Chapter Text
Sunrise was a golden veil over Piltover’s harbour. A blinding line on the horizon, like the painted trim on an antique tea-set, turning the water to a shield of deep, murky burgundy. A good sign for the sailors. Not that there were so many of them anymore, who had to worry about naval conditions for long-distance voyages- not since the Hexgates had been built.
Mel had woken with the light, as she often did. Usually she was quick to rise- Piltover was quiet in the mornings- coffee on the terrace, a few moments contemplation, the distant wheeling of the waking seabirds. This time she stayed in bed, watching the changing colour of the sky. Probably, because of who was with her, there.
A warm palm on her hip, the press of a sturdy forearm under her waist. There was nothing covetous in the way he held her, just comforting. Would he wake, if she shifted out of the embrace? Mel had her doubts. She could feel the softness of his mouth against her shoulderblade, the slight grit of an unshaven cheek. Hot breath, the rising of his chest slow and deep, deeper than the ocean outside.
Jayce Talis was a generous lover. Truth be told, he was generous in a lot of ways. And charming- but it wasn't the kind of charm that he had to try for, not at all. A gift that came naturally to him, and yet went unaccompanied by the usual cruelties of vanity. What a rare thing that was, for a man. For anyone. What a diamond in the rough.
Mel did rise before long, and Jayce didn’t stir. He let her go with a soft, heavy sigh, curling into the place on the pillow her head had vacated. Surrender- as though his sleeping self had expected her to leave him, anyway. But she didn't go far.
Her silk robe, tied loosely about the waist, the coffee she’d been starting to think about. A large canvas- though far from her largest- propped perpendicular to the terrace, and that slow sunrise. This morning, she thought she’d do a bit of work with the reds.
In her own art, Mel didn’t care much to paint people, or even animals. She could do it well, of course, part of her thorough education in Noxus- but it was landscapes, and cities in particular, that she chose for her subjects. So no, it was not the broad curve of a muscular shoulder, what made its way onto that canvas- not the furrowed brow or tender pout, the hesitation in warm hazel eyes. At least, not directly.
The subject of this project was Piltover. Not the bay, as was popular with hobbyists and tourist photographers- the view from her wrap-around terrace, but facing the other way. An exclusion of the ocean in favour of the buildings, first the central hill, then stretching off through the factory district. The slow shift from gilded spires to worn tile, the smoke from the forges and refineries of the lesser houses.
There, the winding line of one shadowed alley-street, that could be the raised vein on the tender inside of a wrist. The patina-dome of the old astrology building, that was the plump swell hidden under those coattails- visible now, blankets strewn aside. At dawn there was a dozen dozen little things that flashed bronze in the sunlight- weather vanes, drainpipes, flagpoles- each one a shimmering speck around the pupil of a tawny eye.
So not such an exacting portrait of the city itself- of course, Mel’s paintings never were. She remembered being critiqued about the expressionism in them, the overt display of sensual emotion. But the city could be looked at any time, and it would be itself. The painting had to be something else. Rooves and towers and rows of chocolatier windows, and overlaying it all, her affection. The subtle distortion of her feeling upon the space.
It was affection, certainly. More than she’d anticipated at the outset- and she had anticipated some. A good investment, made all the better by a handsome face and shapely figure- but it had gone past that, now. It had been past that before she’d kissed him for the first time.
In the high-left corner of the painting, there was a dark patch- a spot where her strokes had grown uncertain, the lines fuzzy. Unfinished. Mel looked at it now, the dry end of her brush pressed against her lower lip. Of course, that bit didn’t need any red; she’d been etching it out in gray and green.
In the real city, this was the edge of the river as she could see it from the terrace- there was a bridge there- one of the less-frequented entrances into the Undercity. Smoke and the vague, blackened shape that was the lip of the first, shallow fissure. In the painting, she wasn't sure what it was. The ache she saw in him sometimes, for which she didn’t quite have a name. Almost like…lovesickness. But on his face, it only ever appeared when he looked away from everyone. At a dark corner, or an empty chair. A longing for something that wasn't there.
…not for today. She still had crimson to use up on her pallet. Sunrise had infected the painting now- stained the lines of it- turning panes of olive skin to warm gold. The metamorphosis would continue in this way the longer she kept the canvas on the easel. A mix of lights cast, of days, of impressions. The evolution of her perception.
Jayce did wake eventually, when Mel’s coffee was only a single chilled sip in the bottom of the glass cup. Stretching, rubbing the back of his neck, a shyness in the way he looked up at her, and around at the expensive furnishings.
“Good morning, Mel. D’you already have breakfast? Want me to make some?”
