Chapter Text
The most beautiful boy Jayce has ever laid eyes on is the last to step off the bus.
It’s Huck’s fault that the second intake of campers is running late. Later, when they’re forced to slog through a staff meeting about it, Jayce will diplomatically suggest that they adjust next year’s schedule to account for unexpected vacationer traffic whereas a handful of other less tactful counsellors just outright blame the driver. Jayce tends not to ally with anyone whose first instinct is to condemn the only blue-collar worker in the room as a matter of principle. But he knows deep down that the only real reason he feels compelled to defend the bus driver at all is because of the boy.
He’s the last to step off the bus, and not only because he was sitting at the back. Jayce sees him through the window first, a smudge of dark hair, an uneven gait, before the tap, tap of his mobility device spills out the open doorway. Jayce isn’t really paying attention, standing a little way back to greet some of the more familiar kids he remembers from last summer, soaking in the adoration of being almost universally known as a dozen or so’s favourite. So he doesn’t notice the lack of a ramp, the fact that it’s just the boy and a quarter dozen stairs before a steep drop from the elevated vehicle to the pavement, until he’s already stumbling.
He doesn’t fall. Huck catches him; gently, the cane is set aside, the boy is offered an arm, and Jayce catches a murmur of something that sounds distantly embarrassed—a thank you or an apology—and accented, before he’s wobbling to the ground and being swarmed by someone who Jayce will later suspect is his only friend. Huck watches to make sure they both find their way across the road to the other campers okay, which is why Jayce will later defend him, even though it is one hundred per cent his fault they’re running late. These are all observations he will make later, stare laser-pointed on the roof of his cabin, unable to sleep. He doesn’t think of any of this in the moment.
In the moment, he’s only thinking of the boy.
Before he decided to pursue science, Jayce had always thought he might one day study art. He loves art. Some of his fondest childhood memories are of begging his mother to take him into the city gallery. Floor to ceiling, wall-to-wall oil portraits. Sunlight spilling across polished wood floors to illuminate centuries-old gilt frames of paintings as dark as oil spills. He liked the dark stuff the best. Subjects in frigid pale swathes of colour against shadowy backdrops, dark-haired and milk-skinned boys, painted soft like lambs on canvas, so rich and expressive they begged touch. Caravaggio and Bouguereau. Angels, birds, black eyes and bloody throats.
This is what the boy looks like.
Jayce is so stunned he can’t speak for a moment. He can only watch in mute horror as the boy and his friend, a fourteen year-old girl who’s a head taller, shuffle into the intake line for orientation. The second bus was running late, it’s already past four, and they have so much to get through that even thinking about it is making Jayce’s skull pound: the welcome assembly, cabin assignments, ice-breakers, the tour. All before dinner. He should be rallying his fellow counsellors to get a move on.
Instead he’s staring at the most beautiful person he’s ever seen in his life and—heart in his throat, stomach in a dark cavern of depravity somewhere he’s not sure he had access to before now—wondering how old he is.
The second he realises what he’s doing, his mouth floods with saliva. Bile pierces the back of his tongue. He has to turn his whole body away and think of nothing but equations to distract his mind before he gets sick. He manages to calm down. Probably, he thinks, he should be concerned about this. It’s possible this is just one more dark instinct he’s been fostering all along that makes it so hard to connect with others—as his ex would put it, the thing that is very wrong with him— but it’s equally possible this is just a marker of another impending quarter-life crisis. Or something that is adjacent to a quarter-life crisis.
Jayce is twenty-seven and has been through so many different bouts of SSRIs and treatment plans, natural remedies and high-dosage mental health procedures, that he struggles to think of himself as a quarter of the way through anything. Sometimes he thinks of life in general as so cruelly long that there’s no way his mind can fathom the thought of more and more of the same without going crazy. Sometimes he thinks that this might be it.
He manages to rally the other counsellors with a bit of hand-clapping and shoulder-bumping, and, albeit haltingly, things fall into motion. They lead the second bus-full of teenagers inside the boundaries of the campground, swallowed by the mouth of wrought iron gates and the big metal sign that reads Young Innovators Science Camp, Est. 1999. Vi falls into step beside him to mutter something he doesn’t catch but doubts is friendly as one of the more overzealous counsellors takes the initiative of launching into a grand speech about the program’s history that Jayce doesn’t pay attention to.
The staff is largely made up of two factions, in his opinion: educators and professional child-minders. He considers himself neither. This year will mark his fifth round of spending his summers at the academy-funded science camp and it’s difficult not to forget why he bothers. The only reason he even started was because he’d needed something to fulfil his volunteer requirement for his master’s degree and Mel, who he hadn’t yet started sleeping with, suggested this. She’d heavily implied that the board looked favourably upon those who picked something… in-house. Something that was or was at least affiliated with where it spent its money. This was back when Jayce still cared about what the board thought. He was really vying for a permanent research position at the time; he still wouldn’t mind one, because what else is he going to do once his PhD is over, even though the thought of being trapped doing the same academy-funded research forever, at the eternal beck and call of academic elitism, makes his skin crawl. What else is he going to do with his life other than disappoint his mother, though? Every year, the invitation to rejoin the faculty at Young Innovators shows up like clockwork. The volunteer policy consent forms and the WWCC renewal and the box he checks to verify that his first aid training is up to date. And every year, like a creature of habit, he dutifully fills them out and mails them back.
He used to drop them off to Mel’s office in person. He won’t be doing that anymore, he supposes. The idea of this being a permanent change, a new normal to adjust to, makes his stomach turn faintly cold, a distant dread. He can’t even muster the energy to feel properly upset by it. It washes over him, leaves him as empty as before.
