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“So?” Jayce returns to his gadgetry without a second glance, as if ignoring the Machine Herald would render him merely an apparition borne from sleepless nights and uncomfortably long bouts of staring at old photos. It’s disturbingly close to the actual truth that he faces during these prolonged sessions spent alone in his forge.
(It’s far from ideal, but recently, Jayce has been trying to avoid fixing things that aren’t broken.)
Viktor’s doing the ‘looming over him ominously’ thing again, and it really works wonders in the harsh red lighting of the furnace embers; however, the villainous image shatters at once as he grunts, “I’ve been unable to pleasure myself for the past three weeks.”
Jayce fleetingly thinks back to their foray into experimental time travel, barely one year into Hextech’s conception; the two of them leaning against one another, nearly cheek to cheek, pouring over ancient, possibly illegal tomes; arguing over inertial axes and body axes, and whether or not they had to factor in planetary orbit; connecting way too many power cells in series with one another, with not one single regard for safety. It had all came to an end when they nearly wiped out half of the campus (from complete existence or from the current timeline, they still argue over), but ultimately, what Heimerdinger didn’t know didn’t hurt him.
Anyways. Jayce wishes that their time machine had worked, wishes he could rewind a half hour into the past and deadbolt all of his windows and doors, barring Viktor from soliciting this conversation in the first place.
Jayce takes a deep breath in, holds it until his lungs burn for release—wonders briefly if Viktor is able to override his body’s natural mechanisms to breathe, to sleep, to abide by socially accepted boundaries—and exhales, weary and downtrodden, like a dog facing life’s greatest challenges of eating kibble and endlessly chasing its own tail.
“Again, so?” His thin veneer of nonchalance is unraveling at the seams, but he only needs to hold out longer than Viktor. Viktor, who hates repetitive answers above all else, acutely aware of the recursive trap that his circuitry-abridged neurons will fall into if Jayce just keeps feeding him the same useless inputs over and over.
Viktor’s processor fans whir with a fervent intensity as he computes his next action. Eventually, he settles on, “I need your help.”
“No.”
“Please,” he tacks on, monotonous, synthetic vocals verging on annoyance, and Jayce laughs out loud.
“No. I’m busy with other things, V.” Most of the things taking up his attention lately are intangible, much to Jayce’s displeasure. Things like yearning, and memories, and dreams, and worst of all, guilt. Things that drive him down into the forge to bang away at them until he can mold them into something useful: like rage, or in this case, a new hammer attachment that increases his range of fire.
“No you’re not,” accuses Viktor, brandishing his staff angrily, like—like he used to with his cane. Jayce blinks away the errant thought. “You finished that concentrator over an hour ago. You’ve just been sitting there, staring at it.”
A frustrated groan rattles out of Jayce’s chest. “Alright, I’m not busy. I just don’t want anything to do with your dick.” Which is the most bold-faced lie he has ever uttered in his life, and both he and Viktor know it. From top-to-bottom, Jayce wants many things to do with Viktor’s dick, starting with his mouth and ending in his ass. He presses his lips together in flustered embarrassment and hopes it passes off as irritation.
Viktor… there's no doubt about it, Viktor rolls his eyes, the amber glow flickering up and to the side before settling back down to bore into Jayce's retinas some more. Good to know he didn’t touch the brain tissue that made him an asshole. “There’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
Jayce narrows his eyes. “No.”
A familiar head tilt. “It’s my birthday?” The harmonics lilt up at the end, unsure.
“Three months ago it was,” Jayce shoots back, jaw set in stubborn determination. He can’t lose, he can’t lose, he can’t—
“But you didn’t get me anything.”
—and he’s fucking lost, because there’s that rumbling, rasping accent that Jayce misses so much, the shortened, clipped vowels squeezed between warbling consonants. The distortion is turned down to the barest whisper of static, and if Jayce closes his eyes, he can imagine Viktor’s bare face next to his, downturned with a pout, eyes brimming with unshed tears because he sounds so fucking sad.
Of course I didn’t get you anything, yells the not-whipped part of his brain, which grows increasingly smaller by the day, you burnt down my research labs and laughed about it, you piece of shit.
Jayce flaps his mouth like a fish, struggling to come up with a response that doesn’t make him out to be a complete jackass. (He’s been working on it, lately, with Cait’s approval.) His mind, in all of its innovative brilliance, comes up empty.
Jayce sighs, folding his hands and looking away in defeat. “I’ll take a look at it.” Viktor perks up noticeably, not seeming the least bit upset about his lack of birthday present. Jayce should probably be more concerned about his lingering affections being weaponized by the enemy, but files it away as a problem to deal with later.
A long-tortured part of his mind, the part he reserves for Viktor alone, the part that’s perpetually tired, confused, and horny—it wakes up now, a little earlier in the night than usual; it conjures a pleasant, comforting image of Viktor sliding off his trousers, his smooth legs stepping through the confines of linen, his undergarments already spotting a damp patch from excitement, and his tremorous accent, pleading, Jayce, please touch me—
To Jayce’s unfathomable horror, Viktor reaches into his pocket instead.
