Archive of Our Own

Jayce doesn't think anyone could blame him for assuming he was traveling with a husk. All evidence pointed to that being the case.

Finding himself in another place, a clouded afternoon somewhere familiar yet alien after all encompassing everything of the care with the towering willowy figure that was his partner now. There was no flesh. There no face to parse or warmth to glean; just the statuesque being staring at Jayce with golden eyes aglow and that claw pointed straight at him.

Viktor didn't speak much. Didn't do much outside of following Jayce as they walked and searched for civilization. 

Conversations were short, efficient, nothing more or less than what was necessary. The empty landscape that should have been Piltover. The storm coming. The smoke coming over the horizon, indicating life. Viktor would need to stay out of sight, lest any people or townsfolk saw what he was-

He nodded along, answers clipped and barren of their usual wit or engagement. Simple yes, simple no, simple nod in recognition of hearing what was said to him. How could Jayce think anything but he was staring at a hollow cocoon? That what was once his partner was anything but truly finally gone and he was left with the autonomous shell of what he made himself?

Jayce wanted to write it down, catalogue the difference. See it visually the past and present in neat little lines to read over and over until it made sense. Until it sunk in fully.

In many ways, they were lucky, second chances doled out to the undeserving. In many ways, Jayce was comforted by something left of Viktor close by, with his voice and the impression of the face he knew resting serenely under the mask. In many ways, Jayce resented him, leaving with him this husk, this mockery of what he was, taunting with his lilt and his accent and the eyes he once knew never opening. 

Jayce wouldn't abandon him. Wouldn't leave him, forget him. He would lead this piece of Viktor to were he needed, watch him, keep him company and safe and from people who could both harm and be harmed by him. If a part of his partner still existed, then Jayce would keep that, however little it was.

He can still feel the heat of the claws shooting past his face. The strength in those hands as they lifted him effortlessly into the air. The cold indifference to his life leaving him, body starved of oxygen as they choked it from him. 

Viktor doesn’t move much when they rest in their search. Just stands. Stares into the fire or out into the darkness. A silent thing, expression as nonexistent as the softness he used to have, still as the trees around them save for the claw on his back rotating, runes fading in and out behind his head in their crude halo in presumed thought.

It’s hard to sleep those first few nights. Jayce can’t blame it on the hard ground or the unfamiliar surroundings. Not the strange sounds or the foreign scents in the air. Not when every time he opens his eyes, its to that husk he once knew so well standing there. 

Staring, eyes lit with some manner of the arcane and cutting as the rest of him burns from the fire at his feet. Surrounded by a dozen figures with their blank faces and their impossible presence that do not leave when Jayce blinks once. Twice.

“You should rest, Jayce.” It says, a lonely shadow of a friend he once knew, voice ethereal and faraway and Jayce’s heart hammers at a proposed threat as he forces himself to close his eyes again.

He can still feel the cold of its palm on his throat from what was barely a few days ago. And it still hurts to swallow. 

The old farmhouse is a blessing. Less than a mile from a small, yet substantial town to allow for Jayce to find some way of making money to afford a life and yet far enough away, what’s left of Viktor can be kept out of sight. The building itself is nothing to write home about as its clearly been neglected for years, its field overgrown, and its walls inviting in more of a bluster than a draft but, with a little work-

"You shouldn't push yourself, Jayce." 

Jayce freezes, the hammer in his hand pausing as the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. His veins feel cold at his positioning; crouched down as he patches a hole in the wall in comparison to the shell of his friend looming, always looming, over him. He is so tall, the tip of his crown almost kissing the ceiling when he is at his full height, his footsteps heavy and the floorboards under them incapable of not creaking with every step. 

And he snuck up on Jayce. Got so close without Jayce having heard. He could've done anything. Could've reached out. Could've-

"It's fine, Vik-" Jayce stops himself, lets the hammer hit the nail a few more times as he bites back a grimace from the screaming in his leg at the position or the screaming in his thoughts at everything else. 

He flinches when the hammer is taken from him smoothly, a quiet ‘allow me’ ringing hollow and Jayce doesn't have the energy to argue or fight it. Almost grateful for it as he moves and that lithe towering form takes his place, crouches down, going through the motions as observed and the claw at its back open and vigilant as ever. Maybe thats good for him, a little manual labor to occupy an empty body while Jayce goes to stretch out his leg and rest until he has to make himself food.

Until the next morning, and the day after and the day after when he leaves Viktor to work he seems eager to engage in so Jayce can find some for himself in the town. The husk doesn't follow, doesn't question. Just wishes Jayce well in a quiet distant echo of something he heard every time he left the lab.

It doesn’t stop him from worrying. How can he when every few hours, Jayce can still see the devastation of what that Viktor can spread, those faceless puppets of old and new standing in the crowds of the town and the corners of his periphery? Viktor hasn’t tried, hasn’t even touched Jayce or made mention of any kind of connection or ‘healing’ or evolution, but without Jayce watching him or keeping him busy, he thinks about it as he repairs various machinery and labors with his teeth gritted as his leg burns from it.

But coming back to the house, and Viktor is still there. Sometimes still doing whatever task Jayce left him with. Sometimes watching the overgrown field scattered with rabbits or the birds in the trees of the forest behind the property. Sometimes-

He catches it, sometimes; standing, staring, stock still as if it's finally empty of whatever spark of the arcane still echoing the memories of Viktor inside. At first Jayce would call out, touch him lightly to bring him back. Sometimes, it would rouse, apologize, make itself busy. 

Other times, most times, it would just stay there. Unresponsive for minutes, even an hour once. Jayce stopped calling out to Viktor. Just waited for him to twitch, fingers rubbing at his side and at his palm before the rest of his lanky form began to shift and move once more.

Jayce wonders if its the right thing to do. If there’s a point in trying to rouse Viktor. He might not even be there.

Maybe that's a mystery he doesn't need an answer to.

Work is easy to find in the town and the farms surrounding it. There’s always something needing tuned up. Needing fixing. Needing moved. 

The locals kind and curious enough about the new stranger to give him the work and pay enough to make the pain at the end of the day worth the effort. No one questions his decisions, no one needs to be charmed, no one needs to be coaxed out of funding or into allowing potentially disastrous experiments. 

Just an easy smile, agreeable temperament, and hard labor. Sometimes throwing in the answer to questions of a past made more believable for the brace and the places he’s been. It’s almost serene, soothing in tired muscles and an ache in his leg from too much effort put upon it. He can focus his thoughts on the clang of a hammer, on the crank of a wrench, on the scent of oil and hot rust. 

On the roar of an engine miles in the air. On the crackle of the hexgates towering over the skyline, opening to send airships anywhere. On the smoke billowing from rubble clogging, choking-

Bang on the simple, rusted tractor, the wrench in Jayce’s hands slipping to the dry hay-strewn ground beneath his knees.

“How’s it coming?” The farmer, an older man with a squashed nose and missing teeth asks from where he leans on his half-fixed equipment. 

He stuffs a thumb into his mouth, shoving tobacco to one side, one lazy eye drifting as he takes in Jayce blinking back unbidden moisture from his eyes. Behind him, the sky shines a cloud-dotted cerulean, free of anything obstructing it save for pale puffs of smoke from the town two miles off and the mountains in the distance. Wheat flutters short and green in the late spring breeze, playful and mocking as Jayce swallows down the pounding of his heart. 

“Good.” He answers with a winning smile, picking the wrench and biting back a wince at the twinge in his leg. “Almost done.”

The ravine calls to him when he sleeps, like he left a piece of himself there, wailing to return. The cold, emotionless rock face at every turn. The stagnant water tasting the same as the lizards he barely cooked. The figures, the puppets, grey in disuse always staring, watching, waiting-

“Jayce?”

It’s flesh that greets him when he opens his eyes, pale and flush, not gaunt as it had been in the end but healthy in its angular shapes. A mouth he's drawn the shape of a hundred times over in lieu of never knowing it. A brow furrowed in concern as amber eyes rake over him.

Metal greets Jayce’s touch when he reaches out automatically, disbelievingly. Cold. Immalleable. Nothing like the Viktor he knew.

“Just a bad dream.” He says to the blank mask, aglow from the yellow eyes set into it. “Don't worry about it.”

His heart races as he rolls over, turns his back to it. The sheets of the mattress bunch in his fist as he feels movement behind him. His shoulders tense, shifting coiling tight up his neck when he hears the click of the claw opening and closing.

Anything could happen. This thing could do anything to him.

So why can't he unclench his fingers, still the racing in his pulse, why does he feel the cold of disappointment when the floorboards creak and the door clicks shut and he is alone in the bedroom once more?

“Viktor!” 

Seeing the gaunt, lithe figure collapse, seeing the thing that is left of Viktor caught on the outside wall of the farmhouse, failing to stay standing as his burden of logs is scattered from too long of limbs to the vibrant green grass is…

Strange in its familiarity. In its echo of dozens of times before as Viktor’s condition worsened and Jayce helped him with an arm around his shoulder to a seat as he coughed and spat and seemed as miserable as he is now. To think he’d left it and that particular way Viktor’s hand would shake, touch his own face in his sickness behind though now instead of covering a mouth no longer in existence, Viktor is instead touching his glowing eyes. 

Metal scraping softly against metal. As if there is feeling there. As if there is an ache there.

