Chapter Text
It might not have been the worst day that Jayce had ever had to deal with, but, at the moment, it certainly felt like it could rank. Particularly when, after a week filled, near back to back, with similar days this one had been meant to be an exception—an enforced break.
And, much as he might want to deny it, he only had himself to blame.
At the time, attempting to wrap up one more grant request hadn't seemed a bad idea. There would be an inevitable time crunch, but, if kept within reason, as he had been convinced he could, it should have been fine.
Except, there wasn't really a way to rush a proposal of this nature without it sounding…well, rushed. And that would never net Jayce the results he needed.
The real problem there, of course, was that, rather than taking this as a scene to set the whole thing aside, he had kept going….and going…
The worst of it was that, by the time he had skidded to a stop at their regular lunch spot (situated perfectly between their respective schools; not too posh to strain Jayce's budget, but not too low for Caitlyn's standards), Caitlyn didn't even look surprised. Instead, she just uncrossed her arms with a pointed sigh.
"How good of you to join us."
Jayce shot a glance towards Vi, who tried for a smile, but, given how it seemed more determined to be a grimace, the comfort of it didn't quite land.
"Almost thought you weren't gonna show, golden boy."
The nickname was just a dopey reminder from undergrad that had struck around solely for his friends' inability to let it go, but, try as he might, Jayce still couldn't quite conceal a wince as he slid into the booth across from them. It was ridiculous, he knew, but, ever since his final semester had kicked off in earnest, he had begun to feel less and less deserving of such a label, even as a joke.
Owning up to that, though, would have meant digging into just how little of a handle he felt he had on things nowadays. So, instead, he plastered on his best smile, ignoring how the stretch of it across his face felt near artificial by now.
"As if I'd miss a chance to see my two favorite ladies," he said.
Caitlyn arched a brow at that, the corners of her lips twitching up ever so slightly. "Don't let your mother hear that," she remarked, dryly.
Apparently, one (or both) of them had decided to put orders in ahead of time since drinks arrived within a minute of Jayce sitting down. He should have felt more guilt over that, but, after the mad dash here, he was just grateful there was something to soothe his parched throat.
Or, at least, he was, until Caitlyn, right when he had brought the glass to his lips, decided to blurt out with, "I could try reaching out to some of my parents' contacts, you know."
Jayce managed not to choke, if just barely. "Isn't this meant to be a break from work?" he asked.
The purse of Caitlyn's lips let him know how little that attempted deflection had worked. "I just want to help," she said.
"I know," Jayce replied, "but I thought the point was to do this without Kiramman aid."
In his initial year in the biomedical engineering track for Piltover University's graduate program, the sponsorship of the Kiramman family for his eventual capstone project had begun to seem like a foregone conclusion. Everyone else had certainly spoken as if it were guaranteed to be the case.
Everyone, he was too late to realize, except Mr. and Mrs. Kiramman themselves.
He might be the recipient of their scholarship, but that was as far as they intended to allow their money to stretch when it came to him, apparently. Particularly since, if you were to consider his friendship with their daughter, it really did begin to smack of bias for them to hand out more.
It was the kind of approach that made sense, Jayce knew that, but still, it was difficult, deep down, to keep from finding their outright dismissal of his pitch, as if he truly should have known better already, anything other than cold and humiliating.
That wasn't the kind of thing he could share with Caitlyn, though.
"I'm sorry, sprout—this isn't on you." She was just getting into the thick of her undergrad, out from under her parents' (well-meaning) thumb and with a girlfriend to show for it all. There should be far more exciting things occupying her mind than Jayce and his nonsense. "Besides, it's not all bad, you know. I've actually got some sit downs set up for later this week."
More like a singular, all too tentative phone call, and the hope of more proper, in person meetings after the latest volley of appeals, but, with any luck, the specifics wouldn't matter.
Caitlyn nodded, but Jayce knew better than to expect her to leave it there. She was, after all, a future law student in the making.
"Are you certain there's no room to simplify things? Or perhaps there's some kind of…backup proposal you could go with instead?"
It was a line of inquiry that Jayce had grown familiar with, by now, but that didn't make it any easier to bear, even coming from a friend. The semester had barely kicked off in earnest, so it wasn't as if he was without time.
Even if he had spent the entire summer trying to get ahead of querying rather than going for an internship.
Besides, Heimerdinger, the department head and, therefore, the person with the most right to try counseling him into changing course, was still full of encouragement, if just a little insistent about checking in on his progress.
"This is everything I've been working towards," he said. "I can't just give up on it without a fight."
