Chapter Text
Kiramman is the only name he registers as the sheriff briefs Heimerdinger on the situation. A break-in, an explosion, an Academy student now facing a lot of uncomfortable questions about what the hell he’d been working on that was powerful enough to vaporize the wall of a residential building. A residential building topped by a penthouse that happened to belong to one of the richest families in Piltover.
He has to turn away for a moment, when he first recognizes the face, pretending to stare at the equations on the blackboard that has a chunk taken out of it. Because it’s him. Jayce. Five years older, but unmistakable. He’d like to say he’s forgotten the name and the face (the broad shoulders, the softness of his mouth, the way he’d touched him like something irresistible) in the intervening years. One night of pleasure, enjoyable but ultimately meaningless. But that isn’t true.
There have been plenty of nights of pleasure since then. None lodged like a barb under his ribcage like this one.
So it stings, a bit, learning that Jayce is just some thoughtless rich kid after all, uncaring about the risks to anyone around him. Likely to escape all serious consequences and keep on blithely doing what he wants. Ah well. The disappointment is no one’s fault but his own, for expecting something different.
As he’s lying sleepless and nauseous with anxiety in the holding cell that night, Jayce thinks about The Guy.
It’s ridiculous, in the middle of all of this, for that to be what his mind keeps returning to. But he feels like there’s an iron band squeezing around his ribcage every time he thinks about his future or the trial tomorrow or his mother’s face if he gets exiled or Cassandra Kiramman’s disapproving glare or the fact that he could have killed Cait, she was right there by the door—
So he thinks about The Guy.
Because it had definitely been him, in the apartment. He hadn’t even known Heimerdinger had an assistant. (Heimerdinger prefers to hold his office hours in the lab, or by striking up long impromptu conversations with students in the Academy courtyard when they’re in a hurry to get somewhere.) But he’d recognize those golden eyes and cliff-edge cheekbones anywhere.
(He’d wanted to ask about the cane, there in the wreckage of the Kiramman penthouse. Had something happened in the intervening years to make him need it? He can’t think of a way it wouldn’t have sounded rude, even if he had been confident the guy remembered him. Which he obviously doesn’t. He would have given some indication, wouldn’t he?)
He had seen him a handful of times, these past five years, enough to know he worked at the Academy. Always from a distance: across the quad, a passing glimpse in a busy hallway. Once, he’d caught sight of him at a table in the back corner of a popular café near the Academy, scribbling in a notebook while a drink cooled by his elbow. He’d almost approached him then. But…what would he have said? It’s been three years but I still think about that night. I really want to kiss you again. Do you think about me too? Even he knew that sounded insane.
Maybe if The Guy had looked up then, their eyes would have met across the crowded room. But he hadn’t.
Clearly Jayce had been forgettable, deficient in some way, that night in Professor Nemadine’s office, because he’d woken up after what felt like only a few minutes to find himself alone in the darkened room. He’d swallowed back the hurt. Told himself he was being stupid, expecting more than a fleeting connection. If The Guy had wanted something more than a casual fuck, he would have at least told Jayce his name.
Viktor learns three important things in quick succession over the following day.
One, Jayce Talis is not just some rich kid. He is not even all that rich. Son of a lower House, dependent on Kiramman patronage to fund his research. It shouldn’t change his opinion of him, but it does a little. They are not in the same position, but he understands the careful dance of gratitude toward people who are using you to make themselves feel enlightened and benevolent.
Two, Jayce Talis is a genius.
He digs the notebook out of a box of confiscated items after the trial. Within five minutes he can tell Jayce isn’t crazy. Within ten he can tell he is smart. After Heimerdinger leaves for the night, he sits down at the cluttered office desk and reads the notebook cover to cover. He doesn’t understand all of it—there’s a whole branch of mathematics involving runes and their properties that he knows nothing about—but the physics connecting everything is solid, and the engineering Jayce has laid out, creating a mechanical device to replicate the work of a mage, is clever in the way of solutions that seem obvious in retrospect but no one has ever attempted before.
