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Really—Jayce thinks, as he closes his eyes to meet his fate—really, they should have seen this coming.
“Here’s a thought experiment,” says Viktor. His eyes flash with mischief before dimming to their usual, inscrutable amber. Behind him is a blackboard filled to every corner with equations, notes, and drawings. He shouldn’t be standing so much.
They’re stuck, as they often are, these days. Problem solving takes time, and truly innovative brilliance rarely strikes in quick fashion. They’re awake in the early moments before dawn on the off chance that it’ll catch them sooner rather than later.
“Philosophy, V? Or science?”
“Humour me either way.”
Jayce decides to humour him. He yawns, settles on the oversized, plush chaise lounge they dragged into the lab as a joke, and waves his hand vaguely. Go on, in a gesture.
Viktor hums a single, quiet sound. With a dramatic flick of his wrist, the front-most blackboard slides to the left, revealing the board beneath. It’s their brainstorming board, for bored brainstorming. Among the scribbles are hints of their combined genius, but also half-formed scrawls like HEX-OATS: PART OF A BALANCED BREAKFAST.
“Consider this.” His accent curls lazily around the syllables, just as his gloved fingers around the piece of white chalk. With his knuckles, he swipes away a hastily-drawn cartoon of his own face. Jayce makes a small noise of protest—he thought it had been quite good. Better than Viktor’s own stick-figure Jayce with its tongue out, anyhow.
In its place, a crude sketch of an airship materializes through quick, messy strokes.
“Consider a ship.” Jayce doesn’t usually make a habit of restating the obvious, well familiar with his partner’s usual irritation for the redundant. But it’s worth it to see the corner of his mouth twitch up, to see the quirk of those dark eyebrows.
“Just so,” Viktor nods. “Imagine it belongs to you. Then—”
The hull blows open with chalky, scattered violence. Viktor snaps his fingers, and powder drifts from the fabric to the floor.
Jayce mimics the sound of an explosion. “Boom.”
The minute eye-roll Viktor shoots his way is also worth it. With another piece of chalk, a royal purple this time, he redraws the hull.
“You replace the broken parts. Is it the same ship that originally belonged to you?”
“Yes, obviously,” Jayce blinks.
“Obviously,” Viktor echoes.
Then, he swipes at the white outline until it’s nothing more than a smudge.
“Darling.” Jayce does this sometimes—calls the other man by annoying pet names with the worst possible imitation of his accent. The slight tinge of pink on pale skin is, unsurprisingly, worth it as well. “You killed it.”
“Ah-ah,” tsks the man. With careful movements, he redraws the ship in purple chalk, easing it back into existence. “Over the years, your subpar navigation skills spell doom for the vessel, and you replace every part, piece by piece.”
Jayce snorts, ignoring the jab. “Is this the same ship that originally belonged to me?”
It’s always so easy to finish Viktor’s sentences. His mind is a well-structured, sturdy bookcase, with shelves and compartments available, all neatly labelled. Not predictable, necessarily, but entirely possible to follow, given a slight effort.
The corner of Viktor’s mouth twitches upwards again. “Well?”
What am I, he’d asked. Unspoken were the corollary questions: how, why. But between the vowels lay the truth of the demand, which Jayce shut his ears to, slamming every door closed to trap himself in the undisputed, glorious relief of the moment. Who am I?
You’re alive. And wasn’t that just grand? Wasn’t that always the goal? Viktor, alive.
“I find your premise faulty,” Jayce declares, after a moment’s thought. “Or your question. Maybe both.”
“Explain.”
Viktor takes his usual seat by the board, settling down with a stifled grimace. The movement is enough to send Jayce down a familiar path. He welcomes rage with the acknowledgement of an old friend. He reaches for retribution, the kind that could devour planets. In this state, he finds calm.
“Well, first, on whether this is the same ship,” he says, lying back against the seat to feign relaxation. “Of course it isn’t, physically—but that would have been the case even moments after I initially acquired it. Materials deteriorate over time.”
“And the material reality is insufficient evidence to make your judgement?” A lightness weaves its way into Viktor’s tone, music to Jayce’s ears.
“I’m saying the material reality is irrelevant to the determination,” he counters. “It’s not the body of the ship that counts, but the ownership over it. Hah,” his brain makes a small, humorous ding. “Ownership. Own a ship.”
