Work Text:
The first time Jayce drew Viktor, it was on purpose.
He noted to himself, absentmindedly: Viktor was beautiful.
And Jayce liked drawing beautiful things, and Viktor was all sharp angles and graceful lines - that was what he saw, at first, and what he felt like drawing, so that was what he put on the page.
(A delicate, birdlike wrist, curled around the arm of his chair.)
-
Viktor bought a new scarf. It was autumn, he had anaemia, he was probably cold - he did see a space heater somewhere, right? In the old lab? No, more recently than that. A shop window?
-
The second time Jayce drew Viktor was also on purpose.
It didn't look much like Viktor, despite not having a face yet. It felt off somehow, in the way he carried himself.
Jayce abandoned the drawing and returned to work, but when Viktor stood up an hour later, he watched the man out of the corner of his eye.
-
Note: Viktor held his mug with both hands, one curled around the handle, the other supporting the bottom.
(Jayce drew a lot of mugs that day.)
-
Note: Viktor's hands were not as slight as he'd originally seen them. They were sturdy, squared at the fingertips. His palm was wide and flat, his finger joints protruding. The veins right under the skin gave them a greenish tint.
(That evening, Jayce cracked open his watercolour palette for the first time in months.)
-
The third, fourth and fifth times Jayce drew Viktor were all on purpose, too.
(Three little portraits, as small as a coin. Eyebrows a little lower down- no, that's wrong - no, actually, it's right, but the arch is too wide and it's throwing the whole thing off.)
Note: Viktor, like most beautiful things, was really hard to draw.
-
After a bit, he lost the thread - thirteenth time, maybe? - and a quarter of his sketches tended to turn into Viktor by themselves, with no input from his hand.
Note: Viktor, like everything else, got easier to draw with practice.
-
Gone were the frail fingers daintily resting on the chair's handle; Jayce's sketchbook was filled with hands, hands, engrossed in the many facets of lab work - gripping a forceps, twisting a wrench. Fiddling with gears. Carrying a palmful of tiny, 12-point screws.
Note: whoever liked using fucking 12-points clearly never had to draw a pile of them.
-
Viktor basked in the warmth of their new heater, and Jayce basked in his basking. He'd really gotten quite sappy about this.
Note: Viktor was very much like a cat.
...Mostly in that he will hiss at you if you disturb him, though the heater thing also helped.
-
Drawing someone was a very contemplative ordeal, Jayce thought. He'd drawn a portrait of his mother, before, and by the end had to go cry in her arms and thank her for everything she'd done for him. There was just something about studying a face so intently, something that made buried emotions rise to the surface.
-
Viktor's scarf was a lovely brown colour, a touch lighter than his hair. Made out of wool: tightly knit at first, but as the weeks wore on, progressively lumpier and more uneven, with threads sticking out where Viktor snagged it on things.
Note: Jayce really, really hated drawing fabric. It looked like a misshapen donut.
-
Viktor had slowly seeped from appearing in his notes ("maybe wrong appr. - try with alloys? no pure metals in nature & hexc. rejects man-made?") to his sketchbook (latest one: Viktor with his goggles pushed up on his forehead, plus the faint red imprint they'd left around his eyes), and now into his personal journal.
("Why does he always have to brush off my questions?)
-
Light, light, light. The watercolour palette was getting a lot of mileage, between the blue glow of the Hexcore, the orange sun slipping through their curtains, and the yellow tint of their shitty nightlamps.
The good news: Viktor took a break at the right time for Jayce to watch him in the afternoon light, when he went to sit on the armchair by the window. It was an ethereal image - the sun caught the wild strands of his hair, dipping them in gold.
The bad news: there was no way to represent this without switching to toned paper.
The good news: Jayce bought toned paper.
The bad news: Viktor ended up looking more like some kind of bioluminescent hedgehog.
-
It was really frustrating.
Right, okay, Viktor was beautiful, and he was beautiful because of his face, his body, his hair, his expressions. But Viktor was also beautiful because of his demeanor, and how the hell do you put demeanor in an image?