He knows a little of the arcane. There are places outside of Piltover where it is not so hated and feared, places where one can study magic as a scholar. Plenty of confiscated books end up in Heimerdinger’s office, and anything forbidden and shunned is the kind of thing he wants to know more about on principle. If he reads the books before locking them in the secured vault, well, no one has to know. The interest had been purely academic, up until now.
There are pages and pages of notes on the volatile blue crystals. On the pages that recount Jayce first finding them—he seems to have talked himself onto a Kiramman mining prospecting trip—the writing is so hasty as to be almost illegible, drifting into some personal shorthand he only half understands, as if Jayce’s thoughts were racing faster than he could write them down. He’s made copious notes on their properties, the experiments he’s run so far, and several rejected theories on how to stabilize them. Jayce talks to himself in his notes—reminders, admonishments, questions; petty complaints about this or that Academy student or a class he finds boring; mundane reminders like Cait birthday present mixed in with theories about rune combinations.
The notebook is also full of drawings. Some are precise: prototype schematics, arrangements of runes he doesn’t fully understand the meaning of, a detailed elevation drawing of the rock face where they found the crystals, with thorough geological notes. But the margins are also full of scribbles and doodles. Faces, mostly. Some, he recognizes as Academy professors. (There’s one of Heimerdinger that makes him snort-laugh out loud in the empty room.) But he’s also drawn the rough-hewn, sun-weathered faces of the prospecting crew he seems to have spent some time with; the faces of strangers he met in his travels; a family of stray cats lounging on a stone plaza somewhere.
There’s a figure he notices more than once. A person in some kind of long hooded tunic, carrying a twisted staff that splits at the end. Sometimes many iterations of this person crowd the edges of the page, or just one feature of them drawn over and over: repeated drawings of a hand with long nails or the details of a belt adorned with metal. But never the person’s face. It’s always hidden in the shadow of their hood.
The last few pages of the notebook are repetitions of the same experiments with Jayce’s current prototype. Result: failure is written over and over again, the pen scoring into the paper sometimes, frustration bleeding off the page. He can tell Jayce has hit a wall, and he has the beginning of a theory as to why. The rune math is a mystery, but the crystallography—that he knows. And if the problem is the activation energy, then Jayce has been going in the wrong direction this whole time…
The chalkboard. There were equations written on the chalkboard in the Kiramman penthouse. He remembers vaguely what they were about—something involving resonance frequencies—but not what they said. And his theory relies entirely on what they said, because if they support the hunch he has about where the problem lies…
He’s out the door before he has time to think twice about it, ignoring the dull grind of pain in his knee and hip as he hurries through the darkened, empty streets to the penthouse, the notebook tucked under his arm. There’s one bored enforcer lingering outside the building, who just waves him inside with a shrug when he snaps, “Council business,” in his best imitation of Piltover haughtiness.
There’s an elevator, thankfully. He leans heavily against the wall as it whirrs to the top floor, taking the opportunity to pop his knee a couple of times.
In the penthouse, he learns the third important thing, which is that Jayce Talis is suicidal.
Jayce is standing at the edge of the ragged hole the explosion had torn in the building. Standing right at the edge. Viktor realizes with a clarity like swallowing ice what is happening, and all he can think is NO—
He says the first thing that comes to mind. “Am I interrupting?”
Viktor has a fourth realization, in the following hours. Which is that Jayce Talis is unlike anyone he has ever met.
Jayce’s mind runs at a mile a minute, often in several directions at once. Talking to him feels like putting a live wire between his teeth. Jayce explains the runes, their properties, the general theory behind using them to direct the arcane, enough of the math that Viktor can make sense of some of what he read in the notebook.
“There’s a book I used, written by this Ionian mathematician, it’s—well, it’s probably in the stuff that got confiscated—” he says, stepping neatly over Viktor’s role in all that. “Anyway, I’ll show you how they behave like vectors—” He rubs a section of the chalkboard clean with his sleeve and begins writing, seemingly unheeding of the fact that the end of each line brings him close enough to where Viktor is standing that they could be kissing if he turned his head.