"How about Mel?" Vi hitched a shoulder up into half of a shrug when the other two glanced her way. "What? You already know she likes you."
"Yeah," Jayce frowned. "Kind of what makes that a bad idea."
The split had been an amicable one. In fact, while Mel would have dismissed such a claim outright, Jayce was convinced the only lapse in judgement she had ever made had been in dating him to begin with. That she had still wanted to remain friends after it all had been more than enough for him.
It would be poor form—never mind a direct conflict of interest—to try to use that to push for more, even if Mel had always been one of the greatest advocates of his work.
"Fine, fine." In the blink of an eye, Vi's mouth began to spread into a grin. "You could always come to the bar this weekend then. I'm sure there'll be plenty of people that'll like you there."
That, in this case, meant that the Last Drop, which had been in Vi's family for as far back as any of them could remember. Vi herself had been tending bar there for longer than Jayce was sure could be strictly considered legal.
So, while the phrasing was a little off, the offer itself wasn't all that odd. It was just more likely that, if Jayce were there, it'd be to celebrate a success (or drown a sorrow) than trying to pick anyone up.
He would have said as much too, if Caitlyn hadn't descended into a fit of giggles instead.
"Oh my god, Vi, no!"
"Are you sure?" Vi, for some reason, had actually resorted to waggling her eyebrows now. "There'd be plenty of 'sponsors', if he played his cards right."
Jayce was certain he was going to regret this and yet, "Almost sounds like I should go then."
Caitlyn's eyes went wide, hand shooting out of his hold to slap over her mouth instead. "Jayce, no," she exclaimed. "You really have no idea what you'd be in for."
"Oh, come on," Vi cut in. "You can't say it wouldn't be entertaining to watch."
"Alright, alright," Jayce replied, as Caitlyn's laughter renewed, prompting her to all but collapse in on her girlfriend. "I'll pass on being the weekend entertainment, thanks."
That didn't keep the memory of it from lingering, though; the interaction replaying whenever his mind drifted from the monotony of appeals or phone calls that dropped him into automated queues that led only to the voicemails of people that never called back.
Then, by the time evening rolled in that Saturday, the result of all that effort was another email already so familiar that Jayce was half convinced that it must be the result of some shared corporate template for such occasions.
“Mr. Talis, while we appreciate your ambitious idea, we must unfortunately…”
It was as much as Jayce needed to read before tossing his phone onto the bed, scraping a hand across a face that already felt like it had been rubbed too raw already.
Damn, he really needed to get out of the apartment.
Heading out for a run was always an option, but, while it'd certainly help burn off the anxious buzz of energy underneath his skin, he knew it was just a side effect of his overthinking and no amount of exercise had ever managed to successfully drown that out.
Caitlyn had always insisted that he could reach out to her whenever he might need to, except that didn't make for an excuse to burden her with this. He had already done that enough without even meaning to.
That left Vi or, more accurately, the Last Drop since she was undoubtedly on shift there tonight.
Jayce had, in fact, made it through a fair number of the bar's "themed" nights, by now, even if somewhat forced to for some of them, and each had a recurring trend of Vi insisting to either himself or Caitlyn that they needed to stop worrying about things like regulations or what, at any other time, would have been basic laws.
So, if that had been the impulse behind Vi's teasing, Jayce thought he could handle it. It, at the very least, sounded a more appealing obstacle than slamming himself through another round of probable dead ends.
Besides, by the time he got out of the shower, having traded his sweats for jeans and one of his better henleys, he was actually beginning to feel a bit more like an actual human again.
Since he had no plans on making it through the night sober, he opted for the bus rather than taking his car. Vi was all but guaranteed to let him crash on her couch, but there was no way of knowing whether or not her sister would be on one of her sporadic visits back at the same time. And that meant there could be no promises for his face to remain doodle free.
Whatever was in Jinx's markers was not to be trusted—it had taken him the better part of a day to get it all off last time.
The bus stop was still a few blocks up from the bar itself, but, seeing as the weather hadn't quite caught up to the change in seasons yet, it was still more of a comfortable stroll than the mad scuttle it'd descend into once the leaves began to turn and the chill set in properly. The cracked, uneven sidewalks even got to be less of a tripping hazard for now and more of a "feature".
Then, in what seemed like no time at all, the Last Drop emerged on the horizon with the circular glow of its neon sign making it appear like some kind of beacon of the modern age.