Jayce sometimes thought Viktor belonged too strongly to the three-dimensional world, always in motion, going somewhere, doing something, to be torn away from it and put on paper. When he drew Viktor, it lacked, fundamentally. It felt like seeing a... a house with no door, or something like that. Disconcerting. It always came up short, and the real Viktor, the realness of Viktor, slipped through his fingers like sand.
(The amount of torn, crumpled pages in his trash bin was getting alarming.)
-
It was not that he was obsessed with Viktor, or that he had lost his inspiration to draw other things. It was always there, a pull at the edge of his mind: the line of the roof, starkly juxtaposed against the cloudless sky. The dust particles floating in a stray ray of light in their lab. People going about their lives, so lovable and so human: a group of children gawking starry-eyed at a toy display, an older gentleman wearing bright blue argyle socks.
But, taking all these images, these feelings, and trying to represent them faithfully... it always let some facet of Viktor creep in. Why did he feel compelled to draw the dust in the air? Because it meant a quiet, languid afternoon spent in the lab, when time was slow as molasses and the world felt like a bug suspended in amber.
And Viktor was a part of that image. Always.
And Vik was, well... lovable and human. He did not wear argyle socks, but he had a stupid donut of a scarf that Jayce thought he never washed, and he complained that he needed his caffeine before conversation in the morning but that thing he drank was 5% caffeine and 95% sugar, and he-
Anyway, point was. He drew what compelled him, and the same things that compelled him about the world at large also naturally compelled him about Viktor. You could say that those things were just his type, if a type could include striking roof-sky contrasts and argyle socks - and then, those transformed into the striking contrast between Vik's dark hair and white skin, and stupid donut scarves, because they were ultimately the same thing anyway.
-
He was getting better at this. Viktor looked like himself, most of the time.
It was starting to be a problem.
Viktor stretched, rolling his shoulders, and the shirt of his uniform rode up a little bit - vest and tie had been off since morning - exposing a pale stretch of skin split by the dark bands of his brace.
Contrasts, contrasts.
(It was really starting to be a problem.)
-
Winter was coming.
-
In his journal, later:
"V offered his spare mattress so I didn't have to walk home through the sleet today."
(Then, a single dot at the start of the line, where he had put the tip of the pen on the paper to write but then changed his mind.)
-
Looking back through his sketchbook, Jayce thought he really drew more mechanical things than he felt like drawing - it was just... that it was disappointing, to grasp onto a beautiful feeling and end up with a pale copy. At least gears had the decency to transfer to paper properly.
-
He... might like Viktor more than he'd thought.
Viktor was very...well, likeable, and they made a good team, and they complemented each other well. (That was to say, he tried his best to temper Viktor's batshitness with some caution, but he was starting to run low on caution, while Viktor's batshitness seemed never-ending.)
So Viktor was a bit insane, and extremely attractive, and self-assured, and cuttingly witty, and a genius, and that just checked all of Jayce's boxes, really. Of course he expected the infatuation, ever since Viktor showed up at his wrecked lab with that smug unreadable face of his. He just didn't plan for the... other things.
This was a deviation from the course, which brought him no small amount of anxiety. But he wasn't a scientist for nothing. He could adapt. Right? Right.
So, he might be a little bit in love with Viktor, and that fact might be obvious to everyone, as Cait had not-so-gently let him know.
Time to do absolutely nothing with that information.
-
He noticed he always drew Viktor's waist a little too thin, his shoulders a bit too lithe. He saw the man every day, he really should have noticed earlier - but it struck him one evening as he was tracing the curve of Viktor's side with one fluid line. His hand, or his mind, or his eyes, or some traitorous coalition of the three - they seemed to have developed their own Viktor.
This was worse, worse, worse, so much worse than a pale copy.
Viktor was thin, yes, unhealthily so - in the way pushing him to eat more likely won't fix, though he still tried. And yes, his joints were bony, and yes, his vertebrae showed through the skin at the back of his neck.
And. Yeah. They had titanium rods in them.