At some point Jayce’s stomach growls loud enough that Viktor can hear it. “Jayce, when did you eat last?” he interjects when Jayce pauses for breath.
“Um…” Jayce makes a gesture that answers nothing.
“Do you have any food here?” Viktor prompts when Jayce doesn’t seem to make that connection on his own.
“Yeah…somewhere. Hang on.”
From four different corners of the apartment, none of which are the kitchen, Jayce produces bread, a jar of pickles, a bottle of wine and a coffee pot, which, upon inspection, turns out to have water and unbrewed coffee grounds already in it. Jayce shrugs and puts it on the stove.
They work for hours—sometimes both at the chalkboard; sometimes with Jayce scribbling in a notebook balanced on his knee, wordlessly handing Viktor a schematic or a page of calculations for appraisal when he is finished. They don’t talk about the hole in the wall, or the fact that Jayce was quite recently standing at the edge of it.
He gets stuck watching Jayce, more than once. Folded over himself in a position that makes Viktor’s back twinge just looking at it, bouncing the knee he’s not writing on, hair a bit mussed from running his hands through it and his bottom lip chewed pink from where he keeps absentmindedly biting it. He’s grown into his limbs a bit, in the past five years, but he still sits like he’s too big for the furniture. The light from the lantern they hung to illuminate the board catches his eyes when he looks up.
He realizes he’s in trouble when he makes a mistake on the crystal activation energy calculations. Jayce is standing just behind his shoulder, close enough that he imagines he can feel the heat of his body, although maybe it’s only his own vibrating awareness of the proximity. Jayce just says, “Oh, your coefficient,” and reaches past him to smudge out the mistake with his finger.
“Of course,” he says, distantly shocked that his voice sounds so calm.
Jayce is holding a broken stub of chalk that materialized from somewhere, his pocket maybe, and he just leans into Viktor’s space and continues the equation as if it came from his own brain. His free hand settles lightly against the small of Viktor’s back, so lightly that Viktor is not even sure he realizes he’s doing it. It feels more like casual tenderness, a reminder of the location of a familiar body in space, than any kind of intentional seduction. Which is infinitely worse.
He mumbles something about making more coffee and evacuates to the kitchen to collect himself.
His goddamn coefficient. Of all things, he thinks as he opens the disorganized cabinets looking for coffee beans.
(He doesn’t make mistakes. Let alone have someone else catch them—effortlessly, gracefully, kindly—offering the answer and then moving on like they are in this together—)
He takes a deep breath. Focuses on using the time while he waits for the coffee to brew to review the big picture and not think about Jayce Talis’s stupidly large hands. Because he is starting to see the shape of things. The enormity of the threshold they are standing on is breathtaking. If this works, it could change everything. It’s the kind of paradigm-shifting discovery every scientist dreams of, a once-in-a-generation leap of innovation.
Magic. Not just at the fingertips of those born with power, but for everyone.
He needs to get his emotions under control. Because Jayce is brilliant, and he is going to change the world. And if Viktor is very, very lucky, Jayce will let him help. And he can see it, the way their minds would fit together. Jayce is a genius, but he thinks in all directions at once; he spirals; he digs himself into ruts and can’t always see the artificial limits he has imposed upon the problem. All this is obvious from his notes. He needs a stabilizing influence; someone used to finding a way around problems because the way straight through is inaccessible or unavailable; someone a bit more used to asking why? and also why not? and says who?
Intellectually, they are perfect together. And he is not about to let some…silly little crush gum up the works.
If it were just physical attraction…that he could deal with. It would be painful, sure, but he’s had a lifetime of practice at ignoring pain. But he can already feel the trajectory of his life shifting, being dragged into orbit around Jayce. The acceleration is dizzying. He feels like he’s the one standing at the edge of the ledge now, swaying into the temptation of vertigo and irreversible decisions.
It doesn’t matter. His feelings are incidental. The work is the priority.
He doesn’t even know if Jayce remembers him.
It works.