“Darling,” Viktor mimics. Jayce turns his head to shoot him a grin that probably looks insane. “Focus.”
He’s been losing weight. Viktor, that is. In the eerie dawn, the shadows of his bones are sharp enough to cut, and his skin pulls and sags wanly around them. The smile falls off Jayce’s mouth, bit by bit, until he’s only left with his bottom lip beneath the edge of his canines. That, too, slides into a careful mask of neutrality. Pity earns him no points.
“The ship,” he says. “It’ll be the same one I hold title to, the one I exercise rights over. I own it until I abandon it, or gift it to someone else, or sell it, or whatever.”
“No matter the number of times it’s been changed,” Viktor clarifies. Somehow, the shadows seem to have grown under his eyes. It may be the fault of daylight threatening to burst from the lab window.
“Yes.” Weakly, Jayce turns his gaze back to the ceiling. His thoughts catch somewhere between his brain and his throat, and an uncomfortable warmth flushes through his cheeks and chest. “The ship could eventually turn into a kite. It’d still be mine.”
Let us instead do this once again as partners.
Viktor hovers above him. In the space of blinks, the expressionless, smooth metal shows a kind face, a coveted smile, and warm, amber eyes. Resolve is water that slips from Jayce’s palms, sweat on his skin that makes it impossible to pry mechanical fingers from his jugular. He’s dreamed of being held like this, woken up countless mornings to a pulsing need between his thighs and the ghost of lips pressed to his forehead. The growl beneath his old partner’s voice promises possession of the most seductive kind.
The thing is, he could give up. He could give into Viktor’s gravity and fall at terminal velocity into metal arms. He could cradle that face between shaking hands and crawl into pale, scarred skin, because the depravity of Viktor’s jealousy has only ever been a rival to his own.
But rage is an old friend, and grief even older, and they take control of his mouth before love can even come close.
My partner died in this room, he wants to scream. It comes out as a choked whisper.
My partner, notes another part of his psyche. Mine, mine, mine.
“So change the question,” Jayce concludes. “Humour me instead.”
Viktor’s chuckle, though it betrays his exhaustion, still sounds the same. “What would you change it to?”
Quite frankly, and despite the image he maintains, he struggles with eloquence at the best of times. There’s a reason why Viktor does things, a reason why he phrased the question as he initially did. Jayce doesn’t engage in exercises like this for precisely that reason; it’s a headache to worm his way through any potential cracks in carefully-laid foundation. It’s not the scientific method. His charisma lies in his honesty.
“Tell me,” he chances a peek back at the other man, in no small part relieved to find amber eyes fixed on the floor. When he finds the words, they fall clumsily out of his mouth. “Whether or why the sameness of the ship matters at all.”
“Why does anything in the experiment matter?” Viktor pokes a hole in the question immediately. “How else to determine one’s identity than to ask whether there is some—immutable self.”
The conversation veers all too suddenly towards a landmine. Jayce tries for levity. “Sweetheart.”
To his credit, Viktor accepts the attempt with a flat, if not despairing, glance. It doesn’t stick.
“Darling,” he repeats, though this time, he doesn’t imitate Jayce’s inflection. If there’s a mocking quality to the tone, Jayce doesn’t hear it.
“You’re thinking about this wrong, I think,” Jayce studiously does not look anywhere else but the blackboard. Faint, golden sunlight splashes over the writing, illuminating an old doodle of Viktor’s cane, decorated with a flame design. And underneath it, in Viktor’s own messy longhand: HEX-CANES BRING THE FLAMES!
Viktor shifts in his peripheral vision. “Explain.”
“Identity,” he starts. Identity is not a thing to possess, he would like to argue. But identity is absolutely a thing one can possess, because things are abstract and arbitrary. “How’s this—identity is an idea that is founded by other ideas.”
“You think, therefore you are,” says Viktor, dryly.
“No.” Jayce shakes his head, as though doing so will clarify his thoughts. It helps a little bit. “No, I mean identity is informed. Nature, nurture, relationships, interests—these change us indefinitely. There is no one, singular you on a continuum.”
“But there must be,” the other man insists. “For how would you know that I am Viktor, and you are Jayce?”
With remarkable self-restraint, Jayce does not say something like, I would know you as I know myself, as I know that the sun gives life to this planet, as I know you gave my life back to me.
He does, however, reply: “I know who we are at given moments, all of which exist at infinite points over time,” which is only marginally less love-sick. “They add up to you and me.”
