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It happens the way it always happens, but differently this time. Viktor climbing down the stairs, one shoulder hitched high, and then the tip of his cane slipping off the step, his arm thrown wide, fingers splayed on the wall—but no purchase this time, and he falls.
For years after Jayce will blame himself for this, standing paralyzed, the red dash of blood on the step the same bright color as his terror.
Somehow he never thought anything could happen to Viktor. Viktor, his lover, his angel, the man who saved his life.
—
He looks small in the hospital bed, poorly wrapped, like a child’s present. The gauze wadded around his head, his slender fingers shaking between Jayce’s. They’re cool in his hands as he sits by the bed, raising them constantly to his lips. The faint smell of his soap.
Jayce wants to brush his hair from his face but he’s terrified of all that blood. In his dreams he strokes Viktor’s head and the gauze falls away and the color is infinite, the damage unspools and unspools. He whimpers, kissing Viktor’s hands again.
And his eyes open, just a slice of gold, and before they close Jayce wishes he could climb inside, like walking through a door.
—
He’s different, afterwards.
The way he holds himself is different, the shape of his face is different, still swollen, and the color of his eyes is different too, cooler, more distant. His hip is bruised and the hospital gives him a crutch, and measuring him for a better one is the first time Jayce notices it, how hesitant he is to be touched. He doesn’t like it when Jayce settles a warm hand on his thigh, when he touches Viktor’s shoulder, when he gets too close—not close for Jayce, not close for Jayce-and-Viktor, this wonderful single unit they’ve formed, always laughing and grinning and postulating and humming with interest, but close. For a stranger, maybe.
Viktor’s able to work the way he always does, a little tired but competent, thoughtful, witty. If he looks a little blank sometimes in conversation it doesn’t matter, he’s recovering, he’s injured. If he keeps to himself in their apartment, stays in his room—he’s sick. If his shoulders fall slightly when Jayce addresses him, if he looks at Jayce with the hint of a forced smile, if his face seems wary and expectant like a student waiting for a pop quiz, if there’s something wrong with Viktor—
If—
There’s something wrong with Viktor.
—
“Nothing,” Jayce repeats.
“Well, no,” he says. He plucks at a crease in his pants. “Not really.”
“Nothing at all,” Jayce says.
“I know that we’re, ah. Partners,” Viktor says, very delicately. “And I know the mechanics of this, eh, Hextech theory of yours—”
“Viktor,” he says, desperate. He thinks if Viktor doesn’t stop talking he’ll cry.
“Apologies,” Viktor says, ducking his head. “Beyond theory and well into application. And I have obviously been working with you as long as you say, if the work is so, eh—mechanical for me at this point. Quite rote. But I can’t say I remember you, Jayce, no.”
Even the way he says Jayce, the creeping sense of something wrong in it, like someone else dressing in his clothes. Jayce presses the heel of his hand to his eye.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he says flatly. “Viktor, I think we should take you back to the hospital.”
Viktor’s lips thin.
“You say that like you’re returning a defective product.”
“Obviously not,” Jayce says. “I’m returning my… partner,” he says, to the hospital. “For further medical care.”
“I just left,” Viktor says sadly. It makes Jayce’s heart crack.
“Don’t say it like that, V,” he pleads.
“I’m getting better,” Viktor says. “I remember more here than I ever did in the hospital.” He gestures emphatically at the lab, the projects he’s started, the ones he’s finished for a person he doesn’t remember. “I don’t know what good it does me to sit in a little white room all day.”
And he loves that look, Viktor’s confident look, but there’s something a little wild in it.
“Viktor—” he tries.
“If you know me half as well as you say,” Viktor says, “you know that I’m not so incapable. Let me try this my way. I’m confident it’s working.”
And Jayce, too sick with the idea of only half-knowing Viktor, doesn’t fight.
—
He doesn’t mention their relationship. How could he? Viktor can’t even remember Jayce’s last name, the way he sets his desk, the way he used to take his own coffee for God’s sake. How could Jayce give him anything else? It feels somehow exploitative.