The camp is mostly full of nepo-brats. The snot-nosed rich children of parents who can afford the outrageous fees, less students genuinely interested in science and more a horde of high-performing private school kids riding whichever AP program their fathers paid to put them in. The students themselves range from ages twelve to seventeen, and Jayce tries not to dislike them on the basis that they are children. Even if the majority of them have never had to worry about things like how they’re going to afford university after they graduate, whether they’re working hard enough to make their immigrant parents proud, how much money they’ll need to make to buy a sense of security in life. But then, occasionally, there are kids like—well.
They’re not all bad, is the thing. Jayce is nuanced enough to admit that. His first year, he tutored a sixteen-year-old camper named Caitlyn who was surprisingly funny, sharp and driven and significantly more intelligent than her peers. Jayce adores her. This is the first year she’s attending as a volunteer instead of a camper. He’s met her mother, who he has long-suspected doesn’t like him, and wrote her a glowing recommendation when she applied for the prestigious criminal science degree she is now almost finished with, not that she needed his help getting in. He feels proud whenever he thinks of her. Jayce has so few success stories concerning the people he builds relationships with.
She’s here now, barking orders at the other counsellors as soon as they’ve shuffled the kids into the assembly hall. One of the people she’s bossing around is a far too amused-looking Vi; Jayce should probably warn Cait when he gets a chance. For now, he lets himself blend in with the other adults, content to let them divy up tasks if it means less work for him. Orientation gets along quickly: the same speech as every other year, a quick rundown of what the next five weeks will look like, boasting all the new lab equipment and extracurriculars they’ve added to this year’s program. Singing the academy’s praises. Jayce tunes it out. He tunes back in when he catches movement, and determines they’ve moved onto the cabin assignments. Lists of names are divided amongst the counsellors to split the kids into groups of three and four. Jayce’s own stack is relatively short, and he lucks out by finding the first group, a trio of thirteen-year-old girls, right away. The next group takes some telephone-esque communication to wrangle, and then he’s onto the last page. There’s only one name on it.
Jayce has often oscillated back and forth with believing in fate. In his rational-minded opinion, destiny is too vast and fiddly a concept to possibly be applied to everyone and everything, but there’s a part of him that has always liked believing in the magic of the universe.
The boy is standing alone, like he’s been waiting. Gaze flat and borderline sulky. Up close he looks even smaller, delicate beside Jayce.
Jayce consults the paper a second time like it’s possible it will have changed. “Viktor?”
“Yes.”
“I think there’s been a mistake. It’s only your name on here.”
“No mistake,” says Viktor, and with sudden unwarned intensity that bright gaze is on Jayce, pinning him; the black pinprick of his pupils like insects trapped in amber. “Some of my paperwork still had my deadname on it. They did not know where to put me.”
It is not the moody distracted gaze of a child, but something far more switched on. Jayce feels dizzy to recognise it, and to be the subject of its intense focus. It feels a little like he’s recovering from whiplash. “Your… deadname?”
The boy’s eyebrows drop; the stare increases in flatness. “When someone transitions,” he starts to explain, in the condescending tone of one who is tired of having the same conversation over and over, “from one sex to another—”
“I know what being transgender is,” says Jayce, embarrassed. The boy is not expecting it, and he shuts up; there’s a little flicker of something uncertain on his face that Jayce is instantly obsessed with. A modicum of that sharp haughtiness slips away, briefly, like a stage curtain fluttering. Jayce is overcome with the sudden urge to dig his fingers in and peel it all the way back. “This is, I mean… that’s ridiculous. Putting you by yourself. Let me go talk to somebody.”
“Don’t.” Before he can go anywhere, the boy’s hand darts out, catching his wrist. Small, slender fingers, bitten nails. He immediately withdraws the touch. “Don’t,” he repeats, quieter. “Please. I… don’t mind being by myself.”
Jayce doesn’t fight him. How can he?
How can he possibly be expected to defend against something so clearly god-sent to ruin him as this.
Jayce doesn’t see the boy again for most of the first week. He’s busy tending to his own counsellor duties, for the most part. This year, he’s in charge of running the seminar on mechanical engineering, and also the rope-tying class. It could be worse. Most of the other counsellors are in similar positions, splitting their skills between actual science and other kitschy, less-useful camp activities, vacillating from one side to the other on which is a bigger waste of time. Last year, Vi got lumped with teaching the kids how to build bird-feeders, which backfired anyway when her kid sister unceremoniously lit one on fire. This year she’s running archery and wrestling, which he can tell she’s much happier about.
He learns a handful of things about Viktor organically this way. He doesn’t seek them out. It feels like less of a crime to happen upon them by proxy, the way it seems impossible to avoid learning certain things about any of the campers he ends up saddled with every summer.
He learns that Viktor’s only friend from school is the girl named Sky, a ninth-grader who shares a cabin with a pair of redheads Jayce gets the impression are kind of mean girls. He makes a mental note to bring it up with their parents. In between activities he catches them standing off to the side together, Sky and Viktor, often whispering. Or Sky will be whispering and Viktor will be smothering laughter into his palm. Like it’s something either explicit or dark-humoured, a sly bite to his reaction. He’s got this kind of mean, snarky-sounding laugh in him sometimes, but the rest of the time he laughs so openly and freely that it’s difficult to picture him feeling anything but innocent joy, and Jayce’s stomach hurts. Jayce finds himself wishing he knew what she’d said to make him laugh like that. The moment he catches himself feeling envious of a fourteen-year-old girl is the moment he determines he’s letting himself get in too deep, though, and he forces himself to turn his attention away. To stop seeking out Viktor in every room. This isn’t healthy, whatever it is, whatever he’s going through. Jayce will do better. He has to do better.
The last time he truly got close to someone was—well. But the Mel thing was different. Jayce doesn’t blame her for moving on. Not that what they had could have ever been classified as a relationship by traditional means, but it had still lanced him to hear her suggest they stop seeing each other. How casually it was addressed, over wine. Two adults who loved each other. Two adults who were willing to be realistic about where their paths were headed. Yes, Jayce could be realistic. They’re still friends, in a way that tends to lean more professional these days than he’d like given the way his chest still feels tight whenever he looks at her. Like there’s a betrayal in there somewhere, her inexplicable ability to turn a mirror to the parts of Jayce he’s ashamed of, the buzzing knowledge that in the end, he is always either too much or not enough.
