Work Text:
The sound came from the other side of the laboratory wall - a wet, miserable sound that Viktor had learned, over seven months of cohabitation and four years of friendship, to distinguish from the general ambient noise of Piltover's Academy plumbing. He set down his caliper. He counted silently to ten. Then he picked the caliper back up.
Jayce would come out when he was ready.
Viktor returned his attention to the alignment module spread across his half of the worktable - their worktable, technically, though the distinction had long since ceased to mean anything. The boundary between their respective workspaces had dissolved sometime around the third month of the Hextech project, when Viktor had begun unconsciously placing components he'd finished machining on Jayce's side, within Jayce's reach, in the order Jayce would need them. Jayce had done the same without comment. The center of the table was now a shared vocabulary, a topography they both understood without having mapped it.
He heard the sink run. Then silence. Then the familiar drag-thump of Jayce's footsteps returning - Jayce always dragged his left foot slightly when he was exhausted or embarrassed, though Jayce himself seemed unaware of this.
The door opened.
"Don't," Jayce said immediately.
Viktor had not moved or spoken. He looked up with an expression of complete neutrality.
"Don't look at me like that."
"I'm looking at a diffraction grating," Viktor said. "The grating does not care how you look."
Jayce crossed the room and dropped into his chair. He was pale, which made the circles under his eyes darker than they'd been this morning, and his hair had been shoved back from his face with both hands and left there, a structural disaster. He was wearing the gray shirt with the fraying collar - his stress shirt, Viktor had come to think of it, the one that appeared only when things were bad.
"I'm fine," Jayce said.
"Yes."
"I just - my stomach is doing a thing."
"Mm."
"It's been doing the thing for three days."
Viktor set the caliper down again. This time he did not pick it up. He turned in his chair to face Jayce fully, because Jayce needed to be looked at, even when - especially when - he said he didn't want to be.
"Tell me," Viktor said.
Jayce looked at him. He had very expressive eyes, dark and quick, and right now they were doing something complicated - gratitude and resistance tangled together, the expression of a man who wanted to talk and was annoyed that he wanted to talk.
"I can't stand in front of those people," Jayce said. "I know - I know the material, I know it better than anyone except you, I could build every component blindfolded, but standing there in front of Medarda and Ferros and whoever else they send-" He stopped. He pressed the heel of his palm against his sternum. "My body just starts doing things. Like it's not mine anymore. My throat closes. My hands shake. The last time I had to present to the faculty board, I forgot Heimerdinger's name. His name. I've had lunch with the man."
"You called him 'Professor H,'" Viktor recalled.
"He thought it was charming."
"It was charming."
"Viktor."
"You are not asking me to tell you it will be fine," Viktor said. "You are asking me to tell you something true. So I will tell you something true." He folded his hands in his lap. "You are the best communicator I have ever worked with. This is not sentiment. You have explained our work - work that I, its co-creator, sometimes struggle to articulate - to Heimerdinger's board, to funding committees, to the Academy's ethics panel, and each time you have made them understand not only what Hextech does but why it matters. Why it must exist. You do this through your body, through your conviction, through the specific way you have of making a room feel like they're being let into a secret."
Jayce stared at him.
"The vomiting is your body preparing," Viktor continued. "It is not pleasant, but it is not evidence of incapacity. It is evidence of caring."
"That is the most clinical pep talk anyone has ever given me."
"Would you prefer I lie and tell you the investors will be kind, charming people who ask reasonable questions?"
"Medarda's people aren't kind."
"No. They are not. They are precise and transactional and they will test you. But you have done harder things than this, Jayce." Viktor paused. "And I will be there. In the room."
Jayce looked at him for a long moment. Something in his face shifted - not resolution exactly, but the preliminary movement toward it, the way water begins to move before it flows. Then he turned back to his own workspace and picked up the lattice frame he'd been stress-testing, and Viktor watched him turn it over in his hands the way he always did when he was processing something he wasn't ready to speak.
"Thanks," Jayce said, eventually. Quietly.
"Don't thank me," Viktor said. "Help me align this grating. My hands are cramping."
The next morning it started again before Viktor arrived.
He came through the lab door to find the space empty except for the sound of the sink, and the faint acid smell that had been lingering for three days despite the ventilation running constantly. Viktor stood in the doorway for a moment. Through the wall he could hear Jayce retching - sparse, exhausted heaving, the sound of a stomach that had long since given up its contents but hadn't received the message.
Viktor closed the lab door. He put his bag on the bench. He filled Jayce's mug with hot water from the kettle they kept on the side table - Academy regulations technically forbade any cooking apparatus in the labs, a rule they both ignored with complete equanimity - and he added the ginger packet from the drawer where he kept three of them at all times now, which was a habit he had developed sometime in the last week without consciously deciding to.
By the time the door opened, the mug was steaming and Viktor was sitting on the edge of Jayce's worktable, which was another thing regulations forbade.
Jayce looked wrecked. He looked like he'd slept badly and dreamed worse and spent the morning losing the war against his own digestive tract. He looked up at Viktor and the expression on his face was something Viktor did not have a clean word for - relief and embarrassment and something softer underneath both.
"Ginger tea," Viktor said, and held it out.
Jayce took it with both hands. He sat down heavily in his chair. He pressed the mug against his sternum and closed his eyes.
"Two days," he said.
"Two days," Viktor confirmed.
"I've been-" He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. "I've been trying to run through the opening remarks. In my head. While I'm in there." He gestured vaguely toward the bathroom. "Which is-I know that's insane."
"It is not insane. It is inefficient."
Jayce laughed, a small and tired sound. "You should have been a physician. Bedside manner of a textbook."
"I would have been a terrible physician. I have no patience for patients who do not do what they're told." Viktor watched him drink. "You need to stop rehearsing the words and start rehearsing the feeling."
Jayce lowered the mug. "What does that mean?"
"The anxiety comes from the gap," Viktor said, "between who you believe you are and who you believe those people in that room expect to see. You rehearse the words because you believe if you have the words exactly right, you will be able to perform the version of yourself they expect. But you cannot maintain a performance under pressure. You fall out of it the moment something unexpected happens, and then you are not only without the words but without yourself." He paused. "What you need to rehearse is your own certainty. Not the presentation. The certainty."
Jayce was watching him with that focused, still expression he got when he was actually listening - when he'd stopped preparing his response and was just receiving. It was a particular quality of attention, and Viktor had long since catalogued it, the way he catalogued most things about Jayce, with the automatic precision he applied to data.
"I don't know how to rehearse a feeling," Jayce said.
"I know," Viktor said. "That is why I'm going to help you."
