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Chapter Text

All things considered; the pitfall had technically served its intended purpose. That came as no surprise to Viktor. Rarely did he ever construct a trap that didn’t do exactly what he’d built it to do.

It was what he found at the bottom of it that left him rattled.

The stranger pressed himself back against the uneven dirt walls as he saw Viktor approach, shotgun poised in the hand that wasn’t currently wrapped around the pommel of his cane. He was young from what Viktor could glean at this distance, no more than a year or two his junior, with tawny brown skin and eyes like warm coffee with a touch too much cream. A dark beard grew over a strong, handsome jaw, and the sweater he wore was threadbare and filthy, and not just from the fall into the pit. Poor fool looked as if he’d been on the road for several weeks.

“I-I’m not infected!” The stranger choked out, hands visibly trembling as he raised them in surrender to the shotgun barrel Viktor had aimed between his eyes. There seemed to be no weapon on him. His thighs and torso were visibly bare of holsters.

Viktor paid the man’s words little mind as he quickly cast his gaze at the surrounding woodlands, listening, searching for any sign of movement among the towering aspens. All around, the wilds were eerily still as the sun made its slow descent toward the horizon, gilding the world in the haze of golden hour that bled through the yellow leaves like fire.

His hackles raised. His finger ghosted the trigger. He hated being on this side of the fence.

“Please. I’m unarmed, and I’m just trying to get to Zaun…” the stranger added, calling Viktor’s attention back to him with the sheer ache in his voice. The sincerity.

Viktor shot him a look, the grip on the shotgun tightening. “On your own?”

The stranger swallowed, then nodded. “There used to be more of us. From the Piltover QZ…” his expression dropped, as did his arms. A gesture of quiet defeat. “It’s gone, man. All of it. It… It just happened so fast.”

Viktor set his jaw.

Shit.

The Piltover Quarantine Zone had been one of the few monolithic havens created in the aftermath of mankind’s downfall, a sprawling metropolis walled off against the rising hordes of infected. In fact, it was Piltover’s own Enforcers that had raided Viktor’s neighborhood mere days after the initial outbreak three years ago, driving every resident from their homes and shepherding them into the backs of cramped trucks with the promise of food, shelter, protection… so long as they obeyed.

It was claimed to be all in the good name of preserving humanity, though Viktor knew well enough that it was just another means of what remained of their twisted government to maintain control over the scared and vulnerable. Last Viktor heard over the radio, there had been well over a hundred thousand living within Piltover’s heavily guarded walls.

If it had fallen…

Viktor shifted his stance, face schooled into cold neutrality despite the familiar twinge of pain resonating up his bad leg. He lowered his aim, but only somewhat. “Are you hurt?” He inquired, softer than intended.

The man shook his head, rubbing absently at one of his shoulders. God, he was broad. “Just a little banged up from the fall.”

“Should have watched your step, then.”

The stranger huffed a small laugh. “Fair enough…”

Viktor considered the man at the bottom of the pit for one long thoughtful moment, before he heaved a weary sigh and holstered his shotgun so he could fetch the small ladder leaning against the apple tree that grew by the fence. He could never climb any higher than the bottom rung, but it was all he’d ever needed to reach the lowest hanging fruit. The sweetly spiced preserves Viktor often made from what little he could harvest every autumn always lasted him a while, anyways.

The extension ladder was made from ultra-lightweight fiberglass, easy enough for Viktor to haul beneath his free arm with little fuss. Even so, a grunt escaped him all the same as he dragged it over and shoved it carefully over the edge of the pit, much to the initial shock of the stranger, who merely gawked up at him.

Clearly, he’d held little faith that Viktor would have even bothered to save him at all.

Viktor gestured to the ladder with the end of his cane. “Climb. Slowly.”

And the stranger did, hands trembling slightly until the fiberglass rattled beneath his touch as he hauled himself up one step at a time.

“Stop there,” Viktor ordered, which froze the other man in place, halfway up. Reaching back, Viktor plucked the PIDRA scanner from his belt and activated it with the flick of a switch. The device hummed to life in his grasp.

“How did you get one of those?”

“I stole it,” Viktor muttered as he leaned in close enough to press the reader to the side of the other man’s neck.

The stranger stared up at him as he held still long enough for the scanner to assess for any signs of fungal anomaly in his blood. This close, Viktor quietly noted that his lashes were long and dark, and he had a faint scar running over the apple of his left cheek. “You stole a fucking Piltovian Disaster Response Agency scanner from an Enforcer?”

“You seem surprised.”

“More like impressed. I’d never have the balls.”

Now it was Viktor’s turn to huff in amusement.

The scanner hissed before the screen flashed green, uncoiling the knot of nerves Viktor hadn’t even realized had built in the pit of his stomach.

Not infected. Just as he’d said.

Viktor exchanged the scanner for his shotgun, and wordlessly ordered the man to continue his ascent with the end of it. Once they were both on even ground, Viktor tried not to pay any mind to the sheer size of the stranger before him. A head taller and nearly twice as broad; built like he was more than familiar with an honest day’s labor. Probably a trades worker judging by the visible calluses on the palms he kept raised on either side of him.

Viktor took a small, shuffling step back, and kept the shotgun raised between them. He inclined his head toward the western horizon. “Zaun QZ is in that direction. If you leave now, you will reach its border by daybreak. The road cuts through rural land, so it is mostly barren of infected, but be mindful once you reach the bridge. They are known to hide there.”

Even with this information, the stranger remained where he stood, his exhaustion clearer now that he was out of the pitfall’s shadows. Backlit by the glow of the fading sun, he looked to be on the verge of teetering over. “Listen… I’m starving. I can’t remember the last time I had anything to eat.” He ran his tongue over his chapped bottom lip. “Is there anything you can—”

“I’m sparing you,” Viktor cut him off gently, yet firmly. “That should be enough. Anyone else would not have paid you even that kindness.”

The stranger withered, his eyes as soft and pitiful as a pup pleading for scraps. “M-My name is Jayce Talis…”

“I don’t recall asking.”

“…Please. Please, just enough to hold me until daybreak, and then I’ll go. I promise.”

Viktor cocked his jaw, loathing the pang of sympathy he immediately felt for the man who stood before him, pleading with his hands raised even though he could’ve easily overpowered Viktor at any time. Even more so, he loathed how it was enough to leave his aim wavering.

Damn it.

Damn the persistent weakness of his heart in a world that had never once granted him that same softness.

“If I do this,” Viktor said after a beat of silence. “You will tell no one of what you found here. You will eat, and you will leave, and the existence of myself and this place will disappear from your mind. Do you understand?”

Jayce nodded enthusiastically.

And that was enough for Viktor to re-holster his weapon and turn back toward the fence, wondering briefly if he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life.

When the water first hit his shoulders, Jayce was certain he’d died in that pit and gone to paradise. There had to be no other feasible explanation for the sensation. For the sheer and utter relief of feeling hot, clean water on his skin for the first time since the world as he knew it fell apart.

Groaning shamelessly, Jayce bowed his body forward beneath the spray. He braced both palms on the slick tile of the shower wall as the water rushed down the planes of his back, carrying away the weeks of sweat and grime and old blood that had clung to him since even before Piltover’s walls had fallen.

Showers in the QZ were always five minutes tops, and lukewarm at best. Get in, scrub what you can of the day’s work away, and jump out shivering, and that’s only if your buildings’ limited water reserve had enough to grant you a chance to clean up that week. If not, you had to decide whether not reeking like death for a few days was worth dipping into your drinking water supply. As Jayce watched the precious hot water swirl toward the drain in whorls of grey, he almost felt guilty for allowing himself to linger. To soak it all in.

He washed his hair twice and his body three times over, convinced he’d never get this clean again for as long as he lived. The soap he used smelled soft and pleasant, like fresh citrus peel and mint. Homemade by the looks of it, and far better than anything he’d ever been able to afford at a trading post, even after pulling doubles at the forge.

There came a sharp knock.

“May I enter?” The soft, richly accented voice of his savior—Viktor was his name—asked from behind the bathroom door.

Viktor. Good name. Strong. It suited him.

“Of course!” Jayce called back as he scrubbed a soapy hand down his jaw. Damn, he needed a shave.

A faint creak. A scuffle of steps. The sound of a cane against the bathroom tile. Jayce watched the shift of movement as it cast delicate shadows over the pale shower curtain between them.

“I left you some clean clothes on the sink,” Viktor informed him.

Jayce peeled back the shower curtain just enough to poke his head out, wide eyed. “You did?”

Viktor faltered with one hand braced on the doorknob as though he’d just begun to leave.

He was tall and lithe as a young tree and couldn’t have been much older than his late twenties, just as Jayce was. His short dark hair was swept back in tousled, feathery layers, and the eyes that peered back at Jayce from beneath the shadows of thick brows were like sunlight spilling through a bottle of whiskey; depthless and amber bright. He wore a brown, oversized knit sweater above a crisp white shirt with the collar buttoned high at his throat. If it wasn’t for the pistol holster strapped to his thigh, Jayce would have mistaken him for an English major.

And then there were those damn moles. Like dots of spilled ink on milky white parchment. Viktor had one on his right cheek, and another just above the left corner of his soft, downturned mouth.

Jayce had come to realize fairly quickly that he had a hard time forming coherent sentences when he looked at them for too long.

Viktor adjusted his grip on the cane in his hand, the aid beautifully crafted from sturdy dark wood and burnished metal. “There was an abandoned clothing store at the end of the street that I emptied a couple of years back,” he explained with a shrug as he regarded the pile of neatly folded clothes he’d brought. “I… guessed your size.”

Jayce stared at him in breathless wonder. Him, not the clothes. “…Thank you.”

Throat bobbing visibly, Viktor nodded once and began to step out.

“Uh, hey…” Jayce interrupted before the door could be shut between them once more. He offered a bashful smile. “Is it okay if I have, like… five more minutes in here? This is incredible.”