He’s had some time to make himself be okay with it. To adjust. But sometimes he still feels so achingly lonely that his mind turns back again and again to the same dark place, the little cracks his feelings live in, fissures in the imaginary mirror of his face. Stare bottomless, a never-ending well of hunger and emptiness and need.
Jayce has spoken with enough therapists to know that he’s not—normal. This capacity he has for extremes, the way he wants to absorb the people he cares about. He’s so, so tired of trying to feel normal, though. To feel less, want less, be less. Some days the goal feels more achievable, a purely scientific endeavour of his psychology that he can justify aspiring to. Others…
He’s doing the rounds after everyone has gone to sleep on day seven. He wanders the campground like a ghost. It is weirdly peaceful at night, the muzzy lights of the security lamps, the buzz and zap of insect traps, the crackle of the dying fire he’s always tasked with making sure gets put out. Some of the other counsellors already know he has trouble sleeping, and it’s never a feat to convince the others to trade shifts with him, few others preferring late nights the way he does.
Jayce stops walking when he gets to the knot-tying course, still as he left it. The ropes laid out neatly, ready for another thirty-minute lesson tomorrow. Idly, he stops and picks one up, testing its weight in his hands, its give, running the coarse fibres under his digging thumb. He wonders, for a moment.
It would be easy. He could go off into the woods, even, where it’s unlikely one of the kids would find him. The thought doesn’t unsettle him, just simmers in his brain, a neutral option. Something to mull over like it’s what he wants for lunch. Jayce’s hands fidget, twist the rope absentmindedly, and after that it’s simple to pretend he’s just distracted, to let his hands work for him, looping the hole; tying the knot, around and around.
“Am I interrupting?”
Jayce’s soul leaves his body. He starts, as guilty as if he’s been caught with his hand down his pants, and immediately defaults to anger. Viktor appears unswayed by it all. Perhaps not damaged enough to instinctively fear the sight of an angry man the way Jayce realises he’d assumed he would be. He’s out past curfew, but his unconcerned stare makes Jayce feel like he’s the one breaking the rules, shame making blood rise to his cheeks. Viktor’s eyes slide down to the noose in Jayce’s hands.
Some of Jayce’s anger dissolves and becomes shame instead. He begins gracelessly untying it. The damage is already done, though, Viktor has seen, and he’s—still not reacting. His expression is inscrutable. Other than the signature razor-sharpness of his eyes, there’s nothing at all to be gleaned from his face.
“Viktor, it’s past curfew.” Jayce manages to keep his voice level. “You should be in bed.”
“Are you going to tell on me?” A wry twist of his mouth, and he’s coming over to sit beside Jayce. Haltingly, he lowers himself to the log bench, gingerly stretching out his bad knee. He’s wearing a leg brace. Jayce’s eyes flick between it and his face, trying to figure out what kind, what exactly it does. Viktor’s wrist lifts and lazily motions at Jayce’s shaking fingers, still gripping the half-tied knot. “Does it get boring teaching the same thing over and over? I never understood the purpose of certain… eh, wilderness skills I guess you call them. Camp stuff. Like, what am I supposed to do if I actually find myself stranded in the woods someday? Kayak to safety?”
Jayce knows he’s not angling for a defense of certain activities, definitely not knot-tying class, as being practical tools for survival. He huffs a laugh, playing along. “Better than building a bird-house.”
“I didn’t mind the bird-house, actually. I like animals.” He squints at Jayce, the corner of his mouth tipping up, and there it is again. That uncanny shrewdness, like someone who’s clever beyond his years. Jayce is thinking of paintings again: swallows, little feathered creatures at war in the snow, in beams of shadow and sunlight. Winged things, sharp and luminous in the moonlight.
“How is it?” he finds himself asking, the words tripping off his tongue like a man hypnotised. “Having your own cabin?”
Viktor shrugs. “Lonely. But I would probably feel that way with a cabin-mate, so.”
“You know, I’ve seen the group cabins. They’re not that big. I get a cabin all to myself, too.”
“Oh? You don’t get on well with others?” He’s grinning, baiting him, the realisation sending Jayce’s pulse tripping up his body in his haste to keep up.
“I get on well with everybody. I just don’t really like anybody.”
He’s not sure why he tells the truth. In retrospect it’s a pretty bleak thing to confess, especially to a teenager. Viktor is friends with the fourteen-year-old but he looks younger, could be anywhere from ten to ten thousand with eyes like that. But then Jayce makes the mistake of dragging his gaze up, snaring on Viktor’s, and all at once the horrible, world-tilting realisation slams into him, locking something in place.
Viktor understands.
How pathetic, how typical, how practically karmic for Jayce to find that in somebody like Viktor. Somebody so out of reach, dropped at random in Jayce’s life. An angel eyeing him on the precipice of a crossroads, it feels like. An omen, death in an achingly beautiful parcel.
They sit and talk for close to an hour before Jayce realises what he’s doing and reminds himself that he’d better get them both inside before someone realises the fire’s still burning and comes to check on them. Jayce isn’t sure how he’d explain Viktor being out past curfew, let alone what they’re doing with the ropes. Stranger than this is the realisation that he’s been talking to Viktor for so long, hanging onto his every word, that he’s almost forgotten about the noose he’d been tying when Viktor found him.
Strange. All of it. Very much so.
Jayce walks him back to his cabin. It’s the last one on the row, its doorstep shrouded in darkness, its back to the campground and not the other campers, facing away. “Did you sign up for any of my engineering seminars?”