He hadn't entirely decided what that meant yet. But he'd been thinking about it since yesterday - thinking about it the way he thought about particularly interesting problems, with a kind of patient lateral attention, turning the question over without forcing it, letting the solution surface on its own.
The solution had surfaced that morning, sometime around 4 a.m. when he'd given up on sleeping and sat with his notebook by the window.
He was not sure it was a good solution. He was fairly sure it was the right one.
The day passed the way days passed when a deadline was approaching - in a specific quality of frenetic stillness. They worked. Viktor finished the diffraction grating alignment and moved on to the resonance calibration. Jayce worked on the lattice interface, his movements more deliberate than usual, the particular care of hands that needed something to do. They ate lunch at the worktable, sandwiches from the vendor on the east walkway, and did not talk about the presentation.
Around four o'clock, Viktor made a decision.
"Come to Zaun tonight," he said.
Jayce looked up from the lattice frame. "What?"
"There is a pub I go to. The Last Drop. It's-" He paused, calibrating his description for Jayce's reference points. "It is not Academy adjacent. No one from the funding committee drinks there. No one from the Academy drinks there. The beer is terrible but the atmosphere is honest and I think you need to be somewhere that asks nothing of you."
Jayce set down the lattice frame. He was looking at Viktor with an expression that was hard to parse - surprised, Viktor thought, though they'd been friends for four years and Viktor had grown up in Zaun, so the surprise was slightly baffling.
"You want to take me to a Zaun pub," Jayce said.
"I want to buy you a drink somewhere you don't have to be Jayce Talis, future of Hextech technology." Viktor shrugged, very slightly. "You can just be Jayce."
Jayce looked at him for another moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved.
"Okay," he said.
They took the undercity lift together, which Jayce had done before but never entirely comfortably - he was too large for the cramped cage, too Piltover in his proportions, his shoulders nearly brushing both sides. Viktor watched him recalibrate as they descended, watched the Academy leave him in increments, the way it always did when they crossed the boundary. Jayce's posture changed. His jaw unclenched. By the time they stepped out into the blue-green light of Zaun's middle lanes, he was something closer to himself.
"I always forget," Jayce said, looking up at the shimmer-filtered light, the overlapping structures rising on all sides, "how different it is down here."
"Different from what?"
"From up there." He gestured vaguely upward. "Everything up there is so-considered. Everything is a statement. Every building, every street plan." He turned slowly, taking it in. "Down here it just-grew."
"Mmm," Viktor said. He had complex feelings about the romanticization of necessity, but he understood that Jayce was not romanticizing, exactly - was just genuinely perceiving something true. Zaun had grown. It had grown over itself and around itself and through itself, and the result was dense and unglamorous and more alive than anything Piltover had planned.
He led Jayce through two alleys and around the base of a support pillar, and The Last Drop materialized as it always did - not announced, just there, its door worn smooth from a thousand hands, the amber light spilling through the gap at the bottom like it was keeping itself.
Inside, Viktor nodded to Sev behind the bar, who nodded back without any particular interest, which was why Viktor came here. He steered them to the booth in the back corner, the one with the cracked leather seat and the table that wobbled unless you knew to prop it with your knee, which Viktor knew.
"What do you drink?" Jayce asked.
"Whatever Vander recommends," Viktor said. "Which tonight is probably the Zaunite pale. Bitter. Sulfur finish."
Jayce looked slightly alarmed.
"It grows on you."
"How long does that take?"
"Three visits, approximately." Viktor raised a hand toward Vander, who arrived like someone who did not waste motion. Viktor ordered two pales. Sev deposited them and departed without ceremony.
The pub noise settled around them - not loud, exactly, but layered, the specific texture of a place where people came to talk or not talk as they needed. A card game in the far corner. Two women sharing a bottle of something amber at the bar. The low hum of the ventilation system and beneath it, faintly, the deeper sound of Zaun itself, its constant metabolic noise.
Jayce picked up his glass. He sniffed it cautiously.
"Don't smell it," Viktor advised. "Just drink."
Jayce drank. His face moved through several stages. Viktor watched with composed interest.
"That's-" Jayce said.
"Yes."
"That's genuinely bad."
"Give it a moment."
Jayce held it in his mouth experimentally and then swallowed. "Oh," he said. "Huh."
"Mm."
"That's-weirdly okay, actually."
"You will become a person who cannot explain why they like it," Viktor said. "This is what Zaun does to you."
Jayce laughed. A real one, Viktor noted - not the social laugh or the exhausted one but the unguarded kind that came out of his chest without warning. Viktor picked up his own glass and drank and let the silence sit between them, which was one of the things he valued most about Jayce - that silence between them was never uncomfortable. It was simply a different mode of company.
"I've been thinking about what you said," Jayce said, after a while. "About rehearsing the feeling instead of the words."
"And?"
"I don't know what feeling I'm supposed to be rehearsing." He turned his glass on the table. "Like-what is the feeling? Confidence? I don't feel confident. I feel like I'm about to stand in front of a firing squad."
"Not confidence," Viktor said. "That's not the right word." He considered. "Certainty. Which is different. Confidence is about how you appear. Certainty is about what you know to be true." He looked at Jayce. "What do you know to be true, Jayce? About the work."
Jayce was quiet for a moment.
"It works," he said finally. "The theory is sound. The prototype is-I mean, it actually works. We've proven it. And it matters. That's the thing-" He stopped, and something in his face changed, the thing Viktor had been waiting for. "It will change things. Actually change them. Not incrementally. The way Hextech integrates with-the distribution problem we solved last month, the way we rerouted the-" He stopped again. He looked slightly startled, as though he'd surprised himself.
"Yes," Viktor said.
"That's-that's the feeling."
"That is the feeling," Viktor agreed. "That is what you know to be true. The investors don't need you to perform certainty. They need to see that you have it. And you do." He paused. "That's why I asked you to be the face of it. Not because you're tall and presentable-"
Jayce made a face.
"-though you are both of those things. But because when you actually speak about the work, when you stop performing and just-say it, the way you just said it-it lands differently. It is specific. It is yours." He picked up his glass. "The problem is that you do not trust this. You believe that what comes naturally to you is insufficient, so you try to construct something more formal. And the formal construction is always worse."
Jayce was watching him. The light in the pub was doing something particular to his face - the amber warmth of it, the way it caught in the dark of his eyes. Viktor was accustomed to noticing things about Jayce. He was not, at present, succeeding in not noticing things.
"You really believe in this," Jayce said. "Don't you. The project."
"Yes."
"You believe in me."
Viktor held his gaze. "That is why I am here," he said. "Both things."