Floating blissfully weightless, cradled in the blue light of the arcane, he looks at Jayce, incandescent with delight, and realizes that it is already far too late. He is not at the edge of the ledge. He has already fallen.
It’s nearly four in the morning by the time they get down from the ceiling. As soon as gravity reclaims his limbs he realizes how exhausted he is. The adrenaline is draining out of him, revealing the banked coals of pain smoldering in his knee and hip. He should have taken his nighttime painkiller hours ago. He leans on Heimerdinger’s workbench as subtly as he can.
There’s a flurry of conversation going on between Councilor Medarda, Heimerdinger, and the enforcers he brought with him. After a few minutes of tense back and forth, they’re informed that they are due back at Councilor Medarda’s office at ten-thirty, sharp, to prepare for a presentation they’ll be delivering to the Council that afternoon. Viktor tries not to let the sick lurch of anxiety show on his face. Jayce, when he sneaks a glance, looks both transcendently happy and a little bit manic.
“In the meantime,” Councilor Medarda says, “I’d advise you gentlemen to get some sleep.”
His bad leg throbs when he puts weight on it. He doesn’t regret using his cane to bar the door—it was worth it; it bought them the time they needed; he’d do it again—but he sure is in a predicament now. Maybe he can convince Jayce to walk out and just lie down right here on the desk until morning.
“Let me walk you home?” Jayce is asking. He’d picked up the splintered pieces of Viktor’s cane at some point. “Least I can do, until I fix this for you.”
It’s not far. He could probably make it on his own. Slowly. With a fair amount of humiliation involved. He looks at Jayce, eyes still alight as if the arcane had lit a flame somewhere inside him. “All right,” he says. And Jayce holds out his arm like a fucking romance novel gentleman for him to lean on.
“I can fix this, you know,” Jayce says as they start their slow progress and he tries not to focus too much on Jayce’s extremely solid forearm under his hand. “Or I could build you a sturdier one, if you want.” He has a backup at home, but it’s a shitty one liberated from a hospital years ago, not something designed and built to his exact specifications.
“There’s a few alloys I’ve been experimenting with,” Jayce is saying, and then he’s off talking about alloys, and Viktor lets him go on without really following. The coals in his knee and hip pulse hot with every step.
They’re outside his apartment building and he’s fishing in his pocket for his keys when something occurs to him. “Jayce?” he asks, interrupting a tangent about smelting temperatures. “Do you have somewhere to sleep?”
“Um.” Jayce seems to have genuinely not thought about it.
There is no way he is letting this extremely recently suicidal man wander back alone to the apartment with the giant hole in the wall that he almost jumped from. In fact—he’s realizing—he doesn’t particularly want to let Jayce out of his sight at all.
“Come inside,” he says.
The apartment is nothing fancy by topsider standards. A studio; really just one big room with a kitchen and bathroom off to the side. But it’s twice the size of the space his whole family lived in as a child, and there’s enough light to grow plants, and it’s on the ground floor, so he’s not complaining.
“It’s not much,” he says, gesturing around the apartment as he limps the couple of steps to the entryway closet and extracts the backup cane. It’s a little too short, and the handle gives him a hand cramp by the end of the day. “But there’s a couch.”
It’s out of his mouth before he thinks about it. Jayce shoots him a strange appraising glance, like he’s a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. “I’ll get you some blankets,” he adds, and Jayce blinks and looks away.
He’s too tired for innuendo. He just doesn’t want Jayce to be alone right now.
He sits on the bed, biting back the groan that wants to come out of him, and starts tugging off his outer layers. “Bathroom’s through there.” He nods his head in the right direction. He desperately wants to take off his leg brace, and he doesn’t want Jayce to watch him do it.
Thankfully, Jayce takes the hint and retreats to the bathroom. He can hear the water in the sink running. He extracts himself from the rest of his clothes as quickly as his body will allow.
The marks the brace scores into his thigh are bright red, and he can feel the stiffness lurking in his hip. He’s been on his feet too long. He hadn’t felt it at all, when he was scribbling equations with Jayce or floating in the azure glow of the arcane. But his body always comes to collect.
