientation it needs to be placed in. Trying to grab it again doesn’t work, the Defender wretches it from his hands. “I’m going to put it in you.”
“Haha.”
Slowly, delicately, he slides it through the stoma. It hurts a little, and Jayce – suddenly hyperaware of his pain – slows down. Turns it down into his windpipe, adjusting as the cool metal brushes against flesh. He feels the bruises from within, and it will hurt to speak. But that isn’t an unlived reality for either man.
Finally able to swallow, finally able to use his voice.
“That alright V?”
“I told you, Defender.” It sounds like a slur in his mouth. “I don’t care.” He coughs, doesn’t check for blood. “And it isn’t like you care either.”
His dark eyes flicker up.
His hands grab quickly at his thighs, wrenching them apart before Viktor can squeeze them together to defend himself. He manages it for a second before the Herald pulls away, locking his legs together. “Stop,” Viktor sighs, trying to pull himself up on his forearms. The Defender only stares, grunting as he hoists Viktor by the legs, pushing his thighs to his sternum. With another hand, he parts Viktors thighs a little, exposing his cock.
“I’m trying to make you cum again- “but it’s too rough, it isn’t-
Viktor reaches, leans forward and presses his hand against the Defender’s head. It doesn’t make the man flinch. He doesn’t believe in the sharpness of the fingernails, the metal fused with bone that might crunch through his temple in an instant. There is only the desperation in his eyes, a strange twist of guilt that mirrors itself in the Herald’s chest before he can snuff it out. “Do not.” He says, gently. “I’m not interested in having another orgasm.”
He feels the sigh more than he hears it. “Alright.”
A hand rests against his chest, the artificial heart beneath it strumming a steady rhythm up through his ribs. The hand becomes more, with Jayce delicately pulling himself forward. It’s wrong. Crawling to him like this.
The press of his chest to the Herald is wrong. A stranger on a stranger, seeking comfort in the poison.
“I do not need this.”
The Defender tips his neck forward. He stares at Viktor, a strange look in his eye. Beneath his haze, it seems like grief, with a spoonful of disgust. “This is what you’re supposed to do.”
It is selfish, engaging in this while the Herald is vulnerable. The Defender could do whatever he liked, he knows Viktor’s systems have essentially fully shut down. This is what you’re supposed to do. As in, last time when the Herald fucked him against the couch he should have held him. Not just untying his wrists and rubbing his hands, not just bringing him water.
Perhaps. If Jayce hadn’t been glaring like he would’ve reduced the man to ashes if he could.
“Never got the chance to properly cuddle you.” Before, he means. Before before. He had always been in pain, always needed his pillows positioned just so in order to sleep. Touching only brought about more pain, easily ignored during more invigorating activities but in sleep? Never. Jayce had resorted to holding his hand, stretching his arm across their bed to allow Viktor rest without hurting him.
Or did he mean – ah. Every other coupling they had after everything between them had been destroyed by Jayce’s short sighted political ambitions. After the Defender had sat in the council chamber and advocated for the use of gas - the very same gas that now left him with a deteriorating larynx – on civilians. On children.
The Herald suddenly feels a chill move through him. The hand on his chest feels heavier.
“I’m showing you, so that maybe- “his voice abruptly tightened, words clipped short. “I… I can’t keep going like this.”
“Maybe this is more than you deserve.” It’s all frayed wire. Drained emotion – something inside of him is cooling rapidly, energy depleting.
The Defender doesn’t respond. Not instantly at least. It allows room for the words to squirm and wriggle between them. He takes it. Breathes in the poison. “I called you a terrorist.”
It shakes laughter from his chest. It is all mechanical, dry and utterly humourless. “That’s the worst thing you did?”
Jayce pushes up, pulls himself away from the Herald’s body. The disturbance – Viktor can smell the semen and sweat on him. The odour rises, salt and tang in his beard. His eyes are suddenly haunted, fragile under his eyebrows.
“No.” he says. Something flickers in his gaze. “No. No. I know it’s not.”
It turns out, Viktor isn’t particularly good at this. He should be able to recognise it, recognise the emotions on this face he once knew as well of his own. This wasn’t a feeling – nothing any performative Piltover newspaper would publish, nothing that would be paraded through their courts. This was a raw, private remorse.
It throws him.
After months of secrecy, of ruin, of tearing him to pieces in public and rutting behind locked door – he hadn’t anticipated this. Their bodies knew the script: brutal, brief, and ugly. A fury of men who had already made a decision, of Viktor knowing he had made the decision to part that piece of himself that still…
Viktor had just been waiting for their hands and bodies to catch up to their heads. This softness wasn’t part of the equation. Aftercare, if he had been interpreting Jayce correctly, wasn’t a part of their routine.
Jayce still stares at nothing. “I… saw a girl last night.” The Herald stiffens, spine snapping. His eyes flicker to Viktor’s, and he shakes his head slowly. “War hospital. Bridgewaltz.” It is quiet, voice unspooling. “Shouldn’t have been there – don’t – ah. Fuck.” He runs a hand over his face. There is a tremble to his hands.