Perhaps there is a piece of Viktor in there still, in his fear, in the same way his shoulders twitch when Jayce touches one gingerly. In how he tilts his head, the light in his eyes set inside that smooth, grey face dimming and brightening like an old bulb on the verge of burning out. How can fear be so evident on the emotionless facade as Viktor tells him that something is happening to him in a shaky tone that betrays the formidable figure he’s made himself?

Jayce doesn’t know. Nor does he know why it fills the space left between the anxiety and fear with relief.

Seeing the eyes go dark has Jayce nauseous when he first sees it, barely having woken up and stepped out into the hallway. Viktor was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, hunched so the highest point of his crown would not touched the wood above. Body dark in the low early morning sun, stock still and towering, no light left in him. The life in him gone, a shell for sure, a statue for Jayce to have like the other Viktor had of him to be left in the garden as a reminder, as a condemnation-

“If you’re making faces at me, I would appreciate if you described them.” The crowned head swivels, rotating in a direction that is miles to Jayce’s left. “I would hate to miss out.”

Jayce doesn’t laugh. There’s not enough air in his starved lungs to laugh as he breathes for the first time in minutes and wipes the wet coalescing in the corner of his eyes with his palm. There’s a gruffness to his voice when he informs Viktor that his eyes are dark. 

There’s sarcastic yet soothing lightness to Viktor’s when he simply says ‘wonderful’.

The eyes encase over in a strange, deeply dark membrane that is softer to the touch that anything else on Viktor. To say Jayce is worried is an understatement, each hour passing bringing about a fresh wave of cold, gripping anxiety as he watches the being Viktor has become stumble about the house. Knock into walls and trip and grumble in a way that is so convincingly Viktor yet shaped so very much not. 

How does he reconcile that? Seeing the thing that tried to evolve a population with little disregard to what that meant, that held Jayce aloft by his neck, tried to kill him in more senses of the word that Jayce could reasonably list in the journal he'd picked up from town... How could he reconcile that with the same figure now who cut a piece out of the door frame from whacking the tip of his horn into it and then had to be talked down from magicking said frame a few inches higher?

It's Viktor. It might be Viktor. Jayce wants to believe that it is when he reluctantly leaves for the day to find a little work and stock the pantry.

After he returns, Jayce finds Viktor seated on the floor of the mostly empty living room, back against a wall. His long dark legs stretched out a long the rough wooden floorboards, making an impossibly sad picture as he is slouched and his head lolled to the side. 

"I have given up." He announces, not bothering to turn his head in Jayce's direction. "Unless you are not Jayce, then you are being very calm about this."

Jayce chuckles as he sets his bag down, pulling out his journal from it with a pencil. With a few hobbling steps on a legs who's muscles have long since been seized up tight for the evening, he reaches Viktor's side. Gingerly lowers himself to the floor.

"You know," Jayce starts, voice strained until he is seated, letting out a shaky breath of relief when he can stretch out his knee. "Considering... everything, I don't think that's true. And at this point, I hope you don't." 

He doesn't think about the straps of the brace as he loosens them, fingers automatically finding the clasps and the belts to give the sweating skin under his pants some room to breathe. Viktor's head rolls vaguely in Jayce's direction at the sound, staring around him in the most metaphorical sense. Jayce glances at him once, twice, balking as he continue to glare as best his expressionless face can allow. 

"What?"

"Why do you never let me have any fun?" 

He can't muster a laugh, instead swallowing, letting the pencil held loosely in his hand have his attention. He knows the results of fun had over the past few months. Is familiar with their machinations. They followed him on the walk home. They stand outside the window now and Jayce is grateful Viktor can't see as he closes his eyes to take a steadying breath against the bile rising in his throat. 

"I don't know what your definition of fun is anymore, honestly." 

Viktor makes sound at that, somewhere between a grunt and a chirp that has Jayce's brow furrowing. He lets his head list to the side, the claw at his back scratching delicately at his shoulder as if to soothe him. Can he even feel it, Jayce has to wonder as he opens the notebook.

"I... am finding I do not know either."

"We'll figure it out. We've got time. Probably." He adds, that lingering thought that this be the sign of the end demanding it.

"The vote of confidence is an inspiring one." Viktor says, tapping his fingers on his thigh and the contact rings rings out in a few pleasant notes. "Tell me about what you saw in the town today."

For a night, for a few hours, it feels like them. An iteration they moved past a year or two ago as work and priorities drifted away from dreaming making the impossible the tangible as they sat on the cold floor of the lab talking, talking, talking. A version of themselves that is responsible for Jayce could never let go of Viktor, professionally, platonically, romantically, as even at their farthest points away from each, there was still this. 

There was still them.

Jayce doesn't move when Viktor dozes, the first time since his evolution falling asleep. The notebook is decorated with two faces as he strains to hear the hum in Viktor's chest.

Documenting the change in Viktor feels good. Normal. Writing down every minute detail, sketching the differences, discussing them with a more lively, if ill-tempered Viktor.

There’s a naturality to it. A groove they both fall into with ease. Two well oiled parts finding the exact notch in which they can once again rotate endlessly together. 

Weeks of it, watching Viktor go blind, open his eyes again to something bestial. Tear vents into his neck to breathe. Sleeping. So much sleeping, a strange image in comparison to the shape he’s taken now. 

When Jayce stumbles upon him on the mattress one afternoon, the low sun outside burning in the metal of his form and shining off the gold of his accents, it-

Viktor sleeps the same way he did. Curled on his side on the bare mattress unceremoniously on the floor. Arms a tangle, wrapped around himself with his legs curled. Like he had so many times in the lab when work was long and exhaustion over took the both of them, missing only the light snore that accompanied him at rest.

His eyes are closed. Apathetic mask painted in a recognizable peace and his claw resting over the crown of his head. Long alien form of his body rendered small, vulnerable in this unguarded position despite taking up so much of the sleeping surface.

Jayce wants it to be him, can almost see him as he was; moles and sharp features and bags under his eyes from weeks of not enough sleep. An exhaustion crept into Jayce then, something scared, something frightened needing to be part of this strange serenity. He laid down next to Viktor as he had before, on his side, staring into a face he recognizes.

It’s Viktor as he reaches out for a pale cheek. It’s not Viktor as his finger meet metal warm and pleasantly smooth. It is him even as it seems like its not, two pieces slotting in together as Jayce takes in a face he will never see again and the one he’s going to be seeing every morning here after, touch knowing the seem between mask and what was before it. 

His hand drops. Fingers curl. Jayce closes his eyes, rest finding him swiftly. 

They're out there. Between the trees. Ghosts of something impossible and left behind universes away. 

Jayce frowns, swallows, tears his eyes away back to the shirt he'd been washing when the movement caught his eye. Water sloshes in the bucket as he scrubs the cloth, a vicious sound but it does little to drown out the murmurs. The sounds that shouldn't be there; conversations between people he can't see, murmuring, whispering-

Movement, swift and white and graceful bolts across the treeline. He jerks, catching the bucket in time from tipping it over. Glancing up at a gleaming, gold inlaid figure standing just before the treeline. 

He knows its not there. Not here, at least. In this timeline. In this lifetime. Only one person could make the thing tilting its head at him and that person is contemplating the vines covering their eastern wall, making strange little gagging sounds every few minutes-

It takes a step, overgrown grass around its shins ignorant of its shape or its weight. Another. A third. A fourth.

"Jayce?" 

Warmth blooms in his pants from where the bucket is upset, water spilling over his legs and over the packed dirt. The earth sucks it up greedily, leaving behind little but a dark stain and his clothes a tangled pile in sun. Jayce bites back a yell at the mask looming over him, Viktor eyeing him curiously as does his claw.

"Are you alright?" He asks, head tilted to very like that puppet all those yards away and it its with start Jayce realizes how hard he is breathing.

Jayce closes his mouth, his eyes to the figure looming over him, running a hand over his face to pinch the bridge of his nose. Rubs at it as he falls back on his ass instead of his good knee. Wills his heart back to something comfortable and his thoughts from screaming to run. 

He shouldn't close his eyes. Viktor is close. Viktor could do anything.

Reach out. Touch his forehead. Grab his neck-

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine." His hand slides off his face, going to tip the bucket back over onto it's bottom to slop some drenched clothes into it. "Third time this week. Remind me to write that down." 

Viktor hums over the wet slap of the clothes being thrown into the wooden bucket, peering out into the empty field. There's a release in Jayce when he steps away, the knotting tension in his shoulders snapping at the increasing distance that has Jayce's shoulders dropping from where they were touching his ears. It lessen only more as Viktor approaches where he had been staring, the grass shifting melodically under his heavy uneven steps and his form shining dully, twinkling with every measured motion of his body. 

They both jump as a crow shoots out of the field, scrabbles to fly away, nearly smacking into Viktor in its hurry. He watches it squawk and land in a tree some yards away, leaves shivering silver and green from its hurried landing. The claw on his back lackadaisically shifts and Viktor makes a distance noise of understanding. 

"What are you doing?" Jayce asks, an unmistakable humor in his voice that falls away when Viktor turns his head to retch, a squelching gag coming from him before he straightens once more. 

"I am considering a career as a scarecrow," Viktor shouts across the still grass, touching the side of his mask gingerly and looking back at Jayce as he is crowed at by an annoyed bird. "I would be quite adequate at it, no?" 

"How about you become adequate at helping me wash my clothes?" Jayce yells back, squinting in the sun.

There is still fear in him. Pulse erratic and the cold of anxiety blooming like frost across his back, juxtaposing the sweat in his palms and at the nape of his neck as Viktor approaches once more. Unhurried. A graceful swing to his exaggerated hips and the size of him, the length of him becomes more and more impossible to ignore with every bit of the distance crossed.