So indulgent. It was a chivalry that wasn’t self-serving at all- or at least, not in the usual ways. On a lazier morning, Mel might let him do it. Clatter around in her kitchen and crack too many eggs, grating cheese and slicing mushrooms and biting his lip in the exact same way he did working the forge. Everything, and too much, when Mel alone would probably be satisfied with a cup of yoghurt, at most.
“Let's go down to the café. There’s business I want to discuss.”
Jayce smiled at her, a slight crinkling in the corners of his eyes. She could put that in the painting, too- perhaps in the curling of the clouds above the city- the trouble he had, mixing business and pleasure. Business and love.
“Oh, okay. Yeah.”
Mel could always tell when a man knew he was being watched. This tension she marked in Jayce’s shoulders, his back, as he scratched his chest and stood, padding across to the bathroom. No clothes in reach, of course.
Easy to imagine pawprints on her immaculate marble floor. One of those big, sweet dogs that flopped their heads onto one’s thigh and blinked up adoringly.
(A dog that watched the door, tail drooped, longing for its master’s return- only Mel didn’t think she’d ever seen that door open. Certainly, the key to it wasn’t hers.)
The café was private, for the building’s inhabitants only; Mel took a booth that was even more private. Toast with cream cheese, and smoked fish, cut by habit into dainty pieces. Jayce ordered more, he always ate like he was ravenous; Mel liked that, and would pay for it, too. Of course in Piltover, women weren't supposed to pay. In Noxus, providing was a gesture of dominance, ungendered. So yes, she would like to.
(...a familial inclination, maybe. On the subject of which-)
“My mother is coming to Piltover,” Mel told him. The letter, in the penthouse still- but she didn't need to hold it to feel the way the words itched. The way the seal on the front had pressed down upon her, like a brand over her heart.
Jayce looked startled.
“Really?” A bit of sauce on the inside corner of his mouth he wiped away. “I thought you two were-”
“She isn't coming to visit me,” Mel continued. “She wants something. I’m not sure what, yet. But no doubt she’ll contrive to meet with you.”
There, the darkness. A flicker of it, how he wound the napkin in his hands. The blush was easily justified by the regular pressures of courtship in Piltover, ‘meeting the family’, ‘first introductions’, and so on. But that wasn't an explanation for the bruise. The sore, rubbed-at thing she saw clear as day, just below the surface of his eyes.
“Okay.” The weight of his dark eyelashes, the stubble unevenly shaved. “Is there…anything I should know? Or do? I know everything in Noxus is pretty strict…”
“Just keep your guard up around her.” The silver butter knife at Mel’s side, flaring in the sunlight. “She’s dangerous.”
Jayce smiled at this, a wry quirk of his lips.
“More dangerous than you?”
There it was again- that effortless, unintended charm. Mel was as soft for it as anyone. She returned the smile, took his hand in her own. Rubbed the pad of her writer’s thumb over the scars on his roughened knuckles.
“That depends.”
Mel knew what she liked- and she knew what her mother liked, also. Observations unavoidable at the fortress in Noxus. After the death of her father, even more so.
Mel counted herself lucky that there wasn't so much overlap between the two.
A party.
Here, the exhibition hall of Piltover’s finest gallery; the unveiling of a new suite of conceptualist paintings by- but he couldn’t remember the artist’s name. Massive white canvases, taller than a man and longer than a streetcar, painted sparingly with lines of pale gold. Real gold, he’d been told, a pigment of liquified metal. But this exhibit, no common person could buy a ticket to see. The gallery was open by invitation only. Marble columns, shadows wherein to tuck the string quartet; servants in black silk with trays of wine and hors-d'oeuvres, and clusters of people in jewels that cost more than most labourers could make in a year. The ceiling was a skylight, showing the coiling night clouds. The glass was smeared with unwashed salt from the precipitation upon it.
Everything ached.
The weather had been damp, and unseasonably cold. Gray skies spitting specks of ice-water rain. No matter for the Councillors, the investors, the wealthy people of Piltover, who tucked themselves up in their mansions and penthouses, who travelled in private carriages with furs at their necks- of course, he’d travelled this way, too. Jayce’s request, or perhaps his requirement. He too, had a coat of black fur, high-collared, the softness pressed against his throat- what to wear to these horrible events- it was the finest thing he owned. It didn’t help with the pain; when the weather got like this, nothing really did.
The rain had worked its way into the bones of his leg, the joint of his hip; a slow, dull flare, hurt-as-coals, if coals burned cold instead of hot. Under his arm, in his wrist, a sharp silver pain from putting too much weight into the crutch. A habit of days now. Sitting wouldn’t solve it, at least it would bring a modicum of relief- but there were no chairs in the gallery, save that for the cellist. Standing, mingling was required. Well, he could ask for the facilities. If the men’s room had a stall he could sit there, lay his head against the wall. Respite. Only as long as possible.
