Archive of Our Own

At the end of everything was a new beginning—together, in the infinite prison of the arcane void. A remote world for them alone. But it was more than mere empty space—it was potential. Wild and enigmatic. And early on, they learned that it responded eagerly to their thoughts.

At first its vastness was distinctly unnerving—so much room for the unknown. They’d thwarted its attempted seep into their world, but now they were vulnerable, stranded in its timeless depths.

But maybe the arcane’s will wasn’t such a conscious thing as it was the instinctual pull for a system in nature to propagate. Because though they were easy prey, Jayce and Viktor were left untouched, if unmoored, with only each other’s arms to ground them.

Disbelief at having lived (in some capacity)—coupled with bliss for having their favorite person back in their orbit—had turned the starry black void a bright, fuzzy, pastel pink. It was an assault on the eyes, like a flash grenade, until they could adjust to it. Saccharine and soft. The texture of their strange surroundings, wisps of celestial matter like the clouds of a nebula, had suddenly resembled cotton candy. And when Jayce had expressed as much and had—in a manic state of overwhelm, still—joked of his desire to take a bite, he’d found in an instant that the thought had grown him into a massive, hazy shape against the sky. Like the figure of a god, who was more than capable of closing his teeth around one such cloud.

He wasn’t sure what possessed him to do it. For all he knew he could have been biting into a mass of toxic arcane ooze and subjecting himself to an entirely uncinematic death by internal dissolution, mere moments after heroically sacrificing himself for the fate of the fucking universe. But it was like the universe itself had dared him out of spite, and Jayce Talis was no coward.

When he’d shrunk back down to meet Viktor’s disapprovingly arched brow, he’d shakily exclaimed that it did, in fact, taste like cotton candy. Viktor tried to remain stern, but the affected irritation shattered almost instantly and split his face into a wild grin. It was all so absurd. He'd laughed, and of course Jayce had joined him, and somehow their almost psychotic mirth was enough to choke out the creeping roots of fear and uncertainty before they could take.

At the end of the day, no matter where they were, or what they’d done, or how long they had left to live, they were together. Partners again. They’d each fantasized on every possible definition of that word—what they yearned to mean to each other—and finally they realized, via the worldscale shift of the void around them into deep, luxurious red hues, that the fantasy was mutual and very fucking welcome.

No confession was needed—they could simply look and see. The evidence of their affections for each other was as plain in the shade of their environment as it was in the damning blush on each of their astral faces. That didn’t stop them from trading the words, anyway. It felt good to say, finally, that they were in love.

And as high-stakes and adrenaline-fueled declarations of love usually went in romance novels, their sweet, tearful embrace had become a sweet, tearful kiss. And then a ravenous, desperate kiss. And then, very rapidly, a series of other far more inappropriate activities that they were surprised to find the arcane void lent itself to quite well.

Barely a thought was needed before their lab materialized around them. It was fitting, given that it was probably the star of both of their eerily similar daydreams over the years.

They had a lot of pent-up pining to burn off. If the arcane had eyes, it would have been blushing for a good while.

As there were no clocks here, nor any sort of metric for the passage of time, they might as well have been occupied for a week. Or a year. Or a decade. Or a second. Regardless, after they got it out of their system for the time being, they once again became enticed by discovery, as much as they’d ever been during the golden years of Hextech.

Well, gripped by the balls by discovery might have been more accurate. There was absolutely no defense against the need to know more. That’s how they found themselves drifting through the formless plane, Viktor wrapped up in Jayce’s arms with Jayce’s bearded chin resting on the top of his head, muttering notes and observations to each other. Below them was their new testing ground, sprouting up whatever strange requests they could think to make as they experimented with their control over the place. Their lab, the Council room, the Talis forge, each of their bedrooms, laid out side-by-side in miniature like a dollhouse. Jayce’s hammer disassembled into all of its component parts. A fine Piltovian motor carriage with its engine strewn out beside it, each gear and screw neatly arranged in order of size. To-scale models of both Piltover and Zaun. Viktor’s favorite bakery near the Academy, including little effigies of its staff and customers within and shelves full of baked goods. That one was Jayce’s insistence, and he’d requested they shrink down to take a walk through it.

So, still glued to each other’s person, the two scientists scaled themselves down to fit inside. It seemed indecorous to enter a business—even a facsimile of one—dressed in nothing but swirling patterns of color over their otherwise unclothed astral forms, so Jayce donned the forest green and black that he’d worn before their final fight (sans gaudy armor) and Viktor reclaimed the old lab attire that he’d felt most comfortable in. He’d no need for his cane or crutch in the void, but they’d become as much parts of him as the way he’d evolved to carry himself, so the cane came with the ensemble. He settled for holding it at his side, even if he didn’t use it for balance.

To add to the absurdity, like playacting habits of the past, Jayce held the door open for him and placed a hand at his lower back when he entered. Not so much to catch him if he fell, Viktor thought now, as to simply have his hand on him. Given what they’d learned about each other, it was likely that the need to touch him had always been the main motivator behind Jayce’s handsiness—which was as endearing as it was infuriating. The two were now so closely in sync, he didn’t even need to voice this epiphany for Jayce to understand.

“If you wanted to touch me so much you should have said so,” Viktor drawled up at him as he passed and that large hand settled. “We could have saved ourselves years of that excruciating limbo.”

“Pfft, don’t pin that all on me. All you had to do was bat your eyes and I would’ve been gone.”

“Hmm, I fear it might have had the opposite effect,” Viktor said, casting his gaze around the interior, “as I am not blessed with your mile-long lashes and have often been told my stare is mad and threatening.” To demonstrate, he craned his head up toward Jayce beside him with exaggeratedly wide eyes and began to blink rapidly. His pupils rolled back as he did so, exposing more of the whites. It was mad and threatening. It was a look that could wilt plants. Jayce burst into laughter.

“My god, it’s like you’re being electrocuted!”

He ceased his insane display and the corner of his mouth twitched up. “My point exactly, Jayce.”

“Hold on, I never said it wasn’t incredibly attractive.”

Viktor snorted. “My being electrocuted is incredibly attractive to you?”

“Viktor,” he replied flatly, “you could take a dive in the sewer to Zaun and back and I’d still find you incredibly attractive.”

Viktor gasped and clutched a hand to his chest in mock-disgust, the picture of a highborn-Piltie. Though, the image was somewhat ruined by the grin bullying its way onto his face. The larger man looked far too proud of himself, so Viktor took him down a peg, nudging him in the side. “As revolting as that is, Jayce, I must say it is quite like you to pine after me as I suffer a horrible death.”

His jab hit its mark and Jayce gaped, affronted. “Viktor! Don’t phrase it like that!”

“What, am I wrong?”

“I didn’t do what I did because I was pining, I—” Jayce cut himself off with a deep inhale through his nose. “Fuck, just—look at the damn bakery.” Viktor chuckled and patted his cheek tenderly.

They stepped further into the bakery and Viktor made sure to assess every little feature. The attention to detail was impeccable; it had been some time since Viktor had last been, and he was filled with nostalgia. The patrons and staff were incredibly realistic, humanlike, though eerily frozen in time. And then the seating along the wall of street-facing windows, red afternoon light spilling through, the divots and chips in the wood of the chairs, the smudges in the glass of the display case, the vase of wilted flowers by the register. Even the scent was there, buttery and sweet and warm. Viktor inhaled deep to take it in. “This is uncanny,” he murmured fondly, and for a split-second Jayce disappeared from his side. But he barely had time to turn to look for him before he was back and close by, hazel eyes glittering with enthusiasm inches from his own.

“And best of all,” Jayce said excitedly, pushing a croissant insistently into Viktor’s face, “if I did this right, the pastries are actually edible!” Viktor tried vaguely to protest out of principle (who knew what kind of alien matter he’d be ingesting in this place?) but he couldn’t deny he was curious. Besides, Jayce was practically shoving the thing down Viktor’s throat in his vehemence and Viktor couldn’t find it in him to fight the man on it. He snagged it in his teeth without lifting his hands and tore a chunk off, leaving Jayce to hold the rest. After a few seconds of thoughtful chewing, Viktor absolutely lit up, overjoyed to find that it tasted exactly as he remembered and, much like the cotton candy cloud, went down without putting up a fight.

He groaned in delight through a mouth filled with flaky dough and cheeks puffed like a squirrel, and roughly gripped Jayce’s shoulders across from him. His cane clattered forgotten to the floor in his amazement. Jayce was practically bouncing with excitement, fingers curled around one of Viktor’s arms while the other hand held the rest of the croissant. “Icaddogaeehed dayce, icahcally hacehd!” Viktor exclaimed with gleaming eyes, spitting crumbs.

Jayce grinned and replied, “I didn’t understand a goddamn word of that, Viktor.”

Annoyed that his first bite of food in a very long while had to be cut short by the necessity of clear speech, Viktor swallowed and repeated, “I cannot believe it Jayce, I can actually taste it!”

Jayce released his arm to pump his fist jovially. “Fuck yeah! First date’s officially a success! Record time!”

“Definitely, yes! Wait—first date?”

His eyes briefly went round, but then Jayce had the gall to look sheepish, head ducked and ears burning. “Well, yeah. I figured this is probably the best I could do for the time being. Until we find a way out of here. Is it okay?”

Oh, those puppydog eyes. Viktor smiled softly and lifted his hands to cradle Jayce’s face between them. He rubbed his thumbs through the scruff of his beard, and Jayce leaned into the touch nearly to the point of falling over. Viktor huffed and shook his head in wonder, grin widening. “You ridiculous man. Of course, it is more than okay.” He came forward to lean his forehead against Jayce’s, melting in hazel just as Jayce melted in gold. “You’ve recreated my favorite bakery from memory. The taste of their croissants—I can’t even imagine how long it took you to perfect.”

“Ehh,” Jayce tilted his head back and forth slightly where they were caged by Viktor’s hands. “No more than five minutes. Or five hundred years. Hard to tell.” His teeth flashed, and Viktor had no choice but to close the distance and kiss him.

“Thank you, Jayce,” he murmured against his partner’s lips. He felt something prod his cheek, papery and somewhat greasy, and flinched back a tiny bit to see the other piece of croissant in Jayce’s hand attempting to poke back into his face. “Jayce—” he chuckled, moving to shift his face away, but Jayce curled his arm around his waist and held him fast while the chunk of pastry descended again.

“Here comes the airship!” he sang with that shit-eating grin, and Viktor’s laughter was the opening he needed to force the rest of it into his mouth. Once he swallowed, he raised a brow pointedly (knowing there was no path forward to preserve his dignity and not particularly pressed about it).

“You will pay for that,” he warned. Jayce merely beamed at him.

“I look forward to it.”

After the bakery, they took to a recreation of Jayce’s old workshop. This had been Viktor’s surprise; Jayce didn’t realize where the door he’d opened led until he was met with the cluttered, rubble-strewn space from his memory. Furniture upended and blasted to pieces, save for the couple of chairs and a mismatched table they’d managed to pull together. The smallest degree of order brought to the genesis of all the chaos to follow. His massive chalkboard, as well, littered from end to end with notes and schematics, and most importantly potential, cast in dim light by a handful of golden lanterns and precariously flickering candles dotting the few flat surfaces available in the room. The jagged hole in the wall opened up to black twilight, speckled with stars—different from the arcane void, this was night sky. Awestruck, Jayce wondered briefly how Viktor had managed to overlay the stars of Runeterra’s sky overtop those of the void—a flat-plane image perhaps? A bubble surrounding the building? Viktor’s gentle hand on his arm whisked him out of his head, and he smiled down at him.

“What’s all this?”

“Our first night as partners, yes?” The corner of his mouth pulled up and he shrugged. “I understand the memory is, eh, bittersweet. And I didn’t expect to show you just yet, there are a few details still out of place, but since you’d gone to such trouble with the bakery I thought it only fair to—” Viktor was cut off abruptly by Jayce’s mouth, and after a moment’s pause he sighed into it. Who needed words, anyway? It was so much easier to just liquify in each other’s arms like this. Viktor absently released his cane to let it lean against the wall and slid his hands up Jayce’s chest, utterly lost in his warmth.

When they eventually parted, Jayce kept a hand holding the side of Viktor’s face, thumb brushing over his cheekbone, while the other rested on his hip. “Why here?” he murmured hazily. “Heimerdinger’s lab is where we first created magic.” He was surprised to see Viktor’s smile turn shy, and his fingers tightened ever so slightly where they fisted in Jayce’s shirt. He huffed a quiet laugh.

“It’s, ehh, where I fell in love with you.” Jayce blinked down at him, searching gold eyes but not finding the joke.

“Here? Really?”

“Yes.”

Jayce flitted his eyes skeptically between the blackened scorch marks on the walls and the crumbling stone at the mouth of the hole where his living room should be. “Here…” he deadpanned, “… as in where you had me arrested, and later had to stop me from killing myself?”

“Yes.”

Jayce released him and crossed his arms. “Was the romance really flowing when I felt compelled to offer the guy who’d saved my life some hospitality in the sad rubble of my apartment? And I found nothing but a quarter of a bottle of wine and a jar of fucking pickles to hold him hostage?”

Viktor tilted his head, pretending to think. “There was bread, too, I believe.”

“Ah yes, how could I forget the week-old loaf of stale bread. At least the half of it that wasn’t covered in wall dust.”

“It was a fine offering, really.”

Jayce stared at him incredulously for a few seconds, noting the faint, amused quirk of Viktor’s lips.

“… It was ‘crank it’ wasn’t it.”

“It absolutely was ‘crank it’.”

Both men visibly stifled their grins, affecting seriousness. “It was a good line,” Jayce choked out.

Viktor gave a sober nod. “Very good. Enough to turn a man’s knees to jelly. I distinctly remember hearing the words come out of your mouth and thinking, ‘oh god, I have fallen hopelessly in love with this imbecile.’”

Jayce gaped dramatically, then stuck his lip out in a pout, the epitome of a kicked puppy. It didn’t matter that Viktor could see right through him—he had no choice but to chuckle and reach up and cup the side of his face. “Don’t worry Jayce,” he said amusedly. “You are very smart, but you are also a, ehh, dork. I find both things endearing.” He pressed a quick kiss to his cheek to placate him, and of course Jayce melted under it.

The two ventured further into the space and Jayce was taken back to that night. The night he’d lost everything, then gained everything and more. He felt like he could see their own ghostly forms like floaters at his peripheral—Jayce in his chair and Viktor standing before the board with a stick of chalk dangling from his long fingers, their meager, makeshift feast innocently collecting flies between them. Exhilarated grins lit the room far better than their sparse flames. They’d had the whole world right here, in the energy filling the space between them while their minds imagined magic. But it took a decade, an illness, a broken promise, and a war to bring them together. He’d have been saddened by all the time wasted, but with Viktor’s shoulder brushing his own, their arms linked tightly together like they couldn’t bear to be apart (and they couldn’t, really), it was hard to feel anything but bliss and adoration.

“What are you thinking?” Viktor murmured as Jayce leaned down to nuzzle against his neck. The gravel of his low tone was pleasing by Jayce’s ear. He chuckled against him.

“Just that I think I have you beat.”

“Oh? How so?”

“You said you fell at ‘crank it’.”

Viktor huffed and pushed him back a bit by the shoulder to stare challenge into his eyes. “Ah, are you suggesting you fell earlier than that?”

“Yeah,” Jayce grinned. “I fell at “it’s Viktor’.”

The man snorted and shook his head, smirking when Jayce gave a performative huff.

“What, don’t believe me?”

“You expect me to believe you fell in love with me after sharing perhaps five cumulative minutes of dialogue?”

Jayce shrugged. “Yeah, kinda.” His sincerity still surprised Viktor, no matter how many dozens of times and ways he’d heard the words ‘I love you’ spoken to him without hesitation since their sacrifice. But the man was simply asking to be teased, and Viktor couldn’t resist a bite.

“Jayce Talis, you are a fool. You cannot possibly believe that it happened that quickly.”

“Well tough shit, Vik, ‘cause it did.” Jayce gave his smuggest smile, pleased when Viktor slapped him lightly on the shoulder in retaliation. “Not only that, but I was pretty much obsessed with you from day one.”

“Oh, I can assure you, Jayce, my affections for you would have blown your little crush out of the water. But regardless, this is not a competition.”

“Really? ‘Cause it sounds to me like you’re just a sore loser.”

Oh, that wouldn’t do.

Viktor’s hands slowly found his hips and he icily stared Jayce down like he was preparing for battle. The larger man was undeterred, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking on his heels innocently.

“I may not need it anymore but I am not above hitting you with this cane.”

They both knew Viktor had never done any such thing; the threat was largely reserved for banter. It only grew Jayce’s smile wider, canines flashing in that maddeningly charming way of his. “Don’t threaten me with a good time,” he replied smoothly, and Viktor fought to hold his ground against his own expressive face.

“You are speaking nonsense,” he grated out.

“That sounds like something a sore loser would say.”

Viktor felt his eye twitch. For his own sanity, he allowed his lips to curve into a slow, sly smile. “Talis, I promise you that this game is one you cannot win.”

“What game is that?”

“The game of who loved whom more deeply.” He paused to lean in, languidly stretching until their noses brushed, and murmured a teasing, “Keep up.”

The fire was lit. Jayce scoffed and pulled back. “You can’t be serious. You realize who you’re competing with here?” He gestured emphatically at himself with both hands, a veritable neon sign pointing to his heart. “They didn’t call me Lover Boy for nothing. Loving deeply is kind of my whole thing.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“The three or four people I used to date.”

Viktor gritted his teeth to keep a grip on composure and lifted his chin. “I wanted you for our entire partnership. And yet as clear as I made my intentions, you never once attempted to reciprocate.”

That actually seemed to shock him. Jayce gasped, indignant. “What? Viktor, what the hell are you talking about? I’m the one who was so abysmally far gone for you, but you never showed any interest in me!”

“That is simply untrue!”

“Name one time you made it clear you had feelings for me!”

“How can I? It was my constant state of being for nearly a decade, Jayce.” He enunciated his name like it was an insult. Jayce sputtered.

“You—you showed about as much romantic interest in me as you did for Salo!”

This time it was Viktor who gave a scandalized gasp. “Pure slander!”

“What’s your excuse then? I was all over you, V! You’d have to have been blind not to notice!”

Viktor pinched the bridge of his nose. “This conversation is ridiculous,” he groaned, his cheeks somewhat pink as he’d grown more flustered. Despite their little feud, Jayce was hopelessly magnetized and lurched forward to press a kiss to each of them. His partner huffed in amusement and buried his hands in Jayce’s hair to keep him hunched close, but refused to drop the fight just yet. “I believe you overestimate yourself, Jayce. I had it much worse for you than you did for me.”

“Bullshit,” Jayce said cheerfully, placing another kiss on the tip of Viktor’s nose. “I’d be happy to prove you wrong, but given that we’re not exactly time travelers—”

Jayce’s words were interrupted by a bomb blast of sound. Both men jumped at the deep, warbling, ominous tone that shook the air. Otherworldly, almost organic, similar to the noise they’d both come to associate with the Anomaly. They looked at each other in alarm, then turned to glance frantically around the workshop.

“What is that?” Viktor hissed.

“How the hell should I know! Aren’t you the expert here?”

In an instant the floor fell away, and soon followed the rest of the workshop, dissolving into smoke and wafting away into nothing like ink in water. It left them floating again in the void, clinging uneasily to each other. The deep rumbling noise crested around them, resounding in what passed for bones in their relatively incorporeal bodies. Was this it? Had the arcane finally had enough of their sandboxing and decided to evict them for good?

The world shivered, and a huge pillar of astral smoke coalesced around them, spiraling up like a tornado. The wind didn’t buffet them at all—didn’t even seem to touch them—but still they flinched away in fear as it tore through them, up and away, and when it cleared it left behind… Jayce’s workshop.

Locked in a terrified embrace, they both looked around in puzzlement before again seeking each other. Jayce widened his eyes in unvoiced question. Viktor shrugged his shoulders exaggeratedly.

The workshop was seemingly just how they’d left it. Except—no, there were a few differences. No lanterns nor candles had been lit yet, leaving the place dark and indigo with the faintest glow from the moon outside. Its silver light drenched the walls and caught in the carpet of sharded glass on the ground that had yet to be swept, glittering pinpricks of illumination, as though the night sky could be seen straight through the floor. The intact furniture hadn’t been moved into place yet and the chalkboard was significantly emptier than it had been.

This was before the start of the discovery-filled discussion that had kickstarted their careers. In fact, as they watched, there was a conversation already taking place.

“Nobody’s ever believed in me…” came Viktor’s distant voice, carrying faintly from the hole in the wall—where they could both now see themselves silhouetted against the pale city light. As they had been a decade ago, in their Academy uniforms, in their early twenties, fresh-faced and alight with the extremes of youthful emotion.

“Jayce,” Viktor—his Viktor—whispered urgently beside him. He only nodded vaguely to indicate that he could see it too.

Hand-in-hand, they floated closer. As Viktor’s foot dragged against the stone below, they registered that the floor, and indeed the rest of the room, was as substantial as their earlier experiments. Still, they kept to drifting above the ground for now, unmoored and untrusting of their new environment.

The conversation in front of them continued to play out exactly as they remembered. By the time they hovered just behind their younger counterparts, the other Jayce held his rune bracelet in his hand, face rapt and filled with awe, breathing, “I don’t even know your name.”

The other Viktor replied, “It’s Viktor.”