Jayce looked down at his glass. He was quiet for a moment in a way that had a different quality than their usual silence - a charged quality, which Viktor registered and did not address, because the timing was not right and there were two more pints between them and the night was not finished.
They ordered a second round. Jayce's shoulders came down. They talked about the work - not the presentation, the work itself, the way they talked in the lab at midnight when they'd forgotten to stop, when the ideas had their own momentum. Jayce talked about the distribution problem and Viktor talked about the resonance calibration and somewhere in the middle they built something together the way they always built things, one thought completing another, the conversation itself a kind of engineering.
By the third round, Jayce was leaning forward with his elbows on the table and his eyes bright, and Viktor was watching him with something he did not try to name because naming it would require deciding what to do about it, and he had already decided what to do about it, and the decision was sitting in him quietly.
"You're staring," Jayce said.
"I'm listening."
"You do both at the same time."
"Yes," Viktor said. "It's called attention. You should try it."
Jayce laughed. He had a dimple, left side, that appeared only with the real laugh. Viktor had first noticed it in their second year at the Academy, during a thermodynamics lecture when their professor had made an unexpected pun about calorimetry, and Jayce had turned to Viktor with that unguarded grin, and Viktor had looked at the dimple and thought: oh. That had been the moment, if there was a moment. There had been a moment.
"Come back to mine," Viktor said.
The words landed simply, without performance. Viktor had found, over time, that the way he said things was often more efficient than preamble. He watched Jayce's face process it - not startled, exactly, but something quick and careful moving through his expression. Viktor waited.
"For-" Jayce started.
"Yes," Viktor said.
Jayce looked at him. The card game in the corner was finishing. Sev was wiping down the bar. The pub noise had the quality of late evening, slower and more settled.
"Viktor-"
"I know," Viktor said. "You're going to say you didn't know. Or you're going to say you're not sure. Or you're going to do the thing where you qualify it until there's nothing left of it." He picked up his glass. "But I think you know what this is. And I think you know that I know. And I think you've been wanting to say something about it for a while, which is fine. You don't have to say anything. You can just-" He looked at Jayce, steadily. "Come back to mine."
A long beat. Jayce's jaw moved. The dimple wasn't appearing yet, but his eyes had done something - some of the anxiety had gone out of them, the specific anxiety he carried, and what was underneath it was something softer and more certain.
"Yeah," Jayce said, quietly. "Okay."
Viktor's apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from The Last Drop - fifteen minutes through the glowing dark of Zaun's middle lane, past the shimmer-lit market stalls that stayed open late and the patched-pipe walls with their running condensation, past the neighbor's door with the orange cat always sleeping on the step. Viktor walked with his cane, comfortable at this pace, and Jayce walked beside him, close enough that their arms occasionally touched.
They did not talk during the walk. This was, Viktor thought, the correct choice. Talking would have given Jayce time to construct a complication.
The apartment was small and characterized by books, which were everywhere - shelved, stacked, arranged in the idiosyncratic geography of a person who organized by association rather than subject. Viktor's drafting table occupied the center of the main room, covered in blueprints and overlapping notes, and the window over the side table looked out over the shimmer-filtered dark of the lane below, the blue-green light painting the ceiling in its particular way.
Jayce stood in the middle of the room and looked around. He had been here twice before, for project work, but he looked at it now with different attention - taking stock of where he was and how he got here.
"I like your apartment," he said.
"You've said that."
"I mean it differently now."
Viktor set his cane against the wall and moved to the kitchen, where he filled two glasses of water, as if he had thought ahead. He brought them to the side table. He looked at Jayce.
Jayce was still standing in the middle of the room. He was very large in Viktor's apartment, always had been - too tall, too broad, made everything feel proportionally different. Right now he looked like a man who had arrived somewhere he had been heading for a long time without knowing it, and was adjusting to the recognition.
"I did know," Jayce said.
Viktor waited.
"I knew-I knew that I-" He made a gesture with his hand that had no clear referent but whose meaning was obvious. "I just didn't know what to do about it. I didn't know if you-"
"I'm aware that I'm not easy to read," Viktor said.
"You're not hard to read, exactly. You're just-" Jayce looked at him. "You're very measured. I didn't want to assume. I didn't want to make things weird."
"Things are not weird."
"No," Jayce agreed. He let out a breath - a long, releasing sound, the specific exhalation of a man letting go of something he'd been carrying. "No, they're not."
Viktor crossed the room.
He was not, in general, a physically demonstrative person. This was a matter of efficiency and preference combined, though he was aware that it sometimes read as coldness, which it was not. But when he moved toward Jayce and brought his hand up to the side of Jayce's face - his palm against Jayce's jaw, feeling the warmth there, the slight roughness of stubble - he did it with complete directness, the same way he did everything when he had decided to do it.
Jayce went very still.
"You are going to be extraordinary in that presentation," Viktor said. "I want you to understand that I believe this. Not because it is the thing one says, but because I have worked alongside you for four years and I know, specifically and precisely, what you are capable of." He let his thumb move slightly along Jayce's jaw. "You are not a fraud. You are the person who belongs in that room. You built what we're presenting. You understand it better than any investor who has ever walked through that door. And when you stop trying to be what you think they want and just-say what you know-you are the most convincing person I have ever encountered."
Jayce's throat moved. His hands had come up to Viktor's waist, large and warm, settling there as though they had always meant to.
"Viktor-"
"I know," Viktor said, and closed the distance.
Viktor walked him backward to the bedroom with his hands flat on Jayce's chest - not pushing, just guiding, the way you directed something that needed to go somewhere it hadn't decided yet. Jayce went. He went the way he'd been going all evening, slightly ahead of his own comprehension, his body moving while his brain was still catching up to what was happening.
The bedroom was small, the bed functional, and the shimmer-light from the lane below came through the curtains in slow bars of blue and amber that moved across the ceiling like something breathing. Viktor sat Jayce down on the edge of the bed and stood between his knees and looked at him.
Jayce looked up.
He looked - Viktor observed this with interest - terrified. Not the presentation terror, not the specific anxiety of a man who feared failure. This was different. This was the expression of a man confronted with something he had wanted for too long and didn't know what to do with now that it was real.
Viktor reached for the hem of his shirt. "Lift your arms."
"I-" Jayce said. Then: "Yeah." He lifted his arms. Viktor pulled the shirt over his head and dropped it, and when Jayce's face reappeared he was looking at Viktor with an expression that was doing several things at once - wanting, plainly, and underneath it a kind of stunned quality, like someone who'd walked into a room expecting it to be empty.
Viktor put his hands on Jayce's shoulders. He felt the warmth there, the density of him.