Viktor looked back at him, gaze flickering with something that Jayce found difficult to read but longed to piece together like a calculation bleeding fresh ink through the pages of his old college notebook.

There came a beat of silence, a moment of doubtful hesitation that made Jayce feel antsy in his skin like he’d somehow overstepped, but then…

“Sure.”

The door clicked shut.

Making every second of those five minutes count, Jayce rinsed himself thoroughly, then bid the water a mournful farewell as he cut the flow and threw the shower curtain open. The air was balmy with steam, and the towels freshly laundered given their scent as Jayce burrowed his nose into one of them and breathed in deep. He groaned softly into the fabric.

Simple luxuries.

A spare toothbrush and straight razor had also been left aside for him, and by the time Jayce stepped out of the bathroom twenty minutes later with a shaven jaw and in clothes that fit like a dream, he felt like an entirely new person.

The little house that Viktor resided in at the end of a single gated off street was warmly lit and filled with mismatched furnishings and clutter that invoked a sense of coziness long forgotten in the current state of their world. Stacks of books teetered on every feasible surface between empty coffee mugs and flourishing houseplants of varying species. A fire crackled from within an old wood-burning stove in the sitting room, and he briefly noted a record player perched on a stack of milk crates filled with vinyl’s over by the grand bay window.

As Jayce wandered deeper, drawn toward the scent of something delicious being made that left his stomach muscles aching, he allowed his fingertips to trace along the spines of the nearest stack of books perched on a shelf between a grandfather clock and a rolling blackboard.

He noted familiar titles, ranging between dense tomes on human physiology and mathematics, to cracked mass-market science fiction paperbacks. Jayce smiled softly to himself as he plucked one of those paperbacks from the pile and ran a gentle touch over the yellowed pages and dog-eared corners. A personal favorite title of his, and apparently Viktor’s as well, if the annotations scribbled into the margins as he flipped his way through it were any indication.

Jayce kept the book with him as he took a seat at the end of the dining table where a place had been set out for him, complete with an empty wine glass, silverware, and a neatly folded linen napkin.

There was a matching one on the opposite end. And a candle lit between them.

When the door between the kitchen and the dining room opened without warning, Jayce was so absorbed in the novel that he practically leapt out of his skin.

Brandishing a single plateful of something that smelled downright incredible, Viktor regarded him with a frown.

Jayce held the book up shyly. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” he murmured, reciting the title like it wasn’t blatantly obvious to its owner. “S’one of my favorites. I hope you don’t mind that I—”

“You shaved.”

Jayce blinked, then dragged his hand along the stubbled edge of his jawline like it surprised him as well. “Oh! Yeah… I did. Do you like it?”

Okay.

What the fuck kind of question was that.

Viktor cocked his brow like he wondered the same thing, something not unlike amusement glittering in his amber stare.

“I-I mean…” Jayce quickly clapped the book shut and set it aside, quiet mortification burning toward the tips of his ears. “Thank you, is what I’m trying to say. Again. For the clothes, and the chance to get cleaned up. I actually feel human for the first time in weeks.”

He glanced down at himself. Toward the slim-fitted dark washed jeans and the soft grey henley he wore beneath a green plaid flannel. Viktor had even been kind enough to add a clean pair of boxer briefs to the pile. And socks. Warm wool socks, free of holes.

“Well, I certainly wasn’t going to fit into them, so I am pleased to know they are getting some proper use instead of rotting in a box at the back of my closet,” Viktor murmured as he approached with the food, the strike of his cane resounding like gunshots compared to the calm quiet of the house.

Jayce couldn’t recall the last time he’d ever been somewhere so peaceful that he could hear the chirp of crickets in the woodlands outside. No such place existed in a QZ.

“If you are interested,” Viktor continued. “You can go through the box and take what you need when you leave.”

“Really?”

Viktor hummed just as he set the plate in front of him.

And Jayce just… stared.

He’d expected canned meat. And, if he was feeling truly indulgent, perhaps some tinned beans and something pickled or preserved as a garnish on the side. Not…

“Is... Is this fucking rabbit?”

“It is,” Viktor replied as he left to fetch his own plate, granting Jayce a moment to truly absorb what had been placed in front of him.

Slow roasted rabbit on a bed of mashed potatoes and honey glazed carrots, gently drizzled in what looked to be a gravy made from the fatty pan drippings. There was even a side salad of bright bitter greens and plump cherry tomatoes coated in oil, lemon, and salt.

Food.

Fresh, real food…

Food he didn’t have to break himself for. Fight for. Scrounge for. Food that he didn’t eat hunched over the fire of his forge or scoop cold and gelatinous from the bottom of a can with his fingers.

When Viktor returned and set his own plate down, Jayce’s face split into a tearful, delighted smile so damn wide it downright ached. His hands shook with barely contained giddiness as he unfolded his linen napkin and draped it across his lap. As he did so, he heard the sound of a bottle being uncorked, before Viktor was suddenly filling the empty glass beside him with deep, red wine.

Unable to resist any longer, Jayce grabbed a knife and fork and tucked into his meal.

The first bite nearly made him see the face of God.

Chewing slowly, he gawked across the table at Viktor, who busied himself with filling his own glass like he hadn’t just somehow shifted Jayce’s teetering world back onto its axis.

“Viktor…” Jayce breathed after he swallowed his mouthful. “What the actual fuck.”

That earned him a smirk as Viktor took a seat across from him. He lowered himself slowly, knuckles white around the pommel of his cane like it hurt. His face, however, betrayed no such feeling. Like he was more than used to it. “Ehh, easy praise from a man half-starved.”

“No, no, this isn’t my hunger speaking,” Jayce explained while he laid his hand over his own heart, praying his sincerity, his gratefulness, came through. “I’m serious. I don’t even think I had anything this good before the world went to shit. Certainly not from anyone besides my mom.”

Viktor momentarily looked as if he didn’t quite know how to deal with such a compliment, frowning like he’d been handed something he had no idea how to hold without breaking. So, instead, he merely nodded in acknowledgement of the praise and reached for his wine.

There was a faint dusting of pink blooming along his cheekbones.

Jayce sipped from his own glass. The wine was rich and had the full-bodied flavor of black cherry and plum. Nothing at all like the watered-down piss at the QZ. He swallowed a gulp, before slumping back against the chair with one arm thrown dramatically over his eyes. “Ohhh my god, I may die here.”

“Not on my good rug you’re not.”

Jayce barked a laugh. And Viktor…

Viktor laughed, too. A low, breathy thing, muffled against the backs of long fingers.

Fuck.

Jayce wanted to hear it again. Louder. Brighter.

“Where the hell did you come from?” He asked Viktor in whispered wonder as he began to feast.

Viktor stabbed into a carrot. “Zaun, originally,” he responded. “Though I spent the last few years before the outbreak in Piltover attending its university. I graduated less than a year before everything fell apart.” He used his fork to gesture around them. “This house once belonged to my mother, and I moved in shortly after graduation to care for her in the final months of her life. I’m only grateful she passed a week before the first cordyceps case.”

Jayce blinked. “Wait. You attended Piltover Academy?”

Viktor’s shoulders visibly tensed. “Is that a shock?”

“No! No, no, it isn’t!” Jayce assured him. “I also attended.”

Viktor straightened. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all,” Jayce laughed before washing down another sumptuous mouthful with a swig of wine. “What did you study?”

“I received my Doctorate in Biological Engineering with a Masters in Biorobotics.”

“Fuck off, you did not.”

“If you long for proof, the degrees are both mounted on the wall behind you,” Viktor made a humorless sound against the lip of his glass. “Not that they are worth much of anything now.”

Jayce’s brows furrowed as he studied his savior from across the table, a memory he thought long forgotten suddenly seeping its way to the surface of his mind. One that was tinged with dust-motes and sunbeams and the scent of the Academy library in the early morning hours before the first droves of students shambled in, sleepy-eyed and grumbling with coffees in hand.

“Wait…” he set his fork down. “Did you publish a paper theorizing the potential advancement of physical augmentation and prosthetics using artificially intelligent biorobotics?”

Now it was Viktor’s turn to look stunned. He froze with a bite of rabbit halfway toward his mouth, staring at Jayce as if he’d just sprouted a second head. “…Yes?”

“You titled it The Glorious Evolution.”

“I… I did.” His eyes narrowed. “H-How—”

Jayce reeled, clamping both hands over his eyes as he laughed toward the ceiling. “Holy fuck. Holy fuck, Viktor, that paper was everything!”

“You… read it?”

“Read it? Viktor, I worshiped it.”

Jayce practically knocked his chair backward from how quickly he launched himself out of it. He grabbed both his plate and glass of wine and rounded the table excitedly to sink into the seat at Viktor’s side, instead. And Viktor watched it all in muted shock, brows shot up toward his hairline.

“I was working toward my Doctorate of Mechanical Engineering when it released. It was all I thought about for weeks,” he explained, breathless from the way his heart thundered behind his ribs.

And the way Viktor looked back at him, then, with a familiar mixture of awe and curiosity…

It made Jayce feel like he was finally, finally being seen for the first time. Not as a survivor, but as a scientist.

He watched the unexpected smile ignite across the other man’s face, slow and dazzling, like the first kiss of gilded light on the horizon at dawn. Like the promise of a long and hazy summer when all he’d ever known was the cold and the dark. It highlighted the slight crookedness of Viktor’s canines. The little gap between his two front teeth.

Fuck, he was so beautiful.

“…You are an engineer.”

“Was,” Jayce’s own smile faltered, a flicker of sadness shifting the edges of his mouth downward. “Just a blacksmith, now. I was hired to design and build weapons and tools used by PIDRA back at the QZ. Didn’t pay much, but it kept me busy.”

Viktor’s fingers, long and slender, absently traced over the rim of his wine glass. Jayce struggled not to stare. He wondered how they’d feel burrowed into the back of his hair, or wrapped around his throat, or pressing down against the flat of his tongue as he sucked them straight to the knuckle…

…Jesus Christ.