Jayce had been watching his own younger self’s face at the moment the words were spoken and he quickly pointed and exclaimed, “AHA!” Viktor just about jumped out of his skin, clutching to Jayce’s arm like his ghost was attempting to escape.

“What! What is it, Jayce!?”

“Look!” he shouted triumphantly, finger still stuck in his other self’s face while the two continued speaking, oblivious. “Just like I fucking said! Right there, I was already gone!”

After a beat, Viktor released the tension in a stuttering breath. His eyes narrowed skeptically. “What are you talking about?”

“Ugh, look!”

The world shifted around them, slowed, stopped. Particles froze in the air, and the faint noises of the city grew stiflingly silent. Viktor’s eyes widened but a second later the dust motes resumed their movement, backwards. Their younger selves reversed haltingly, pulled like marionettes. Time rewound while they watched until it once again slowed to a halt, and then began its forward motion as though nothing had happened.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Look at my face, quick!” Viktor did as he was told and closely observed Past Jayce’s face when the response came.

“It’s Viktor.”

Nothing changed. Not a single twitch on his features. A moment passed. Their past conversation resumed again. Jayce looked at Viktor expectantly, grin wide and gloating, but Viktor merely arched a brow. “And what was I supposed to be seeing?”

“Wha—oh come on Viktor, I know you saw it.”

“Saw what?!”

“My face! I went all mushy and soft when you said your name! Look at my damn eyes!”

And at that, the scene rewound yet again and picked up at the same place. Again, Viktor studied Jayce’s face closely—particularly his eyes—and there was absolutely nothing damning in them. Well, maybe the slightest softening, but it certainly didn’t scream ‘love at first sight’.

“I’m not seeing whatever you’re seeing.”

Jayce groaned melodramatically. At that point, their past selves had finished their talk on the ledge and were heading inside to begin playing around with Jayce’s research notes. Viktor started when Past Viktor began to walk directly into him, but he phased through without consequence, wisping like fog before reforming on the other side of him.

“Regardless, this is… fascinating,” he breathed, studying his younger self’s back as he limped to the chalkboard. “Are we watching past events as they happened? Or are we viewing our own memories?”

Jayce hummed in thought. “Well, they’re not from our perspective, and if they were our memories they’d have some level of subjectivity to them; we probably wouldn’t be seeing exactly the same things.”

“Right, and we would not have distinct recall of details we did not personally observe.” To test, Viktor floated over to the wall still intact beside the crater and roved his eyes over it for something to latch onto—amongst the cracked plaster, a framed photograph of Jayce as a child, grinning and held aloft on his parents’ shoulders. It was crooked, likely knocked askew by the blast, and the glass in the corner was splintered. “Here,” he said, gesturing toward it. Jayce drifted up beside him. “I know I did not see this photograph here back then, so I would not have any memory of it.”

Jayce’s eyes widened slightly in realization. “And I didn’t look for it after the explosion—I wouldn’t remember the glass being broken. So…”

“This is not a memory, but an objective recreation of the past.” He gripped his chin thoughtfully. “I assume we’ve been shown this because of our little argument. But was this one of us, or the arcane itself?”

“I think it was me,” Jayce mused, mirroring Viktor’s body language. “I’d just said that I wished I could show you to prove you wrong. I—hmm—did I subconsciously pull us into a vision of the past?”

“You also controlled it just now,” Viktor pointed out. “By turning back time.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure how I knew I could do that. I just… felt it.”

“So, if we can direct the scene, it stands to reason that we can change the scene as well.”

Jayce shrugged lightly. “Wanna try?” Viktor pursed his lips and thought back to their tiff. Jayce had made a valiant attempt to prove how swiftly he’d tripped over the edge, but his parameters were subjective anyway. Whether or not Viktor saw the genesis of ‘love’ in his eyes (and he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t simply seeing a reflection of his own) there was no precise definition for such a thing.

But now that he knew the rules of the game, and had the freedom to make the first move, there was no way Viktor would lose.

His lips curled into a mischievous smile, met with a nervous chuckle by Jayce, and without preamble Viktor envisioned a moment in time that would make his point wonderfully.

The workshop evaporated around them and in its place bloomed an old memory. Smoke solidified into a dusty, densely-packed room, with a large desk made of dark, worn wood at the center. On one wall loomed a tall window, clean glass cut intricately into floral patterns that framed its view of the Academy courtyard below. The perimeter of the space was clogged with stacked chairs and small tables pushed up against the walls.

This was a laboratory—their first together, to be precise. It was also a storage closet.

Until they could secure the Council’s funding, the only tools they’d had at their disposal were the extras scrounged up by the Academy’s alumni research program; seeing as their little passion project hadn’t been sanctioned or even submitted for approval at the beginning of the term, there was simply no space nor equipment for them to lay claim to. They’d had to wait for the beginning of the next term to petition for a real lab, and of course they’d gotten it with no issues. What they were selling was magic, after all.

But this tiny lab marked the beginning of their professional relationship. They’d both been buzzing from having been given a chance to prove themselves. And Viktor vividly recalled the birth of his long-standing scheme—an experiment constantly revisited over years of partnership. Project: Expressing-My-Desires-as-Transparently-as-Possible.

After only a few days of back-and-forths with Jayce, he’d basically already decided that he was the Ideal Man, and Viktor wanted him. And the honeymoon era of their partnership in all its sleepless nights of science, science, science had bonded them so much in such a short time that by the day of this particular memory, Viktor had finally worked up the nerve to approach step one of his Impeccable Plan to Win Jayce Talis’s Heart.

It'd gone by many names.

When the two of them settled in the new environment, this time touching down to stand, Jayce glanced around with a low whistle. “Wow, it’s been ages since I thought of this place.”

“Our first lab,” Viktor hummed, nodding. “Where we learned how to work well with each other.”

“Thank god we did. I think every other person in the damn Academy assumed we’d be tearing out each other’s throats by day three. Felt good to prove them wrong.”

“Yes, that was our thing, wasn’t it—proving them wrong.”

Jayce leaned down and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Once, I heard a student in the hall ask why the big one didn’t just eat the little one.”

Viktor gave a wry chuckle. “I believe they had bets going as well. Greatest odds were that you’d be found half-dead on the floor with a cane-shaped crater in the side of your skull.”

“Yeah, I’m still pissed there was no payout on that one.”

“You bet, did you?” Viktor drawled, lips twitching in amusement.

“Hell yes, rent money. Why do you think I went out of my way to irritate you so often?”

“Hm, I’d pegged you as a masochist.”

“If only you had,” Jayce said with a wicked grin. Viktor warred between wanting to kiss him and wanting to whack him in the shin, but settled for a flick to the forehead. Jayce accepted the toll, catching his hand as it pulled away and clasping it affectionately between his own. “Why did you take us here, anyway?”

“Only to prove you wrong.”

If he’d timed this right, he knew precisely when this memory began. Any second now…

As Jayce opened his mouth, his response was cut off by the door slamming open across the room, hard enough to strike a classroom desk beside it and kick up a plume of dust from its surface. Jayce and Viktor turned with a start to the sound to find a figure silhouetted against the warm morning glow of the hall beyond. Jayce—Past Jayce, that is—lowered his leg where he’d used his thigh to push the door open. His arms were occupied with a precarious stack of boxes and crates, tipping this way and that and nearly toppling as he weaved his way into the room in an attempt to keep the tower upright. His face was stiff with something just short of panic, his eyes glued to the top of the pile above him. Then, with a lurching tilt, Past Jayce crossed the space to the worktable at the center and quickly heaved the whole load onto its surface. A small toolbox fell from the top and clattered onto the wood, and a few screwdrivers rolled out to be caught by a large, jutting hand before they could seek out the floor. He huffed a sigh and righted the toolbox before depositing them back inside.

Viktor’s Jayce watched with fascination as his past self began separating out the stack of boxes onto the desk and meticulously unloading them. Tools and machinery, odds and ends, notebooks and electrical equipment and heavily-padded receptacles containing his then-volatile collection of Hex crystals, ripe for testing. Everything finding its way into designated homes on the tabletop or inside the many drawers along each side.

“I remember this,” he breathed in awe, taking a step closer to his younger counterpart. “Moving day.”

“The first official day of our research,” Viktor added fondly. Though they’d been in close proximity for about two weeks between near-exile and moving day—commandeering each of their homes for some rather crude, makeshift labwork in the meantime—they’d both silently agreed that the milestone of acquiring a lab would mark the true beginning of their lifelong endeavor.

And those weeks had not been idle. While Jayce and Viktor had plotted their next moves vis-à-vis Hextech by day, Viktor did much the same by night—but that private notebook was discreetly entitled “Operation: Secure Pretty Boy Talis” and was only opened in the comfort of his apartment, away from prying eyes.

He’d approached it from the angle of a scientist. It was all he knew, after all, and he was of the staunch belief that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved with science. The pages were filled with diagrams, statistics, dialogue trees of every possible combination of responses to simple verbal stimuli. He kept track of every variable that might impact the results: Jayce’s mood, time of day, weather, location, when they’d last spoken, whether one or both of them had remembered to eat breakfast that morning, etcetera, etcetera. He’d run the numbers over and over, coming to a fairly conclusive set of probabilities, all of it leading to the one scenario in which Jayce would be most likely to respond favorably to his advances.

Past Jayce continued to stock their new lab in idle contentment. Though Viktor could have easily watched him work for hours, eyes tracing and devouring the strain of his muscles as he manhandled some heavy tool or another out of its container, he ultimately had a point to prove. A game to win.

“We’re too far back,” he muttered to himself, eliciting a puzzled look from his Jayce. Then, with a thought, he willed time to roll forward, gradually accelerating to a sprint. The pale, golden shafts of early-morning light streaming through the lab’s window now shifted before their eyes, angling over the table and Jayce’s diligent work and brightening into white beams of mid-morning light instead. Young Jayce’s hands moved at a blur as he unpacked the remaining boxes with impossible fervor. As his partner watched the transition unfold he glanced to Viktor with a subtle quirk of his brow, the Language of Jayce that he knew to mean he was impressed with his control over the scene.

It must have been some form of instinct that urged him to let up on the cranking of time; Viktor released his hold and allowed the world to slow like a spun wheel until it returned to its normal pace. Past Jayce was just finishing up with the last crate of equipment, a soft smile on his face as he prepared to cross this first task off his list for the day.

Jayce sidled up behind his past self to observe his efforts, eyes flitting between neatly-stacked and organized tools and his own peaceful expression. Probably remembering the feeling of that simple accomplishment, preparing their new lab to become ground zero for a series of explosive and horrendously unsafe tests that would rock the neighboring labs for months, before they’d eventually be given their larger, much more private workspace. A blessing for all involved, really.

“What should I be watching for?” Jayce asked, glancing back at him. Viktor had to work to hide his devious little grin, knowing exactly what was coming. Already envisioning the look of defeat on his partner’s face.

They didn’t have to wait long. The door to the lab opened once again—much less violently than before—and Past Viktor slid inside with the kind of poise he could only muster before his cane had made way for a crutch. Past Jayce, hearing the dull, metal thud of his cane hitting stone even before registering that the door had opened, turned with tangible excitement toward the noise. A wide grin split his face, white and gleaming against tan skin dusted with a light blush of pink. He was still clean-shaven back then. One might even say baby-faced if only in comparison to his current ruggedness, but even then he was a handsome man. Coveted. The hunger stirred in Viktor now just as he knew it had back then, and if he looked closely he could even see the subtle darkening of his own sharp eyes. It was perhaps self-indulgent, but he paused the scene for just a bit to drink him in.

“You were hot back then,” Viktor mused absently. He could feel Jayce’s indignance beside him without even looking, and this time didn’t hide his smirk.

“Back then, huh?” Jayce deadpanned.

“Hm, yes. Such a youthful energy.”

Jayce barked a laugh. “I know you’re fucking with me, if only because I’d fear for my life if I made any plans to get rid of the beard.”

“You will not—”

“Yeah, yeah, loud and clear,” Jayce said amusedly. Viktor cast a sidelong glare at him. He might have gone for another retort, but their past selves were about to greet one another. Which meant his Plan was about to be launched into action. And Jayce would finally, finally see just how blind he’d been all along. He resumed the scene.

“Watch,” he whispered intently, zeroing in on his young face as the exchange began. “I am about to court you, and you will be utterly oblivious.”

He remembered his perfect logic. The checklist in his head that would yield gold if followed properly. This day had been highly-anticipated—check number one. Jayce and Viktor had been chomping at the bit for a real lab space, and the excitement was palpable. Jayce would be in a good mood (and there was no doubt that he was, now that Viktor could view him from afar). It was also a clear, sunny morning, warm and bright and brimming with potential. Check number two. And Viktor had recalled stopping Heimerdinger in the halls earlier to inquire after his partner’s whereabouts, being told that the man had been seen heading into the nearby bakery before his arrival. He’d clearly eaten and was therefore energized—check number three. The rest of his variables had easily followed suit, everything culminating in exactly the perfect moment to take his shot at Jayce Talis.

Past Jayce’s smile was unfaltering, that adorable gap in his teeth on full display when he greeted Past Viktor. “Morning, partner!”

There was nothing but joy in those hazel eyes. Viktor simply wanted to pinch his cheeks. Beside him, his older, manlier, somewhat unkempt counterpart only cringed, muttering, “Fuck, I was goofy, wasn’t I.” Viktor would have teased him, but the interjection left no time before his past self’s response.

This was it. Viktor’s first volley in the war for Jayce’s heart. Now he’d surely see just how much of himself Viktor had put on the line to steal his affections, and he’d realize what a fool he’d been.

Watch Talis! Bask in your ignorance!

Past Viktor gave him a small smile, polite but genuine. Then let loose his most precise attack.

“Hello, Jayce. How has your morning been?”

Perfection.

And silence. Wordless, slack-jawed silence.

There was no question Jayce was dumb with utter shock beside him. How could he have been so foolish? How could he not have seen the way Viktor threw himself at his feet? Their past selves carried on in companionable chatter at the periphery of his attention, but his focus was on the conspicuous lack of breath entering Jayce’s lungs.

“It’s been great, really productive! Got us just about set up in here, and there’s a croissant in that box at the end of the table for you!”

“… My, how considerate. Thank you, Jayce.”

“Anytime, partner!”

“You enjoy calling me that.”

“Of course! You’re the first person insane enough to agree to it.”

Eventually, when it became clear that that undeniable moment of romantic courtship had come and gone, Jayce turned slowly to him. But Viktor was instantly puzzled to find not an anguished pout, but a look of pure incredulity drilling daggers into him.

“Viktor… That was IT?!”

Viktor blinked at his outburst. This was… unexpected. Jayce was not pouting, and in fact was looking at Viktor like he was the problem. What was wrong with him? Had he been struck blind?

Jayce, for his part, was decidedly not blind, and he was more grateful for that fact than he’d ever been in his life. The warmth of pure affection bloomed in his chest while his partner scoffed, wide-eyed and affronted. “How dare—I—I was starting small!”

“Starting small?” Jayce cried in disbelief and mounting delight. “You mean fucking microscopic?!”

Viktor had been expecting far more groveling on Jayce’s part and was doing a piss-poor job of masking his embarrassment, the words tumbling out of him in a deluge. “Our partnership was still so new! I would have been an absolute fool to push it any further than that, if I’d been too aggressive you would have been scared off, or you would have interpreted my advances as purely carnal—which isn’t to say that there wasn’t a degree of lust contributing to my attraction to you—but the intent was not to proposition you, rather to show you that I was interested in pursuing things further at a comfortable pace and—” He finally cut himself off at the look on Jayce’s face, somewhere between amazement and amusement. And for just a moment, just for his sake, Viktor swallowed his pride and forced himself to rewind the exchange in his head, to put himself in his partner’s position—something he’d surprisingly never considered before right this moment.

And, well…

Shit.

A deep flush colored his cheeks. A resigned sigh was huffed, and he weakly slapped Jayce’s chest with the back of his hand. “Shut up,” he muttered. Jayce couldn’t help but laugh.

Before Viktor could stew too long in his humiliation, Jayce scooped him up into a crushing hug, pressing a kiss into his hair. “Viktor, your idea of flirting was to say hello to me,” he said, awed. “Please don’t ever change.”

The other man grumbled in lame protest against his chest. “I was establishing that I was pleased to see you, and that I cared enough about your life outside of work to inquire after your morning mmph—”

“Shhhh,” Jayce shushed him, pressing a finger over Viktor’s mouth. He knew full well he was being insufferable. Viktor at least had the restraint to merely chuck his chest again half-heartedly rather than beat him into submission with his cane, as threatened.

“What about you then, smug bastard?” challenged Viktor, pushing back from Jayce’s hold just enough to arch an eyebrow at him. “You expect me to believe you performed any better?”

“Uhh, yeah. Kinda.” Jayce shrugged, entirely unperturbed. “Lover Boy, remember?”

Viktor’s eyes narrowed, two slits of judgmental gold and cheeks puffed in aggrievement. If he was trying to strike fear into him it was hopeless, because the only thing afflicting Jayce was cuteness aggression.

“Prove it, then,” Viktor demanded. It was a rather juvenile response for Viktor, of all people, but Jayce chose to take it as a compliment; not many people had ever had the distinct pleasure of witnessing Competitive Viktor up close and personal. Possibly even just Jayce. He tried not to give away how much that puffed his chest because he’d never hear the end of it, and instead answered Viktor’s challenge with a dauntless grin.

“My pleasure.”

And just to be a dick, he snapped his fingers coolly as the lab melted away around them, pluming up into a whirlwind of ashy vapor (possibly made a bit more theatrical at Jayce’s whim). Viktor stared at him flatly during the scene transition, all too knowing, but Jayce was smug and undeterred.

When the smoke dissipated, they were standing in a far more familiar and beloved lab. THE lab. Though they both knew it was illusory, they couldn’t help but relax a bit into it, shoulders falling in contentment. Viktor sighed beside him and murmured wistfully, “I’ve missed this place.”

Jayce snorted and bumped lightly into his shoulder. “We were just here.”

Viktor turned bright red. They were, in fact, just here. Multiple times. Engaging in a variety of creative and less than professional experiments. Of course, Viktor had literally just been freed from the control of an ancient hypnotic magic and had his long-held affections fervently reciprocated within a microsecond of each other, so he could hardly be blamed if he was a little too distracted to breathe the sterile air and appreciate the lab’s industrial décor.

That said, he was more intimately familiar with the tiny scratches and divots on the worktable’s surface than he’d ever been before. And what his sweat looked like pooling in them. Thank you, Jayce.

Aloud he only gave his grumpiest harumph and rolled his eyes. A useless effort with his face the color of a lovely Piltovian sunset. Jayce merely grinned.

The scene began as most did in this room—with Viktor in the throes of tireless work.

Well, throws, in this case.

The wrench he’d been working with sailed spectacularly through the air to the tune of Past Viktor’s frustrated growl, glinting as it hurtled like a comet across the lab. It just missed by a hair the big goofy smile wedging itself through the barely-opened lab door, and Past Jayce let loose an incredibly masculine yelp when it collided deafeningly into the wall directly next to his head. By the time it hit the floor, Jayce was already ducking back behind the door like the fearless man’s man that he was.

“Viktor, what the FUCK?!”

Present Viktor watched the event with a cringe plastered on, hardly registering it before Jayce leaned down to whisper, “You’ve got a funny way of showing love, V.”

He and his younger counterpart spoke simultaneously—

“Well, clearly I hadn’t seen you come in!”

“Oh, my apologies, Jayce, I did not see you come in.”

Jayce smirked, and Young Jayce carefully poked his head back into the room.

“Any more flying instruments?”

“Ha, no,” Past Viktor said, at least having the decency to sound bashful about it. “I became frustrated tightening this node on the frame of the stabilizer.”

“Oh?” Past Jayce finally entered the lab—picking up the wrench on his way—and walked up behind Past Viktor at his workstation. “Can I help?”

“Mm, perhaps,” he replied, a bit reluctantly. In front of him was a shell of latticed metal, a container for the crystal meant to channel energy and allow excess to dissipate to prevent overload—a necessity if they were going to begin experimenting with the Hex crystals in earnest. Everything up to this point had been small, controlled tests, but they were ready to graduate to larger leaps. “I am having to align these nodes on the left while tightening this one here,” Past Viktor was explaining, lifting the overlapping metal slats on the lattice for Jayce to see, “but I cannot get enough leverage with one hand.”

Past Jayce nodded once before reaching over his shoulder to help hold the pieces in place. “Here, I got you. Go for it.”

Jayce and Viktor watched their younger selves work seamlessly in tandem, Jayce shifting to hold each set of nodes together while Viktor diligently tightened them. One’s wide chest was conspicuously pressed close against the back of the other’s shoulder, perhaps tighter than was strictly necessary. Now that they both knew what to look for, they could clearly see Viktor tensing under him and the bob of his throat when he swallowed. They could also see the evident anxious energy seeming to run electricity through Jayce’s nerves, if his schoolgirlish trembling was any indication. How the two had managed to circle each other obliviously for so many fucking years was a mystery greater than the arcane itself.

“Alright, Jayce,” Present Viktor interrupted their casual voyeurism. “Give me your best shot.”

“So sure of yourself,” Jayce chuckled, shaking his head. “I hope you’re prepared to beg for my forgiveness after this.”

“Ha. Absurd.”

