Work Text:
Viktor emerges from his lab, finally done crafting a prosthetic arm for one of his patients. He’s greeted with the sight of Naph in his living room, curled up in the corner of his sofa with Viktor’s old Man of Progress mug, which he must have dug up from the back of the kitchen cabinets. A steaming cup of sweetmilk sits on the counter.
“Thank you, Naph,” he says, settling in the chair across from the boy with the cup of sweetmilk.
When Naph hears Viktor, his head snaps up. “You finished?” Naph inquires, practically leaping to his feet, eager and buzzing with excitement. “Can I look at the prosthetic before you go? I won’t touch it, I promise. Please? ”
“Yes, you may,” Victor acquiesces with a sigh. The words barely leave his mouth before Naph runs into the lab. “Be careful, Naph,” Viktor says when the boy slips on the hardwood floor and almost faceplants.
Viktor wonders how they got here. One day, a young boy broke into his residence on Emberflit Alley. Viktor showed him his life’s work, gave him an implant to temporarily erase his fear, and offered to make it permanent once the kid saw how weak emotions made you. The man half-expected to never see the scrawny boy again, but now, years later, that same boy is now his apprentice – of sorts.
More often than not, Naph is with Viktor. Viktor has no idea where he hangs out when he’s not in his house, and he doesn’t ask. Naph helps him around his lab, sometimes running errands to collect materials. On occasion, Viktor lets Naph help him construct simple augmentations or prosthetics; the boy is no genius, but he is hard-working.
He’s yet to be fully convinced that steel bears none of the weaknesses of the flesh and hasn’t asked for a permanent inhibitor, choosing to use the temporary implant whenever he wants. Whenever Viktor tries to convince him of its benefits, citing how he’s living just fine with no emotions thanks to the inhibitor planted snugly at the nape of his neck, Naph just looks at him with doubt. The last time the topic was brought up, Naph gave him a skeptical “uh-huh” before pointing out the traces of Viktor’s old life, like the old, silver crutch or the leg brace he no longer needs. Viktor hasn’t brought it up again since; he can recognize a lost cause.
Once Naph finishes marveling over his work, Viktor re-enters his lab to collect the prosthetic arm so that he can deliver it to its intended recipient. A young girl, caught up in a dispute between two chem-barons, had her right arm crushed completely by the infrastructure that had collapsed during the fight. Her mother came to Viktor, pleading with the Machine Herald to help her daughter, and Viktor agreed. His goal is to help the people of Zaun, after all.
He dons his mask before leaving through the tall, metal gates and makes his way to his patient’s residence. The streets, like usual, are filthy and filled with Shimmer addicts.
Viktor arrives at his patient’s sorry excuse of a home, a dilapidated shack that looks as if a strong breeze could send it tumbling down.
“Where is the patient?” He asks curtly once a woman – the mother who visited him about her daughter’s injury – opens the front door. Trembling, she leads him to the corner of the barely-furnished shack. The girl lies on a dirty mattress. She’s much younger than Viktor anticipated. Her face is pallid and the stump of her arm is poorly bandaged in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. Viktor sets to work. There’s a lot to do.
Hours later, the operation is done, and the girl is outfitted with a new, shiny prosthetic arm. Once Viktor tells the mother that all is well, she falls to her knees and shakily offers him a handful of coins. Viktor looks down at the woman prostrating on the floor and says, “I do not require payment.” Quickly, he leaves through the front door.
His walk back is quiet and uneventful, and he lets his mind wander, cataloging the materials he needs to send Naph to pick up and making a note to replenish his sweetmilk supply. His inhibitor, he remembers, also needs to be worked on. Suddenly, the silence is broken. A loud boom comes somewhere in the direction of Emberflit Alley that makes Viktor halt in his tracks – Viktor could recognize that sound anywhere. The walk becomes a jog, which becomes a full-on sprint once another ear-splitting boom echoes through Zaun.
As Viktor races down the streets, he realizes that, thankfully, the source of pandemonium isn’t his home. Unfortunately, he came across this revelation by running straight into the chaos himself. A large factory dedicated to manufacturing Shimmer lies in ruins before him, and emerging from the rubble practically unscathed is the one and only Defender of Tomorrow, armed with his signature weapon, the Mercury Hammer.
The Machine Herald and the Defender of Tomorrow haven’t come face to face in almost a year. Their last fight nearly decimated the bridge between Piltover and Zaun, and since then, they’ve had a silent agreement to not interfere in each other’s cities. Their agreement is, apparently, no longer valid.
