Chapter Text
And I’ve been thinking
Of all the little things
That you’ve been missing,
When will you learn?
I could love you with my eyes closed,
Kiss you with a blindfold,
Figure you out.
(VOILÀ - Figure You Out)
Jayce never really knew what to make of the stories people like to tell about kindred spirits, people you’re so intimately familiar with that they could be a part of you, around whom you don’t need to finish your sentences because they know what you’re thinking anyway.
He’s always regarded it as a bit of a cultural white lie, similar to Santa Claus and happy endings. A nice idea that doesn’t exist outside of children’s hopes and dreams.
But everyone finds themselves proven wrong at some point.
When he and Viktor first start working together, Jayce concludes that there must be something to it after all.
Their shared enthusiasm is a vortex of late nights and hastily scribbled numbers on a chalkboard and “wait, I think I’ve got it!” and “holy shit, you’re right!”, an echo chamber that throws his own excitement back at him in a way he always wanted but never thought possible.
It’s an incredible feeling.
His lifelong passion, which has thrown a wedge in many a friendship over the years due to its obsessive nature, finally seems to build bridges rather than tear them down. That final glass wall between him and the social world he so easily visited but never felt quite at home in is the very thing that now locks the two of them in a shared headspace, and it is exhilarating.
Jayce is as singularly focused as he has been his entire life, but now there’s someone else in here with him.
It’s only natural that he would get curious about the man that made it all possible.
At first, Jayce thinks that that curiosity must be one-sided.
Whenever he asks a question or broaches a topic that doesn’t pertain to the science at hand, it’s not that Viktor doesn’t answer—he does, perfectly politely…but he remains very much on a surface level, either carefully guarded or simply disinterested in such distractions.
Or both.
“What was your family like?” Jayce asks him one day, both hands stuffed in his academy uniform pockets, bag over his shoulder and idly shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he waits for Viktor to gather his notebooks.
It’s not that they’re leaving because it’s already dark, that wouldn’t stop them. They’re only leaving because Heimerdinger got word from a concerned security guard that the light in these rooms seems to always be on throughout the night, and the sounds of minor explosions are getting unsettling.
Heimerdinger lectured them about lab safety and a work-life balance and both their eyes glossed over a little as he kept talking. He doesn’t get that this is their life. But ultimately they agreed to call it a night anyway, if just to get him off their backs.
“Oh? Well”, Viktor says, pushing one notebook down a little less than gently in his bag so that another can fit, “My mother was a seamstress, and my father worked in the factories.” He shrugs.
That doesn’t feel like it answers his question, but Jayce notes the past tense and his follow-up dries on his tongue. Okay then.
So the next thing he says pertains to the science.
Jayce learns that this doesn’t just happen with potentially sensitive topics, though.
It happens when he asks about Viktor’s hobbies (he doesn’t really have any, work takes up too much time), his experiences at the academy (he’s had decent grades and the people were pleasant), or what he’s planning to do with the rest of the day (not much, really, probably keep working on this formula).
Viktor is a master at responses that are short enough to not give much away, but not so short as to appear like he is trying to shut down the conversation.
He never once offers up anything on his own, and he never asks a question back.
It’s an odd, detached way of socializing that Jayce doesn’t quite know what to do with, and so at first he thinks that maybe Viktor just isn’t good at conversation, but that doesn’t quite sit right with how brilliant he knows the man to be.
So instead he concludes that Viktor simply doesn’t want to be his friend and he’s letting him down gently. Maybe Hextech really is the only thing he cares about and he can’t be bothered with social chit-chat or knowing Jayce as a person outside of their work. It stings a bit, but he can work with that.
Eventually though, slowly, Jayce learns that maybe he simply needs to be more patient.
It takes months, but ever so slowly Viktor begins to thaw around him. At first, he barely notices when Viktor casually mentions how the archaic grammar in this old tome reminds him of his mother’s native language.
Or when Jayce brings food to the lab—because gods know Viktor won’t—and he points at a chunky little pastry and explains that those sweetcakes are originally an invention of the undercity and he used to eat them sometimes as a special treat when he was little. They need almost nothing except flour and water, and some spices that grow natively down in the shadows.