Even with so little light, Jayce can see Viktor nodding enthusiastically. “Of course. I’ve actually, ah.” A sudden fumbling. Jayce imagines his cheeks are rosy. “I’ve read your papers, Jayce. Ah. Counsellor Talis. Or is Jayce…”
A flutter of his eyelashes; he has to know what he’s doing. Jayce feels sick, all of a sudden, to decide the only reason he’s asking is because the youngest kids in that course are fourteen, like it makes a fucking difference. “Jayce is fine.” He makes himself follow it with, “How old are you, Viktor?”
“Seventeen.”
Something in Jayce halts, surprised. Oh, he thinks. Well. That’s not—
“Next September.”
The something halts again. In his mind, a gear grinds to a stop, then stumbles back around to hastily do the math. It’s only June. “You’re fifteen.”
Viktor’s smiling like it’s a joke they’re both in on. Biting back sly joy like wording it this way was a clever trick. Jayce’s stomach rolls over. He should go back to his own cabin before this gets any worse.
“I’ll see you at one of the seminars?” he finds himself breathing.
“Or at rope-tying.” Viktor’s stare lingers as he goes inside. He’s fifteen. He’s fifteen. “See you later, Counsellor Talis.”
He’s fifteen. Jayce is a monster.
Jayce doesn’t mean to become—fixated. But Viktor is so special.
Jayce has never met anyone like him. He’s ruthless, deadpan, shockingly clever; but at times he reveals how soft he is underneath, how infinitely caring, how sweet and sincere. Jayce is obsessed with the contrast. How it seems that Viktor is still figuring out how to carry himself, how to handle the masks he uses to face the world, how much or how little of himself he wants to give away. Jayce can see that he wants, so much, himself. There’s a neediness in him, something wild and unguarded that Jayce wants to test the give of between his teeth, wants to mold into something new and clean with his own bare hands.
Viktor is endlessly surprising, too. He’s frequently catching Jayce off-guard with opinions and interests, hobbies and beliefs. He tells dirty jokes in a soft monotone that gives Jayce whiplash, then smiles at his resulting disorientation; always doing it on purpose. Foul-mouthed and precocious, the loveliest thing Jayce has ever seen. He listens to Radiohead and Fiona Apple and dislikes hamburgers, but never turns down Sky’s pickles when she offers them. He breezes through all his seminars, excelling in all the academic parts that the camp has to offer. He has a knack for engineering and an interest in robotics and he is on a scholarship, passed some elite entrance exam that got him special funding to be here, same as Sky. Jayce is greedy for every single morsel he’s offered, every piece of new information, every shard and sliver of him.
Viktor is unlike anyone. He’s so young and so jaded. He’s brave and soft-bellied, determined but burdened by an untameable tenderness at his very core, something Jayce can tell he wishes to be rid of. He has more drive, spurred on like a vicious dog, than anyone Jayce knows. It makes Jayce want to know him better. It makes Jayce want to know everything.
He is walking past Vi’s wrestling group when he realises Viktor is waiting for a turn. He stops to watch without even thinking about what he’s doing. Finds himself smiling to watch him fidget, to try and guess what he’s thinking. Viktor loathes pointless physical activity like this. But he refuses to sit them out. Jayce wonders if he’s thinking of proving anything to himself, or if he is only thinking of how soon this will be over before he can go to lunch.
It is Viktor’s turn. No one volunteers to spar with him. His face goes carefully blank in a way Jayce is learning means he’s pissed off, turning it all inward. Jayce almost does something unthinkably stupid like walk over to volunteer himself before Vi offers to partner with him. Jayce watches, hopelessly charmed by the way Viktor only gets more and more frustrated with himself, loathe to accept any help, pushing himself like the result genuinely matters. He hangs on to his instructor’s every word like he thinks he needs to learn how to fight. It’s—very endearing, actually, partly just that signature determination, the sharp focus. It’s not going all that badly until Vi goes to demonstrate a move that he’s clearly not prepared for and accidentally knocks him flat on his back.
He’s only down for a moment. Vi helps him up, plays it off, and he laughs along with everyone else as he accepts his cane and limps to the back of the group. But Jayce’s stomach is in shambles from the sight of Viktor, bright red and mortified, flat on his back in the dirt.
Jayce walks away quickly with the heat eating a hole in his stomach. He doesn’t once stop picturing it, not until he finally slips into unconsciousness in the late hours of the night.
Without meaning to, they form a habit. Of talking, of companionship. If anyone thinks it’s strange, they don’t say anything, though once notably Viktor mentions Sky feeling a little sour that Jayce is taking up so much of his time and Jayce is so momentarily blinded by panic that he considers finding an excuse to send her home. He calms down at the realisation that Viktor is only teasing him, telling a light-hearted anecdote about his friend. A fourteen-year-old girl who is no more than innocently jealous about Viktor getting special attention, or maybe the other way around. Jayce is ashamed he jumped to the other conclusion so quickly.
Viktor often lingers after Jayce’s activities, seeks him out during free time, where he’ll sit with his leg stretched out while Jayce does whatever work they’ve saddled him with, or pretends he was planning on reading the book he spreads out in front of him, like this is his real purpose for choosing to spend his free time away from the cabin. Viktor is mostly content to just let Jayce chew his ear off about any given topic, on some days only occasionally chiming in, on others such a lively debate partner when something sparks his interest that it dares his never-ending contrarian streak, at war with his bone-deep need to be praised. Jayce is generous, always making the observations he knows Viktor’s after, plying him with acknowledgement. “I like your Tidal shirt. What you’re studying is so advanced. You’re brilliant. I wish you were old enough to be my research partner.”
It’s bewildering, that one person can so easily keep his attention, can keep up with him; of course Viktor has to be a teenager. It is no less addicting to fall into the routine of expecting his company, of looking forward to it, even. And it’s not unheard of, right? Jayce formed a friendship with Caitlyn when she was only sixteen. Nobody else seems to think it’s strange, so perhaps Jayce is overthinking it.