Only you could show me this, Viktor explains, and his voice sounds like it did the day they made Hextech work. Young, unmarred. Infatuated.
Jayce feels his eyes widening at the revelation. His breath stutters in his lungs. How many lifetimes has Viktor lived through? How many times has he faced the reality of Jayce’s love, the depths of it? Has he met a Jayce brave enough to cross the smouldering bridge between them, one with enough courage to press lips to the tantalizing nape of his neck? How many times has he been betrayed? The possibilities are a white-water river that runs, and runs, and runs.
All I want is my partner back, he had said. Or maybe he’s saying it, or maybe he will say it. Sentiments can exist singularly over a continuum. Some ideas are immutable.
“Hm,” is all Viktor has to offer in response. When Jayce musters the strength to look at him again, the sight breaks his heart. Viktor is brighter than all the stars in the galaxies beyond them. He should never look so defeated.
“Come here,” Jayce beckons, shifting over on the chaise lounge to make his intentions clear. To his mild surprise, Viktor readily obeys, and hauls himself up to limp across the short distance.
He sits down again with a heavy exhale, perching on the edge so as not to touch Jayce’s legs. And that’s simply not on, is it?
“Come here,” he repeats, reaching and pulling until Viktor is horizontal beside him. His crutch clatters to the floor.
It’s a tight squeeze; they’re pressed against each other from thigh to shoulder. Despite that, or more likely, because of it, something in Jayce’s chest jumps with pure giddiness.
“I do not know if I am comfortable,” Viktor murmurs, “with the idea that identity is as fluid as you say.”
“Why tie yourself down?” Jayce wants to know. “How else would you grow to be better?”
“Hm,” replies the other man, again. “Of course there must be room to grow—and you’ll note, Jayce, that one must grow from something, which arguably defeats your theory—but to be able to change at any given moment would also justify that we can choose the bad, and that can defensibly be who we are.”
“That’s the balancing act of it all,” Jayce doesn’t dare tilt his head forward, or place his lips near the vicinity of Viktor’s cool, unblemished throat to feel the pulse beneath it with his tongue. No—he behaves, and keeps an appropriate palm over Viktor’s chest, where he imagines he can feel a steady beat. “That’s what makes us human.”
Viktor turns his head. This close, Jayce can observe flecks of gold in the beautiful amber of his eyes, can feel puffs of warm breath against his chin. He could close the gap, allow the inertia of the moment to carry them away, finally know how it would feel to chase the butterflies that flutter in his stomach.
“I admire you,” whispers Viktor, almost intelligible beneath the roaring flame of Jayce’s desire. “Or rather, I envy that you can find comfort in this chaotic system. Freedom of choice is a privilege that I’ve yet to feel earned.”
They’re still talking about hypotheticals. They’re still talking, period, and Jayce should really focus on that, instead of drinking in the scent of something undeniably Viktor. He could crush entire cities underfoot with the knowledge of it. He could consume the world.
“Of course you’ve earned it,” he struggles to reply, unsure if he’s even communicating aloud. “You earned it by virtue of being alive.”
Viktor simply smiles. He looks sad.
You must go, Jayce.
Jayce can’t go. Jayce has let him go too many times to make the same mistake again. He won’t do it again.
In this expanse of universes and possibilities and antimatter, Viktor’s glowing shoulder is surprisingly solid beneath his own, nearly-incorporeal hand. If he concentrates, he can feel the worn fabric of an Academy waistcoat, or the hard line of Viktor’s collarbone.
He doesn’t know what his face is doing. Probably revealing every secret he’s tried to bury beneath the shoddily-constructed box labelled Viktor in his head—except it’s less a box and more like a palace, and less like a palace and more like an entire world compressed into the chambers of his heart, each piece of Viktor carefully catalogued and placed somewhere safe.
But he has no reason to keep anything a secret anymore. If this is the end, then he won’t regret a single choice. Butterflies flap their wings; ships have their parts replaced; there are infinite versions of them at infinite points in infinite lives, and every single one is a love story.
We finish this together.
“Here’s a thought experiment,” says Viktor. It's centuries earlier or later in worlds that rise and fall in the space of a breath.
And really—Jayce thinks, as he closes his eyes and presses a light, chaste kiss to the corner of his partner’s mouth—really, they should have seen this coming.