Chapter Text
To say that Jayce tended towards being singularly focused would be like saying that there exists an integer that, when added to itself, does not equal the same as itself multiplied by two. Which is to say it would be completely, mathematically, and provably incorrect.
There had been a lot of things he’d sacrificed in favor of manifesting his boyhood dream into reality—things he’d let fall to the wayside so he can help more people, so he can do things better, so he can change the world. It’ll be worth it, in the end, he told himself. An endless mantra looping in his head again and again as he turned down trips and opportunities to study something else or somewhere else.
Chances he could have taken, places he could have gone, things he could have known. He collected them all, scraps of memories and sacrifices made in the name of a greater dream, and he placed them into the jars that lined the interior of his chest. An eternal back-burner waiting for later. Once he’s cracked the mysteries of the stone, he can finally read that book. Once he’s figured out the next set of runes he can talk to that girl that keeps chatting him up at the pastry stand a few blocks away. Once Hextech is founded, he can go on that trip.
It was always pushed back, it was always later, it was always once I have this figured out I can relax, I can take a step back.
That’s the thing about later though, isn’t it? It never really comes.
Later is later is later is later and it all at once, in the middle of his lab with the soft glow of a mid-afternoon streaking through his windows, it strikes Jayce with all the grace and poise of a blue-spark explosion and a door to his face, that he is thirty years old.
Across the lab, with two desks and a graveyard of scrap metal between them, Viktor licks his thumb and swipes through a few pages of a notebook.
“You know I was thinking,” Viktor says, without looking up. “What if we tried inverting the runes on the next chassis? It might help if we’re able to route the power down instead of up—that way we’re not trying to force the flow downwards once it already has its upward momentum.”
Viktor flips another page, like he didn’t walk into the lab half an hour ago with deeper bags under his eyes than normal and two tremendous, fresh-looking, bite-bruises just above his collar. Like Viktor didn’t sit down, unbothered, and not even trying to hide them.
Jayce has been watching him for about half an hour now—well, Jayce has been watching him for six years in reality.
Even the voice in his head hums at that, twisting uncomfortably as he draws his eyes from the shape of Viktor across the room. Not in a weird way, he defends to no one but himself. He’s been watching Viktor for years because how is he supposed to not? How is he supposed to have him in the space they share, leaning against Jayce’s desk or leaving a fresh, full, coffee cup at his elbow and not watch him? Is he expected to not be endlessly fascinated by the way he moves, the shifting weight of his body as he stands at the chalkboard, fingertips pressed to his lips as he sinks deeper and deeper in the sticky-black morass of thought and contemplation.
Watching Viktor is like watching the tide roll in, beauty and power coalescing to strike the beaches.
“Are you listening or am I talking to myself?”
Jayce blinks hard. “Huh?”
“Suppose that answers that.” The tip of Viktor’s cane clicks against the floor. “Coffee? That always helps you focus.”
Jayce shakes his head. “No, sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “But yeah, coffee. Thanks, V.”
Viktor hums and Jayce watches, he watches, as Viktor crosses from his over-crowded desk to the small coffee-cart they’d installed in the corner long ago. Years now, Jayce thinks. It has to have been years now because they’ve been at this together for years.
For six years.
His stomach twists at the thought as his eyes follow the shape of Viktor’s bruises across the room. He can trace them out by now, he can follow the lines and the pressure points and he knows where they’re deeper in color—the place where this person's canines dug into Viktor’s skin.
“Are you feeling well?” Viktor asks as he draws two mugs from the second rack. “You’re normally much more focused than this.”
“Yes,” he lies. “I’m just a little tired. I had a long night.”
Viktor hums in turn. “As did I,” he says, casually, as he fills up the mugs and Jayce is met with the tidal roar of blood in his ears. An unfamiliar rush of heat collects uncomfortable and bile-slick in his stomach. His teeth grit behind his lips.
“Yeah?” Jayce says, in a way he sincerely hopes comes off as casual. “Relaxing?”
One pale hand extends out, setting a cup of coffee on the corner of the lab table. One for Jayce, first. “Eh, I suppose. It was good to clear my head. It’s when I first considered the idea of reversing the polarity of the gemstone’s charge when we’re installing it into a larger device.”
Jayce’s brows raise above the churning and sudden illness that creeps through him. “You were, uh, workshopping with someone last night?”
Viktor glances back over his shoulder, heavy brows knitting. “No, I was having sex.”
A tendril of the tension coiled between Jayce’s shoulders unfurls for just a moment before it slinks tighter in on itself and he isn’t sure why. Viktor’s allowed to…to do whatever it is he likes.
He’s an adult. He’s not Jayce’s.
