Work Text:
They never found a cure.
At least, not one that Jayce was ever expecting, a miracle tightly packed into the capsule of a pill or drawn into the chamber of a glass syringe by a doctor’s steady hand. Not one that came with a treatment plan or carefully measured doses that would draw the poison from Viktor’s lungs. The kind of cure that Jayce spent countless nights fighting to envision in his mind’s eye as he lay with his partner’s body nestled protectively against his own, clinging to Jayce in sleep with the same ferocity with which he stubbornly clung to the stretch of borrowed time following his diagnosis. His touch bruised, his nails scarred, even as those rattled, fractured breaths betrayed his worsening condition. His crooked little smiles had slowly begun to grow weaker, and his kisses became progressively tinged with the bitterness of old blood.
Fading. Fading. Viktor was a flame at the end of its wick, sputtering and swelling with its last dregs of light and heat, desperate to keep burning even as the wax creeped higher. Yet on and on he worked, posting himself for hours on end in the pool of strange blue light that spilled from the Hexcore’s rotating plates, seeking the correct combination of runes that would save him. A borderline obsession that Jayce had never been able to fault him for.
Not even now.
And on the rare nights Viktor managed to drag himself from the lab, Jayce’s arms were always waiting. A sanctuary of warmth and protection, of heat and stolen passion, soft lips and callused fingers tracing invisible paths between the moles dotting Viktor’s skin as Jayce’s eyes affixed themselves to the ceiling in the hazy afterglow. Feeling helpless. Feeling lost. Wondering why, of all the miracles the two of them had forged together, was this one so impossible to grasp?
And then there was the Council. Heimerdinger’s forced retirement and the sudden appearance of Mel’s mother on their shores. The stolen gemstone. Silco. Shimmer. Caitlyn and the trencher girl with the bruised knuckles urging him to fight as Mel stood at his other shoulder and urged him to make peace. A Hextech hammer forged in secret and a contract exchanged with the enemy on sun-drenched battlements.
Sometime in the midst of the chaos, Viktor stopped dragging himself from the lab. Stopped seeking shelter in the circle of Jayce’s arms when the weight of his fate grew too tiresome to bear alone. And Jayce had been too busy to notice. Too tangled within his own web of politics and responsibility to see the man he loved quietly unraveling at the seams, a current of darkness and arcane corruption dragging him beneath the surface.
It was all too much. Jayce had become a rope bridge stretched too tautly across a gaping chasm that was only growing wider by the second, pulling his focus in two separate directions with such force that he’d felt his edges fraying, his supports begin to snap.
A city on the brink of collapse. The man he loved on the brink of death. And Jayce hadn’t been enough for either of them.
Whatever it takes. That’s what the two of them had promised each other on that first grey dawn as they lay in a breathless, sweat-soaked tangle within Viktor’s bed. Whatever it takes, they would find a way to keep Viktor alive.
Jayce just hadn’t expected the lengths his partner would go through to mean that.
Jayce fought to remain conscious with the warmth of fresh blood clinging to his lashes. The air around him was stifling, clogged with blackened smoke and motes of floating dust and debris that glimmered in the decaying red glow of sunset as it spilled in through the open wounds in the surrounding laboratory walls. It hurt to breathe. Hurt to take in even the smallest swell of air from where he lay facedown against the floor, brow split open and oozing from being caught by surprise and knocked against the side of his workstation. His vision swam. His mouth tasted like copper and ash.
Damn it.
Damn it, he needed to move.
The handle of his Mercury Hammer glinted in his peripheral, a shock of gold in the bloodred light. But as Jayce made a feeble attempt to reach for it, gloved fingertips skating along piles of singed research papers spilled across the lab, the end of a long, iron staff came down against the back of his hand. Not hard, not violent. More of a warning, pressing firmly enough to halt the movement, causing Jayce to make a sound of wretched frustration at the back of his throat.
“Don’t be foolish,” a voice spoke from somewhere above him, the sound of it carving into the deepest, most festering wounds in Jayce’s heart. Not because of the way it had changed, spoken with the grating, robotic timbre of some sort of strange voice modifier. But because of what had remained familiar.
The husk of an accent.
Snarling through gritted teeth, Jayce lifted his head to regard the figure that prowled slowly into view, sharp edges and angles gilded in the furious red of a fading day. He was still as long and lithe as the morning Jayce first set his eyes upon him within the ruins of his workshop all those years ago, and yet… different. Changed. Augmented into something that felt more like an echo of the man that had once haunted this laboratory, a fond memory blurred by the passage of time. Familiar, yet not. A stranger that still somehow felt like home. Even now. Even like this.
Even after everything.
Viktor’s flesh and muscle were intricately woven with wires and plates of metal, entire segments of that familiar body carved away like dead meat to make room for iron and steel. Necessary progress, he had once called it. His leg brace remained, though, only this model had been fused into the strange arcane-forged metal of what had once been his bad leg, a permanent aid for a disability that would never leave him, no matter the intervention of magic and technology. Meanwhile, a ribcage of thin translucent tubes curved around his chest plate and pumped a slow, continuous drip of Shimmer cocktails into whatever flesh remained somewhere beneath, no doubt keeping those withered, poisoned lungs from decaying any further. A terminal sickness suspended in time. Not gone, but not worsening.
And not a cure.
The crutch Jayce had lovingly forged with his own hands was nowhere to be found, now. Or perhaps… altered, the metal bent and twisted to instead take the shape of the towering staff that Viktor now leaned on, its claw-like tip protectively housing the sinister, jagged shape of the Hexcore. Even from where he lay, Jayce heard it humming. Felt it watching with that vile, arcane sentience it possessed, sparks and flares of purple light crackling around it as it rotated in place, a mutated shadow of what it had once been.
With a grunt, Jayce drew himself up onto his elbows, but Viktor’s staff was on him yet again, pressing sharply into his spine until Jayce had no choice but to flatten himself down against the laboratory floor once more. Shards of glass and rubble bit into the side of his cheek. He groaned.
“Stay down,” Viktor commanded, though with a remarkable softness that Jayce couldn’t quite place. “Do not give me further reason to bring you harm. I did not come for you.”
But Jayce was stubborn. Furious. Desperate and so full of hurt and regret that all sense of self-preservation went out the window. Before Viktor could slip further into the lab in search of whatever he might need to further his experiments, Jayce mustered enough strength to reach up and curl gloved fingers into the tattered hem of his ex-partner’s cloak. A pin to a moth’s wing, keeping it secured in place.
Blood sticky on his skin, Jayce held on like a lifeline. Held on with the very same hand that had lifted in what became the deciding vote that expelled the man he loved from the streets of Piltover and back into the twisting shadows of Zaun’s underbelly. A necessary decision he had not made lightly in order to save Viktor from himself. Sky’s death and the illegal self-mutilation using an artifact of the arcane would have sent Viktor to rot in the bowels of Stillwater Hold had Jayce not intervened with the option for banishment. He had only done what he thought was best.
Feeling the tug of fingers against his cloak, Viktor faltered before turning, at last, to face him.
The mask his ex-partner wore was nothing short of haunting; plates of smooth, angled steel shaped to resemble something almost skull-like. Utterly featureless, save for a pair of upturned, glaring eyes that blazed like captured hellfire, emitting a faint golden glow that carved through the shadows. The only indication that Viktor was somewhere beneath it was the familiar tufts of unkept dark hair atop his head, the feathered layers just as long and wild as they’d ever been.