“Though if you saw the plant, you would not be inclined to eat it,” Viktor says and takes a bite of the sweetcake Jayce offered to him. He hums with closed eyes, and for a moment he reminds Jayce of a purring cat.
He really picks up on the shift in demeanor when one day, after being stuck on the same problem for hours and finally accepting that perhaps they need a short break, Viktor asks him about his patronage with the Kirammans.
Jayce can’t quite hide his surprise, but he beams as he responds. He talks of his friendship with Caitlyn, how he wishes they were the same age so he wouldn’t have had to spend so much time with people he didn’t like in order to get through his school years, and all the little social niceties that her family had taught him over the years that now allow him to navigate the world of Piltover’s elite whenever he briefly crosses into it.
Viktor nods and asks polite follow-up questions between sips from his mug.
The conversation lasts much longer than Jayce ever would have expected it to.
“You’re absolutely fucking brilliant!”
It’s only barely the proof of concept for Hextech-based remote control, not even a prototype yet, but it works. The gems react to each other at a distance.
Viktor turns back to him with a small, sheepish smile and his ears a little pink at the compliment. “Eh, you almost had it anyway,” he says. “I just finished it.”
Jayce came in this morning after a night spent pinching his nose bridge in frustration at equations that wouldn’t work even though they should work and there was no reason why they wouldn’t work, and he was ready for another day of wanting to rip his hair out hunched over a textbook.
Instead, he came in to learn that a) Viktor hadn’t gone home, b) Viktor hadn’t even slept, and c) Viktor had found the solution.
The gem he turns in his hand glints, and the other one in the brass contraption on the other side of the room hums and visibly vibrates with the movement. One step closer to their hex-claw project, with its diagrams that fill pages upon pages of each of their notes.
“Shut up,” Jayce says, but there’s no malice in it. There wouldn’t even be any space for malice on his face, not with how wide his grin is. “You’re a goddamn genius, Viktor. Gods…” He shakes his head and huffs out a single laugh. “You didn’t just save my life, you also keep saving my life’s work when I’m too dense to do it myself.”
“Tch!” Viktor hisses and handwaves him away, but the little smile still plays around his lips as he turns back to the board, and when he looks at Jayce again later there’s something genuine and open in his expression that wasn’t there before.
After that, it becomes more obvious. Viktor goes into more detail when he does occasionally speak about himself, and he no longer stares transfixed at his notebook or the board while he does. He’s more comfortable asking questions and seems genuinely interested in the answers.
In general, a sense of ease and familiarity seems to permeate their lab as the months go by. They comfortably settle into the spaces the other leaves, they adjust to their respective idiosyncrasies, and piece by piece they slowly learn about what makes them each tick.
Viktor learns how Jayce likes his coffee (no milk, two sugar), Jayce learns that Viktor doesn’t like coffee and prefers to drink alarming amounts of sweetmilk instead.
He learns how to make sweetmilk.
His first attempts are atrocious, so eventually, when he stubbornly insists no no, let me, I got it, Viktor lets himself be dragged away from the board for a minute to teach him the right ratios, and after that, he no longer pulls a face when Jayce is the one to make their drinks in the morning.
Viktor learns that it’s best to just let Jayce rant when he’s frustrated, because arguing doesn’t work and he calms down quickly if he can just let it out, like a pressure cooker venting steam. Without even looking up he makes various sympathetic noises while Jayce paces the lab with steps that are a lot more forceful than necessary, and he no longer shrinks away from it.
The first few times he saw Jayce in this mood, he was guarded, careful, like a bird eyeing a cat and debating whether it was getting close enough to fly off to safety. As he got used to it though and learned to trust that Jayce wouldn’t turn his frustration to anything except perhaps the tiny bits of chalk he rubs to dust between his hands, he relaxed and learned to simply let it pass.
Sometimes he gets up in the middle of it and reappears a minute or two later with a cup of coffee, no milk, two sugar. He’s learned that when Jayce finds a gesture particularly sweet, he sometimes forgets that he was angry just a moment ago, and that way they can get back to work quicker.
Jayce learns that Viktor has better and worse days in terms of his pain levels, and he learns how to loosen his leg brace when it begins to chafe and pinch on days when Viktor’s back hurts with bending down.