The place was a dive in the truest sense of the world, unlike the places that crowded the outskirts of the university's campus, attempting (and failing) to imitate the concept now that it'd become popularized. At first glance, it looked likely to fall in on itself, but Jayce, who had spent most of his life taking things apart to put them back together again, could track the obvious care with which each patch had been placed onto the building, no matter how mismatched the parts involved.
Better yet, it was familiar ground, which was exactly what Jayce clung to after a delayed sense of anxiety threatened to lock him in place. The particulars of whatever he was about to walk in on might still be a mystery, but that didn’t keep it from being a guarantee that, if things took a turn from amusing to actually uncomfortable, then Vi, or at least one of her fathers, would be sure to step in.
All of it became a moot point by the time he got inside, anyway.
If there actually was an event happening tonight then it was easily the most sedate of any Jayce had ever encountered. In fact, based on appearances, it had more in common with the academic get-togethers that he used to attend back when time wasn’t the luxury it was now. At a glance, most of the people mingling about wouldn’t have looked out of place rubbing elbows at a Kiramman gala.
So, it made it all the more strange for Vi to all but toss a glass into the air the instant she caught sight of him. The only response given to Jayce’s scrunched up face and spread out hands (the closest he could get, from afar, to asking, “What the hell?”) were sharp gesticulations to come over before she ducked down to clean up the remnants of the—no doubt shattered—glass.
It was an action Jayce would have already taken on his own, order or no, so, outside of a roll of his eyes, he didn’t see any issue with obeying.
At least until his first few steps brought him, entirely unexpectedly, almost right into someone else.
“Oh! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“Of course not.” The woman in question was actually smiling up at him, which, he had to admit, was a better reaction than those he tended to get after his clumsiness had kicked in. That her hand had, at some point, wound up braced against his arm was a bit more of a surprise, but then, given the steep ends to her stilettos, it was probably needed to catch her balance again. “You’re much too sweet a boy for that, yes?”
Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t keep the flush that brought about at bay, ears burning all the more when the woman just tittered at the sight of it.
“Now, now, Theo, you’re scaring the poor boy.”
Fortunately, Jayce was a little too distracted by the realization of just how many people had begun to flock in around them without him realizing, to outright gape at the arrival of a man he was certain he had seen on more than a few billboards around town.
The pout the woman—Theo, apparently—affected did little to belie the slyness of her smile. “I suppose we should be glad Renata couldn’t attend after all then.”
“Or Margot!”
If Jayce were still somehow unaware of just what a crowd had been drawn, the resulting uproar of laughter, along with how the crush of bodies had some people falling into him with it, would have done it. “Um, excuse me, I’m actually here to meet a friend, so if you wouldn’t mind…”
“We’re all here to meet friends,” and, damn, if the man wasn’t outright wearing his billboard smile now, “but I wasn’t aware you were already spoken for.”
“Spoken… Oh, no!” Jayce thrust his hands up as best he could in such cramped quarters. “It’s not like that.” How had Mel put it back when trying, ever so patiently, to explain why they had to part ways? “I’m married to my work, actually.”
“I see.” Theo drummed her fingers over the glass she held—each of her many rings going clink, clink, clink against it in turn—with a gleam to her eyes that Jayce couldn’t quite place. “And what work might that be?”
That drew Jayce up short.
Vi, at the moment, was trying with increasing desperation to catch his attention, but she had been the one to claim, however strangely, that there would be a chance for him to pick up a sponsor tonight.
So, with every other option all but exhausted, it had to at least be worth a shot, right?
It wasn’t as if he weren’t accustomed, by now, to throwing himself straight into the thick of things. Enough so that he had been made to sit through more than one lecture over it from whoever closest to him managed to figure out what he had done the fastest. But, even in those times where it all blew up in his face (literally, sometimes), he was still able to learn enough from the experience to make it worth it.
Perhaps it was a little karmic then that it got more and more difficult to cling to that familiar justification the longer things went on.
He had had to run through a gauntlet like this before, in preparation not just for his graduate term, but any future job prospects. Innovation could only run so far, after all, without someone footing the bill. Except, back then, he had had either Caitlyn or Mel there with him, not only to keep him on track, but to dismantle any lines of inquiry that strayed off topic.
Left to his own devices, all Jayce seemed capable of doing was floundering in an effort to at least keep his head above water. He could have sworn that even more people had flocked in around them over the past few minutes, but, surely, that had to be a trick of his anxiety.
Right?
“Are you sure I can’t get you a drink?” asked a woman that Jayce could have sworn he had seen gracing the cover of a lone fashion magazine of Caitlyn’s.