It made an image flicker in Jayce’s mind that sent his pulse roaring. An image of Viktor posted in front of their blackboard, fingertips dusted in a thin layer of white chalk as he scrawled the fourth line of a complex formula across its surface. When Jayce burst in with word of project approval from the Counsel, Viktor had turned with a relieved smile, and the sunlight pouring in through the windows struck his eyes just right, making them as bright and golden as summertime captured in a glass bottle.
Viktor’s gaze had glowed then, too.
And Jayce had fallen in love.
For a small stretch of time, neither of them said a word. Only watched each other, only stared, nearly a decade of history crackling like static in the air between them, unspoken. Knuckles whitening, Jayce felt himself recall the agony of every shared triumph within these four walls, every failure, every captured glance across a workstation scattered in machine parts and crumpled blueprints. Every tentative touch in passing. The laughter, the arguments, the exhaustive nights of work and the smiles meant for him and him alone.
He remembered the sweat and heat of a love confessed too late in the quiet stretch of dawn, and the mutual betrayal of trust that reduced it all to ashes.
He remembered Viktor refusing to look back at him as he disappeared across the bridge.
And he remembered hating himself every day since.
“M’sorry…” Jayce breathed at last, grasp tightening on his ex-partner’s cloak. He wasn’t apologizing for what had transpired between them. The decisions he’d had to make. No… there was no point to that, he thought. No point in lingering on what couldn’t be taken back.
He was apologizing for what he was about to do.
In a flash of newfound strength, Jayce gave Viktor’s cloak a forceful yank, throwing the other man momentarily off balance. He then acted quickly, using the taut fabric as leverage to swing himself across the floor and kick Viktor’s legs out from under him, sending his ex-partner tumbling to the rubble in a loud clatter of metal.
The guilt bloomed faster than Jayce was expecting, clawing his heart to ribbons. He tried not to think of it. Tried not to focus on Viktor’s pained grunt as he lay in a heap of tangled limbs, on the flickering memories of him leaning heavily against his crutch, or how sore he used to get after a long day in the lab, muscles stiff and knotted beneath Jayce’s hands as he massaged the ache away while laying reverent kisses upon each of his moles.
Seizing the brief moment of weakness, Jayce struck, launching himself atop Viktor to pin him down, thighs squeezing at either side of that narrow frame of flesh and fabric and steel. Viktor, however, was fast, thrusting the heel of his hand upward to strike the underside of Jayce’s chin hard enough to make his teeth clack together and his vision swim. Jayce reeled back with the impact, momentarily dazed, before claws of long, icy metal swiftly locked around his throat.
The room teetered in a dizzying rush as Jayce now found himself trapped beneath Viktor’s body, pinned in place as blood coated the inside of his mouth from where he’d accidentally bit into his own cheek. The hand around his throat, however, did not belong to his ex-partner, but rather the familiar Hextech contraption protruding out from where it had been hidden beneath the fall of his cloak, bolted into the back of his armor.
“S-So that’s where that thing went…” Jayce hissed as the Hexclaw pressed into his airways. He writhed beneath the weight of Viktor’s body, so much denser, so much heavier than it had ever been. His hips bucked, teeth stained red as he bared them in a grimace. “Had… H-Had a feeling you might’ve had an idea of where it suddenly disappeared to.”
“It was my concept, after all,” Viktor responded coolly. “Only fair I got something worthwhile out of your backstabbing.”
Jayce tried not to wince at that.
“I did w-what I had… to do…” Jayce wheezed, vision darkening at the edges. He curled one hand around the Hexclaw, but the damned thing was immoveable, pressing into his airways. “I won’t apologize for saving you from being thrown into Still… S-Stillwater.”
“Is that what you thought you did?” Viktor regarded him for a thoughtful moment, head tilting in an eerily birdlike manner. “How characteristically self-righteous of you.”
Jayce frowned.
It was then that Viktor leaned in close. So close that, had there not been a mask of metal between them, Jayce was certain he would’ve felt the heat of his exhales, tasted the familiarity of his breath. It made his pulse kick up, made his stomach flutter, and fear had nothing to do with it. He swallowed thickly.
“You ruined me, Jayce Talis,” Viktor whispered. “Body and soul, you ruined me.”
“You ruined y-yourself,” Jayce breathed sharply. “The things you did. The way you… you mutilated your body with that thing.” He shot a look toward the Hexcore at the end of Viktor’s staff, now laid across the floor from their scuffle. “H-How could you have ever thought something like that would be okay, Viktor?”
“Because you said you loved me.”
Jayce went still, frost settling on his ribcage in the echo of those words. The Hexclaw had stopped squeezing at his throat, but he made no move to break loose of its hold, focus locked on the heaving rise and fall of Viktor’s chest, the insurmountably human ache in his tone still lingering beneath so much mechanism and machine.
His heart fractured down the middle, a gaping wound.
“I had months, if not weeks, left to live,” Viktor continued slowly, voice-modifier crackling as clawed gauntlets curled into the front of Jayce’s shirt. “Do you think any of the decisions I made within this room were made lightly? Do you think I would have turned to Shimmer, of all things, had there been any other choice? My body was decaying around me, Jayce. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep, could barely hold myself up most days with how weak I was becoming. The nights I spent at that table carving runes into my skin were spent foolishly convinced that you would understand because you said you loved me, too.”
Jayce felt the scorch of tears building behind his eyes as self-loathing and regret, bitter as ashes in its wretched familiarity, made a home for itself in the place where his heart had once been.
He wished he could’ve understood.
Gods, more than anything, he wished it.
“Whatever it takes. That’s what we promised each other. Whatever it takes, I would find a way to live. For the Undercity. For Hextech. For you. I made these decisions for you, Jayce,” Viktor said darkly. “Because of you, and you sent me away. I wanted to grow old at your side and you sent me back to the shadows, destroying my legacy, poisoning my name.”
“I never meant to. The banishment was only supposed to be a temporary one until I smoothed things over with what remained of the Counsel and found a way to dig you out of the hole you’d buried yourself in. I did what I thought was right.”
“As did I. Funny, isn’t it?”
Trembling, Jayce reached up with a tentative, apologetic hand and lay the backs of his fingers against the side of Viktor’s mask, the metal startlingly warm to the touch even through his glove. “Vik—”
As though reacting to a burn, Viktor wrenched himself away with such force that he ended up on the other side of the room, clutching the edge of his old workstation to keep from stumbling. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
Now free, Jayce slowly unfurled himself from the laboratory floor, but not without reaching for the handle of his Mercury Hammer should the need to defend himself arise once more. Weapon heavy in his hand, he rose to his full and towering height, praying he would not need an excuse to use it as he studied Viktor in the red glow of dusk. Studied the curve of his back and the curls of his hair and the way his shoulders shook as though he were hyperventilating.
That’s when Viktor quickly reached up and brushed clumsy, desperate fingertips against either side of his face. Then, a sound. A click followed by the low hiss of pressure being released, resonating in the smoky red gloom. Jayce could do nothing but watch, eyes widening, as Viktor pulled his mask away from his face and dropped it with a clatter against the table’s surface.
And then he turned.
Oh.
Oh Gods.
