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The laminate floorboards chilled Viktor to the bone as he rose from the kitchen table, heaving a full-body sigh, leaving the silver-white-teal graveyard of his email inbox gaping with the absence of the video conference he’d just ended. It went like this every time: without anything other than a computer screen in front of him, it was impossible to pay attention without straining his mind in a way he was well aware was unsustainable every time he had a remote meeting. He had a few key phrases scrawled on a sticky note that he’d stuck to his laptop right beside the trackpad, but at a second glance, he only vaguely remembered their context.
Severe winter weather warnings had blurred the weekend—Saturday and Sunday, huddled together for warmth, were forfeited wholesale to a white haze that had made Viktor wonder if he would ever be able to pry Jayce up from beneath the quilts.
He had a rule about giving Jayce time and letting him curl into his protective shell during poor weather like this, especially after what happened to him and Ximena when he was a young boy, but after two entire days of only seeing Jayce outside the bedroom to shuffle to the bathroom or eat cold leftovers out of the container, he started to worry.
Monday alighted sloppy and jolting, wheels scraping the runway, sending a shower of sparks out around it, and coasted straight into two-foot-tall snowbanks that piled against the doors, melting down the sides of buildings like undermixed meringue.
He grimaced as he put weight on his right leg, feeling that familiar ache flare up in his hip, knee, and lower back, radiating in waves from those three distinct points. He felt like one of those projected barometric pressure maps, like the snowstorm with all the glory of the trough that heralded it was centered, directly, on him. All his joints, to varying extents, felt like painfully swollen cork buried beneath his lean muscles and pasty skin.
Viktor took slow, deep breaths, leaning into his crutch as he eased into the motions of walking through the kitchen, passing through the threshold to the hallway, and across the hall to the bedroom door, behind which, he imagined, Jayce still slept.
“Jayce,” he called gently, opening the door to see that Rio hadn’t moved from her spot between Jayce’s legs, no doubt possessive over that continued warmth. “The meeting is over, you can get out of bed now.”
Viktor watched as the pile of his husband beneath the blankets groaned at being roused, and lifted his head blearily from under the pillows.
He met Jayce’s eyes, almost forgetting not to frown as he recognized the telltale dullness of his irises, framed by exhaustion-darkened delicate eyelid skin.
That exhaustion did nothing to mask his guilt as he asked, “How did it go?”
Viktor stared at him a moment before deciding how to answer. “Well enough.” He crossed the threshold into the bedroom, each step siphoning more of the cold into his body. “What I could pay attention to, at least,” he muttered, hoping his dry humor would translate into some type of movement or response from Jayce as he dug through the sock drawer to rectify the issue.
Jayce groaned again, a solid profession of his frustration.
“I know, słoneczko,” Viktor sighed, moving to the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. He set his crutch against the bedside table, hissing in pain as he sat down, and when he peeked behind him, Jayce was already dragging himself up.
“It’s cold,” Jayce mumbled, crawling toward Viktor, earning a mewl of protest from the little princess as she jumped down and trotted out of the room. “Let me.”
Viktor placed a hand on Jayce’s shoulder, stopping him halfway through swinging his body up over the edge of the bed. He was about to protest, keenly aware that Jayce was overriding his exhaustion by ignoring his own needs in favor of Viktor’s, but upon further reflection, maybe this rupture in stasis was what he needed to break out of the miasma. Maybe it would help.
He swiped his thumb gently over Jayce’s skin, attempting to offer some reassurance as he considered it.
“Alright,” he murmured, handing the bundled socks over to Jayce, giving his shoulder a light squeeze before letting go.
Jayce settled at Viktor’s feet, bare skin of his shins pressed to the cold floor as he knelt, spine bowed forward, folded in on himself, in just boxer-briefs and a white tank top. He peeled the pair of socks apart from one another, rolling the knit down on itself as he gingerly took Viktor’s calf in one hand and rested his foot on his thigh.
Viktor held his breath, fighting a fierce internal battle over the urge to resist, to pull away, to tell Jayce that he didn’t need to spring into action every time Viktor did something that caused him mild inconvenience or discomfort, especially when Jayce wasn’t even in a state to take care of himself. He remained dutifully silent, coaxing the shape of his mouth into something less frown-like, even as he watched the deep malcontent etching its harsh lines in the furrow of Jayce’s brow, in the taut corners of his mouth.