That wouldn’t help with his chest, of course. There was a bubble at the very top of his lungs, perhaps the size of a nectarine; that was the amount of room left with which to breathe. The inhale was piercing white, a wrap-around knife, just below the ribs. The exhale, of course, just wiggled the blade around more. Blood on the back of his throat, a hint of it. The pressure on the inside of his head told him he had a fever.
When one of the waiters wandered by, then- their orbits typically avoided his little shadow, pressed alone against a column, hmm, wonder why- he snatched a glass. The crystal was chilled, the liquid within the colour of velvet, thick and strong and faintly sweet. He knew what he wasn’t supposed to do, but he did it anyway. The inner jacket pocket, a little packet of teardrop pills. A prescription his accent disqualified him for, even after surgery, after he’d needed bolts implanted in his spine. Well, Jayce had helped him get it, eventually. Not to be mixed with alcohol- and he almost never drank anyway. Reckless. The tablet had no taste on his tongue.
Jayce. If not for Jayce, Viktor wouldn’t be here. Well, Viktor wouldn’t be a lot of things. He didn’t know if he would’ve been able to catch his own ‘big break’, nor where the compass of his ambitions would have pointed, if he hadn’t chosen to steal that notebook from Heimerdinger’s office all those years ago. Of course, he could tell himself that Jayce wouldn’t be here without Viktor, either- and from a technical standpoint, that was probably true. Possibly. The Gates could only have come about through a combination of their ideas, a synthesis of their inclinations. A chance meeting that had changed the world, and could’ve been missed just as easily. In those first few days, so many points of failure.
His head had started to spin. That was the temperature, the heat pooling and prickling below his cheeks- he hadn’t noticed it so much back home, it must have come upon him on the way to the party. Alone. The invitation in the pneumatic tube had said Jayce would meet him here. And Viktor knew well enough by now to say that hadn’t been a lie. At least, not when the letter had been written.
A second heavy swallow took the glass to half-empty. But ethanol, too, was said to be a painkiller. The conversations around him were blurring in the corners of his mind. He’d stopped paying attention to the other guests- after all, no one was paying any attention to him.
What had he imagined? What did he hope for? The warmth of a hand on his shoulder. The low, gentle voice he’d been hearing less and less these days. The sideways flicker of a smile, warm or shy or nervous or dazzling. Being shaken around a bit, just a little, in the way he pretended to begrudge. Of course, for a long time now, Jayce’s enthusiasm- his affection- had been the best painkiller of all. The heat of his presence, the most soothing balm.
It couldn’t be such a crime, then, that Viktor wanted to feel it more. Wanted to chase that medicine down to its source, to drink it from Jayce’s mouth, to be buried in it and have it buried inside him. The comforting press of a body that was like the sun. Sometimes, Viktor watched Jayce work, eyes caught on the back of his neck, and imagined what it would feel like not to wake up alone.
Maudlin nonsense. Viktor drained the glass. He could feel a dizziness rising, one no longer entirely explained by fever- good, then, the pill was working. It ought to be, there was nothing else in there, no barrier to stop its soak into his veins. No, he hadn’t eaten before this. Viktor didn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.
A sound cut through this spiral- sudden, familiar- a man’s laugh. Viktor straightened, ridiculous, ears pricked up like a lonely dog- but there he was. Just on the other side of the floor. A parting in the crowd, like a ray peeking through clouds. Oh, on these kinds of nights, it was so easy to see it, why the people called him what they did. Gold in the paintings, gold on the goblet rims, in the tassels, the buckles, the man. Viktor could have sworn he actually glowed with it.
He was talking- but those around him were so dim, they might well have been faceless. Shades. Animated, gesturing with his own wineglass, lips quirked in a broad grin. The tiny gap between his front teeth, the nick in his brow. These details alone were more stunning than any of the vain nonsense lining the walls. A picture like this one, Viktor could contemplate for days.
Did he know Viktor was here? Had he gotten the returned pneumatic tube, saying he’d come? Did he know why Viktor had come in the first place? Because he hated high society parties. There was not a single other person here he cared for, or who cared for him, not at all. No, Viktor was only here for Jayce, here because the alternative had been lying in bed alone, at home, aching and feverish and so exhausted he couldn’t sleep-
As Viktor watched, a hand curled over Jayce’s elbow, bringing him close; a fingertip touch on his shoulder, a whisper in his ear. The blow was so abrupt, and so sharp, Viktor didn’t even really feel it. But there was another creature made of gold.