Viktor’s eyes were the first thing Jayce noticed, the sclera black as clouds of ink poured into water, utterly inhuman. The very sight of them chilled Jayce to the bone, ominous and narrowed in a glowing, scathing glare, and yet… Gods help him, and yet they were somehow still the same. Sharp and intelligent. The color still as deep and warm as sunlight drifting through a bottle of amber honey, the gold so familiar that it made Jayce’s knees nearly buckle beneath the weight of their gaze, and how long it had been since he last saw it.
There was more skin upon that face than Jayce had been expecting given the state of everything below Viktor’s neck. The only metal visible were on vented plates that were fused just beneath the sharp angle of Viktor’s cheekbones to form either side of his angled jaw, the gaps in the slats emitting a strange golden glow from somewhere deep within. Besides that, it was all still there. The same crooked nose, the same dark circles casting shadows beneath his eyes, the same tousled bangs.
His heart plummeted.
And there they were. The same two little moles in the same exact spots that Jayce had memorized a thousand times with his lips.
The scorching caress of a single tear rushed down his cheek, and he made no effort to stop it because, despite everything, this was still Viktor.
His Viktor.
“Baby…” Jayce breathed.
Viktor flinched as though wounded. “Don’t.”
Tentatively, Jayce took a breath and risked the smallest step forward toward his ex-partner but was instantly halted as the Hexclaw extended viciously between them, its laser aimed between his eyes in wordless warning. Heat and light charging in a concentrated ball of arcane power that would incinerate him if he wasn’t careful about this. Though not attached to his body, the device had somehow managed to become connected to Viktor’s mind since Jayce last saw it, an extension of himself that reacted with all the ease of a third arm. Viktor need only envision it burning a smoking hole straight through Jayce’s sternum for it to happen, a hairline trigger in a trembling hand.
Jayce staggered, jaw tightening as he adjusted the hammer in his grasp.
“Get out of my way, Jayce,” Viktor said, voice so much clearer now without his mask. So much more human. “I told you I did not come here for you, but I will cut you down if need be.”
“Then why haven’t you, yet? If you can kill me with only a thought and take anything you need from this lab, why haven’t you just done it?” Jayce replied, swallowing, aching with the hope that flooded his chest as he risked a step forward once more. “You hold all the power here, Viktor, yet there you stand, hesitating. Warning me. Why is that?”
Viktor’s gaze darkened. “Do not test the capacity of my mercy, Defender of Tomorrow, lest I give you a real excuse to use that hammer of yours.”
Jayce’s brow twitched.
“That’s what they’re hailing you as now, isn’t it? What they chant in the streets as you pass?” A look of disgust twisted through Viktor’s features as he spat out the words like they were poison tainting his tongue. “You’ve never stopped being Piltover’s little golden boy. Not even long enough to help the innocents you’re now at war with like you promised me you would. As always, it falls to me and me alone to give a shit about the Undercity.”
Jayce tried not to let that rattle him as he continued to approach. “You’re deflecting, Viktor.”
“And you’re getting on my fucking nerves,” Viktor snarled, canines flashing. “Move.”
“No.”
“Jayce.”
Another step forward, before the Hexclaw’s laser suddenly cut a vicious line across the ground mere milometers from Jayce’s boot, leaving a smoking laceration in the laboratory floor. A much clearer warning this time, yet one that Jayce ignored still, pulse roaring as he swallowed his nerve and stepped over the scorch mark with newfound vigor.
Jayce’s voice struggled to remain even. “You missed.”
“Take one step closer and I won’t make that mistake again,” Viktor muttered through clenched teeth, his own tone wavering.
In all their years together, he had never seen Viktor look so exhausted, expression falling dead like a cloud passing over the sun, blotting out its warmth and light. Dark hair clung to his sweat-dampened brow, and Jayce would have given anything for the chance to brush those strands back.
“Just walk away, Jayce. You’re good at that, especially when it comes to me,” he continued, Hexclaw dropping heavily like a tired arm. “You begged me not to leave you when I first got sick, and I ended up fighting the battle alone anyhow. I should have known better than to think I meant anything to you.”
Regret knotted itself in Jayce’s throat as memories of that grey morning lay in tatters between them. How hopeful they’d been, then, laying in each other’s arms. How perfect it had all seemed, and then he’d gone and let the war with Silco distract him from everything he’d fought so hard to protect. Viktor had every right to hate him. To be furious.
But the stars had aligned for them that day, and Jayce had to believe it wasn’t too late to shift the heavens in their favor once more.
He had to try.
Gods, he had to…
“You did,” Jayce argued, tears building on his lashes as he took another step forward. “Viktor, you meant the world to me.”
Viktor glared, eerie eyes catching the last glimmer of red as it bled toward the horizon line. “Liar.”
Jayce took another step. He was now close enough to touch if he risked reaching out. “You mean the world to me.”
“LIAR.”
Jayce had only a split second to react as the Hexclaw’s laser fired in the echo of Viktor’s roar. He flung his Mercury Hammer upward, battering the beam of molten light away before it could touch him and sending it ricocheting off the metal and toward the laboratory ceiling above them. The silence that followed was deafening, heartbeat a volcanic roar in Jayce’s ears as he stared up at the smoldering hole left behind. His breaths escaped him in short, startled bursts.
When he glanced back at Viktor, their expressions mirrored each other, a mixture of muted shock and horror as Viktor stood with one trembling hand outstretched toward Jayce. There were lines of fresh black tears staining the apples of his cheeks, dark and glinting like oil. If machines could weep, Jayce imagined it would look just like that.
But Viktor never cried. In all the years the two of them had known each other, Viktor shedding tears for any reason was a rare occurrence only witnessed less than a handful of times. Even in the wake of a terminal diagnosis, with Jayce choking back his own wretched sobs at his bedside, Viktor’s eyes had remained dry, clouded gaze trained to the ceiling. Numb. Resigned.
But now…
As if only then sensing the presence of his own tears, Viktor sharply turned away and scrubbed both hands over his own cheeks with a sniffle, muttering something about ‘failed suppressants’ between what Jayce could only assume were curses in his mother tongue.
Jayce’s voice was breathless as realization took root like a seed in the pit of his stomach. “…You still love me.”
He expected coldness in response. He expected poisoned words and outright denial and the clamp of cold metal around his throat, but what Jayce received instead was the low, wounded sound of pain running deeper than marrow. And then…
“Of course I fucking do!”
Jayce’s vision tunneled. Blurred. He felt the handle of his hammer slip from his grasp to loudly clatter against the floor between them.
“I burn for you, Jayce Talis,” Viktor said, his voice thin and ruined in his throat, like every syllable was agony to voice aloud. “I always have. Even now. Even after everything. You have managed to slip beneath my skin and linger like an infection that I cannot cure. No matter how many pieces of myself I carve away and replace with metal, there you somehow remain, just beneath the surface. How dare you…” Grief took the form of a wild sort of madness in Viktor’s eyes as he stared at Jayce through a veil of black tears. He looked like a cornered animal, teeth bared. Frightened. Furious. “How fucking dare you make me love you in this way. How dare you make me love you and believe we had a chance!”
“Viktor—”
“Fuck you.”