Okay.

Apparently, this is where his exhausted mind deigned to wander after weeks of stumbling through the wilds outside Piltover without proper human contact. Fantastic.

“That explains your hands,” Viktor mused aloud as he tilted his head, allowing a stray tendril of dark hair to fall across his brow in such a way that Jayce found it difficult to function.

“My hands?”

“Mm. The calluses. I noticed them when you were in the pit. Figured you were a trades worker of some kind.”

Dear fucking God above.

“You’re observant.”

“I have to be,” Viktor muttered as he pushed a cherry tomato around his plate with the prongs of his fork. “Alone out here? One simply cannot be too careful lest a vagrant trip and fall into one of the traps.”

Jayce guffawed. “I didn’t trip! I just sort of…” he made a vague sort of flailing gesture with his hands.

Viktor quirked a brow. “Meandered a little too far to the left?”

“Shut up.”

Viktor smirked against the edge of his wine glass.

“Actually… y’know what’s funny?” Jayce murmured as he rested both arms across the edge of the table and allowed himself to lean in closer. Just a little, so he could admire the way Viktor’s eyes reflected the single candle flame burning at the center of the table. “On the morning that everything went to hell, I, ah…” He scrubbed a nervous hand over the back of his neck. “I was actually going to shoot you an email asking if you’d like to meet up for coffee.”

Viktor snorted, though not unkindly. “Liar.”

“I’m serious,” said Jayce with a shrug. “I wanted to pick your brain about a theory I was workshopping for my final dissertation.”

“Is that so?”

He nodded. “You were the only person I wanted to speak to about it. Reading your paper…” His voice softened. “It was like I was seeing my own views of the world staring back at me. Someone else who saw the potential I saw for what the future could be. Who wasn’t afraid to shatter boundaries to make things better for everyone.”

“Cum fit mutandi mundum, non petendi licentiam,” Viktor breathed, reciting the familiar mantra of their Academy. The same one that was carved into the entryway leading into the soaring halls of the Department of Science.

“Exactly,” Jayce whispered, feeling that old familiar pang of bittersweetness. The one that often came to him at the end of a long day at the forge, when he stood at the window of his apartment in the QZ and imagined his life had the world not ended around him.

The changes he could have made. Useless, now, in the grand scheme of it all.

“Let’s hear it.”

Jayce faltered halfway into another mouthful of food and looked up at Viktor. “Hm?”

“Your theory,” Viktor clarified. “Let’s hear it.”

Jayce blinked. Swallowed. “…Really?”

“Eh, we might be three years late, but I believe I am long overdue for an old-fashioned brain picking, anyways,” Viktor said as he leaned back in his seat and crossed his bad leg over the other, hand absently massaging circles into the muscle above his knee. He then jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “If it helps, I can even put a pot of coffee on?”

Jayce beamed.

They rolled the blackboard over. Talked as Jayce scraped clean not one but two platefuls of supper. Drained the bottle of wine between them, then exchanged it for a pot of fresh coffee and a plate of crisp anise biscuits that Viktor had baked the day before.

The clock ticked. The moon rose, a curved sickle that smiled silver bright against the starless black sky. Paying no heed to the hours that passed, Jayce covered the surface of Viktor’s blackboard from corner to corner with various prototype sketches and schematics detailing the magnificent theory he would have built his final dissertation around, his movements animated with a degree of passion that Viktor had long forgot existed in the world.

And from it, he felt his own lost spark ignite, like the last gasping dregs of a dying ember finally being fed the tinder needed to grow into a healthy, roaring flame.

They debated like rivals.

Collaborated like partners.

Laughed like lifelong friends.

And through it all, the room around Viktor faded into the background, like an artist dragging their hand down a finished painting and smearing the still-wet oils. Familiar details suddenly blurred, suddenly changed and, for a moment, the walls of his home shifted to become the sun-drenched halls of Piltover Academy, where a pair of bright young scientists shared dreams of changing the world together.

Perhaps in another life, that is precisely what they did.

Eventually, once the table had been tidied and the dishes washed and dried, they moved their conversation into to the living room, where Viktor settled on the corner of the couch nearest to the wood-burning stove. Wine still warm in his belly, he allowed his gaze to subtly drag up along the long curve of Jayce’s spine as he thumbed through Viktor’s old vinyl collection with a ghost of a smile upon his lips.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Jayce said as he plucked a vinyl from the pile and turned it over to read the track list. “How did you even end up here? I thought PIDRA emptied all the towns within a hundred-mile radius of its borders.”

Viktor rubbed an absentminded thumb up and down the ceramic edge of his mug. Feathers of delicate steam rose from the coffee’s tawny surface. “There is a bunker ten feet below the floor you are currently standing on.” He enunciated this by tapping the end of his cane against the hardwood. “That is where I hid when they came.”

Jayce cast him a surprised look. “A bunker?”

“Mm. My late father was a… survivalist of sorts,” Viktor explained as he leaned back into the plush cushioning of the couch. “A byproduct of growing up as a very young child within a war-torn country. Even after moving here, the paranoia never left him, and ironically enough, he’d spent his whole life convinced the world was going to end in one way or another. He had a bunker constructed beneath this house to ensure that my mother and I would always be safe if bombs were to suddenly drop on our heads.”

Viktor peered down at his reflection warped on the surface of his coffee and huffed a sharp exhale through his nose. “In all honesty, my mother used it as a storage basement up until three years ago. Now it is my workshop.”

Jayce turned to face him, dark brows furrowed, the vinyl sleeve still in his grasp. “But why hide? Why not just go with the others to the QZ?”

“You mean the QZ that fell?”

“You couldn’t have possibly known that would happen then.”

Viktor leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Do you honestly believe the Enforcers would have taken one look at me and not put me down like a dog?”

Jayce paled at that, eyes flicking over to the cane in Viktor’s grasp.

“PIDRA are not exactly known for showing mercy to those they do not deem useful. A brilliant mind means nothing if I cannot work and earn my place within Piltover’s walls as a productive member of new society. I would have merely been just another mouth they could not afford to feed.” Viktor shrugged. “And so… I hid. And when the neighborhood emptied and the Enforcers vanished from sight with everyone loaded into the backs of their trucks, I raised the fence, set my traps, and have been here ever since.”

Jayce tilted his head, and the devastatingly gentle way he regarded Viktor from across the room made him shift within his seat. “…Alone?”

“Ah, I have been alone for much of my life,” Viktor murmured, turning his attention away from Jayce’s eyes to instead focus on the crackle of the hungry fire through the grates of the wood-burning stove. He was used to pity, but being looked at with understanding made it feel as if his very skin was an ill-fitting suit he’d stuffed himself into.

He didn’t know what to do with such a feeling. How it pressed at him in all the wrong places, like a misaligned seam.

“Children can be cruel creatures, and not many wanted to play with a child who could not keep up in a game of playground tag.”

A long beat of silence, a pop of crackling flame, before Jayce whispered, “I would’ve played with you.”

Viktor fixed him with a deadpan look, even as his chest ached with something unspoken. Something he didn’t want to look too closely at.

“I mean it. Big dork like me with his superhero t-shirts and rock collection? I would’ve thought you were the fucking coolest,” Jayce smiled until it creased the corners of his eyes. “Just like I do now.”

Viktor clicked his tongue and took a long sip from his coffee, unable to suppress the little smile he hid behind the ceramic. “How much wine have you had?”

“No more than you.”

“Mm.”

He watched, then, as Jayce slipped the vinyl from its protective sleeve and gingerly set it upon the turntable.

“You know… I’m kind of pissed that we never encountered each other at the Academy,” said Jayce.

“It was a fairly large department in a roaring beast of a school,” Viktor replied. “Though it is possible we may have brushed shoulders once or twice, even with me being a year ahead of you.”

Jayce shook his head. “I’d like to think I would’ve remembered you if we did.”

“Because of the…?” He gestured toward his cane.

“No,” Jayce lifted the needle and set it carefully upon the spinning edge of the record.

The sound crackled, before a familiar timeless tune began to resonate from the little speaker. The trilling of the strings filled the room in a sweeping melody that Viktor knew like the pulse of his own heart. He’d spent many an evening balanced on his mother’s slippered feet, slowly dancing to it with her as a saucepan of sweetmilk simmered on the stovetop.

“There’s just… something about you, I guess,” Jayce continued, transfixed on the vinyl as it gleamed in the flickering firelight. “Something that I feel would have allowed me to pluck you from the crowd as though you were the only drop of color in an ocean of grey.”

Viktor felt his mouth go dry.

He…

He couldn’t have possibly heard that right.

“Do you remember the Distinguished Innovator’s Gala they held for the DOS graduates at the end of every year?” Jayce then asked, hands stuffed casually into the pockets of his jeans like Viktor’s heart wasn’t currently attempting to claw its way out of his throat.

Viktor’s voice was tight. “I am aware of it.”

“I remember they always invited the alumni from the previous year to attend,” Jayce looked over at him. “I’d like to think I would have met you there, had mine happened.”

“Alas, there is a small flaw to your theory.”

“Which is?”

“I would not have been there. I didn’t even attend my own.”

Jayce sputtered. “What?! Why not?”

“I have never been overly fond of grand social gatherings,” Viktor admitted as he set his mug of coffee on the side table. “Too many eyes. Too many bodies. It has always left me anxious.”

“Well, lucky for you, there’s only the two of us here.”

Viktor narrowed his eyes distrustfully. “…And?”

“And let’s imagine we’re at the Gala right now,” Jayce gestured toward their surroundings with a sweeping twirl of his arms. “The world is still in one piece, and you and I are standing inside of the Academy Conservatory where the parties are usually held. The chandeliers are glittering, champagne is pouring down pyramids of crystal flute glasses, there’s a string orchestra on the dais by the glass doors that open out to the gardens.” He grinned, then. “What are you wearing?”