“Ah, who do we have here?” Viktor sneers, activating the Hexclaw and aiming it straight at Jayce’s head. “What brings the Man of Progress from the great city of Piltover to the filthy streets of Zaun?”
“Maybe, if you kept Shimmer off the streets,” Jayce grunts as he hoists his hammer, “I wouldn’t have to come down here to try and shut this operation down myself.”
“It is hardly my fault that your enforcers reek of incompetence. Perhaps it is time to replace your sheriff,” he goads. “Now, get out of my city.”
“Make me.”
The Hexclaw fires, but Jayce dodges to the side at the last minute, the beam only grazing his cheek instead of blowing his head off. Then, the hammer transforms into its cannon form. Jayce aims and takes a shot in retaliation. There’s no time to think as Viktor darts away.
The fight is a familiar song and dance. They might not have seen each other in months, but Viktor still knows how Jayce fights. Relying on the Hexclaw isn’t working, he realizes, so he makes use of the agility his augmented legs give him to move in close, forcing Jayce to abandon his hammer. They grapple for a little while. Viktor takes some ugly hits to the head, but he evens up the score with some nasty punches to his opponent’s kidneys.
One of the many advantages of having steel limbs is that Viktor is now significantly stronger than regular humans, Jayce included. He manages to pin the Defender of Tomorrow on the ground, one hand retraining the other’s arms, his forearm braced against his opponent’s throat. He activates the Hexclaw.
A metal fist – no a fucking gauntlet – lands squarely on Viktor’s jaw, and it’s only due to the fact that it's reinforced with steel that it doesn’t shatter immediately. He flies off of Jayce and smacks into one of the factory’s concrete walls head-first. Pain erupts all over his body, but he manages to ignore it due to sheer will and gets up. He powers up the Hexclaw again, aiming at Jayce’s prone body, but the enforcer’s dog snatches him out of the way in the nick of time.
Of course Jayce brought backup to dismantle the Shimmer factor. How could Viktor allow himself to be so stupid? Why did rationality fly out the window at the mere sight of his nemesis?
Vi hauls Jayce to his feet and turns to leave. “Get it together, pretty boy!” Vi yells with a yank to his arm when he hesitates. Jayce looks back once before the two retreat from the undercity.
Viktor’s in no condition to follow them. Though he had little flesh to injure, Jayce’s hammer managed to damage his steel body, and Vi’s punch left his head spinning. It wouldn’t be a wise idea anyway.
Getting back to Emberflit Alley is a struggle, but Viktor manages to do it. Naph greets him at the front entrance, arms crossed and awaiting an explanation. “Enforcers,” Viktor supplies. He hobbles past his apprentice and collapses in a chair at the kitchen table, too weary to make it to his lab to make his repairs.
Naph zips past him into his lab and returns with an armful of tools, which he drops onto the table. He takes a seat next to Viktor. “I’ll help,” he says simply.
“Viktor, wake up.” Viktor doesn’t stir, his head still aching as if someone had taken a hammer to it. The spat with the Defender of Tomorrow days ago had really done a number on him. The disembodied voice repeats itself. “ Wake up. It’s about your ex-boyfriend.”
Viktor jolts up. “What about him?” He asks. He pauses, processing the other’s words, then spits, “Jayce is not my ex-boyfriend.” When they were lab partners, he and Jayce existed in some gray area. It might not have been explicitly defined, but Viktor knows that there was something between him and Jayce, something mutually acknowledged but left unsaid.
Naph looks thoroughly unimpressed.
“I didn’t even say his name. You have a wall dedicated to him,” he says, flinging his arm in the direction of the living room wall that’s covered in miscellaneous articles about the Defender of Tomorrow dating back to almost a decade ago.
“That is for…research purposes,” Viktor protests. He wants nothing to do with that man anymore. Every time he looks at the Defender of Tomorrow, his chest aches for some reason, and no matter what he tries, the ache never fully goes away. Reason dictates that he should take down all the articles and erase the man’s presence from his home. However, the obsessive desire to keep up with Jayce’s activity triumphs over all rationality. This contradictory behavior is inextricable with humanity. Hopefully, when Viktor perfects his inhibitor, he’ll take down the wall.
Naph sighs. “You know what? Sure. Tell yourself that. Whatever helps you sleep at night,” he continues with a roll of his eyes. “Anyway, look.”