Jayce ignores the warmth deep in him. The knot in his throat. The way he squeezes his legs together and wets his bottom lip with his tongue in favor of slapping the last sock into the bucket.

Viktor stops before him, stoops to grab the washing in one hand before offering his own to Jayce. He can hear Viktor breathing, a soft hiss accompanying the softer blue emanating from the slits under his jaw. The metal is hot in Jayce's palm, the grip familiar in its alien strength and that warmth burns with a sweet fervor as Jayce is pulled easily, effortlessly to his feet. 

It's fine. Viktor asks where the soap is as he lumbers off to the well and they're fine.

“You seem in good spirits, sir.” 

Jayce huffs, not stopping his hammer on the chipped, red fence he’s been hired to repair, choosing to keep his eyes on his instrument and the lush grass at the base of the posts fluttering in the small mid-morning breeze. He doesn’t have to look to know its the younger of the teachers at the local school, her voice melodic and sweet.

“Been a good few days." He says, incapable of ignoring someone who needed his attention. "Think I’m finally getting used to this place.”  

He throws a grin over over his shoulder, taking in the modest blue dress and blonde hair standing over him against a cloudless sky. There's a basket in her hands, closed and innocuous as the shouts and peals of laughter and screaming of students rings out closer to the school. Jayce turns away, picks up another plank to hammer into the gap of the fence. 

“That's good to hear. You seemed to be having a rough time of it when you got here."

Over the bang of the hammer, he can hear her shifting. Weight rolling from one leg to the other. A shift of the basket on her arm as it rubs against her worn, yet clean dress.

"Yeah, it's was a long trip." Jayce grabs another nail, lines it up, wood smooth and well sanded against his knuckles. "But getting settled in. Working on...everything, honestly." 

He ends it in a laugh, a little forced, a little sardonic. He can hear the woman hum, hear her think, and if he glances over his shoulder, she's hewing her lip, tapping delicate fingers on the top of her basket.

"You know..." She starts, and Jayce's shoulders are immediately at his ears. "You work so hard. Would you- If you weren’t busy tonight, I could buy you a drink at the pub. Celebrate settling in.” 

She’s sweet. Lovely. Kind eyes and a kind soul as she teaches the children of the town with a patience difficult to employ with small children.

“No, sorry, I have to get home to my partner. He’s-” Seven feet tall. Evolved into something else. Gagging every few minutes. Sleeping again. Joking again. Heart beating again. “Sick.” 

It comes natural to him. How many different times did he offer some kind of the same excuse to get out of some event and back to the lab? How many dates and meetings and unimportant parties did he happily miss out on just to get another few hours of Viktor’s time?

Jayce didn’t care then, and he finds he doesn’t care much now as she takes his excuse with a bow of her head and a ‘maybe next time’. Leaves the basket lunch and Jayce to his work. When he’s done, his payment is fair and given with a coy smile. 

But Jayce doesn't think much of it as he walks home, leg in all sorts of ways and mind what he will find when he gets to his destination. What little of her was in his thoughts is gone entirely when Viktor greets him with a new addition to the ever growing list of changes.

Jayce is well enough to admit that the sight of Viktor’s new mouth is concerning. The trajectory of this happening is feasible, not exactly surprising but it is… 

“What the hell is happening to you?” Jayce asks, turning from noting something in his journal back to Viktor.

There's a smell emanating from him, one Jayce had caught whiffs of before but now the sweetness of the arcane coalescing with an earthier musk is unavoidable. The mouth is open, a glow with a soft blue, framed by the mandibles that split the lower half of Viktor's mask. The flesh inside wet with saliva, soft to the touch as he avoids the twitching tongue, strange animalistic teeth hard as bone as one would expect for something organic and alive.

Living. Breathing. In Jayce’s hands again, he hopes. 

Oh, does he hope.

“Once I know, I will be happy to tell you.” Viktor says, mouth still even as he speaks and there’s a bubbling lightness pulling at the corners of Jayce’s lips that he has to fight.

It’s just a touch, less than something a dog would do, the barest rasp of a tongue against his palm. Viktor is quick to apologize, retreating the thing back into his face as his head tries to as well. It should’ve been funny, standard, there and forgotten about the moment it started and ended.

Jayce felt it everywhere. From his hand to his stomach, up his spine, between his legs. A brilliant flash of something he’d forgotten he was capable since week two of being stuck at the bottom of the ravine. He has to breathe, heat crawling up his neck as he grabs the notepad again for something to do.

Here? Now? In conjunction with this, a Viktor who's form does not portray a sexuality to it? 

They move on. Jayce changes the subject to food, consumption. Takes them to the kitchen to make something as his mouth moves left and his mind moves right. 

As he catches himself during the process of frying meat and vegetables and buttering bread, staring at parts of Viktor. At his mouth as they eat, confident he could call it a logical curiosity in the way he takes in how Viktor's new jaw moves, how the mandibles bite and tear into his meal, how that tongue curls out, seeking crumbs and juice that have found themselves down his neck.

It's for curiosity's sake he tells himself when that heat finds him again at Viktor's descriptions of remembering taste. Has to be when Jayce focuses on his hands gesturing, long fingers no longer pale but still elegant and long and capable. When his eyes drift back to the mouth and he crosses his legs under the table, hyper-aware of the brace and how it bumps into, upsets the wood with a thump.

Viktor asks if he's okay, head tilted in concern at the grunt of pain Jayce made. Jayce rubs at his calf, half to soothe the flare up of fire searing at his nerves and half to buy time to allow his mouth to form something better than wondering how that tongue would feel between his legs.

Attraction to Viktor was second nature for all of their shared partnership. Part and parcel. Jayce didn’t experience a day, a minute of time in Viktor’s presence where it wasn’t a consistent droning in the background of his thoughts. 

With Viktor's own flippancy to most people approaching him with interest and the way his eyes never seemed to drift to Jayce, no matter what he tried, it never occurred to Jayce that attraction could be reciprocated. They were partners, friends; the work came first and anything else was a footnote. Attraction was just the backdrop of every interaction, every thought, every lonely night when Jayce's hands drifted south and he felt guilty in the morning, but never enough to stop.

Extending that, an appreciation that was fanatical if Jayce let himself think of it too much, to what Viktor is now seems impossible after what he’s done. Done to Jayce. Done to himself, made into something so unconscionable to consider, lacking everything someone needs to be attracted to despite still being Viktor.

He loves him. Jayce will always love Viktor, no matter the form, despite everything he's done, but that attraction, that…

Jayce excuses himself for bed, citing a long day that is half true. Closes the door carefully, the coiling in his gut reaching a fervor pitch as he takes the few steps to the mattress. The idea is already set in stone, action being taken before he even lays down as his palm lays over a cock that's willing itself out of its dormancy. 

He thinks of Viktor as he knew him before his illness started to sap his health. As he never knew him, naked and atop of Jayce, touching him instead of himself and murmuring sultry nothings in his ears. A fantasy he’s engaged in countless times.

That voice, that particular way he says Jayce's name like he's painting the words into the air. That mouth, how he wanted to feel it on him, anywhere everywhere Viktor wanted, Jayce wanted it to. Those hands-

Hands sliding over his thighs. One wrapping around his cock, the other creeping up his chest. Around his neck, pressure light, ‘you're doing so good Jayce-’

Skin grey. Face smooths, morphs. Eyes glowing and golden sunken into a flat mask and the grip on his neck turn iron as the hand around his cock becomes metallic and if Jayce tries to fight it, buck him off, he is slammed back, legs grabbed if he kicks, the claw heating, whirring as that mouth opens-

Jayce lays there panting, taking his own hand from his neck, shirt soaked with enough semen to need to wash it discreetly. The images fade, recede, blending in with something almost mundane and he can almost convince himself it hadn’t taken any turn and it had lit up every nerve in his body like a wildfire. 

He strips his shirt. Gets to his feet. A need to see Viktor, hear his voice, hear the human in him driving Jayce from the mattress. 

Jayce trusts him. He does. Viktor wouldn’t-

The Viktor of before wouldn’t hurt him. What he became, what Jayce made him become however has shown a capacity for hurt. A capacity he thinks about and he thinks about and he thinks about. 

Jayce forgives it. It was a different situation. A different time. Viktor wasn’t wholly himself and Jayce hadn’t been either. Viktor, the man in his new form itching at his willowy elbow for the thirtieth time that day as he pokes and prods at a cut on Jayce’s arm as they sit in the kitchen in a simulacrum of times before where the script was flipped and life was more complicated, is not the same as the puppet who tried to break him. Or Herald who tried to do the same. 

“I don’t miss this.” Viktor says, water sloshing in the bowl by Jayce's elbow on the table as he grabs a rag from it. 

The water squeezed out by Viktor's hand runs a burning orange in the afternoon like filtering in from the open kitchen window. He shakes the excess with a few gentle flicks of his wrist, the metal of his skin collecting small droplets that are alright the same the rest of the liquid. Jayce hisses when the rag is pressed to the cut, grateful for the sting over the static skittering over his skin from contact; clearly a week in between touching himself too long.

“What, bleeding?” Jayce asks, still, prickling at the back of his neck as Viktor hums.

The claw is open. Rotating this way and that, clicking in Viktor’s examination as he pulls the reddened rag away to grab some cloth for a bandage. His motions are stiff, mandibles parted, and even as he is unraveling the bandages, his eyes dart to the blood welling again in the cut. 