And maybe Viktor’s changed his mind.
He doesn’t know how to feel about it sometimes, watching Viktor, watching himself love Viktor. The way he holds his pens, the callouses on his fingers; the snag of his crooked tooth when he smiles; the soft way he hums to himself as he works, stopping when he finds something curious; the sharp red marks left by his googles, like someone is annotating Viktor, marking everything he loves. The warm flicker of his eyes when Jayce walks in, that loving moment followed by disinterest, as if he isn’t who Viktor expected him to be.
And the moment before the flicker fades, when Viktor is exactly who Jayce expected him to be.
—
He tries to remember everything Viktor loves. It’s hard, because Viktor loves so much. The radio dramas that play in the evenings that Viktor listens to attentively over dinner; the horribly boring card game Jayce always seems to lose at; the sun-yellow flowers Viktor always pauses to smell at the market stall, smiling to himself, some secret pleasure. He showed Jayce once the game his grandmother taught him, holding the flower under your chin to see if your skin has a buttery shadow. “Ah yes, I see it,” Viktor said wisely, tucking the flower into Jayce’s breast pocket.
“See what?”
“It means you’re in love,” Viktor said, and kissed his ear.
So he sets up the radio; he fishes the pack of cards out of the back of his desk; he buys a bouquet of yellow flowers and then, on reflection, two. Viktor walks in looking vaguely ambushed.
“Did someone die?”
“No,” Jayce says. “God no. I just thought it would be, you know.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Nice.”
“Nice,” Viktor repeats. He drops his satchel and walks over to the flowers, arranging them a little. Something tender in the movement, like a mother combing her child’s hair. Jayce watches for a while, transfixed.
There’s a memory here, for Jayce if not for Viktor. Lying on his stomach in bed, feeling Viktor’s hand settle between his shoulder blades, sliding up to play with his hair. The soft evening light, the fresh air from the open balcony, the feeling of complete safety, complete in the way a circle is complete, natural, whole.
In a way he doesn’t think he felt safe at all until he knew Viktor.
“What’s their name?” he asks hopefully. “The flowers.”
“Hm?” Viktor says, turning his head. “Ah. You wouldn’t know it.”
—
“I think I want to go home,” Viktor says one night.
They’re in the lab, it’s nearly eight, and if he’s surprised Viktor wants to leave so early he doesn’t show it, pushing his goggles up. “Okay, V,” he says. “Just give me three minutes to finish the frame.”
Viktor looks at him oddly. It takes Jayce a while to figure out what he means.
“Oh,” he says. “You mean like—”
“It’s been a long time,” Viktor says patiently. “A long time to live in another city, in someone else’s apartment.” He misreads the expression on Jayce’s face. “A lovely apartment,” he says. “It’s just not mine.”
“Of course,” Jayce says blankly.
“I’d like to rent my own place for a while, in the Undercity,” he says. “To connect with my roots. I feel there are so many missing pieces, but more than anything I feel this sense of rootlessness.” His fingers tighten slightly, soft fists. “And it’s maddening, really, because I can almost feel the shape of what’s missing, the emptiness, but I don’t know the shape that fits.” He shakes his head a little, embarrassed. “Not to sound too…”
“No,” Jayce says. “I know what you mean.” He clears his throat. “The missing part. I get it.”
Viktor’s forehead creases, then smoothes.
“Ah!” he says. “Yes, of course. You were a refugee too.”
Jayce smiles at him wanly.
“Yeah, Vik,” he says. “You remembered.”
—
He thinks he’s dying. He thinks this is exactly what it feels like to die, packing all Viktor’s memories into a box.
He’s kept a few things, the too-much things, the secret gestures—a book on dirigibles with an overly sincere dedication on the inside cover, a few pressed flowers, a sketchbook full of doodles passed back and forth, Viktor’s rail-thin body and Jayce’s absurdly inflated head. “I love you, though,” Viktor said, ruffling his hair. The photocopied Zaunish poem he was so proud to find, the one Viktor once got drunk enough to tell him was terrible, only to write another one in pen on the back when he got marginally drunker. “It doesn’t rhyme,” Viktor said, slurring a little.