This memory contained Jayce’s first foray into romantic warfare. Though his own feelings had been simmering and expanding like steam in his chest just as long as Viktor’s (longer, even if Viktor didn’t believe him), it had taken him a little more time to build up the confidence to make his own play. And after seeing exactly what Viktor considered ‘courting’, Jayce knew there was no way on Runeterra he’d be able to deny the romance in this upcoming gesture.

Of course, it had been a battle in itself trying to figure the guy out; Viktor was a regular enigma. Jayce half thought he’d planted that reputation amongst Academy-goers himself, just to avoid having to make small-talk. He himself hadn’t been immune to it, at least at first. But after a while, and well by this point—about three months in—Jayce had come to recognize the soft, sensitive man he truly was. In all honesty, Viktor had never even really tried to hide it. He didn’t put on a show, didn’t wear cockiness like a mask. What protected him from unwanted attention was rumor and stigma, and he’d never seemed to have any urgency to correct either.

That never sat quite right with Jayce; he shouldn’t have had to tolerate close-mindedness just to be left alone. But it wasn’t his place to decry society for him, least of all as part of its gilded half.

Either way, threats of Stoic Viktor hadn’t put off Jayce one bit; he’d already been long-smitten by the time they’d become close enough for him to see through it. Viktor from the very beginning had been painfully kind. Empathetic. So much so that he nearly suffered for it. He’d saved Jayce from the ledge, in more ways than one, when he could have left him to flounder—all at great risk to himself. And of course his brain. Jayce loved a good brain. A whole world of sharp wit and soft edges for him to sink his hands into, vaster and grander than the sprawling city and far more populated.

And it didn’t hurt that he was smoking hot. If Jayce were to be honest, that box was probably checked even before “it’s Viktor”, the morning he’d had him arrested, but Jayce figured he’d better not push his luck.

All that said, romancing Viktor would be like defusing a bomb. Viktor wasn’t used to being accepted and understood. The man was so reserved and low-key, even Jayce’s famed shoulder-pats were sometimes too much for him (though he’d warmed up to them significantly over the years). But here, after three months of partnership, Jayce had feared coming on too strong. Viktor would probably spook like a horse at an airhorn and run for the hills.

Was that dehumanizing?

Anyway, thus was born Jayce’s Hextech-Adjacent Method to Maximize and Engineer Romance, or HAMMER for short—and it was a bitch and a half to manhandle that acronym together so he used it as often as possible in his notetaking. It referred to the series of trials he’d be running on his unwitting partner within the lab to gauge his interest and—god willing—win his heart. At least that was the thesis he’d scribbled on the front page of his own private diary journal. In practice, it was one failed attempt at flirting after another after another, all thanks to Viktor’s unfortunate inability to read a room.

It began with a simple question: What does Viktor like?

The most obvious answer was work, but it wouldn’t be much of a date if Jayce asked him to stay in and work some more. Viktor would gladly work all hours if Jayce weren’t there to drag him away. Food? The guy hardly ate. That was probably owing to the aforementioned obsession with work, though, since Jayce was occasionally successful at fitting something sweet and flaky in his mouth.

Jayce had hit upon the answer then: Viktor had a sweet tooth!

Lucky for him, he’d found the perfect spot nearby—a quiet, casual establishment that happened to have quite an extensive desserts menu. Perfect for a bribe.

Viktor was still watching their past selves work, affecting disinterest but visibly taken with the view. His lip was caught between his teeth and chewed contemplatively, his brow slightly furrowed. Nostalgia, if Jayce were to guess.

He almost hated to interrupt, but he was busy proving Viktor wrong, so the quiet peace went out the window when Jayce threw an arm around his shoulders and jostled him around amiably. Viktor grunted in surprise, jolted from reverie or some other squishy sentiment that didn’t lend itself to winning. He tilted his head to glare menacingly up at him from beneath low brows, and Jayce tried very hard not to shudder.

“Watch,” he said instead, gesturing with a nod toward the younger duo. “And prepare to feel like an idiot.”

Past Jayce stood just behind Past Viktor, no longer pressed into his back now that his job was done but still close enough to tousle Viktor’s hair with nervous breaths. He rocked back and forth on his heels—not exactly helping the schoolgirl allegations—but Past Viktor didn’t seem to notice him. His attention was already returned in full to the stabilizer frame, turning it in his hands and straining his eyes for any nicks in the engraved runes.

Eventually, Past Jayce built up his nerve and took a deep breath in preparation—a brutal strike incoming.

“So… Viktor…”

A beat of silence, marred only by the whisper of fingertips sliding on smooth metal. Minute creaks of leather where Jayce’s boots toed restlessly at the floor.

Then, after long enough had passed that it seemed more like the start to a thought than an answer to Jayce, “… Yes?”

Past Jayce let out a nervous, stuttering breath. To Viktor, it might look like he was about to make a tactical retreat, but Jayce remembered what it had taken to steel himself in this moment before he put it all on the line. In the blink of an eye his younger self’s face morphed into something poster-worthy, a bright, near-manic grin belied by eyes brimming with pure bisexual panic. Viktor actually cringed away in horror.

“Oh, that’s unsettling,” he breathed.

“Shut up.”

“Viktor! Are you hungry?!” Past Jayce blurted out, pitched high with nerves.

That caused Past Viktor to pause briefly in his inspection, fingers stilling over the frame and head tilting slightly in puzzlement. Still looking away from him, Past Viktor shrugged. “I suppose so.” His hands took up their work again and he hunched back over his desk. “I will likely be at this all night, though. Once I’ve ensured the quality of the runes I will begin to secure it to the pedestal, that way we can get right into tests in the morning.”

As he spoke, Past Jayce’s smile lost some of its plastic charm, corners falling a touch before he was able to re-plaster it on thicker than before. This time Viktor made an audible gagging noise.

“Don’t be a pest,” Jayce sighed at him.

“How can I not when you are so diligently impersonating a grinning demon from my childhood nightmares.” Viktor received a flick behind his ear for his mockery and huffed in amusement.

Not to be dissuaded, Past Jayce cleared his throat and tried again. “Well I’m starving,” he said cheerfully.

Without missing a beat, “You should eat something then.”

Shit, Jayce remembered thinking. Shit. Fuck. Abort. Abort.

But then, once again, he called on all of his courage. He called on his mother’s faith, his father’s strength of will. He called on his family’s steel—generations of boundless determination and dedication, hard-won scars and fighters’ blood flowing through his veins. He called on that bone-deep, ancestral instinct to persevere. He would not fail!

“You need a break, too, V,” he replied, just the slightest tremor to his voice. The moment of truth. “Do you wanna go get something?”

Present Jayce grinned in triumph. Past Jayce glowed with anticipation.

“Why would we go elsewhere when we have perfectly fine food here? I believe you still have half of a sandwich in the icebox.”

Devastation.

He might as well have written it on his forehead. The lance of utter rejection that stabbed through Past Jayce’s chest also ripped up his pretty little mask of confidence. He was lucky Past Viktor was faced away from him or he’d have thought he stubbed his toe.

To his credit, he tried valiantly to save it. “I-I mean that, uhh, you and I should—”

“Jayce, can you hand me that, ehh, that blade—” Past Viktor interjected, completely oblivious, waving his hand vaguely toward his etching tool further down the table. Past Jayce opened his mouth again but the words stuck in his throat. He glanced uselessly between Viktor and the blade, back and forth, before a resigned sigh deflated him completely. He picked up the tool and handed it to him with all the vivacity of a stray dog left in the rain.

So much for fighters’ blood. Sorry mom and dad, Talis men are weak now. That’s my bad.

If Jayce recalled, they spent the rest of the night securing the metal shell to its pedestal. He’d eaten the rest of his sandwich and Viktor had eaten sleep. Forty minutes of it, anyway.

At the time, the heartbreak had almost put him off of future rounds of testing HAMMER. But now Jayce could see it for what it was: Viktor’s total and abysmal nescience of romantic cues. In short, fucking validation.

But when he glanced toward Viktor, he didn’t look particularly embarrassed. His mouth wasn’t hanging open in shock, nor were his eyes wide with dismay. No, he looked… more amused than Jayce would have liked.

“What?” he said cautiously.

“Hmm?” Viktor hummed, mischievous golden eyes flitting up to meet his.

Jayce scoffed. “Why are you smirking like that? I just proved you wrong.”

“Oh? Did you?” The curl of his lips was downright devastating, and like the seconds before disaster, Jayce felt a sickening freefall in his gut.

“Yes I goddamn did,” Jayce insisted, voice edging ever-so-slightly into desperation. He took a step back to stare down at Viktor incredulously. “I literally asked you out to dinner and you didn’t even realize it!”

Viktor tutted gently. “Jayce, Jayce, Jayccceeee.” The slight admonishment and the overbearing condescension from anyone else would have grated Jayce’s nerves raw, but the way Viktor wore it did something for him. He felt the heat curling up and making itself comfortable inside him, but dammit he still had a bet to win! He gritted his teeth and forced his face into neutrality, but he was sure Viktor could see straight through him. Amber eyes glinted far too knowingly, and that attractive smirk only grew sharper.

“Viktor, Viktor, Viktooooor,” Jayce deadpanned.

They held each other’s gaze for a few seconds, tuning out the drone of mundane conversation happening directly in front of them, until all that remained was the tug-of-war they played with their eyes. But whether it was the absurdity of the scene they’d just witnessed or the fact that neither of them could hold up a ruse for very long around the other, both of their faces broke simultaneously. Laughter huffed out of Jayce while Viktor’s teeth flashed in a disbelieving grin.

“Jayce, you cannot be serious,” Viktor laughed. “You did not ask me on a date, you asked if I was hungry!”

Jayce scoffed, his smile wide. “No, I asked if you wanted to get dinner with me!”

“Jayce, for fuck’s sake! You said ‘do you wanna go get something?’” Jayce bit his lip to stifle laughter at Viktor’s horrendous impersonation of his voice. “That is not courtship—that is as casual as you could possibly be! I’ve heard you say very similar, if not exactly those words to Caitlyn!”

“Oh, come on—”

“Not to mention, I was clearly distracted!” Viktor exclaimed through barely-contained mirth. He threw his hands out wide—a degree of animatedness only shown to Jayce. “I do not wait for you to be working through complex logarithmic functions to ask you what color socks I should wear tomorrow!”

“That’s hardly the same thing!” Jayce protested weakly, but as his own cheeks turned pink he already knew he was done. Round two lost. One serving one. Viktor chuckled and patted his cheek sympathetically.

“It’s okay, Jayce. I’m sure you’ll get me next time.”

They took a beat to watch their younger selves work. Focused, content, so completely compatible in everything they did. From the way Viktor didn’t even need to ask for the screwdriver down the table before Jayce was pressing it into his hand, to how Viktor silently created space on their cluttered blackboard when an idea came to Jayce that needed jotting down. And then there was the once-invisible layer blanketing it all: the near-imperceptible shiver from Viktor when Jayce absently placed his hand over the small of his back; how Jayce sucked in a breath when Viktor brushed his shoulder reaching for a tool.

“How blind we were,” Viktor echoed Jayce’s thoughts. He hummed in agreement, savoring the warmth of the man next to him that he’d taken for granted back then. But despite the thickening of the air like a cozy weighted blanket—earnest and sober—Jayce wasn’t finished being a little shit yet. And he knew Viktor wasn’t either.

So Jayce added, with a good amount of snark, “I think you mean… ‘how blind you were.’”

“Yes, you’re right. Allow me to amend,” Viktor responded drily. “’How blind you were.’”

“Hey that’s not what I—” Jayce groaned. “Fine,” he bit out. “Your move then, Mister Romance.”

Viktor regarded him flatly. “Really? That’s the best you could do?”

“Oh, sorry, do you demand more respect? Could call you Herald.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.”

They fell into another round of giggling so obscenely sweet the arcane itself should have been demanding they get a room.

Viktor composed himself first, smoothing his hands over nonexistent wrinkles in his vest. “Right, well. My turn.” He leveled Jayce with a look before giving a graceful snap of his own long fingers to imitate Jayce’s earlier dramatics. The arcane swept them away.

This time they emerged into a lab that had been much more lived in. In the year and a half that it had seen, their clutter had found comfortable enough homes to be less considered clutter and more… creative storage. Tools, filled and dogeared journals, their few personal effects—a coat flung over the chair or a small, wilting plant beneath the window—all occupying sovereign space they’d carved out in the terrain, through habit and stalemate with the objects surrounding them.

It was by now as much a home as either of their apartments. Even without the ever-expanding collection of contraband smuggled in through an unexpecting Academy—Jayce’s high-end, exotic coffee blend and the old, tarnished pot in which to desecrate it; a pile of Viktor’s books stacked haphazardly on whatever shelf space they could spare; blankets and pillows and a stolen cot from the infirmary for all that time they spent definitely not sleeping in the lab, because such things were irresponsible and frowned upon. They’d practically moved themselves in after only a year, and they had each other’s company to blame.

The time between this skirmish and Viktor’s last had been filled with a variety of similar-scale attempts. Small smiles and pleasant greetings all met with a decent level of kindness from Jayce (proportionate, and not insufficient, as Viktor was now discovering to his own chagrin). Today would be the day he took a truly large leap.

Two weeks prior, Jayce had broken his favorite hammer. It was an old, rusted thing. Hardly heavy enough to get the job done and easily dwarfed by his dinner-plate hands. The first time Viktor had seen him using it, driving rivets into the frame of one of their larger prototypes, he’d up and asked him what he was hoping to accomplish with such a lackluster tool. Jayce’s response had been unexpected, and endearingly earnest.

“It was my father’s,” he’d said, a distant look in his eye but a soft smile turning his lips. He’d twirled the handle dexterously before catching it in his fist to admire its imperfect edges. “He gave it to me when I was a kid. It was one of the first he’d ever forged. It’s what got him into the business.”

At a loss for words, and aching with guilt for having ridiculed him for using it, Viktor had only managed a quiet “Oh.”

“I know it’s not the most efficient,” Jayce had continued, suddenly meek as he rubbed the back of his neck, “but I’ve always thought of it as good luck.” He’d laughed then, something soft and fond that had Viktor’s heart clenching.

He hadn’t been surprised that Jayce could be so sentimental. But he never again brought up the tool or its effectiveness. Whenever he saw Jayce working with it, almost pleading, coaxing it to bend to his will, Viktor had to hide his smile.

So when one day it simply snapped in his hands after one particularly rough strike, its death knell rang out into stillness profound enough to unnerve even Viktor. He’d been startled by the sound, turning to find Jayce unmoving, staring down at the headless handle still held tight in his fist. The expression on his face had been… alarmingly blank. Viktor recalled approaching him cautiously, calling his name to no response, until all at once he’d seemed to snap out of it, looking towards Viktor with a muddled look he couldn’t quite parse out.

He’d smiled though, gleaming white teeth on display, as though nothing of note had happened. And then he’d claimed to need the restroom and left in a hurry. Decidedly unusual behavior.

For a few days Jayce had toyed with the broken tool in-between tasks, trying to decide how to put it back together, but the brittle metal had fully sheared just below the head. Decades of use and stress, Viktor supposed. Jayce was leery of attempting to reattach the head; it would never have the same structural integrity, would never be usable again. But worse still was smelting it down and reshaping it back into one solid piece.

“Every little scratch and nick is history,” he’d murmured down at the tool when Viktor had asked. Sadness on his golden retriever face, big shimmering eyes that made Viktor’s blood hot—how dare the universe bully his Jayce like this?! It could not stand.

He’d managed to swipe it from Jayce’s workspace when his back was turned, and miraculously, he hadn’t gone looking for it.

Admittedly, the solution wasn’t terribly complex. Jayce had probably been blinded by sentimentality. All Viktor needed to do was add a pin inside the shaft and weld a ring around the break as extra support. It wouldn’t be as sturdy as quite literally any other hammer in the lab, but it was just as functional as it had been before the break—that is, just barely.

He’d made it neat and paid more attention to aesthetics than he normally would. But it was important that his handiwork compliment the original Talis’s design. He’d managed to bevel the support ring just so to resemble an accent on a fully-formed piece. There was even a little Talis ‘T’ etched into the metal—comparatively sloppy, perhaps, but he’d felt it was necessary.

It was a labor of love, after all. Maybe his efforts would convey as much to Jayce.

Now, years later, Viktor and Jayce leaned against the worktable beside a Past Jayce, who was welding something or another with a decided hunch in his posture. Though his dark goggles hid his eyes, the overgrown stubble and the way he absently bit his lip as he worked was telling enough of his mental state. His hair was also mussed from nervous hands running through it, matted beneath the goggles’ strap; it would probably pluck a good number of strands like feathers from a big sad goose when he removed them.

“God, I look pathetic,” Jayce moaned, staring dejectedly at himself. “Why do I look like that? When is this?”

Viktor shrugged. “You were going through a time.”

“I look drunk.”

“No, you look appropriately emotional. Hush.”

Past Viktor entered the scene through the lab door. Past Jayce did not throw a wrench at his head upon his entry. Present Jayce told him as much. He poked him in the side hard enough to make him squirm away and teased, “Hey, V, notice how I didn’t throw a wrench at your head? That’s called being a considerate partner.”

Viktor met his shit-eating grin with a flat, deadly look. Neither flinched, and they were pulled from their standoff by Past Viktor’s approach. “Jayce,” he called, cane tapping lightly; his gait was easier today, either a low-pain day or excitement that he hid remarkably well behind a calm smile. His free hand was bent behind his back.

Unusually, Past Jayce didn’t turn to meet him with all his normal boundless enthusiasm. Instead, he gave a half-hearted wave over his shoulder and hummed in greeting, still slumped over his welding.

Past Viktor stopped behind him and craned his neck to see his work. Their unseen interlopers caught a glimpse too—it was sloppy as hell. A novel disaster in otherwise skilled hands. Jayce grumbled under his breath beside him, staring daggers into his past self’s subpar welding job. The words “dumbass” and “goddamn mental crisis” were thrown around, barely audible, and Viktor smirked.

Evidently, Past Viktor couldn’t resist a jab either. “Is this a new technique, Jayce? I’ve never seen it done this way,” he said innocently. His proximity finally roused Past Jayce from his miserable stupor; he glanced behind him tiredly and pulled his goggles up to rest on his forehead. On the way up, his gloved fingers brushed against his cheekbone and left behind a smudge of grease. That and his red-rimmed eyes really added to the whole ‘freshly divorced’ look.

Jayce groaned beside him and kneaded his fingers into his forehead. “You sure I wasn’t hungover?” Viktor whacked him lightly with the back of his hand, clicking his tongue.

“Do not mock him, he has had a bad week.”

“He’s me.”

“Yes, and you are adorable.” Viktor punctuated the word by poking the tip of Jayce’s nose. Attempting to hold his ground and keep his disapproving frown intact was a decidedly uphill battle for Jayce.

“You have been rather down lately,” Viktor’s past counterpart hedged. A statement, because a question would invite nothing but unwanted assurances. And Jayce was a truly terrible liar.

The big lump of melancholy shrugged and tried to force a smile, but it was wobbly enough to crumble under a firm glance. Certainly not a load-bearing smile. “I’m fine,” he lied through his teeth. “It’s nothing.”

Past Viktor arched an eyebrow. Normally that look was enough to curdle any lesser man’s blood, but Jayce had grown used to it and could see the real concern underneath. Past Jayce’s smile grew thin, as effective a front as attempting to hide behind a streetlamp in all his conspicuous six-and-some-odd feet.

“Jayce,” Past Viktor said in mild warning. He looked like he might want to put up more of a fight, but the larger man finally deflated, tipping his head back to sigh up at the ceiling.

“It’s stupid,” he muttered. “Just my stupid hammer…”

At that, Present Jayce’s hesitant recollection seemed to click. “Ohhh, the hammer…” he breathed.

“Indeed.” Viktor barely stifled his smugness.

It is all coming together…

“It is not stupid.” Past Viktor spoke over Jayce’s revelation. Then, he boldly placed a comforting hand on his partner’s shoulder.

The effect was instant amongst everyone else in the room. Past Jayce went slightly stiff, eyes widening in surprise and a blush dusting his cheeks; Present Viktor’s mouth curled into a self-assured, mischievous grin; and Present Jayce gaped, downright offended, gazing in disbelief at his utterly obtuse younger self. He voiced his incredulity before he could even think to cover his ass, throwing all pretense of competitive vigilance out the window and leaving himself fully at Viktor’s mercy.

“What the fuck, why am I not saying anything!” he cried, grasping fistfuls of his own hair in aggravation. “Look how young I was—this is, what, a year or two in at most? You hardly ever touched me back then! It took me so damn long to get you to warm up to physical touch, and I’m just sitting there like a statue!?”

“Yes, I recall thinking the same thing,” Viktor said drily. Sure enough, there was a twitch in Past Viktor’s jaw where he’d clenched it in evident frustration.

His long fingers tightened on Past Jayce’s shoulder, almost demanding his acknowledgement. Their two observers watched as his nails dug in and scraped along the material of Past Jayce’s shirt. Not forceful enough to qualify as aggressive, but insistent. Prodding. Beseeching.

Past Jayce merely continued to gaze up at his partner obliviously. Mouth flat, teetering between despondency and a stiff, placatory smile. The indignance was sharp and palpable in Past Viktor’s eyes.

The Jayce observing them dragged his hand down his face. “Fuuuuck.”

Smiling in victory, Viktor leaned in close to murmur rather evilly in his ear, “Oh, we haven’t even reached the main event, Jayce.” The larger man audibly swallowed; he already knew he’d lost this round. But Viktor wouldn’t claim his win until his partner—his prey—was utterly and irrefutably decimated at his feet. Out of love, of course.

