Chapter Text
Years, days, makes no difference to me, babe
You look exactly the same to me
Ain't no time, crossing your legs inside the diner
Raising the coffee to your lips, the steam.
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It was mostly to pass the time , is what Viktor often told himself. The first kiss had been very tentative, very hesitant.
“I don’t want to-“
“Hurt me?”
“Change things,” said Jayce.
“Nothing has to change,” Viktor had said in his affectless, factual way. “It would just be the work-“ he gestured with one hand- “and this.”
That first kiss eventually bloomed into guiltier pleasures. It bled into every day routines. Viktor’s joints would ache during and Jayce would notice, very gentle, a soft mechanism- cold on hot, skin on skin. There was something soothing about the way Jayce touched, Viktor thought. More healing than any balm or medication.
It was remarkably easy to convince themselves that these actions would have no equal opposite reaction, no consequence.
Poor form, for two scientists.
It was always wordless, it was always spontaneous. They never talked about it after the first time, but Viktor didn’t mind. It added a ferocity to their work, a fire under the alchemy of their collaboration. In a way, it was the vulnerability of creation, the essential factor of play that is involved in invention, that was more intimate than the sex. It was sometimes harder for Viktor to explain a particularly outlandish theory out loud and risk Jayce’s dismissal than it was for him to wander up behind him and press his face into the nape of his neck, let his arms snake around him, softly mouthing his neck, his ear. Jayce would usually turn around with his mouth slightly open. Viktor would roll his eyes and open his mouth to say something mocking, but be cut off by lips pressed against his own, Jayce’s tongue in his mouth and his hand cradling his head.
It was very easy in the early days.
Sometimes nights would get long, work would stray into dark hours and they would resign to sleeping at the lab. They kept two roll mats in the cupboard. When they took them out and laid them flat, they would pad them with their own endless conversation; the cushion of safety they had in each other could make even a thin mat on hard floor feel comfortable. There was nothing to be afraid of with Jayce at this point. Viktor could think out loud, barely noticing he was doing it, and Jayce would understand him perfectly. Jayce would know exactly what he was seeing in his own minds eye, each of their grand visions crashing into each other and moulding into hybrid palaces of equations, formulae, a future so bright they could taste it. Their shared understanding was almost a physical place between them, somewhere they could inhabit that was apart from time, objects, space. It was only them and what they could create together.
Viktor would go on to retain the habit of talking out loud as he worked things out in the lab long after their time making hextech was over and Jayce was out in the real world. Viktor, lost in thought, often would look over for Jayce’s input and find himself alone in the lab, having forgotten that Jayce no longer belonged to him alone anymore. But this was much later.
Now, they roll out their tattered blue mats side by side and Jayce extinguishes the light, and there’s the blue-dark silence, their anticipation thrumming in the air, who will be first? Viktor waits as long as it will take him to make up his mind. In darkness, he waits for Jayce. It feels different in the night, more like something real, and Viktor doesn’t want real. Viktor doesn’t want to be the one needing, the one chasing after. So he waits. Sometimes it takes Jayce so long Viktor thinks he’s fallen asleep, and then as he rolls over, giving up.
Then he feels a heavy hand slide around his waist and it lights a warm blaze in his stomach. He lets himself be pulled close, Jayce’s body curling around his own; he shudders at the myriad of suggestions dredged up by the feeling of someone at his back. He feels Jayce’s breath stir the hair on the back of his neck and it’s just their breathing mingling in the quiet for a while, too loud in Viktor’s ears. His heart speeds up incrementally. The waiting, the waiting. Jayce always makes him wait. He doesn’t seem to understand that Viktor has never had that luxury, doesn’t have that kind of time. Patience is not a virtue of Viktor’s- it can’t be when you never know when your body is going to betray you next, never know if what you can do today will be physically impossible next year. He does not imagine his own aged self when they talk about the future they’re building. He thinks instead about how Hextech will look. He cannot picture living to see his own grey hairs.
And yet he waits for Jayce. He wants it too much to risk scaring him away.
Viktor was accustomed to the way his body moved now. Jayce was a familiar form, a familiar pressure, a familiar warmth. Always warm. Always flushed to the touch- something molten about him, like the metal they worked with. Never thinking to bring changes of clothes despite sleeping at the lab often enough, they usually stripped to their boxers to sleep- Jayce shirtless, Viktor still in the thin academy uniform shirt.
Viktor can feel Jayce’s own heartbeat against his back through the thin material, and he suddenly wishes there was nothing between them at all. None of the chaos of two bodies but instead one soul. Then he screws his eyes shut and shakes the thought away like he’s a priest and it’s blasphemy, because it is, in a way. The depth of his vacuous loneliness is something he keeps guarded and close to his chest; his loneliness is a rabbit caught in a trap that he tends to but never sets free- feeding it just enough to keep it alive. And this, he feels, would not be an attractive quality to someone like Jayce. People with everything, people like Jayce, are repelled by those with nothing- just as those with nothing are drawn to that dazzling species of the well-loved. Moths to flame.
He can feel Jayce’s hardness pressing against his tailbone and is vaguely turned on at how he doesn’t try to hide it. A symptom of Jayce’s natural confidence of belonging- sex is easier with someone who doesn’t bat around the bush, and once past the first wrenching, awkward interactions, Jayce had relaxed into the easiest lover Viktor had ever had. That was another one of the teetering dominoes of Viktor’s double-sided affection and anxiety- Jayce was fun. Jayce was light hearted. Jayce was arrogant as fuck, too, and that translated into his intimacy as much as everything else. Viktor didn’t know what he’d do with himself if Jayce took this away.