Jayce was suddenly across the room before even realizing he’d moved, backing Viktor against the table’s edge as he drew him into the protective circle of his arms. He didn’t care about the consequences. Didn’t care if the laser trained on him once more and spliced him in two. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore besides this moment. This man. Viktor resisted at first, thrashing and beating at Jayce’s chest with shaking fists, but Jayce held firm as he burrowed his face into the feathered layers of his ex-partner’s hair and allowed his own tears of grief to fall.
How long had it been since he’d last held Viktor this way? Since his heart had last felt so blissfully at home in the arms of his partner?
Despite the augmentations, Viktor fit just as perfectly against him as he always had.
“You ruined me…” Viktor murmured brokenly, no longer fighting the ferocity of Jayce’s embrace. Rather, he seemed to sink into it with unparalleled exhaustion, voice muffled against the hollow of his throat. “I hate you.”
Jayce’s held on tighter, eyes squeezing shut as he brushed his lips against his ex-partner’s hairline. Gods, he still smelled the same. Like ozone and the pages of an old book. “No, you don’t.”
A beat of silence, and then…
“You’re right.”
Jayce’s heart leapt into his throat.
Viktor then leaned back just enough to peer up into Jayce’s wet eyes, his expression dark and unreadable. “I just hate what we were both forced to become.”
Boys to men to monsters.
Swallowing thickly, Jayce reached up and cupped his hands against either side of Viktor’s face, palms swallowing up his cheeks. Soft skin, so familiar, juxtaposed against plates of strange glowing metal. Beautiful, still, because it was Viktor. Carefully, he brushed dry the tears of black oil before leaning in close. “Me, too.”
Kissing Viktor was a risk Jayce would have taken a thousand times over, a hesitant caress of pressure that felt so much like the first they’d shared so long ago. Slow and careful, Viktor’s mouth achingly soft against his own, even as he went rigid with surprise in Jayce’s grasp. At first, his ex-partner didn’t respond to the kiss, nor did he reciprocate. He only stood there, breathing, trembling. So much so that Jayce considered drawing back with an apology on his tongue, but the thought was cut short as Viktor suddenly surged up and brought their mouths together in a bruising collision that drew a groan from Jayce’s throat.
It was fierce. Clumsy. Desperate. It was starved tongues and roaming hands and gasping breaths exchanged in the shadows of an approaching night. It was hurt and fury eroding beneath the comfort of each other’s touch, a festering wound knitting itself shut to leave behind a scar that would never fade. A constant reminder of the pain that had led them both here. Had made them both unrecognizable in the eyes of the brilliant young scientists they had once been, laughing together in the ruins of Jayce’s old workshop.
Boys to men to monsters.
Yet loved all the same.
Clawed metal fingers fisted through the back of Jayce’s hair, making him see stars as he snarled and licked his way into the pliant heat of Viktor’s mouth. Gods, he still tasted the same. Still sounded the same, soft, high whimpers carving through the quiet as Jayce pressed Viktor back against the edge of the desk and slipped his knee between his metal thighs, forcing them apart. He needed to be closer. He needed his clothes and all that pesky armor Viktor wore to be cast aside. He needed skin on metal on skin, however his ex-partner was willing to offer it.
He needed them to be okay again, if only for now, if only for tonight.
And tomorrow, he would piece the tatters of his heart back together in the aftermath.
Jayce’s nerves were alight with a want he hadn’t felt in years, a staticky crackle just beneath the surface of his skin. Familiar. Familiar. Something that only Viktor had ever been able to ignite within him.
“Viktor—”
Whatever words would have followed strangled themselves in Jayce’s throat as a pair of hands flattened themselves against his chest and shoved with enough force to send him tumbling backwards against the floor, tailbone striking the slate hard enough to send pain singing up his spinal column. Jayce grunted roughly, but before he could catch his bearings, Viktor was atop him once more, pinning him in place.
Only this time felt different.
Jayce’s thighs fell open, an instinctual reaction that hungrily welcomed the weight of Viktor’s narrow hips as he prowled over Jayce with newfound intent, gilded irises glowing with captured light in the black depths of his gaze. Pulse rocketing, Jayce gasped as he felt the press of metal return to his throat, a careful squeeze, only this time it did not belong to the Hexclaw. It was Viktor’s own hand holding him now, the gauntlet cool against his skin.
Trembling, Jayce tilted his head back, submissively offering up his throat in wordless surrender. In a trust that had never truly wavered, even as their fists grew bruised and bloodied and the space between them stretched to the width of the bridge that kept their vastly different worlds apart. Gold and iron. Sunlight and shadow. Piltover and Zaun.
The tether that connected their hearts, however, somehow remained. Even as it tangled and frayed, winding through the lanes and alleys of their respective cities, it always remained.
And Jayce had to believe that meant something.
“I love you,” Jayce whispered, a tear rolling down his temple. “Even when I hate you, I love you. Even if you kill me now, I’ll love you still. That won’t ever change.”
In the echo of those words, Viktor watched him quietly, thoughtfully, thumb passing back and forth over Jayce’s adam’s apple. The gesture was devastatingly affectionate considering how easily he could crush his windpipe if the desire arose. How quickly he could shift the tide if he snapped back into himself and remembered what had brought him here tonight in the first place.
Then, Jayce felt the hold on his throat slip away, only for it to be immediately replaced by Viktor’s mouth as it began laying a path of slow, reverent kisses along his skin. Jayce gasped loudly in response, eyes rolling into the back of his skull as each petal-soft caress of those lips sent shockwaves through him, the scrape of teeth and tongue like a firework going off under his skin. Crackle and spark. Heat and color. He writhed desperately, hands pressing into the bulky metal armor on Viktor’s shoulders. A string of groans bubbled up from Jayce’s chest as his ex-partner marked him, mouth drawing a galaxy of fresh bruises to the surface.
He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve this…
“H-Hah…” Jayce whined, hips tilting upward to press against the weight of Viktor’s body, desperate for friction as he lost himself to the delicious sting of being claimed by the only person he’d ever truly belonged to. “Viktor, p-please…”
Viktor hummed in response against the hollow of his throat before biting down hard enough for Jayce’s vision to white out, a broken cry tumbling forth. A part of him knew blood had been drawn. A part of him was thrilled by it.
“Ah! F-Fuck, baby…”
“Open your mouth,” Viktor then whispered. “Give me your tongue.”
Stifling a groan, Jayce obeyed without question, lips parting to offer up his tongue like a tithe to the man above him. A gift upon the altar of a god. With a pleased little sound, Viktor kissed him with bruising vigor, suckling that tongue into his own mouth in such a way that sent a lightning strike of desire rushing straight to Jayce’s cock. He tasted like copper and chaos and smoke, and Jayce could do nothing but whine, high and heady in response, drunk on the heat of his ex-partner’s kiss as his hands roamed up along Viktor’s arms, across the valleys of his back, the juts of an iron spinal column, and into the softness of his hair. Strange new shapes for Jayce to devote himself to memorizing, mountains and valleys of metal and skin.
“You’re beautiful,” Jayce breathed shakily as their kiss broke. He then took the opportunity to nose at the little dark mole just above the corner of Viktor’s mouth before kissing it sweetly. “Gods, you’re still so fucking beautiful, Viktor.”
“I’m not.” Viktor said as he stared down at him, mouth set into a grim line. “I’m functional, and you are a terrible liar.”
“Despite my many fuckups, I’ve never lied to you, Viktor, nor do I intend to start now,” Jayce responded firmly, fingers curling into the edge of Viktor’s cloak. “Take your armor off and let me prove it.”