After a few moments of startled silence, Past Viktor seemed to realize he was making no headway with the Physical Contact Tactic (iteration 26, subsection 14-C of the Jayce Talis Acquisition Plan), and decided to perform a tactical retreat. His hand slowly left Jayce’s shoulder and everyone in the room winced.

Admittedly, Viktor had forgotten about that part. His cowardice pained him as much now as it did back then. It wouldn’t change the outcome of this battle—merely a stumbling block—but it certainly didn’t feel great to relive.

“Okay, that… that one hurt,” Viktor conceded, grimacing.

“You gave up so fast.”

Viktor could feel piercing eyes on him and scoffed defensively. “Well, pardon me, my confidence had taken a great blow thanks to your denseness.”

“You weren’t complaining about your ‘great blow’ earlier—”

“Hush, Jayce!”

Jayce mimed a zipper over his mouth, looking thoroughly amused.

“It is not stupid,” Past Viktor said again, fingers fidgeting subtly on his cane. “It had sentimental value to you. It is only natural to mourn its loss.” His attempt at consolation was met with a miserable huff and a shake of Past Jayce’s head.

“But it’s just a hammer,” he groaned toward the ceiling. Tired hazel eyes slipped closed as his fingers came up to knead at them. His voice continued somewhat muffled under his hand. “I’m a damn scientist, I shouldn’t be so thrown off by a broken tool. Sentimental or not.”

Past Viktor pressed his lips together, and though it might’ve looked to Jayce like nerves, Viktor knew himself well enough to recognize the fond smile he was fighting off in favor of solemnity. “Have you given any more thought to fixing it?” Past Jayce’s head shook silently, his large hand along for the ride like he’d accidentally glued it in place. “May I ask why?”

He gave a loose, despondent shrug. “Every time I think about touching it, I just…” Another useless shrug and a twinge of his brows. “I just…” His face scrunched into a grimace as his hand dropped like a dead fish into his lap. “I don’t want it to be different,” Past Jayce sighed. “It was his…”

Past Viktor nodded in sympathy. “It was your father’s work. I understand.”

Internally, he was shorting out in sudden fear, visible only to their ghostly observers by the razor-sharp alertness in his eyes. Past Jayce would surely have noticed it too, had he not been preoccupied.

In the pause that followed, Present Viktor explained, “I was afraid you would disapprove of me going behind your back.” He bumped up lightly against his partner’s side. “I very nearly gave up a second time today.”

Jayce chuckled. “Well, seeing as we didn’t end this conversation with one of us bent over the worktable, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in the long run if you had.” Viktor turned to threaten him with a deadpan glare.

“You downplay my gesture out of fear, Talis,” he said down his nose. “I will forgive the slight because I know what a loss it is for you to have to practice humility. Alas, I’m sure your ego will survive the beating.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Jayce grinned.

“Still,” continued Past Viktor, prompting the two interlopers-from-the-future to check back in. His cane clacked softly as he took a step closer, now practically leaned against Jayce’s chair. “I’m sure it would feel better to have it fixed than to leave it broken.”

As Past Jayce nodded thoughtfully, his future counterpart gave a quiet snort. “Planting that in my head awful fast, V. Trying to cover your ass?”

Viktor sniffed. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

His pseudo-manipulation did the trick (because how could one call it manipulation if absolutely no persuasion is needed?), and Past Jayce smiled tiredly up at his partner. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I just… need to suck it up and do it.”

Past Viktor’s arm tensed behind his back and his eyes gleamed with anticipation. That was his cue. He was confident, in the way that a gambler betting their life’s sum on a game of chance might be.

This’ll be the one for sure.

The gods will surely grant me luck today.

Statistically, it should be impossible to fail fifteen times in a row.

“Well, Jayce,” he said. “What if I told you you didn’t have to?”

Past Jayce’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean?”

With an elegant little flourish, Past Viktor’s hand emerged from behind his back and revealed the hammer he’d fixed. The handiwork was admittedly flawless; it was clean, unblemished, practically unchanged. The only visible addition was the support ring around the shaft bearing the (not quite as flawless) Talis crest.

He knew he’d done well. Still, he couldn’t fully abate the hesitant flutter in his chest with the reveal. Although he was about ninety percent sure Jayce would break down sobbing with gratitude at the gesture, there was still about nine percent that worried that Jayce might instead break down sobbing from devastation at the changes he’d made to it. And one percent wondered if he’d take Viktor’s proactivity as some sort of unimaginable betrayal, lock him out of the lab and cut him from Jayce’s life for the trouble.

But truly, Viktor was more logical than that; he told himself as much, and pointedly ignored the little micro-rush of dread twisting his gut.

Past Jayce’s face was terrifyingly blank for a few seconds while he processed what he was looking at, eyes flitting between the hammer in Viktor’s outstretched hand and his increasingly cautious gaze. The room held its breath, despite half of it already having lived through this exchange.

After a heavy, drawn-out moment, day broke over Past Jayce’s face. His eyes brightened with joy, and his mouth spread into the biggest possible grin. He shot up from his seat in excitement, taking the offered tool from Viktor to examine it further.

“Woah, Viktor,” he breathed, turning it over in his hands, squinting at it from all angles. “This is clean.” Past Viktor subtly preened at the compliment. Then, darting hazel eyes found the crest Viktor had engraved, widening in awe. “Holy shit, Vik, did you etch this?”

Past Viktor hummed in affirmation, but gave a comparatively sheepish shrug. “It is a bit, ehh, unpracticed, of course. I’d never actually drawn your family crest before, so I knew there was a chance it would come out—”

“Viktor,” his partner interrupted. When Past Viktor looked back up at his Jayce, there were genuine stars in his eyes. “It’s perfect. It’s beyond perfect.”

Slowly, Past Viktor allowed a smile to bloom. Delicate, but full. He had intended on confining it, perhaps arbitrarily. He’d planned on vigilance; if he allowed himself too much hope, he’d wind up uncomfortably vulnerable to heartbreak. But, he was entirely unable to reign said hope in. Not with the way his partner’s eyes had grown devastatingly moist—indeed, the man was about to begin sobbing. Nor the way that Past Jayce’s grin wobbled with a level of emotion that would likely invite a flash flood into the lab, if not for him caging his tears in.

“Thank you, Viktor,” Past Jayce said with a blinding level of sincerity. Almost unconsciously, he snatched up Past Viktor’s hand and clasped it tight, oblivious to the flush instantly darkening the smaller man’s cheeks. “This is the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

They were standing so close now. Leaned into each other’s space, a slender hand well-caged by a massive, calloused one that now absently rubbed circled into its knuckles. Breath practically shared, as Past Jayce smiled sweetly and Past Viktor tried surreptitiously to enter his partner’s higher airspace on the tips of his toes. “Of course, Jayce,” he murmured. “It is my pleasure. I… would do anything for you.”

Jayce and Viktor watched their past selves inch closer and closer together, drinking in tender little smiles and softly flushed cheeks. It should have been the long-awaited climax of a cheesy romance novel, a cheap payoff much too soon into the story. It should have made their hearts pound, made them clutch their hands to their mouths and lean forward in rapt fixation, as though gripping the rail in a box seat at the theater.

Instead, Viktor watched on with an evil grin and Jayce had his face hidden in his hands, pitched downward in shame. Because both of them had seen this play and knew all too well how it ended.

Past Viktor invited himself closer, thinking to himself, ‘This is it! All of my efforts are finally paying off!’ His mouth opened, and though Present Viktor knew he hadn’t had The Words on the tip of his tongue just yet—still risk-adverse and relegated to underhanded tactics—he was sure he could have given their partnership the lightest shove in the right direction if he’d had the chance.

But before he could, Past Jayce beamed down at him, adjusted his grip on Past Viktor’s hand, and shook it vigorously as though closing a business deal.

“Thanks partner!” he said merrily. “I owe you! Next time you break a tool, I’m on it!”

Past Viktor’s smile froze stiff. The visible agony of his rejection was backdropped wonderfully by the miserable wail of a brutalized animal—straight from Present Jayce’s soul and muffled uselessly into his hands. Present Viktor stood by his distressed partner and silently gloated.

The scene before them played out as one might expect. Space was again put between the two scientists. They retired to their respective workstations. The atmosphere was dense and packed with explosives, but its volatility only seemed to be felt by one.

“Look at how you broke my heart, dear Jayce,” Viktor crooned into Jayce’s ear. He placed a hand on his back and rubbed soothing, mocking circles into it. “You totter around the lab without a care while I bear a spear driven through my chest.”

“Viktooor…” Jayce groaned against his palms. Viktor’s grin only widened.

He couldn’t help but lay it on a little thicker, donning an air of grave martyrdom. “Such a woeful life I led back then,” he sighed. “Ignored and underappreciated, chronically pained, withering, dying, and now, emotionally devastated.” He tsk-ed sadly and shook his head. Jayce’s head snapped up, his face flushing with a lovely cocktail of outrage and anguish as he sputtered.

“Viktor, come on!” He grabbed at Viktor’s hand with both of his and held it solemnly between them. His knees hit the floor with a thud so he could pout melodramatically up at Viktor with shining eyes. “You know I didn’t know you were into me! All I could think was, ‘Wow! What a sweet gesture from my lab-partner-who-definitely-isn’t-into-me!’”

Viktor fake-sniffled, turning his head away to fake-hide his fake-tears. “And to think I took the chance, leapt outside my comfort zone, only to be rejected!”

Jayce whined again, “Viktor, I’m sorryyyy!”

At the look of utter helplessness on Jayce’s face, Viktor had no choice but to drop the bit. He softened and wrapped his arms around his partner’s shoulders in earnest, chuckling and curling over his large frame. “It’s okay, Jayce, I’m only teasing,” he murmured into the top of Jayce’s head.

Jayce’s response, appropriately, was to snake his arms tight around Viktor’s waist and groan into his stomach. “I know you are. It’s, like, your natural state.” Viktor snorted. The face buried against his torso sniffled and turned so his cheek was pressed against Viktor’s warmth. “But I have to give you this one. If I’d just… opened my damn eyes…”

“Are you sure you do not wish to explain to me how this labor of love could have been easily misconstrued as platonic, Jayce?”

Jayce canted his eyes up Viktor’s chest and gave him a flat look. “Oh, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “If it was just the tool I’d call bullshit.”

Viktor gasped in offense. “That hammer might as well have been a diamond fucking ring!”

“Oh, c’mon, we do favors for each other all the time! Fixing a broken tool is hardly the most labor-intensive act of kindness between us.”

“Hm.” Viktor squinted down at him. “Granted.”

Strong arms tightened around him as Jayce huffed. “But yeah, it was the tool. And the engraved crest. And the care you put into preserving it, for the sentimentality.” Jayce burrowed his face back into Viktor’s shirt, ears tinged red. His voice emerged muffled. “And how you comforted me. And the hand on the shoulder. And you basically trying to inhale my fumes afterward.”

“And ‘anything for you’?”

Jayce sighed, the sound absorbed into astral fabric. “Yes, and ‘anything for you’.”

Viktor smiled down at him softly, stroking through Jayce’s hair. “So what I think you’re trying to say is…?”

“We wasted so much time.”

Viktor gave a conceding hum. “Well, yes, that is true. But also on your mind…?”

Jayce straightened suddenly and looked up at him, gaze serious. “We could’ve had years to engage in inappropriate workplace conduct!”

“I—what?

“To break the worktable in! Scare the shit out of Sky or Heimerdinger!” Jayce moaned in theatrical defeat up toward the ceiling, as though cursing whichever deity was responsible for their mutual romantic ineptitude. “The tragedy, V! Think of all the HR complaints that never were!”

The reprimand caught in the back of Viktor’s throat, and all he could do was stare, deadpan. “Jayce.”

“You know what I should’ve said? ‘Now that I’ve accepted your hammer, what do you say you take mine?’” The man had the absolute gall to waggle his eyebrows suggestively at that, a sly smile spreading wide.

“Ah, so your humility has its limits,” Viktor said drily.

Jayce finally rose from his kneel, making sure to press a quick kiss to Viktor’s forehead on the way up. Despite his insufferable attitude, he did at least have the decency to acquiesce, raising his palms in a gesture of surrender. “But yes, Viktor. You win this round. Congratulations.”

Viktor grinned. “That is what I was waiting for.”

A thick finger poked into his forehead, earning an exasperated huff, and Jayce smirked down at him. “Don’t get too cocky, though.”

Viktor sighed. “We both know I didn’t get cocky—not for eight years.”

“Boo. Bad pun.”

“Oh, I do not want to hear it,” Viktor said with a scoff. “Mister Great-Blow, Take-My-Hammer.” He clicked his tongue, affronted, but Jayce was already well past apologies. It was time to win.

He rubbed his hands together like a fly and donned a devious grin. “Oho, I’ve got a good one.”

Viktor rolled his eyes and flicked a hand in his direction. “Let’s see it,” he drawled.

At his request, the room dissolved once again, before blooming immediately back into place. The lab as they’d inhabited it perhaps three or four years in. Much the same as the scene they’d just left, with the exception of the massive contraption consuming most of the center of the lab.

It was an enormous rotunda-like structure, easily thirty feet in diameter. The perimeter was a shell of metal plating with hand-etched runes, weaving between pockets of carefully insulated Hex crystals. In the center, a raised platform was ringed in even more signaling runes, all dark of the pulsating blue blow that would pour through them when the crystals were activated.

This was their Hexgate prototype. One of them, anyhow. In order to function properly and not just send their testing object jettisoning into orbit, they required a launching pad and a landing pad. The latter would be constructed next, on the opposite end of the academy.

The room was angrily lit by swelling dusk—the fiery, dappled red glow of a forge lancing through the single tall window. Brightest as the sun glinted off white stone roofs on its way below the horizon. During this final hour before sundown, the lab was at its hottest, and therefore Past Viktor sweltered with his arms jammed in between layers of sun-warmed steel.

He sat on a ladder above the rotunda, welding a support beam between the sheets of metal that comprised the wall. Soon it would curve up and in as more rune-marked panels were added to complete the prototype’s rounded roof.

It certainly went against proper lab safety protocol, but Past Viktor had shed decorum to accommodate the heat. His vest had been discarded over the back of Jayce’s chair, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows—exposing pale, lean forearms before the edge of his protective gloves. His dress shirt was unbuttoned, kept out of the way of his work only by the cage of his waistband. As a result, the instant the environment finished coalescing around the two travelers, Present Jayce was transfixed and drooling at the sight of his partner’s exposed torso.

He couldn’t help it. He’d never given himself a chance to openly ogle before, and the sight before him was too glorious: Viktor, unkempt—the sharp, lithe line of him glistening with sweat from the shimmer of summer heat off the window’s glass. Drenched red and gold by the sunset (Talis colors!), smooth porcelain skin tantalizingly bare above and below his brace. He could’ve been a model if science hadn’t panned out. On top of that, his diligent and deft hands building their shared dream just about melted Jayce into an infatuated little puddle on the stone floor. Jayce sighed dreamily.

Viktor’s eyes were on him, felt like a power drill revving through his temple. “Keep it in your pants, Talis,” he grumbled. If anything, Jayce stared harder.

“Never got to stare at you before. Throw me a bone, hot stuff.”

Viktor huffed. “I wasn’t aware you were interested in bottoming.”

Jayce gave a startled snort and turned to Viktor. The smaller man watched him stone-faced, but there was a little tremor in his lips as he was clearly fighting off a smile. He was waiting for Jayce’s reaction to his attempted pun. Fucking adorable.

“Ah, a bone. Got it,” Jayce said, eyes bright with amusement. “I see what you’re going for. Didn’t reeaally work, but A for effort.”

Apparently the praise wasn’t satisfactory. Viktor glared at him and crossed his arms, a threat in his voice when he muttered, “As though you are the world’s authority on innuendo.”

Jayce grinned. “Came with the promotion, actually,” he said, bumping his shoulder against Viktor’s. “Councilor Talis: Safeguard of Hextech, High Minister of Sex Jokes.”

“You are an ass, Councilor Talis,” Viktor scoffed. A delighted little shiver passed through Jayce’s body at Viktor’s use of the title, which did not go unnoticed. Viktor raised a brow, looked him up and down. “Really, Jayce?”

“Oh, yeah, we’re using that later, for sure,” Jayce said, giddy and shameless.

“Ass,” Viktor muttered.

“Your ass.”

There was no contest to that.

The lab door pushed open then, permitting a brief respite of cooler air from the dark hallway beyond, before it quickly homogenized into the rest of the room’s stuffy heat. Past Viktor removed his arms from within the steel scaffolding and pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. Shadows pooled in the hollows of his eyes as he turned from the setting sun, the contrast igniting the gold within and sharpening the angles of his face.

Jayce whistled a catcall at him, and was promptly doubled over by a jab to his ribs.

“You are embarrassing,” hissed Viktor as Jayce wheezed a laugh—but beneath his mortification was palpable affection, and Jayce chose to heed the latter. He leaned in and stole a kiss on Viktor’s cheek as his past self entered the room.

Past Jayce was more filled out than he’d been before, thicker with tasteful muscle. His stubble was now more manicured—a fashion choice rather than a consequence of poor time management. He had two black garment bags slung over his arm and a paper cup in each fist, as he turned to lightly shoulder the door closed behind him. “Hey, Vik!” he called as he stepped into the lab, quickly cinching his hold on the bags when one of them attempted to slide off of his arm. “Figured you’d still be here. I wanted to—uhh…” Past Jayce stopped in his tracks when he finally faced his partner fully, eyes widening and jaw dropping open stupidly. Ogling.

From his perspective, Viktor was silhouetted by bloodred sunset, the embers of daylight framing his figure and filtering through strands of wild hair like a sinful halo. Both observers watched the bob of Past Jayce’s throat as he swallowed—and the clenching of his thighs as he battled off obvious arousal.

“Holy shit,” Jayce whispered. “I’m pitching a tent and you didn’t even notice.”

Viktor sighed. “Don’t exaggerate, you’re hardly showing.”

It only took a moment for Past Jayce to pull himself together, shaking his head. As though he’d merely gotten lost in thought. The tinge of his cheeks could almost be attributed to the afternoon heat.

“Jayce, hello,” Past Viktor greeted from his perch. He set aside his welding torch onto the scaffolding and carefully eased himself down the ladder. By the time he reached the bottom, Past Jayce had already snapped himself out of his stupor and rushed forward to help. He deposited the garment bags and cups onto an auxiliary worktable next to the prototype and half-jogged to the base of the ladder. The gesture earned some unintelligible grumbling from Past Viktor under his breath, but he still allowed Jayce to take his hand and offer him something to balance on as he regained his footing on the ground. Past Jayce plucked his cane from where it rested against the worktable and passed it over.

Past Viktor nodded as he took the offered cane. “Thank you,” he murmured, and he definitely hesitated before releasing Jayce’s hand, fingers lingering around his for just a few seconds longer than necessary. “Ah, what were you saying?”

Past Jayce blinked. “Oh! Right!” He straightened and clasped his hands behind his back, the picture of a man with a speech planned. “Well, we’ve been making good progress, right?”

Past Viktor hummed in consideration, tilting his head back and forth. “Ehh, I suppose so. I do believe there is room for improvement. We could be making better time if—”

“—Yeah, yeah, if we ate, slept, and took our breaks in the lab. You’ve said,” Past Jayce interrupted, rolling his eyes.

“To save on time needed for travel!”

“And so you never miss my charming smile,” Past Jayce teased, gifting him one to demonstrate—bright and blinding as midday sun. Past Viktor’s brows lowered into a half-hearted glare.

Apart from them, the elder Jayce leaned down to whisper into his partner’s ear, “Fliiiiirting.”

Viktor huffed and turned his face away. “Ineffectually,” he mumbled. But the blush on his ears and cheekbones easily gave him up. Jayce hummed flatly, unconvinced.

“Charming,” drawled Past Viktor. He ambled to the main workbench and leaned back against it to begin buttoning his shirt back up. Both Jayces silently lamented the loss. “Why do you ask, Jayce?”

Past Jayce cleared his throat and stepped closer. His nervousness wasn’t subtle—seen in the twitch of his jaw, his hands restlessly smoothing over the wrinkles in his shirt and tugging at his tie—but still Past Viktor didn’t appear to notice. “Well, uhh… We’ve been ahead of schedule for some time,” he said slowly, hedging. “The Council hasn’t been on our ass as much, and until the next shipment of crystals comes in, we’re pretty much stalled on the Hexgate prototype.”

“Hmph. ‘Stalled’ is not ideal,” muttered Past Viktor.

Past Jayce gave a wry chuckle. “Maybe not. But we have the time to spare right now for little delays. We’re fortunate it was this shipment and not next quarter’s that got held up.” He had a point and he knew it—but still, Past Viktor merely sighed morosely. Always the workaholic. Past Jayce wrinkled his nose in mild frustration. “Don’t give me that,” he said. “We’re doing damn good work. And we’re only human, right?” He gave his partner a gentle, imploring smile. “Be positive, just this once—for me?”

An entire war seemed to play out on Past Viktor’s face, brows twinging together, eyes flickering between Jayce’s. It only spanned a second—the man had never had the luxury of ‘being positive’, and they both knew it didn’t come easy to him—but, this was Jayce. It was impossible to deny him when he used those puppydog eyes. Viktor’s face softened, a small smile teasing his lips.

“Fine, yes,” Past Viktor conceded. He trilled his fingers in the air sardonically. “Congratulations, us.”