That tongue peeks out. The air in Jayce's lungs solidify as he can hear Vitkor's breathing. As a willowy, deceptively strong hand grabs his arm to maneuver it, to allow Viktor to begin wrapping it.

“I did it too much, I think." He says, motions perfunctory. Medical. And he stares and stares and stares- "I found myself tired of seeing it, in the end there.”

The bandaging finishes with a little tuck yet Viktor still holds onto his bicep as he falls silent. Jayce should take his arm back. He needs to take it back now. 

It’s hard not to catch. A stare too long. That thumping in his chest as the vents he breathes out of under his neck begin to burn blue. Mandibles shift, head tilted as if he is lost for a moment, his grip on Jayce’s arm crushing, possessive, and Jayce’s feels it in a panicked burst of cold in his chest and hot everywhere else when he tries to tug out of it. 

“Viktor?” 

He blinks, head rocking back. The grip loosens, slides away as the rest of him shrinks, takes a few steps back and Jayce twitches to not tumble off his seat and match them forward. 

“Ah, I lost myself for a moment.” 

Jayce breathes. Tongue wetting his bottom lip. Tells him it’s fine as he fights the urge to tell him to do it again. 

There is simplicity, serenity in mundanity. Dreaming of impossibilities, rubbing elbows with the highest in society, making the future with something ephemeral and intangible yet made tangible. It makes you forget how the simplest of tasks contain the easiest of pleasures. 

A meandering walk. Drawing a person. Chopping wood. Cooking a meal. 

Jayce stands in their kitchen, knife in hand as he chops an array of vegetables with a dusty proficiency that is becoming easier and easier the more he does it. Mind focused on the task, the motion of his wrists, the slice of the blade through greens, the smell of freshly chopped produce. It's almost enough to take his mind off the rotted, half eaten lizard in the sink basin to his left, demanding his attention to it's impossible presence.

He knows it's not there. Nothing like those creatures having been seen since they came to this place.

He can still smell it. Taste it. Feel its meat in his hand and in his mouth, iron and sulphur overriding the pungent, sweet onion that threatens to wet his eyes.

Jayce blinks against the sting. Pinches his brow, rubbing at it as he flinches at the tickle of something on his shoulder. When he opens his eyes, the carcass is still there, buzzing and alive with flies and marred by his own teeth. 

Floorboards creak. Tell tale hum and uneven footsteps of Viktor coming through the door, ducking under the frame as Jayce glances over his shoulder to the towering figure he cuts. To the way his thin form seems to fill the space impossibly. 

Maybe its the decaying lizard in the sink. Maybe it's the onion tightening his tear ducts, stinging his eyes, Maybe its pain in his leg but when those footsteps come closer, one step, two steps-

“Quite the medley here. Feeling creative tonight?” 

The question innocent, good natured. The presence close, companionable. The figure of Viktor looming over Jayce, curling over him and his blood is both frigid and molten and Jayce’s spine straightens to degree he is certain it will snap even as his knees quake. 

“It’s just- um…” 

There's no thoughts in his head. The melody of vegetables to his left and the poultry salt and awaiting more care to his right become insignificant. Forgotten in the droning potential energy building, building in his muscles to run.

He’s fine. Viktor’s fine. They’re fine. Nothing can or could or would happen Jayce has to remind himself as the knife in his hand is slick with sweat and how hot his face is and how he can feel the outline of Viktor along his back. Smell the whisper of the arcane infused with his strange musk.

The brush of a touch to the base of his neck has Jayce freezing, the knife clattering to the empty sink. A mutter of an ant, the flick of fingers as it is tossed aside but Jayce doesn’t register that so much as he does the soldered together connection point from where Viktor’s finger pinched the top of his spine down to between his thighs.

“Jayce? Is something wrong?” A hand clamps over his shoulder, neither threatening nor domineering yet simply concerned.

Viktor looms. Jayce can understand the height over him without having to see it. Can picture it fully with every blink of his eyes, the smooth thumb just kissing the edge of his neck transmitting the same danger as if it was jammed into his esophagus. 

And when he breathes, quickening, harsh, a cascade of cold panic just coating something hotter and electric. When his chest expands and he shifts his stance, the static droning in his ears and bolting through his gut. If he cocks his hips, bends a little, chases the ghost of something solid and hard behind him…

“Fine.” He bites out, swallowing back a thousand contradictions as he reaches for the knife. “Just… saw something.” 

The weight of it in his hand does not center him. The grip on his shoulder leaves him shakier than it found him. 

“Mm,” The weight of Viktor's hand intensifies as he peers over Jayce's head, all but curled over him to look into the sink. "What did you see?" 

“It's nothing.” He exclaims in a burst of air, his breathing is unbearable in his own ears. Five miles ran standing still. “Can you grab some wood from outside? For the stove?” 

The weight leaves. The hand slides off. There’s a dull thunk, Viktor lightly smacking his own forehead. 

“Ah, I knew I forgot something.” Jayce doesn't look to follow the steady, yet expedient footsteps of Viktor's exit. "One moment." 

In the quiet that descends on the kitchen, it’s still there; the afterburn of warm metal on his neck. Every blink and the room is colder, emptier, larger, semi-circle of tables flitted between the wooden counters and the empty overlit humming space before the anomaly. Jayce’s fingers curl around the edge of the sink, willing himself to breath. 

He could still be there behind him. In front of him. Holding him, hoisting him, moving him to do as he wants, no effort needed. Not to turn him, move him, but to pin him to the counter, Jayce’s struggle nothing but an irritation as that crowned head tilts and the claw whirs, heating up and Viktor steps between scrambling legs, unaffected by broken nails scratching at an impenetrable carapace-

A crack. A thud. The grumbling of man who’s dropped whatever he was carrying and Jayce finds his knuckles white from where they grip the sink. His lungs panicked. His head dizzy as he glances around the kitchen. 

His body is hot, trousers tight and he ignores that in favor of splashing water on his face and getting back to his chopping. If the onion is chunkier, uneven, in the finished meal, Viktor either does not notice or chooses not to comment. 

Viktor didn’t know he was awake. The last he saw of Jayce was asleep on that mattress before he crept out of the cottage as well as his weight and the creaking floorboards would allow. Unaware of Jayce struggling to his feet, limping after him as he heard the front door close. 

Grass, long in the early summer and dark in the night, painted his legs as he stepped outside, quiet and following the gangly figure lumbering just yards away. Birds scatter at his approach to the treeline, their pecking in the dirt left for lonelier minutes as the hexclaw is open and vigilant. 

Jayce has heard him leave before. Almost every night, but the exhaustion of the day and the need to rest overrode the want to see what Viktor was doing. Not tonight as Jayce waits, observes Viktor cast silver in the moonlight as he stills, as his head twitches as if he's searching, calculating, before-

The rabbit has but a moment to scream, a short burst of ear splitting noise, back feet kicking once, twice, claws grating on the metal of the hand that snatched it as Viktor straightens. A simple flick of a wrist accompanied by a crack and the stilling form of the rodent. Nothing left to it and it is limp in Viktor’s grasp save for the few last kicks of muscles spasming before they know they’re dead. 

It’s brought to his face, mandibles ripping into the fur and the skin, rending it from the body before partaking in the bloodied flesh. Stripping it from bone with teeth and thin fingers alike, an animalism unbecoming of the deity he tried to become. Blood running rivulets down purple grey metal, his hands, his wrists, coating gold accents in desecration as it does the same down his neck. 

How quick the carcass is consumed, the pieces, ribs, spines, fur matted dark with blood, left clutched tight in his palms as Viktor’s head raises, rolling back in silent enjoyment as the parts his mouth shift, tongue glowing blue and curling out of its hidden compartment to lap what remains on the mask. Red splattered near the eyes closed in satisfaction at a great shuddering breath that leaves him.

Jayce is quiet going back inside when Viktor begins to move, more purposeful in his march to the treeline. Obscuring his actions as Jayce obscures himself behind the door. 

His breath is labored. Heart pounding with the same force as a hammer on an anvil, shaping his ribs to something else, the bones molten from an unbearable heat that’s bloomed worse than all the times before. That’s burning from his thighs to his groin up through his chest and into his neck and his tongue. 

Swollen in so many places. Hands balled into fists at his sides, nails biting into the flesh of his palm to touch nothing. Shaped and molded by the clanging of his heart and the throbbing of his blood to the memory of cold limbs around him. Of pulling him down. Taking his hammer from him. 

Hoisting him into the air. Stripping him. Ignoring his attempts to fight. Taking. Taking. 

The sloshing of water in the bucket outside the door is hard to miss with the open windows, even from the bedroom. Jayce curls more onto his side at the front door being shut softly, eyes closed at the creak of floorboards, shirt damp with his spend on it ball in a corner of the room under various articles of clothing he will clean later. The short hair at his nape stand on end at the pause of a figure at the threshold of the bedroom. 

“Jayce?” Viktor calls, quiet, ethereal, no doubt waiting for a response. 

When he receives none, there’s creaking, one step, two, the distance crossed easily for the length of his legs. A small whoosh of air from him as he squats down. The kiss of warm fingers against the juncture of Jayce’s jaw, just the barest of touches to the hairs of his beard and the skin of his neck eliciting a sweet hum from Viktor. 

He’s so careful as he folds himself to the mattress behind him, laying down as soft as his form can allow to not disturb the partner not sleeping already on it. On his side no doubt, facing Jayce as there's a tap of a touch to his side, digits hesitant, moving in a question more for Viktor than himself. They slide forward, a willowy arm nestling itself over Jayce and the form behind him relaxes. 