A dark brow cocked. “You won’t like what you find.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Jayce expected far more resistance than he was given, nervousness writhing with unbridled delight in the pit of his stomach as Viktor wordlessly sat back upon his knees and began undressing. Off came his cloak first, the tattered blue fabric pooling around their bodies, followed by the clasps and buckles holding the Hexclaw in place. Then came the armor, layers of metal forged by Viktor’s own hands falling away to reveal even more metal beneath, the latter kind far more delicate to behold as it was fused with Viktor’s skin. A near-seamless extension of himself, an intricate patchwork of steel and flesh that grew more awe-inspiring the longer Jayce admired it.
Viktor had remade himself with the same care he’d used when working with Hextech, and it was every bit as miraculous to behold as the magic they’d first created together, Shimmer tubes included. Stripped down to nothing but a pair of boxers, Viktor knelt before him as a living combination of chaos and order, flesh and steel, human and machine. And somehow, Viktor made it work. Somehow, Viktor made it all make sense.
Somehow, Viktor made it beautiful.
Mouth growing dry, Jayce clumsily began tugging off his own clothes as well, hands shaking with such force that he accidentally popped two buttons off his coat and sent them rocketing like bullets across the laboratory floor.
And then Viktor chuckled, as melodic as a wind chime on a sleepy summer evening, and Jayce almost broke down right then and there.
Oh Gods, how long had it been since he last heard that sound?
“Shush,” Jayce’s voice shook as he kicked off his boots and began unbuckling his belt. “Don’t laugh at me, asshole.”
“Do I make you nervous?” Viktor asked, the ghost of an almost-smile lifting the edge of his mouth as he ran the backs of strange metal fingers against the side of Jayce’s thigh.
Donned only in a pair of tented trousers, Jayce shivered. “You’ve always made me nervous.”
“Mm.”
Clinging tight to a burst of newfound courage, Jayce then curled his fingers around the back of Viktor’s neck and tugged him down into another kiss. The kind that was crushing. The kind that stole breath. The kind that tasted like the thousand unspoken apologies Jayce hadn’t been able to say since the day his brilliant partner crossed that bridge and slipped from his life forever. And Viktor allowed it, collapsing into the press of their mouths with a slow sigh that somehow felt like peace. Like understanding.
Like those apologies Jayce never voiced aloud had been accepted anyways.
Carefully and without warning, Jayce took hold of Viktor and switched their positions, tossing the other man onto his back against the laboratory floor, mindful of the scattered debris. He kept the back of Viktor’s head cradled within the palm of his hand as he lay him down over the rumpled fabric of his cloak, as precious as anything they’d ever forged within this room together. His hair was so soft, his lips so pliant. It hardly seemed real. A reunion envisioned a thousand times in the smoldering dark on the cold stretch of an empty bed once filled.
When Viktor reached up and touched his cheeks with all the tenderness of a love that hadn’t been destroyed by a few reckless decisions, Jayce realized he was crying, tears wet beneath the brush of Viktor’s thumbs.
And then he just couldn’t stop.
Oh Gods, he couldn’t stop…
Sobs tore through his throat, low and guttural and from the depths of that shadowed chasm where his heart had once beat. Crumpling, Jayce dropped his head to the curve of Viktor’s shoulder, guilty and ashamed, a wretched display of sorrow he didn’t deserve to feel.
But then Viktor touched him with debilitating softness, arms curling around the expanse of Jayce’s bare shoulders, one hand of metal and the other of flesh squeezing him unbearably close, and he felt like he could almost be worthy of forgiveness. Like the roof could cave in on them at that very moment and he would somehow survive, protected in the shelter of his lover-turned-enemy’s embrace.
“Shh…” Viktor whispered before dropping the smallest kiss to his temple.
“I’m sorry…” Jayce choked. “M’sorry, m’sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, Viktor…”
Viktor squeezed him tighter. “I know.”
“I n-never meant… I never wanted to…”
“I know, Jayce.”
“I should’ve been there,” Jayce continued, head lifting so he could peer down at the man he loved as tears blurred his vision and clogged his voice. “When you were sick and desperate and scared, I should have been there. I should have seen it. I should have understood what you had to do to survive, and I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t. I’m so sorry I left you to fight these battles alone, baby.”
Viktor softly shook his head as his thumb apologetically traced over the fresh cut running through Jayce’s eyebrow, blood dried, skin aching. “My obsession with progress and survival was not a simple thing to understand, Jayce. How could you, when you have never known the feeling of death breathing down the back of your neck? It was not fair of you to forget me, but it was not fair of me to push you away, either.”
Jayce scoffed. “I wasn’t exactly easy to trust, anymore.”
Viktor then held up his augmented hand between them, the arcane metal glinting purple in the silver moonlight. “Neither was I.”
Without hesitation, Jayce took that hand into his grasp and feathered kisses, soft as gossamer, against those knuckles. A part of him wondered if Viktor could even feel it. If the metal could soak in his adoration as easily as his skin could. Eager to find out, he trailed those kisses from the heart of Viktor’s palm and over the inside of his wrist until the metal faded into the skin of his arm. Up and up his kisses climbed, over his bicep and the curve of his shoulder where Jayce then kissed the graceful bone of his clavicle where skin fused with the plates of metal that formed his neck. He then kissed every faded scar he could locate, the arcane runes he’d spent a lifetime understanding still visible from where they’d been carved into his ex-partner’s skin, and Viktor shivered beneath him through it all, head tipping back with a breathless sound that felt like salvation.
“Viktor…” Jayce asked against the shell of his ear. “May I fuck you? Just one more time?”
It was a bad idea. A terrible idea. A reckless, utterly moronic idea to even suggest such a thing. Jayce knew it and Viktor did, too. They were on opposite sides of an ongoing war with no end in sight, loyal to their cities and their people, and getting physical on the floor of the lab where they’d spent years quietly falling in love over a shared dream would only complicate matters further.
They weren’t partners anymore. Would never be again. That’s just the way things were, now.
But as Jayce peered down at Viktor and caught sight of a single black tear breaking free of his lashes, he knew he would endure any amount of agony the universe had to offer in the aftermath of this bad idea if it meant one more night pretending that the two of them weren’t broken beyond repair.
If it meant they could be in love, openly and without heartbreak or regret, for just a single perfect moment.
No Counsel. No Hextech. No war. No betrayals.
Just them. Where they were always meant to be.
Leaning up, Viktor nudged their noses together with a single, breathless, “…Yes.”
And that’s all Jayce needed.
Without further prompt, Jayce began making his way down the sweep of Viktor’s graceful body, mouth and hands lavishing the acres of warm flesh and metal with unspoken reverence, taking note of everything changed, everything familiar. Viktor’s ribs were now metal while his stomach was skin, leanly muscled and still dotted with moles. His chest was complex, a combination of the two, and Jayce took the time to carefully swirl his tongue around each dusky little nipple between the mechanism of steel and tubing keeping Viktor’s lungs in functioning order.
Hands burrowed in the back of Jayce’s hair, Viktor sighed deeply beneath him, rise and fall, inhale and exhale, without a cough or blood-clogged rattle to follow.