“Clothes, hopefully.”

Jayce barked a laugh. “C’mon, I’m serious!” He shifted his stance and posed gallantly like a theater actor, hands on his hips. “I’m in a white suit jacket embellished with gold. My cravat is blood red. My waistcoat is embroidered. I smell fantastic.” He pointed to Viktor. “And you?”

Viktor cocked his jaw, the sudden brush of countless butterfly wings beneath his ribcage making it difficult to catch his breath in that moment. He adjusted his grasp on the pommel of his cane, palms suddenly clammy. “I am…” he swallowed, warmth reaching his ears. “…in all black. With a white silk cravat and… and gloves.”

Jayce hummed low like the answer pleased him. He then began to cross the room in slow, languid strides. “I spot you from across the ballroom, hugging the wall like you’re a specimen pinned in a shadowbox, and I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Viktor felt that same heat bloom within his every extremity, now. Thank fucking God he set his coffee down when he did, because he was certain the mug would have dropped from his hand from the shock of it.

And he watched, helpless, as Jayce came to a stop right in front of him, towering so tall that all Viktor knew was the darkness of his shadow as it washed over him. The scent of his own homemade soap on his skin.

“I cross the Conservatory to get to your side,” Jayce then extended the bend of his elbow, his smile enthralling in its gentleness. “And I ask you to dance with me.”

Viktor stared at him. “…Beg pardon?”

“I ask you to dance,” Jayce unhurriedly repeated through a whisper. “With me.”

“And do I say yes?”

“That’s entirely up to you.”

Viktor pressed his lips into a thin line as he regarded the arm being offered. His voice wavered brokenly, so soft that it was any wonder Jayce heard him beneath the music. “I am… not very good, I’m afraid.”

Jayce’s tone left Viktor aching. “That’s okay. I can show you.”

After a moment of hesitation, Viktor’s free hand shook somewhat as he tentatively placed it on the curve of Jayce’s bicep. The flannel he wore was soft beneath his palm, and from this angle he noted a small white scar on his clavicle. Viktor focused on that as he used his cane to unfurl himself from the edge of the couch. That, and certainly not on the way Jayce rose smoothly with him, offering himself as a form of support without feeling the need to deprive Viktor of the simple dignity that came with being able to stand on his own.

He allowed Jayce to lead him to the center of the room.

Then set his cane against the milk crate holding his vinyl collection.

“Here,” Jayce murmured as he stood before him. “Take my hand.”

And Viktor did, though not without first drawing in a slow breath to attempt to stifle the way his fingers trembled as they curled slowly into Jayce’s. The brush of skin on skin after years deprived of even the most basic human contact surged like an electrical current through Viktor, those calluses rough against his own palm.

The starving ache of it was... insurmountable.

Swallowing thickly, he tried not to appear as nervous as he was when he felt the weight of Jayce’s other hand settle on the small of his back, impossibly warm even through his sweater. He sensed the brush of a thumb over one of the titanium bolts drilled into his spinal column from the countless surgeries he’d endured as a child, the motion wholly unfamiliar in its unspoken tenderness. In its quiet, effortless care of him.

“Place your other hand on my shoulder,” Jayce instructed, his breath warm against the shell of Viktor’s ear. His voice was deep and low, like the promise of thunder on a summer morning when Viktor was still nestled in bed, windows open, safe and momentarily free of pain. “I won’t let you fall. Promise.”

Viktor nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He then did as he was bidden and curled his arm beneath Jayce’s, so that he could wrap his hand around the back of one broad, powerful shoulder. He felt the muscles there roll into his palm like the way an affectionate cat would push all of itself into you when it wanted attention.

That brought them so much closer together, chests colliding until Viktor was certain Jayce could feel the way his heart jackrabbited against his ribs. He was consumed by his awareness of it. All of it. Jayce’s heat, his scent, his body. He felt the soft scratch of the other man’s cheek stubble as it came to rest against his temple, heard the click of Jayce’s throat as he swallowed before taking in a long, shuddering breath.

Like he, too, was nervous, though Viktor couldn’t fathom why.

“Ready?” Jayce asked.

“Mhm.”

Then, as the music faded into crackling silence and the next song swelled into a trilling start, they began to move. A slow shuffle in place upon Viktor’s living room rug, weight swaying from one foot to the other in a way that did not force Viktor beyond his own limitations. Like Jayce, in the few hours they’d come to know one another, had already made it a point to begin familiarizing himself with it. Like it mattered to him. Like it mattered at all.

Like, at this time tomorrow, Jayce wasn’t going to be miles away within Zaun’s protective borders, with Viktor’s existence as no more than a fleeting memory to look back on.

Wincing against the unexpected sting of that thought, Viktor closed his eyes and allowed his head to come to rest against Jayce’s shoulder.

What a foolish thing to feel.

Neither of them spoke for a time, content to simply listen to the timeless sound of the music as it crackled from the speaker, the female singer belting words of unrequited love through the halls of Viktor’s empty little house as they swayed in a slow circle before the flickering fire.

“So…” Viktor finally managed, voice crackling. He cleared his throat before continuing. “…You had a rock collection?”

Jayce burst into a fit of soft, bubbling laughter, the rumbling sound of it dissipating the swell of tension that had built between them. Unable to help himself, Viktor laughed as well, grin pressed into the fabric of Jayce’s shirt.

“I did,” Jayce replied, thumb lazily tracing over the bumps of Viktor’s knuckles. A firestorm of a sensation upon a body that had long forgotten what it felt like to be reached for. “God, I was so fucking proud of it, too. I remember spending hours digging in the garden behind my house or wading through the shallows of the lake, hunting for them. I asked for a hammer and chisel for my eighth birthday so that I could crack some open in search of fossils and geodes. I had a whole display of the best ones in my bedroom, and even brought them along with me when I moved into the Academy dorms.”

“All while donned in a… what was it? Superhero t-shirt?”

“Absolutely.”

Viktor lifted his head just enough to peer up into those bright, tawny eyes, quietly admiring how the firelight seemed to set them ablaze from within. “Hm. Big dork indeed…”

Jayce smirked down at him, his breath warm and scenting pleasantly of wine as it fluttered over Viktor’s bangs. “Takes one to know one.”

“How dare you.”

He watched the way Jayce’s expression softened. The way his eyes flit from one of Viktor’s features to the other, like he was trying to memorize every detail, every flaw. His moles and lashes and the cut of his cheeks. And Viktor, foolish and greedy as he was, did the very same to him. Took it all in like he knew this very moment would be the only thing he had left of a time when the world didn’t feel so broken.

“I, uh…” Jayce whispered as he dragged his tongue over his chapped lower lip. Viktor’s eyes followed the motion. “…I wanted to thank you.”

“You do that a lot.”

“I have reason to.”

“And what is it for this time? The good wine or for not shooting you in the face?”

Jayce gave a breathy chuckle. “Both I guess, but… Mostly for helping me feel like my old self again.” He shrugged one shoulder and looked toward the blackboard in the dining room entryway, his gaze growing distant. “I sort of lost him for a little while. Out there.”

Viktor knew the feeling. “…You’re welcome.”

Jayce’s cheek returned to his brow as they fell quiet once more, breaths rising and falling in tandem. Content to do nothing but merely exist in one another’s company. In the warmth, in the contact of tightly clasped fingers, in the lazy rhythm of bodies shuffling from one socked foot to the other.

Simple things, in this world. Rare things.

After a time, the music began to fade, and the muscle in Jayce’s jaw feathered as he leaned back and focused his attention on anywhere else but Viktor. “I guess… I should probably get going, huh? Don’t think I’ll be making it to Zaun QZ before daybreak at this rate.”

Viktor’s stomach plummeted. He looked toward the window but could not see beyond the reflection the pair of them threw across the glass, like lovers entwined. In the late hour with the barely-there slice of a moon, the world beyond the protection of Viktor’s fence would be nothing but perilous, unpredictable darkness. A darkness where fungus thrived.

He fought to keep the panic from his voice. “Tomorrow.”

“…What?”

“You will leave tomorrow,” Viktor clarified firmly, despite the way his pulse roared within his ears. “I will not have you traveling this late.”

Jayce looked over slowly. “You seemed to have no issue with it earlier.”

“That was when you were just the stranger that fell into one of my traps,” Viktor responded.

“And now?”

“Now… you are my friend. And I will not send my friend out into that world exhausted and unprepared.”

Jayce said nothing.

The music stopped playing.

Their hands remained connected.

So, Viktor continued. “Tomorrow morning, I will pack you a bag with supplies and provisions. I will arm you with weapons. And you will make sure you get where you need to go. Safely.”

Jayce’s dark lashes fluttered like his eyes began to burn and, sure enough, the firelight caught the gleam of new wetness building on his waterline. His eyes trailed toward Viktor’s mouth. Clung there. He began to lean in. “Vik—”

“You may sleep here,” Viktor withdrew from Jayce’s touch like he was tearing a bandage off a wound, and instead reached for the familiar press of his cane pommel. His hand wrapped around the cold metal. Sought comfort in the never-wavering stability it provided when all else felt like it was crumbling in his grasp. He would not look up again. “I will fetch you a blanket.”

Viktor slipped away without another word. Carried himself toward the linen closet at the end of the hall. Ignored how unfathomably cold he felt now that he’d drifted out of Jayce’s orbit. He popped open the door and grabbed a throw blanket and pillow from one of the shelves.

When he returned with them tucked beneath his arm, Jayce was sitting on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees. He didn’t look over as Viktor placed the items beside him.

“If you need anything, I will be down the hall,” Viktor whispered.

Jayce merely nodded. It was only when Viktor was halfway out of the room that he spoke again. “…Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“No,” Jayce was looking at him, now, his expression unreadable in the harsh shadows cast by the fading firelight. “I mean thank you for… for dancing with me tonight. At the Gala we never had.”

Viktor felt his heart fracture down the middle. “Thank you for asking me to.”