Viktor is so careful with him. Touches gentle, treatment fragile. Jayce needs that, needs that it soothes him. 

And he hates that he dreams of something else.

Observing the changes in Viktor, watching him become renewed as he is pained and short-tempered and stiff, should exacerbate the dread that underlays their interactions. He’s eating, hunting, becoming something neither of them could have predicted. A side effect of the arcane neither could foretell or hypothesize that Viktor swears, and Jayce has come to believe, he did not wish for. 

It should exacerbate it when Jayce awakens to Viktor all but leaping from bed, taking unsteady steps outside in the warm moonlight. Disgust him as he sees pieces of the being Viktor has become sloughing off from hurried desperate motions of his clawed hands. Horrify him at the pale white carapace beneath the metal, at the way Viktor pleads with him when he notices Jayce standing there, mouth agape and frozen in the doorway.

Jayce tries to understand the ease, the calm he felt as they peeled the last of Viktor’s old skin from him and he noted the way Viktor all but purred, breathing easier as he was free from it. How he flinched at each step in his new coating when they went back inside to the kitchen. How his motions fluid, corporeal, alive elicited something so visceral in Jayce while they observed and cataloged the remnants of what they just tore from Viktor in their kitchen.

There isn't dread. There is no horror. Nothing close to what has been coloring every moment between waking up here and now.

He wants to shout. To leap. To pull Viktor in as he is now like he had countless times in their lab. Feel him warm, breathing, his heart beating, his body living again.

Viktor tells him he is feeling good and every ounce of Jayce echoes that sentiment. 

Sometimes it the ravine in his dreams. Sometimes it's Mel or the other Viktor in his white robe or pinnacle of the cosmos inside the hexcore and all the people's Viktor has taken into himself. Sometimes its his mom. Sometimes its sweet nothing, incidental motions and images and sounds that slip away come the morning light as his eyes slide open and there is a pleasant, necessary weight from Viktor's arm over his chest. 

Other times...

It's the councilor room. The tables, the chairs, the dark floor, all the same since its reconstruction. But it's not the puppet that stands across from him, golden eyes gleaming and form towering. 

Jayce doesn't have time to run, doesn't have the capacity any more even as he tries. The distance between is crossed before he can take two steps, grip on his arm iron. He can struggle, he can slip it for a moment. Two, boots sliding on polished stone

Viktor doesn't have to wrap his legs around him like he did before. He's so much larger now and it is so much easier to lift Jayce's face, make him look into the mask as he is observed like an ant. 

He can fight. An elbow, throwing his weight back enough to shock Viktor frees him and its one step. Two. Three, each foot in front of the other on shaking legs before that force is back on him. 

Before his back hits the smooth surface of the table, clawed hand around his throat. It's warmer than he remember, burning with a heat all its own and softer than the metal of before, yet no less impenetrable. Jayce tries to swing a hand, finds both pinned above his head as if it were child's play. 

Its so easy how a claw tears through his shirts. How his choked demands to get off him are met with a tongue to his skin. With his pants being pulled off, leaving him bare. With that free hand on his cock, on his bare thigh, pushing it up, spreading him.  

Its so easy how his legs wrap around those hips, how his back bows for contact, how his mouth open to moan but there's no air to allow to come to fruition-

The sun has only begun to peak over the horizon, orange and blue infiltrating the blanket of a dark night waning outside the window when Jayce opens his eyes. He takes a breathe deep through his nose, the dark grey arm weighing his chest down, hindering it somewhat. There's a face pressed partially to his own, the smooth glossy chitin of the mark sending pleasant sparks through him if he lets his head turn just so, lets the bristle of his beard catch along the grooves of it.

Sparks that only aid the ache between his legs, cock stiff, wetting the front of his underwear. Jayce closes his eyes. Thinks of nothing as the idea of turning his face, pressing his lips to that mask as he pushes Viktor's arm down, down is less of a conscious thought and more of a sweet serenade within him to do so.

Kissing Viktor was a sensation he thought about often, perhaps too much given the pages he’d written about it.

They didn't have much time for romance. Enough time to think about it and not much to do about it. Wish all Jayce wanted, but his focus was elsewhere when they were together, dreaming of intimacy left to his empty bed and quiet moments that shocked Jayce how fast they would come and go.

Viktor always wanted to work. Jayce always wanted to work. There wasn't time to address much else even if he thought about it. 

They both thought about it, as Jayce found despite being certain of the contrary. Despite assuming he’d missed his chance, time having run out given death, rebirth, ascension, everything. 

There's a lot of time now, however. And there’s a lot of catching Viktor looking at Jayce. A familiar find, a thousand different instances that led to conversations and questions and inquiries that never matched the particular gleam to Viktor’s eye in the lab when Jayce asked him about. He always wrote it off as wishful thinking, an active imagination and years of nursing a need for an appreciative gaze from someone specific and elegantly long fingers holding him conveying something akin to the hallucinations that plague Jayce now. 

“You’re drooling a bit there.” 

There’s not a lot to hide the truth of the matter now. 

Viktor, in all his new strange twitchy glory, straightens, mouth closing at Jayce’s words. Eyes darting away from Jayce's bare chest and how he shifts the wood ax in his hands. He hurriedly wipes the wet line running down his jaw into the rivulets of his neck with a grumble about the alien nature of his mandibles, that they have a mind of their own at times.

“I have been given too many appendages. I cannot be eh... responsible for them at all times.” 

The little pinpricks over his chest and his abdomen glow a soft blue in the sunset, trailing down, down to the exaggerated V of his hips. Dragging Jayce’s gaze past to the unassuming slit that’s appeared between his legs. Barely perceptible save for times like these as it is lit in its own faint light. 

Jayce turns. Grabs a log and lines it up on the stump as he hand the rest. The crack of the ax splitting the log thunders through the quiet midday and Jayce doesn't have to turn to know he is being observed once more. 

Kissing Viktor has always been a thought, a want that ran a perpetual course through Jayce’s mind. He wonders if Viktor still shares it. 

Jayce expected reciprocity when he finally did it, when he kissed Viktor. There was no surprise in his initial hesitations or how slowly he seemed to open to Jayce's advances. How his hands took so achingly long to touch him, how he seemed to thaw only when Jayce lapped at the remnants of wine on the hidden seam of his smooth mouth. 

He should have expected the ferocity that followed. A brilliant moment of broken restraint, an animal Viktor evolved into partaking of instincts neither of them understand. Viktor had him on his back, wrist pinned over his head, choking on that tongue that has occupied so much of his waking thoughts

Jayce became frozen for that startling precious few seconds. Lungs constricted. The need to kick, to fight, to escape there at the forefront as Viktor bore down upon him with his hands and his mouth even. 

The pain in his leg shot through the miasma his was sinking into, hard pointed knee digging directly into the knot of badly healed scar tissue and he was slapping at Viktor's side. When he moved off, Jayce mourned it, flush and alive from it and he followed Viktor. The comparatively slower pace that followed, the control Viktor exhibited in his excitement, his hunger...

Maybe it was for the best. Maybe its everything Jayce has wanted. 

He's still overcome. Still helpless. Viktor in him in ways he’d only dreamed about as a tongue laps at Jayce’s sweat and a clawed, hard hand holds his neck. 

Jayce can still breath. Those claws do not sink into his skin save for a kiss as Viktor’s thrusts turn erratic and Jayce’s mouth has reached an incomprehensible litany of please. He's dreamt of this, years and years and years of being molded to Viktor's pleasure, succumbing to his needs and his hands and his cock in ways so very like this.

But he doesn’t want to breathe. He doesn’t want a way out, to be able to do more than squirm and fight uselessly as those claws and those hips tear into him. He wants more than the bite that sends him over the edge, choked out on his own orgasm as he tries to curl out of Viktor’s grasp and into himself. 

Wants more than-

Viktor lays them out in the afterglow. Pets his face, his arms, his chest. There’s a purr to him thats answered by a resounding satisfaction. Completeness. Something missing found, a distance crossed, destination reached. 

It’s everything he’s wanted. 

Isn’t it?

The introduction of a new component does not necessitate change of the dynamic, Jayce finds. Or, at least, it doesn't when that component was already a part the dynamic had intended. When both parties have built that machine of themselves together, when both intend for a part to always be introduced, it can't meaningfully change how the machine works since it was always supposed to run with or without it. 

Intimacy. Physicality. It's always been, always been intended, and an increase in the scope of that is just the next logical step. 

Sex doesn't change them. Being able to hold him, kiss him whenever he feels does not mark anything more notable that the inclusion of the activities. Walking up to Viktor, taking his hand, pressing his lips to his shoulder, having the hexclaw scratch at his scalp as he rests on Viktor's side in the evening as the sun sets and the cicadas take their final bow for the crickets that follow their act...

It's natural. Like sitting in the kitchen, arguing over something inane. Like building the couch or the mattress frame together quietly, peacefully. Like plotting out the exact dimensions and placement of a future garden, passing the pencil back and forth to make annotations on the page in Jayce's notebook. 

This is them. It's always been them. And it feels right, it feels normal, Jayce is happy, happier than he can describe himself for years and yet-

Viktor is careful with him, aware of the size and the shape of himself. He tsks at the marks he leaves unintentionally with his claws and his mouth, worries over bruises blooming from his momentary lapses in restraint. Let’s Jayce initiate contact, intimacy, unfolding and partaking only when it is clear he has been granted permission to do so.