“You’re exquisite…” Jayce whispered, hot and breathless against the trail of soft, dark hairs beneath the other man’s navel. Viktor’s thighs, both metal, fell open in an effortless display of trust to reveal the long line of his cock straining beneath the damp fabric of his boxers. Pulse thundering, Jayce nipped at the sharp juts of his ex-partner’s hipbones, then nosed at the waistband just above it. “Every inch of you, divine.”
Viktor made a small sound. “…Jayce…”
“Look at me,” Jayce commanded, low and firm, as he tugged those boxers down and discarded them to some unseen shadow across the lab. And Viktor obeyed. Oh, did he obey, black sclera and gilded irises affixing themselves upon Jayce with rapt attention. Gods, if he thought that gaze could make him shiver before…
Viktor’s cock hung heavily between them, pink and swollen and dribbling over the moles on his stomach. Just as beautiful, as perfect, as Jayce remembered it. Gently, Jayce curled his fingers around the base and gave it a slow, tentative stroke, before leaning in to flatten his tongue against the vein running up along the sensitive underside. Eager to take his time, he licked a torturous stripe from base to tip, all while peering up at his ex-partner through the fan of his own lashes.
Viktor’s cheeks had bloomed with flush, voice crackling in his throat as his hips canted upward toward the heat of Jayce’s tongue. “J-Jayce… Ah!”
Jayce hummed before slipping Viktor into the scorching heat of his mouth and swallowing him down in a single, effortless motion, hungry for the stretch and the salt and the weight of his once-lover against his tongue. Hungry to draw forth more of those sweet, delirious sounds that he’d gone so long without. He felt Viktor buck beneath him, felt the sting of fingers wrenching through the back of his hair as the sound of his own name resonated off the laboratory walls, and it only spurred him on.
Jayce was good at this. He knew he was, and he knew exactly what drove Viktor to the brink. Knew exactly how to scramble his thoughts and slur his words and leave him in a broken, breathless heap using nothing but his mouth. Hands flattening on the insides of Viktor’s thighs, Jayce spread him even wider, pinning him in place against the laboratory floor as his he hollowed out his cheeks and suckled him down over and over and over again.
He lost himself to it. To the sounds of Viktor coming undone beneath him and the head of his cock repeatedly striking the back of his throat. To the blissful familiarity of it all within a room where they had once fucked on every feasible surface. Where they had brainstormed and crafted, laughed and fought, all while falling in love. He didn’t care that his cheeks had begun to ache and that drool was dribbling down his chin. All that mattered was that Viktor was no longer looking at him with hurt and hatred. All that mattered was that, for a small stretch of time, Viktor’s heart was no longer in pain.
With a strangled gasp for air, Jayce released him at last, mouth coming away from a Viktor with a wet pop and string of glistening saliva. His throat burned. His eyes stung. He felt incredible. Peaceful. Whole.
“J-Jayce…” Viktor whined, limbs trembling as Jayce’s tongue began swirling over his swollen crown and dipped into the leaking slit to lap up the slick bubbling there. “H-Hah… Ah, fuck… Fuck, Jayce…”
“I love the way you say my name,” Jayce murmured, pumping Viktor from base to tip as he sunk his teeth into the jut of his hip bone, leaving his own possessive mark behind. “Wanna hear more of it. Wanna feel you carve every letter of it into the skin of my back as I fuck you.”
Viktor keened, spine arcing off the floor.
“Turn over,” Jayce said as he drew back onto his knees. “On your stomach for me, baby.”
Viktor obliged without complaint, rolling over across the rumpled valley of his cloak fabric before tucking his head into the pillow of his folded arms. Jayce’s hands were on him instantaneously, broad palms skimming down the planes of his ex-partner’s back, helpless but to admire the graceful, tapered shape he knew so well. That clockwork back brace was now gone, replaced instead with a brand new spinal column of iron and gold.
“Mm… Hips up,” Jayce whispered as he pressed a kiss onto each of the little moles that had managed to survive Viktor’s augmentations. “Higher. Put your weight on your knees and your ass in the air. Mm… Yeah. Yeah, just like that, baby.”
Any sound Viktor made in response was muffled against the pillow of his own arms as he knelt on full display before Jayce, cock hanging heavily between the spread of his thighs, spine curved prettily, and ass poised high. A vision of filth and submission.
For a long while, Jayce could do nothing but stare, hands caressing the trembling muscles of Viktor’s legs and along the curve of his ass cheeks, squeezing and spreading him open.
“Gods, look at you, Viktor…” Jayce breathed as he placed a kiss against the set of dimples at the small of Viktor’s back. “You’re a vision with your back curved like this, all spread open for me. Do you know how gorgeous you are?”
Viktor stirred and shot him a hazy-eyed glare, a flush sitting high on his cheeks. “Sh-Shut up.”
Jayce grinned. “No.”
He could tell Viktor was about to say something, a snarky retort at the back of his throat, but whatever it was reformed itself into a high, broken groan as Jayce flattened his tongue against Viktor’s entrance and gave him a long, firm lick.
“Fuck!” Viktor gasped, jolting in place as though he’d been struck by lightning.
It was dizzying, the warm, dark musk of Viktor’s taste against his tongue. The eager response of his muscles and the way they trembled in Jayce’s grasp. Goosebumps scattered across his skin. Sweat bloomed, a silver sheen in the moonlight. Jayce could hardly suppress his own sounds of pleasure because of it, spreading Viktor’s ass wider as he lapped and fucked him open with his tongue with a groaning, building hunger.
“J-Jayce…h-hah…” Viktor breathed, rocking forward on his knees before pressing back into the heat of Jayce’s mouth, like he couldn’t decide whether he wanted an escape from the pleasure or to be consumed by it. “P-Please.”
Jayce huffed, reaching down to palm himself through his trousers as he feasted like a starved man before his first meal in years. Viktor’s body bloomed open so beautifully for him, the clenched muscle slowly softening beneath his tongue. Eager, so eager.
“Jayce…” Viktor’s knuckles were white around the fistful of cloak he gripped. “P-Please… Please, I need…”
“Shh,” Jayce soothed, before leaning over toward the workstation behind them and tugging open one of the bottom drawers. There, hidden beneath a pile of messy notebooks just where they’d left it so long ago, was a half-used glass phial of oil. Jayce popped the cap and poured a generous amount onto his fingers. “Patience. Just breathe… I’ll take care of you, Viktor. I’ll always take care of you.”
Viktor caught sight of the phial and cocked a brow. “That was still in there?”
“Everything of yours is still exactly where you last left it,” Jayce informed him through a small shrug like he wasn’t almost admitting that there was a time he once believed Viktor would return to him and things would go right back to how they’d always been. Simple. Easy. “I just… couldn’t get rid of any of it.”
“Mm.”
Oil properly warmed, Jayce then draped himself over Viktor’s back and nosed at the peach-fuzz softness of the hair at the nape of his ex-partner’s neck, careful not to lay too much of his weight down lest it become too much for Viktor’s disability. Teeth scraping at the curve of Viktor’s shoulder, Jayce pressed a single slickened finger against his entrance and began to gently push, breaching that tight, scorching body one knuckle at a time.
Viktor cried out, head thrown back, and Jayce took the opportunity to wrap his free hand around his throat. The metal plates clicked beneath his grasp, warm to the touch.