When Jayce smiled this time, it didn’t reach his eyes. Viktor couldn’t fathom why.

“Sleep well, Viktor.”

“You too, Jayce.”

Viktor stared at the ceiling of his bedroom for the remainder of the night.

Dawn came too quickly.

“Will that be enough?” Viktor asked from his place in the open doorway, when the hour painted the world in a silvery haze. He studied the shape of Jayce’s silhouette, stark black against the muted landscape, where sheets of rolling fog carpeted the ground and turned the aspens ghostly. Gentle rain battered at the roof above their heads, carrying it with a chill that Viktor felt in the marrow of his bad leg.

He did not get a response.

Then again, Jayce hadn’t said very much at all this morning. Like a wall had been built between them in the hours since their dance. Like Viktor was suddenly speaking to the cold side of a locked door.

He didn’t understand it, but perhaps it was for the best.

Standing in the middle of the porch, Jayce stared off toward the electric fence at the end of the lane, a heavy duffel bag slung over one of his shoulders. Inside of it were more clothes, a tin of good coffee, the rest of Viktor’s anise biscuits wrapped up in a tea towel, and a jar of apple preserves. There were also bandages. Water. Bullets. A compass. He had a jacket on, now, too. Yet another thing Viktor added last-minute to the list of supplies he’d packed for him at daybreak when sleep became a wispy, ungraspable thing.

Right now, the hood of that jacket was drawn up, and there was a rifle strapped to Jayce’s powerful back. A pistol holstered on one thigh. A bowie knife at his belt.

It didn’t feel like enough.

It didn’t feel at all like enough to keep him safe against the world on the other side of that fence.

Viktor white knuckled his cane, then raised his voice above the drone of rainfall. “Jayce.”

The only acknowledgement came in the form of a barely-there turn of Jayce’s head.

Fuck, he hated this.

Viktor sighed. “What I packed you. Do you think it will be enough?”

Jayce adjusted his grip on the strap of the duffel. He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah.”

Setting his jaw, Viktor came forward, porch creaking beneath their combined weight. As he did, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a familiar little paperback novel. He flipped it open, where a small slip of paper had been tucked between the pages like a bookmark. On it, a series of numbers in Viktor’s handwriting.

“When you get to Zaun, should you find a working radio, this is the frequency that you can reach me at,” Viktor explained, his voice growing tighter. “My only request is that you contact me as soon as you can, if only to offer me peace of mind. I want to be assured that you made it safely.”

He held out the book, but Jayce didn’t move. Didn’t do anything but stare down at the battered old thing, with its faded cover and curling yellowed pages. At the title ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ staring back at him.

Viktor noted the way Jayce’s grasp tightened on the bag strap. The slight wibble of his lower jaw before it clenched.

“It’s alright…” Viktor whispered. “Take it.”

Jayce did, their fingers brushing as the novel was passed from one hand to another, causing Viktor’s breath to catch. He watched as Jayce’s thumb traced over the raised letters of the title, before he unzipped his jacket just enough to tuck the book safely into the interior breast pocket, right above his heart.

“Will you be okay?” Jayce murmured. “Out here?”

“I always am.”

Wordlessly, Viktor withdrew a crude little device no bigger than a television remote from his belt loop. He extended the antennae, then aimed it down the lane toward the electric fence. With the flick of a switch, the gate rattled, then slid open on its own, just enough to allow the width of a single human body to pass through unharmed.

Jayce made an impressed sound at his side. “Did you alter a basic garage door opener for your front gate?”

“Mhm. I can also control the frequency of the electricity running through the fence with it,” Viktor stated, chest puffing in a rare swell of pride he so rarely got to display in front of others. “My next goal is to find a means of setting off my traps in a similar fashion.”

“What kind of traps are we talking?”

“Would you laugh if I told you I have been considering lasers?”

Jayce’s brows shot up toward his hairline. “Lasers.”

“Lasers,” Viktor echoed through a grin. “I already have trip wires and motion detecting flame throwers checked off the project list. Plus, a pitfall or two, as you are aware. Though I don’t believe there is anything needing to be improved on with those. They are already so handy in capturing vagrants that meander a little too far to the left on their own.”

He’d intended it to come across as a joke. To draw that beautiful swell of loud, boisterous laughter from Jayce’s chest. Cleave a hole into the wall that had been built between them just big enough for Viktor to shove his way back inside, if only for a minute. If only to get one last fleeting glimpse of what his life might have felt like, had the world not ended.

Had he gone to that Gala.

Had he been asked to dance.

But when Viktor peered over, Jayce was only looking at him, silent, while tears glinted in his eyes.

It caught him entirely off guard. “…Jayce?”

He was drawn into the embrace faster than he could react. So fast that Viktor nearly staggered off balance with the sheer force of it, a startled gasp tearing from his chest as he was yanked in close…

And held.

Held.

Jayce’s broad arms enveloped him tightly. Wholly. A wall of solid warmth that surrounded Viktor from all sides, providing a sense of safety and assurance against the horrors of their new world that neither an electrically charged chain-link fence nor an explosive trip wire had ever come close to achieving. For a beat, Viktor could do nothing but stand frozen, hand clutching at the cold air while his ribcage splintered like brittle branches beneath the pounding of his heart.

But then, as though a switch had been flicked within him, Viktor felt the shock dissolve.

And then he clutched Jayce just as tightly. Curled his fingers into the back of his jacket. Pressed his nose into his shoulder and choked back a noise of quiet despair. The desperate, pathetic plea he wouldn’t dare allow himself to voice aloud toward the brilliant man he’d only known for less than a day.

Please don’t go.

“Viktor…” Jayce murmured into the crook of his neck, the timbre of his voice sending a pleasing vibration humming through Viktor’s sternum. “I… I just—”

“If you try to thank me again, Jayce Talis, so help me God, I will hit you with my cane.”

Jayce laughed, then, but the sound of it was watery against his ear. Broken.

“Go,” Viktor breathed, that one syllable carving into him like a serrated blade through an already festered wound. “Or you will never reach the bridge before nightfall.”

They withdrew from each other slowly, Jayce’s palms dragging down the length of Viktor’s arms as they did so. Shoulders to elbows. Elbows to wrists. Their hands connected. Entwined, though only briefly. A fleeting caress of skin on skin, a squeeze of fingers in wordless farewell, before Jayce adjusted the strap on his shoulder and stepped into the rainfall, wet gravel crunching beneath his boots.

Viktor’s entire body vibrated in the aftermath of it, a current of lightning humming beneath his skin. It took everything in his power to remain where he was. To not tear himself off the porch as fast as his body would carry him and keep Jayce from drifting out of reach.

He spoke up before the rain could drown his voice. “…Jayce?”

Jayce stopped and turned, the motion tight. Expectant.

Viktor tried not to ask himself why.

He kept his voice steady. “If you ever find yourself outside of Zaun’s borders in less harrowing circumstances, you are always welcome back here for dinner.”

Despite the hood of his jacket casting his eyes in shadow, Viktor felt the weight of Jayce’s gaze upon him as tangibly as he would a hand against his cheek.

He received a single nod. A lift of a waving hand.

And then he watched, the invisible string between them pulling taut at the knots it had formed around his heart when he hadn’t been paying enough attention, as Jayce slipped through the space in the open gate and vanished like a specter in the fog.

His thumb sought the remote switch at his belt and flicked it. The gate eased closed. The electricity hummed back to life.

The front door had barely clicked shut at Viktor’s back when the heartache struck him, as heartache was so often known to do; swift and sudden, leaving him breathless and staggering as if he’d just taken a sharp blow to the gut.

He let himself feel it. For now, he let himself feel it.

Loneliness was so much worse when you felt it after a reprieve. Like slipping warm, dry feet back into a pair of drenched boots.

Damn it.

Goddamn it.

He should never have let him stay for supper.

Viktor didn’t know how long he remained there, slumped against the front door while his cane trembled beneath his weight. All he knew was that when he finally lifted his hand from his face and took a long, steadying breath to ground himself, his fingers came away damp and his eyes felt bruised in their sockets.

The blackboard was still where they’d left it last night, tucked into the space between the dining and living room. Jayce’s chalk drawings were still so bright upon its surface, the spidery lines of his writing filling the empty places between diagrams. It was the only evidence Viktor possessed that Jayce ever existed, if only for a few hours, within the walls of an empty little house at the end of Emberfilt Lane.

He couldn’t bear to look at it anymore.

Viktor walked towards the board and numbly reached for the eraser perched upon the metal ledge.

There came a knock on the door.

Jayce was still panting when the door creaked open. His hands stung sharply where he clenched them at his sides, palms scraped raw from clambering over wet, gnarled bark.

He didn’t know what he was doing, at first. What idiocy had compelled him to turn around not ten minutes down the forest path and take off at a dead sprint back in the direction he’d come from. What urged him to drag the ladder up from the pitfall and use it to climb into the highest branches of that old apple tree and vault himself safely over the top of the fence, narrowly avoiding the traps set there. The coils of barbed wire and electric metal.

It was only when Viktor appeared in the threshold, flushed and teary eyed with a blackboard eraser in his grasp, that Jayce had his answer. His reason. His purpose.

Him.

“Jayce?! H-How did you—”

“Ask me to stay.”

Viktor visibly stopped breathing.

The duffel bag thudded dully as Jayce heaved its considerable weight off his shoulder and onto the porch. He did the same with the rifle. The pistol. The knife. Stripped himself down to the same defenseless vulnerability of the man he’d been just the day before, staring down the barrel of a shotgun with only the tattered shirt on his back.

A single tear broke free of Viktor’s lash line. Jayce’s eyes followed the path it took down his cheek.

Viktor still hadn’t made a sound, nor a move for that matter, which prompted Jayce to take a single step closer, dripping rainwater onto the welcome mat.

He tugged his drenched hood off and peered down into those eyes, dark hair clinging to the water on his brow. “Ask me to stay,” he repeated, softer now. Like a secret. Like a plea.

