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Victor is annoyingly captivating. More so than the newest publication on quantum chips, which their professor rambles excitedly on about in the background. A topic that should have him enthralled, but falls laughably short compared to Victor. Infuriatingly perfect Victor. Always pristinely put together with a type of care and attention that Reed can evidently appreciate, but never mimic himself. He catches fragments of the professor’s words, fingers twitching instinctively around his pencil when he hears something particularly interesting, but he’s too distracted to write any of it down.
Victor looks especially good today, he thinks. The warm hue of his button-up meshes well with his deep, olive-toned skin. He’s cuffed it at the elbows, a habit born of smudging the arms of his shirts with graphite and chalk one too many times. The fabric hugs his forearms in a way that makes Reed feel inappropriately warm, the vein that runs along the underside of his arm prominent from how he grips his pencil. Reed refrains from licking his lips.
“Richards?”
Reed’s eyes travel slowly upward. Victor looks between him and the professor, a frustrated scrunch forming between his brows. It’s a minor tic that very much endears Reed despite it nearly always being a signal that he’s about to be scolded or yelled at. Reed intently watches him look back and forth, aiming to catch the way the curve of his nose is backlit by the fluorescents of the lecture hall.
“Richards.”
He spent longer on his hair today, perhaps because his first class was cancelled. Reed can tell by the more defined coils and the faint, powdery scent of hair product lingering in the air between them. It’s delicate, imperceptible to anyone not familiar with him. But Reed is familiar with Victor, more so than any of their peers, and to know that the clinging trace of lavender is his conditioner gives Reed an odd sense of self importance, of ego, that he thought himself at least somewhat above. Victor is standoffish at best with most, if not all others, and yet he indulges Reed in their strange, undefined but undeniably intimate (and exclusive, Reed thinks, or rather hopes) relationship. It makes him feel smug, triumphant, as though he’s won something special—aforementioned ego argues that he has—and that… somewhat surprises him. The cat that caught the canary, Reed thinks absently, a phrase he normally only applies to Victor. Irked with himself, he brushes the thought aside and instead traces the curve of Victor’s face with his eyes. He sighs, too breathy to be entirely casual, and—
“Reed!” Victor snaps, left hand suddenly encasing Reed’s right. He’s squinting at him something vicious. Reed jolts so abruptly that his glasses slip down his nose, knees nearly colliding with the underside of the small table. He stares at Victor with wide eyes, then realizes with immense embarrassment that he’s been staring at Victor, and without a hint of subtlety. Warmth spreads to the high points of his cheeks, face no doubt flushing pink as Victor goes on. “Is there something on my face?” He bites out, teeth grit.
Reed makes the mistake of looking at Victor’s lips, finding that they’re pursed into an annoyed pout that does not help him reassign his focus whatsoever. He swallows thickly, eyes snapping back to Victor’s thin, irritated ones. “No,” he eventually manages, sheepish.
“Then, what, pray tell, is distracting you so thoroughly?”
You, Reed thinks privately, but refrains from saying it aloud, because there’s a half-chance it will only vex him more, that he will sneer at Reed for the soppy truth rather than be endeared by it. Those are not great odds, so he instead murmurs an abashed nothing and looks away.
Victor must be feeling gracious today, though, because he only scoffs, more exasperated than contemptuous. Reed expects him to withdraw his hand, preemptively mourning the loss, but Victor does the opposite. He turns Reed’s hand over, threads their fingers together, and—still staring at him—utters a sharp, final instruction. “Focus,” he orders, but it falls short of properly scolding with how he rubs the back of Reed’s hand with his thumb.
Reed nods sharply and fixes his lax grip around his pencil, awkwardly adjusting his left arm to write on the right-handed desk. He shoves his glasses up and looks toward the professor to listen, tuning in toward the tail end of his spiel. His mind fills in the context of its own accord, parsing out what’s useful from his circuitous speech for notes. Victor watches him several moments longer—long enough that it makes Reed scribble down some disjointed nonsense to appease him, antsy to get those prying eyes off of him—before finally looking away.
Reed dutifully writes for the rest of the period, and he maintains that forced focus through the rest of his classes, but part of his mind remains persistently tethered to the phantom, pervasive warmth of Victor’s hand in his. His fingers twitch around the empty space where it was for hours, clinging to the rare affection of Victor von Doom. It’s ridiculous, Reed thinks, that something so minor as a touch can lodge itself so deeply in his chest, like a flame that refuses to die out no matter how hard you stomp on it. Yet it lingers, stubborn and so, so consuming, softening the edges of his thoughts no matter how he tries to sharpen them elsewhere. By the time his day is over, tucked in his bed in the darkness of his dorm room, the warmth is still there. It echoes faintly against his skin, like pins and needles, and he knows—against his better judgement, something he thought superior for so long—that it will follow him. And, against his better judgement, he’s not entirely sure that he minds.