Suddenly, a newspaper is thrust in front of Viktor’s face. The paper is of good quality, durable, and looking fresh off the press, unlike that of the rags that circulate in Zaun. It must be from Piltover. His face scrunches in disgust. “Why should I be looking at Piltie trash? Where did you even get this?” He doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the Jayce wall is almost completely made from Piltover newspaper clippings.
“Just look at it,” his apprentice insists.
Relenting, Viktor does. At times like these, Viktor misses the times when Naph was scared of him. Plastered on the front page is a photo of Jayce, unsurprisingly, but upon further inspection, Viktor notices a smaller figure pressed against his side. A young girl stands next to his best friend turned nemesis, Jayce’s large hand wrapped protectively around her shoulder. Under his right eye, a scratch mars his pretty face, meaning this photo must’ve been taken recently.
The last time Viktor checked, Jayce hated children and only interacted with them for publicity. When he did, he awkwardly kept them at arm's length, as if he were handling something dirty that would soil his pristine, white suit with its presence. But here in the photo, the man looked completely at ease, an easy smile spread across his handsome face.
There’s only one good explanation for all of this: the little girl is Jayce’s kid .
“Since when did the Defender of Tomorrow have a child ?”
“I skimmed over the thing, but it doesn’t say who she is. She’s probably not his kid though. Wouldn’t she have shown up earlier?”
Viktor doesn’t hear Naph, too lost in thought. Where did the child come from? Who is the mother?
Did that mean Jayce was over Viktor ?
Naph watches Viktor go through a small mental crisis, partially amused and partially concerned. “I think I’ll go now and let you be all weird about your ex,” he states. “I’ll put this on the Jayce wall for you.” Naph makes his way to the door, and as he passes the Jayce wall, he sticks the newspaper smack in the middle. Sometimes, Viktor thinks the boy can read his mind.
Viktor is pissed. Did Pilties ever think things through? The stunt with the Shimmer factory resulted in many casualties and countless injuries, leading to an influx of patients for the Machine Herald. He and Naph have been running themselves ragged trying to save the lives and limbs of so many people.
What makes things worse is the fact that Jayce won’t leave his mind. The combination of meeting him again face to face and seeing the Piltie newspaper has seriously messed something up in him. The ache has gotten worse. He replaced his heart, he installed the inhibitor in order to deal with this long ago. Why does this man and their split still cause him so much pain?
Viktor keeps trying to squash those thoughts into a box. It works, but only for a little while. In between counter surgeries and prosthetic operations, when Viktor allows himself to rest, they pop back out.
God damn it.
Thanks to their efforts, the last of their patients were able to go home fixed today.
He pours himself a cup of sweetmilk, and before he can think better of it, he roots around in the top kitchen cabinet for the bottle of vodka he keeps stashed away. Usually, he doesn’t drink alcohol with his sweetmilk, but he’s tired and wants to relax. Sitting at the kitchen table, he presses a series of buttons located at the side of his neck to turn off the mechanism that filters alcohol from his blood. The inhibitor will prevent him from making any foolish decisions while drunk, and thanks to his augmented body, he won’t get a hangover tomorrow.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Naph interrupts just as Viktor is about to fill the remaining half of his mug with vodka. “I know you’ve been having it rough because he showed up again, but I don’t think this is a healthy way to cope.” Viktor responds by pouring the alcohol into his drink. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret,” Naph says, exasperated, before leaving.
And so Viktor drinks, refilling his cup with varying amounts of sweetmilk and vodka, until his mind becomes fuzzy. He’s got a pleasant buzz going on, and that’s when it all goes wrong. He turns to get out of his chair and is met with the sight of the Jayce wall, the offending newspaper with the picture of the Defender of Tomorrow and the girl who Viktor deduced is his daughter still stuck in the middle.
He plummets from his euphoric high. The sheer amount of work he had over the past few days made him forget all about the offending article. Bitterness swirls in his chest, and suddenly, Viktor’s reliving the crisis he had when he first saw the damn thing.
The solution, he decides, is to check. He'll break into the man’s house, and see for himself. He’s done it before – he can do it again.
That’s how he ends up in PIltover, severely inebriated and stumbling up the front steps of Jayce’s white mansion. Security is a joke, and Viktor breaks in easily. He checks the rooms one by one, searching for signs of the little blonde girl, but to no avail.