The hesitation ringing clear whenever he touches Jayce back. Or when Jayce catches him staring, glaring with his mandibles shifting, fingers curling as though he means to cross the space between them. Approach and treat Jayce like that rabbit he beheld Viktor tearing apart with all the gluttony and need he can posses. 

But it's always replaced in that moment of recognition. The burning of his gaze blowing out to a softer guilt as Viktor looks away and Jayce, ever the inventor, the researcher, wants to test exactly how he can bring it back.

Gentle is good. Careful is good. Viktor has the capacity to hurt, has hurt, and this is still new, he is still new and yet-

“I would hate to do something you did not want, Jayce.” Viktor says when questioned, when pressed a few weeks of this addendum to their dynamic. "Or worse."

Jayce huffs, a little laugh and drops head as he shakes it. Leans more on his forearm where it is resting on the kitchen table as he looks back at Viktor leaning against the wall. Offers a genuine smile at his care and consideration.

“Well, you could try and I’ll let you know.” He offers with a shrug, hopeful whatever senses Viktor has returned to him can't hear the thunder in his veins. 

A thunder that only grows more cacophonous as silence pervades the kitchen and Viktor stares and stares and stares. There's a trill that comes from him, bright and alien in how it ripples through Jayce, makes the flesh of his arm pimple and the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. The hexclaw raises, perks up, its fingers open and JAyce can almost smell the acrid burning of oxygen as if it were starting up.

“Would you?” Viktor asks, words hanging heavy in the air and Jayce has to swallow at the weight of them.

“Yes.” Is his answer, one he knows he doesn't believe himself.

Jayce has learned the odds and ends of his leg; what pains it, makes it worse for the evening, what's best for it throughout the day. He's gotten better at ignoring the hallucinations, barely blinking at the shapes and figures that visit him and taunt him from universes his mind still seems partially stuck in. He's made peace with Viktor's shape, the face of him made wholly different yet the heart of him still the same. 

But he can't get over this.

Viktor stares at him, through him, into him and like clockwork, Jayce's chest begins to hurt from how hard he is trying to keep his breathing under control. Jayce wants to laugh, play it off but he freezes, straightens as Viktor pushes off the wall. Approaches him cautiously like he’s a wounded animal and he both needs and doesn't want it.

The brush of his knuckles, long, hard and yet inviting, against Jayce’s beard having him falling into grace of a touch, palm opened to catch his face as Viktor leans down to chase him, to press his mask to Jayce’s cheek. Simple yet effective, the breath Jayce releases at the drag of Viktor’s face down his own to his neck one of marked, shuddering relief. He can close his eyes. Lose himself to it at the whisper of a tongue on his skin. 

Viktor is gentle with him as every action is proceeded with a pause for protest, though none are forthcoming. Not when he unbuttons Jayce’s shirt, warm clawed fingers ghosting down bare skin to make him gasp. Not when that tongue finds his chest as that hand find his pants. Not when a palm is grinding down onto his cock, slow steady march that when combine with mandibles pinching a nipple has Jayce shivering, grasping with his own hand at the crown of Viktor’s head to keep him there.

He both loves and hates it. Jayce thinks of that first night, of more than that as he is so thankful and beside himself with the slow ride. He dreads every moment Viktor could grab him, pull him, push him down, hold him there despite his protests or any meaningless fight he put up, and mourns them when he doesn’t as his mouth nibbles at Jayce’s throat and the hand and claw not around his cock take their fill of his chest and his thigh as Jayce pants and whispers his name.

There is home in Viktor’s hands and he misses a room of it he knew so very briefly.

It's hard not to ignore the way Viktor keeps himself during sex or any intimacy for that matter. He's aware of the size of himself and the strength but something else is keeping him oh so careful around Jayce. He shies from certain touches, certain behaviors, even once leaving the cottage for almost an hour when he found Jayce nude on their bed in the summer heat, not coming inside until Jayce dressed and went and found him pondering the start of their garden. 

There had been that glare to him, just for a moment. If Jayce hadn't been present for their first night together where Viktor barely seemed to maintain a kind of control, he would have believed the excuse of forgetting to rinse off Viktor provided. When added to the other factors, the other incidents, the other ways lets himself slip, it begins to paint a hypothesis in Jayce's mind.

Maybe he tries to bait it. Observations and evidence mount that Viktor is holding back so what would it take to make him not? Maybe it’s not exactly right, maybe they should talk about it, maybe maybe maybe-

There’s sensitive parts to Viktor now. Actions he responds to differently than others. Visuals Jayce has noted for how he stiffens and his chest starts that thumping noise and he has to turn away. Whatever magic changed him brought about an animal to him that he still has yet to let go of the leash to when pushed. 

The evening is young, dinner cooking in the oven thanks to Viktor’s continued practice to remember how to do such a thing. It’s rare to find him still and at rest outside of sleeping or when Jayce pulls him to their couch, but there Viktor is, seated upon the cushions with a book Jayce brought home.

Jayce sits beside him, that itching in his core leading him to grunt at Viktor’s distracted greeting. Fingers slide into the divots of his exaggerated hips, the carapace oddly softer there, addicting to touch for how he can feel blood moving and nerves twitching under it. His mouth finds itself on Viktor’s shoulder and he tastes the nascent magic bursting on his tongue, knowing a drag of his teeth on the hard, yet lively surface will bring an attentive trill from Viktor’s chest. 

“Jayce…” Viktor drones, a warning to his tone as the claw between his back and Jayce’s chest touches his shoulder. 

It doesn’t push him away and the snap of the book closing, the straightening of a spine has Jayce scooting closer. Pressing him to Viktor's side as his fingers follow the path down his hips between his legs. There isn't salt on his neck when his tongue finds it, but the carapace is still pleasant under his mouth, a muskier taste present as the tips of his fingers tease the tip of Viktor's slit.

He knows he likes the scratch of his beard, the grind of two fingers on either side of the swelling part between his legs, the quiet plea of how much Jayce wants him whispered against his chitin. Viktor's chest has already begun that thumping. If Jayce looks down, his abdomen is cerulean glow, slit beginning to part, the click of mandibles parting as Viktor hisses and a willowy hand grabs Jayce's thigh in a grip that will bruise come morning.

Jayce's breath escapes him as his back hits the cushions. Wrists above his head before he can blink, that mouth open just so as Viktor bares down on him. Insinuating between Jayce’s legs, pushing one away from the other to make room.  

The kiss of the claw on his throat drags a wet gasp from Jayce, pressure cutting it off. Viktor’s mouth opens, body bending over, moving in, hold on his neck tightening and Jayce’s leg kicks-

Jayce coughs for how fast he sucks in air when the pressure recedes, Viktor pulling back as quick as he had been upon him. His mandibles are parted, mouth and tongue aglow, but for a moment before he closes them as well. Regains a semblance of self Jayce isn’t looking for right now as the expressionless face reads guilty. 

“Jayce, I’m- I didn’t mean-” Jayce grabs a retreating arm, flinching as his leg hits the floor with how fast he sits up. 

“I wanted you to.” 

Can Viktor hear his heart as his attempts to pull away cease? Jayce can't hear anything over it in his ears and his throat and his chest, the coiling heat of just a few moments before cooled at the exposure of thoughts he never wanted let out.

“What?” Viktor asks, the word coming out more of a quiet hiss. 

“I want you to hurt me.” It comes out in a rasp, Jayce holding Viktor’s gaze as he says it, the corners of his eyes hot as he forces himself to stare at his partner. “Like before we came here.”

Viktor’s gaze is unwavering, the apathy of his mask a boon if it weren’t for how his mandibles clicked in worry as Jayce’s own mouth quivers in his own confession. The tug of his arm lessens. The posture of his body weakens.

“Jayce…” He says, pulling Jayce to him as that simple word breaks whatever dam kept a flood of unexamined and wholly condemning emotions from spilling out of Jayce’s eyes. Viktor folds him to his chest, rests a chin atop his head, breathes him in as Jayce a shuddering breath of his own. “Oh, Jayce.”

It takes a few weeks. Several conversations. Viktor having to think it over, pick Jayce’s brain for his thoughts, feelings, boundaries, though the dialogue comes about without warning, randomly, long stretches of silence on the topic before Viktor has a question. 

“But for what reason?” He asks, apropos of nothing as he often would. 

Jayce looks up from his belt, the notch he’s using less worn than the previous. Viktor is in the doorway, watching quietly, all long lines and strange rivulets in his hunched stance, shining in the morning sun. Beauty can be subjective, personal, and Jayce smiles as he finds him such. 

“I... don’t know.” Jayce says with a small laugh, adjusting his trousers and the tuck of his shirt. “I just know that I’m interested in it.” 

Viktor hums, takes that. Stops Jayce for a kiss on his way out. Is silent on the subject until-

“How exactly much... hurt are you wanting out of me?” 

His words are punctuated by the mandibles tearing into the crusty bread brought back from the baker’s for part of their dinner. Jayce blink at him from across the table. Lets his spoon hit the plate a few times before he touches his forehead to pinch at his brow.

“Not… it’s a game. Roleplay, Viktor. You chase me down. We fight. I struggle. When you overtake me, you do what you want.” Jayce swallows back the saliva building in his mouth, knowing it has nothing to do with the food and everything with the heat filling his cheeks and the idea branding itself into his imagination. “If I get hurt in the process, then that’s part of it.”