Viktor’s chest ached, struck by the tender sorrow he failed to bury. He reached out, grazing the side of Jayce’s face with his fingertips on their way to the curve of his ear, the rough shag of his grown-out hair. He held his husband’s jaw in the palm of his hand, fingers twitching with the desire to move through that hair instead of just scraping against his unshaven cheek.
Jayce froze at the contact, halfway through switching from Viktor’s right foot to his left, and the look it earned him held so much condensed shame that Viktor wanted nothing more than to pull Jayce back up into bed with him and lie together until their flesh dissolved into fine-spun linen and squares of calico cotton stitched atop polyester batting. But that wouldn’t solve anything.
He seemed to ignore Viktor’s hand on his face while he rolled up Viktor’s left sock and placed it on his foot, but once he was done, he sighed, folding even further forward. Indirectly pressing further into Viktor’s palm, but doing so nonetheless.
Viktor slid his other hand to the opposite side of Jayce’s jaw, holding his face in a delicate grip. “You didn’t miss anything,” he reassured, lifting Jayce’s face so he could lean down and press an insistent kiss to his hairline. “I promise.”
Jayce swallowed hard, jaw working like he was about to say something, but he changed his mind and crushed his molars together, flexing his masseters instead. He nodded almost imperceptibly, turning his face to exhale into Viktor’s palm before running his hands up and down Viktor’s shins, pushing up beneath the loose flannel of his trouser legs, mussing the fine dusting of hair over his mole-speckled legs.
Jayce stood shortly after that, and walked back around to his side of the bed, pulling the dark grey sweatpants back on that he had kicked off in his sleep. He grabbed a chunky knit cardigan from the floor and tugged that on as well, hardly bothering to cover his shoulders with it, plucking the charging cable from his phone, exhaling heavily when he saw the time.
Viktor grabbed his crutch and stood as Jayce left the bedroom, keeping eyes trained on him as he walked straight into the office to retrieve his laptop, reemerging seconds later with the thin silver machine tucked beneath his arm.
“Did you take notes?” he asked, not raising his voice nor turning over his shoulder.
Viktor followed him through the kitchen, the gel grips on the soles of his socks doing their job to keep him from slipping across the laminate. “Eh… sort of,” he answered, eyes falling directly onto the neon-orange sticky note inundated with his narrow, slanted scrawl. He held it out to Jayce, who had stopped cold, staring out the giant living-room window at the thick coating of snow that had swallowed not only their yard, but also their vehicles and mailbox, leaving the whole outside world white and lumpy.
Viktor’s hand landed gingerly on the back of Jayce’s arm, and he flinched, recoiling from the touch. “I n—need to—um—” he forced out, clutching his phone tight in his hand.
“I texted Ximena this morning and let her know you would be calling,” Viktor smoothed, sticking the useless note to the middle of the dining table. “She said she would wait by the phone.”
Jayce flashed a grateful but no less devastatingly panicked look toward Viktor, dialing his mother’s number as he rounded the corner into the hall and disappeared back into the office. It was, aside from the laundry room and bathroom, the room in the house with the fewest windows. Its only window was covered by dark brown accordion-pleated window-shades, offering respite from natural light whenever one of them was trying to (counterintuitively) work through a migraine, or otherwise required a quiet, dark space.
Viktor glanced back at his dimmed laptop screen, noting the slew of new messages that had come in since he stepped away.
The day was going to be a battle, he could already tell.
Blessedly, he won the staring contest with this inbox, the screen blinking into inky oblivion before Viktor closed the thing, pushing it further toward the middle of the table.
The first time something like this had happened was the first year he and Jayce lived together in undergrad. A snowstorm had crept up on Piltover, much like the one that trapped them at home today, and Jayce had been jittery, pacing up and down the hall, asking Viktor if he was cold every other minute.
He hadn’t known about the blizzard that nearly killed Jayce and Ximena at the time, so Viktor was completely out of his depth as Jayce went back and forth from the thermostat, adjusting the temperature setting by increments of five degrees, vacillating between sweating and freezing, and piling Viktor beneath blankets on their couch.
Jayce didn’t want to be touched, then, either. He had a complicated relationship with shame and fear for someone who was otherwise fairly emotionally open, hiding away to process the things that scared him about himself, and only verbally processing when prompted or frenzied.