His Jayce snorted and shook his head. “Your sacrifice will be remembered,” he said fondly.

“I’ll entrust you with my eulogy, dear partner.”

Jayce recalled using every ounce of his inner strength to keep himself from grabbing Viktor, right then and there, and kissing him stupid. He watched his past self’s jaw clench and felt a pang of sympathy for his struggle.

It had been years, now, of this yearnful purgatory. Years of working shoulder-to-shoulder with the man of his dreams, resigned to spouting love confessions from the safety of his head.

The time hadn’t been idle, of course; after many trials and many errors, his HAMMER logs had filled nearly five notebooks. He’d learned after several attempts how Viktor liked his tea—and that he was a fiend for something called “sweetmilk”. At least seven pages were dedicated to recipes, once he’d committed himself to learning how to make it. Then all it took was a morning delivery every day, placed fresh and steaming hot on Viktor’s desk when he arrived. Sometimes in paper cups rather than ceramic (although reserved for special occasions to minimize waste), after Viktor had offhandedly mentioned preferring the taste for reasons he couldn’t articulate. And then weeks of observations—marking down Viktor’s reactions, his cute little mmmm noises, how quickly he finished each cup. After a couple dozen trials, he had Viktor’s favorite recipe marked with a star. Needless to say, he’d stopped needing the recipe before long, and now had it lodged stubbornly in his brain for the rest of his days. Space well-used, he thought.

He'd also come to determine Viktor’s favorite eateries. His favorite leisure activities. His preferred holidays, when he’d be most likely to take a damn break. All through meticulous research. Conversations, inviting him out and seeing what clicked.

The whole experience was as enjoyable as it was strategic; Jayce loved Viktor, and therefore loved spending time with him. He loved learning about him. He loved pleasing him, figuring out what made him tick and making him tick. And then promptly returning home at the end of the day to cry into his pillow and imagine how else he could make the man tick.

Well, maybe he didn’t love the tearful pining, so much as he relished the anticipation of finally seeing it through—however long it took.

But HAMMER could only carry him so far. It was all theoretical, after all—it wouldn’t amount to shit if Viktor never responded to the fruits of his research. Jayce had taken so many shots: bringing Viktor tea or his favorite sweetmilk daily, taking him out for meals, spending their rare weekends together—enjoying his company—walking him home and waiting terrified at the door, before ultimately wishing him a good night and leaving with his tail between his legs—unable to form the request to come inside and stay for a drink.

And never once had Viktor recognized his efforts for what they were. It had become painfully disheartening, placing his heart on the lab table and returning to find it untouched and shriveled up, like a sandwich left out to rot. He knew things would be different if he had the courage to take Viktor by the shoulders and say, “I love you, Viktor, please be my partner in the lab and in life!”

But they were well past the point of getting to know each other. Now, they were as close as two platonic friends could be—even uncomfortably closer, if Caitlyn’s bouts of teenage nausea were to be believed (and were they really?! Best friends held each other’s hands and gave each other neck massages all the time!). They were practically each other’s whole worlds. The fallout of failure would’ve ruined everything. Irreparably. Forever.

Of course, as Jayce and Viktor traveled through these scenes of the past, they knew that their respective reservations about confessing had come from identical fears. It was all so trivial now. So laughable.

Pitiful, but tragic, nonetheless.

But this was supposed to be the night. Years of unspoken tension, failed attempts, painful yearning—all (hopefully) culminating in one night of crumbling walls.

Jayce had been given invitations to the Kirammans’ summer gala. A notoriously stuffy event, populated by highborn jackasses from Houses with big names. But well-catered and well-liquored, and the perfect excuse to preen. There was only one person on the planet he could imagine asking to be by his side. He’d planned everything, curated precisely for him and his partner.

They’d arrive late, dressed to the nines. They’d crash into this exclusive, elite event like a couple of fashionable meteors and proudly take up space. They’d raid the caterers’ trays of fancy hors d'oeuvres, indulge in expensive wine that could probably cover both of their apartments’ combined rent. They’d find someone with a modicum of intrigue to speak to, attempt to sling Hextech—and if they didn’t find any interest, they’d steal away to a corner table or a balcony. Watch the crowds, trade snide observational humor. Take notes on the tablecloth and ooze innocence as they quickly switched tables. Maybe share a dance, if Jayce was lucky.

And then, when the moment presented itself, he’d turn to his partner, smolder—eyes strategically bright with starlight—and tell him, “I’m glad you came. When you’re with me, everything feels right.” Or something along those lines—maybe the wine would’ve lent him a bit more in the way of poetry. But he’d put his affections out there, and Viktor—ideally already primed for romance by the fact that he’d been asked to the gala in the first place—would realize exactly what this night meant to Jayce, and to him.

And then maybe they’d find themselves alone, beneath a silver moon, serenaded by nocturnal insects, and they’d both lean in slowly until their lips brushed—and at this point, Jayce was already far enough into his mental fanfiction that he couldn’t very well not imagine himself a sexy end to the evening (or three). Perhaps he’d been a bit distracted by flashes of some of the private fantasies that had kept him up at night—distracted enough that he didn’t realize he’d stopped speaking for a few seconds too long.

He was dropped back into his body with a start, struck first by the backlit gold of Viktor’s eyes, glittering with amusement.

If Past Viktor thought much of his blatant staring, he left it unsaid. “You still have not told me what this is about,” he prompted, lips twitching into a smirk. Caught, Past Jayce blew out a hefty, grounding sigh. No more stalling.

He rounded back toward the smaller worktable and grabbed the paper cups, hot and spongy with moisture. Past Viktor blinked in mild surprise when one cup was pushed insistently toward his face, steam curling out of the lid and around his cheek.

“Jay—”

“Sweetmilk!” Past Jayce exclaimed stiffly, cheeks already flushing. “Your favorite.”

A bribe, was what it was.

Past Viktor eyed the cup with raised brows, a flicker of skepticism arcing over his face. Like a fluttering flash of light hidden behind storm clouds, it was there and gone. Habit and anticipation won out quickly, turning his lips up into a delighted little grin as he took the cup from Jayce’s hand. “Thank you, Jayce,” he said serenely, bringing the cup to his nose and inhaling deep the spice of home. Jayce knew the scent was safety to him—warmth pulled into his lungs, into his chest. Effervescent comfort. Jayce’s heart swelled as he watched his partner take a long sip, his eyes slipping closed in bliss. He gave a tiny, pleased moan, and Past Jayce nearly bit his tongue clean off in his restraint. After a moment holding onto the warmth of that sip, Past Viktor sighed contentedly and smiled up at him. “This is perfect, as always. Perhaps a bit hot for it today, but still—just what I needed.”

Dazed and bleary with want, past Jayce slowly returned his smile. “Any time, partner,” he murmured.

Present Jayce poked his Viktor in the ribs—sweet revenge for earlier. “Smitten,” he whispered down at him with a smug, cruel grin. Viktor merely grunted in response and waved him off vaguely—a response telling in itself. Jayce’s smile grew.

As the cozy, fragrant steam saturated the small space between them with a sense of sanctuary, Past Jayce took a sip of his own drink—standard coffee—to steel himself.

“So, anyway…” he began, rocking back on his heels, forcing himself to meet Viktor’s open, expectant face. Anxiety tried to tug his gaze away. The dust on the stone floor was awfully inviting, and the doodles and sketches on the scrap pages littering the worktable really drew the eye—but Past Jayce knew he mustn’t be enticed. He needed to give this his all. This was everything.

“Anyway?” Past Viktor parroted.

“Anyway… You might’ve heard, but there’s a gala later tonight.”

Past Viktor hummed in acknowledgement and leaned his free hand back on the desk behind him. “Yes, I have heard. The Kirammans’ summer gala. The event of the year, so they say,” he drawled with a wry smile.

Past Jayce chuckled. “Right, the place to be.”

“Hm, I take it you were invited? They were your patrons, after all.”

Shit, that sounded dangerously close to derision. He needed to tread carefully. Jayce being his best friend did not protect him from ridicule (teasing or otherwise), where his upper-middle class and Houseborn privileges were concerned. A quick sip of coffee scalded his tongue back into action, like prodding a frightened animal to get its ass moving.

“Yeah, I did,” Past Jayce answered, attempting to make his voice light, and inwardly wincing at the nervous tremor. He prayed to a few gods he didn’t believe in that Viktor didn’t hear.

“Such dull events,” said Past Viktor as he lifted his cup for another sip.

“You’re right, they definitely can be.” Past Jayce chuckled, shifted his weight. “The guests can be insufferable, and the conversations are usually pretty vapid. But there are some aspects that can be enjoyable. Good food, expensive booze, some of the best trained musicians in the city. And sometimes you can find someone worthwhile to talk to, or at least talk about.”

Past Viktor gave a small smile. “Little victories.”

He grinned in reply. “Exactly.” Past Jayce shifted again, the leather of his boots creaking quietly, and he clutched his cup with both whiteknuckled hands. “Can’t help but think about the invitees that don’t have a plus one.”

“What about them?”

“Well… it must be such a shame to attend an event like that alone, don’t you think?” Past Jayce pretended to focus on ensuring the lid was tight on his cup (it was) while his eyes flickered surreptitiously up to Past Viktor’s. An easy segue, if he bit…

Past Viktor shrugged. “Not particularly.”

His flippancy was a swift punch to the gut. “Oh,” Past Jayce choked out, smile growing stiff.

“I don’t see the appeal, with or without company. It is a celebration of the pompous and self-aggrandizing. Tone-deaf opulence meant to appeal to the egos of Piltover’s lauded gods.” Past Viktor carried on enthusiastically, voice bright and humored despite the scathe of his tirade. Past Jayce smiled along, but it stung like a mouthful of glass. “Truth be told, I couldn’t imagine a greater waste of time. I believe one’s company would have to be truly extraordinary to distract from the sheer audacity of such an event.”

Past Jayce watched him with wide, horrified eyes and a smile of melted plastic. His voice emerged thin and wobbly—“I see…”

“You understand!” Past Viktor smiled so sweetly at him, even as his words took vicious little bites of Jayce’s soul. “I knew you must’ve felt the same, as we are of such similar minds.”

Oh, how could such a lovely sentiment threaten to lay him out like a bat to the head? Viktor’s praise was coveted—but dear god, not like this.

No—Jayce had to stay strong! This was meant to be the gateway to confession—the move to end all pining! So what if Viktor scoffed at the mere thought of accepting his invitation? Viktor scoffed at many things. And every once in a while, he’d rescind his harsh judgement and acquiesce. Like when Jayce had first introduced him to Caitlyn, and he’d had to concede that she was actually fairly cool “for a Kiramman”.

Or when he’d decried spicy food as the work of demons—until Ximena’s cooking was forced onto his tongue, and he had no choice but to admit his narrowmindedness.

Or when he’d been coerced (under threat of losing overtime privileges) into reading Desire on the Pilt—a bold and darkly sensual romance novella that Jayce had come into work sobbing over. The price for Viktor’s relentless bullying was to experience it himself, and the very next day, he’d burst into the lab and promptly declared it a work of literary genius. (“Gabriella’s self-discovery and free expression of her sexuality was captivating, yet liberating! Such a cathartic reading experience, and an author who clearly knows romance intimately.”)

Needless to say, there was still a chance for his partner to change his tune. He couldn’t give up yet. He was a Talis! He had fighter’s blood, dammit!

Before he could talk himself out of it, Past Jayce whirled back towards the table that held the two garment bags he’d arrived with. One was for him, and one was for Viktor. Complementary suits—white, red, and gold. He’d known full well that it was beyond presumptuous, but the thought of Viktor in his colors had been too tempting to pass up. He scooped up the bags and returned to his partner.

“Viktor,” he said quickly, before his nerve failed him. He gazed intensely into Past Viktor’s eyes, arrested his attention. “Would you like to come with me to the gala tonight?”

Golden eyes widened in surprise. For a tense moment, he looked to be struck speechless—earnest and anticipatory. He licked his lips, and Past Jayce continued to smile down at him nervously.

Then, the dreaded response made real—Past Viktor scoffed. He’d known it was coming, but Past Jayce’s stomach still dropped through the floor. The sound hit the room like an ominous tectonic rumble, unease befalling their two invisible onlookers.

“Oh god,” breathed Present Viktor. For once, Jayce did not jump on him for his lapse—watching the scene play out would be punishment enough.

“No, I would not like to go to the gala, Jayce,” Past Viktor said, the statement haughty even as he offered Jayce a good-natured smile. “As I’ve just said, it sounds like a dreadful experience. Moreso while we endure such insipidity with the weight of our unfinished prototype dangling over our heads, wouldn’t you agree?”

Past Jayce couldn’t speak. His future self knew it well—the creep of ice under his skin, freezing him solid to the spot. The paralysis of dread was one of the most torturous sensations he’d ever felt. Even when his leg had snapped in two like a stick of peppermint… Well, no, that was decidedly worse, for sure. But this was a close second—watching any possibility that Viktor’s regard for him might exceed the platonic, might expand the scope of what sacrifices he considered bearable, torn up like so much tissue paper.

His partner continued, oblivious, tilting his cup back and forth in his hands, “I understand it must be less palatable for you to attend on your own, but I encourage you to consider not attending at all if it causes such discomfort.”

Past Jayce choked. “Wait, I—”

“And you found a suit for me?” Past Viktor leaned over, squinting at the bags on Jayce’s arm. “Hm, I appreciate your thoughtfulness—but you must know better than to assume that I do not have gala-worthy garments already. I attended many similar evenings under Heimerdinger’s employ, as I’m sure you recall.”

“Right, I… I know.”

Jayce floundered, jaw hung. He could have offered more. He could have fought harder, yearned more openly. Made any attempt whatsoever to elucidate and make his heart known. His hands itched to grab and shake, his feet demanded to lurch forward. But the words remained lodged in his throat, and his limbs did not cooperate. It was like wading through mud. And Jayce—one who often bordered on obsessively put-together, and strived for obsessive control—did not fare well with mud.

Each push forward was a step into the unknown. And there was no guideline, no procedure he could devise that would keep them afloat if Jayce invited chaos into their partnership.

So rather than face it head-on, he kept still and let it part around him.

“Of course,” he said with a brittle, shaky laugh. His smile had all the structure of a rickety rope bridge, but Past Viktor seemed pleased enough by his agreement not to notice. “Sorry, I uhh, didn’t mean to assume. I just…”

“It’s quite alright, Jayce,” Past Viktor assured him, giving a rather dismissive wave of his hand. “I know you meant no ill will.” He took a noisy slurp of his sweetmilk while he eyed the garment bags again, and gestured toward them with his cup as he swallowed. “I do hope this didn’t set you back too much. Although, it might have been smart to ask me first before going to the trouble—”

“N-No, no trouble!” Past Jayce cut in brightly. “Forget I said anything.” He had no choice but to cut the cord on his damn pride, flinging the bags onto the table beside him with a carelessness that drove a knife into his chest. Practicality, he told himself; those suits were not cheap!

But he wasn’t so deep in denial that he couldn’t mourn the image that would never be, of Viktor neatly dressed in his colors. Viktor with a soft smile, and liquor-warmed cheeks. Hair slicked back, perhaps. Standing by his side, or hanging off his arm—proclaiming to the room and to the world that they were each other’s.

Jayce was pathetic and he knew it.

To Past Viktor, he merely smiled and nodded toward the nearly-built prototype at the center of the room. “Where’d you leave off?” he asked, disturbed by the lack of substance in his own voice—chipper, yet hollow. Past Viktor gave him an odd look, but whatever thoughts lay behind those furrowed brows were quickly dismissed, as he gave a mild shrug.

“The main energy channels are complete. I am merely rounding off the chamber.”

And just like that, they fell back into rhythm. Work always seemed to fill in whatever gaps formed between them, for better or worse. Later on, Jayce would wish his partner a good night, take his garment bags, and slip out. He’d head to his apartment to change. Take a quick detour to sob into his pillow. Viktor’s suit would be tossed into the depths of his closet, out of sight but never quite forgotten. And Jayce would go to the gala alone. He’d bear it for a couple of hours—the small-talk, the excess—before sneaking out. And when he returned home once again, he’d drink himself into a stupor and regret everything in the morning.

And it would haunt him for years to follow.

But for now, Jayce and Viktor watched solemnly as their shared memory ticked on, in familiarity and excruciating slowness—bent over schematics, amid soft, amiable chatter, and quiet pain held tight in Past Jayce’s shoulders.

He hadn’t thought too much of it when he’d first chosen this day to revisit, but this failure had followed Jayce for a long time. Granted, they all did, in some way—marked him like battle scars. But this time, he’d finally had the courage to ask, and was rejected. He’d feared that heartache religiously, and now he knew firsthand what it felt like. It didn’t get much more traumatizing than that.

So maybe it hadn’t been the greatest idea, reliving it. Even though it’d all worked out in the end—Viktor, his love, finally by his side—this particular memory stuck like a splinter under his skin. His victory was right there in front of them, cut and dry, plain as day. But the triumph was muted.

Beside him, Viktor stared on silently. Jayce had to lean down to see his face, and fuck if that wasn’t a huge mistake—his eyes were wide and sorrowful and brimming with tears. His bottom lip trembled, and distress wilted him like an aged plant.

Jayce felt like he’d just kicked a kitten down a flight of stairs. In a blink, he had Viktor tightly bundled up in his arms, his head tucked beneath Jayce’s chin. Viktor gave a small grunt of surprise, but melted into his hold. He nuzzled into Jayce’s neck, chuckling weakly. “Why do I get the sense that you are just as defeated by my loss in this round as me?” he murmured, equal parts fondness and despondent regret.

Jayce whined above him. “Because I am. I’d love to rub it in your face, but all I can think about is how sad this made me.”

“And me,” Viktor sighed. “Even though I didn’t realize what you were truly asking me, back then, a large part of me had hoped you’d call it what it was—what I wanted it to be. A date. A confession.”

“And I should’ve, because that’s what it was!” Jayce pulled back, holding Viktor by the shoulders and fixing him with moist eyes. “I should’ve been braver, kept trying—”

“Jayce, please,” Viktor interrupted, “take your win.” Sadness clung to his smile, but it did grow brighter, welcoming back in a tinge of humor. “I acquiesce. You asked me to be your date, and I rejected you. I am thoroughly embarrassed.”

Jayce gave a shy smile. “Why did you turn me down, anyway?”

He scrunched his face, cheeks tinting pink. “I thought you simply wanted a friend to suffer alongside you,” he muttered, his admission inviting another flood of affection through Jayce. “And ehh, it would have hurt too much to accompany you platonically, knowing it couldn’t be more.”

“Viktor—”

“I am aware, Jayce.”

“We’re both idiots.”

“I am aware, Jayce.”

Jayce huffed a sigh at their shared absurdity. It was almost comical how cat-and-mouse their partnership had been, unbeknownst to them, and he clung tight to that sentiment—they hadn’t begun this game to make each other feel small, and living in the melancholy of what could have been was a good way to do that. Their new existence in this void wasn’t perfect, but it was a miracle—one they were still finding beauty in with each moment shared. Jayce couldn’t bear to drain the color from it.

“Okay, well. If you insist…” A smirk grew on Jayce’s face, and his eyes narrowed with mischief. “I’ll graciously accept your surrender.”

Viktor knew him so well—he read the shift in his face in real-time, his determination to step forward, back into the spirit of competition. Contrived, perhaps—an obvious redirect. But as long as neither drew attention to it, they could carry on innocently enough. So, Viktor replied drily, “How magnanimous.”

“Do me a favor, V,” Jayce said, looking down his nose at him. “Say it one more time.”

Viktor scowled at him like he’d just knocked a drink out of his hand. “Are we really doing this?”

“Not moving a muscle until I hear you say it,” Jayce sang, rocking playfully on his heels.

Viktor stared at him for a long moment, analyzing. Cutting him into fun shapes with the Hexclaw in his mind. “Such a pest,” he hissed in mock-disdain. But he did concede, theatrically sighing and addressing the ceiling—“O, Almighty Jayce, I hereby declare you the winner of this round.” His gaze snapped back to Jayce’s, promising some extensive torture later. He couldn’t fully fight off the beginnings of a smile, though. “Is that to your satisfaction, Talis?”

Jayce grinned. “That was perfect, Viktor, thank you.”

“Hmph,” Viktor grunted icily. He reached up and grabbed Jayce’s shirt collar, tugging him down to glare straight into his amused (and increasingly aroused) eyes. “Do not get too smug, Pretty Boy,” he threatened, voice low. “This game is not over yet. Why don’t we try and break this tie, hm?”

Bent over by Viktor’s grip, Jayce’s laugh came out strained, but eager. He let himself be yanked further down, greedily inhaling Viktor’s air as it brushed his face. Buzzing with anticipation. “Sounds fun,” he teased quietly. And just to provoke, he closed the distance and stole a kiss on the tip of Viktor’s nose.

Viktor’s annoyed glare deepened, but it was belied by the knowing, humored gleam in his eyes. “Keep that optimism,” he whispered darkly, and his grin grew wide and predatory. “Though we did not agree on any consequences for the loser, I do look forward to having you completely submit to me at the end of this game.”

Unfazed, Jayce hummed contentedly. “And I you.”

With the threat landing as successfully as it possibly could’ve (that is: not very), Viktor released Jayce, and his menacing air subsided. “Give me a moment to brainstorm,” he said, soft and affectionate now, in this space between rounds.

Jayce smiled and kissed his forehead. “Sure.”