"You're looking at me like that again," Jayce said.
"Yes."
"Like I'm - like you're-" He stopped. "Viktor, I feel like I'm going to say something stupid."
"You frequently say something stupid," Viktor said. "It has not been a problem so far."
A breath that was almost a laugh. "This is different."
"How."
Jayce looked at him. His jaw moved. "I can't believe this is happening," he said, and it came out unguarded - no performance, no management, just the plain fact of it. "I've thought about this. About you. For a really long time and I just - I can't believe-"
"It's happening," Viktor said. Simply.
"I know. I know that. I'm looking at you and I know that, I just-" He made the hand gesture, the one without a referent that Viktor had learned to read as the gesture of a man whose vocabulary had run ahead of him. "I keep thinking I'm going to wake up."
Viktor looked at him steadily. Then he reached up and pressed his thumb firmly to the center of Jayce's sternum - not hard, just definite, a clear point of contact.
"You're awake," he said.
Jayce looked down at Viktor's hand. Then back up. Something in his face shifted - the stunned quality did not leave but something underneath it settled, like a foundation finding level. He exhaled slowly.
"Okay," he said.
"Undress me," Viktor said.
Jayce's hands came to the buttons of his shirt immediately, and Viktor watched his face as he worked - the concentration in it, the care. He was slow. Not hesitant exactly, but deliberate, as though he was aware this was something he only got to do for the first time once. He undid each button with his large, precise fingers - the same hands that managed hextech components on the lab table, steady and exact - and when he spread the shirt open and back from Viktor's shoulders his expression shifted into something Viktor did not have a clean word for.
His hands rested at Viktor's sides. He did not move for a moment.
"Hi," he said, very quietly.
"You've said that," Viktor said.
"I know." His thumbs moved in slow strokes across Viktor's ribs. "I just-" He looked up. "Can I just - for a second-"
"You may take as long as you like," Viktor said. He meant it. He had nowhere to be.
Jayce looked at him with the full quality of his attention - not the performative kind, not the kind he deployed in meetings and presentations, but the real thing, the concentrated focus he brought to problems he found genuinely interesting. Viktor held still under it.
"You actually want this," Jayce said. "You actually - this isn't-"
"Jayce."
"I know. I know it isn't. I just-" He stopped. His hands tightened slightly at Viktor's sides. "You're very certain about things and I'm - I'm not - I don't know what I am right now."
"You're here," Viktor said. "That's sufficient." He paused. "Lie back."
Jayce lay back. He caught himself on his elbows first and looked up at Viktor from that angle - uncertain in a way Viktor had almost never seen from him, an uncharacteristic smallness, as though he'd given something up in lying down.
Viktor swung his leg over and settled carefully across Jayce's thighs, managing the left hip, and Jayce's breath caught. His hands came immediately to Viktor's hips - his default position, the grip that oriented him - and he looked up at Viktor's face with that stripped-down expression, the one that said he'd stopped trying to manage himself.
"You're really here," Jayce said.
"I am," Viktor said. "Stop being surprised by it."
"I can't help it." A breath. "Viktor, I - I've wanted this for so long that it's kind of-" He laughed, slightly, and it was the unguarded laugh, the real one. "It's kind of a lot."
"Then we'll go slowly," Viktor said. He brought his hand to the side of Jayce's face - his palm against his jaw, feeling the warmth, the faint roughness - and watched Jayce turn into it almost without meaning to, an instinctive lean. "There's no rush. We have time."
Jayce's eyes closed briefly. When they opened again something had changed in them - the stunned quality still there, but no longer the whole thing. Underneath it was something quieter and more trusting.
"Okay," he said.
Viktor leaned down and kissed him.
He worked slowly. This had always been the plan - Viktor did not revise plans without cause - but Jayce's shyness gave the slowness a different texture, turned it from patience into something more like deliberate reassurance. Every time Viktor moved to something new he could feel Jayce recalibrate, absorb the fact of it, and he gave him time for this without drawing attention to it.
He pressed his mouth to Jayce's jaw, the line of his throat, the hollow at the base of it where his pulse ran fast and readable. He felt the hands at his hips tighten.
"Viktor," Jayce said.
"Mm."
"You don't have to - I mean, you don't have to go slow because of me, I'm-"
"I'm going slowly because I want to," Viktor said, against his skin. "Not for your benefit. For mine." He pressed his mouth to the ridge of Jayce's collarbone and felt the small helpless sound that produced. "I've been waiting. I intend to take my time."
A silence. "You've been-" Jayce started.
"Waiting," Viktor confirmed. "Yes."
Another silence, different in quality - not the silence of uncertainty but of something being absorbed. Viktor worked his way down Jayce's chest and felt the way he went still. Not tense. Still. The specific stillness of someone paying complete attention, afraid to move in case they disturbed something.
"How long," Jayce said, and his voice had already changed register, dropped lower.
Viktor pressed his mouth to the soft skin at his ribs. "Long enough," he said.
"Viktor-"
"Second year," Viktor said. "The thermodynamics lecture. You made a face at something Ferros said and I thought-" He moved downward, unhurried. "I thought: there it is."
A sharp intake of breath - not from what Viktor was doing with his mouth, but from the information itself. "Second year," Jayce said. "That's - that's three years ago."
"Yes."
"You never - you didn't say anything, you never-"
"I was waiting for the right time," Viktor said. He looked up at him. "The right time appears to have been two days before your first investor presentation."
Jayce stared at him. Then he made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and something more complicated, and his hand came up to cover his eyes for a moment. "Three years," he said. "Viktor."
"We've established this," Viktor said. "Shall I stop?"
The hand came down. Jayce looked at him. "No," he said. "Absolutely not. I just-" He exhaled. "I've wasted so much time."
"We're not wasting any now," Viktor said, and moved.
He took the rest of Jayce's clothes off methodical patience and Jayce let him, which was its own revelation - Jayce, who generally occupied space with the unconscious confidence of someone who had never had reason to be self-conscious about his body, went shy. It happened in stages. The moment Viktor's attention landed on him, directly and without deflection, Jayce's hand came up as though to cover himself, and then he caught himself doing it and his jaw tightened.
"Don't," Viktor said.
Jayce's hand stopped. He looked at Viktor.
"Don't," Viktor said again. "There's nothing here I don't want to look at."
Jayce's throat moved. The shyness did not leave but he moved his hand, placing it carefully back at his side, and Viktor watched him do it and felt something - the word that came was tenderness, which he acknowledged and did not fight.
"You're-" Jayce started. He stopped. His jaw was tight again, the specific tightness of a man managing an excess of feeling.