He’s doing the rounds one night when he goes out of his way to walk by Viktor’s cabin. The last one on the row. He strolls to the back, the side that faces the campground, away from everyone else. Viktor is sitting with one knee drawn to his chest, a novel balanced on top of it. Outside, reading in the dim light.
Jayce takes a second to recover from the unexpected sight of him before he thinks to check what he’s reading. Crouching in the yellowish glow of the nearby security lamps, the spectral light of the moon, he can just make out the cover. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov.
It’s almost as obscene as if he’d caught him reading Lolita. That it’s adjacent enough to be suspicious but not enough to confirm his motive has Jayce’s head spinning. He feels ill with himself for even entertaining the association. “Big fiction reader, are you?”
Viktor doesn’t startle, so he must have heard him coming. His keen gaze flips up, turning something like coy. “That surprises you?”
“Do you…” Jayce’s throat feels dry. He has no idea why. “Which language are you reading it in?”
He only asks because he assumes, given the accent, that English isn’t his default. Viktor’s eyebrows fall. “Nabokov was Russian. It’s impressive enough that I’m bilingual, no? Unless you didn’t already know that my native language is Czech.”
Jayce actually didn’t, though he’d gone out of his way to read Viktor’s file. “I think they print those in a few languages, actually.”
“It is in English.” He flips it around, his narrow fingers obscuring part of the page. Jayce’s eyes still fall immediately and try to read whatever is visible anyway. Like the prose itself might reveal something, some twisted divination. Viktor continues, “It is— eh— so far. I’m not sold on any of his work. I don’t like unreliable narrators.”
It’s not the first time Jayce’s body has gone all warm from the unexpected pleasantness of speaking to someone who loves to intellectualise as much as Viktor does. He’ll force himself to forge an opinion on just about anything. Equally so he is desperate to gorge himself on knowledge, to fill himself with as many obscure facts and tastes and interests as Jayce assumes it takes to feel justified about not feeling his age. “Not many kids at school care so much about twentieth-century literature, I bet.”
Viktor rolls his eyes. “Tell me more how not like other boys I am, counsellor.”
Heat pools in Jayce’s stomach. It takes him a dragging several moments to realise that Viktor is joking, that he’s baring his crooked little canine tooth at him, lifted in an equally crooked smile. Jayce is stunned by the urge to smack the look off his face.
He stands quickly, drying his palms covertly by sliding them into his pockets. He cuffs the back of Viktor’s leg with the toe of his shoe. “It’s past curfew. Get your ass in your cabin and use a torch if you wanna stay up all night reading.”
“You’re not going to lecture me about needing eight hours of sleep?”
“Nine at your age. If any of the other counsellors ask you, I really laid into you about it too, okay? I’d be in so much trouble if they found out I let you get away with half the things I do.”
Jayce isn’t sure whether it’s the admission or the forced casualness that has the desired effect of stunning him. It probably doesn’t matter when the result is the same. Viktor is unsure, suddenly, caught off-guard by an unplanned-for anomaly. Ah. The heat in Jayce’s stomach simmers, pleasant, an innocent interest if he tends it.
Viktor stubbornly refuses to be outplayed, though. “What else would you get in trouble for?”
Jayce should leave. He should leave, should say nothing. He would not even be at fault if he did, does not owe this child an apology for doing the right thing—and yet. Shame and guilt linger as he lets Viktor get away with it, as he sets the new boundary that these sorts of jokes are allowed. “Flirting won’t extend your curfew. Up, and I’ll pretend I don’t see those cigarettes.”
Viktor looks baffled as he pats his pocket for a carton that clearly isn’t there; Jayce grins, thrilled to see him caught, but more thrilled to see the unhinged delight that crosses his face a moment later to realise he’s been played. Any evidence of unbridled delight is quickly smothered beneath a neutral expression, haughty and tight and so young. “It’s rude to accuse me of smoking. I have a serious lung condition.”
“Asthma is not a serious lung condition.” Jayce knows it isn’t all of what he has, but it makes Viktor’s shoulders relax. “I’m just messing with you. I wouldn’t tell anyone even if I did catch you smoking.”
Viktor’s gaze falls, lifts itself, falls again. “What if it wasn’t cigarettes.”
Ah. He’s testing another boundary, pushing to see how tolerant of his behaviour Jayce will be. “Do I look like a prude to you? I got up to plenty of worse stuff at your age. I’m not going to get you in trouble, Viktor. I know how much being here means to you.”
The breath that leaves him is explosive, far too revealing. “I don’t have, for the record. Anything. I have, before, but… it’s medical, I wouldn’t risk my scholarship by bringing any here. I didn’t even bring strong painkillers.”
It irritates Jayce in a flash, the thought that doing so could risk Viktor’s scholarship, his place at the camp, especially given the circumstances. Then he realises the obvious. “You can’t get a medical card at your age.”
“It is self-prescribed. The weed,” he clarifies, with a pointed look, “not the painkillers. I know enough about chronic pain and my condition that it can’t be that much of a stretch to consider it justified, Jayce.”
Jayce considers it justified mostly just on account of him being a teenager, and it being fairly normal teenage behaviour. But he’s distracted, because he will probably never get over the way that Viktor says his name. The way his accent turns the vowel sharp, the shape his mouth makes of the word. “Huh. I guess that makes sense.”
Viktor fidgets. “If I told you something. Uh. Hm. I’m trying to figure out if you’re in one of those situations where you’d be obligated—”
“I’m not a teacher,” Jayce says, wetting his lips when it comes out sounding the way it does, followed by, “or, I mean, a therapist counsellor, I’m officially only a student volunteer here. Speaking in terms of legal obligation.” He needs to keep going. “But as an adult—”
Viktor speaks over him. “I put myself on puberty blockers. My foster father doesn’t know.”