They paused while Viktor considered where to send them next, and Jayce busied himself with watching their past selves discuss adjustments over their blueprints. They stood side-by-side before the tall window, shoulders bumping, arms gesturing animatedly. Forms backlit by cool, dimming red—a shade that evoked bittersweet nostalgia—as night fast approached. They were ethereal, leaning beside each other against the table. Not quite ghosts, nor demanding to be mourned. But something that quietly compelled reverence.

Memory given form, agonizing but integral. Jayce knew he owed what they had now to the choices they’d made before. But there was something here—heaviness in the solemn quiet—that bothered him. Clung to an unlit corner of his brain. He couldn’t assign words to it, but there was an undercurrent of unease that he couldn’t shake. He could vaguely feel its outline—a shape to everything they’d come to witness today—but its nature eluded him.

“Jayce?” He started when he heard his name, spoken softly near his ear. He refocused onto his Viktor, blinking away from the pair that hadn’t yet gotten it right. Viktor cupped his face in a hand and gazed at him with fondness, and a small degree of concern. “Are you alright, my love?” Viktor asked.

Jayce hated the look of the worry line between his partner’s brows, so he kissed it away. “Never better,” he said, and he really did mean it. He couldn’t help the introspection, he supposed—after all, they were quite literally reliving the past—but it was time to get back on track.

“Good,” Viktor said with an impish grin. “Then I suggest you prepare your next apology. And your next memory, because this will be quick.”

“Don’t you worry, baby, I’m never quick.”

Viktor groaned in dismay. “Ah, there he is.”

As Viktor began to will the scene to shift, mist spiraling at the edges of the room, Jayce pursed his lips in thought. “Remember Desire on the Pilt?”

“Hm?” Viktor blinked at him, caught off guard. “Yes, sadly. Why?”

“This felt a little like the scene when Gabriella turned down the Duke’s invitation to the ball.”

Viktor lifted a questioning brow. “What brought this on?”

“Huh? Oh, I was just reminded of the book, is all. You didn’t want anything to do with it at first—and then you wouldn’t shut up about it for over a week.” Jayce grinned when Viktor backhanded him on the arm.

“You make me sound obsessed,” he grumbled, his petulance earning a laugh from Jayce.

“Hey, remember, I was too! It just made me think you might’ve changed your mind about the gala.”

“Though I didn’t…”

Jayce’s smile softened. “No, you didn’t. And that’s okay. We’re here right?” Viktor didn’t answer immediately, watching the floor with furrowed brows—feigning concentration, Jayce guessed. He bumped Viktor’s shoulder playfully. “Actually, you spoke a lot like Gabriella, too. ‘Tone-deaf opulence’ and everything. I thought maybe you were quoting that chapter.”

His partner stiffened beside him. “Please do not remind me of that,” he muttered, voice strained. “For all I know, she was based on…”

Jayce’s head tilted in confusion. “Huh?”

“Nothing. Ignore me.”

“Wait, what—”

“Moving on!” Viktor declared.

The room shifted once again, sweeping away Jayce’s protests.

Astral smoke swirled and eddied around them, and they both awaited the familiar beat of competition in morbid anticipation. There was a kind of entertainment in the agony. It was like they’d somehow plagiarized their own memories. Over and over. It wasn’t just embarrassing—it was genuinely concerning, how frequently they’d managed to careen past each other, like runaway carriages in the night.

If nothing else, though, it was excellent proof that Jayce and Viktor were meant for each other. No one, in all of Runeterra, could compete with the brainpower of two “geniuses” who were beyond determined never to use theirs. In a way it was a comfort—if either one of them had ever gotten their shit together, nothing would have changed. Neither of them could become too mired in regret when their stupidity was a team sport.

Viktor took them to a replica of the Academy library—cold and ancient stone submerged in the blue shadow of night, warmed only by flickering sconces high on the walls between towering shelves. His past self sat hunched at a table, multiple tomes scattered open around him. His crutch leaned against the table, and the orange glow of the lantern beside him spilled dim light over words on dusty pages. Past Viktor himself appeared just as worn as those old, leather bindings—the bags beneath his eyes bruised deeper, and exhaustion read in every hair out of place, and every too-long blink. His chin was propped on a fist as he poured over the blurring text.

They watched as Past Jayce materialized at the edge of the memory before quietly approaching his partner. His steps were not as silent as the rest of the library, but Past Viktor didn’t react until a large hand clasped his shoulder from behind. He gave only a minor twitch, a dip of his head in acknowledgement.

The conversation was mundane. Muscle-memory. They’d had this talk many, many times. Jayce would softly implore his partner to take a break, to call it a night. Viktor would protest in short grunts and noncommittal hums. He’d scrunch his nose, shake his head. “I appreciate your concern, Jayce, but I am very close. I will rest once I’ve finished this equation.” It’d become a familiar script over the years. As tempting a thought as it was, Jayce wasn’t so boorish that he’d lift his partner over his shoulder and carry him off to the nearest horizontal surface. All he could really do was be there to place a blanket over Viktor’s shoulders when he returned to find him sleeping.

Only a few times had he been brave enough to carry Viktor to the couch—and only when Viktor was already fast asleep. Neither had ever drawn attention to it in the morning.

But tonight, a rarity. It was as Past Jayce was yawning—mid-plea for Viktor to step away with him—that something passed over Viktor’s face. Guilt. Sheepishness. Something carefully fond. His eyes unfocused for a few seconds as he let this particular emotion pool in him. But then, slowly, he shut the book in front of him. All of them. And as Past Jayce watched wide-eyed, Past Viktor glanced up at him over his shoulder and gave a tired smile.

“Alright, Jayce. I’ll go to bed.” His hand came up and gently caressed the fingers still resting on his shoulder. “… For you.”

And he did. He allowed Past Jayce to help him return the books, and then together they walked through the still streets—their future counterparts following closely behind, ordering time to fly faster—until they reached Viktor’s door. And though they parted there, each retiring to their respective homes, their nighttime routines were both filled with thoughts of the other.

Once Jayce and Viktor were watching the slow rise and fall of Past Viktor’s sleeping chest, Jayce turned to him quizzically. “What was this?” he asked, and Viktor smiled.

“You asked me to go to bed at a reasonable time, and I agreed.”

Jayce blinked. “Oh, so we’re just submitting the bare minimum now, are we?”

Viktor’s brows dropped. “Jayce, you know how focused I get. Any other day, I’d sooner have performed cartwheels through the Academy Square than retire early.”

This made Jayce wince in pity. “That’s not really much of a brag, V.” Viktor scoffed.

“It wasn’t a brag, it was an explanation—”

“An excuse.”

“—For some of my unideal habits,” Viktor finished pointedly, arching a brow. “But tonight, I did this for you. I didn’t want you to worry, or to lose sleep over me losing sleep. This was my way of caring for you.”

Jayce smirked. “Ah, I like that. So for your next birthday, instead of getting you anything, I guess I’ll just think about setting fire to Heimerdinger’s office—and then not do that.”

“Hmph.” Viktor rolled his eyes. “You think that threatens me?”

“Hey, I could end up burning some pretty important research!”

Viktor groaned. “I could only hope his manuscript would burn, too.”

“Manuscript?”

“Never mind that,” Viktor quickly waved him off, his gaze dutifully trained on his own sleeping form. “Such a threat is not in the spirit of the game, anyway—taking care of yourself for my sake.”

Jayce huffed in exasperation. “Okay, fine, it’s sweet,” he said, “but it’s not flirting.”

A drawn-out pause stretched between them. Viktor’s face went red.

“… Touché.”

Then they were off to the next. Jayce took them to a—Viktor gagged when he realized—faculty party.

Strings of colorful lights high on the walls of the Academy ballroom indicated that this had been a holiday party. Professors, researchers, administrators, and even TAs mingled with reddened cheeks and mugs of hot, spiked cider. A few of the more eccentric staff wore scratchy sweaters and snow-damp scarves—more as a symbol of the season than for any semblance of practicality—but most were content to have merely dressed down from their typically uniformed attire. Beneath the warm hum of mildly inebriated chatter carried a cheery tune from the string quartet in the corner.

All in all, despite the ballroom setting and the unmitigable opulence of an Academy function, the event was fairly cozy. Still, Viktor couldn’t help but tense, scowling into the crowd.

“You’ve already lost me, Lover Boy,” he grumbled. “Nothing that transpires at a staff party can be taken as anything less than hostile.”

Jayce huffed dismissively, flitting his gaze around for their familiar silhouettes. “Give me a chance, will you?”

Eventually he spotted them—practically glued to each other’s sides, where else?—standing vigil by the open bar. Past Jayce wore a thick wool scarf of red and white, featuring his family crest (a gift knitted by mom), but otherwise he and Past Viktor were dressed as though they’d come straight from the lab. They probably had. Past Viktor had a cup whiteknuckled in front of his mouth, lips squished against the rim, and his crutch was gripped like a lifeline beside him. With wary, darting eyes—glassy, yet sharp—and the size of the luggage beneath them, his fatigue here was almost more pronounced than it’d been under many days of sleep deprivation. A product of his environment, he’d explained drily when Past Jayce had asked him earlier if he was alright.

Jayce and Viktor drew near enough to note the whiff of booze that clung to their collars like perfume. It was to be expected—they’d both gotten unreasonably sloshed, unreasonably early. Jayce’s payment for Viktor’s sacrifice was that they’d get drunk together, and they’d done so in record time.

Past Jayce was conversing with a small group of other researchers on the Academy’s payroll, polite and charming despite his clear intoxication (dear god, could the man ensnare with nothing but a smile). Past Viktor stood just behind him, against the bar, watching on with grim fascination. He didn’t speak unless spoken to, typically, but he was far from impolite when addressed, chatting quietly yet amiably with a couple of junior researchers that had swept in to meet the shadowed half of Hextech.

“Alright,” Jayce said as they stopped to watch. “So you know how I get really touchy when I drink?”

“You’re touchy always, Jayce,” Viktor replied flatly, earning a sigh.

“Fine but, like, moreso.”

He wasn’t making this up; Jayce-under-the-influence was on an entirely different level than sober-Jayce when it came to casual touches. They’d had many a night of friendly “bonding” (or “mandatory time off” after Heimerdinger had walked in on them napping at their desks beside a pile of unsecured, unstable, decidedly armed Hex crystals). And usually, Viktor ended these nights with some serious fantasizing sessions once he stumbled home. He couldn’t help it—drunk Jayce put his obscenely large mitts everywhere.

If Viktor told a joke, if he asked a question, if he thought of something to jot down, if he stood from his chair to fetch more booze—each time, a hand landed on his shoulder, his back, even ruffling his hair. Viktor would have called it excessive if he didn’t absolutely live for the contact. Little sensations to file away for future reference.

Now the two of them watched as Past Jayce’s hands practically lived on the shoulders of his colleagues. Every time someone new was addressed, they got to become quite intimate with the heat of Jayce’s palm. No one complained. Though the older gentleman who taught thermodynamics pressed his lips together and squirmed at the insistent touch, the silver-haired woman who headed tome curation in the library appeared absolutely charmed. Her face turned beet-red when Jayce shoved a business card at her—their fingers brushing in the exchange—and she shivered so violently Past Viktor had had half a mind to ask her to find a private room to sort herself out in.

Still, he could only think to himself, Same, Gladys. Same.

Present Viktor elbowed his partner lightly in the ribs.

“Ow—hey!” Jayce protested, rubbing his side and giving his best pathetic pout.

Viktor huffed. “Did you bring me here to watch you flirt with a woman old enough to be your mother, Jayce?”

“Huh? No, of course not!”

“What about poor Neil, there?” Viktor said, gesturing toward the professor currently under Past Jayce’s patting fingers—red-faced, wide-eyed, his polite smile stiff and strained. “Now just look at that blush. You’ve definitely awakened something in him.”

Disgust twisted Jayce’s face into a scowl and he recoiled. “Ew, no! God, Viktor, that man gave me some of my lowest grades when I was a student!”

Viktor narrowed his eyes at him incredulously. “That’s your only issue? He’s also happily married.”

“I’m just saying, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to charm him of all people!”

“Jayce, please,” Viktor growled, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Damn, fine!” Jayce had the sense to crank up the speed for a bit after that, and Viktor watched as guest after guest approached Jayce, and each received his hands. Pats on the arm, shoulder, back—all jerky and comically fast as they sped through the evening. They watched as both Past Jayce and Viktor became more and more drunk as the night wore on, until Past Viktor was practically folded in half with how far he was hunched over, and Past Jayce wore such a deep red over his tan cheeks it was like he’d painted himself in his House colors.

Finally, Jayce returned time to its normal flow. The other party guests left their company (poor Gladys gripping his business card to her chest like a token of love), and soon Past Jayce and Viktor stood (wobbled) alone. The larger man turned back to his partner tiredly, but with a certain, tangible degree of eagerness. “Ready to get out of here?” he asked. Past Viktor sighed with all the gravity of a factory worker after a twelve-hour shift, slumping where he stood into a question mark.

“I have never heard such glorious words in my life,” he slurred. A genuine tear trembled in his eye and he swiped it away melodramatically.

Apparently, something in his reaction had struck a chord with Past Jayce, because the man responded with an affectionate smile. And as sure as the sun rises, Past Jayce placed his hand onto his partner’s back. A warm, albeit ordinary touch. Past Viktor didn’t even flinch, instead tipping his drink back and downing the rest of it in one go. No mind paid to that hand cupped over the back of his shoulder.

But Present Jayce was grinning like he’d won the lottery. “Check that out, V,” he said smugly, making sure to wave toward the point of contact with a deliberate, theatrical sweep. Like a cheap carriage salesman. Viktor squinted in confusion.

“Care to explain?”

Jayce groaned toward the ceiling. “Don’t be dense,” he pled. “Use your fully functional scientist eyes, I implore you.”

Viktor gave a dry hum, brows lifting in sarcastic acknowledgement. “Ahh, of course. Well my scientist eyes see an older woman currently sniffing your scent off of a piece of cardstock over by the wall—” Jayce scoffed, but his cheeks bloomed red. “—and while I do not remember much from this evening, I imagine that I was left wanting for an excuse to sniff your scent myself.”

Jayce crossed his arms and leaned his shoulder against a pillar across from the bar, where their past selves still loitered. “Classy,” he said flatly, before gesturing again with a flat palm—toward a drunk and independently-swaying duo, and the hand still pressed onto the smaller man’s person. “But look at this hard evidence! I’m not delusional!”

Viktor didn’t relish hurting his partner’s feelings, but the man was also squinting at him with pity, like he had adopted a new terminal diagnosis. Because clearly he was beyond hopeless for not acknowledging the apparent love confession that was the most Jayce-Talis-typical behavior ever witnessed. “You’re touching my back,” Viktor deadpanned. “How revolutionary.”

Jayce chose not to pout too hard about it, which saved Viktor a good deal of guilt. Instead, he frowned as though disappointed.

“Come on, you know me better than that!” Jayce insisted. He slung his arm over Viktor’s shoulders and steered him closer. Viktor managed not to stumble as they drew right up to their mirror images, leaning into Jayce’s warmth for balance. Then, the world came to an abrupt stop around them—Past Jayce mid-laugh and Past Viktor nodding off like a retiree where he stood. “Now,” Jayce continued, pulling Viktor in until both of their faces hovered just above the wide hand splayed over Past Viktor’s back. “Tell me what you see.”

“I see your damn hand on my back, Jayce.”

“Noooo, c’mon Viktor!” the larger man whined, and—oh, there were those pouty eyes. Viktor’s lips twitched but he didn’t budge. “Look at hand placement! Angle! Tightness!”

“Jayce, you have touched me in exactly the same way every time I handed you a wrench, or landed a throw into the waste bin with a ball of paper. Hell, you have touched every guest here tonight identically!”

“My in-love shoulder touches are completely different from my friendly shoulder touches!” Jayce cried, tossing his hands into the air. “I hold you tighter, first of all. And the placement is lower, and—and the spread of my fingers! It’s obvious!”

Oh, this man’s utter insanity—Viktor was filled with both frustration and admiration, loving and dreading every second of his partner’s obliviousness. Viktor’s fingers fisted tightly in his hair and threatened to tear it out in clumps as he gritted out, “Clearly it is not, that is the problem!”

Several seconds of silence passed between them, steeped in mock-tension. Narrowed eyes held each other captive in mutual disbelief. Finally, both men sagged and laughed jovially at the absurdity.

“This is so stupid,” said Jayce with a grin, covering his embarrassment-flushed face with a hand. Viktor leaned in and kissed the back of it, aiming for the cheek beneath to lave with his affections.

“You truly had the angle of your hand down to such a science?” he lilted in amusement, hovering near Jayce’s covered face. The man slowly lowered his hand, just enough to meet Viktor’s eyes, and humor relaxed his features when he saw the warmth there. Jayce smiled sheepishly.

“Should’ve stuck to real science, huh?” he chuckled.

“At the very least, not mad science.”

“Always mad for you, gorgeous.” Jayce’s eyes gleamed with mischief.

Viktor responded with a put-upon sigh and shook his head sadly. “However did I manage to fall in love with such a dork?”

Now that their concentration was waning, making way for comfortable contemplation, the ballroom faded away around them, and they were once again left floating in the infinite void. They smiled at each other for a moment, simply taking each other in. Two beings of a pale, soft glow, that shimmered beneath illusory clothing and the skin they’d worn in life. Violet starlight reflected in their eyes—bright, glittering vibrancy dotting velvet sky behind heathery-gray nebulae. Otherworldly beauty, to belie the ridiculousness of their current fight.

A fight that they both apparently needed a refresher on.

Jayce giggled, wide-eyed and somewhat bemused. “Remind me what we were arguing about?”

Humor pulled Viktor’s grin wider. “Who loved whom more deeply, yes?”

Jayce wheezed a laugh as the two of them drifted closer together, their knees bumping lightly into each other. He hooked a foot around Viktor’s ankle to keep him from floating off. “And after all of that, we’re still tied, aren’t we?”

“I believe we are.”

“Like the Duke and the knight competing for Gabriella’s hand, each fighting to prove their love for her was greater—”

Viktor arched a brow. “You are very stuck on that book, Jayce.”

“—and then all three of them fucked nasty.” Jayce grinned, waggling his brows. “Very inspiring, acrobatic stuff. I actually took notes during that scene.” He was surprised to find Viktor’s face paling, distress scrunching his features. “Vik?”

“I have another piece of evidence,” Viktor blurted. He looked like he might be sick. Jayce’s eyes widened with alarm and confusion.

“Uhh, what’s that?”

“This was not flirting, but it is proof that I loved you. I never told you that—” Viktor squeezed his eyes shut and covered his face with his hands, the melodrama of it all legitimately worrying Jayce. Viktor’s voice came muffled—“I discovered the true identity of the author of Desire on the Pilt.”

Jayce blinked, as the information took a second to register. His jaw dropped. “You did!?” Jayce cried. “That’s—why didn’t you tell me!? I would’ve killed to meet—”

“It was Professor Heimerdinger!”

Okay that—

Huh?

Jayce stared at him blankly, uncomprehending. “What?”

“The name of the author of Desire on the Pilt, Ceril V. Hymanwringer—was a pseudonym,” Viktor moaned in despair into his palms, “for none other than the Head of the Council of Piltover.”

Jayce’s gut curdled with a dread more profound than anything he’d ever felt in his life. Not even dropping femur-first into a dystopian hellscape Piltover-to-come didn’t compare. “No,” he whispered shakily, eyes round and filled with horror. Viktor nodded sadly, still burying his face.

“Yes. I found his manuscript in a hidden drawer in his office. Along with drafts of some of his more… risqué scenes. And… diagrams.”

“NO!”

“Yes!” Viktor practically wailed. The arcane void around them shifted into hues of bleak gray and bile-green—which was not helping to settle Jayce’s stomach. “I am sorry that you now have this information,” Viktor continued solemnly, dropping his hands to reveal tears in his eyes. “But know that I kept it from you for as long as I did to protect you, Jayce. Because I love you.”

Jayce swallowed thickly, the horror of it all sticking in his throat. “Viktor,” he managed to choke out. “All of those smut scenes…”

“Please, Jayce, I beg you not to dwell on it.”

“It’s kind of fucking hard not to! I based so many of my fantasies on—” Jayce gagged suddenly, heat spilling into the skin of his face. His hands flew up to cover his mouth. “—Oh, GOD.”

“Jayce,” Viktor said in warning, suddenly wary, “I am not keen to discover what might be expelled from an astral projection in place of vomit—”

“I’m fine!” Jayce said quickly, swallowing again. “I’m fine, I’m good.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I—” His eyes widened again as a new horrifying thought occurred to him. “Wait, is Gabriella so similar to you because—”

“I told you not to dwell on it!”

Lacking any reliable means to file an HR complaint about a yordle presumed dead (or missing, at the very least) from a pocket realm separate from their original world, Jayce and Viktor eventually managed to progress past a state of paralyzed disgust by banishing this fresh horror into the back of their heads, to be hopefully forgotten forever. Though Jayce suspected it would return to haunt him at night when he least expected it, in-between PTSD flashes of nightmare-Piltover and blasting a cavity into his soulmate’s chest.

“Okay,” Jayce said, shellshocked, shaking his head. The void had since returned to a more neutral lavender. “So even though that wasn’t flirting, you definitely sacrificed yourself by carrying that burden alone, for my sake.”

“Are we retroactively counting non-flirtatious gestures?” Viktor asked, floating upside-down in front of him.