He ends up in Jayce’s personal lab. The desk is covered in miscellaneous items, loose papers, gears, and a half-eaten sandwich. Fondness overtakes him. The mess is endearing. It’s all very… him .
“Looking for something?” Viktor whirls around to see the Defender of Tomorrow, haggard and sporting dark bags under his eyes, at the door’s threshold. Even tired, he looks good. The injury from the Hexclaw hasn’t healed yet, faint traces of it on his cheek, just underneath his right eye. It might scar. Jayce walks in Viktor’s direction to stand in front of his desk, shooing him away from his work. He’s standing so close. “Ok, what are you here for?”
Viktor doesn’t know what compels him to do what he does. He wordlessly leans into Jayce’s space, walking his fingers up the broad expanse of his chest and then sliding his pointer up the hollow of his throat before letting it rest under his chin. Long ago, before his augmentations, Viktor was the shorter of the two. Now, a part of him croons in satisfaction as Jayce is forced to tilt his head up slightly so that he can look him in the eyes.
Gaze drifting down, he toys with the idea of curling his hand around Jayce’s throat and squeezing until he’s gasping for air. Viktor remembers what the man likes. What a pretty sight Jayce would be, clawing at his hand in an attempt to get Viktor to release him, thrashing in grip. Viktor would make it slow and painful, and he would relish the sight of tears welling up in the corners of Jayce’s eyes. He would stop, of course, but only when it was too much for Jayce to handle.
But before he can do just that, Jayce snaps him out of his drunken reverie.
“Woah there,” he says, grabbing Viktor’s wrist with uncharacteristic gentleness and maneuvering his hand away from his vulnerable neck. “What’s gotten into you?”
He gives a hum in lieu of a response because he has no idea how these foreign thoughts have invaded his mind.
“Oh my god, you’re drunk . You only get this touchy when you’re plastered.” A gleeful smile spreads across Jayce’s face when he realizes, and suddenly the smarmy asshole is back. “Let me get this straight. For some reason, you decided to get drunk, and you decided to surprise me in my lab at ass-o’clock in the morning? I didn’t know I had such a dedicated fan,” he teases. ”What do you want, a Man of Progress mug? A signed photograph? Both? You know, you could’ve gone to one of the scheduled meet-and-greets if you wanted to see me so much–”
“I missed you.” The words slip from his lips unbidden. Both men freeze. Where had that come from? The worst thing, Viktor finds, is that he means it.
An epiphany dawns upon him. Lifting his hand to the back of his neck, he gropes around for the almost seamless panel at his nape. Since he’s absolutely wasted, his fine motor skills have gone to absolute shit, so it takes him a few attempts to finally pop it open. When he finally gets to feel around the small components and wires inside the compartment, his recent behavior suddenly makes more sense.
His inhibitor is busted.
It likely broke during the scuffle with Jayce - Viktor took a few nasty hits to the head during the fight. In hindsight, everything seems so obvious. With a sudden surge of anger that seems to purge the drunken haze from his mind, he scowls. “This is all your fault.”
Reeling in indignation, Jayce cries, “Hey, I didn’t do anything! You’re the one who broke into my lab – at an ungodly hour in the morning, which is frankly psychopathic behavior, V, by the way – and started pushing me around. In my own lab! How is that my fault?! ‘I missed you’?” He mocks, crossing his arms. “I hope you don’t think I buy that crap.”
“You broke my inhibitor!”
“Inhibitor…?” Jayce repeats carefully, sounding confused.
Words fail him. In fact, it’s insulting that Jayce doesn’t know what he’s referencing. “My inhibitor? Which I have been utilizing for the past decade to regulate my emotions? I know you know about it – I know I have told you about it.” Viktor throws his hands up in frustration. Despite being such an intelligent man, Jayce could be quite stupid.
“You mean the chemtech implant ? You installed a slave chip in your own head?!” Massaging his forehead, he slumps against the desk with a sigh. “Seriously, why are you here? To rob me again? I’m tired. I’ve been awake for almost seventy-two hours, and I can't work myself up to give a shit about all of this. Especially when it feels like I’m talking to a fucking robot –”
Jayce falls silent when Viktor lifts his hand to his face to remove his mask. It’s a concession he would never grant anyone else. There’s a soft hiss as the clasps come undone.
Back when they were on friendly terms, Jayce told him he was an open book. One night, they were standing in the corner at one of those stupid galas meant for schmoozing and ass-kissing. A brave soul approached the pair in hopes of improving their post-academy career prospects, but Viktor’s disgust and derision were so apparent, the student ran away before they managed to finish their sentence, leaving Viktor annoyed and Jayce cackling once he realized what happened.