He never drew those. He tried to tell himself it was because he didn't usually draw Viktor from the back, but it was a transparent lie. The truth was they... made him uncomfortable. Imagining it. The grinding. The metal-on-bone every time Viktor shifted. Picturing the tissue parted on the operation table and the bone drill boring holes into the discs and-
And, with this realization, he promptly drew two sketches of the back of Viktor's neck, from memory, with all the appropriate metal parts - except, shit, how many pins did he have? Three? Four?
He'd have to pay more attention.
But, anyway - Viktor was thin, yes, but he did not have such a gentle curve at his waist. His hips were squared, his legs were long and angular. His calves were naturally well-defined - less so on his right leg, where the muscular atrophy had set in. His right knee sagged inwards, and consequently so did his foot. Viktor leaned on his cane more, these days, he'd noticed, and he dragged his leg limply along the floor, when before he'd lifted it with relative ease at each step.
What did he have eyes for, Jayce berated himself, what did he have a functioning occipital lobe for, if not to process what was in front of him? He slapped his sketchbook down and leaned back in his chair; Viktor didn't even spare his outburst a glance.
Somewhere, in the space between Viktor's form and Jayce's eyes, something had happened, a refraction of the light, a warping - something that had sent Jayce's lines on the wrong trajectories over and over again. Something that made him cherry-pick at Viktor like a fussy child - the thin waist stays; the titanium rods go, too uncomfortable. The hair, the scarf, the cane, those can stay, but save the bulky back harness, it was... it was, what, unsightly? Guilt-inducing? Jayce felt a hot flush of shame and scratched at the seam of his collar uneasily. Was that really what he thought?
He just didn't want Viktor to be sick, a part of his mind tried to reason, and he balked at it. Viktor would have smacked him if he'd said that out loud, and he'd have deserved it, too. Viktor was sick, and he would always be some degree of sick, and there was no changing that, and his own stupid saviour complex had no place in the matter. Ugh.
And was he trying to relate Viktor to his previous conquests, who had all been women? Was that it? He thought he'd gotten past his sexuality crisis unscathed, two years back, but maybe not. (Note: He needs to talk to Cait, ASAP.)
An even more distressing thought: was he even truly attracted to Viktor, or just to an idea of Viktor that he'd made up in his brain, polished to fit his own tastes?
Sanitized. Soulless.
He sneered at himself and tucked his sketchbook in a drawer, somewhere.
-
It was three pins in the first three vertebrae - and a peek at his back brace from the fourth one down.
(How far down.)
(...In the name of artistic accuracy, of course.)
-
With spring peeking through in places, he was starting to feel more present, lately. Brighter. The fogginess had lifted, a little bit, and the warped glass he'd been staring through had started to melt away. Viktor had noticed, because of course he had; he'd noticed in that quiet way of his, and he smiled more, teased Jayce more often. Laid a friendly hand on his shoulder, once. Jayce swore he could still feel the lingering warmth there, just a couple inches off the crook of his neck.
The fake Viktor went away, along with a couple pages from his sketchbook backlog. Instead - three titanium rods, a little inverted V-shape just below them. The bulk of the chest brace Vik had started wearing more and more often, under his clothes. It left a bump at his left shoulder where the strap was, which in turn made his shirt and vest stretch diagonally across his chest. (When his vest was off, the shirt hinted at the hollow plane of his abdomen, caught the ridge of his ribcage. Jayce tried very pointedly not to stare.) It must have valves or clasps along the back, because they left prominent bumps along his shoulder blades when he leaned forward.
-
Viktor banged his elbow on the doorframe in his animated gesturing, stopping his tirade to hiss and clutch at it. He then vengefully elbowed the offending object once again, which did not improve things, and Jayce tried very hard not to laugh and instead got him some ice - because he was a good friend like that.
Viktor brought a cushion from the couch, a pathetically thin and limp one, to rest his elbow on while writing. It was not long before he'd slumped face-first into it and was lethargically combing a hand through his hair, probably on the verge of falling asleep; Jayce wondered when the last time he'd properly rested was. (He also wondered if the man's hair really was as soft as it looked.)