In fact—Jayce’s lips pitch into a bit of a frown. He hides it behind porcelain. “I didn’t know you were seeing someone.”
I didn’t know you’d keep that from me, I didn’t know you didn’t want me to know.
He swallows it down around the taste of Viktor’s favorite bitter roast.
“I’m not. It was, eh, a casual encounter. I don’t have the time for committed relationships at the moment.” Viktor collects his mug in one hand and makes his way back to the desk. “What do you think about what I said earlier? The inversion?”
Jayce feels his face heat more. Of course—of course he knew hypothetically that people had casual sex. He was a student once, he saw others pressed in corners of the library and whispering far too close in darkened halls. He’d heard stories of friendships breaking down, he’d seen his own sparse groups of friends driven apart by one-night stands.
He’s always been drawn to a singular focus.
“Ah.” Jayce pushes his hair back. “I guess that makes sense. We could also try flipping the directional channel of the actual containment sphere.”
He worries his lower lip as he drinks in the sight of Viktor’s profile, the way his brows knit as he considers Jayce’s idea.
Viktor hums, lips pushing against the ceramic rim of his coffee cup. “Mmm. Perhaps. I can get started on a few different prototypes. That way we can see which works better. I worry about the lifespan of a jointed mechanism, and the necessary upkeep.”
Jayce shrugs, picking up his own mug in turn, and tries not to think about the possibility that maybe, once, this one was Viktor’s. He tries not to let his mind wander the phantom sensation of lips brushing against the mug, wondering if he can place Viktor’s lip-print there in the same place Jayce’s is and—okay.
That’s enough thinking for today.
Absolutely.
Jayce sets the coffee down, undrunk. “Let’s worry about getting it off the ground first,” he points out—turning his attention to the plans sketched out by his elbow. “One thing at a time.”
One thing at a time.
###
After that first day, Jayce can’t stop noticing. He thinks, at first, that maybe it’s just him. Maybe he’s seeing it more now that he knows it’s there. It’s a cognitive bias, right—something about buying a red shirt and suddenly everyone around you is wearing red shirts. He’s heard about that one, he knows about that one.
Once you know your lab partner likes to be bitten and bruised during casual sex, suddenly you can see it fucking everywhere.
And Jayce can see it. Everywhere.
The first set of bite marks faded slowly, turning a vicious purple and black before slowly bleeding through greens and yellows that peeked up over the edge of Viktor’s collar like some polluted sunset. And not long after, Jayce spotted another, fresh, set when Viktor stretched over the back of his chair.
Then another, a few weeks later, when the oppressive heat of summer started to bleed through the fans they had set up in the lab and Viktor had loosened his tie and undone a few buttons on his vest—teeth imprinted on his collarbone, like someone had tried to consume him whole.
It was impossible to unsee.
It was impossible to miss.
Sometimes the marks on his throat bled from their home there, and drifted aimlessly down into other parts of Viktor’s body that Jayce could see in flashes and sparks. Marks on his arms where he pushes his sleeves up, on the knobs of his wrist in purple and yellow splotches. Sometimes, Jayce sees them like watercolors, paint dipped to water to spread and curl around the pale stretching canvas of his skin.
It makes him angry in a way he can’t even explain.
It’s a little over a month after the first set of bruises made themselves painfully known that Jayce first sees the bruises on his hips.
He can’t remember what he’d been doing, whatever scientific advancement had consumed him entirely, whatever brilliant idea he was working through hunched over his papers with the end of his pen caught between his teeth and the legs of his chair tilted onto the back two when he looked up to see Viktor bent over his own stack of papers. He was reaching across his desk for one of the older prototypes of a containment sphere.
At first, Jayce thought they were shadows. At first he thought they were caught up in the metallic knobs and twists of Viktor’s back brace, dancing across the pale skin of his back—he has more moles, one right there next to his spine—but reality shattered that observation faster than a crack of lightning splits the sky.
As Jayce’s eyes drew down the edges of them, where the whispers of purple and blue mottle and blend near the rising peak of Viktor’s hips he realized they were near-perfect handprints.
A cold spike of something pierces through Jayce’s gut as he takes in the sliver of a bruise he’s seeing.
His mouth opens and he has no idea what he wants to say, and he knows he shouldn’t say anything he knows it isn’t really his business. What people do in their rooms isn’t anything he should care about, isn’t anything he should be mindful of. Viktor isn’t his, he never has been. He never has been.
Jayce’s mind is as traitorous as his mouth however, it seems. What if someone is hurting him?
“What the hell happened to you?”