The blackboard eraser clattered between them.

And then Viktor seized the front of his jacket and tugged him close enough to crash their mouths together like he was starved for it.

Jayce needed no other answer than that.

The kiss was clumsy yet feverish; a bruising, desperate collision that left Jayce stumbling with a groan into the circle of Viktor’s arms. His hands shook as they lifted, thumbs brushing dry the tears that gathered on silken lashes as he caged Viktor against the entryway wall and licked into his gasping, pliant mouth like a man half mad.

Jesus Christ, Viktor’s fucking mouth. Sweeter than wine, darker than coffee. Jayce wanted to drown in it. Die in it. Feel its slow caress flay him apart until there was nothing left of Jayce but ruination.

There came an insistent tug on the hem of his jacket, and Jayce took that as order enough to shrug the thing off his shoulders, refusing to break the kiss for even a moment as he did so. However, his stupid arm went and got stuck partway through the tangle of soaked fabric, and he grumbled in barely restrained impatience as he forced himself to pull away momentarily and focus on getting free.

He felt Viktor’s amused little laugh against the edge of his pout.

“Shush, you,” Jayce huffed.

Viktor’s only response to that was to seize him by the jaw and drag him close enough to sink his teeth into his bottom lip. The sensation sent a jolt of need rocketing straight to his cock, and he groaned. Shamelessly.

Viktor’s accent was like dark honey. His smirk like the devil itself. “Make me.”

The jacket hit the floor.

With a snarl, Jayce used the side of his boot to slam the front door shut before he grabbed hold of Viktor’s ass and lifted him effortlessly into his arms. Viktor, meanwhile, let out a sound of startled delight that Jayce knew, in the depths of his soul, would echo with him for the rest of time. Bright as a porch light left on after nightfall, forever calling him home.

He basked in the feel of those lithe legs eagerly wrapping themselves around his waist, even as he made sure to take great care in handling the one that he knew gave Viktor such immense trouble. Carefully, Jayce’s palm slid along his right thigh. His knee. His calve. His fingers rubbed soothing circles into the tense muscles there, before he then hitched Viktor’s leg up a little higher on his hip to relieve any strain or pressure the unexpected motion might’ve caused.

“This okay?” He asked gently.

He heard Viktor click his tongue above him. Noted the slight catch in his breath.

And when Jayce looked up, he was left shaken by the look Viktor was giving him. Something that could only be described as devastation.

Shit. Panic lanced through him. “Did I hurt you, baby?”

To his relief, Viktor quickly shook his head.

Their foreheads then connected, noses brushing in a quiet moment of sweetness that had no business existing between the two of them after so little time. It made Jayce’s tongue feel heavy in his mouth. Made his lashes flutter and his eyes squeeze closed.

Made him want to fall to his knees. Declare brash and foolish things that had no place in his mouth. Not now. Not yet.

Tipping his face up, Jayce threw all sense to the wind and stole another kiss, instead. Softer this time. A careful, unhurried caress that had Viktor sighing into it. Jayce felt slender fingers burrow into the back of his hair and drag him in tighter. So much tighter.

How long has it been, Jayce wondered, since you were last touched with softness? Since you were last touched at all?

“Take me to bed, Jayce Talis,” Viktor murmured, before his lips sought out the shell of Jayce’s ear and seared his next words into it like a brand. “And take me apart.”

“Jesus fuck…”

Hooking the curved pommel of Viktor’s cane over his own arm, Jayce proceeded to carry the other man down the hall and through the door he recalled him disappearing behind the night before. The rain was so much louder in here, pattering against a tall window that looked out toward a vegetable garden, gossamer curtains swaying in the false breeze from a battered old desk fan oscillating in the corner. There were more books scattered around the room than there were anywhere else in the house, like Viktor often sought refuge between familiar pages when pain made sleep a faraway thing.

The bed looked to have been hastily made as Jayce staggered over to it. He placed a knee on the edge of the mattress, then carefully laid Viktor down against the rumpled blue blanket there with the reverence of an offering. A tithe being placed on an altar. He set the cane aside against the nightstand, always within reach, should Viktor need it.

All the while, Viktor kissed him. Touched him. Cupped his face and dragged his mouth across Jayce’s features like he longed to know the shape of them with his lips, each one sending goosebumps rippling down his skin. Viktor kissed over his lashes and freckles. His eyebrow scar. The uneven shape of his cupid’s bow. Kissed him with the eager fervor of a teenager in the backseat of his parent’s car, desperate to sneak in as much affection as possible before curfew tore Jayce from his arms. Like their time was somehow limited.

Like he still expected that Jayce would want to leave at the end of it all. Like it still hadn’t registered that this was it. That Jayce was home.

For as long as Viktor wanted him, Jayce was home.

They looked at each other.

And Jayce lost his fucking breath.

There was something about watery sunlight spilling through rainclouds that made Viktor look like a dream. Even in the silver haze and all those sleepy shifting shadows, the flush that sat high on the other man’s cheekbones was bright as a rose garden. His eyes were twin shocks of gold.

The only drop of color in an ocean of grey, just as Jayce had said last night.

And oh, Jayce was helpless but to touch him. To gather Viktor’s face into the cradle of his palm and remind himself that what he was seeing was real. Tangible. That he wouldn’t just gasp awake moments from now in his pallet back at Piltover QZ, his arms empty, his heart even more so, longing for someone that only ever existed as a name at the end of his favorite research paper.

“You are…” Jayce murmured, his voice tight. Aching. “…so fucking beautiful.”

Viktor made a small sound at the back of his throat and quickly turned his face into Jayce’s palm. His lips feathered kisses along the sore spots the apple tree bark had left behind, as though in apology.

“You wield your charms like a weapon, Jayce Talis,” Viktor’s lips seared against his skin as he spoke.

“You certainly enjoyed them last night, fawning over me as we danced.”

Viktor scoffed. “I did not fawn.”

Jayce dropped his head and began lavishing the edge of Viktor’s jawline in teasing nips and kisses. “Mm. Seemed like fawning.”

“That was m-merely…” Viktor gasped, head tilting back in offering as Jayce’s mouth found the warm hollow of his throat and suckled a sweet little mark into it. His fingers twined through Jayce’s hair. Tugged at his flannel. Urging. Begging. “…your own arrogance addling your mind.”

“I actually think it was talk of my rock collection getting you hot and bothered more than anything.”

Viktor burst out laughing.

And not just a small laugh. Nothing soft or breathy or muffled behind the shield of his fingers, like Viktor tried to always make sure he never took up too much space, even within his own home. No, this… this was a downright fucking cackle, sudden as a thunderclap, and loud enough to resonate off the bedroom walls. The kind of laugh that made Viktor throw his head back toward the ceiling, palm slapped over his eyes.

It was so much better than Jayce could have ever imagined.

“See?” He grinned broadly, even while his voice shook with something he dared not name. “Still fawning, even now.”

Viktor smirked up at him from the spaces between his fingers. “You know, if I recall correctly, you are the one who looked at my mouth first.”

Jayce sucked his teeth as he dragged his hand up along the outside of Viktor’s thigh. “To be fair, I’ve been looking at your mouth since the moment we met,” he stated before spreading Viktor’s legs a little wider. Just so he could press in. Nice and close. “And your moles. And your fingers. And the sweep of that long, beautiful throat.”

With a sudden surge up onto his elbows, Viktor kissed him hard enough to knock their teeth together. The smile was still on Jayce’s face as he groaned and let his mouth fall open, desperate for the way Viktor licked slow and hot and hungry into it. Desperate to be devoured whole.

There came a tug at Jayce’s belt, before Viktor whispered against his tongue. “Take off your fucking clothes.”

An electric thrill danced down his spine as he sat back on his knees. “Bossy.”

Despite the remark, Jayce stripped quickly, obediently ridding himself of layers of cotton and flannel while Viktor did the same. His belt buckle rattled as he unclasped it with shaky, nervous fingers, and once his boots had been toed off, he practically tossed his jeans halfway across the room to thwap dully against the edge of the doorframe.

Now in nothing but a pair of boxers that did little to conceal the want pressing thick and hard against the damp cotton, Jayce grabbed hold of Viktor’s hips and tugged him down the mattress toward him. Viktor gasped, stripped down to nothing but boxers himself, his long, slender body splayed out across the blankets in acres of milky white skin. Skin, Jayce noted with quiet delight, that was covered like a star map in moles. Countless constellations of them, dark and delicate, across the canvas of his body.

Unable to help himself, Jayce leaned down and made it his personal mission to press a kiss to each and every one. Starting at the dot on Viktor’s throat, he worked his way downward in slow succession, connecting one mole to the other with no more than the warm caress of his mouth, the wet drag of his tongue. A cartographer mapping out paths and routes between waypoints.

He heard Viktor sigh beneath him. Felt him writhe and arc himself into the press of each kiss. Jayce hummed as fingers eased their way into his dark hair and across the muscles of his shoulders, urging him on. Urging him lower.

“Jayce…” Viktor breathed his name into the bedroom air like a prayer as Jayce’s lips found the mole just above his navel, the kiss sending goosebumps scattering.

Panting, Jayce then carefully hooked his fingers beneath the waistband of Viktor’s boxers. His mouth began to water. “…May I?”

Viktor’s pupils were blown wide as he peered down at him, swallowing the amber of his irises like an eclipse that left nothing but a glinting ring of color behind. He swallowed. Nodded. Lifted his hips.

And Jayce dragged his boxers right off.

Without the obstruction of the fabric, Jayce’s gaze immediately caught hold of a series of old, faded scars running parallel over the curve of Viktor’s right hip. The shape of them, the positioning, looked far too meticulous to be from anything other than a scalpel blade. Several scalpel blades, actually.

He traced over the puckered edge of one with the pad of his thumb. The scar appeared well over a decade old.