Installing the inhibitor helped him control his expressiveness, but clearly, he couldn’t rely on it now to stop him from betraying his emotions, or to stop his body from moving to make stupid, stupid decisions.
For a moment, his arm stalls. At first, he thinks it’s another mechanical failure that he passed over when making repairs, but no, it’s not that.
He’s scared of what Jayce will find written on his face, clear for the world to see.
Finally, Viktor removes his mask completely and drops it. It falls to the floor, the clattering echoing through the lab, the sound as loud as a gunshot. For the first time in a decade, the two of them, as Viktor and Jayce, not the Machine Herald and the Defender of Tomorrow, look each other in the eyes.
“I miss you,” he confesses once more, breaking the tense silence. Without the modulator in his mask regulating his voice, even Viktor can hear how tired and broken he sounds.
Jayce frowns. “You miss me? You literally tried to kill me about a week ago. You’re giving me a lot of mixed signals here, V.”
“I…” Viktor struggles to find the words that would make it clear to his ex-partner that he's being sincere. “Since we have parted ways, I have found myself…unsure of what to do, sometimes, without you there to consult. Your absence has left a hole in my life that I have been unable to fill.”
“Uh huh,” Jayce replies with a skeptical lift of his eyebrow.
The man’s dismissal is the final straw. Frustration overwhelms Viktor, and suddenly he explodes, letting a decade’s worth of suppressed emotions pour out.
“I try to mind my own business, ignore Piltover and all their ignorance, and stick to Zaun, and then I see the newspaper, the one of you and that little girl who’s probably your daughter–” He chokes himself off. “And now I am here because the thought of you moving on has made me an emotional wreck. I cannot function. My productivity has declined because you are always on my mind. I had to see it for myself – I owed it to myself – to see if it was true because…” Viktor swallows, his throat dry since he never got around to working on his vocal cords. “Because I needed a reason, something . I do not think I will ever be able to move on from us without it.”
“V–”
“I miss you, arrogance and egotism and all! You do not have a good record of believing me but believe this. I miss you so much that, no matter how many times I augment myself, I am unable to get rid of this ache in my chest when I think of you and how you no longer occupy the space by my side. I want it to stop . I replace my heart, I modify my inhibitor – no matter what I do, what changes I make, every single time I fail. Failure, it always ends in failure! I just want it to stop .”
By the end of his tirade, he feels lightheaded, and his chest is heaving, which shouldn’t even be possible with the changes he made to his body. A voice in his head says that this outburst probably wasn’t doing him any favors and that he should calm down. This voice of reason sounds strangely like Naph. Naph doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Jayce blinks in surprise. “Uh, she’s not my daughter, V.”
What?
“What?”
Shifting awkwardly and looking away, Jayce says, “She’s not my kid. The little menace walked into my workshop one day demanding I fix her broken soldier toy, the day you send those chem-slaves to kill me, by the way. I haven’t been able to get rid of her since.” Viktor can tell that’s a lie. If Jayce really wanted her gone, she would’ve never seen him again.
Not waiting for a response, Jayce continues, moving back to meet Viktor’s stare. “And, well. You see, it’s kinda hard to go out and have a kid when you’ve been hung up on the same bastard for a decade.”
“Oh.”
Jayce sighs. “I’m pretty pathetic when it comes to you, you know. It’s obvious. Cait tells me, Vi tells me – hell, even Heimerdinger said something about it when I try to drink or work myself into a stupor to cope. Long story short, I’m still stupid when it comes to you, V, even after what we’ve done to each other this past decade. Have been and always will be, unfortunately.”
Viktor is having a lot of revelations today. Jayce doesn’t have a daughter? He missed Victor? He still… loved him, even after all that’s happened between them? His drunk mind can’t process all of this information in its current state. This feels too good to be true. “Ah, we should discuss this properly when we are not drunk or high off of sleep deprivation.”
“Sure,” Jayce shrugs. “We can hash the finer details out at a later date, but I’d really, really need to talk about this now. I know I fucked things up, but can we try again?”