He kept his lines light, so the scratching of the pencil on the paper didn't disturb Viktor.
-
"Are you really ignoring me right now?"
Viktor hummed absentmindedly, not pausing his writing.
"Viktor," Jayce tried. The man didn't turn. "Viiiiiiktor."
"What?"
"I ate your leftovers."
"Mmm," Viktor replied.
Jayce scratched his head. "Uhhh. I'm getting married tomorrow."
"Mhmm," Viktor said, still not looking up.
"Okay, ouch. Fine, I...I lost the good pliers." A pregnant pause, for effect. "The ones with the stripey handle."
Viktor swivelled in his chair. "You did not."
Jayce held up the well-loved tool with a flourish. "I did not." Quickly, before Viktor turned back around, he rushed out: "You mind taking a look at this?"
With a sigh, Viktor resigned himself to the interruption.
"Bring it here."
Jayce dropped his notebook down in front of Viktor.
"So, the downlink thing, right. Tried to get it to unscramble, nothing. It barely gets there in one piece, and then the airliner talks to itself in a loop off of the echoes." Jayce said, leaning on Viktor's desk. "5.5, as usual."
Viktor looked longingly in the direction of his own notes, but turned his attention to Jayce's nonetheless.
"So, then, d'ya think same frequency with breaks, like," he stretched across Viktor's back to point at the page, "this, or different frequencies and we eat the loss? I'm seriously considering just splitting them, at this point," Jayce admitted.
Viktor stiffened slightly below his hand, but- wait, below- what? Jayce looked at his traitorous hand resting between Viktor's shoulder blades and quickly removed it, as if burnt.
"Mm, give me a second," Viktor said, pulling the notebook closer. "Guard time?"
"Twenty seconds or so on that last one. I don't think we can do less."
"We could. They can't."
Jayce shrugged. "You'd be pissed too if someone asked you to get fifty fucking oscillators by next month."
The man hummed noncommittally. "Then try a minute, perhaps even two minutes. We're in uncharted waters here, they can hardly blame us for it being slow."
Jayce shook his head. "Tried it with ten, Vik, still nothing. That's not the issue."
He switched to leaning on the desk with his other hand and turned a couple pages, stopping on a hand-drawn table of values.
"It gets fucked up on the way first, and then the echoes make it worse." He pointed to the first row. "Three second transmission, one minute guard, got there on 64% and then kept echoing another five minutes. Of course, the call-back got lost completely," another row down, "so I said, fine, make it ten for the interference, but it still only got there on 60% first symbol," he pointed at the subsequent attempts, "61, 68... 55, Vik, fifty-fucking-five, that's like... half! It's pissing me the hell off!"
"It is indeed half," Viktor replied amusedly, eyes scanning the numbers. "Mmm. I admit this is more your area than mine. I'll have to look over the charts."
Jayce let his head slump. "Yeah, sure, I'll leave 'em here. Just let me finish up."
He patted Viktor on the back and trudged over to his seat.
"If we're lucky," he muttered to himself, "they get the half of the message that says 'do not', not the one that just says 'land'."
He heard Viktor snort behind him.
"Ah, so you can pay attention to what I'm saying, when you find it convenient. I see how it is."
"I sincerely doubt you're getting married."
"Hey!"
"Yes. I would have heard about it by now," Viktor was smiling. Even with his back turned, he could picture the little quirk of his lips, as if he was trying to hold back his grin, fuck, God dammit, "perhaps even a speech or two, a few galas, the works."
"Ugh." Jayce grimaced and continued tidying his desk. "I hate that you're right. They would make it a whole celebration."
"No, no, not celebration. I rather think the entirety of Piltover's bachelorettes would be deep in mourning, Jayce. That you are, how to say, off the market."
Jayce flushed a bit, thankful he wasn't facing Viktor. He'd get endless shit for it. "Even worse."
"Not looking, eh?"