“Um, no thank you.” It was already difficult enough to keep his head steady with the competing array of fragrances wafting off of the surrounding bodies. There were already, embarrassingly, a few beads of sweat rolling down the back of his neck. “I actually wanted to return to—”
He couldn’t quite disguise how he tensed at a hand curling around his bicep, but at least he managed to swallow back the yelp.
“Sorry, sorry.” It was billboard man again, sounding decidedly not sorry. “Lost my footing there for a second. This doesn’t seem like the kind of gains you get locked away in a lab, though. I wonder if you might—”
It tapered off into a sharp exclamation that would have caused Jayce to startle back farther, if not for the press of a hand against the small of his back. The voice that followed was decidedly cool, carrying with it an accent that Jayce couldn’t quite place.
“Am I interrupting?”
Whatever Jayce might have said in response wound up caught somewhere in his throat by the time he had a chance to turn his head.
Under other circumstances, it would have been from the other man’s looks alone. The narrow, angular lines of the man’s face, accentuated from how his dark hair—shot through with streaks of gray—had been pulled back into a loose ponytail, made Jacye’s fingers itch to sketch in a way he hadn’t in ages.
But, the longer those amber eyes rested on him, the more Jayce became certain of one near impossible fact.
"You're Viktor Navrátil."
He winced all but the second he left his mouth, knowing there was no way to disguise how awestruck he sounded.
That Viktor was so quick to laugh only made it worse. His hand, however, never moved from where it rested on Jayce’s back and then, “That’s a better pronunciation than most manage.”
If not for how that made Jayce duck his head, he might not have even noticed how the end of Viktor’s cane had come to rest atop the fine leather shoes of the man from the billboards. “Oh…um…I think that…?”
Viktor, having followed Jayce’s line of vision, hummed almost to himself then before shifting his cane off to the side. “Ah,” he said, “if it isn’t Nicholas.”
“Viktor,” the man grit back.
“I hope you won’t mind clearing a path? We have some work to discuss.”
That was news to Jayce, but, given that it got the crowd to part with only mild grumbling, he could hardly care at the moment. It was more than a little mortifying, though, to realize that, at some point, he had simply decided to follow Viktor wherever he might lead.
Which, as it turned out, happened to be right up the bar.
Viktor settled onto one of the barstools, cane placed over his lap, as if entirely unaware of how thoroughly Vi was staring him down. Jayce would have tried to wave her off if Viktor’s own gaze weren’t so firmly placed on himself.
That was, in all honesty, still the part of this that Jayce was trying to wrap his head around.
Viktor Navrátil was the kind of success story that the university loved being able to boast of. Particularly Heimerdinger, although he tended to come across as almost paternal whenever he reminded people of how Viktor had started out as his assistant. He had never approved of Viktor leaving the position for a vacancy under Corin Reveck and, considering the scandal that had hit the man not long after, Jayce couldn’t exactly blame the professor.
The company had almost folded in on itself—would have, if not for Viktor taking the reins, rebranding it into Augments. Nowadays, it was one of the leading biomedical corporations in its field and, among them, easily one of the few with the most authentic, trustworthy results.
“I’ll need to lodge a complaint with Heimerdinger.”
“W—What?” Jayce stumbled forward, suddenly lightheaded. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Of course not. Why would you…?” Viktor paused, the furrow that had been starting to gather on his brow clearing. “Apologies, apparently I’m more out of practice than I realized. I meant only that he had been remiss in informing me of your work.”
“Wait,” Jayce said, wondering if, at some point tonight, he would stop feeling at a scramble to catch up, “you heard all of that?”
Viktor’s smile was a small, crooked thing, nearing a smirk around the edges. “I’d make for a very poor scientist,” he replied, “if I didn’t notice the man launching a passionate defense over the benefits of my field.”
For once, Jayce felt too proud for the usual twinge of embarrassment over having gotten carried away again to actually land. “Good thing you're not a bad scientist then,” he said.
Viktor barked out a laugh, looking almost surprised by the sound of it. “Indeed.” He gestured to the stool next to him. “Come on then, no need to be looming over there when we could be discussing business instead.”
“Is that what we're discussing then?” Jayce asked, dropping onto the stool. It left him able to catch Vi out of the corner of his eye, all too aware of how she was currently staring him down.
“That is my hope, yes,” Viktor said. “Unless someone back there made a better offer.”
“God no,” Jayce breathed out emphatically. He felt himself growing hot under the collar again as Viktor began to snicker anew. “That is to say—”
“Never apologize for honesty.” There was that crooked smile again. “It's refreshing.”
