Chapter Text
Jayce stares at the papers sitting on his desk. Despite his pencil in desperate need of sharpening, he can’t bring himself to pull away, or even look away for that matter. The papers in question sported his messy scrawl, various words scattered along drawings that no one who wasn’t him had any chance of deciphering.
To an outsider, his thought process is erratic. His mind leaps from one concept to another with wild abandon, and Jayce is left desperately trying to hold onto the thought while he scrambles to finish writing his previous. For not the first time, Jayce wishes he could invent a machine to transcribe the words as he thought them, his hands unable to keep up with the train in his mind that plows on ahead. There’s no stops on this train, just scenic views that whizz by in a blink, new ideas and railways suddenly opening as they catch his eye.
But Jayce is used to this kind of flow. Sure, there’s no brakes on the train, meaning he can often get stuck working like this for hours and forget to eat or sleep, but this is where he gets the most work done! And he was really on the cusp of a breakthrough, he could feel it.
How were they supposed to adjust the speed of the user’s grip in one rotational movement? Maybe they could-
Jayce.
Alter the shape of the pulley? But what about different tensions of the pulley, wait no that was an entirely different issue…which could be solved-
Jayce.
Using a pulley that could variably change size. The concept was basically the same, the touch points would still be there for the cable to run alon-
“JAYCE.”
The train in his mind, unable to stop even if had wanted to, suddenly decouples from the rails and crashes magnificently, tearing up the landscape as it skids.
Jayce looks up startled, the environment around him jarring as if he hadn’t been sitting here for hours, and instead had suddenly been teleported to this position.
He blinks, like being woken up from a dream, and glances down at the paper in front of him. The feeling of its hold in his brain, the familiarity, rapidly fading. The energy it had lingers in his mind, leaving him feeling fuzzy in a way he couldn’t tell was good or bad.
“Jayce?”
When he remembers how to speak again, his voice is gravelly, “Uh- yeah yeah I heard you. What’s up?”
Viktor sits in front of him, his own schematics laid out on the desk they’re currently sharing. Viktor stares at him for a moment, his disheveled hair framing his concerned eyes. Had he slept recently? Maybe he should ask him- “I’ve been calling your name for ages now.”
Jayce glances down briefly at the paper again, one of the sketches distracting him before he remembers he should probably answer the other man, “Right. Right sorry. I swear I’m listening now.”
He forces himself to look at Viktor, who sighs, “Your leg is shaking the whole table, it’s ah- making it a bit of a challenge to get clean lines.”
Sure enough, when Jayce looks down his leg is bouncing up and down, the motion transmitting to the shared table.
He brings his leg to a halt despite the pressure that almost immediately starts building inside him, and he smiles apologetically at Viktor. His leg almost starts again at the feeling, but he catches it this time.
Jayce can’t keep his mind from wandering, to the moments in his childhood where an instructor would single him out for disrupting. Hissing at him, Do you ever sit still??
However, Viktor’s voice held none of the annoyance that had been in his old instructor’s tone. Instead, it was more factual. Jayce was shaking the table, and he shouldn’t be disrupting his partner’s work in the first place. He should have more self control than that.
Viktor, unaware of his internal struggle, nods and mutters a small, “Thank you.” when the shaking stops, before returning to work, easily becoming reabsorbed into the process. Jayce is left watching him, and only realizes he’s staring when Viktor shoots him a look. He shakes his head, as if he can shake the cobwebs from his own mind, and looks back down at the paper.
He feels the train in his mind trying to start up again, trying to find traction in the mud it’s gotten itself stuck in. The pressure inside him builds, and he finds himself resting a hand on his own leg to keep it from bouncing again.
He spends the next few minutes in this state. His thoughts flickering around, dancing between paying attention to keeping himself still, to the paper in front of him, to the buzzing of the lights, to the gentle scratch of Viktor’s pencil, and back to keeping himself still. Minutes turn into an hour, and his pencil that had almost seemed to grow warm with use earlier had now gone cold in his grip. His paper lay abandoned, the thoughts that had been flowing so freely before now plugged up like a dam.
He’s already sharpened his pencil twice since he started trying to work again, but he finds himself standing up once more to repeat the action, if only to attempt to release some of the pressure that had started to make his skin crawl.
He once again brings his pencil to a perfect point, and sits back down in his seat. Only this time he feels eyes on him, and looks up to see Viktor watching him intently, as if he were one of their hextech experiments. Jayce is surprised to find he isn’t made uncomfortable by the action, only caught off guard, it usually requires nothing short of the world ending before his partner would even consider pausing his work.
He knows.
Jayce gives him one of his award winning smiles, “What, do I have food on my face or something?”
Viktor only narrows his eyes further, gaze flickering down towards Jayce’s work, “You are quite restless, aren’t you?” He asks, ignoring the question.
Jayce follows Viktor’s gaze, and winces, a feeling he can only define as shame growing like an ugly vine inside him. It wraps around his lungs, stealing his breath. ‘He knows’ rings through his skull. He knows how lazy you are. He knows you’re unreliable. He’s going to get annoyed. Why couldn’t you just get it done? He’s disappointed. Disappointed.