Jayce almost dropped the pen he was holding. "What, from them? No."
You, however...
"From them," Viktor repeated in an unreadable tone.
He could see the eyebrow raise in his mind's eye, the left one, always, unless he was very surprised, in which case it was both. He wondered if the implications of what he'd said elicited a double-eyebrow-raise.
"I left you the notes," he said instead, walking to the door. "Get some sleep, okay?"
Viktor just waved him off. "Goodnight, Jayce."
-
He opened his sketchbook, of half a mind to fix up one of today's sketches before properly going to bed, and-
Was greeted with two charts of radio-transmission test runs.
Oh, shit.
Well then.
-
This, Jayce thought, an hour of pacing later, had been a terrible, horrible, extremely bad idea.
This was a realization that struck him often, though it was usually followed by something blowing up. The lack of an explosion was a nice change of pace, he thought. He could almost get used to it. Going through uniforms like that was kind of eating into his budget, so, honestly-
Nope. Couldn't rationalise it.
He thunked his head against the wall.
Horrible.
Idea.
-
"Good morning, Jayce," Viktor replied, engrossed in work already.
Had he even left the lab? If he hadn't, maybe he'd been too busy with his own work to- what was he doing now? The piston thing? Maybe he didn't even open Jayce's notebook; Jayce prayed to every deity he knew the name of.
"Ah, I tried to look over your numbers, last evening."
Of course.
"Ah, yeah, about that," Jayce started. Don't make it weird. Dooooon't make it weird. (So very sorry about creepily drawing you, it's just that I am helplessly taken by your features. Anyway. How do you feel about modelling nude for me?)
"I do believe you left me the wrong notebook," Viktor cut his mental monologue off. He was still scribbling away. That had to be a good sign, right? That he hadn't ran out the door screaming? Or, maybe not.
"Yeah, sorry," Jayce said sheepishly. "Uh, mixed them up. Same cover, you know."
Viktor turned to glance at him. He looked perfectly at ease - relaxed shoulders, one leg tucked under his chair, the other one extended in a straight line. But then again, when didn't Viktor look at ease?
"Doesn't seem like a terribly inspired choice, I must say," Viktor remarked, eyes starting to show his amusement.
Jayce knew what he should have done - played it cool, like he was unbothered, Viktor would find no fun in teasing him then. Maybe even acted hurt; Viktor would not be deliberately cruel. Instead, he did the worst possible thing, covering his flush with his hands and sighing loudly.
"No, it wasn't," he said.
Viktor was silent for a second, and Jayce peeked from between his fingers. Jayce was certain the man had smelled blood in the water, judging by his widening grin.
"Jayce."
Jayce removed his hands and picked up his pen to fiddle with. "Yes?"
"There's no need for that," Viktor said. "I'm flattered."
Ah, there it was. The polite rejection.
"But?"
Viktor cocked his head, raising an eyebrow. "There's no 'but'. I'm flattered. Your attention to detail is admirable. I can see why technical drawing attracts you."
Jayce's flush brightened and he resisted the urge to turn around and go back out the door.
"Thanks," he said, instead of you attract me more, for fuck's sake. He walked over to his desk and sat down, feeling a bit like he'd turned his back on an apex predator.
Viktor made to go back to his work, but then swivelled towards Jayce once again and paused for a second, for the first time of the morning seeming unsure.
"Though I must ask...erm, why?"
That was the question he was dreading. Oh, God, what the hell does he even say to that.
"Why what?"
Just play dumb.
Viktor levelled him with a look that said, not funny, Jayce. He held the man's gaze, though he had no hopes of winning their little staring contest; Viktor had a look that could cut steel. Moments later he capitulated and buried his face in his hands again. Ah, the bitter taste of defeat.
"Why do I make up almost, hm, almost half of your sketchbook?" Viktor asked - just to twist the knife, the bastard. "Surely, the amount of features I possess is finite. One would think you would simply run out and move on."
That was such a strange way to phrase the issue that Jayce was momentarily stunned out of his embarrassment. "What? It doesn't work like that," he replied. "It's not a... checklist. I could draw them multiple times."