Jayce slowly, hesitantly, raises a hand up to Viktor’s face, giving him ample time to stop this madness before it’s too late, but for some reason, Viktor doesn’t. The other man’s hand cups Viktor’s cheek, his thumbs absently stroking along his cheekbones, and Viktor hates the way he relaxes into his touch. He hates the shuddering sigh that escapes his lips. It’s too, too much for him all at once. The corners of Jayce’s mouth curl up into a smug smile at Viktor’s reaction.
Viktor curses these stupid feelings and this stupid man with his stupid smirk. He wants to kiss that stupid look off his face.
So he does just that.
It begins as an innocent press of lips. But it soon becomes clear that his partner intends to make this kiss filthier as his hands snake upwards and bury themselves in Viktor’s hair. Viktor’s hands flail around helplessly before he settles on resting them on Jayce’s hips, and the next thing he knows, Jayce yanks his head closer. A tongue swipes against the seam of his lips, so he opens his mouth, and now they’re kissing for real and his mechanical heart is beating so fast that he swears it’s on the verge of failure and–
Jayce pulls away abruptly, and Viktor lets out an involuntary whine at the loss of contact. “Did you get drunk off of laced sweetmilk or something?” The silence he receives is an answer in and of itself. “You know I hate the taste of anise!” He groans.
“Well excuse me, I was not exactly planning for this to happen,” Viktor snarks back.
“Ok, but why sweetmilk? You have so many options on how to get hammered, and you choose one of the worst ways possible.”
“It tastes good!” Viktor protests vehemently.
“Are you pouting? ” No, Viktor was not pouting. “It’s just a drink! A shitty one too!”
“I apologize that your taste is lacking.”
“Yeah, I have shitty taste – when it comes to men , apparently . ”
Their bickering stops abruptly as the two of them process the sheer absurdity of the situation. Here they are, the Machine Herald and the Defender of Tomorrow, one drunk and the other sleep-deprived, arguing over the fact that Viktor drinks alcoholic sweetmilk. They burst into a fit of giggles, leaning on each other when it's too hard to stand up on their own.
When their laughter dies away, Jayce whispers into Viktor’s ear, “I’ve missed this, I’ve missed you so much.”
“Me too.”
“Amaranthine, this is Viktor. Viktor, this is Amaranthine.” A little girl stands in front of Viktor. They’re in Jayce’s personal lab, far away from prying eyes. She’s tiny and blonde and probably seems adorable to anyone who isn’t Viktor. He extends a hand, and so does she after a moment of hesitation.
“Pleasure to meet you, Amaranthine,” he says politely.
“Likewise,” she replies with equal politeness. Out of the corner of his eye, Viktor can see Jayce nodding along approvingly. That stops when Amaranthine turns to Jayce and says, “So is this the guy you never shut up about?” Jayce talked about him?
“Amaranthine!” He cries in horror.
“What? It’s true!” She puts on her best impersonation of Jayce’s voice. “Every other day, it’s ‘my old partner would’ve loved this,’ or ‘he would laugh if he saw me now.’ Sometimes, when you’re drunk, it’s ‘god he’s so beautiful, I miss him so much I want to die.’ And just a few days ago, after your fight–”
A flush spreads across Jayce’s face, mirroring Viktor’s own. Jayce moves to clasp a hand over her mouth then jerks it away. “Did you just lick me?”
“Serves you right.”
Suddenly, the skylight shatters above them, a figure falling down through the opening. Jayce pulls Amaranthine in, covering her small body to protect her from the shards of glass raining down. It takes Viktor a second to process, and then he’s scrambling to catch the intruder.
“Naph!” He exclaims once the boy is safe in his arms. “What are you doing?!”
“I wanted to keep an eye on you. The last time you went to Piltover, you were drunk, and you came back super emotional.” Naph scrambles out of Viktor’s arms, finally noticing the two other people in the room. “Oh, it’s the guy on your mug and the girl from the newspaper.”
“You kept that?” Jayce asks incredulously as if he can’t fathom the possibility that Viktor still has anything from their time together. “I thought you hated that thing!”
“I…” Why is Naph doing this to him? “Yes. Yes, I did.” Deciding to get introductions done and over with, he says, “Amaranthine and Jayce, this is Naph, my…apprentice of sorts.”
“Are you back together again?” Naph pipes up.
Viktor holds back his protest at the implication that they were ever together in the first place. “We are.”
“Neat.” Naph grins, a mischievous glint entering his eyes. “Does that mean you’re finally taking down the Jayce wall?”
“The what? ”
“Oh my god,” Viktor groans, burying his head in his hands. Amaranthine gives him a consolatory pat on the arm.