“One of many surgeries from my childhood,” Viktor explained softly. “An attempt to grant me some semblance of relief from the malformed leg I’d been born with. I would have required more as I got older to maintain functionality, but… well.”

Hospitals weren’t exactly much of a thing anymore.

Back at the QZ, things had been so limited after the initial raids of medical facilities before PIDRA could get a proper grasp on the nationwide swell of panic, that Jayce often needed to stitch his own wounds shut with no more than a splash of whiskey and a hot sewing needle in his apartment bathroom. PIDRA never believed in expending resources best used for cordyceps research on anything less than a bullet wound. And that was only if the person was deemed important enough to save.

Things as simple as gauze rolls and ibuprofen were often passed from palm to palm behind Enforcer backs as illicit street contraband. Jayce remembered trading his fair share of weapons for them. For blissful, temporary relief from his various forge burns and the headaches that followed hours of listening to the strike of his own hammer against flaring red iron.

Viktor was right for hiding inside that bunker. For never allowing himself to be taken behind those walls into that kind of existence.

Jayce dropped a kiss to the bend of Viktor’s bad knee. There was a scar there, too. “Tell me what I can do…” he whispered. “…to make this comfortable for you, baby.”

Viktor reached for one of the pillows above his head and held it out to Jayce. “Place this beneath my hips.”

Jayce did. Carefully.

“And my leg…” Viktor continued, his voice thin and breathless. “…it, ah… it should remain elevated.”

“Like this?” Jayce asked, his tone light as he positioned Viktor’s leg to drape over his shoulder, like the motion alone hadn’t just ignited a wildfire along his nerve endings. Brows quirking, he turned his head and dragged wet, open-mouthed kisses along the delicate shape of Viktor’s ankle. The side of his calf. The inner softness of his trembling thigh.

Viktor made a soft sound beneath him. “…J-Jayce…”

“And if I go lower?” Jayce inquired, lips trailing down, down, down… all while still making sure to keep his leg propped up. “Is this still okay for you?”

Viktor squirmed. Nodded.

Taking that as permission, Jayce moved onto his stomach so that his clothed cock was trapped between his own weight and the mattress beneath them. His hands swallowed the insides of Viktor’s thighs whole as he threw both of his gorgeous legs over his shoulders now, fingers pressing in firm, spreading him wide.

Jayce kissed over the sensitive crease of his pelvis. The tufts of soft, dark curls trailing from Viktor’s navel and down toward the one place Jayce had not yet lavished in attention. Teasing. Tormenting, the scent of Viktor hot and heady in his nose the closer his kisses ventured.

Despite the autumn rain, the temperature of the room had shot up so abruptly that Jayce felt the bloom of fresh sweat along the back of his own neck as he exhaled over Viktor’s drenched, aching skin. Dusty pink with desire in the hazy light, his cock swollen at his apex. Wanting. Waiting.

“Look at you,” Jayce murmured in wonder. “Fuck, look at you.”

The first lick was slow. A long, tentative drag that had Viktor abruptly jolting where he lay, fingers flying to the sweat-dampened hair on Jayce’s head and gripping hard enough to make him see stars.

“O-Ohhh god…” Viktor choked, thighs shaking with the threat of clamping shut on either side of Jayce’s face. And they might’ve, had Jayce’s grip not been pinning him in place.

“Shh, I’ve got you,” Jayce breathed against him. “I’m here, baby.”

His lashes fluttered as he repeated the motion again. And then again, again, again… drunk on the taste of the slick that coated his tongue each time he dragged it upward. Jayce took his time with it, tracing teasing little circles over the swell of Viktor’s cock before his lips formed a gentle seal around it, nose pressed into the soft curls above. And when Jayce began to suck, Viktor made a strangled sound that nearly had him spilling into his damn boxers right then and there.

“Jayce…” Viktor whined. “F-Fuck, don’t stop… Please…”

Jayce’s breathing began to quicken, now, as the ravenous hunger took hold. As he dismissed any need to breathe and instead buried his face between Viktor’s thighs like a man desperate to drown in him. He tongued greedily at Viktor’s entrance as though it were his last meal on earth, the sounds salacious and wet over the rainstorm. All the while, Viktor tugged at his hair. Clawed at his shoulder. Filled the balmy air around them with the high, broken pleas of yes, and there, and more, and Jayce, Jayce, oh Jayce…

He could have done this forever. Lived here, between Viktor’s legs, forever.

When Jayce risked a glance upward, Viktor was practically bowed off the mattress, head thrown back while sunlight glinted off the sweat pooling in the dips and hollows of his heaving chest and stomach. Mouth open, brows pinched, dark hair clinging to the sheen on his brow.

An absolute fucking vision.

It was at that moment that Jayce suddenly felt Viktor’s hips lift off the bed to begin rutting upward against the hungry press of his mouth. He held Jayce’s head in place as he did so, fingers twisting through dark strands until his scalp burned deliciously. It left Jayce helpless but to surrender and take it. To do nothing but let Viktor fuck himself on his face until his chin was utterly drenched in him.

“That’s it, baby…” Jayce moaned against him. “Use me.”

Viktor babbled deliriously between gasps of Jayce’s name. His breathing was quickly growing erratic. His hips stuttered through their movements, like he couldn’t decide between bringing Jayce in tighter or shoving the overwhelming feel of him away as he teetered closer and closer to that white hot edge.

Viktor keened so much louder, now. “I-I’m… Oh. Oh fuck… f-fuck, I’m going to…”

Jayce released a guttural moan as he dragged the other man closer. He pressed the whole of his mouth to Viktor, now, desperate to milk every drop. His own cock ached where it lay pinned against the bed, leaking into the cotton of his boxers. It didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered except…

“JAYCE!”

That.

Viktor’s voice utterly shattered as he came against Jayce’s tongue. His thighs snapped closed, squeezing at Jayce’s head from both sides as he succumbed to the throes of his orgasm. And Jayce held him through it. Devoured him through it, even as Viktor thrashed and bucked off the squealing mattress, jolting like each suckle around his cock sent an electric spark burning through his nervous system. Jayce refused to relent. Refused to allow his mouth to break contact until Viktor was nearly sobbing beneath him, long limbs writhing over sweat-drenched sheets.

And when Jayce lifted his head at last, lips glistening and hair sticking up in every direction, he was met with nothing short of a scathing, flush-cheeked glare.

It delighted him. Made his heart do something stupid in his chest.

“Stop… looking so… d-damned proud of yourself,” Viktor panted, that amber gaze piercing even through the haze of afterglow. He then reached toward Jayce, grasping at the empty space between their bodies in a weak, beckoning gesture, even as he maintained an air of feigned indifference. A quiet plea for closeness.

Jayce was weak for it.

“Now, how could I not?” Jayce smirked as he prowled up the mattress and into those waiting arms until his body was practically caging the other man in place beneath him. Viktor’s arms circled around the back of his neck and shoulders. Raked through his hair, sweet and soothing.

Jayce reached back and felt for Viktor’s right thigh to then hitch it up over his hip, remembering his promise to keep it elevated. He noted the way the sore muscle trembled beneath his touch, and it would have concerned him, had Viktor’s entire body not been doing the same.

Oh, this was terrible for his ego.

Jayce dropped his lips to the edge of Viktor’s mouth and proceeded to kiss a path up toward his ear. He felt the responding shudder about as much as he heard it while Viktor’s nails scratched pleasantly at the nape of his neck. “Mm, especially when I have your legs shaking like this?”

Viktor scoffed lightly, and it was enough for Jayce to take his face between his palms and kiss him senseless, shared laughter dancing on their breaths.

He didn’t even notice the fact that one of Viktor’s hands had slipped between their sweat-drenched bodies. Not until there came a sudden tug on the waistband of his boxers. Not until he felt the warm caress of long, careful fingers wrapping themselves around his neglected cock, the shock of it tearing a gasp from his throat.

It had been so long. Too long since anyone had last touched him like this. Held him like this. Wanted him like this.

“H-Holy shit…” Jayce choked as he dropped his forehead to press against Viktor’s. His brow pinched, and he squeezed his eyes shut to focus on keeping his breathing in check, on keeping himself in control, even while Viktor dragged his hand from base to tip in a torturously slow series of strokes that nearly had Jayce losing his fucking mind right then and there. Stars danced in his vision as his blood went molten in his veins. “Oh, Vik…”

“Shh, my sweet. I’ve got you,” Viktor whispered, echoing Jayce’s soothing words from earlier before stealing the most delicate brush of a kiss against the edge of his mouth. He thumbed over Jayce’s crown, smearing the slick building there until Jayce’s thigh muscles spasmed against the instinct to buck into the feeling.

When Jayce opened his eyes, Viktor was watching him closely. Almost, dare he say, softly.

It made his throat nearly lock up around his next words.

“How do you want me?”

With a responding swallow, Viktor slid his free hand over the back of Jayce’s neck, carding through the shortest strands at his nape. “Just like this. I… I want you close.” Their noses bumped, mouths ghosting, the gesture breathless and wanting. “Need you close to me, Jayce.”

Fuck, how could he ever deny that?

“M’not going anywhere. Not ever. Not until you send me away,” Jayce vowed, meaning every syllable even while his voice wavered through the emotional weight of the words. He gently lifted Viktor’s left leg to join the other at his hip, and felt slender ankles lock themselves together over the small of his back.

A reverent kiss was briefly placed on Viktor’s sweat-dampened hairline before Jayce brought their foreheads together once more. The air in what little proximity remained between their faces crackled like an energy surge through a conduit.

“Guide me inside of you, baby.”

He heard Viktor’s breath catch, before the hand upon his cock ceased its relentless teasing. While Viktor looked down between their bodies to begin aligning Jayce with his entrance, Jayce was preoccupied with merely watching him, awed by the spidery shadows Viktor’s lashes cast across his cheekbones in the afternoon light. Awed by his moles and the shape of his kiss-bruised mouth, and the exquisite mechanism of a mind that ticked like clockwork behind a pair of eyes that gleamed like poured gold.