It's enough for him that night, the conversation dropping for another day in favor of eating. In favor of Viktor helping clean up. In favor of long arms wrapping around him and a body, warm, inviting, against him, curling over him as the evening passes between conversations of possibilities and long stretches of nothing.

“What if it becomes too much. Am I to stop when you say?” Viktor inquires, conversational as he is kneeling besides Jayce's legs.

His hand around Jayce's ankle is light, soothing as Viktor guides Jayce's leg through an evening stretching routine they've established. Flat on his back on the living room floor, knee brought up to his chest, and Jayce lets out a breath.  He stares the wooden ceiling, nostril twitching as the burn in the muscles hits the limit of what he can take, leg beginning to quake in Viktor's grasp as it is brought back down again.

“We’ll come up with a signal.” He says when he can, gritting his teeth as another repetition starts.

“What if it is too much for me?” 

“Signal for you too.” Jayce's answer is clipped, teeth gritting it burns more than the last time and Viktor grows quiet on the subject once again.

Anyone else, Jayce would be irritated, annoyed to the point of pushing the subject but this is a song and dance he’s tread before. Presenting Viktor with an idea of probable absurdity and Viktor never one to shoot it down without proper consideration. Sometimes in arguments that raged for days, or sometimes in this thoughtful contemplation.

Jayce can find peace in the stretches of silence on the topic. There’s always hope in them. If Viktor doesn’t shoot it down in it infancy, lets it grow in his mind, then perhaps…

“I am struggling with my capacity to be able to… not harm you, Jayce.” Viktor announces amidst a peaceful afternoon in the kitchen. “More than you seem to want. If we do this, I don’t know if I can keep myself from, eh, taking things too far.”

The knife in Jayces hand pauses, the long brown peel of the potato in the other droops toward the floor in his inaction. The scent of dirt, of the vegetables, is thick in the muggy air, in his mouth as Jayce takes in Viktor hunched in the chair opposite him. His own work is shoddy, potatoes less peeled and more hacked apart, born from a long unused skill set in a new body needing to re-teach muscles and unbefitting the regal grace of the rest of him

“I have faith in you.” Jayce tells him after a stretch, resuming his spiraling work to revealed the pale flesh.

“It is very misplaced faith.” 

A joke but, even now, Jayce knows when a joke from Viktor is belaying something else. He glances up again, eyes roving over the twitching mouth and the hexclaw scratching at the base of Viktor’s hairline.

“Do you want to harm me?” Jayce asks, jumping at the thud of a potato hitting the floor. 

Viktor curses, hissing as he bends over to grab the vegetable from where it rocks on an uneven, half peeled surface along the wooden floor. When he sits up, he sets it on the table. Closes his eyes as the claw of his index finger taps a measured pattern and he breathes in deep enough for Jayce to hear.

“I do not.” He admits finally, shoulders falling and his eyelids sliding open once more. He doesn’t look at Jayce though, preferring the ground as he waves a hand over himself. “This form, the way it makes me move, feel… I am not sure.”

The knife thunks on the table as Jayce stands. He crosses the space in three small limping, creaking steps that have Viktor tensing, turning his head to peer up at him. Jayce slides his hands up Viktor’s sharp, alien cheeks, keeps him there as he understands the lines of his new face. 

“But you don’t?”

Viktor blinks at him, hexclaw twisting and turning as his mandibles twitch. Jayce’s thumbs smooth over the space under his yellow eyes and Viktor leans into that. Rolls his head into Jayce’s palms yet never glancing away. 

“No.” He breathes like he’d been lost and only just found a way back, and Jayce nods, leaning in. 

“Then I trust you.” He says to the smooth chitin of his forehead, the smooth material warms under his lips as he lingers there and willowy hands encircle his waist. 

They encase him. Hold him. And he can feel safe in that.

The forest behind the old farmhouse is a beautiful place in the daylight. Old growth trees reaching forever into the blue sky as if they too dream of reaching the sun. A quality Jayce can understand, finding solace in the nature he had long since not found himself in during his life in the city.

Perhaps not at night though. Maybe not when the sky is dark save for the smattering of stars that seems impossible around the moon in comparison to the sky he’s used to. Maybe not with the canopies of those monoliths that usually shade him from the harshness of the sun yet tonight keep the light of anything from reaching him save for the smallest of beams that led him out here as he followed something he was sure to be a person that disappeared when he caught it.

Jayce casts about for anything familiar in the dark, but finds nothing now that whatever figure he was following is gone. He is well and truly alone, even the crickets and the frogs hushing to silence the longer he stands there, lost. Several minutes deep into the trees with just the scant moon to guide him home, Jayce attempts to orient himself, searching for anything to give a direction, a possibility for a way home.

It’s the thumping that catches his attention; a low rhythmic yet excited pounding like knuckles muffled on an old door. It fades, taking with it the only sound in the dark of the woods. There’s a cold in Jaye’s spine creeping up and up into his neck as he casts around, look for anything in the absence of crickets and frogs that were singing but moments before and only finding the shadows between the trees, branches still yet reaching out, eager-

A touch to his back. Prodding. Mocking. Jayce jolts, turning to find relief in a twig poking out from a newer bush. He breathes, shoulders dropping as his heart pounds under his hand from where he touches his chest.

His hand drops, taking a step back. Reorients himself to the direction he assumes he needs for home. For safety, swiveling on his heel and knowing that is but a ten minute walk away. 

One step. Two. Three, his leg already sore and complaining but he can make it and Jayce raises his head from watching the uneven, old rooted ground. 

A fourth is halted, glints of gold shining in the small dots of pale moonlight between the still canopy. A fifth is behind him, breath catching in his chest at the soft glow of yellow observing him. A sixth, a seventh, back, back at the low hiss of something human in shape and unknowable in its entirety tilts his head, expressionless visage so filled with glee as Jayce stumbles on his eighth and most hurried step. 

“There you are, Jayce.”

The peek of vibrant blue tongue from between the split of his mouth has Jayce moving. Turning on his heel. Just out of reach to feel the scrape of deceptively strong willowy fingers at the back of his shirt, that light ephemeral tug betraying the true intentions of the hand that attempted it. 

His movement is sluggish, limping, even the adrenaline of his heart pumping and lungs burning cannot override the weakness in his leg at every hurried step. What's worse is the trees, their branches, the bushes covering their roots, slapping at him. Grabbing at him so each pull on his clothes heightening the rushing in his ears and the heat blooming down into his core that he may be caught.

Jayce doesn't slow. Doesn't care for direction. Doesn’t dare look behind him to see his pursuer as each hammering beat of his heart could be footsteps coming towards him as he crashes through limb and twig that tear into any bare skin they may catch themselves on.

It can't be far now. Can't have gone that far out of his way that safety isn't just another few treelines away-

A grip to his shoulder, crushingly sure, precludes an arm strapped across his chest from behind, pulling him to a sturdy, immaleable form. Jayce shifts his feet on instinct, slamming his weight back to throw off his pursuer into the thick trunk of the tree behind them. The shock of the quick motion, the crunch of chitin and claw into bark pulling a chittering hiss has him free, Jayce stumbling from the hold. 

One step, Two. Thr-

Uneven ground meets weak leg as his foot lands awkwardly on the side of a root, fire shooting up his calf and all the way into his gut. Unable to catch his foot, world turning sideways and Jayce careens with a heavy thump onto his side into the cool dirt of the forest floor. His ears ring, muffling yet not hiding the sound of heavy, uneven footsteps behind him and Jayce coughs, gets his elbows underneath him, his knees…

A twig snapping under the weight of his chest rings out as it is slammed into the earth. Pinned by a clawed foot on his spine that only presses harder when Jayce tries to buck it off. 

“Unfortunate.” Viktor drones, a chirp of interest rising from within him. “I would have expected more from you, Jayce.”

His leg twinges as he kicks it out. Breathes heavy yet short from the pressure keeping lungs from expanding. He feels hot, hotter than he should; not from the summer evening or the exertion but from a consuming, raging heat from deep, deep in him thats found a call to answer. 

Jayce wants to run. Wants to be free. Wants that friction to his cock already stirring heavy with every failed, aborted bump of his hips to the grass and the dirt as he tries to swat at the leg holding him down. 

“Get off, Viktor.” He grunts out, teeth gritted, the taste of dirt in his mouth as the foot on his back presses harder. 

As he crouches over Jayce, one hand in the leaves and detritus over his head, the other grabbing Jayce’s own, taking it to the earth as well. As fingers insinuate themselves between his, taking the squeeze they are offered. As Viktor leans down, mouth opening, tongue aglow in a soft blue and lapping hungrily at the sweat trickling behind Jayce’s ear.

It's a soft sound that leaves him, Jayce unable to stop it at the familiar touch. Nor can he keep himself from grinding his hips down into the hard dirt as Viktor's hand leaves his and he remembers himself. Snarls as he gets an elbow and a knee under himself to try and push Viktor off again.

He doesn’t see the claw, only feels its cruel grasp in his hair, Jayce yelping as its roots are pulled until his head is lifted with it. 

“As you wish.” 

The pressure is off his back but for a moment before the collar of his shirt is grasped. Body thrown, shoulder hitting the base of a tree a few feet away as if he were nothing more than crumpled paper. For a moment, he lays there, breath coming out harsh and cacophonous in the relative quiet around them.

Jayce struggles to get an arm under him, sputtering as the world spins and his pulse races in his throat and between his legs. The act of sitting up momentous between the measured thumps of Viktor’s lackadaisical loping over to him, that head titled again. Willowy fingers reach out, grasp Jacce’s hair once more and with a painful tug, he is rigthed, back against the tree. 