It’s in his voice, coiled around his throat and drifting through the air around them but Jayce doesn’t know why he says it, he doesn’t know why or where it came from. But it’s there, lingering in the air between them like the twinkling sparks of their first experiment, like a sparking sphere hanging in suspended animation, tossing a cog back and forth like a game.
But this isn’t as fun.
The line of Viktor’s back stiffens with Jayce’s offering and, well, maybe he should’ve worked harder to keep his mouth shut.
“What do you mean?” Viktor’s voice is hard as he straightens back up.
Jayce winces at his own stupidity. “I uh. Your back. You’re bruised, Viktor. And you’ve…had a lot more recently.”
“It’s none of your business, Jayce.”
True. But still. Jayce worries his lower lip. “Is it…the same, uh, the same person?”
Viktor swears under his breath in a language that Jayce doesn’t know, pulling the back of his shirt down over the brace. He starts to unspool slowly, and Jayce can see the winding knot of tension in his spine start to pick to pieces around him. “No.”
Jayce squeezes his eyes shut. “Look, V. I…you’re my best friend. I…is someone…” he gestures vaguely with a hand. “Hurting you?”
Viktor turns so slowly Jayce wonders if he’s even moving at all until he’s facing him, staring at Jayce with a look that he can’t quite decipher—but it pins Jayce into place properly. It makes him feel splayed open, taken apart there on the lab floor like he’s another one of the pieces of junk they dredged up from the scrapyards for spare parts.
The force of Viktor’s gaze clicks the last two legs of Jayce’s chair to the tile.
“Is someone hurting me?” Viktor asks. “Is that what you’re asking me?”
Jayce’s feet can’t seem to get unstuck, and he can’t seem to peel himself out of his chair. “Yes? I’m…you’ve had these bruises all over these past few months. I’m…you can’t blame me for being worried, Viktor.”
“I thought we cleared this up a few months ago,” Viktor says, setting his pen down. “My sex life is none of your business, Jayce. But if you must know, no it is not from the same person, and no no one is hurting me. At least not outside of what I ask of them.”
His brows knit. “You…ask people to hurt you?”
Viktor rolls his eyes, as if Jayce isn’t bringing up a valid concern. “Yes. I enjoy rough sex.”
Jayce feels his face heat. “Oh. Um. Okay.”
He looks to the side, feeling a bit like one of the Kiramman’s hounds after they’ve been caught chasing the rabbits in the front lawn.
Viktor sighs, expression softening when the sound draws Jayce’s eyes once more. “I appreciate your concern, Jayce. But I promise I am perfectly safe. I understand that the Undercity has a different, eh, sexual culture than Piltover—but nothing I do puts me in any danger.”
That, Jayce has heard. He’s heard the whisperings between his classmates. If you were really desperate, if you really wanted to get laid you could delve down into the Undercity, where people were far less careful about their sexualities—that there were places where you could trade coin for an evening with a man or a woman or whoever you wanted to lie with.
Jayce never understood the draw of them, never understood the why.
It all seemed like a waste of time, and a waste of money, really.
It’s not like Jayce hasn’t thought about it, like he doesn’t find people attractive, like he hasn’t considered it—he just…never had the time.
He worries his lip as Viktor watches him, like he’s waiting for confirmation. “As long as, um…you’re safe. That’s all that matters to me.”
Something in his chest hurts at the prospect regardless. Viktor nods, stiffly, and bends back over his work.
They’re at it for nearly thirty seconds before Jayce asks, “So you go back to the Undercity a lot, then? I didn’t know you went home that often.”
Viktor blinks down at his work, pausing but not stopping. “I don’t. I haven’t been back down there for nearly a year.”
“Oh. I thought—you said—”
“I sleep with people in Piltover, Jayce just as I presume you do. Not everyone is so precious about sex, though I imagine my Undercity nature brings out a particular sense within them.” There’s that sliver of bitterness in Viktor’s voice that tugs at something in Jayce—that same protective urge that lights up every time Viktor says something that implies someone here isn’t treating him like they should.
“I um.” He clears his throat, catching on the first half of the sentence. “I actually…uh. Don’t. So.”
The scratching of Viktor’s pen flickers to a halt this time. “Don’t what?”
His cheeks heat again, an endless burn that he can’t seem to stop. “Hextech has really taken up a lot of my time, y’know? I really, like, had to focus on this when I was younger and ever since we cracked it I spend every day here, pretty much all hours.”
“As do I,” Viktor points out. “Is this about you thinking I’m not as dedicated to Hextech as you are? Because I am, Jayce, I—”
“It’s not,” Jayce says, his throat seizing around the sudden horror that Viktor would ever presume Jayce doesn’t think he’s as dedicated. “Trust me, Viktor. I know that without you, there wouldn’t be anything—we’re…we’re partners in this, equals. I just…y’know. I’m constantly thinking about it, and I always figured I’d spend some time dating once I had Hextech off the ground, and then it was once we’d gotten the funding we needed, then once we managed to get out the projects we promised, then the Gates. Now it’s…”
He looks down at the schematics for new tubes for new containment pipes to channel the hex energies. “Now it’s once we finish these.”