Things had gotten a little bit better in the years between, but part of him was still the little boy lost in the storm, and another part still was a stubborn man who feared the rejection that had marked the years of his adolescence.
Though Jayce had rejected the idea of Viktor cooking for him while he was rotting in bed, today was a new day, and he wasn’t going to let Jayce continue eating cold flour tortillas and shredded cheese from the bag. He retrieved a cutting board from the cabinet, pulled a combination of kielbasa, sauerkraut, fresh cabbage, onion, garlic, mushrooms, prunes, and spices from their respective storage places in the kitchen and started to chop.
Viktor had gotten through just about all the prep by the time he heard from Jayce again. He’d finished his conversation with his mother, and Viktor could tell by the change in his voice that he’d decided to call Caitlyn afterwards. After that, it was quiet. It wasn’t enough time elapsed that the quiet concerned him, but he told himself he would go and check in as soon as the aromatics were cooking down.
He didn’t quite make it that far before a loud crash in two parts from the office spiked his blood pressure and he felt the panic rising in his throat. He heard Rio hop down from her bay-window perch and trot down the hall toward the office.
“Jayce?” he called, waiting a few seconds in the subsequent silence before following after Rio.
His heart was in his throat as he approached the door, terrified of what he might find on the other side. His hand shook as he turned the knob.
What he did see, to his great relief, was Jayce, standing behind the desk, very much alive, the office chair overturned behind him, wheels still spinning, and the contents of the desk, including his laptop, flung across the room and piled on the floor.
Jayce himself was staring despondently at the wreckage, chest heaving.
It didn’t take a co-CEO of a leading biotech company to surmise what had happened. “Are you alright?” Viktor asked, doing his best to ignore the rushing of his pulse in his ears.
“Fuck,” Jayce breathed, gritting his teeth against the storm that was no doubt raging in his mind. He slammed his fist down on the surface of the desk, startling Viktor, and looking like he was about to collapse into it. “Fuck.”
The laptop had all but shattered on the ground, and pens were scattered everywhere. That was, in two words, not ideal. Viktor held the foot of his crutch in front of Rio so she didn’t go in and end up choking on pieces of broken plastic.
“What happened?” he prompted, trying to find the wherewithal to get Jayce out of the office so he could come up with a plan for cleaning up the mess.
His desire was granted, but not quite in the way he hoped, as Jayce pushed past him like a whirlwind, beelining straight for the front door. The latch clicked, sucking air through the hall as the door opened, and Jayce vanished into thigh-deep snow, not for the first time in his life, slamming the door behind him.
Viktor cursed under his breath, closing the office door hastily to prevent any cat-related mishaps as he turned to run after Jayce, his crutch pounding the laminate in a long, uneven rhythm.
He hustled down the hall, flashes of thoughts of putting on shoes barely reaching his mind as he fumbled for the doorknob and yanked it open.
Jayce had waded a ways off into the snow, leaving long, striding trails in his wake. Viktor couldn’t quite make out his expression from the landing, but he had crumpled, holding his head in his hands, and a begrudging gratitude reared up in Viktor that Jayce hadn’t just taken off running, knowing that Viktor couldn’t follow him in this snow.
Grimacing, Viktor planted the foot of his crutch and eased himself down the front step, ice crystals melting into the fibers of his socks. He fought his way forward, dampness creeping into his clothes, doing his best to utilize the path Jayce had cleared.
“We can replace your laptop,” Viktor called, small with the way the snow suffocated his voice. “We’ll download your hard drive onto the desktop so you don’t lose anything. Get the same model as your old one so you don’t have to learn a new keyboard or UI.” He huffed with the exertion as he reached Jayce, sliding his free hand gently down Jayce’s forearm, trying not to startle him. “We can take the day off,” he ventured. His tone softened. “It will be alright.”
This time, Jayce did not flinch away. It took Viktor a few seconds to register that he was crying, shoulders shaking with his muffled sobs, eyes screwed shut and ringed with tears.
“I should be able to do it,” he growled, jaw clenched tight through the entire statement.
Viktor shook his head. “Do what?”
“Work,” Jayce spat, forcing the words. “This. Everything.”
