Chapter Text
Piltover’s shortest day is topside New Year’s Eve. The sun sets hurriedly and revelers venture into darkness, donning bright masks that catch the streetlights’ glow in flashes at the right angle, like falling stars. They gather in the plaza and pop bottle corks and canisters of crepe-paper streamers just before midnight. The streamers will clog the gutters the next day, dissolving in melting snow, and the bottles will be empty, their only residue a hangover. But those will be problems for the next year. And next year always sounds so far away.
Viktor’s prototype, however… is a problem now.
“None of the materials worked?” Jayce asks, adjusting his tie in the reflection of a gearplate. He’s probably running late to Amara’s annual party — the one they’re relying on to recruit a few more patrons to their funding round.
Viktor pauses, casting for a way to make the day’s results sound better.
“Not a single one.”
The scent of scorched metal might have told Jayce that.
Viktor’s cutting claw is laid before him on the table, its chassis cracked open beneath the harsh desk lamp. A month ago he’d have had a notebook to take down the precise conditions of its brokenness, but after so many trials, he’s stopped bothering. Nothing stands up to the energy he’s trying to channel into a narrow point of piercing light.
“What’s the record before burnout so far?”
Viktor pulls the latest focal ring and examines its charred and deformed edges. “Twenty-nine minutes,” he says, trying to keep irritation out of his voice.
“That’s not terrible. You can do a lot of things in half an hour—”
“Your family didn’t sell hammers that snapped after a day!”
Viktor knows how presumptuous that sounds the moment that he says it. The claw isn’t anywhere near a tool, it’s barely more than a proof of concept. But he finds his heart racing with frustration. It’s late afternoon and it’s getting dim, and he can already hear the first shouts from the streets; he’ll be going home through crowds of drunken students if he goes at all. All because the raw energy of hextech keeps outstripping even his most generous calculations, and he’s got barely enough time to run these tests at all—
Jayce rests a hand on Viktor’s arm, breaking his chain of agitated thoughts.
“Look. Science doesn’t happen overnight — I mean, not usually.”
“You’re… yes. Of course. You’re right. It’s just…” Viktor swallows and forces himself to be reasonable. “It’s supposed to happen eventually. And… well, the investors.”
“V — don’t worry about the investors. I’ll take care of them.”
Which only makes Viktor feel bad.
Their investors want that tower they’re constructing at the city’s edge: the hexgate. A monument to Piltover’s greatness, a portal for its merchants and its politicians. And… yes, Viktor will admit it’s an extraordinary thing. But the hexgate is an institution. A person cannot hold it, cannot feel the course of it like blood.
And so Viktor sneaks hours in the laboratory, staying awake till he can barely see. He rounds numbers on their balance sheets and puts the difference toward metals and artificing costs, hoping their accountant will be sympathetic. He makes Jayce go off alone to parties like the one he’s headed for tonight, his partner delaying his own work to sweet-talk guilds into handing over a little more gold.
“You know…” Jayce’s hand is warm through the fabric of Viktor’s shirt. “You never did tell me how you came up with this idea.”
Viktor shakes his head. “It will sound silly.”
“I doubt it.”
It’s an obvious concept, Viktor should tell Jayce — a beam of energy. But he’s already half-committed. It would sound sillier to back out.
“When… when I was young, there was a street performer in the undercity. He smashed objects with his bare hands — boards, bricks, you get the idea,” he says. “I was sure it was a trick. But I observed him for a week and I came up with nothing — no mechanical aids, no weakened props. I even swapped out the bricks when he wasn’t looking. It didn’t matter.”
“Wait, sorry, you swapped out his—”
“I finally admitted there was no deception. And I…”
Jayce’s hand shifts, and Viktor catalogs its movement across his clothes.
“You what?”
“I cried. Because if there wasn’t, it meant his only ability was brute strength. No cleverness to it. And nothing I could ever have.”
It is absurd. Viktor regrets saying anything. Because he’s a scientist and an inventor, and he considered himself one even then, a child. Being disappointed that he couldn’t break things — it’s hard to make that sound anything but juvenile. It’s hard to articulate that it… it didn’t really seem like destruction. When Viktor watched cement burst, he saw change. The brilliant precision of the man’s movements, remaking the world in ways that seemed impossible with nothing but his own hands.
And Viktor had wanted it. The same way he’d wanted to wander the undercity’s hidden places without the fear of being taunted or robbed or beaten, without planning every scavenging trip to account for how little he could carry. He’d wanted the feeling of a power that was part of him, not conferred by somebody else’s protection or pity or the knife he’d learned to keep close. He’d felt guilty for the want, because it seemed like a betrayal of all his fights to make people respect him as he was — but guilt was helpless in the face of desire.