“You don’t have to do that,” Viktor says on the first such day, with his face set and brows furrowed as if trying to solve a particularly difficult puzzle, though his eyes are trained on the blank wall.
“Hey, nonsense, come on. You’ve been wincing all day every time you move. I’m glad to help if I can.” He kneels on the floor by Viktor’s knee and hovers his hand over the brace, looking up to check Viktor’s face for permission. He nods but still refuses to meet Jayce’s eye.
“The buckles around the knee itself first,” he mutters. “Top one, then bottom.”
Eventually, he lets Jayce help him without protesting every single time, citing simple efficiency. It’s good enough for Jayce.
Viktor learns to interpret the many sighs and huffs and mumbles that Jayce makes over the course of any given day. He knows which sigh means to leave him alone, and which one means that he should come over to Jayce’s desk to take a look at what he’s working on and offer his opinion.
“Give me that,” he says then and gently pulls Jayce’s notes out from under his arm, flips through them with thoughtful hums. Sometimes he pulls his own chair up so they both sit at the same workbench and can go through the papers together to locate the issue.
When invitations to galas and networking events begin to come in, Viktor seems to know just by Jayce’s face as he reads the letter whether he wants to go or not—and whether he needs Viktor to come along.
He hates it, but sometimes he does anyway.
And Jayce learns that by the conventions of Viktor’s mother’s home country, the names and nicknames you address someone with aren’t just something one comes up with on a whim, they are specific. He calls him Vik one time, and Viktor reacts by shifting in his seat uncomfortably.
“Sorry,” Jayce says immediately, “I didn’t—”
“It’s Витя.”
“What?”
“Vitya. That is the diminutive for my name.” Viktor doesn’t look at him. “If you want to use one, use that.”
“Vitya,” Jayce repeats and his smile must be audible even to Viktor, who is still very intently studying the sweetmilk mug in his hands. “I like it, it suits you.”
So from then on, that is what Jayce uses more often than not when he speaks to Viktor in the privacy of their shared lab, which is most of the time.
Occasionally, when nights get particularly late and they can’t agree on the set-up of an experiment, they fight. They raise their voices, sometimes sweep papers off a desk or scratch a heavy line through their work on the blackboard, and sometimes they leave the room to cool off and slam the door behind them.
It never lasts long, though. They never get personal with it, and it doesn’t take them long to come back with a sheepish smile and an apology. They’re both comfortable admitting fault, which Jayce notes as something he doesn’t easily do for everyone.
Over time, Jayce begins to realize that while he’s had friends before, none of them have really seemed to get him the way Viktor does.
He would name Caitlyn as the one exception, but she’s a noblewoman’s daughter who only just turned sixteen a few weeks ago—they may be on the same wavelength, but there is still a disconnect there in terms of interests and their respective places in life. She is his little sister.
Viktor is his equal.
One time, Viktor points out how nonchalantly tactile Jayce is—an absent-minded observation while he’s chewing on his pencil as they’re both hunched over the same page in a dusty tome from the library.
Jayce is taken aback for a moment, but he considers it, and Viktor might be right.
He didn’t even realize how often he finds himself with a hand on Viktor’s shoulder, or nudging his arm aside so he can reach the chalk, or tapping his back in warning when it’s a tight squeeze to get past him so he doesn’t suddenly take a step back.
“Oh,” Jayce says, taking his hand from where it was resting on Viktor’s shoulder to stabilize himself—damning evidence. Instead, it wanders to rub the back of his own neck where it’s heating up with embarrassment. “I swear I don’t even notice I’m doing it. Sorry. I’ll try to uh…stop.”
Viktor glances over at him. “That’s not what I said.”
It happens when Jayce gets ready to leave that same night.
“I’m gonna head home,” he says as he grabs his keys. Viktor doesn’t look up right away; he seems preoccupied. “Vitya. You probably should, too. Come on, it’s really late.”
Jayce no longer bothers to gather all his things in a bag just to bring them back in the morning. Most of his stuff just stays here at this point. It’s no big deal, the only one who is ever in here is Viktor anyway.
Viktor, who turns around in his chair as Jayce shrugs on his coat, and regards him thoughtfully and with an intensity that feels a little out of place.