Viktor is watching him with another one of his indecipherable looks, and Jayce is kind of getting tired of being watched like that. A little.
“Jayce,” Viktor starts, slowly. “Have you ever had sex?”
He’s pretty sure he doesn’t need to answer. He’s pretty sure the burning under his skin is a beacon in and of itself, bleeding the truth down from his cheekbones and letting it melt down to his collarbone. “I’ve been busy,” he says, letting the unspoken for thirty years linger and settle between them.
Viktor clears his throat, and Jayce hears the pen collect again, but there isn’t scratching, there isn’t anything. “It’s nothing to, eh, to be ashamed of. Really. I apologize for making you uncomfortable.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” he lies. “Really. It’s…I mean I guess it’s different for people in Piltover.”
“How do you mean?” One scratch of his pen, as Jayce can’t bring himself to look up from the dancing and swirling papers in his hands.
Jayce shrugs as if Viktor might be watching him. “It’s…I mean I don’t know how it is in the Undercity, but it’s…I don’t know, you always want the right person, right? You want it to be romantic, don’t you? It's the fantasy of a perfect person and a perfect night where you just match.”
“I lost my virginity at a brothel,” Viktor says, easily, and Jayce chokes on his own spit. “Er, are you okay?”
Jayce hunches over as he coughs. “What?”
“Most of the people I knew growing up did. It was based mostly on curiosity rather than anything else, but I viewed it as being educational. Learning from a professional on how to handle my own body and please others. It’s far more effective than fumbling through it with another inexperienced person. And it got the nerves out of the way rather quickly.”
Jayce’s eyes whip over to Viktor and he—he can’t be suggesting—can he? He tries to imagine Viktor, younger, with a handful of coin he scraped together in the brothel Jayce had passed down into the Lanes six years ago. He tries to conjure one in his head, with red silks with some woman dripping in perfume and gold and glitter—he tries to imagine himself in that position, tries to imagine himself sneaking around the Undercity trying to ensure he isn’t noticed as he tries to pay for sex.
It makes his skin crawl almost exactly as much as it doesn’t.
“I uh.” Jayce feels his face burning. “I mean I guess that makes sense. It’s the most…I guess it is the most effective way to learn, isn’t it?”
Viktor hums. “It was. And I’m sure it didn’t hurt that there wasn’t the same sort of social stigma surrounding them that you have. It wasn’t necessarily an expectation but, like I said, most people I knew suggested it.”
Jayce rubs the back of his neck because if he’s going to keep holding the papers the sweat from his palms is going to soak through them and make them unreadable. “Was it…I mean was it nice?”
“Er,” Viktor starts, eloquently. “It was…I was eighteen so it was quite a few years ago now. But I recall him being very polite and very careful. I was very upfront with him about what I wanted and what I was there for. He was very…he was very kind about it. I wouldn’t call it romantic by any means but it was certainly pleasant. If…I would recommend a first time, if that is something you are even interested in, should be with someone experienced, someone who knows you and knows how to help you. If anything to keep you from hurting yourself by doing something reckless.”
Jayce nods minutely. He could…he could do that.
If that’s what Viktor is suggesting.
It’s not…it’s not what Jayce thought about, alone in his flat imagining some faceless body, a nice dinner with flowers and the soft glow of candlelight in his bedroom. But Viktor was right, wasn’t he? He could just get it out of the way, he could just tear the bandage off.
Totally.
It wasn't as if Jayce didn't find people attractive, it wasn't as if he didn't want to have sex with people.
They don’t talk much before the sun starts to set behind the windows, casting the sharp shadows of an oncoming night over the floor until they start to encompass the both of them. Viktor slows to a stop first, his hands streaked with grease after fiddling with a new joint system for for nearly an hour after Jayce migrated to work on a few equations at the crowded chalkboard.
“I’m going to head home. I was thinking about getting dinner,” he says, as Jayce stares down at the math that stubbornly refuses to solve itself. “If you’d like to join and continue our discussion, I would not be opposed.”
Jayce worries his lip between two sharp teeth for a long moment. The last thing he wants is to talk about going to a brothel with Viktor. “I uh.” He shakes his head. “I’m going to stay here for a little longer, but thanks.”
He flashes Viktor what he hopes is a convincing smile.