Jayce won’t understand that. He’s broad and tall, all muscle, the kind of body Viktor catches people looking at with envy. If anything he seems put out by it. After parties he makes the occasional wry comment about how they’d rather see him in the forge than at a conference, and Viktor nods, trying hard to grasp what it would feel like to be seen that way.
“What happened then?” Jayce asks. A polite method, Viktor supposes, of asking him to get to the point.
“I think my mother noticed, and she must have spoken to him. Because next time I passed he called to me. And… there’s no trick, he told me. But it wasn’t just strength, either. It was focus. Understanding where the material was weakest and knowing how to put every fraction of your power there.”
“So…”
“So — so focused hextech. Magic concentrated so finely it could hit the head of a pin. What more incredible force could you produce?”
Behind him, Jayce laughs — the kind of laugh Viktor’s learned to recognize as admiration.
“Wish I’d known you as a kid. I bet you were adorable.”
“Eh.”
There is a moment of silence. Jayce’s touch is still and heavy. Viktor’s hand flexes on the table — and he imagines how easy it would be to slot it into Jayce’s and pull him close.
He kills the thought as quickly as he can.
Maybe something could have happened between them if it had happened early. That first night, when everything was in flux and nothing was impossible. But Viktor was too transfixed by the thrill of discovery to separate it from how he felt about his partner. For two weeks he barely had time to sleep, let alone try anything else in his bed. And by the time that first rush was over, he’d realized how often Jayce touched him. How little trouble Jayce had showing his affection. Which meant… that if Jayce wanted anything more, he’d make sure Viktor knew. By now he’s had two years to do it.
Viktor is no stranger to risk. But compromising their work over some infatuation is a step too far. Even if their partnership survives Viktor confessing a feeling Jayce doesn’t have, things would change. Better they stay like this — enough affection to keep Viktor from going elsewhere, never nearly as much as he wants, all taken in a way Jayce doesn’t intend.
Guilt. Desire. Et cetera.
“You’d better get to your party.”
“Please. If it was my party I’d serve real food.”
Jayce’s hand lifts, and Viktor can practically sense him fidgeting with his tie. Viktor stands to take a look at it, conscious of how few inches are between them.
“Tch. Stop touching it.”
Viktor straightens the fabric and smooths down Jayce’s vest — a professional courtesy. He waits as Jayce steps away and dons his coat, trying not to imagine there’s a hesitation there.
“Don’t stay too late,” Jayce says at the door. “And my mother’s got an open dinner invitation for you, if you want to celebrate tonight.”
Viktor wishes momentarily he’d taken up Jayce’s earlier invitation: the plus-one for Amara’s party. Not because he’d enjoy it, or because anyone except Heimerdinger would bother having a conversation with him. Not because it would be helpful, since Jayce might not like these soirees much either, but he’s gotten good at faking it. Just because the party is where Jayce will be tonight.
“I will be fine. I’d rather get some sleep.”
Besides, for Viktor, it’s not even a holiday.
The undercity new year began three weeks ago. Viktor spent the night in the lab. He hasn’t been down since he began working with Jayce — not for more than brief jaunts to the Lanes for equipment, like any topsider might make.
Now he watches the door close and sits back at his desk, looking into the claw array. There’s nothing to be done. He’s exhausted the last of his test metals. Even if he weren’t, they’re always short on crystals. The investors believe in them, somebody says so every quarter, but sometimes Viktor gets the sense they’re being punished for keeping anything but the hexgates on their ledgers — put on a short leash lest they get unprofitable ideas.
Viktor gets a deep, cold ache in his chest when he thinks too hard about it. Because one day the hexgates will be finished, and Viktor has watched too many scientists fall into lives of perpetual maintenance, their dreams extinguished under the crush of practicality. He has to lay the groundwork for something new. Something he might be able to take back to Zaun…
Zaun, and the conversation with Jayce, jogs a half-forgotten detail from his memory.
The metal’s failure is in a sense corrosion — and the undercity knows corrosion. Factories in the sumps have to account for it. They produce alloys that are never exported or even sent topside, because the cost of working through the guilds would eat the profits. Metals used only for construction within the fissures, sold only through old-boy business partnerships.
Almost only.
The cold ache gets stronger. Because a path of action has etched itself within his mind, and it will require something far more unpleasant than going down.
It will require going home. And if he doesn’t try tonight, he’s going to lose his nerve.