"I know," Viktor said. He moved his hand slowly, deliberately, making the breadth of his interest unambiguous. Jayce's head went back against the pillow with a short, cut-off sound. "You're not required to say it."
"I want to," Jayce said. "I just - I don't have the-" A breath. "The words right now."
"You don't need words right now," Viktor said. "Just stay with me."
"I'm-" His hands had found Viktor's shoulders, gripping. "Viktor, I'm very much staying with you. I am not going anywhere."
"Good." Viktor pressed his mouth to the inside of Jayce's knee and felt the full-body flinch, the slightly disbelieving sound. "Good."
When Viktor moved lower Jayce made a sound and immediately covered his mouth with the back of his hand.
Viktor looked up at him. "Don't do that," he said.
Jayce lowered his hand. He was looking at the ceiling with an expression of trying to maintain some structural integrity and finding the task increasingly beyond him. "Sorry," he said. "I - it's just - it's a lot."
"Tell me," Viktor said.
"It's a lot," Jayce said again. "You. This. The fact that you're-" He stopped. Viktor waited. "I keep thinking about being in the lab tomorrow and sitting across the table from you and this being something that happened. That this is a thing that exists now."
"It is," Viktor said.
"I know." He exhaled slowly. "It's good. It's a good a lot."
Viktor looked at him for a moment from this angle - Jayce stretched out against his pillow, the shimmer-light moving across his chest, his hands open at his sides in what Viktor recognized as conscious effort to keep them there, to not cover himself, to stay present and not retreat into the shyness. He was trying. He was very visibly trying.
Viktor brought his mouth to him and heard the sharp sound Jayce made and felt the hands that found his hair - not directing, just grounding, the same way Jayce gripped the worktable when he was concentrating on something difficult.
"Viktor-" His voice had fractured slightly. "I - that's-"
Viktor continued.
"That's - God - that's really-" A longer silence, filled only by the sound of his breathing shortening. "Viktor."
"Mm."
"I can't-" The sentence did not finish. Viktor felt the hands tighten in his hair and the small, restrained lift of Jayce's hips that said clearly he was trying very hard to hold still and not doing well at it. He looked up briefly and found Jayce looking back at him with an expression that was - stunned was still the right word, but it had become a different quality of stunned. Not disbelief at the situation. Disbelief at Viktor specifically, at being looked at this way, attended to this way, with this much focused intention.
"You're looking at me again," Jayce managed.
"Yes," Viktor said. "I told you what that means."
A broken sound. "Right," Jayce said. "Attention." His head fell back. "Viktor, I'm going to - if you keep-"
Viktor pulled back just enough to speak. "You're doing so well," he said, and watched what that produced - the full-body shudder, the hands clenching in his hair. "You've been carrying so much. For months. And you're here and you're present and you're-" He pressed his mouth to the inside of Jayce's thigh, felt him tremble. "-exactly where you're supposed to be."
"Viktor-" Barely voiced now, the consonants going soft. "I can't - when you say things like that I can't-"
"I know," Viktor said. "That's why I'm saying them." He moved back to where Jayce needed him and felt the full-body response, the groan that Jayce tried and failed to muffle. "Don't," Viktor said, against him. "I want to hear you."
The sound Jayce made then was unguarded in a way that nothing else had been - not the managed version, not the performance, just him, just the plain fact of what he was feeling with no layer over it.
"Viktor." Fractured. Desperate. "Viktor, I'm - I need-"
Viktor looked up at him one final time. Jayce's head was back, his chest heaving, his hands in Viktor's hair holding on with a grip. He was at the very edge of himself. His eyes found Viktor's and in them was the shyness still - the disbelief still, the I can't believe this is happening still - but underneath all of it something open and entirely trusting.
The arrangements required care and Viktor gave them care without making it a production - a brief direction, low-voiced. Jayce absorbed it and adjusted, which he did well, which he always did when he stopped overthinking and just responded. Viktor moved over him and Jayce looked up at him and the shyness came back in full - not as hesitation but as wonder, the specific wonder of someone who keeps being surprised by the same extraordinary thing.
"Still can't believe it," Jayce said softly.
"I know," Viktor said. "You'll get used to it."
Something in Jayce's face - the slight parting of his lips, the way his eyes went soft at the edges. "Yeah?"
"Yes," Viktor said, and moved.
The sound Jayce made was not words. His hands, which had been at Viktor's waist, moved up his back and gripped, and Viktor felt the whole of him come present - fully, without reservation, the way Jayce did everything when he finally stopped managing himself and just allowed. Viktor watched his face absorb each motion, watched the shyness and the wanting cycle through him, the disbelief surfacing and being replaced by something more immediate and then surfacing again, a tide.
"You're still doing it," Viktor said.
"Doing what." Rough, barely functional.
"Looking like you can't believe it."
A breath that caught halfway. "I can't," Jayce said. "Viktor, I genuinely - I used to sit across the worktable and think that I would never-" He stopped. Viktor moved and the sentence didn't reassemble. "-think you'd never-"
"I did," Viktor said. "I do."
Jayce made a sound with no category - not language, not quite, but completely legible. His whole body was shaking slightly, the specific tremor of someone holding themselves at the absolute limit.
Viktor pressed his mouth to his temple. Whispered something. Quietly. Evenly. The way he said everything he meant.
Jayce came apart.
It moved through him completely - a long, shuddering exhale that took his voice with it, his hands tightening and then releasing in Viktor's hair, his whole body resolving from tension into something loose and undone. Viktor held him through it with his hands at his hips, steady, present, and felt the specific satisfaction of this - not triumph, nothing so reductive - but the deep, even satisfaction of having given someone exactly what they needed in exactly the right way.
He worked him through it slowly, carefully, until Jayce's breathing began its long return to even.
Then he moved up his body.
Jayce looked at him with the glassy eyes of a man, thoroughly taken apart, and was still in the early stages of reassembly. His hair was a disaster. His jaw was loose. He looked, Viktor thought, profoundly unlike himself in the best possible way - all the composite stripped off, nothing left but him.
"Hi," Jayce said.
"Hello," Viktor said.
"That was-" He stopped. Started again. "You said come for me like you were asking me to pass a component across the worktable."
"Did it work?"
A breath. "Viktor."
"Did it work," Viktor said again, patient.
Jayce looked at the ceiling. "Yes," he said. "Extremely. Catastrophically." A pause. "It's going in the permanent record."
Viktor felt something move in him that he recognized, after a moment, as amusement - the real kind, the rare kind. "Noted," he said.
Jayce turned his head to look at him. The shyness was still there, softer now, worn to something gentler by everything that had happened. He reached up and touched Viktor's face - large hand, careful, the thumb moving once across his cheekbone.