“Let me know if this position is too much,” Jayce huffed against Viktor’s ear, teeth clenching against the squeeze of slickened muscle surrounding his finger. Buried to the knuckle, he allowed Viktor a moment, two moments, to adjust, before he began to pump it in and out of his body. “F-Fuck… You okay so far, baby?”
Viktor choked, hips rolling back against Jayce’s hand. “…Y-Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Jayce…” Viktor fixed him with a look. “Metal is much stronger than flesh. I can take it.”
Even so, old habits were hard to break. Jayce couldn’t help but fuck him open slowly, patiently, until one finger became two and then eventually became three, slick and scissoring, stretching Viktor to the brink of madness in preparation for what was about to come. All the while, Viktor came undone in his hands, their cheeks pressed together, babbling groans and gasps and strings of incoherent words to fill the silence of the place they’d once haunted together. Jayce’s favorite sounds in his favorite room.
“That’s it, baby…” Jayce softly encouraged as his fingers curled against Viktor’s inner walls and sought out the little bundle of sensitive nerves hidden deep within. He pressed against it, causing his ex-partner to buck with a startled groan. “Fuck. So good for me… So tight. How do you want me?”
Oddly enough, when Viktor swallowed, Jayce felt it the movement beneath the clicking metal plates against his palm. “I want… I w-want… to see you. I want to look at you, Jayce. Please...”
Jayce dropped his forehead to the back of Viktor’s shoulder as he felt his heart soar. “Okay… Okay, hang on.”
Drawing back entirely, Jayce rose fully to his feet and shucked off his trousers at last, kicking them somewhere beneath the desk as he reached for the oil once more. As he took the time to slicken himself up, he watched as Viktor turned over onto his back beneath him, flushed and ruined as he lay splayed across the rumpled fabric of his cloak, the chaos of their battle. Even different, even changed, Viktor still looked the same as he did that morning. Hazy-eyed and delirious with desire, dark bangs clinging to a sweat-dampened brow.
“I could stare at you eternally,” Jayce whispered, voice hitching as he stroked himself to the sight of Viktor, positive he could get off to this and this alone if he truly wanted to.
Viktor hummed and skimmed fingertips up and down his own stomach, clearly more than content with the show Jayce was giving him as well. “Mm… Now wouldn’t that be boring.”
“Not from this angle.”
It was at that moment that Viktor began to move, slowly rising onto his knees all the while maintaining unwavering eye contact with Jayce. Gods help him, there was power in that look, and Jayce’s tongue felt incredibly heavy within his own mouth as he watched his ex-partner unfurl himself from the floor with all the grace of a flower in bloom, metal legs bearing the motion effortlessly and without need for the iron staff still laying across the room. Now, the two of them stood eye to eye, and Jayce realized he’d stopped breathing entirely.
“Well? What are you waiting for, Defender?” Viktor seemed to purr as he draped both arms against Jayce’s shoulders, dragging him so close that their cocks brushed between their bodies and their mouths ghosted together. “Hurry up and take what’s yours.”
Jayce snapped.
Mine.
In a flash of movement, Jayce seized the other man beneath the curve of his ass with a possessive snarl and whirled around to throw him against the surface of the nearby desk. Viktor laughed breathlessly through it, a miraculous sound, hands burrowed through the back of Jayce’s hair as his slender thighs fell open to make space for his hips. Straightening, Jayce then took hold of Viktor’s bad leg and lifted it to rest against his shoulder, the mixture of arcane metal and the permanent brace startlingly heavy to bear.
Reaching down, Jayce aligned the slickened head of his cock with Viktor’s entrance but found himself faltering. Hesitating. Swallowing thickly, he flicked his eyes up to meet those of his lover-turned-enemy-turned-lover-once-more, catching those same complex thoughts staring back at him through a pair of glowing irises.
Something shifted in the air between them, then. Like the world, once sitting crookedly upon its axis, had finally righted itself, forcing everything back into startling clarity.
They were never going to be able to move on from this, were they?
As if sensing it, too, Viktor offered the smallest, gentlest smile Jayce had ever been given, and that was all it took for Jayce’s hips to ease forward, cock breaching the ring of muscle and plunging into the clenching heat he knew so well. The only place he ever truly belonged.
Mine.
“Ohhhh G-Gods!” Viktor’s ruined voice resounded off the laboratory walls, eyes rolling so far back into his skull that all Jayce could see was black sclera. Both hands slammed against the desk’s surface, scrabbling desperately for purchase as Jayce pressed deeper, and deeper, and deeper still. “Fuck… oh, f-fuck…”
Jayce trembled, legs nearly giving out beneath him at the overwhelming, all-consuming heat of Viktor’s body swallowing up every last inch he had to offer. Sweat bloomed on his brow, the salt of it stinging at the fresh scrapes marring his skin and pulling a broken groan from the depths of his chest. It felt so good. Too good. Better than anything he’d ever deserve, and as he bottomed out within his ex-partner with a visible shudder, Jayce felt a tear break free from his lashes, lost to the catharsis.
“Viktor…” He panted, feverish brow pressed to the metal calve rested on his shoulder. “…Viktor, you’re mine.”
Viktor practically sobbed in response, one arm thrown over his eyes.
Slowly, Jayce pulled back, withdrawing his cock in its near entirety from the other man’s body, before slamming back in with enough force to make them both shout. Stars danced on the edges of his vision, a dizzying whirl of galaxies.
“Say it,” Jayce growled through clenched teeth. He flattened one hand upon his ex-partner’s stomach, wishing he could feel himself through the skin and muscle and organs there, full and thick and claiming. Buried to the hilt, his hips fell still. Torturously so. “Say it, Machine Herald.”
Viktor’s eyes snapped toward him, brows raised.
“You think I don’t also know your little moniker?” Jayce smiled, breathless and triumphant. It was a rare achievement to be able to catch Viktor by surprise. “Go on, then, baby. Let me hear it, and I’ll fuck you just how you like it.”
He could tell from the half-hearted glare he received that Viktor was battling internally with his pride, but that battle was quickly lost the moment Jayce gave his hips a little roll, leaving Viktor’s mouth to fall open in a silent groan.
“Y-Yours…” he huffed.
“Mhmm… Again,” Jayce commanded as he began to move, slowly at first but with building vigor, arms wrapped tightly around Viktor’s metal leg. “Louder.”
Viktor whined, knuckles whitening where he clung for dear life to the edge of the desk. “A-Ah… Fuck! F-Fuck, Jayce, I’m… I’m yours.”
“Again.”
Jayce needed to hear it. Needed all of Piltover, all of Zaun, to hear it. Needed the sound of it to resonate through the empty halls of the decimated Academy and echo in the unfathomable space that had built between them. He needed the sound of it to imprint like a brand to Viktor’s vocal cords until he could say nothing else for the rest of his life.
“Y-Yours!” Viktor bellowed as Jayce roughly fucked into him with abandon, the slap of colliding skin like thunderclaps in the quiet. “J-Jayce, I’m yours!”
“And I’m yours…” Jayce responded, eyes fluttering. “I’ve always been yours… I’ll a-always be yours…”
Without missing a beat, Jayce took up his ex-partner’s other leg and placed it on his opposite shoulder, forcing Viktor’s ankles to cross at the back of his neck as he bowed forward and bent him clean in half upon the desk’s surface, elbows pressed to the backs of knees. Helpless but to take it, Viktor cried out desperately, deliriously, hands scrabbling up along Jayce’s shoulders as his metal throat was lavished in wet, open-mouthed kisses.