“Oh my god!” Jayce’s voice does not go up an octave. He does not shriek and jump away in terror from his former colleague slash ex-lover slash now mortal enemy. “What the fuck, Viktor,” he does not scream, and it does not echo through his forge, a piercing, eerie wail of shock and frankly, betrayal.
The Machine Herald looks down at the… at the detached organ plaintively, turning it uselessly in his hands. “I made it modular.”
“Why?” Jayce is not freaking out. Viktor appears to be taken aback, insofar as one can appear to be anything while wearing a solid mask forged from steel and mesh. Viktor backtracks physically, the thing in his hand flopping this way and that, and another hysterical noise escapes Jayce’s throat.
“Are you alright?” asks Viktor, with concern that’s unintentionally mocking in its earnestness, as if he isn’t standing there, holding his fucking cock in his hands like a hotdog from one of those generic Progress Day food stalls that Jayce loves so much.
Jayce’s world grows a little dimmer at the comparison. Never again. He’ll never enjoy another Progress Day dog for as long as he lives without acquiring a degenerative brain disorder that eats away at the neural pathways leading him to this very moment.
Jayce knows he has a flair for the melodramatic, with his sighs and eyerolls and facepalms and weak stomach. But for the first time in his life, he doesn’t think he’s able to properly match the sheer extent of the twisting, writhing, vulgar dread that is currently flowing through every inch of his body.
If I killed him, I wouldn’t have to deal with this anymore. It’s a deliciously irrational thought, a visceral hallmark of fight-or-flight instinct, and every time he catches the long line of it in his peripherals, his conviction to follow through with violence increases tenfold. His fingers shake with the itch to wrap around the handle of the Mercury Hammer and swing while Viktor’s impassive mask looks on, blissfully unaware of this wretched mental undoing.
Alright, so maybe he is up to feeling dramatic enough. Jayce resets, for both their sakes; deep, deep, deep down, he knows he’d eventually regret murdering Viktor, regardless of the temporary peace of mind it would bring him. He takes a steadying, calming, centering breath, just like how his mom taught him to at the age of fifteen, back when he had far too many opinions and not nearly enough frontal cortex development, and tries not to scream.
(keyword: tries.)
“WHY DID YOU DO THAT,” he asks Viktor, in the utmost neutral tone he can muster in his current state of world-ending disarray.
“You’re upset,” Viktor observes, astute as ever, his head tilting a few degrees to the left. His right, Jayce’s left.
Jayce breaks down Viktor’s headshot into every excruciating detail—the lock of gray hair that licks up near Viktor’s right (his left, Jayce’s right) temple, the slight lean to his sloping figure, a puzzlingly persistent force of habit ever since his bad leg (Viktor’s right) had been replaced years ago; the way his dramatically tattered cape is tossed across his shoulders, exposing too much of the right one (who fucking cares whose left or right it is, Jayce, look down, LOOK AT HIS HANDS, HE’S HOLDING HIS
“NO I’M NOT,” Jayce denies, the perfect picture of stoicism with his gritted teeth and white knuckles and forehead vein threatening to burst.
Viktor blinks at him, owlish. “You should sit down. Your body is about to experience vasovagal syncope.”
“Vasovagal syncope,” Jayce parrots back, and yes, his vision is swimming, “Just say I’m about to faint, you pretentious dick.” He does sit down, because Viktor is right—he’s one downward glance away from succumbing to the sweet, sweet void of unconsciousness, and he’d rather not field test his body’s ability to crumple without landing on his face. Cait would never let him live it down if he broke his nose from passing out twice.
The back of the chair wedges painfully into the nape of his neck as he avoids looking at Viktor, gaze turned up and away into the shadows murmuring along the forge’s high ceiling. “I’m not touching that,” Jayce says to the ceiling, dragging a beleaguered hand down his face.
“I didn’t ask you to,” Viktor’s careful tone is reminiscent of a handler calming a skittish horse, if the handler had torn out their vocal cords and replaced them with synthetic elastomer bands.
Against all of his better judgment, Jayce peeks through his fingers. Fights a full body shiver and a hysterical laugh threatening to eek out of him like plumes of smoke from a chem-factory tower.
He can do this. For his old friend, he can do this.
“Tell me what’s wrong with it. Don’t,” his voice breaks, but it’s a necessary evil, given that Viktor had nearly taken a step to bring that thing closer to him for demonstration purposes, “Just… tell me. Using words.”
Viktor huffs in half-amusement, half-indignation, but stops in his tracks as Jayce asks. “The ejaculation process is not working as intended. I suspect there is an issue with the valve actuation for the vas deferens or epididymis."
Jayce vaguely remembers some of those terms, and the implication of them being said by Viktor is enough to make his cheeks flush, humiliating as this whole thing is; he throws an entire arm over his face for good measure to hide his expressions from the biomedical onslaught. "So you're only having issues with, with the, uh, byproducts? You can still feel all of the… desired sensations?"
"You're asking if I can still orgasm?"
Jayce doesn't rise to the bait. He lets the silence linger and fester in the air between them until it borders on awkward and suffocating and weird. He knows that Viktor knows that he knows that Viktor's full of shit.