"Can I-" he started.
"Yes," Viktor said. "Come here."
The new arrangement required care and Viktor gave them care without making it a production - a brief direction, low-voiced. Jayce absorbed it and adjusted, which he did well, which he always did when he stopped overthinking and just responded. Viktor moved over him and Jayce looked up at him and the shyness came back in full - not as hesitation but as wonder, the specific wonder of someone who keeps being surprised by the same extraordinary thing.
"Still can't believe it," Jayce said softly.
"I know," Viktor said. "You'll get used to it."
Something in Jayce's face - the slight parting of his lips, the way his eyes went soft at the edges. "Yeah?"
"Yes," Viktor said, and moved.
The sound Jayce made was not words. His hands, which had been at Viktor's waist, moved up his back and gripped, and Viktor felt the whole of him come present - fully, without reservation, the way Jayce did everything when he finally stopped managing himself and just allowed. Viktor watched his face absorb each motion, watched the shyness and the wanting cycle through him, the disbelief surfacing and being replaced by something more immediate and then surfacing again, a tide.
Viktor felt Jayce's arms come fully around him, pulling him close with the specific grip of someone who has been given something and intends to hold it. "Viktor."
"I know," Viktor said. He moved with him, steady, unhurried, and brought his mouth close to Jayce's ear. "You've been so good," he said, in the same even voice he used for everything he meant. "So patient. So precise. Everything you've built, everything you've carried-" He felt Jayce's breath shatter. "All of it is real. All of it matters. You matter - specifically, to me, in ways I have not said often enough."
"Viktor-" It was barely sound.
"You are extraordinary," Viktor said. "And you are here. And this is real."
Jayce made a sound with no category - not language, not quite, but completely legible. His whole body was shaking slightly, the specific tremor of someone holding themselves at the absolute limit.
Viktor pressed his mouth to his temple.
"Come for me," he said.
Viktor held him through it, steady, until the shuddering passed and Jayce went loose beneath him. Then he pulled back carefully, and Jayce made a soft, incoherent sound of protest at the loss of contact.
"Shh," Viktor said. Not unkindly.
He took himself in hand and finished with his eyes on Jayce - on the open, wrecked, entirely unguarded face of him, the rise and fall of his chest still uneven, the way he was looking up at Viktor with that expression that had no performance left in it whatsoever. It did not take long. Viktor came with a quiet exhale, spending across Jayce's stomach and chest, and stayed still for a moment afterward.
Jayce looked down.
The shyness came back all at once - a visible wave of it, moving up his throat and into his face. He made a sound that was not quite a word.
"Viktor-"
"Yes," Viktor said.
"You - I-" He looked down at himself again, then up at Viktor, then back down, as though he was still resolving what had happened. "You-"
"I'm aware of what I did," Viktor said. "I was present for it."
"I know, I just-" Jayce's hand moved vaguely, gesturing at his own chest, at the evidence of Viktor on him, and his face was doing something complicated - wanting and undone and thoroughly, helplessly embarrassed all at once.
Viktor looked at him with composed interest. "Are you scandalized."
"I'm not - I'm not scandalized-"
"You look scandalized."
"I'm just-" Jayce pressed the back of his hand to his mouth briefly, which did nothing to conceal that his ears had gone red. "I didn't expect - I mean I didn't think you'd-"
"What did you think I would do," Viktor said.
"I don't know. Something more - I don't know. Reserved."
Viktor regarded him for a moment. "You are in my bed," he said, "after three years of waiting, and you expected me to be reserved."
"When you say it like that-"
"How would you like me to say it."
Jayce looked at him. His ears were still red. He gestured again at his own chest - helplessly, slightly incoherently - and Viktor followed the gesture with his eyes and then looked back at Jayce's face with complete equanimity.
"It suits you," Viktor said.
"Viktor-"
"You're being prudish."
"I'm not being prudish, I just-"
"You are visibly flustered by something that you wanted," Viktor said, with mild patience. "That is the definition of prudish."
"I wanted it," Jayce said, and the admission came out slightly strangled. "I just - I didn't know I wanted it until - and then I did and it was-" He stopped. He looked at the ceiling. He looked back at Viktor. He made the hand gesture again, the one without a referent, the one that meant his vocabulary had failed him entirely.
Viktor watched him. Then, with the same deliberateness he applied to everything, he reached out and pressed his palm flat against Jayce's sternum - against the evidence of himself there - and held it.
Jayce went completely still.
"This," Viktor said, "is not something to be embarrassed about." He held Jayce's gaze. "You are allowed to want things, Jayce. We have discussed this."
A long beat. Jayce looked at Viktor's hand on his chest. Then at Viktor's face.
"I know," he said. Quietly. The embarrassment had not entirely left but something had shifted underneath it - the same shift as earlier, the foundation finding level. "I know that."
"Good," Viktor said, and did not move his hand.
Jayce covered it with his own. His palm over Viktor's, pressing it closer.
"Reserved," Jayce said, after a moment, with a slightly disbelieving exhale. "I really thought-"
"You consistently underestimate me," Viktor said.
"Yeah," Jayce said. "I'm starting to understand that." He looked at the ceiling. The smile was there now - the real one, the dimple. "I'm going to stop doing that."
"Good," Viktor said. "It was getting tedious."
After.
The shimmer-light moved across the ceiling in its slow pattern. Zaun's nighttime noise came through the window, the particular density of sound in the middle lanes - pipes and voices and somewhere below them the deep metabolic thrum of the undercity doing its constant work.
Jayce was on his back. Viktor lay beside him, the left hip positioned for minimum complaint, his head on the pillow at approximately Jayce's shoulder level. He was aware of Jayce's heartbeat still decelerating from the rate it had achieved. He was aware of the warmth radiating off him.
For a long time neither of them spoke.
"Okay," Jayce said finally.
Viktor waited.
"That was-" He stopped. Started again. "I've been afraid of a lot of things lately. You know that. You-you are extremely aware of how much I've been afraid of things."
"I have cleaned up after some of the consequences, yes."
Jayce made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Right. And-" He paused. Viktor felt his chest rise with the breath he took. "I don't feel afraid right now. I don't feel-any of the things I've been feeling for three days. I just feel-" Another pause. "Like myself. Like the actual version of myself and not the one I'm trying to perform."
Viktor turned his head to look at him.
Jayce was looking at the ceiling. His profile in the shimmer-light was angular and still, stripped of the restlessness that usually animated it. He looked, Viktor thought, like a man who had been carrying something for a long time and had briefly set it down, and was taking stock of how much lighter the world felt.
"That's the feeling," Viktor said.