“Nah, that’ll get messy.” Jayce waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll make us even, though—remember that time the bakery almost discontinued your favorite almond pastries?”

Viktor’s face lit up at the memory, the excitement probably enhanced after such a harrowing conversation. “Don’t tell me,” he said, hushed. Jayce smiled shyly.

“Yeah, I might’ve, uhh…” He rubbed the back of his neck with a large hand, cheeks flushing slightly. “Bribed them with House money to keep it on the menu.”

Though he already knew what Jayce was going to say, Viktor gasped. He reached out and clasped the sides of Jayce’s face to pull himself closer, still upside-down. “Jayce Talis, you did not.” His voice scolded, but it was giddy with delight. Jayce laughed.

“I did, I’m sorry! Maybe it was over the top, but you seemed so sad when you heard they were disappearing—”

“I was devastated!”

“—yeah, and I couldn’t let it slide!” Still embarrassed, despite Viktor’s reaction, Jayce’s blush deepened. He hid his face against the side of Viktor’s, feeling gentle lips press onto his temple. “The problem was the ingredients were more expensive than their other pastries. So I, uhh, may have allocated a monthly donation to make sure they got what they needed to keep making them.”

“And you never told me,” Viktor murmured in awe.

“Of course not! It was so excessive, I thought you’d find it wasteful. And I did it to make you happy, not to make you love me.” He felt Viktor smile against him, and melted at the timbre of his soft chuckle.

Viktor whispered, “Well, you got both.” They pulled back to gaze at each other again, letting the starry sky around them fade into the delicate pink that had come to signify strong feelings of love. Viktor twisted his body until he slowly spun right-side-up, eyes never leaving Jayce’s. They drifted closer again, noses bumping, and Jayce’s smile fell the slightest bit into something more sober.

“You’re incredible, you know that?” Jayce said quietly, eyes glittering, his voice hardly a hum.

Viktor grinned. “Yes,” he said, and Jayce huffed a laugh, shaking his head. They closed the short distance, lips meeting in a gentle kiss that was all warmth and little heat. When they parted, Viktor sighed, still smiling. “And you are breathtaking.”

Jayce knew he wasn’t cool enough to try and smother the lovestruck giggle that bubbled up in response. And it only fed Viktor’s bright, wonderful smile, so he figured it was worth the sacrifice to his long-tattered ego.

“So,” Viktor finally said, to rouse them both from the spell, “just how many of our benign gestures over the years were made with the intent to court? I suspect if we were to count each one we’d be here quite a while.”

“Eight years, probably!” They both laughed.

Almost without thinking, Jayce summoned up a room around them—his apartment from the later years of their partnership. A cozy space with plush beige sofas and a cheerily crackling fireplace, walls a clean white interrupted by dozens of framed photographs—ninety-percent of which were of Jayce and Viktor, in various states of candidness. Working, posing, grinning, yearning—snapshots of their long companionship, lovingly caressed by bright, simulated sunlight spilling through the glass balcony doors.

Jayce had the couch materialize underneath him, and quickly pulled Viktor into his arms. He tipped his head back onto the armrest to smile at the ceiling while Viktor made himself comfortable on his chest.

“Are we done then?” Viktor drawled, a hand shifting to trace light circles over Jayce’s collarbone. He felt the vibration of the laugh in Jayce’s chest.

“Of course not—I haven’t won yet,” he said. Viktor scoffed and slapped his tit. The man beneath him kept grinning, tightening his arms around him. “Got sick of the void, though. I prefer talking like this. Just… relaxing on the couch, like we did back then.”

“Never on top of each other.”

“Sadly not. Such a shame.”

Viktor hummed in agreement, “Mm, such a shame.” A beat of quiet followed, and the moment was so raw and grounded with a sense of safety, they allowed it to linger. Just a few minutes longer, living in the quiet pop of firewood and the faint song of birds on the balcony, and the heat of each other’s resting bodies. Before they knew it, they could end up burrowing into this point in space and memory for eons—wrapped in love and reverie until worlds ended outside their astral prison. But they had eternity to bask—perhaps had already done so without realizing it—and there was so much to experience here together. So much more to discover, so many directions to grow. And they were like two saplings grafted together—they’d always be wound around each other, no matter which way their leaves stretched.

Now, though, they still occupied a state of competitiveness together. And being the scientists that they were, they couldn’t allow a problem to go unsolved for long.

Sooner than an eternity later, Viktor tilted his head up to challenge his partner once more with his sharp gaze. “Allow me bonus points if I can make a correct guess,” he said with renewed fire. Jayce’s eyes narrowed slightly, studying him, and he smiled.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “Sure. Why the hell not?”

Viktor lifted himself onto a forearm to hover over Jayce, hair falling over half-lidded eyes as he gazed down at him in thought. His other hand came up and waved vaguely off to the side, toward the center of the room, prompting Jayce to glance that way. Coalescing in front of the fireplace, suspended in air, was a mirage set in swirling smoke—a portal. At first, it was filled with stars—a window to the night sky of the void—but it was quickly replaced with an image of the two of them.

Viktor, mid-twenties, sat in the chair in the lab. He’d a faint blush on his face, and he chewed the inside of his cheek with his eyes glued to the ground. Knelt in front of him was Jayce—eager, grinning wide, his wide hands clasped around Viktor’s right leg. He was maneuvering a loop of cloth measuring tape around Viktor’s thigh, tightening it with deft hands. Completely oblivious to the panic playing out over Viktor’s face as he chatted happily about something inaudible.

Then the portal rippled like the disturbed surface of a pond, and the image within shifted. Now, Viktor stood by the lab bench, supported by a hand on the table, and a hand on Jayce’s broad shoulder. The man’s torso sported only an undershirt and a thick sheen of sweat that trickled enticingly through contours of muscle—he’d just come from the forge, and Viktor’s face had grown impossibly hot. Viktor’s leg was now sheathed in clean silver and red metalwork, held together by tiny Talis-crest catches.

“You made this brace for me,” Viktor said, turning his eyes back down to Jayce’s below him. “Using your own hands, in your family colors, and with great personal effort.” He gave a sly grin—a ‘gotchya’ sort of smirk—and his voice lowered teasingly. “This was an unspoken declaration of love.”

Jayce smiled toothily, and for a second Viktor thought he’d be congratulated. Hearing “You were right!” from Jayce had often tested his resolve to not disappear indecently into a broom closet in the middle of the workday. But the praise didn’t come immediately, which was frankly unacceptable. Viktor froze, puzzlement furrowing his brows. This wasn’t necessarily a pleased smile he was seeing. He took a closer look, and… yeah, that was the smile of a man dropped suddenly into a social event in a foreign country—helplessly confused and edged with panic.

“Jayce?” Viktor asked cautiously.

Jayce gave an uncertain, apologetic laugh, wide eyes darting around the room. “So, uhh, about that…”

“No…”

“Okay, look! In hindsight, I can see why you might assume there was a plan…"

Viktor’s heart sank, straight through the floor and out into the void of space—probably misplaced out there like a pin dropped in the carpet. He felt sick—cheated! This was betrayal, plain and simple! All those years fantasizing that he could’ve been wearing a love letter on his leg, and this whole time, JAYCE HAD—

“There was no plan,” Viktor despaired. Jayce shook his head. He looked like he wanted to dig a deep hole, leap in, and pull the dirt in after him.

“The Talis details were kind of like a signature, to be honest,” Jayce said with a cringe, his blush furious and pitiful. “At the time, I was really just… doing a kindness for a buddy.”

The air wheezed out of Viktor as though he’d been gut-punched. “Oh, I think I just felt my dick shrivel up,” he muttered, horrified.

“Woahwoahwoah don’t get me wrong!” Jayce shot up in his seat, Viktor held stubbornly in place on his lap by the hands on his waist. “I was madly fucking in love with you—that just wasn’t a factor in me making the brace!”

Viktor squirmed weakly in his grasp. “Jayce—”

“The main reason was because you were my friend, and I wanted you to be comfortable! And, wouldn’t it be kind of creepy if I crafted your medical aid in my House colors as some ultra-possessive brand that you couldn’t remove?”

“Why else did you!?” Viktor cried in exasperation.

“Because I liked the colors on you and I thought that it should look nice if you were going to be wearing it at all times!”

Viktor growled, grabbing a fistful of his own hair to yank. “Curse you and your unnatural integrity!” he spat with mock-venom. Jayce stuck his bottom lip out in a pout, and his eyes were moist enough that Viktor was almost fooled into thinking he’d struck a nerve. But no, the man was smirking, which was green light enough to poke him in the forehead like a pest.

“Fine! Whatever!” Jayce eventually huffed. “Is it my turn?”

“What, you want a guess?” Viktor’s brow lifted judgmentally.

“Well, duh—if you get to play for bonus points, so do I.”

Viktor crossed his arms. “Hmph. Fine—go.”

A wide, lopsided grin spread over Jayce’s face. “Well, you did call me hot,” he practically sang. “Does that count?”

“Excuse me?” Viktor squinted in confusion.

“In the forge!” The still-hovering portal, like water, shivered and became obscured by concentric rings of waves. When it cleared it revealed a very shiny, very damp, very muscled Jayce—gold in the light of the forge’s flame while he worked—and Viktor beside him with his shirt collar open, tie undone, and face the red of Jayce’s molten metal. There was audio to accompany this memory—growling flames and blasting steam. The ring of struck metal as Jayce’s hammer came down, and the little grunt of effort expelled with each hit.

It was as sexual and jarring as walking in on the man with a lewd magazine in hand. Viktor yelped, scandalized. “Gah! You cannot just spring such an erotic image at me with no warning!” Viktor hissed, positive he could feel his pants growing tighter (and given that he was still perched on Jayce’s lap, he could probably feel it too). Jayce grinned evilly.

The Viktor in the portal spoke, gaze trained politely on Jayce’s work. “This looks acceptable, Jayce,” he said. “Finish up that part. We will test what we have now and continue the metalwork tomorrow—you are hot.”

Viktor didn’t even wait to hear Past Jayce’s response before glaring down at his partner pointedly. “Please, Jayce, you are being willfully obtuse. Clearly I was being literal.”

“‘You are hot.’”

“HOT. The temperature, Jayce. As in you were overheating.”

Jayce hummed, not buying it. “I dunno, Vik—”

“You are chugging like a damn train, Jayce,” Viktor cut in flatly. Now that he listened for it, Forge-Jayce’s breaths were truly blasting out of him, rapid and rasping.

“Okay…” Jayce bit his lip, eyes flickering between him and the portal. “Okay, yeah, maybe I sound like I’m dying.”

Viktor sighed. “Thank you.”

“But what about when you said I could handle carrying the parts of the prototype back to the lab because I was strong enough—”

“Practicality. I would have thrown my back out for a month.”

Jayce exhaled hard through his nose, indignant. “You said I had exquisite muscles’!”

“Yes, and speaking from a purely biological perspective, your muscles are quite impressive.”

He paused, gnawing on the inside of his cheek, studying Viktor with narrowed eyes. “You really didn’t mean that as a flirt?” he asked slowly, an undercurrent of betrayal in his tone—one Viktor recognized and had very little sympathy for. Taste of your own medicine, Talis.

“Unfortunately, I did not.” Viktor held his ground. He wasn’t lying, of course, but he wasn’t about to be tempted to concede that maybe, perhaps, he’d been flirting just the tiniest bit, because he respected Jayce too much to acquiesce out of pity.

He also very much did not want to lose, and at their current rate, they’d end this whole pointless affair with a goddamned tie.

“Here’s one,” Jayce continued. “What about that time you ‘tripped’ in the lab and stumbled into me and your hand landed square on my crotch?”

“EXCUSE ME?”

“I said—you grabbed my crotch.”

Viktor gaped at him, feeling that traitorous heat in his cheeks again. He simply couldn’t answer right away—weeks and weeks of embarrassment-nightmares suddenly welled to the surface like his psyche had sprung a leak, excavated from where they’d been dutifully buried for all those years. He’d done everything in his power to seal away those agonizing memories like a cursed artifact in a tomb but dammit, did Jayce have a knack for barreling in with heavy machinery and razing Viktor’s sanity to the ground.

“That was entirely accidental,” he finally managed to choke out.

Jayce glared flatly. “Viktor. You held onto my dick ‘n balls for over five seconds.”

“I was catching my balance!” Viktor cried. His hands flew up to cover his face and he practically screamed in humiliation, muffled into his palms. “You are evil for reminding me of the single lowest moment of my life—”

“The single lowest?!”

“Yes, as a matter of fact—”

“Viktor—you have literally died, THREE TIMES—”

“Which should tell you how thoroughly the crotch-grabbing incident haunted me!” Jayce let out a huff of playful frustration before grabbing Viktor’s wrists and prying his hands away from his steaming face. “Unhand me!” Viktor whined in protest, barely fighting back. “Jayce Talis, I am divorcing you. I swear to god, I will find another astral void to pack up and move to.”

His threats didn’t hold for long—they quickly devolved into giggles as Jayce leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek, and the other, and his forehead, and his nose, and every square inch of skin on his face until Viktor was breathless with affectionate laughter.

“Jayce!” Viktor wheezed, his cheeks aching with mirth. “Stop it, I am supposed to be angry with you!”

“Ha! Why’s that?”

“I… I don’t remember.”

The two men cackled, leaning forward to drape onto each other for balance. Jayce’s arms wound around Viktor’s middle again and he squeezed him tight, and Viktor rested his head beneath Jayce’s chin—both of them shaking with laughter until they petered out into comfortable stillness. Jayce kissed the top of Viktor’s head, and Viktor turned his face to nip at Jayce’s throat.

There was no time in the void; what they spent languid in each other’s arms might as well have been the rest of their lives—and simultaneously not enough. Or more accurately, it would never be enough. Even now, with Viktor buried in Jayce’s warmth, and Jayce flooded with Viktor’s scent, both could only bask in their embrace as a comfort that they were only being permitted to have. That they were never guaranteed. That they’d spent years dancing around—leaning toward—running from. It was very easy to picture it all getting ripped away, for no other reason than divine humor. And so their touches still held that faint shred of tension that might never ease, and each tender kiss and clasp of their fingers felt like it cut off just a second too soon.

The game was a bond—a shortcoming they both shared. It was a wonderful distraction. It brought out the competitive fire in each of them that hadn’t had a need to burn since they’d arrived. But it was also, in its accumulation, an exercise in pain tolerance. The razor-sharp edge of unfiltered memory—clear of the tint of bias, nostalgia, and self-preservation—felt like punishing lashes for every mistake they’d ever made throughout their partnership. There was certainly a sort of masochistic thrill in walking through the past and knowing what they were missing. Like seeing holes in the walls, or empty space by the desk where their chairs should be. Something so fundamental to them now, its prior absence illuminated by hindsight. At least the fact that they were identical in their woes provided willing company for their misery to adore.

But despite the unspoken sense of futility lurking behind the wall in each memory they revisited, the game still needled them like a puzzle left unfinished. Viktor was the first to give this unsteadiness a voice.

“As entertaining as this has been,” he murmured into the side of Jayce’s neck, “I cannot help but feel like we’ve done more harm to each other than good.”

Jayce gave a quiet grunt of acknowledgement, replying softly, “I don’t feel harmed… do you?”

Viktor took a beat to think, but he shook his head minutely. “You could never truly harm me.” He felt Jayce’s lips curve into a smile.

“And I never would.”

Viktor hummed. “Well… an explosive shot of arcane energy to the chest might say other—”

“Fuck’s sake, Viktor,” Jayce groaned, but Viktor was already chucking over his protests.

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry, Jayce. I couldn’t resist.” Viktor gave his partner’s neck a kiss, clumsy through a wide smile, and relaxed when he felt Jayce giggling along. “But what I mean is, we’ve only managed to remind each other of what could have been. Sure, each victory provides a lush hit of dopamine and prime ammunition for future arguments—”

“Oh yeah? Well remember that time you rejected my invite to the gala?” Jayce interrupted with a grin.

“Precisely.” Viktor smirked faintly, then pulled back a bit so they were face to face. He gently pulled one of Jayce’s hands from his waist to hold it in both of his own, playing absently with his fingers. “But yes, despite the surface-level rewards of winning a battle, there was never truly any ‘winning’, was there? Because ultimately, we’re celebrating moments that had once filled us with despair and hopelessness, knowing before we even begin that we won’t successfully win each other in any of them.”

Viktor summoned the nerve to glance up into Jayce’s sad, hazel eyes, lacing and unlacing their fingers restlessly. But they weren’t just sad—they were filled to the brim with love. “You haven’t hurt me, Viktor,” he murmured. “Because the happiness I feel watching those memories with you—playing and arguing, kicking your ass and getting my ass kicked—that’s worth so much more to me than any amount of regret.”

Viktor couldn’t help but smile at his earnestness. He lifted Jayce’s hand to his lips and kissed his fingertips. And as was his way, Jayce tried to be a little shit and poked a finger into Viktor’s mouth, and was promptly bitten for his troubles. At his exaggerated wince, Viktor snorted and shook his head. “Even still,” he said, smile falling at the corners with a whisper of melancholy, “I vowed from the moment we opened our eyes after the end… that I would never hurt you again. And this game has begun to feel like a betrayal. Perhaps that is, ehh, theatrical of me. But I suppose the sting of our final altercation is still too fresh.”

“Viktor…” Two large hands cupped Viktor’s face, holding him like a delicate little bird, and such devastating affection radiated from his smile that Viktor could’ve easily believed it to be a dream, if he didn’t know better. He shuffled in a little bit closer into Jayce’s grounding body heat. “For all we know, it’s been a thousand years since you stuck your bony, purple fingers into my brain matter. But even if it’s only been an hour, we’re not there now. None of that matters anymore. This—here and now—is what matters.”

They smiled at each other, drinking each other in like it was the first and the last time. Viktor shook his head slowly, in disbelief and awe. “I would still like to show you something,” he said, hushed in deference to the devotion that hung between them like a physical presence. “A time I offered you my love, without expectation. Something you were never meant to see, because you didn’t need to.”

“Not part of the game then?”

“No, not this. You can watch this, and you do not have to feel any guilt for missed chances. The only thing that kept us apart here was my own cowardice. And the most important thing is that I loved you, whether I had your attention or not.”

Jayce smiled, slow and serene. “Show me?”

This time, when the living room began to disperse into mist, it wasn’t a raging whirlwind—it was the softest, gentlest stirring of air. It felt like familiarity. The breeze that carded through Viktor’s hair when they leaned together on the balcony railing at the Academy’s tallest point, watching the sun set gold over the city, watching that gold burn in Viktor’s eyes. The wind that sighed through the peaceful garden where they took their lunch, gently urging the violets behind their bench to sway and brush against Jayce’s cheeks like a sign of nature’s affection. It was warm breath, a sigh of relief. And it spared the majority of the living room, only claiming pieces.

Several photographs dissolved off of the walls—yet to be taken, presumably; the fire dimmed as dancing flames shrunk down to embers amongst the burnt logs; blankets and quilts appeared, draped over the couch, over each cushion in the sitting room—even piled on the floor before the fireplace; and outside the glass doors, the balcony was carpeted with snow, a blinding glow screaming in from the sunlight’s reflection on pure, pristine white.

There came a knock at the door. Past Jayce appeared from the hall and rushed to answer it, and when he pulled it open, Past Viktor waited on the other side. Leaning on his cane, a satchel over his shoulder—zipper straining with the volume of its contents. His shoulders and hair were damp, white flakes still dotting his scarf where they’d yet to melt. Past Jayce took one look at his shivering partner and quickly ushered him inside.

“God, Vik, c’mere!” Past Jayce fretted, guiding him with a hand on his back toward the fireplace in a state close to panic. “You’re freezing! Here—get warm, I’ll get you a towel.” Past Viktor was deposited in front of the weakening fire with a somewhat bemused smile. He shook his head as he watched Past Jayce go.

Jayce and Viktor still held each other on the couch, nestled comfortably against the armrest—as though their own living room had just been invaded by oblivious ghosts, and not the other way around. Jayce gave a low hum, felt more than heard with Viktor’s ear against his chest. “Snow day,” he said, voice light and wistful, with a rasp of fondness.

“Snow day,” Viktor agreed.

It had been a habit of theirs. The winter brought snow, and for Jayce, the snow brought anxiety. The anxiety then brought distraction, and their work paid the price. Despite his love of efficiency, Viktor had never drawn attention to Jayce’s shame in the way he’d always privately anticipated. Every snowfall, without fail, Jayce would find himself just about bedridden with twofold distress: the cold ruthlessness of a bad memory, and the dread of Viktor thinking him a burden.

But Viktor, early on, had done his best to try and dispel that paranoia. Reassurances, tender touches and initiated hugs, always offering his support when he believed it was needed.

But that wasn’t all that had made these winters bearable for Jayce. After their first year working together, Jayce had spent the better part of the chilly season in full-blown doomsday-mode. Every trek into the lab, through even the lightest dusting of snow—mere powder—had left him anywhere from disoriented to panicked for the entire work day. Eventually, toward the end of the season, a concerned Viktor had approached him. That’s when he learned about Jayce’s little quirk (“trauma” he’d hurriedly corrected, when Jayce had tried to downplay this aspect of himself).

But Jayce suddenly found himself unburdened by these harrowing walks to work, when the following year, the Academy began locking its doors on days of heavier snowfall. If more than an inch or so was expected, Jayce and Viktor weren’t even allowed entry into their lab. And Viktor was kind enough to send him a tube early enough in the morning that Jayce didn’t have to worry about trudging all the way to the Academy, only to find it buttoned up tight.