He can’t quite tell if it lands right or not, but soon Viktor’s shape is replaced by unbroken shadows again—and Jayce stands there, stuck to the ground, letting them swallow him whole.
###
Viktor and Jayce don’t talk about it again, but Viktor seems almost apologetic. Two more nights he asks Jayce if he’d like to grab dinner with him, walk home with him, talk about it—all the sort of things he never did before, but it’s the sort of extended hand that Jayce can all-too easily imagine an olive branch in.
Not that Jayce is really sure why, he’s the one who pressed the issue.
Viktor gets over it by the end of the week, though, and drops the offers.
It takes another week before Jayce can summon the courage to actually go through with Viktor’s suggestion.
It’s a weekend, where he tugs on the same outfit he’d worn the last time he went down into the Undercity—covering his uniform in a plain grey cloak, something that covers the well-tailored and well-cut shape of his clothing in order to hopefully help him blend in better. He tries to draw a balance, not wanting to look too shabby for whatever person he finds down there.
He considers bathing a second time that day, if only just to buy himself a little more time—but he swallows down the building stone of anxiety instead.
He can do this.
He can absolutely do this.
Logically, Jayce knows that those who work in a brothel have seen worse than him. Logically, Jayce knows he’s good looking—he knows he takes care of himself, he knows he’s handsome, he knows he’s strong. He knows he’s relatively well-versed in the theoretical understanding of the body, he knows how to follow instruction, he knows how to read people. He knows how to do as he’s told.
He knows enough, and what he doesn’t know, he knows he can make it up as he goes. He sucks in a breath through his nose as he changes his shoes out for the boots that he wears when he trudges around in the junkyards with Viktor, pulling up scrap metals and abandoned pieces of tech in order to find parts and pieces they can pick apart.
The trip to the Undercity takes less time the second time, he swears it does. He makes his way down to the Lanes, picking at his nails as he debates pulling the hood of the ragged, plain, cloak up higher. There’s no reason someone like him should be down here, except for this, isn’t there? And Jayce knows it, and Jayce knows, logically again, that even if he ran into anyone else he knew, that they would be just as questionable here as himself.
He knows that.
The last time he was down here was buying the parts he’d later gotten confiscated. He’d seen the brothel back then when he’d passed by it.
But the swelling storm of anxiety that churns deep in his gut doesn’t. That part of him starves against something else, clawing at the inside of his stomach until he feels like he’s going to be absolutely sick by the time his eyes catch on the red glow. Crimson light spills out from windows and an arched, attractive, doorway. The building itself isn’t necessarily innocuous, but the people walking down the narrow road don’t seem to pay it any mind, really. The open doorway is protected from wandering eyes peeking inside by heavy velvet curtains that shift and twitch in the humid and rank breeze of the Undercity.
Outside, a handful of figures stand, leaning against the wall with their legs stretched before them—waving at passersby in a way that Jayce figures seems to suggest they’re, eh, employees of the institution.
Institution, really?
He shakes off his own thoughts as he breathes deep against the swelling tide of anxiety and—and one of the people enticing the pedestrians is a sharp-boned young man. Jayce’s eyes catch on him for a moment, following the line of his narrow shoulders down to wide and almost familiar hands. He twists with laughter at something that Jayce can’t hear from his place a handful of feet away from the gaggle. Something about him makes something hot pool low in Jayce’s gut. Brown hair sweeps back from a narrow, well-defined face, marked gently with a beauty mark tucked just under his eye.
Jayce’s feet are drawn towards him like some kind of inhuman and magical pull—like the tide is drawn to the shoreline, again, like some kind of gravity.
The eyes are wrong, the mouth is wrong—wrong from what? The closer Jayce gets the more he realizes that the young man in the doorway isn’t quite what he was thinking, but he also doesn’t know what he was thinking.
He catches on Jayce’s gaze, mouth tugging into a slim and warm smile.
“Can I help you?” And the voice is wrong, too. Jayce doesn’t know how but he knows it doesn’t scratch whatever itch is currently crawling up under his skin.
It doesn’t stifle the fire entirely, but it also doesn’t really build it. “I um. I was just, uh…”
The man’s head tilts. “Looking for company?”
He’s pretty. Jayce can’t deny that. He’d…Jayce isn’t sure what he’d come here for. Part of him thought, for a moment, that he was coming down here for a woman. To find someone soft and sweet, who he can learn from. His mind had offered him some kind of beautiful older woman, tall and elegant who can guide him but, well, this man doesn’t actually seem much older than Jayce is himself. In fact, Jayce thinks he might be a little younger, judging by the sort of softness to his eyes and his face. But he can't quite unhook himself from this man, he can't stop staring at him.