Jayce looked at him.
"That is the feeling you need to rehearse," Viktor said. "Not confidence. Not performance. This." He held Jayce's gaze. "This is what you know to be true. About yourself. About the work. About-" He paused. "About the fact that the people in that room cannot take what you've built, cannot take what you are, regardless of how the meeting goes." He let that settle. "Take this into the room with you."
Jayce was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "How."
"You remember it," Viktor said. "The same way you remember a measurement. You fix it in your mind - specifically, precisely - and you return to it when you need it." He paused. "You remember that I believe in you. That I have believed in you since the second year of the Academy when you explained your resonance theory to me and I thought: this is the person I have been waiting to work with. I did not say this. I am saying it now." He said it plainly, without inflation. "Take this with you into the meeting. I will be there, in the back of that room, and everything I think about you and your capabilities will be in the room with me. You will not be alone."
Jayce looked at him for a long moment. Something was working in his face - not the complicated thing this time, not the composite of anxiety and effort and performance, but something simpler. Something that was gathering rather than dispersing.
"I've been doing this wrong," he said.
"Which part."
"The part where I'm-the part where I try to be more than what I actually am because I'm afraid what I actually am isn't enough." He exhaled slowly. "I keep adding things. More vocabulary, more technical language, more-ornamentation. And you keep telling me to strip it down."
"Because the thing underneath the ornamentation is more convincing than the ornamentation," Viktor said. "Yes."
Jayce turned his head on the pillow to look at Viktor directly. They were very close, which Viktor registered with a particular clarity - the warmth between them, the proximity, the quality of attention Jayce was giving him.
"I'm going to nail it," Jayce said.
Viktor looked at him. "Yes," he said. "You are."
"Because of what I actually know. Not what I think I'm supposed to know."
"Yes."
"And because you'll be there."
"Yes," Viktor said. "That too."
Jayce nodded slowly. Then he reached out and found Viktor's hand on the pillow between them and held it, lightly, with the thumb moving once across the back of it the way Viktor had moved his thumb across Jayce's jaw in the pub - an echo, a callback, the specific vocabulary they were apparently already building.
"Can I stay?" Jayce asked.
"Yes," Viktor said.
"I'll set an alarm. Early. We can go over the opening remarks before we-"
"Jayce."
"Right. Sleep."
"Sleep."
He did not sleep immediately. Viktor rarely did - his mind moved at its own pace and was not easily redirected. He lay in the dark and listened to Jayce's breathing slow and settle into the deep, even rhythm of sleep, and he thought about the presentation.
Two days. The investors would arrive at eleven and Jayce would stand at the front of the Hextech demonstration lab in his best coat - the blue one, Viktor would remind him in the morning, not the gray - and he would open his mouth and either give them the performance version or the real one. Viktor knew which it would be. He had watched Jayce's face in the pub, in the bed, on the pillow in the dark, and he knew: Jayce had arrived somewhere tonight, the way you arrived somewhere when you stopped trying to get there.
He would walk into that room with the specific knowledge that he was known by someone who understood him precisely and valued him for it, not despite what he was but because of what he was. Viktor had, he thought, given Jayce several things tonight - some of them practical, in the calibrated-praise sense, and some of them structural, which were harder to explain but which Viktor believed in the way he believed in things he could not yet prove but knew to be true.
The shimmer-light moved across the ceiling. Jayce breathed. The city made its constant sound below.
Viktor, who did not generally find it easy to stop thinking, stopped thinking.
Morning came in through the gap in the curtains before the alarm did - the filtered blue-green shimmer of Zaun's dawn, the smell of the lane below already active, someone's cooking stall sending up something warm and savory that Viktor identified as fried dough without opening his eyes.
He was aware, before anything else, of Jayce. Specifically the warmth of him, the way he'd migrated during the night until he was curled around Viktor's side with one large arm across his waist and his face buried somewhere in the vicinity of Viktor's shoulder. This was - Viktor lay still and processed it - not unwelcome. More than not unwelcome. He considered the specific quality of waking with another person's warmth around him and the particular safety of it, which he had not experienced in some time and which he was aware could become something he wanted.
He filed this carefully.
Jayce shifted and made a sound that was not quite language.
"It's early," Viktor said.
"Mm," Jayce agreed, without opening his eyes or moving his face from Viktor's shoulder. After a moment: "What time?"
"Six, approximately."
"Good." He did not move. His arm across Viktor's waist tightened slightly, automatically, the way a person gripped something they didn't want to put down. Viktor looked at the ceiling and let this happen.
"Your alarm will go off in half an hour," Viktor said.
"I know."
"The blue coat," Viktor said. "Not the gray."
A beat of silence. Then Jayce made a small sound that might have been amusement. "You've been thinking about my presentation."
"I am always thinking about the project."
"Even now."
"Especially now." He paused. "The blue coat photographs better and the collar does not make you look defensive. The investors will read body language. The gray collar creates tension in the shoulder line."
Jayce lifted his head. He looked at Viktor with an expression that was doing several things at once, primary among them something warm and slightly incredulous.
"You are the strangest person I have ever met," Jayce said.
"This is well established."
"I mean it as a compliment."
"I know," Viktor said. He looked at Jayce - morning light on his face, the disaster of his hair, the circles still under his eyes but lighter than yesterday, as though some of the tension had shifted during the night. "How is your stomach?"
Jayce checked. He looked slightly surprised by the check. "Fine," he said. "It's-actually fine."
"Good."
"That's-huh." He lay back down and Viktor allowed this, permitted the arm back across his waist. "That's the first morning in four days."
"Physiological response to stress," Viktor said. "You were catastrophizing. The catastrophe has been-recalibrated."
"Is that what happened," Jayce said, and the dry amusement in his voice was the best version of his voice, Viktor thought - the confident one, the undefended one, the one that emerged when Jayce had nothing to prove.
"Among other things," Viktor said.
Jayce was quiet for a moment. Then: "Viktor."
"Mm."
"What is-" He stopped. Started differently. "What is this. For you. What is-us-" He stopped again, and Viktor could feel the effort he was making not to spiral into it, the conscious application of last night's lesson to this particular vulnerability.
"I don't know yet," Viktor said. Simply, because it was true and because Jayce deserved the truth without ornamentation. "I know that I've wanted to-" He paused, choosing. "-be here with you for some time. I know that what I said last night was not - not performance. Not strategic." He turned his head to look at Jayce. "I believe in you. Specifically. I value you-" A pause. "-more than I generally say. You should know that. The fact that I don't say it as often as I perhaps should does not mean it is not there."
Jayce was looking at him. The morning light was doing the same thing to his eyes that the pub light had done last night - making them very dark and very present.