On those days, Viktor would tell Jayce to prepare to work from home—and then he’d walk the short distance to Jayce’s apartment, and they’d spend the day warm and safe in each other’s company.

So from their place on the couch, Jayce and Viktor watched as Past Viktor was handed a towel to dry off with, and Past Jayce grabbed his hands to inspect each finger for the black roots of frostbite. Past Viktor tended the fire and grew it almost dangerously hot. Past Jayce made them tea. And together, they reclined before the fireplace, on and under piles of blankets. And they worked—notebooks and loose pages scattered on the floor, calculations thrown up on the chalkboard whenever one of them deigned to stand from their nest to record them.

It was cozy. Safe. Sparks of joy in the bleakness of winter. Jayce watched them and smiled. “These were some of my favorite days,” he murmured, eyes shining. “Even with the snow. When you were with me, I was almost grateful for the snow.”

Viktor’s brows ticked up and he gave an impressed hum. “High praise.”

“Hey, I said ‘almost’.” Viktor chuckled quietly, turning in Jayce’s lap to lean his head back against his shoulder. Jayce barely loosened his grip around Viktor’s waist for long enough to let him shift. “You have no idea how much it meant to me,” Jayce continued, pausing to kiss Viktor’s temple. “You walking to my place every time the Academy closed. It worried the hell out of me, but I also lived for days like these.”

The fire crackled. Paper crinkled. Two scientists murmured quietly to one another, and the snow outside dampened every hint of the outside world. This was the world—quaint, quiet, and covetable. Jayce’s lips moved lazily over the side of Viktor’s face.

“And that is what I wanted you to know,” Viktor whispered into the quiet, thick like a wool blanket. “These snow days, the Academy closures… they were a lie.”

Jayce’s lips paused against his skin. “A lie?” he repeated, puzzled.

“The Academy never closed for snow days, Jayce. I made it up.” Jayce was quiet for a few moments—long enough for a tiny speck of doubt to grow in Viktor’s brain. Had he overstepped? Was a lie like this a sign of distrust? He turned his head to glance up at his partner, noting his knitted brows. “Jayce?”

The larger man blinked down at him, hearing the faintest shade of insecurity in his voice. He was instantly sobered by it, reassuring Viktor with another peck on his cheek. “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “But why? Why lie about it?”

Viktor looked away again sheepishly. “I, ehh, didn’t want you to suffer,” he mumbled. “I didn’t want you to go through what you did, every time you needed to walk through the snow. But I knew that if I suggested simply taking those days off, you’d see it as pity.” And how could Viktor ever pity a man as strong as Jayce? No, that strength was exactly what fueled Viktor’s need to protect him—because he rarely ever used it for himself. He, who deserved strength and softness more than anything. Sudden, powerful emotion spurred Viktor to twist further around, cupping Jayce’s face and capturing his eyes with intensity. He implored, breathing into his face, “You were never, never a burden to me, Jayce. You were everything. And all I wanted was to take that pain from you—I couldn’t bear it if you believed I’d done so out of obligation for the work, for Hextech. Perhaps it is infantilizing, that I believed I needed to lie to protect you, but I couldn’t have you concluding that I did not trust you to take care of yourself. Do you understand?”

Jayce startled him by laughing, straight into the breath of Viktor’s heartfelt confession. Viktor furrowed his brows, defensiveness at the ready, but Jayce yanked his face in and kissed him deep. “Mph—” Viktor grunted in half-hearted protest. He melted quicker than the snow on his past self’s scarf.

They parted, barely, and Jayce chuckled breathlessly. “Do you know how many times I measured and re-measured your cane? Your brace, whenever I had a chance? Just to make sure they were perfect? Do you know how hard I fought for the lift in the Research Wing to be fixed when maintenance took too long? And your stool—when they first gave us the lab, it didn’t have wheels. It was custom-made, by me.” Viktor watched him wide-eyed, lips parted. Jayce took advantage of his speechlessness to steal another sweet kiss, whispering against his lips, “Of course I understand, Viktor. Of course I do.”

Viktor sighed into another kiss. The angle was a bit uncomfortable, his spine twisting as it was (and why the hell could his incorporeal body ache? That felt like some bullshit), but Viktor’d be damned if he pulled away. “How silly of me,” he murmured hazily. Of course Jayce would understand. No one in the world could possibly understand more.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t?” said Jayce gently.

“I…” Viktor closed his mouth, frowning. Admitting that was tricky. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Jayce—or that Jayce loved him—but there was a certain danger in complacency. He shifted to face forward again, feeling Jayce’s chin hook over his shoulder. “It is difficult…” he said slowly, “… believing this is real, I suppose. Each new variable adds risk. Like adding weight to an unstable tower, a pebble at a time. Fearing that the next might be too much…”

“Viktor,” Jayce sighed—a tickle against Viktor’s collarbone—equal parts exasperated and endeared. “Nothing you could do or say would ever be too much.”

“I… I know… but you don’t feel it too? This…”

“… this fear?” Jayce finished for him. Viktor hummed in affirmation. In front of the fireplace, Past Jayce attempted a sip of his tea and spilled a bit over the rim of the mug. He cried out in dismay as it splashed over his shirt, and Past Viktor beside him stifled his laughter very poorly. There was a smile in Jayce’s voice when he spoke again. “Yeah, I feel it. God, every second I get to be with you feels like more than I deserve. I spent so long wanting you and doing nothing about it, I feel like I need to prove that I’m worthy of this—that I’m not gonna fuck it all up again.”

Viktor tilted his head to the side, resting it on top of Jayce’s. “You have nothing to prove to me, Jayce.”

“And neither do you.”

“Mmn…” A small grimace pinched Viktor’s brows. “I don’t know… My body, my past… I have always had more to prove, like it or not.”

“Viktor, I swear to god, I will tickle you into submission.”

Without warning, the wind kicked up around them. Jayce and Viktor jumped in alarm, watching frantically as the living room began to erode away. Scattering like particles of iridescent sand shaved off the crest of a dune, shining atoms of memory coming to rest among the stars of the void. The room vanished like a hole burnt into a photograph, until only the stars remained—but the wind did not cease.

“What the hell?!” Jayce cried, cinching his arms tighter around Viktor’s waist to hold him close. The couch beneath them dissolved as well and left them floating.

The room that took shape around them next, solidifying from that familiar astral fog, began with dark tiled floors, gray walls, the pale yellow glow of a single bedside lamp. Then the bed—wide with sterile white sheets—and the man inhabiting it.

It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Viktor breathed shallowly, pallid and frail, swallowed by the starched pillow as though it were quicksand. A cannula at his nose fed him oxygen in a quiet hiss, and an IV snaked out from the bag hanging beside him and disappeared beneath the covers. He lay still and stiff—an interrupted burial, half-submerged in the soil of hospital linens. Only the faintest rise and fall of his chest seemed to chain his ghost to his body.

And perched in his chair was a watchful Jayce. Hair disheveled, clothing rumpled from restless shifting. His eyes glinted in the sickly light, like some nocturnal animal’s—serrated with distress, and mad determination. Almost dangerous—and yet so, so sad. He could’ve killed a man with no qualms if he thought for a second it would save his partner.

“Jayce…” breathed Viktor, taking him in from where they floated beyond the foot of the bed. He hadn’t seen his partner like this before—at least, not as he was then. The madness had swarmed him after his time in the ravine, of course, but he’d come back looking just as wild as he’d been made. This Jayce didn’t know that kind of trauma yet—but it seemed to Viktor that there’d always been a little bit of insanity in him. The despair on his exhausted face broke Viktor’s heart. And Jayce must’ve heard the crack.

“Hey, don’t,” he said softly, pulling Viktor close and resting his mouth against his hair. “No pity, okay? It’s all in the past.”

Viktor swallowed, but nodded. “I presume you weren’t the one to take us here…”

“No, I wasn’t. I think… this was the arcane.” Jayce attempted a tension-breaking laugh, but it came out stiff and uneasy. Though he wasn’t sure if he could hurt the feelings of the concept of magic, he wasn’t keen to test his luck by joking about the arcane’s morbid idea of couple’s counseling.

“You think the arcane has the sentience to accomplish this?” Viktor hissed warily, darting his eyes around the hospital room like the “arcane” was lying in wait with a bat. “We haven’t seen explicit evidence of this yet… and why would it use its freewill to deliver us such morbid couple’s counseling?”

“That’s what I was going to say!” Jayce exclaimed. “God, we’re so similar, it’s insane. It’s probably gonna fucking kill us now, though.”

“I doubt that,” Viktor said reluctantly. “We were brought here for a reason.”

Jayce hummed uncertainly and fell silent. For a while, the only sound was breathing. The insistent whisper of canned air forced through the tube, and Past Jayce’s unsteady puffs. Ragged, fighting the burn behind his eyes and the quiver in his chest. He had ended up crying—multiple times. The whole range of anguish, from silent dampness on his cheeks, to throat-rending, heaving sobs. His partner was leaving him soon and he was calculating how best to fight the gods—weave past them and tear a hole into the wall of the afterlife, so Viktor could come back through. Jayce demanded nothing less of himself. But he made sure he only cried when he was alone, when Viktor wouldn’t hear him.

Eventually, like he was making some grand address, Past Jayce stood stiffly from his seat. He stepped closer to the bed, to Viktor’s side, and knelt down onto the ground. A faint, teary smile just barely ghosted his lips—enough to show how entirely his love for Viktor overrode his urge to cower. It kept him from mourning too soon.

Past Jayce grasped his partner’s limp hand in one of his own, and with the other he stroked through Past Viktor’s hair. That small, hopeful smile lingered, but Past Viktor didn’t stir. Past Jayce spoke to him then, in a voice that carried the full weight of his heart—and suddenly, his present self knew exactly why they’d been brought here.

“I miss you, you know…” he began softly. The room felt too big for his voice, like it could be lost in the thick shadows in the corners, or beneath Viktor’s heartbeat. “I miss your voice. I guess that’s my own fault. I haven’t been around much this week, what with… everything.” He shook his head, squeezing Viktor’s bony hand tighter, and took a breath. “But even before, I felt like something was slipping. Like I was losing you. All of that press, those speeches, the posing for photos and paintings—god, everything that kept me away from the lab… None of it mattered. It was all empty. ‘Promoting Hextech’ was never as good an excuse as I made it out to be. I wish I could go back and turn them all down.” His fingers trailed from Viktor’s hair to his temple, swept over his brow to push the strands back from his face. He cradled Viktor’s cheek, stroking the ledge of his cheekbone with his thumb. Careful to avoid the oxygen tubes that lay over his face. “Only one thing has ever mattered, in all of this. And that’s you. You, Viktor, are everything. Your mind. Your kindness. Your selflessness. Your wit, your humor, your smile, your warmth—god, every little thing about you, it’s my whole world. More than science, more than Hextech. More than the damn blimps with my worthless face slapped on the side.” A broken laugh fell out of him. His cheeks were damp with quiet tears. “This whole time I’ve tried to be slow and careful. Tried not to push too hard. Somehow I gave up trying for a while. But I can’t anymore—I can’t pretend anymore that you’re not my reason for existing. And I’m not losing you. I swear to god, I’ll burn this whole world to the ground before I let that happen.”

Viktor’s breath hitched in his sleep—an unconscious noise, but it was as though he’d issued the challenge to him. To keep that oath, or burn the world. Jayce felt his resolve sear into him like a brand, and he didn’t flinch. This might’ve been the beginning of the end, his present self thought—the catalyst for his betrayal, his mad science with the Hexcore—but the end hadn’t truly been the end. It’d been a lesson, one he’d study again and again, until the words blurred on the page, if it meant delivering a fraction of the peace that Viktor deserved. Jayce watched his past visage make a promise to himself that he’d never be given a chance to keep. It made him squeeze Viktor’s astral body even closer to his chest—more grateful than he’d ever been to have that privilege.

Past Jayce leaned in slowly, until his lips brushed his partner’s forehead, light as a whisper. But it wasn’t enough, so he pressed in closer, kissed him harder. The cool, dry skin of Viktor’s face was the canvas for Jayce’s deepest-rooted affections, taking on the press of his lips like a diary entry. His mouth lingered there, just to cling to the feel of him for a second longer. “After this crisis is done, and we have a second to breathe,” he murmured, “I’m going to tell you. I don’t care about subtlety anymore. I’m going to tell you that I love you… I love you, Viktor. And there is nothing in this world that can ever change that.”

The second those words were set free, the hospital room began to blur. The wind rushed through, smeared away the memory like a still-wet painting. The last thing Jayce and Viktor finally noticed before the scene vanished was the offering on the bedside table—supplication for his sleeping god. A steaming paper cup of homemade sweetmilk. And an open takeout box, with a croissant from Viktor’s favorite bakery.

Inky smoke swept around them, enclosed them like a pair of large hands. Darkness and the gentle pressure of mist-dense air. And just as quickly, the smoke wisped away. The stars of the void shone around them again.

The gravity here felt different from before. No longer precarious, balanced above turbulence—like the chaos of the Arcane watched them warily. It felt… resolved. Steady. Somehow satisfied. Jayce and Viktor looked at each other once again, hovering amongst the stars’ peaceful light, and tears sprung to their eyes. Viktor threw arms around Jayce’s neck and buried himself against his shoulder. Jayce’s breath caught, his throat clicking as he swallowed thickly, and he drew his arms tight enough around Viktor to bruise.

“You loved me…” Viktor said, voice quivering, muffled against Jayce’s neck. Jayce let out a surprised, teary laugh.

“Well, yeah—of course I did! Were you actually shocked?”

“Hah, I suppose not.” Viktor tilted his head back, just enough to meet Jayce’s gaze—serious and insistent. Though he was hesitant to give that lingering insecurity a voice, this was the way to conquer it. Communication and trust. “But hearing it from you, back then—before there was any expectation…”

“You believe me?”

Viktor smiled. “I believe you. My god, of course I believe you.”

Jayce heaved a theatrical sigh of relief. “Good, because I don’t think I could possibly make it any clearer.”

Viktor snorted and chucked Jayce’s chest playfully before pulling away. “You know that was never in question,” he said with a wry smile. “But maybe I understand now that your love did not have conditions. I had it before I knew it was there, and I have it now.” His face softened, and his confession took on a sober tinge. “And even after everything that has changed—and every way that I have changed—I can see that your love hasn’t.”

“It’s only grown deeper,” Jayce said warmly. God, his heart felt so full—cotton stuffing in his chest. He hadn’t realized that a mere ‘I love you’ wasn’t nearly wide enough to contain the depth of his feeling—not until that unfiltered longing, cultivated in his private fear, was bared for Viktor’s viewing (and his own remembering). And now that the truth was in the open, of just how dire that longing had grown—Jayce, strangely, no longer felt that desperate urge to prove it was real.

And Viktor, too, thrived in this new certainty between them. After revealing his own dedication—his drive to comfort his partner in ways he was never supposed to know—Viktor had been stupid enough to think for a second that this made them even. It would never have been that simple. Not when he held Jayce in such higher regard by default—a finger perpetually weighing his side of the scales down.

But then, arcane intervention. Vulnerability. He realized in that moment that it was not just a matter of acceptance; it took genuine, steadfast love to trust in the love of his partner. The sheer weight of his worth to Jayce broke the scales. There was no ‘even’ or ‘balanced’. There was only right.

And he and Jayce—they were right.

“I get it now,” said Jayce in a reverent hush. His large palms gently caged Viktor’s face, and he clung to those golden eyes like his north star. Viktor wrapped his hands around the fingers holding his cheeks and squeezed, dared him to let go. “We never needed to prove to each other whose love was deeper. We lack enough self-awareness that that was doomed from the start.”

“Are you positive? I’m just sure that nothing struck deeper than when I asked how your morning was going.”

“As devastating as that was, I think it’s still on par with the ‘precise angle of my hand that indicates romantic attraction’.”

“Hm. Fair enough,” Viktor grinned. “So after everything, a tie. I am content with that.”

Jayce huffed a laugh and leaned in to nuzzle his nose against Viktor’s. “Well, seeing as this is the part where we learn our lesson and recite the moral takeaway for our eldritch, faceless audience, I’d certainly hope so.”

Their laughter overlapped as one unified expression of mirth, the chime of complementary bells in an inseparable chord. Everything they were, condensed into one vital concept: together.

The most important thing that could ever be known—that they were still here, together. That they’d continued to choose each other, every time. ‘Together’ was as reliable as a surname. A necessary state of being, the only one that could support life. If that was what the arcane wanted them to understand—that the only thing that had ever truly mattered was that they persisted together—then they’d deliver that message into each other’s ears and on each other’s lips, again and again. Until they were filled to bursting with gratitude, with no room to fit any regrets for the time they took to get here. They could remember and respect the tragedy, acknowledge the circumstances of imperfect life—and far outrun the illusion that they could’ve had more, if only they’d acted quicker, grander, more decisively.

They couldn’t have had more, because they’d already had everything.

“My Jayce,” Viktor whispered into the breath between kisses. “I have much to regret, and to atone for, if ever I have the chance. But when it comes to you, I cannot anymore. I am sick of measuring myself.”

“I am too,” Jayce replied in a low hum. “And we don’t have to—to regret our time together, just because it didn’t take the exact shape we wanted back then.”

Viktor sighed happily, reveling in the warmth of completeness—feeling seen, accepting and being accepted. The kind of kinship he’d only ever felt with one man. He pulled Jayce’s face down to kiss his forehead, murmuring, “I could never regret you.”

And Jayce felt like the luckiest man in the boundless cosmos around them—though he knew if he expressed as much, they’d find themselves in another bloody war to claim the title of Most Currently Head Over Heels. Such was their nature. He relieved a bit of the giddy flutter of elation in his chest by peppering every available inch of Viktor’s face with kisses, until—ticklish—the smaller man pushed his face away with a breathless laugh. Jave grinned down at him through his hand. “Better get used to it, Vik,” he teased, though his expression softened, and his next words were painfully earnest. “We have a second chance now, and I intend to use the hell out of it.”

It felt like a vow as much as anything; his sincerity quieted the high-voltage buzz of excitement under Viktor’s skin into something more still and raw. Viktor’s smile became shy. “A second chance…” he repeated quietly. “Even if it is just the two of us here?”

Jayce replied with certainty, “Especially then.”

The night sky shifted into hues of warm pink, as the arcane again bore helpless witness to another long round of cloyingly sweet kisses and caresses—saccharine giggles entirely unbecoming of two renowned scientists, in all their supposed scholarly rationality. Even coming away from their contest with tentative proof that the arcane had a mind of its own, they couldn’t be bothered to harbor any self-consciousness. Let it see—call it a punishment.

Eventually, Jayce broke away enough to smirk at his partner. “A better love story than Heimerdinger could have ever written, right?”

A sudden, full-body shudder of disgust wracked through Viktor. “Dear god, Jayce, do not remind me of that ever again.”

“What! I thought you loved it!” Jayce said, eyes dancing with mischief.

Viktor covered his heated face with his hands. “You underestimate how much that discovery traumatized me,” he moaned in distress. Jayce merely laughed.

“You have to admit—the little guy could be creative. There’s a couple of things I’ve always wanted to—”

“JAYCE TALIS, don’t you dare finish that thought!”

It was then that a ripple pulsed through the fabric of the arcane void—a sensation different from their shifting scenes, and their astral matter manipulation. A stone dropped in a pond, the surface tension broken in that split-second between stillness and chaos. A tear in a threshold of potential energy, where gravity drew their minds like water toward a hole in a bucket.

Jayce and Viktor both looked toward the disturbance that they felt like a magnetic pull—and there against the starry peach-pink banner of the void was a tear. A hole of inarticulable dimensions—navigable, as size was all relative to their whims—visible as a formless white interruption of space itself.

They knew instinctually that it was a gateway.

“Is that…” Jayce breathed, eyes wide and reflecting the light of the portal before them. Viktor hummed in fascinated thought beside him.

“An exit,” Viktor finished, voice thick with relief. “It is an exit, Jayce.”

It could have been a reward— compensation for the visions they’d shared, of tender confessions and understandings. A sign that the magical entity they inhabited had only ever intended for them to discover certainty in each other, and reaffirm their mutual trust.

Or it could have been disgust, and an excuse to clear the two of them out before they defiled the void with more of their inappropriate shenanigans.

Either way—Jayce and Viktor could feel its pull like a tug on a string. The prison gates were open.

They looked to each other, brows knit with nerves and uncertainty; there was no telling what they’d find on the other side. Nothingness or death. A war-torn future they’d failed to prevent. The Piltover they’d left behind, peaceful and thriving. Or, something entirely new and unknown—a chance for a fresh start, perhaps. The timelines were endless, but so was their devotion. In their eyes, they found matching determination—because they knew that whatever awaited them, they wouldn’t face it alone. And that would be more than enough.

Jayce held out his hand, and Viktor wordlessly took it, squeezing to ground them both. “Alright,” Jayce said, voice edged with both fear and excitement. “Wanna see where this goes?”

Viktor grinned. “How very scientific,” he drawled, eyes glittering. “Would you like to make it a bet?”

Jayce laughed loudly in response—so endeared, so endlessly surprised by his partner. It wouldn’t matter who won, because any world they stepped into would be perfect, so long as they went hand-in-hand. “Fuck it,” Jayce said with a smile. “You’re on.”

They made their bets, gripped each other’s hands tight, and edged forward, until the light engulfed them and swept them away.