He can’t take the strong painkiller he usually knocks himself out with at night. They have to be back at Councilor Medarda’s office six hours from now and he’ll still be too groggy if he does that. He takes a double dose of the weaker one and hopes a hot shower in the morning will take the edge off.
Perhaps Jayce lingers in the bathroom a little long, but he can’t think about that beyond being grateful that it gives him time to crawl into the long-sleeved woolens he wears to sleep, which he chose because he’s always cold, but which have the added benefit of covering all the marks from his back and leg braces.
When Jayce emerges, he’s in his shorts and undershirt, the rest of his clothes neatly folded and clutched awkwardly in front of him. Viktor hopes he keeps his face neutral enough. When he shuffles back from going to piss and brush his teeth, Jayce is lying on the couch with a blanket pulled up to his chin. The couch is very clearly too small for him in every dimension; his feet dangle off the armrest and his shoulders are hunched together. But, well, Viktor doesn’t have Professor Nemadine’s couch budget, does he?
He climbs into bed and drags the blankets up over himself. Then he lies there, wide awake in the dark, listening to Jayce shift around awkwardly on the couch.
“What do you think they’re going to ask us, at the Council meeting tomorrow?” Jayce whispers after a minute. “Do you think we’re gonna have to replicate the results? I don’t know if I can do it again. I don’t even really understand what I did—”
“Jayce.”
“Fuck. We’re gonna have to explain how we got into Heimerdinger’s office, aren’t we? I don’t want to get you in trouble. We can blame everything on me. We can say that…I stole the keys, or…I made you take me there. Somehow. Shit. I never wanted to drag you into this—”
“You did not drag me into anything, Jayce.”
“Why do you think Councilor Medarda wants us at her office so earl—”
“Jayce.”
Jayce stops talking.
“None of these questions will be answered at half past four in the morning.”
“Right. You’re right.” A long, shaky breath, exhaled into the darkness. “Sorry.”
“The alarm clock is set for nine. Go to sleep, Jayce.”
He doesn’t follow his own advice. He stares up at the ceiling and listens to Jayce toss and turn. Jayce is trying to be quiet, but the couch is old and it creaks.
He lasts about twenty minutes before he says, “Jayce?”
“Sorry. Sorry,” Jayce whispers. “I’ll be quiet.”
There is one obvious, practical solution. Now is not the time to be getting weird about it. “Just get in the bed,” he says, as casually as he can.
There’s a long moment of silence before Jayce says, “What?”
“You need sleep, and you’re not comfortable there.”
“Are you…getting out of the bed?”
“Absolutely not. There’s room for two.” He knows it’s not the done thing in Piltover, but he shared a bed with four of his cousins for a while as a child. This can’t be that different, right?
It’s completely different. Which he realizes as soon as Jayce’s weight settles on the bed. He scoots over toward the wall, staring resolutely up at the ceiling, and after a very long pause, he feels Jayce pull back the blankets and slide in beside him.
God, the heat coming off him. He can feel it even with a hand’s width of space between them in the bed. He can hear Jayce’s breathing beside him in the dark: the forced steadiness of someone who isn’t calm but is trying to be. There’s some faint kind of sandalwoody scent to him—his hair product or his aftershave, maybe—and a hint of masculine sweat underneath that.
This was a terrible idea.
He turns toward the wall, shoving a pillow between his knees to keep his hip from complaining. After a moment, Jayce also shifts, turning onto his side to mirror him. They are still a few inches apart. A space that could be closed, but neither of them moves to do it.
He makes himself take slow, calming breaths. He really is tired, and he’ll be useless tomorrow if he doesn’t sleep soon.
He’s halfway to drifting off when Jayce whispers, “Thank you.” So soft and quiet and vulnerable. A child asking for comfort. “I don’t think”—a shuddering breath—“it’s good for me to be alone right now.”
Something wells up in him, sudden and fierce and growling, shocking enough he has to breathe through it like pain. “You’re not,” he says. “I’m right here.”