“You always feel so… s-so fucking good on my cock…” Jayce whispered as he pounded senselessly into the man beneath him, causing the desk to rock. “I missed this… I m-missed you… Gods, I missed you so f-fucking much…”
“Jayce…” Viktor’s nails pressed into the skin of his shoulder blades, pulling stinging red welts to the surface. “J-Jayce… Oh Jayce… m-my Jayce…”
Jayce made a broken sound and captured Viktor’s mouth in a bruising kiss that tasted like everything he never thought he’d feel again. Like redemption and forgiveness. Like hope and second chances. Like the promise of a future he thought had long slipped from his grasp, ruined by distrust and betrayal on both sides.
“I love you,” Jayce whispered against Viktor’s lips, that startling presence of tears blurring his vision. Distorting is voice. Reaching down, he brushed back those dark locks clinging to his ex-partner’s brow. “Y-You don’t have to say it back… I just…”
“I love you, too,” Viktor cut him off before leaning up to brush his mouth against Jayce’s lashes, kissing away the tears that hadn’t yet fallen, just as he’d done on that sleepy grey dawn so long ago. “I love you, too, J-Jayce.”
In that instant, Jayce felt himself shatter and rebuild anew. Felt the shadows dissipate to welcome the warm flicker of a growing ember’s light, the tentative promise of an unspoken maybe hanging in the air between them. With a wretched sob, he kissed Viktor. Kissed him again and again and again as the tears tumbled forth, as his hips moved and the desk rocked and the moonlight bleeding in from the window behind him swaddled them in the silver of its light.
Jayce’s hand slipped down between their bodies and curled around Viktor’s cock to stroke it in time with each thrust, eager to witness the achingly familiar sight of his ex-partner falling apart. Eager to drag him closer and closer to the teetering, white-hot edge of release.
“F-Fuck… h-hah… Ah, J-Jayce…” Viktor whimpered, black tears rushing down his temples. Jayce kissed them away reverently, tasting salt and the underlying hint of metal. “Jayce p-please, I’m… I’m so… I’m gonna…”
“Come for me, my baby…” Jayce panted, the coil of release tightening within his own belly as well. Building, building, molten hot and sharp as thorns. He could hardly collect his thoughts. Could hardly do anything more but slur over his words as he pressed his face in the crook of Viktor’s shoulder and fucked him with everything he had, hitting that sweet spot over and over and over. His muscles ached, his skin stung, his heart danced among the stars. “L-Let me hear you. Let them all hear you.”
Viktor held on like Jayce was the only thing tethering him to the ground, voice shattering. “Jayce… J-Jayce… O-Ohhh, Gods! Jayce!”
Ropes of warm white spilled across Jayce’s fingers in the echo of his own name being screamed to the heavens. Viktor’s orgasms were always brutal, wave after wave of convulsing pleasure leaving him a writhing, sweat-soaked mess of gorgeous devastation in Jayce’s arms. Growling, Jayce fucked him through it. Fucked him and kissed him and tasted the salt of his sweat and the sweetness of his sighs as his own release quickly followed, carrying him over the edge by Viktor’s body squeezing around him.
“H-Hah… Oh fuck…” Jayce whined, vision teetering. “F-Fuck! Viktor… Viktor… Viktor…”
He came hard, shooting deep into his ex-partner’s body with all the force of a Hexgate launch. His vision whitened, his legs nearly gave out. It was all so much, too much, and Viktor was there with him through it all, lavishing his throat and shoulders with wet kisses and bruising bites that only emptied him out further.
He couldn’t remember the last time he felt so whole.
Couldn’t remember the last time he’d ever been this happy.
Breathless and barely able to hold himself up, Jayce gently unhooked Viktor’s legs from his shoulders and swept him up into his arms with ease, cradling him close as he sunk back down onto the laboratory floor to bask in the trembling afterglow together. The cold side of the desk was a soothing press against his freshly-scratched back, and Jayce sighed deeply, cheek coming to rest against the top of Viktor’s head.
They caught their breath in comfortable silence, Viktor’s dense weight upon his lap almost enough to tempt Jayce into falling asleep if he wasn’t careful. Their hands wordlessly sought each other in the darkness, the brush of knuckles, the curl of fingers, before Viktor drew Jayce’s palm toward his mouth and pressed a lingering kiss to his lifeline.
“How do you feel?” Jayce couldn’t help but ask. Another habit hard to break. “You okay?”
“Mhmm…” Viktor nodded, nose pressed to the pulse point at the side of Jayce’s throat. "Just sore."
“Wasn’t too much?”
“Never.”
“May I be so bold as to ask…” Jayce swallowed back his nerves before continuing, free hand absentmindedly running up and down the length of Viktor’s bad leg. “…What did you come here for tonight, anyways?”
A few moments passed before Viktor responded, fingertips stroking patterns through the dark patch of curls on Jayce’s chest. “Just my remaining research notes. And… well…”
“A gemstone.”
Viktor’s silence was answer enough.
“May I ask what for?” Jayce prodded gently as he nosed at Viktor’s hairline, quietly thrilled to smell himself all over him, heavy with sweat and sex.
“I’ve been brainstorming a Hextech device to aid in the removal of harmful toxins from the air in Zaun,” Viktor explained. “A complex arcane system of filters that would ideally be installed within the fissures to trap the individual poisons, regardless of density, before they’re able to escape into the breathable air. The miniature prototype is partially constructed within my lab, already, but I’ll need a gemstone if I have any hopes of properly testing it in the field, and then several more if it somehow succeeds. The sheer size of the real thing would be…”
“Nearly as big as the Hexgates.”
“In a way, yes.”
Jayce’s stomach churned with unspoken understanding, promoting the arms wrapped around Viktor to fiercely tighten their hold. Of course. The fissure toxins. The very thing that had formed Viktor’s terminal illness, a cruel and gruesome mutation that lay dormant within Viktor’s body from childhood and up until his thirty-first year, where it bloomed and thrived and consumed without warning, leaving him to slowly drown in his own blood with only a handful of months to live.
“It’s still in its early stages,” Viktor went on with a small shrug. “It’s an ambitious venture, I’ll admit, and I can’t guarantee it’ll work, but…”
“May I help?”
Viktor’s eyes snapped up toward him. “…What?”
It was Jayce’s turn to shrug, now, a bashful smile gracing his features. “We’ve always worked better as a team, you and I. Besides, let’s consider it the first of several apologies I owe you.”
“I owe you just as many.”
“And you can start by telling me exactly where I can bring the gemstone tomorrow,” Jayce hummed, leaning down to nudge the bridge of Viktor’s nose with his own. His voice lowered to a whisper. “I keep them locked up tight in my apartment across the city, now. Too dangerous here. Too obvious, too.”
Viktor clamped his hand over his own eyes. “Of course I’d break into the wrong fucking place.”
“Not necessarily wrong,” Jayce grinned. He feathered their mouths together. “I was here, after all.”
“Mm… How fortunate for me.”
Viktor kissed him, then, and oh there it was… There it was. Gods help him, there it was.
The taste of magic.
“There’s a house at the end of Emberfilt Alley behind a crooked iron gate. No matter what we are now, no matter what becomes of us later, you will always find me there, Jayce Talis.”
And Jayce always did.