"The answer is no," Viktor says eventually, "I can feel some modicum of arousal, and it gets erect, but I am unable to progress from there. It's quite frustrating."
Jayce chews on the inside of his cheek, and opens his mouth to respond—
Jayce, Jayce, Jayce, Viktor would chant in his ear, like a hymn, like a prayer, hands twisted in sheets as he bucks against the thick fingers relentlessly working him open. Jayce's other hand pins him at his waist, slipping against the sheen of sweat and spit and slick.
Not yet, V, he would croon back, breath ragged, nosing into Viktor's damp curls and inhaling the heady scent of his lust, all pine and smoke. He crooks his fingers, massaging familiar circles until Viktor tightens around him, his whole body jolting with a stuttered, a-ah!
You're doing so good, he pants, kissing up the severe ridge of Viktor's collarbone, free hand letting go to finally jerk himself off in tandem, painfully erect from the sight alone. Come on, V.
He watches like a hawk for the telltale signs, as Viktor's chest heaves with gasping, stuttered breaths; as his hips rut obscenely against Jayce's fingers; as his darkened eyes, pin pricked with tears, flutter beatifically—
Jayce withdraws from him completely, and Viktor sobs like he's dying.
Jayce frantically squeezes his own cock, thumbs the slit until release, letting out a wounded, drawn-out groan as he makes a mess of Viktor's stomach. His body is nearly numb from pleasure, and he has half a mind to pass out right then and there.
In a haze of postcoital bliss, he looks down at Viktor, gorgeous, perfect Viktor, and thinks he looks breathtaking like this, all sharp planes of flushed skin and quivering limbs and pathetically leaking cock.
He must have been drinking in the sight for longer than he intended, because Viktor's lungs punch out a soft and broken, please, Jayce.
The corners of his lips tug up into a smile, tender, loving. Alright. Let me help you feel good. His calloused palms slide up the smooth expanse of Viktor's thighs, catching trails of sweat and release.
But Jayce must have misjudged the timing, because he never gets to follow through with his promise. Viktor shakes like a leaf, wet lips parted in a breathless moan, and tips over the edge with his cock completely untouched—
NOW'S NOT THE TIME, Jayce screams internally, chasing away the thoughts like stray cats with a broomstick. Arousal takes a seat to anger, which shifts into much more familiar self-loathing. Why? Why does this happen to him?
"Jayce?"
Great. Even Viktor sounds uncomfortable, which probably means he's just been standing there in prolonged silence while Jayce fantasized about having sex with him, again.
Jayce squeezes his eyes shut from behind his arm and wishes he were dead. Maybe violence is the answer. He would take violent urges over whatever the fuck his miswired brain seemed hellbent on churning out these days.
"I know you haven't fallen asleep, Jayce. You'd be snoring."
He clears his throat in a facsimile of put togetherness, racks his brain for something smart to say that doesn’t fall along the lines of, I miss us, can we please start fucking and maybe kissing again, or I don’t really mind the augments. Actually, I find them kind of hot. "Wouldn't that mean it's an issue with your prostate? Ejaculation and orgasm are separate from each other. If it were a valve issue, you'd still be able to climax."
Viktor hums, but it’s actually more of a screech of dissonant chords, flats and sharps combining to create a truly unholy noise, and Jayce winces at the way his eardrums throb. “I’ve been having trouble with consistently replicating the problem via prostate stimulation,” there’s a pause, a full bar rest that goes up in flames with the rest of the sheet music when Viktor says, “I figured you had more expertise in this area, actually.”
Jayce falls backwards out of the chair. The impact of his skull against stone doesn't kill him immediately, which is disappointing on so many levels.
Viktor doesn't rush to his side, probably because his sensors can already detect his breathing patterns or brain activity levels or some other bullshit like that.
"Viktor," he groans from the ground, head aching from both physical and emotional blunt force trauma. "are you fucking with me right now?"
The Machine Herald crosses his arms, still holding his dick in one hand like a bottle of water. The bastard. Jayce wants to strip him down for parts and make him beg. "Possibly."
Jayce sucks in a breath. “As much as I would love to collaborate with you on this joint venture, the current circumstances are not to my liking.”
More whirring fans. “Accommodations can be arranged.”
"I'm not comfortable with doing anything with you until you deal with that." He eyes the offending member warily.
Viktor tilts his head, and Jayce is man enough to admit that he finds it endearing. "You mean that you want it reattached?"
Jayce stares at the sideways image of him, uncomprehending, because of course? What other options for sex—
It hits Jayce with all of the sudden force of an airship, and he nearly gags. "Actually, nevermind,” he says, vehemently embarrassed and hopelessly turned on past the point of plausible deniability. “Don’t contact me further about this.”
Viktor bristles in his armor. Jayce knows him well enough to recognize his fucked up version of giggling. “But—”
“Get out, Viktor.” He needs to find a wall to bash his skull in by yesterday. He closes his eyes to sleep, perchance to dream, and doesn't see the Machine Herald slip out from the forge with a polite wave goodbye using his hexclaw.
“I’ll update you tomorrow, then.”