“Okay, okay.” Vi dropped a hand down onto the bar in order to lean in, but, now that Jayce actually wanted to catch her eye, she barely glanced in his direction. All her focus was on Viktor, who didn’t seem at all bothered by the scrutiny. “Either of you want anything? Figured I should check-in now before the nerd talk kicks off.”
It was all a part of her job, Jayce knew that, but there was still a part of it that felt a little too much like hovering. Probably in an effort to keep an ear out for how things went in order to tell Caitlyn about it all later.
Not that that did anything to make Jayce less nervous.
“Just water, thanks.”
“Leaving the food up to me then?” Viktor waved off Jayce’s hasty attempts to insist otherwise. “Really, I insist. If I plan on keeping you, I should at least make it worth your while, yes?”
Jayce could only nod, not trusting his voice with how dry his throat had become. Stupid, he knew, when there wasn’t a chance of Viktor meaning it in any kind of way that wasn’t perfectly innocent.
It didn’t help that, once Vi had headed off with their orders, Viktor angled himself properly towards Jayce, his eyes full of expectation. “So,” he said, “show me what you have so far.”
It should have been intimidating and, to be fair, it was, at first. Except none of the usual hurdles he had to overcome seemed to exist with Viktor. There weren’t any interruptions to ask for explanations around more technical terms (“In English?” as if that could still be considered funny) and, even when he had slipped past his earlier stumblings enough to launch into what could only be referred to as a passionate babble, Viktor didn’t look the least bit bothered.
At some point, in response to an off-hand, sheepish remark that, had he only known how the night would go, he would have brought his notes, Viktor wound up commandeering a collection of pens and even more napkins from a baffled Vi before lifting plates of mostly untouched appetizers out of the way.
“Not the most ideal of workspaces,” he admitted, “but I’ve gotten by with worse.”
Jayce, who had once driven his mother half mad by trying to put projects together in the car on the way to school, had to laugh in agreement.
The schematics weren’t a perfect match, of course, to what existed in the notebook tucked away back at his apartment, but, in some ways, these were even more valuable.
He had had Heimerdinger to look over his work before now, of course, but the professor had never been as hands on as Viktor proved to be. Literally, sometimes, with how Viktor would occasionally move his pen too far into Jayce’s own, so that there was nothing left to do but stop and let him add his notes in around the margins, speaking through them with a speed that could almost rival Jayce’s own.
It should have been frustrating, but Jayce found himself charmed instead. And, no, he didn’t much care what that said about him, thank you.
He didn’t even notice the gradual diminishing of sound around them until it wasn’t Vi’s usual presence appearing on the other side of the bar, but Vander’s far more substantial one.
“Sorry to interrupt, boys,” he said, “but it’s closing time.”
“Right.” Jayce winced a little, trying to collect the napkins into something of a proper pile to avoid confronting the sense of disappointment that wanted to creep in. “Sorry, I didn’t realize I’d kept you so long.”
Viktor, who had already eased himself off the barstool in order to stretch out stiff limbs, paused to cock his head to the side. “No apologies needed,” he said. “This night far exceeded the expectations that I originally had for it.”
“O—Oh.”
Jayce realized, a little belatedly, that he had begun to clutch the napkins a little too tightly in his hand, rushing to smooth them out, much to Viktor’s apparent bemusement. It took him a moment longer to drum up the right amount of courage, but, if this really was going to be his one shot, there wasn’t a chance he could let it go without saying anything.
“Thank you for taking the time to listen to me, and for working through all that with me. Maybe this new round of insights will help convince some of the sponsors that…” The rest of it escaped him at the realization that Viktor had begun to frown. “Did I say something wrong?”
“Only that…” Viktor huffed out a small, incredulous sound. “What exactly did you think we were doing just now?”
Jayce blinked once. Then twice.
“Um…” He shifted on the barstool, unsure what to make of Viktor’s raised brows. “I thought you were being nice?”
Viktor snorted.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, in the wake of Jayce’s confusion. “If you only knew how rare it is to hear myself referred to as such…” He paused, straightening back up with a shake of his head. “No, Jayce—I should have been clearer. I was hoping that you would let me sponsor your work.”
It was a good thing that Jayce was currently sitting down, given the buzz that filled his ears all at once at that. He swallowed hard like he could do something truly dumb, like demand to know if Viktor really meant that.
“Thank you, sir,” he went with instead.
“Really, Jayce” Viktor clicked a tongue to the roof of his mouth, yet his expression was all fondness. “It’s Viktor.”