Jayce stills. “What? Did I forget something?” His eyes dart around the room—library books, but those don’t have to be returned until the end of the week. Chalk and pens and notebooks and the briefcase with the Hextech gems they’ve refined. Nothing out of the ordinary.
When he looks back to Viktor, he has gathered his cane and pulls himself to his feet, his expression still unreadable. Jayce frowns as Viktor crosses over to him in two decisive steps, and opens his mouth to ask again what the problem is when Viktor’s free hand lightly grabs the edge of the coat.
“Wh—”
“Tell me,” he says quietly. “if I’m gravely misunderstanding something here.”
And Viktor leans in, lightly pulling Jayce down by his coat, and he kisses him.
Jayce short-circuits.
Viktor’s lips are a little dry and chapped and they only press on his for a brief second or two, so much softer than he would have expected. More a question than anything else, before he pulls back to search Jayce’s eyes for the answer.
And Jayce stands completely frozen. He knows his shoulders must be tense and his eyes must be wide, and he can’t even bring himself to close his mouth for a second. He’s reeling.
What?
Has he misunderstood this whole thing? His sluggish, frozen mind tries its damn best to rake through the memories of the past days, weeks, months, as a vague sense of panic slowly claws its way up. Has…Viktor ever mentioned an interest in men? Hell, in anyone?
He knows Piltovian culture doesn’t much care about fixed definitions around patterns of attraction, but still, Viktor would have somehow mentioned…it would have come up at some point if he preferred men, wouldn’t it?
Has Viktor been flirting with him, has…shit, has Jayce been flirting without even noticing? It wouldn’t be the first time his actions were read as something they weren’t intended to be.
He feels like someone dropped a boulder into his stomach from a great height. Did he fuck this up?
Oh gods, did he royally fuck this whole thing up?
It sure looks like it, if Viktor’s face is any indication. Whatever he is looking for in Jayce’s gaze, he clearly doesn’t find it. His eyes widen for a moment—shock, embarrassment? Fear, even?—before something in his face changes. He lets go of Jayce’s coat and takes a step back, straightening as though steeling himself.
“I’m very sorry,” he says, and it sounds heavy, like the echo of a door falling shut. “It seems I really have…gravely misunderstood.”
That finally manages to get Jayce out of feeling like a deer in headlights and thaws his words—except now, it feels like they all want to come gushing out at the same time.
“No no, I’m— I’m sorry. Clearly I— Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” He takes a deep breath and tries desperately to sort his thoughts into something resembling a logical order.
When he was fifteen, Jayce had his first girlfriend. Her name was Aria, and Jayce blushed every time she kissed him, in that clumsy, experimental way teenagers do in their first relationship.
He never wanted to do anything else ever again.
They dated for a few months, and Jayce wanted to marry her.
When his friends spoke of boys, he never understood.
“I just, I’m not— I don’t like men like that.” His face burns. “I’m sorry if I—”
Viktor shakes his head and takes another small step back. “You did nothing wrong, Jayce. I apologize for overstepping. I, eh…jumped to conclusions. It was my mistake.”
The look on his face makes something seize in Jayce’s chest. For a moment it evokes a feeling reminiscent of being handed something fragile and dropping it, that moment of staring at the shards on the floor in silent horror as it dawns on you what you’ve done.
As quickly as the feeling comes, though, it passes, and the hurt seems to wipe off Viktor’s face. Or maybe it just retreats inside.
Jayce doesn’t want to think about that.
He rubs the back of his neck with one hand, trying a careful, sheepish smile. “Nothing to apologize for,” he says, and he hopes his attempt at a light-hearted tone doesn’t sound too forced. “Are…are we good?”
Viktor gives a small smile of his own, but it looks wrong. “Of course. We can just forget about it. A lapse in judgment on my part.”
“Yeah, for sure! No big deal, I promise,” Jayce says maybe a little too quickly. He won’t hold it against Viktor, of course he won’t. It’s fine, it happens—this kind of thing is only awkward if you make it awkward, and Jayce is determined not to be that guy.
He leaves the lab quickly after that and promises to be back in the morning in a voice that’s perhaps a little too strained to be upbeat.