“Y-yeah,” Jayce manages, feeling himself flush. Something cool and dry curves around his fingers and Jayce jolts before he realizes that it’s this man’s hand curling into Jayce’s own hot, nerve-slick palm. “I um. Yes.”
Yes. He can do this.
He can do this.
Someone around him huffs something that isn’t unlike a laugh and he feels himself start to burn anew. But the hand in his squeezes, leaving his heart fluttering a little in his chest. Jayce looks up, catching on cool eyes that seem to pin him into place, not unlike the way Viktor looks at him in the lab. “Why don’t you come inside? We can talk where it’s quiet.”
His voice is alluring, even if it isn’t quite what Jayce expects him to sound like. He nods, a little dumb, and follows as the man parts the thick curtains to let Jayce slip into the brothel behind him. The halls are busier than Jayce thought they’d be. Bodies shift around him, moving through doors and into rooms that Jayce can only catch a glimpse into.
There’s one that looks like it has a heavy, oversized tub currently holding three different people, in another, Jayce catches sight of a mess of bodies that he can’t quite determine how many or of what are tangled together. He feels his cheeks darken only more as the anchoring hand in his own pulls him down the low-lit and softly lined hall.
“Hey, handsome,” a low, smoke-warm, voice croons out at him as a woman appears in one of the doorways, entirely nude.
Jayce freezes once his eyes snap up to the ceiling. “I—uh. Hello. Ma’am.”
His guide releases his hand and Jayce thinks he’s going to sink through the floor without it. But Jayce can feel him moving around him. “I’m sorry, my dear, he’s already spoken for. But there was a group who seemed interested outside. I’ll have someone send them along, hm?”
That same confident hand falls to Jayce’s hip and he feels himself relax into the touch. If only faintly.
The woman disappears and Jayce’s companion offers him a brush of fingers up under his cloak, following the length of Jayce’s side. “My apologies for that. Men as…enticing as you rarely come around here.”
Jayce looks down and this time, when he’s smiling, it’s with too many teeth. “We have to be a little protective of the things we want.”
He can feel his brows furrowing as he tries to parse out what that means, but that warm hand is resting on his chest and Jayce can feel his heart pattering away under the touch. “Um. I…” his mouth is dry and all he can think is how much he can’t quite place where he knows this man.
Surely he doesn’t, right? Surely he’s never seen him more—he’s never ventured into this part of the Lanes. He’s never dared to come this far beneath the surface for this exact reason. But here he is, like a specter of someone Jayce used to know. His tongue twists over itself as he follows the line of the man’s fingers down to the back of his hand and the knobby joint of his wrist and for a second Jayce thinks there’s supposed to be a mark right above it—a dark splotch buried between the proximal and distal carpal bones.
And he blinks and he’s in the lab, staring at Viktor’s hands as he gesticulates, in the middle of a fevered and excited discussion of how they can adapt their newest invention to create a self-powering water purification plant. He blinks and Viktor’s hands are shoving something under his face, schematics for a new plant, for a new system of pipes, for a new series of cranks and gears that will make the process sixty percent more efficient.
He blinks and the red wash of the brothel is the cool blues and greys of their lab, he blinks and the man standing in front of him is a little bit shorter, a little bit skinnier, with a longer face and wry smile that only tugs Jayce towards him even more. He blinks and his stomach clenches around the wrongness that he knows was clinging to his skin and under his tongue.
The man’s head tilts and he looks so much like Viktor that it hurts.
Jayce pulls back like he’s been burned. His mouth works around something half-way between an apology and a sound of horror at himself. “I—sor—uh.”
The man’s brows knit and it doesn't help the gun-sinking feeling of abject mortification at himself that he’s here, in a brothel, being led to a room to sleep with an absolute ringer for Viktor. Viktor, his partner, his best friend, the other half of his mind and his company. Viktor who is the only person he’s ever felt so matched with. He shouldn't be doing this, oh fuck, he should not be doing this.
Bile churns in his stomach and the man’s hand sweeps up to Jayce’s collar, voice churning low and soothing. “Hey, hey, look at me,” he purrs. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Jayce absolutely should not be doing this, but for a moment he can pretend it's Viktor and for a moment he wants to.
He takes a step backwards and Jayce follows, like a dance he isn’t sure of his as mind won’t stop filling in those fantasies he’s had a thousand times before with Viktor’s shape now. The faceless person that had been tucked at his side in the thoughts of dinner dates and romance become Viktor coiled on Jayce’s sofa, laughing too hard at a stupid joke that Jayce made about combustion engines and hex technology, Viktor watching the night sky pass with him as they contemplate the sort of maps they’d need to make if they wanted to really learn how to teleport people through the spaces between the stars. Viktor standing beside him in the council chambers, Viktor setting coffee by his elbow—reality haunts him between the cracks in his own fantasies.