The cold gripped him with its icy fingers, but he hardly felt it with the way his heart raced, forcing blood through his capillaries. “I take the day off when I’m in enough pain,” he stated, his tone blunt and revelatory. “You know that. You’re the one who makes me do it.”
Jayce flashed him a stunned, pleading look, helpless for an argument. “That’s different,” he complained, his voice rough, scraped from his throat.
“It’s not,” Viktor countered. “You cannot suffocate your pain with work any more than I can force myself to walk unaided.”
He could, but it would make things worse. He could, but it would cause more pain in the long run.
He could, but it would cost him his life.
Jayce’s expression twisted into something so brutally, anguishingly pained. The claws of it tore at Viktor’s heart.
“What do you suggest I do?” Jayce hissed, still entrenched in that desperate, protective fury that shielded him from the deep gouge of vulnerability.
Viktor’s fingers found Jayce’s, cold and wet from tears. “Come inside.” He threaded his fingers between Jayce’s, pulling their hands down to the center of Jayce’s chest. “Stop torturing yourself.”
The muted seafoam satin of the bathroom walls complimented the hollow lap of the water against the sides of the tub almost too well, calling to mind the sun-salt breeze of the strand, of brighter times that felt a million years away.
He had his laptop resting over his thighs as he sat atop the closed toilet lid, warm and warmer in the humid air as he scrolled through the checkout forms, typing their details into the little boxes—the address, his memorized credit card number, the instructions to deliver packages to the side door instead of the front.
The sloshy gurgle of the washing machine on the other side of the wall changed to thumpy whirring, signaling the switch to the spin part of the cycle just as he clicked the blue checkout button at the bottom of the form, ignoring the hell out of the little red banner that disclaimed longer shipping and delivery times due to the inclement weather.
“It should be here by Monday,” Viktor said, spinning his laptop around to show Jayce the confirmation email with the estimated arrival date.
Jayce looked up from his even, near-catatonic keel, studied the screen for a few seconds, nodded, then went back to looking down at the water.
Getting Jayce back into the house had been hard enough on its own, but getting him out of his soaked, freezing clothes and into a hot bath was a whole other ordeal.
Wet footprints with decorative drippings tracked from the front door down the length of the hall, into the office, and across from the kitchen to the bedroom and bathroom. No single room in their house had been spared in the compromise—Jayce had stood over him as he unscrewed the tiny screws from the back panel and unseated the hard drive, then walked it back to the desktop, where the adapter was plugged in, and set it to transfer, all before he would agree to even change clothes.
And then there was that. Viktor couldn’t get the image of Jayce sullenly peeling his damp clothes away from his body out of his mind. He was silent and reticent, staring stubbornly forward, certainly less agitated, but no less trapped in the fetor of his own mind. Frustration radiated off him in waves. The void of the quiet bored a vacuum in the center of Viktor’s body. And though he understood what the alternative would be, he couldn’t find it in himself to feel entirely contented.
Viktor closed his laptop and set it on the counter beside the sink before leaning down and dipping his fingers into the water, swirling his hand around next to Jayce’s leg, brushing the back of his knuckles lightly along Jayce’s calf, almost as if by chance or accident.
The water was just lukewarm now, having lost a good deal of its heat to Jayce’s frigid skin and through steam to heat the air.
He flicked the switch to open the drain, and turned the hot tap on to replace the water that had gone tepid. Jayce’s head whipped up immediately, and Viktor felt that irritation flare toward him without even facing his husband.
“It was getting cold,” Viktor said simply, getting up from the toilet lid, situating his crutch beneath his arm.
“At least let it drain before you refill it,” he heard Jayce mumble, turning off the tap to let some of the water drain out first.
Viktor smiled to himself as he crossed back into the kitchen to check on the soup.
He’d long since fried and combined all the ingredients, and now they simmered together in a homemade mushroom-and-vegetable broth that Viktor kept frozen cubes of from when he’d made it months ago.
Steam flushed up into the air when Viktor removed the lid, flooding the kitchen with the familiar sour, savory aroma of bigos.
He took a deep breath as he stirred it, catching the sound of the drain closing and the tap turning back on from the bathroom. That, at least, eased his mind after all the excitement of the morning.
Rio padded up behind him, mewing inquisitively while she brushed her sweater-clad body against the back of Viktor’s legs. He would have liked to pick her up, but it was too much to juggle while he was using his crutch, so he settled for petting her with his left foot instead.