But more than anything, Jayce was simply awed by the fact that, of all the places he could have possibly ended up in the decaying husk of what remained of their world, he’d somehow found himself here. In Viktor’s home. In Viktor’s bed.

In Viktor’s arms.

God, he had never believed in fate before this.

The first nudge against slickened flesh had them both inhaling in unison as Viktor angled his cock just so. Jayce’s pulse was a roar of want within his ears, drowning out the drone of rain against the window glass. He tried to swallow his nerves and brace himself, breath trapped behind the cage of his clenched teeth.

But nothing could have prepared him for it.

It was the warmth that hit him first. That enveloping, indescribably wet heat wrapping itself around his swollen crown. Jayce felt his knuckles whiten where they clutched the blanket above Viktor’s head, the tendons in his arm bulging with the strain.

That piercing amber gaze flicked upward to meet his own. He noted a small nod. Felt the gust of a shaky breath.

And then Jayce shifted his hips and began to gently press his way inside.

“Ohhhh…” Viktor’s mouth fell open as he released a long, keening moan into the bedroom air, spine arcing and eyes rolling so far back into his skull that all Jayce could see were the whites. Slender hands clung to Jayce’s shoulders, nails biting crescent-shaped marks into the taut cords of muscle there.

Jayce could have almost blacked out from the feel of it.

Viktor’s body welcomed him like nothing else, engulfing every inch of Jayce until galaxies formed on the edge of his vision. Jayce couldn’t breathe through it. Couldn’t fathom a single coherent thought that wasn’t the mantra of Viktor’s name repeated over and over in his head, the sound of it resplendent as a psalm. His chest heaved, and a low, guttural sound fluttered up from the back of Jayce’s throat as he felt Viktor’s body pull him in that much deeper, muscles blooming open to allow him to sink to the very hilt with ease.

Quaking, Jayce dropped his head against Viktor’s shoulder, overwhelmed by the tangle of their bodies. The way they somehow felt entwined all the way down to the frayed edges of their very souls.

And yet he still didn’t feel close enough.

Would never be close enough.

“V-Viktor…” Jayce whined, which earned him a brush of fingers against the edge of his jaw. He leaned into it greedily, only for Viktor to grip his chin and turn his face enough to press their mouths together in a hungry claim.

“Go on, my sweet,” Viktor urged, breathless. “Fuck me like you mean it.”

Christ…

The mattress squeaked as Jayce withdrew himself in one long, slow drag, and their eyes connected in one fleeting moment of static charged tension, before Jayce plunged back inside in a single thrust. He claimed Viktor’s lips as he did so, and the taste of the high, shattered sound that tore through the other man’s throat was sweeter than anything he’d ever known.

“Mine…” Jayce growled softly into Viktor’s open, gasping mouth as he began a steady building rhythm. “Fuck, you’re mine, Viktor.”

A bold claim, and yet one Viktor didn’t outright deny. As they moved, his nails clawed desperately over Jayce’s shoulder blades, and Jayce’s skin stung where the salt of his sweat seeped into the angry marks left behind. Marks he prayed would stay with him for days, the burn that accompanied shifting muscle serving as a reminder of what Viktor felt like in this moment. Sounded like. Tasted like. It spurred Jayce on. Drove him that much deeper, the wet collision of their bodies sounding like applause to his ears as he buried his face in the crook of Viktor’s neck and lost himself to the feel of him entirely.

All the while, Viktor filled the air with the melody of his cries, the strike of each thrust sending his voice scattering to the ceiling, more beautiful than the song they’d danced to just hours before.

“H-Hah, Jayce… Jayce!” Viktor whined; head thrown back against the blankets. “You’re so… s-so fucking deep. God, I can feel you in my throat…”

Jayce groaned as he pressed his teeth into Viktor’s fluttering pulse point to draw a purple bloom to the surface. His stomach muscles fluttered as a familiar sensation began to tighten beneath them, his own release building so much faster than he would have liked. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in goddamn hell of lasting long when it’d been years since he last did this, but it didn’t matter.

Without missing a beat, Jayce reached down between their heaving bodies and dragged his fingers over the shape of Viktor’s slick and swollen cock. That earned him a gasp, and Jayce reveled in the wide-eyed look of startled bliss that crossed Viktor’s face as he began passing his thumb over it in time with his thrusts.

“Ohhh f-fuck, like that… like that…” Viktor choked, his eyes never leaving Jayce’s, even as they visibly threatened to roll back. He cradled either side of Jayce’s face. “J-Just like that, Jayce… Don’t stop.”

Jayce would have sooner died than stop. He brushed their noses together, breaths colliding in the building heat. The air reeked of sweat and sex between them. The bed sheets clung to their skin. “You gonna come for me again, baby? You gonna soak my cock?”

Viktor could only nod, tears of delirious pleasure building in the corners of his eyes.

“Keep your eyes on me…” Jayce commanded, breathless, hips and fingers working in tandem to bring Viktor back toward the edge. “W-Wanna watch it. Wanna see how beautiful you look…”

“Jayce…”

“You’re perfect. You’re everything.”

Oh. That seemed to do it.

A masterpiece unfolded beneath him at that moment when Viktor came a second time, only now Jayce was blessed with the ability to witness it. To watch the slow distortion of those exquisite features as Viktor’s entire body seized around his shaft, and Jayce resisted blinking lest he miss a singular moment of it.

Perfect. Yeah, that really was the only way to describe the way Viktor looked, the way he felt, the way he sounded, voice cracking through a cry of Jayce’s name. Always Jayce’s name. And Jayce stroked him through it, cooing sweet nothings against the flushed curve of Viktor’s cheek until his cock was drenched to the hilt.

“That’s it, baby…” Jayce panted, teeth gnashing against the squeeze of muscles around his cock. “F-Fuck! Let it all out for me…”

Viktor writhed, and Jayce took the opportunity to seize him by the wrists and pin both of his hands to the blankets above his head. Palm to palm, fingers entwined as their bodies moved as one, echoing their dance as Jayce fucked him senselessly into the mattress. Sweat ran down his hairline. His shoulders. His stomach. It fell onto Viktor’s skin like the rainfall outside.

It was rough. Messy. Desperate. It was everything the two of them needed after so long fighting to survive alone. This reminder of unflinching human connection and vulnerability. It was a devastating madness that Jayce prayed he wouldn’t emerge from unscathed, unchanged. This sensation of their spent, overused bodies tangled within one another reduced his mind to a thoughtless haze. A jumble of static scattered amidst a singular word:

Viktor.

The coil of release tightened sharply in the base of his abdomen. He could hold back no longer. He was teetering on the precarious edge by the tips of his toes, ready to plunge. Ready for the weightless freefall.

“B-Baby, I’m…” Jayce groaned, the rhythm of his hips growing messier, more erratic. The control was slipping through his grasp like water. “…M’gonna… Where d-do you want me to…”

The heel of Viktor’s foot pressed into his lower back, pulling him in tighter while Viktor’s breath scalded over his ear.

“Inside.”

Fuck.

Jayce’s vision blackened at the edges, consciousness nearly leaving him entirely as the orgasm took full claim. He threw his head back and cried out until his voice broke, hips stilling as he spilled in seemingly endless ribbons deep into the heat of Viktor’s body. Over and over. Filling him completely. Claiming him from within until it began to leak out.

Shocks of light and color ignited in Jayce’s vision like fireworks as he all but collapsed, boneless, upon Viktor’s chest. His grasp on the other man’s wrist had loosened sometime in the aftershocks, which prompted Viktor to immediately slide his hands over Jayce’s scratched up shoulders and gather him close, nose burying itself into the damp tufts of his hair as they came down together in slow, heaving breaths.

Neither of them spoke for a time, content to merely lay together. Be together, as the rainstorm calmed into a drizzle over the gilded autumn woodlands, and the afternoon shadows shifted their position on the walls. Viktor traced absentminded patterns over the damp skin of Jayce’s back, his touch soft enough to begin lulling him dangerously close to the sleep he’d never caught the night before.

Jayce forced himself to withdraw from Viktor’s body, then. He shifted his hips, a faint sound choking from the both of them as his softened cock slipped free, allowing him to climb off of Viktor and collapse onto the mattress beside him, instead, with a graceless thump. Though not without tugging Viktor along with him, turning him onto his good side so that Jayce could draw his bad leg up and around his hip as he did so.

Nestled together, Viktor released a hum, and his smile was small and almost bashful when Jayce caught it.

He passed his palm back and forth along Viktor’s thigh. “You okay, baby?”

“Yes…” Viktor nodded, fingertips trailing over the dusting of dark hair growing between Jayce’s pecs.

“No pain?”

“No more than what I am used to.”

Jayce brushed his lips over the crooked bridge of Viktor’s nose. “Not bad for a big dork, huh?”

Viktor laughed, and Jayce snatched up the lilting sound of it with his own mouth, kissing fiercely. Deeply. The curve of Viktor’s brilliant yet exhausted smile pressed against his own. Fuck, he could never get enough of it.

“So…” Jayce whispered while his lips then sought out the mole on Viktor’s cheek. “You, uh... You never did ask me.”

Viktor was quiet for a moment. A long moment. Too long for a twinge of panic to not immediately grow teeth and sink into the back of his mind, making Jayce feel as though his heart was about to claw its way out of his throat and run out of the room.

He watched Viktor closely.

Noted the nervous bob of his throat. The unexpected sheen of wetness in his eyes.

“Would you please stay with me, Jayce Talis…” came the murmured response as Viktor’s touch slid over his chest, right above his roaring heart. “…here in this house at the end of the world?”

Jayce could have almost collapsed with the relief of it. He brought one of Viktor's hands to his mouth and began lavishing the bumps of his knuckles with kisses. “…Yes. God, please.”

“For how long?”

“Until you’re fucking sick of me.”

When Viktor brought their mouths together, it was the closest thing to forever that Jayce had ever known.

“Deal.”