Jayce can’t stop smelling the familiar spice and citrus of Viktor’s scent obfuscating the sharp and heady incense that poorly attempts to cover the smell of sweat and sex that haunts the brothel.
By the time he can suck in a breath again, he’s in a darkened room, being guided down onto the edge of a bed that, if he thinks more than two seconds about, Jayce really doesn’t want to be sitting on. He’s sure it’s cleaned between uses—it has to be, right?
Right?
He sinks his head down between his own knees and sucks in a deep breath. “S-sorry,” he manages and the man pours himself down into the space beside him, letting the dip of the bed pull them closer.
A narrow arm drapes over the back of Jayce’s shoulders and he wonders if that’s what the weight of Viktor’s body would feel like against his own.
The traitorous, awful, part of himself wonders if he sleeps with this man, if he’ll know what it’s like to fuck Viktor. If that would put the memory and thought into his mind, if that would give him what he needs to grip his own cock in the dead of night and imagine Viktor’s body against his own.
He shudders at the thought of treating the image of his best friend like some kind of pin-up magazine.
The prostitute beside him hushes him softly. “Come on now,” he croons. “It’s alright. Take your time. It’s alright.”
Viktor’s voice haunts him, the idea of someone being kind to him.
He looks over at the man once he’s collected himself enough to and, well, he’s handsome, isn’t he? Jayce drinks in the sight of him, the shape of his face backlit by the low, covered, lamplight radiating from the corners of a dark, velvet-lined, room. “Sorry, I’ve never—”
“I guessed,” the man laughs, soft and not unkind. “You’re hardly the first topsider who’s come to me to be the first man they sleep with. I’m honored by it, really.”
Jayce winces. “Am I that obvious?”
“Very.” Another soft laugh. “That’s why everyone in that hall was trying to snap you up. They want to swindle you.”
Jayce huffs out a frustrated breath, scrubbing his hands up over his own face. Stupid. Of course, of course. “Thanks, for uh, for keeping them off me.”
The arm on his back turns to a hand, rubbing slow, warm, circles between his shoulder blades. “Fuck, I would let it happen to. I uh, I don’t even know…I don’t even know what it usually costs.”
“Then I suppose you’re lucky that you found me, didn’t you?” There’s a warm little tug to his voice, and Jayce can’t pick it apart. He’s certain that Viktor would be able to, that Viktor would know. Maybe he should have told him he was planning this, maybe he should have gotten his advice before he jumped headlong into this plan of his.
He feels himself darken, but the man doesn’t let him linger in it for too long. “You’ve got me here,” he tells him. “Prices usually vary on what services it is you want. If it’s your first time, I presume you want it all?”
Jayce worries his lip again. “I uh. What does it all entail?”
“How many times do you think you can come in an evening,” he asks and Jayce blanches at the question.
The idea that someone would ask him that, the idea that someone would ever really want to know that sends something clenching and twisting inside his stomach. He’s never talked about sex so brazenly with anyone expect, well, except Viktor. Viktor was the only one who ever broached the topic with such plainness and ease.
To Jayce it had always been something kept under wraps and pretense, it had always been something discussed in whispers and secrets, something they didn’t discuss. Something they didn’t talk about.
“I um.” He feels himself starting to sweat through his undershirt, the cotton sticking to him in an almost terribly uncomfortable way. “A couple? I guess.”
The man hums, leaning in to bump his forehead against Jayce’s shoulder, sliding until he’s nuzzling his cheek there. “In that case, I could always suck you off,” he breathes. “Show you what it’s like to come in someone’s mouth before you fuck me.”
The visual, the idea of it, lances hot through Jayce’s gut and he feels himself react to the offer above anything else. He burns, from head to toe. “That…” he tries to wet his lips but his entire mouth is bone dry, an aching desert pleading for anything. “That would…yeah.”
Another hand comes to rest on his knee, careful fingers tracing the inseam of his trousers in a way that absolutely renders Jayce’s mind blank.
The man murmurs a price into Jayce’s shoulder and he agrees without question.
Jayce feels the smile pushing up against him as the feather-light touch slips further up the inside of his thigh, inching closer to where Jayce is starting to fill out. “Half up front, then I suppose we can get started.”
He pays him and the man peels off, the space where he left feeling achingly cold in the wake as he pours himself down between Jayce’s spread legs with a grace that Jayce knows Viktor doesn’t have. Viktor is beautiful, he’s elegant and intriguing in how he moves but he doesn’t have this sort of feline fluidity to him. He could never drop to his knees like this.
But the rest of it?