“You are enjoying this a little too much, I would think.” Viktor purrs, making a panting Jayce look up at those gleaming eyes as places a leg between Jayce’s own spread thighs. Presses his foot to Jayce’s clothed cock.

Its the pressure that pulls the whine from his throat, bubbling even as he holds it back. Damning when it whimpers from him at the release of his hair and the fingers gently gliding through it. The bark of the trunk behind him is rough when his head lolls back, desperate to follow a glimpse of kindness. 

“Is it not easier to give in, Jayce?”

The foot begins to move away, halted only by a shaking hand wrapping around Viktor’s ankle to keep it there. He is obliged, Viktor leaning over him with an arm on the bark and his hand cupping the back of Jayce's head. 

"Show me how good you can be." Viktor all but purrs, moonlight glinting off the gold of his crown and that hand at the back of his skull tightening in his hair once more. 

The palm at the back of his head pulls it forward, a little trill ringing out into the air as Jayce's mouth touches his slit. It's instinct to open his mouth, the heady mix of Viktor's musk and the arcane on his tongue encouraging his participation. Rewarding him as he laps at it, closes his eyes and loses himself in the familiar motions of exciting the thing over grinding his hips into Jayce's eager mouth. 

When the foot wedges itself under his groin, presses that ankle to his cock and he whines from the friction, the hold in his hair only grows tighter. More demanding as Viktor all but presses his back harder into the tree to get more from him, the lips of his slit swelling, slick beginning to wet Jayce's beard. It's only natural then, when the tip of his cock begins to grow, to peek out into the open, for Jayce to latch onto it, suckle on it, eyes opening to that glowing gold watching him with a snarling open mouth.

His head is pulled back just as the lips part, Viktor's cock filling out rapidly, dripping a clear fluid. Jayce wants to push forward, know that taste, that weight of it on his tongue. Viktor's grip keeps his head still, just the barest wet brush against his lips granted and it twitches against them.

"There you are." Viktor says, rocking his ankle forward again in a way that has Jayce's lips falling open. "Do you not want to be good for me?"

His hand slides up Viktor's leg, damp from the slick dribbling down it. Pressing into the divot of his hip.

It's cruel how his thumb digs in, the screech his assailant bellows ear piercing. 

Jayce throws himself out of the cage Viktor has made around him. Kicks out his leg into Viktor's, unbalancing him, toppling him into the tree and Jayce scrambles to his feet. Stands on shaking legs, throbbing both in the brace and higher, the night's breeze cooling the damp in his trousers. 

One step. Two. Three. Fo-

A grab to his shoulder again. A mistake to turn into it, to bat it away, buy him some time. A hand finds his throat. 

It's an odd sensation, being lifted off the ground this way, Jayce's hands coming around a wrist to tug uselessly at an iron grip. Viktor holds him aloft, stares at him, face lit by the silver moonlight streaming between the trees and body a glow from the azure constellations in his carapace. Mouth open and the hissing panting from his vents all the noise he makes when Jayce's boots kick fruitlessly into his chest.

Jayce splutters for air, nail scrambling at unyielding chitin as he is pulled in closer. As long elegant fingers find his belt.

“I had forgotten how fetching you look like this.” He never takes his eyes from Jayce's face, the grip on Jayce's neck loosening only enough to allow some air into his starving lungs as his belt is pulled open. “All mine do with as I wish.”

“Not…yours-” Jayce gasps, even as his cock throbs at the thought, every brush of Viktor's sharp knuckles against it as his pants are opened more damning than the last.

“Ah, why do we not test that hypothesis?” He asks, the calm, if not mild tone juxtaposing the way his mandibles quiver and how his hand tugs Jayce's clothes from his legs. 

The chill of the evening hitting bare skin is not but a footnote in his mind as he is moved, back hitting the uneven dirt and Viktor places himself between spread, tired legs. The claw still has his throat, not tight enough to keep him from breathing, but enough of a warning that he doesn't heed as he tries to slam one of his fists into the crook of Viktor's elbow. Viktor tuts, trilling from deep in his chest against and he plucks Jayce's wrist like flowers from a bush, pressing them together to the earth over Jayce's head while he lefts Jayce's hips, spreading him, opening him for that twitching cerulean cock.

There's no slow first breach, no gentle entrance, Viktor inside him in a smooth, thoughtless thrust that has a moan clawing is way through gritted teeth as Jayce fights the hold on his wrists. The glide of his slick cock, every odd little bump dragging too quickly to be enough as the pace Viktor sets is too fast, too hungry, and Jayce's legs shake from wanting to wrap around that thin waist. He thinks there's words leaving his throat, choked out from the claw around it and the way Viktor's chest thumps send an extra ripple down into his cock, demanding Viktor get off, get out of him despite how he tries his best to meet each of Viktor's thrusts. 

"Quiet now, Jayce." Viktor hisses, claw leaving his throat to clench his jaw as he leans down to lap at Jayce's lips and teeth until a hard thrust has his mouth opening in a gasp to it. 

It's thick as it fills him, tastes him, and Jayce can't stop himself from sucking on it, treating it as if it were the same as the cock filling. He gets lost in it, barely recognizing one of his wrists has been let go until he feels the warm, humming chitin of Viktor's chest under his pal and fingers insinuating themselves between his above his head once more. He squeezes them back, refuses to let them, whining before he can stop himself when that tongue leaves his mouth empty, finds Viktor searching his face.

"Is that all y-you got?" Jayce manages, legs moving on their own to wrap around Viktor's waist as must as they can, his palm finding Viktor's side to pull him even closer, deeper on the next thrust into him that has his bottom lip caught between his teeth. 

The snarl is expected. The way Jayce is folded, all but in half as his shirt falls and bares his stomach, is planned. The way the thumping in Viktor's chest all but vibrates the total of him with each deep, resounding punch of sound from the hand clutching Jayce's, to the claws digging into his side, to the cock stretching him to the brink, is not. 

Nor is the way Viktor lunges, the bite to Jayce's shoulder strikes through every avenue of him, first sharp in the fire that lights up his core as Viktor uses him in a careless abandon. Jayce can't move, can't breath as that panicked pleasure mounts, built up and up with every drag of that relentless cock in him. He lifts his head, mouth open, wanting to grind back into it, escape it, Viktor's hold on his palm, on his side, on his shoulder never ceases, and Jayce's legs shake from it as desperate little sounds are fucked from him. 

His mouth is moving, begging, shaking legs tightening around Viktor for him to be deeper, harder, more please please please-

It crests, Jayce folding in on himself as best he can as his orgasm rips through him, made all the more punctuated by Viktor's own relentless, desperate fucking. And it lasts, and it lasts, his toes curling against Viktor's back and free hand trembling, scrabbling to grab his cock as it shoots across both of their stomachs. Only capable in the last after shocks of mewling small encouragements when he feels the wet warmth blooming in him, Viktor's thrusts turning sloppy with another trill coming from him before he stills.

The mandibles release his shoulder, Jayce collapsing to the dirt as he pants and is followed by Viktor unfolding him, curling over him once more. By the flat of Viktor's forehead being pressing to his own.

Jayce doesn’t remember much about being carried back to their home, still wrapped around Viktor in his steady march through the forest. Just the way Viktor mutters small little praises every few moments, pleased little sounds carrying through from deep in his chest until they reach the cottage and Jayce is laid out on the bed.

Careful hands look him over. Any scrape, any cut cleaned as every tight muscle is stretched, eased back into a form that will not leave him as sore tomorrow. An event that is scored by Viktor’s own tutting about not wanting to be Jayce in the morning as his fingers smooth over flushed skin. He leaves Jayce only for a moment to draw a bath, returning only when it is ready to help Jayce in. 

He's washed dutifully, barely acknowledging the activity as he is lost in the relative weightlessness of himself. It is only after the water is exchanged so he can relax that he rouses. Grabs at Viktor to fold himself in there with him, behind him, and time is lost with the solid form at his back, holding him lightly in the quiet of their bathroom.

The water is becoming more tepid, but neither make a move to leave, most especially Jayce as the hexclaw draws meaningless patterns on his chest and Viktor all but purrs behind him. The soreness in his chest, in his hips, in his leg will not abate. In fact it will be worse come tomorrow, but he can't find it in himself to be worried much about it. 

"Are you quite satisfied?" Viktor asks, barely piercing the fog of Jayce's brain.

"No." Is his answer, word thick as his tongue remembers how to work. "You can do it again in the morning if you want." 

There's a pinch to his chest, hard but not unearned that has him squawking. The water sloshes as his own hand reaches up, slapping behind him at Viktor's smooth mouth until the claw releases. It resumes its lulling motions, Viktor's head bowing at the request of a pull from the back of his neck to press his face to Jayce's damp hair. 

"Did you uh, enjoy that?" His fingers roam the textured surface of Viktor's neck, enjoying the patterns and divots and how he maps them mentally with each pass.

"Mm. It has...soothed something in me." Viktor say, resting his chin atop Jayce's head and Jayce can feel him breathing him. "I could be convinced to entertain this again."

Jayce's huffs, good natured, makes a comment about writing that down with everything else before tipping his head back to pull Viktor to his mouth. Tomorrow, there will be more conversations, more discussions, boundaries properly drawn, and more in-depth understandings that have long since needed to be had. A difficult task for the both of them.

But tonight, Jayce has this. He has Viktor, alive and here.