His eyes try to hold onto Jayce’s, cannily orange in the moonlight. Like he’s some sprite thing from a painting, a creature of mythology. Jayce hadn’t even been aware he was in a foster situation. His file still mentions a biological mother; a father, deceased. Another way he’s like Jayce. “That seems suitable, given your situation.”
“You’re not going to ask where I get them?”
“I’m sure you’re careful and I can make some educated guesses. Everyone knows a pharmacist.”
Viktor’s next response comes out flat and rehearsed. “You don’t doubt the need for psychological and medical intervention prior to a minor being given access to biology-altering materials?”
“I don’t doubt that you’re a boy, Viktor.”
Viktor’s breath catches. It’s obvious and devastating. Jayce can’t help himself, dropping to a crouch again, hovering close. “Does that surprise you? You being a boy is not the problem here, V.”
It goes from something he could still plausibly contradict if confronted about it to something he has zero excuses for in about a second. Viktor turns to him, lithe nervy body rising to its knees, the bad one teetering, hovering in a way that suggests he’s thinking about climbing into Jayce’s lap. “I…”
Jayce picks this moment to make it plausible again. He helps Viktor to his feet, nudges him in the direction of his cabin, walks the rest of the way to his own the way a responsible adult absolutely would in the same situation.
And if he jerks himself raw, comes biting the side of his hand bloody just from thinking about it, it’s nobody’s business but his own. It is nothing he can be condemned for, anyway. A sickness that might he purged if he spends enough time fucking his fist.
The following morning, he’s put on a supervisor shift for Viktor’s group while they’re forced to endure an hour of activities that the board deems ‘outdoorsy’. It’s all kids who didn’t sign up for enough other activities outside the classroom. Fulfilling the program’s promise of enrichment the same as non-academic summer programs, so that your child can enjoy the full spectrum of development-dependent social activities recommended for their age group while still gaining an academic advantage. Jayce has read the part of the pamphlet that goes into detail about recommendations for parents enough times to know most of it by heart. He had previously pictured someone Viktor depends on thoughtfully reading it, now wonders if the details had even been skimmed, if some man had simply signed a dotted line after hearing it would be a pre-paid summer-long absence.
Jayce grinds his teeth at even the thought of Viktor being neglected. There are two-and-a-half weeks left of camp. After that, Viktor could be in the hands of anyone for the better part of the next year, completely out of Jayce’s reach. Inaccessible to Jayce’s ability to help him, if… not that it’s his obligation to help, but he wants to. The thought of abandoning Viktor entirely makes his stomach ache, makes the world tilt in a vertigo of wrongness. Like he owes it to him for being subject to Jayce’s obvious defect, marked forever the object of his unsubtle attention.
Not that Viktor seems to mind. God. It shouldn’t matter or not if Viktor minds.
Jayce just cares about him, that’s all. He’ll figure it out. Between now and then, he’ll find a way to access him—no, not that, he’ll simply find a way to make himself available to help—in the ‘real world’. This, thought in gleeful self-hating irony, as if summer camp is not the real world, as if consequences don’t exist here. In Viktor’s day-to-day life, he amends. He’ll pass on a phone number or an email address to the foster father. Put in a recommendation that Viktor comes back to camp next year.
They don’t speak again until Viktor approaches him after the lunch hour, when he’s pretending not to be trying to get away with missing his turn at archery. “You are avoiding me.”
The dark thing in Jayce loves watching the flicker of uncertainty pass over Viktor’s face at the genuine-seeming confusion he tries to affect. “Why would I avoid you?”
The breath Viktor lets out is shaky. The end of it is clamped between his teeth. “Enjoy your lunch, counsellor.”
Jayce lets him stew. He stays away from Viktor’s cabin that night. Pictures him sneaking out, sitting on the ground again, squinting to try to make out words on pages by moonlight, heart rabbiting in his throat. Pictures him startling at every sound, turning to check if it’s Jayce, before his back starts to ache and he realises he’s been sitting out for too long, Jayce is not coming. The accompanying notion of doubt that will subsequently fester. Viktor wondering if he’s imagining it after all, not experienced enough to be able to tell, to know just by looking, to identify from Jayce’s expressions how much of it is definite.
Jayce is a bad man. The heat in his stomach broils.
He watches Viktor bleary and shadowy-eyed at breakfast, the awkward way he arranges himself. At one point, their stares collide, and he makes an admirable effort to pretend as though he doesn’t notice Jayce watching him. Jayce likes the idea of playing like this, of going back and forth indefinitely. Painter and lamb. Of adding strokes, trying to outdo each other’s vicious twisting, of over and over choosing whether to bluff. He thinks that someone like Viktor would probably be good at chess, could beat Jayce if he really put his heart into it. He likes the idea of being outmatched intellectually, of being played and outplayed and viciously, mercilessly outplaying. The effort it takes to push someone as steadfast as Viktor out of their depth is hopelessly gratifying. To see the shaky, belly-up vulnerable results up close.
Even at his age, Viktor is astonishingly self-preserving. Though he is less convinced of his intrinsic value than he is simply hellbent on survival, it is no less heart-stoppingly beautiful to witness than something more evolved. Jayce can get him there; with time, can teach him, can make him see what Jayce does. The thought makes his chest tighten, makes his teeth ache with the sudden urge to produce tangible results. He wants to calm himself of the notion, reassure himself of a sense of control. Maybe he’ll send an email to the foster father today. He’ll feel better when he can stop visualising on a calendar and how long Viktor will be out of his reach for. The urge to protect him feels bizarrely paternal, and that thought isn’t worth visiting, certainly not in the context of someone he’s as conflicted about as Viktor, given what it implies about Jayce otherwise. He decides not to make a big deal about it. No need to give undue attention to something so uncomfortable.