On his way back to the bathroom, with Rio in tow, Viktor stopped to turn the thermostat up a couple degrees.
He was glad to see that Jayce had let the tub refill before turning the tap off again, and he used his crutch to ease himself down onto the edge of the tub, facing toward Jayce, swirling his hand in a tiny figure-eight under the now pleasantly hot water.
Rio came up to the side of the tub a few moments after Viktor, gripping the side with her front paws to get up and stare at Jayce.
He extended a wet hand toward her, petting her exactly once before she pulled back and shook the wetness from her head, chirping in protest.
The corner of his mouth twitched up the barest amount in amusement, and Viktor suddenly felt like he could breathe again.
Viktor reached for Jayce’s hand, catching it before he could slip it back into the water. He looked up in response, questioning. Viktor responded by bending down and pressing a kiss into Jayce’s palm. The dampness transferred from Jayce’s hand to Viktor’s face, but he didn’t mind.
“I was thinking that after this, we could check on the hard drive transfer, then lie together on the couch and put on Fellowship of the Ring.” He straightened up, not letting go of Jayce’s hand. “The soup is almost done, so.”
His husband squeezed his hand gently, a gesture of good will.
“Viktor, I—” he started, but choked on the words. “I’m sorry I’m—”
“Shh, złotko,” Viktor soothed, placing Jayce’s hand in his lap to instead reach for his face. “None of that.”
“No, you don’t—” Jayce paused, cut off by the practiced glide of Viktor’s fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck. “I need to be able to take care of you, and I’m—I’m not—”
“I can take care of myself when I need to,” Viktor murmured, gently scratching Jayce’s scalp with the broad, dull whites of his fingernails. “And you, too. When you will let me.”
He seemed to consider that, but turned his face away.
“I am your husband, Jayce.” He pulled Jayce’s face back toward him, staring intently into his pale-golden eyes. “So let me.”
By the time the Fellowship of the Ring had been dubbed by Elrond with the pledge of Aragorn’s sword, Legolas’s bow, and Gimli’s axe, two empty bowls sat in their cozies on the coffee table with dregs of orange broth rimming the bottoms.
Viktor had drawn the curtains across the big bay window to block out the visual reminder of the storm, and turned the burner off to let the soup cool for portioning and storage, and settled in with Jayce before pressing play on the movie.
Jayce laid on his back on the couch, and Viktor lay prone on top of him, head tucked between Jayce’s neck and his shoulder, resting his full body weight on Jayce in a practice that was half-grounding, half-cuddle, and something they both enjoyed immensely. Rio slept curled up by their feet, a favorite spot of hers.
The emergency alert radio he’d gotten Jayce as a gift to replace the one they’d bought after their first snowstorm together hummed and crackled at a low volume on the end table beside them, repeatedly reporting on driving conditions and the projected rate of snowmelt, which roads were plowed and which would be plowed soon, and coordinated efforts to remove fallen tree limbs.
Jayce’s hands traced featherlight circles beneath Viktor’s shirt, catching on the waistband of his sweatpants every once in a while. Viktor, in turn, dragged his fingertips up and down Jayce’s side, melting into him where their bodies touched.
“I really am sorry about earlier,” Jayce whispered, almost too timid for Viktor to hear.
But hear, he did. “You don’t need to apologize,” Viktor murmured back, turning to kiss gingerly at Jayce’s neck.
Jayce shuddered, sighing. “I just… don’t want something to happen, and,” he sniffed, “when everything is so loud… and so still, and I can’t—” his palm stilled, settling firm and warm at the small of Viktor’s back. “I don’t want anything to happen,” he repeated, his tone plunging into misery once more.
Viktor lifted himself from Jayce’s chest, propping himself up on his arms to meet Jayce’s gaze. “I will not let anything happen to us,” Viktor pressed, and felt Jayce’s hand apply firmer pressure to his back.
“Okay,” Jayce breathed, nodding as if he was still trying to convince himself.
Viktor tipped his face forward, kissing the edge of Jayce’s jaw, and Jayce responded by leaning down to press his lips to Viktor’s—a slow, tentative, gentle thing.
A wave of warmth and security washed over him. He never felt safer than he did when he was in Jayce’s arms, and he sincerely hoped Jayce felt the same way about him.
He meant it. By Janna, he meant it.