Mel Medarda was beautiful. At least as beautiful as she always was- and quite probably moreso. Glitter on her cheeks and up her temples, a single bauble inlaid on her glabella, another on the swell of her lower lip. The dress was dark, but that just made all the adornments shine more- around her wrists, her waist, her long, shapely neck- a crown woven into the braids she wore, tied high behind her head. Whatever she had said, it made Jayce laugh- quietly, but not just politely- the crinkling around his eyes was genuine. The tender, lopsided curve of his mouth.
Viktor was not ashamed of himself, and he was too old for envy. Still, there was no way to look at an image like that, and not feel something wither. No way not to notice how tall she stood- the straightness of her back, the effortless angle of her hip, the shine on her cheek that could be contributed to good health as much as makeup. Her perfection, her glory.
Viktor had pushed away from the column that had protected him, ignored the grinding feeling in his joints as he forced himself to take a step forwards- but it was too late for that, already. He was too slow. Mel was guiding Jayce away, a hand on his back, on his arm, chin pressed close against his shoulder. A bit of mischief in both their postures- but Viktor guessed only Mel was putting it on- or rather, that she was aware of the picture, in a way she probably couldn’t help. Jayce wasn’t, not always. His skill was not so deliberated.
Of course, no one stopped them, everyone could see what it was. A lovebirds’ embrace, a bit of coy amusement. The signal of success in that entirely natural, expected forward path. So the Man of Progress and Piltover’s stunning Noxian councillor would disappear from the party a while, come back in an hour or so, clothes a little unsettled and faces flushed. Or Jayce unsettled, Jayce flushed, rather. More likely, they wouldn’t come back at all. Everyone who noticed would raise their eyebrows, would laugh a little. Who could begrudge them that? They were young, beautiful people, and they were in love.
(Gold, both of them. The metal that didn’t rot- but Viktor was bronze, and he was covered in patina.)
Viktor suddenly felt a pain so deep and so sharp it was almost overwhelming. He coughed, a hard spasm in his chest, fumbled again for the phial of pills. A hard look at one of the waiters got him a second glass, too. A double dose was acceptable in his condition, even though the prescription was strong- of course, that wasn’t factoring in the alcohol- but he didn’t see anyone serving water here, so.
Well, he’d have this, and then he’d go home. Presumably. Jayce had sent the carriage to bring him here, he’d have to figure out his own way back. Call a taxi. Sit in late-night traffic, press his forehead to the window. His apartment was dark, and tended to be cold- the space heaters would take their time to warm up- the smell of dust and antiseptic, and whatever there was of himself beneath that. It would be quiet. Yes, it was a very quiet apartment.
Viktor had already taken the wineglass halfway; he felt the muted sensation of something close to him, a shadow that had fallen, overlapping with his own. Strange. He’d been in a bubble since he’d arrived- like any diseased animal, the rest of the flock took one look at him, and knew well to keep away. Better leave that one be, who knows what you might catch- or attract.
(Bait for the wolf.)
A woman Viktor was certain he'd never seen before. Tall and strong and imposing, and so obviously confident it blinded. The furs she wore, wrapped across her chest, did not look like something purchased- not finery- more like a trophy, what she’d caught and killed on her own. Scars on her face, across the rippling muscle of her bare arms. It was startling, that she was looking at him. But the way she looked- that startled more.
Viktor knew that kind of look- he’d seen it plenty- less and less the sicker he got. But he knew it, yes.
He knew what to do with it, also.
(And Jayce was gone. He hadn't sought after Viktor, hadn’t waited. Hadn’t tried to keep his casual little promise.)
So when the woman dipped her head to speak, voice low, Viktor leaned closer to her- let his eyes flicker and drop, heavy lashes, parted lips. There was a symbol on the clasp at her breast, Viktor recognized it. Noxian. Her accent revealed this, also.
A hand on his shoulder, heavy and hot. A thumb that curved to brush the bare skin above the collar at his throat.
(Twice his age, at least- a certain familiarity in the shape of her mouth, the colour of her eyes. But it couldn’t be. It surely wasn’t- how ludicrous a thing, if it was.)
“Are you enjoying this party, little one?”
Heat on his ear, and heat down his spine, and an impetuous weightlessness that surely came from the drugs. Viktor swallowed the shiver on his tongue, tilted his head to the side.
“No.” Innocent, a purse of his mouth. “I was hoping…someone might take me from it.”
The hand on his shoulder travelled down, brushing the brace, settling on the bend of his lower back. Broad enough the touch practically covered it, warmth radiating into his bones. But for her it would surely be easy, wrapping her fingers around his waist. Easy to pick him up, to carry him around even, if she wanted. Viktor’s usual interest, that- even if he was usually interested in men.
…it wasn’t necessary, of course. She simply had to begin making her way through the crowd, hand on his body, guiding him.
Viktor followed.