He felt Jayce’s fingers- calloused fingertips, bitten nails, his brain supplied- ghost up his arm. There was a pulling at the collar of Viktor’s half unbuttoned shirt, Jayce dragging it down so his shoulder was bare. Viktor closed his eyes. Jayce inclined his head forward; Viktor could feel his warm breath on the cold round of his shoulder.
Jayce pressed his lips to skin, deliberate and careful. Viktor shivered. The other man took this as the permission that it was and started to suck a line of bites, travelling from shoulder to neck, each more bruising than the last. Viktor felt himself getting hard too but did nothing but let Jayce ruin pale skin, trying desperately not to think about who might see him tomorrow and wonder.
“Turn to face me,” Jayce murmured, low.
Viktor did as he was asked, but fixed Jayce with a disapproving eye he knew the other could see in the near-darkness.
Jayce grinned, his teeth glinting dimly, and the mere sight of him sent a jolt of lightning down Viktor’s spine.
“Don’t smile like that,” said Viktor cooly.
“Like what?”
“Like you‘re plotting something.”
He liked the way their accents jarred against each other, his rounded, accented vowels underscoring Jayce’s Piltovian ones.
“You’d enjoy whatever I was plotting. You’d let me,” said Jayce. He said it in a thoughtful tone rather than a playful one; he was too earnest for serious banter. His unintentional ability to cut through Viktor’s defences always felt cruel, but the sharp edged nature of his little truths were painful in the right ways. Cut me deeper. You’re right. I’d let you.
“Would I?” Viktor meant to sound scathing, but it came out too vague.
Jayce reached again and pulled in Viktor closer so that their noses were nearly touching and nudged his leg between Viktor’s so they were entwined.
Viktor could smell him. The savoury tinge of sweat, of grease, of soft sulphur. He knew he was the same; it was the smell of a hard day’s work. His thigh was warm against Jayce’s; the arm that wasn’t tucked under his head was close against his chest, warmed by the furnace of Jayce’s own. He splayed a hand over Jayce’s heart, enjoyed the slight shiver that his coldness inspired and pressed himself against Jayce’s erection so he could feel his too against his hip. He watched his lover-for-the-night’s face contort; Jayce pulled him in even closer.
He freed a hand from their embrace and cupped Jayce’s face, caressing his cheekbone with a consolatory thumb before letting his hand slip to rest gently at his neck. Jayce hummed, slightly strangled, and stared into Viktor’s eyes, searching for something unknown.
Viktor did not know what he was looking for and simply let him drink his fill. Whatever it was, he eventually was satisfied. He tangled a hand in Viktor’s hair and pulled him in.
The kiss was open mouthed and wet; it was docking in a familiar harbour after a rough day at sea. Viktor swirled his tongue against Jayce’s teeth, Jayce bit his lip and Viktor moaned quietly into his mouth.
Jayce shifted so he could move to be on top of him, never breaking away, settling so he was flush against him in all the best ways; rubbing against each other, the pressure of Jayce’s against his own. Viktor sighed, loosely curling a hand at the back of Jayce’s head; the thick sharpness of close cut hair. With his other hand he fingered the band of Jayce’s boxers. Jayce hissed through his teeth.
“Viktor,” he said meaningfully. Don’t tease.
Viktor paid no attention to this. He let his fingers slide slowly underneath the fabric, tracing the skin of his hipbone, his inner thigh. Jayce took to Viktor’s neck, kissing and sucking at pressure points as a sort of plea for clemency. His own arousal flaring, Viktor finally wrapped a firm grip around Jayce’s shaft. Jayce’s mouth stuttered against neck, saliva dragging. He started a brutal pace, far too slow.
“Viktor,” Jayce breathed again, coming up to stare at him reproachfully.
“Fine,” he croaked, and was met by passionate lips against his own. He smiled into the kiss and quickened his hand. When he felt the tell tale signs that Jayce was about to let himself go- shuddering breaths, muscles tightly coiled- he let his hand slip free. He gripped the back of Jayce’s neck again and smiled up at him, enjoying the look of pure resentment he received.
“You bastard, ” Jayce gasped.
Viktor wanted that sound bottled away, wanted to save it for a special occasion and drink it all in one go and be so inebriated he couldn’t stand.
“I thought you wanted to do something more?” said Viktor, trying for innocent and failing, too pleased.
“I’m not gonna last now.”
“Perhaps we should wait until you regain your composure.”
He couldn’t bring himself to hide his amusement. In retaliation, Jayce ruthlessly palmed Viktor through his boxers. Viktor inhaled sharply at the sudden attention and arched to the touch. Just as swiftly, Jayce dragged his hand away to grip his hip with a burning firmness, pushing him back down into the mat and kissing him with infuriating softness. Viktor whined at the loss of contact and Jayce stole the sound with his annoyingly light kisses, not enough pressure-
“Alright, your point has been made,” he panted.
“Are you sure?” Jayce asked, full of mock concern.
Viktor dragged him down into a real kiss. Jayce broke away first.
“Sex before we pass out?”
They never usually talked this much. Jarred, Viktor accidentally let out something too sharp for the vulnerability of the question.
“If there’s nothing else you plan on doing tonight.”
This is a bite, a swipe from an argument they’d had earlier that day about Jayce straying from their research that was really about him spending more time recently with Counsellor Medarda, their ellusive patron. Viktor knew it would be over the moment she decided she wanted Jayce for more than just politics. It was as simple as that. Sometimes, it felt like he’d already lost and he imagined as he spoke to Jayce in the present that he was doubly living in a memory.
But Jayce, ever the diplomat, lets the barb go without tearing flesh.
“Nothing else,” he assured him mindlessly.
“Well, alright then,” said Viktor, weak to his want; absentmindedly tracing a circle with no end on Jayce’s back as the other man slid the elastic of his waistband down.