Would he look up at Jayce through half-lidded eyes, would he touch him like this? Would his fingers follow the line of Jayce’s leg, tracing him like a revenant idol. Would Viktor treat him so lovingly? Would he smooth his hands along the trembling edge of his leg until he soothes them away?
The man nestled between Jayce’s legs looks so deceptively right there and, and for a second Jayce wonders if maybe this is better like this? Could he look at this man and keep him there forever? Jayce tries to read more into the look and that foolish part of him that used to listen, rapt to the love stories that his mom told him nightly, wonders if he looks at everyone like that.
If there’s a tenderness to his touch no matter who he touches. If he’s just as gentle with everyone, keeping Jayce’s gaze almost mesmerized against his own as he dips his head forward, lips brushing up against the straining bulge in his trousers.
It’s almost electric, the masterful touch up against him. He swallows the pitifully desperate noise that he feels building up in the pit of his throat. Another kiss, and Jayce feels his stomach clench with something—with something.
He feels himself throb in time with the soft, almost shuddering, breath that the man offers, washing warm over the fabric as a soft, pink, tongue slips out from between two lips to drag against the fabric and—fuck. Jayce hisses between the visual and the feeling. “I—”
“I know,” comes the crooning voice buried in his groin. “Let me take care of you. Let me show you what you’ve been missing.”
It’s coy, it’s gentle, and Jayce barely manages to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth in time to groan out a thin noise as the man’s nose ducks to nuzzle into the space between Jayce’s thighs. The anchoring hand lifts off Jayce’s leg and all he can see through the haze of arousal is Viktor there, Viktor’s hand drifting up to his waistband, Viktor’s nose pressed against his clothed erection, Viktor’s lips working soft kisses down the strain of him.
Viktor’s thumb, nails blunt and always a little bruised from work, running over the button on the front of his trousers, Viktor’s hair falling into Viktor’s eyes and Viktor and Viktor and Viktor it’s all he wants it’s all he needs it’s all he craves as the button slips out of the loop of fabric and—
And it’s like ice-water pouring down Jayce all at once as he blinks again and it isn’t Viktor.
And all he can see his this man, this stranger, kneeling between his legs.
He looks down, expecting the rich, clever, golden eyes—the kind of eyes that Jayce has always been able to drown in, overcome by the sight of him overcome by the fire that always burns like the sunset over Piltover, like the reflection of fire on metal.
And it isn’t.
It just isn’t Viktor and Jayce can’t pretend as well-manicured fingers find Jayce’s fly.
And it isn't Viktor and for a flash-bang moment, with a half-instinctual curl in his gut all Jayce can think is I want it to be.
He jerks back, the reverie he was stuck in shattering like a beautiful window and scattering shards of broken glass across the bed around them.
“Don’t worry,” the man tries. “I’ll be gentle.”
“I—fuck,” Jayce says, shifting away from him again. He covers his face with his hands. “Fuck I’m so sorry I—I’m so sorry.”
The man’s eyes flicker down between his legs. “It’s fine,” he repeats. “It happens to a lot of men. I know people say that but it really is true. You can trust me.”
You can trust me.
Something sticks in Jayce’s throat: I don’t even know you. He doesn’t say it, but it’s a close thing.
“I’m so sorry.”
“You’re nervous,” he tries, voice curling like smoke once again. “I can get you back up again.”
Jayce shakes his head. “No, no I—” A deep breath. His voice is tight, mortified. “I think I’m pretending you’re someone.”
“Oh?” He sits back on his haunches, looking up at Jayce. “Who?”
“I really can’t say. He’s—he’s my best friend.”
The man hums, curiously. “You can call me his name, you know,” he offers. “I really don’t care what you call me. You’re paying for my time, you’re allowed to pretend I’m whoever you want.”
Well. Of course. For a man as smart as he is, Jayce feels incredibly foolish in the moment. He swipes his hand under his nose as he sniffs once, trying to stifle the sudden wave of burning that starts afresh behind his eyes and deep in his sinuses.
It’s the incense.
“I should go, I’m sorry I—” Jayce fumbles for the bag of coin he budgeted out for this specifically. He dumps out the other half of what he owes. “For your time and uh—” another handful, uncounted, shoved into the prostitutes incorrect hands. “For the inconvenience.”
The man blinks, first down at the money then up at Jayce. “I—what?”
“Just take it,” he says, doing his fly back up as he clears his throat. “And uh, you didn’t um. You didn’t see me.”
When Jayce looks down, the man is staring at the coin again. “Whatever you say,” he says. “I hope you find…well. Whatever it is you’re after.”
And Jayce is gone, feeling suddenly freezing cold in the humid Undercity air.