Disappointed.
He finds himself apologizing, the words spilling over from his mouth before he can even process them, “Shit- I’m so sorry- I’m not trying to slack off, seriously. I promise I’ll get back to it I’m not trying to leave all the work to you or anything-“
Viktor silences him with a calmly raised hand, but the expression he wears is alarmed, “Jayce- I believe I may have given off the wrong impression. My comment was not to scrutinize your work ethic—which I’ve personally seen first hand—it was merely an observation.” A smile then crosses his face, “You are many things but uh, i don’t believe a ‘slacker’ is one of them.”
The effect is instant, and Jayce feels much of the tension leave his shoulders. But he’s left with a twinge of guilt. The paper still lays clearly untouched for the entire world to see, and Jayce has the urge to hide it under some books, or maybe under one of his hextech machines so that when people looked they would see that he’s capable of success. He wants to hold up all his creations, shaking them in their faces. He wants to scream, Look at what I’ve created despite this. Despite me. I’m useful I promise. I’m brilliant I promise. Look at what I’ve done. I can prove it.
His leg has started up again without his notice, and he clenches his jaw in frustration, forcing himself to take a deep breath. He has to prove to Viktor that he’s reliable if they’re going to make their hextech dream a reality. He has to prove he has self control, and get work done. Can listen. Can sit still.
Focus.
Any hopes that Viktor might not have noticed his internal struggle this time is dashed the moment he meets the other’s eyes. But instead of his eyes being filled with disappointment like he expected, they’re instead filled with a curiosity. Perhaps, even a dawning understanding.
Viktor hums thoughtfully, then grabs his cane and pushes himself to his feet. Jayce’s guilty eyes follow him as he wanders across the room, towards the pile of scrapped ideas they have in the corner.
It’s grown considerably, but neither of them have the heart to get rid of their failed experiments, just in case one day they might be useful.
Jayce can’t see from his angle what Viktor grabs after he spends a minute rummaging around in the pile, but soon enough he’s making his way back over and lowering himself into the chair once again.
Viktor then places an object onto the table in front of Jayce, and he immediately recognizes it. It’s a cube shape, with different moveable sections and runes shakily scratched into its various surfaces. When they had made it, it reminded him of a rubix cube he used to play with when he was younger. They hadn’t been able to make this particular idea work, but they knew there was something there at least.
Jayce automatically picks up the cube, almost impulsively, and rotated a few of the joints. When he looks up from it, Viktor is watching him, almost expectantly. Jayce glances around, as if the answer to his confusion will be scratched into the walls somewhere, “Uh… did you want me to do something or..?”
“Tell me about this.” Viktor requests instead, tapping his finger on Jayce’s paper to redirect his attention.
Jayce frowns, “What? Why? You already know what it is. Would just be a waste of time- and I’ve clearly wasted enough time already-”
“Tell me anyway.” Viktor interrupts with a casual shrug, crossing his arms and leaning back comfortably in his chair.
Jayce sighs, and reluctantly scans the schematics. He feels the pressure inside him push against it, and it takes him a long time, an embarrassingly long time, to reorient himself in the headspace he’d been in earlier. It feels impossible to even begin, and he feels himself grow frustrated again.
But Viktor sits there patiently. It’s clear that there’s no timer ticking away. No time limit. And it’s that patience that allows him to actually think.
He finds his hands automatically rotate the cube in his hands, flicking the various sections as he runs through the numbers in his mind. Suddenly, the buzzing of the lights, and the Everything Else that had been bothering him earlier aren’t such a big deal.
He starts talking, going through each of the concepts he had drawn in order. Sometimes he’d find himself start to go off on a tangent about a different subsystem that they weren’t currently worrying about, but Viktor was well used to this after their short time working together, and was able to redirect their focus. When it came to the part he got stuck on earlier, he’s standing up and dragging the chalk board over to where their seats are. Sometimes he tries to talk too fast and his words turn messy, sentences barely formed, but luckily Viktor is able to keep up, or asks him to repeat something he’s said without any hint of annoyance. He paces back and forth, creates wide gestures with his arms, and the cube gets tossed and thrown and rotated in his hands throughout it all. He nearly jumps on top of the table when he realizes the error in his work.
The smile that Viktor gives him though, as if they’ve discovered how to float with hextech for the first time again, feels even better. It’s the face Viktor always wears when one of his experiments is a resounding success.
It’s as he’s frantically fixing his work, something like victory singing in his chest, when he realizes he's suddenly gone quiet and he doesn’t know for how long. Viktor is still sitting across from him, and traces of the smile he wore earlier linger on his face.
And the cube still sits in his hand, which he finds himself rotating the different sections with one hand as he works. It’s quiet, but still gives a satisfying click as the sections slot into place. Whenever he feels the pressure building inside of him again, the feeling of the cube staves it off. It doesn’t go away completely, doesn’t ever really, but it helps more than he ever expected.
A new train chugs along the rails, but this one comes with a brake.