It only cuts Viktor for a moment, emotional regulator flaring under the unprocessed feeling.
“There, I just. I just watched.” His eyes are losing focus again. “There wasn’t even a doctor, fucking nothing. Janna – a nurse? They were…” This isn’t the script. Viktor closes his eyes. This isn’t how it goes. “There were these shards. Concrete. In her leg.”
There it is. The pain, empathy, rage, grief – it all hits at once and short-circuits into numbness. Jayce doesn’t see it. Doesn’t even realise that when Viktor isn’t in his lab he is also up there. Tugging bones back into place. Picking glass out of chests and faces. The Defender is fragile, human, lacking enough imagination to not realise that only hours ago Viktor had been sawing off a man’s crushed arm.
Jayce is supposed to lie, or rage, or deflect blame. Deny the victims, drown in his own sense of justice, prioritise his comfortable life in the council while they extract as much from Zaun as possible. Viktor is supposed to sneer, to take him apart with sharp efficiency. The guilt is eased by the easy violence. It is only comfortable in a bed of lies. They are only safe when Viktor doesn’t think about Jayce’s betrayal.
But now, with the line blurring, Viktor cannot read where this is going. He can feel the shift, the grief lining each inch of Jayce’s body. He hadn’t thought either. His processor kicks up, the whirring just minimally louder. He had not bothered before.
He turns his body slowly. Watches Jayce’s unguarded expression. It hasn’t been like this since their youth, before the council, before the bridges were blown apart, before the sky went dark and the waters ran black.
No condescension. No performance. Just exhaustion. Rotted ideology from the inside out.
His throat is dry. It’s the only part of him that feels warm, pain pulsing heat up his neck. He isn’t responding correctly, mind twisting, refusing to react in the ways it used to. “You don’t say these things to me.” He says, finally. Jayce exhales, from the gut. “What is wrong with you?”
He wipes at his mouth, beard loud against his calloused palms. “I don’t know what to do with it.” Ugly. Uneven. Real.
It unmoors him utterly. Because a treacherous part of him clings to it. Wants to say stay. Fix the mess you’ve made of us. Fuck Piltover’s mineral rights, fuck the domination, fuck the sanctions and bombs. Let me show you what redemption looks like, in the gutters you helped create.
This is still Jayce. He clamps the thought behind his teeth, grips like a dying thing.
The same man who wrote and signed the funding bills. Who sold and bought weapons used against those with empty hands. The same man who openly called him a terrorist on the world stage while Zaun’s markets burned.
His emotional regulator emits a high whine from his spine, too faint for Jayce to notice, but it might as well be a pick in his skull. His calibration is off, far too off, equilibrium degrading with each passing breath.
This is what his regulator was for. To emit something clinical, eliminate the unnecessary anger. But it slips through, boiling in his chest, then gone. Then back again.
“You think this means something.” He says, and the amber light behind his eyes brightens in the Defender’s. “That you can erase all of it like this? With me?”
His shoulders sag. “I never said that-”
“That you can build it with your votes, with your weapons – your funding.” The sharpness is creeping into his tone. “And then climb in here and pretend like this is revelatory information? To me?”
“I never said that!”
“When the murder of my people funds every comfort you depend on?” He leans in, hydraulics punctuating each word. “Defenceless civilians. Children. All for this false notion of safety. As though you might kill enough of us to prevent us from defending ourselves against your senseless need to extract more, and more, and more.”
Jayce stands. His pulse is visible in his neck, hair wild in the stale air. “If you hadn’t blown up the bridge- “
“Because your enforces killed the protestors while your council was interfering with our elections.” He bites back, easy. Voice utterly devoid of pity. “Don’t expect me to indulge you while you cry over Zaun’s corpses.”
“I gave everything to try and convince Silco to come to a peaceful solution- “
“By demilitarising? By giving up the last genuine defence we had against invasion?” His voice cracks, head tilting. “And how were we to know for certain that – while Piltover possessed all military power – that your council would just give up its domination over our city? Come now, Jayce. You’ve read history. You cannot possibly expect such naivety. You expect resources, and your city relies on endless extraction- “
Jayce’s voice cracks completely. “I want you to believe I’m trying!” His temper is fast, sparking bright and stupid. His hands are fists, as though Viktor might believe he would use them. He won’t. They don’t do that here. If Jayce wants to kill him, it’ll be in daylight.
“You are not.” His voice drops to a whisper. “You think this is about you, and it isn’t. You enjoy being their weapon, the weight of it. The applause.” He says, deadly and cold. “It is boring. A desire for dopamine via domination. It is dull.” His chest hisses, some release valve unclenching. “I do not care about your feelings. I care about what you do.”
He doesn’t have a rebuttal for that. Nothing. The anger is rising to his cheeks, a familiar, easy thing. His clothes are pulled on quickly, not bothering with the buttons. When he’s done, he laughs once. Bitter.
“You’re a real bastard, V.”
Viktor sighs. “Get out.”
Jayce does. The window opens. A sickly breeze floods his nostrils.
The room cools.