He doesn’t need the added grief of wondering whether he’s doomed by behavioural science on account of his own varied and measurable issues, even if it does interest him in a purely scientific way, a little. A study in desire, subject: a man as unstable as one who might have fastened himself a noose and used it had a fifteen-year-old not caught him.
It is probable the world would be better off if Jayce had doubled down on his conviction about that one. Given it another try. It’s difficult not to reject the idea altogether, not to feel indignant that it is not, in fact, worse with him still here, that perhaps he has a purpose after all. That it was here the whole time just waiting to be discovered, unearthed like a precious gemstone. A purpose that could explain the divine intervention: Viktor. Knowing Viktor, caring for Viktor, or at least in some capacity having an affect on Viktor’s wellbeing. Colliding with Viktor. Being a mark he can’t erase in whatever capacity Jayce manages to will it.
A less instinct-based, emotional part of Jayce’s brain is professionally horrified by the justifications necessary to excuse the thrill of possessiveness itself. Likely another case of him being too much. Jayce’s ability to overwhelm his partners with desire, to be smothering with his affection, is a well-documented flaw. Even Cait had thought his weekly check-ins were ‘a bit much’. It is something he keeps insisting he will work at, something he has no desire at all to work on now. It feels too kismet, Viktor in need of someone to devote themselves to his well being, Jayce in need of a reason to exist.
The side effect of Viktor being lovely and Jayce being abominable is a workable roadblock. The discovery that Jayce is the sort of man who would, apparently, abandon his own morals the moment an exemption became personally appealing is disappointing, but not obliterating. He won’t deny it feels good to simmer in something shaped like wanting, to feel interest in something of any kind for a change. Especially after so much time spent feeling damp, muted, lacking in something crucial. As long as he refuses to act on it, the wanting is private enough to be acceptable, could possibly be rewarded with something that is only slightly less unforgivable when it is, at the very least, legally pursuable.
It’s not Jayce’s fault that his soulmate is too young for him. He can wait.
He’s been far more patient for less.
It comes to a head in their last week. Jayce is tasked with dousing the group campfire again. He hangs back, takes enough time to make the rounds that he knows without a doubt that everyone else has gone to sleep. The firepit is far enough away from the sleeping cabins that he feels safe enough to escape for a private drink. Jayce rarely drinks, but when he does, it’s of the lukewarm brown liquor, smuggled-in-his-own-luggage variety, rather than the chilled white cooking wine the cooks sometimes drink in the back after-hours that is, as far as he’s aware, the only authorised alcohol on the campsite.
It burns his throat. Settles warm in his guts, pacifying him.
He almost doesn’t notice Viktor. At least not until he’s close enough to have to stifle his footsteps, though the accompanying tap and drag of his cane is so undeniable that Jayce doesn’t know why he bothers. “You should be inside. It’s after curfew.”
“Walk me back to my cabin,” Viktor dares. He takes the bottle from Jayce’s slack fingers. Jayce lets him. Watches him tilt it back, wince at the taste, mouth thinning and throat fighting off a gag as he swallows it. Then, with no warning, he drops himself backwards into Jayce’s lap.
Jayce is forced to catch his cane with one hand, steadying Viktor by his waist with the other. Like every time he’s thought about this, the size difference is lethal. It deals the deadly blow. Jayce’s whole hand spans his hip to the centre of his ribcage, fingers spreading, chasing the skin-warm heat beneath his sleep clothes. There is a nervous flutter of his waist against Jayce’s palm; Jayce’s fingers dig into the sharp edges of bone like they intend to leave permanent bruises there. Shadows on the inside, a mark no one but the two of them can see.
Jayce groans, forehead dropping to the sharp wing of Viktor’s shoulder blade, shivering like he’s got a nervous baby bird in his lap instead of a boy.
“What are you doing,” Jayce says, like it’s the fifteen-year-old’s responsibility to answer.
“Don’t worry about it.” The words are deceptively confident. Viktor’s voice is shaking. “No one comes back here, right?”
He’s more afraid of getting caught than of actually doing this. It’s unbearably cute. It’s devastating in context. Part of Jayce is horrified, wants to protect him from his own naivety; part of him wants to take the offered chance to claim . It’s devastating, laid out before him, so many firsts . A permanent bruise.
He’s not an evil person. Viktor could be at risk of much worse. Their situation is not normal, but surely it’s okay to allow himself to—have—a little. Just a little.
Viktor is trembling like a leaf in his lap.
Jayce cautiously sets his cane aside, using his now free hand to pet at Viktor’s hip. He strokes his flank, his belly, like he’s an unreasonably frightened animal and not a child having a justifiable reaction to new stimuli. Jayce genuinely means for it to be comforting, but he gets sort of distracted by the fact that his hands span Viktor’s entire waist, fingers meeting in the middle, almost overlapping. He’s so small. Viktor would be so easy to move, if they—
A soft brush of hair against his cheek. Jayce peels his eyes open and sees Viktor looking up at him, bright eyes upside down. The white stretch of his throat in the moonlight as he cranes his head back. “I trust you,” he murmurs.
It’s probably the worst thing he can say given how quickly it rids Jayce of his higher reasoning. Like a sleeper agent, like something dangerous coming to life, he runs his palms up over the vulnerable flesh of Viktor’s throat, thumb seeking a mole to obsessively pet over, mouth crushing gracelessly to the hinge of Viktor’s jaw.
Viktor’s mouth drops open, starts panting.
Jayce’s hand falls from his waist to his hip, gripping him, stilling him. He needs the other to fully grind Viktor to a halt. He continues to wriggle, body restless, new enough to sex that it could be arguably accidental that he keeps pushing back against the growing bulge in Jayce’s pants. Jayce thinks so, anyway. The thought of anything different has his hands itching, his face flooding with heat. He is unable to stop himself from slurring out, “Have you–?” It comes out sounding completely depraved.