He’s kept a few things; but the rest of it goes away box by box, harder than the shock of losing it all at once, harder than the shock of losing Viktor all at once. The sight of Viktor’s neatly folded shirts makes him want to cry. He does, a little, into his hand.
The things Viktor was so attuned to before, always noticing, and the terrible thing is the way Jayce can still see him almost remember now, his lips barely parted, his hand nearly stretching out, before it doesn’t, and he doesn’t speak, and in a series of invisible negotiations seems to forget that he noticed at all. But Jayce remembers the way Viktor used to walk up behind him, the comforting tap of his cane, the space between his steps, his cool hand on Jayce’s shoulder.
Viktor always seemed to speak the most that way, with just a gesture. Something deeper than speech.
“I’ll always be grateful to you,” he says in the car, holding a potted plant in his lap. “And I’ll keep in touch.”
“Yeah,” Jayce says numbly. “If you want to.”
“It may only be a few months,” he says. “It may be longer. I think it will be good for my memory, being in a familiar place. Working on my own projects.”
Hextech was your own project, Jayce doesn’t say.
He waits for a long time in the parking lot after the boxes are unloaded, watching the steam curl from the car. Winter night, the exhaust almost white in the dark, and Viktor’s slouched figure walking away, shoulder hitched.
It feels like looking through the small end of a telescope, watching someone who used to mean everything to him start to disappear.
—
Eight days later, Viktor calls him in the middle of the night.
“Vik?” he slurs.
“I think I am, eh,” Viktor says. “Having a panic attack.”
Jayce drives over, still half asleep, the phone tucked under his ear. “Just keep talking to me, okay?” he says. “Name three things you can see.”
“I can’t see anything,” Viktor says faintly. “Should I turn on the light?”
“No, baby,” he says. “You don’t have to turn on the light. How about three things you can hear?”
Silence for a while.
“The cars on the street,” Viktor says. “The radiator. The sound of your breathing.”
Jayce almost takes the door off trying to get in. Viktor gets it open in the dark, keys dropping from his shaky hands as Jayce sweeps him up.
“V,” he breathes, holding him. He kisses a loose curl. “God.”
He turns on the light, guides Viktor to the kitchen table by the hand and deposits him there carefully. Jayce turns on the radio, just low enough to make out voices, and puts the kettle on. “You’re out of that tea you like,” he says, and Viktor wets his lips.
“What tea do I like?” Viktor asks.
“The one with the, ah—” he makes a gesture with his hands. “Red packet. The woman in her bonnet on the cover.”
“That’s not a bonnet.”
“I’m not very good with fashion details.”
He settles down next to Viktor at the table, pressing a mug into his hands. Something that smells like cinnamon. For a long time he watches Viktor drink. It’s hard not to kiss the top of his head.
“V,” he says finally. “Why did you call?”
Viktor holds his mug a little closer to his chest.
“It made me think of you,” he says. “That you had them. Or perhaps that I had them, and you… helped.” He glances away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “There’s a lot I’ve forgotten.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Jayce says. “I’m just—glad you called.”
Viktor quirks his mouth.
“At two in the morning?”
“At two in the morning,” Jayce says. “Or three, or four, or seven at night. Doesn’t matter to me, really.”
He looks at Viktor, too earnestly.
“You loved me,” Viktor says. He says it calmly, not a hypothesis but something known, a plain little fact like the laws of motion.
Jayce shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “I love you.”
Viktor turns his face for a moment, a sliver of light from the door catching his jaw. He breathes out with the slow reluctance of a smoker. Then he touches Jayce’s hand.
“I think I could learn to love you,” he says softly. “I think I’m already learning.”
—
He holds Viktor to his chest all night, too afraid to let go, and in the morning Viktor kisses his ear and murmurs some small, lovely word Jayce doesn’t catch.
“The flowers,” Viktor says, and kisses him again.