"Yeah," Jayce said. "I know." He paused. "I think I've known for a while. That you-that this was possible. I just didn't-" He made the hand gesture again, the one without a referent. "I didn't want to assume."
"You should learn to assume, on occasion," Viktor said. "Selectively."
"Is that advice."
"It is observation." He paused. "You undersell yourself, Jayce. Consistently. You assume that what you have to offer is less than what is wanted. This is incorrect."
Jayce looked at him with the strange composite expression again - gratitude and resistance and something underneath both of them that Viktor thought, this morning, he could read more clearly. Wanting, he thought. Just wanting, and the unfamiliarity of being given it directly.
"Okay," Jayce said.
"Okay," Viktor said.
The alarm went off. Viktor reached past Jayce to stop it and they remained in the tangle of the bed for another moment, in the Zaun morning light, listening to the city below.
"We should go over the opening remarks," Jayce said.
"Yes."
"And then I need to go back and change. I don't have-"
"The blue coat is at the Academy. You have everything you need there." Viktor sat up, already calculating. "Shower first. I'll make coffee. We can use the table."
Jayce sat up too, running both hands through his hair, which achieved nothing except redistributing the damage. He looked around the small bedroom with its shimmer-light bars and its stacked books and its impractical quantity of drafting notes pinned to the wall above the desk, and his expression was the wondering one - the one that Viktor had identified in the pub as belonging to a man in a place he'd been heading toward without knowing it.
"This is a good place," Jayce said.
"It is small and the ventilation is insufficient," Viktor said.
"Yeah." Jayce looked at him. "But it's a good place."
Viktor looked at him for a moment. "Yes," he said, and meant it in the sense Jayce intended. "It is."
They sat across from each other at Viktor's drafting table with the blueprints pushed aside and the coffee cooling at their elbows, and Jayce ran through the opening remarks.
He ran through them twice the wrong way - the performed version, the formal vocabulary, the ornamented language - and Viktor listened without interrupting and then said: "Try it again. Say what you know."
The third time, Jayce put down the notes.
He looked at Viktor, and he said it - said what the work was, what it could do, why it had to exist - in the plain language of a man who understood something to his bones and was speaking from that understanding rather than from the performance of it. He spoke for four minutes without stopping and when he finished Viktor set his coffee down.
"That," Viktor said.
Jayce looked at him.
"That, exactly. Say that."
Jayce let out a long breath. The circles under his eyes were still there, but his jaw was unclenched and his hands were still and the quality of his presence in the room was different - settled, grounded, the specific weight of a person who knows where they stand.
"Okay," Jayce said.
"Good."
"I'm-" He started, then stopped, and Viktor waited. "I'm going to go get ready." He stood, pushing back from the table. He was very large in the morning light, very present, the blue coat a day away and the gray stress shirt folded over the chair where it would remain until Jayce came back for it, which Viktor thought Jayce probably understood was an implicit invitation.
At the door, Jayce stopped. He turned.
He crossed back to the table and leaned down and kissed Viktor - not quickly, not carelessly, but with that particular attention he'd given everything last night, the full quality of his focus applied to this single point of contact. Viktor's hand came up to his jaw without decision.
When Jayce pulled back his eyes were very dark and his voice was the lowest version of itself.
"Tonight," he said. "After. Can I-"
"Yes," Viktor said.
Jayce nodded. He straightened up. He went to the door.
"Jayce."
He turned.
Viktor held his gaze. "You know what you know," he said. "Take it into the room."
Jayce looked at him across the small apartment, across the blueprints and the stacked books and the morning light coming through the Zaun curtains, and whatever had been tangled in his face for four days was not there anymore. What was there instead was simpler and more solid.
"I will," he said.
The door closed. Viktor listened to his footsteps on the stairs - the drag-and-thump, but lighter this time, the step of a man not dragging himself anywhere, just walking - and then the street-level door, and then Zaun took him in its noise.
Viktor picked up his coffee. He looked at the blueprints.
Two days, he thought, and corrected himself immediately: one day and a morning. Jayce would stand in front of Medarda's people and Ferros's people and whoever else the funding committee assembled, and he would open his mouth, and he would say what he knew. Viktor would be in the back of the room with everything he'd ever thought about Jayce Talis - four years of it, catalogued precisely, every specific and irreducible observation - and it would be in the room, and Jayce would feel it.
And after, Viktor thought. After.
He unrolled the next section of blueprints and picked up his pencil, and began.
The presentation was, by all accounts, extraordinary.
Medarda's people said so afterward - said it with the measured precision of people who did not give compliments carelessly, who understood the difference between performance and conviction. Ferros's representative said so. Heimerdinger, who had attended as a quiet courtesy, said so with specific warmth.
Jayce had not been smooth. He had not been polished. He had been, instead, specific and certain and entirely himself, and he had spoken about the work the way Viktor had heard him speak about it at midnight in the lab, the way he had spoken about it the night before in a Zaun pub with his elbows on the table, and the room had understood that they were in the presence of someone who knew something true.
Viktor stood in the back of the room.
He watched Jayce move through the demonstration - the resonance calibration, the distribution module, the lattice interface, his large hands managing the prototype with ease, after all, he had built it; he understood it at the cellular level. Watched him field questions with directness, without trying to answer a question different from the one being asked.
He watched Jayce's eyes find him once, briefly, across the room.
Viktor nodded.
Jayce turned back to the investors and gave them the rest.
Afterward, in the hallway, Jayce found him with the slightly dazed look of a man emerging from something that had gone differently than he'd catastrophized. The investors were still murmuring to each other in the demonstration room. The funding committee's secretary was already writing.
"Well?" Jayce said.
Viktor looked at him. The blue coat. The hair marginally improved from the previous two days' disasters. The dark eyes, which were doing something that Viktor recognized now as a specific, private brightness - the expression he'd catalogued last night as belonging only to contexts from which performance had been stripped.
"I told you," Viktor said.
Jayce exhaled. It was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob and entirely unlike anything Viktor had heard from him before - the sound of a very large amount of tension leaving a body all at once. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.
"Yeah," he said, when he'd recovered. "Yeah, you did."
They stood in the hallway outside the demonstration room, close enough that their shoulders were nearly touching, while the city moved around them and the investors decided what they were going to fund and the secretary kept writing.
"Tonight," Viktor said.
Jayce looked at him.
"Come to mine. Tonight."
A pause. The brightness again.
"Yeah," Jayce said. "Okay."
Viktor turned toward the lab.
Behind him, he heard Jayce's footsteps - steady now, even, no drag at all - heading somewhere he needed to be.