Viktor latches onto it, mind gone sharp again when Jayce should be turning it off. “Do you like that, Counsellor Talis? The idea of being my first? I’m not a child.” It’s an unexpected diversion in tone, a sudden hardening even though the volume of his voice largely remains the same. Jayce is obsessed with him like this, how quiet he gets when he’s angry. “You of all people should know not to treat me like I am made of glass.”
“You’re not,” Jayce says, “I don’t,” instead of any of the things he should be actually arguing about.
Jayce fists him by the back of the hair. Not as hard as he wants to, but harder than he intends; Viktor’s eyelids flutter. There’s a flash of something stunned in his eyes that he’s too slow to hide completely that tells Jayce he’s probably right about him being a virgin. With his other hand, he turns Viktor’s face, well aware as his pulse jumps in his throat that doing this out here is stupid. It’s unlikely they’ll get caught but certainly not impossible, and not improbable enough to make it anything but a reckless decision concerning Jayce’s career. The feeling of Viktor’s wet uncoordinated mouth opening up under his makes none of it mean anything. There can quite literally only be this, the feral need to trace the sharp point of his crooked canine with the point of a tongue, the soft wet gasp he lets out when Jayce licks into the back of his mouth. The kittenish suck he laves the tip of Jayce’s tongue with, shy and unsure, the way his teeth dent Jayce’s bottom lip like he’s not sure how hard he’s allowed to bite down. All of it threatens to send Jayce permanently insane. It leaves him incapable of doing anything but kissing and kissing and kissing the boy in his lap.
Viktor struggles to pull adequate air through his nose. He squirms and turns pink, the blush creeping from his ears to his neck from the lack of oxygen. Jayce pulls away enough to let him gasp through his mouth again and he whines, the noise pitchy and startled, like he doesn’t mean to make it. All reasonable thoughts flee Jayce’s mind as one of the hands he’s using to hold Viktor’s hip drops to hook around his thigh and drag him open, so that at least one of his legs is being held in place by Jayce’s, his slender ankle trapped behind Jayce’s foot. The other hand he slips under the waistband of Viktor’s sleep shorts and touches him.
He’s soaking wet through his underwear. He reacts to Jayce’s touch like it’s the best thing he’s ever felt even though Jayce is barely cupping him. The first brush of his fingers over the approximate location of Viktor’s clit, tracing the soaked-through seam of him up to find the shape of the hard nub through a layer of wet cotton, has Viktor trying to snap his thighs shut. Jayce bites back a groan and uses his foot to hook Viktor’s other ankle and hold him open.
Viktor is trembling, hot face turned to hide in Jayce’s neck. He’s panting around high-pitched strangled little noises that he is obviously trying very hard not to make. Jayce strokes over him again like a man possessed, hypnotised by the way it makes Viktor’s hips jump as the little rise of him starts pulsing. Jayce rubs him, featherlight traces of his fingertips up and down over the slippery fabric, so frictionless he doesn’t even see the point of pushing them aside, and suddenly with no warning at all Viktor is mewling, aborted cries tapering off into one long bitten-off whine as he comes on Jayce’s hand.
He reacts like it’s new. Like he can’t believe it, like it’s horrible, like it’s ecstasy. Someone who has never felt this kind of pleasure before. It lances Jayce through the guts. There is no way, he thinks, delirious with arousal, that someone who flirts the way that Viktor does—who makes those kinds of jokes, who flirts with Jayce— has never touched himself. And yes, Jayce recalls, reassuring himself, there was once a joke about a vibrator, allusions to thinking about Jayce when he went back to his cabin, the one he occupies all alone. He’s sixteen in—September, he said? Not even that far away—and he’s someone who is demonstrably in possession of his own desires. Surely Jayce would not have gotten cornered into this if he wasn’t.
His fingers continue to pet over Viktor despite his obvious attempts to squirm away from the overstimulation. “Too much,” he squeaks, voice barely above a whisper; shocked, kind of crackly, like he doesn’t trust himself to speak any louder. “T-too much, I can’t—please, Jayce.”
The please is what does it. Jayce groans, grasps him by the hip instead. It takes all of his willpower not to start mindlessly rutting against Viktor’s back. He reminds himself that they should not be tempting fate by prolonging this. They’re still out in the open, have gotten away with something monumental just now. “Baby.”
“Ah—another time.” The pet name throws him off balance. He still smiles at Jayce over his shoulder, attempting saucy bravado, like Jayce can’t see the shaky quality to the expression, the still axis-tilted, poleaxed look in his eyes. “Goodnight, Jayce.”
Jayce lets him go only because he doesn’t call him Counsellor Talis. It’s sweet, genuine. Not intended to torture him. He considers chasing him down to his cabin, talks himself out of barging over there several times before he makes it back to his own. The orgasm he has choking into the pillow shoved between his teeth is the best he can recall having in months, dissolving a stomach full of shame and guilt and blazing, ruinous desire. The latter lingers, but he feels less out of control.
His head pounds with the memory playing on repeat of every detail: Viktor’s thighs held open, his wet mouth under Jayce’s tongue, the shaking apart of his body as Jayce ever-so-gently pet an orgasm out of him. The desire to go over there and give him a pleasure that is a thousand times more intense, to give him everything he could ever possibly want; the need to tear him apart like meat beneath Jayce’s teeth. It’s all burning the world’s slowest hole in Jayce’s stomach, causing permanent damage. Viktor was so pliant, so sweet, utterly perfect. Jayce remembers, I trust you—
He gets himself off a second time. That almost never happens on account of his history with SSRIs and their lingering effects on his libido. He hasn’t taken any kind of pill in months, but he’s still shocked by the speed with which the orgasm crashes over him, the needy heat that begins to build in his body again only shortly after. He’s not used to wanting like this. Whatever magic Viktor is made of feels like it was put on this earth to heal him, and here he is, already craving it like an addict. Camp ends in two weeks. He will have to be so, so careful.
Jayce can be careful. He’s good at careful.