"You did," Viktor stated dryly. "And I'm asking, why?"
Jayce huffed. He could tell Viktor to drop it...
"You're beautiful," Jayce said, before he could overthink himself out of it.
Viktor stilled, caught with his mouth open as he was preparing to speak. He closed it and stared at Jayce.
"Erm. Thank you."
"You do know that, right?"
"Sure." Viktor cocked his head. "Though I don't mind hearing it again," he said lightly, his teasing smile returning.
Jayce chuckled with his heart in his throat.
"Good. But, um, that's why. It's like, when you see a pretty rock on the ground, and you take it home, you know? Um, you've probably never done that. I guess I just like...capturing these kinds of things. On paper."
"So in this instance I am the...pretty rock."
Jayce shrugged vaguely.
"And you want to take me home."
Jayce barked out a surprised laugh, flustered. His ears must be bright red by now.
"I certainly wouldn't mind, Vik."
"Hmm," Viktor smiled, looking equal parts smug and relieved. Maybe a hint of vindication - as if he was thinking ha, look at that, I was right. "Glad that's settled then. Your staring was very distracting, you know. I'd wondered."
Jayce let his head fall on the desk, to hide both his blush and his idiotic grin.
"You're horrible."
His answer came in the form of the sharp clacks of Viktor's cane on the hardwood, heading towards him. He purposefully didn't lift his head from his desk, and jumped when he felt the press of a hand against the small of his back despite expecting the touch.
"You are very handsome too, Jayce," Viktor said somewhere close to his ear, and Jayce shivered.
"Stop being so- so, suave," he protested. "Ugh!"
Viktor snickered, and Jayce lifted his head. Viktor was finally, finally looking a bit ruffled too, a slight blush dusted across his cheeks and a smile on his lips, looking carefree and mischievous. He was bracing himself against the desk, cane at his side.
"My apologies. I should be more crass, then? Jayce, let's have sex in the supply cupboard."
He could feel the movement of the man's laugh against his side as he sputtered.
"I'll leave and go back to work without even saying goodbye," Viktor went on, merciless. "Hmm, certainly less suave, no?"
That... might have awakened something in Jayce, something he promptly decided to unpack... later.
"You would," he managed.
"Maybe. I would say goodbye, at the very least. Can't promise about the rest."
"Why the cupboard, though," Jayce said, leaning his head against Viktor's sternum, careful not to tip the man's balance. "We have the whole lab." Viktor wrapped one arm around his shoulders and Jayce sighed contently; he hadn't felt this comfortable in a while.
"Shock value," Viktor said, threading his fingers through Jayce's hair. "Eh, for Pilties at least," he amended, waving a hand.
"I love it when you talk with your hands."
Viktor's fingers stilled in his hair, and Jayce smiled; the fact that he could make the normally impassable Viktor freeze in his tracks a little with a compliment - it stirred a spark of self-satisfaction in his chest, like a little firework.
"So I could infer," Viktor replied, voice not betraying any emotion, but Jayce knew better. He could hear Viktor's heartbeat, after all. "The one with the, ah, ink pen."
"Yeah," Jayce said, wistfully. He could still recall the exact moment, though it wasn't unique by any means. Muted light from the front left that cast Viktor's long, graceful shadow up the blackboard behind him. The golden handle of his cane caught the fading sunlight, and so did Viktor's eyes, ignited doubly by his passion - and then, his lively gesturing, so out of place in the gentle dusk. (Contrasts, contrasts). "I remember that one."
They were both quiet for a moment, and just as Jayce was deciding to break the silence somehow, Viktor said:
"So, what is it about my hands?"
"Oh my God."
"You seem to have a fascination with them."
"Shut up."
Viktor grinned, flashing his teeth, and Jayce couldn't help returning his smile. He felt a little bit like there was... a lamp in his chest. Or the sun. Or something.
Yeah, scratch that, he thought. It had been an extremely, very good, exceptional idea.