i'm so glad i found your work ❤️❤️ i've been reading and rereading all your jayvik works for the past few weeks while going through kind of a rough patch and it's been SUCH a comfort. looove love love reading about jayce taking care of viktor, and especially in "It Wears Him Out" you've written it with both such intensely heart wrenching and heart warming scenes it's amazing!! the rollercoaster of emotions i went through while reading was sooo cathartic. not to mention how captivating your narrative is. truly truly thank you so much for writing and sharing your work, it means more to me than what i can put into words just THANK YOUU ❤️❤️❤️❤️
This is my very first ask on this new blog and it's the sweetest thing ever? Rip my heart out why don't you. I'm so sorry to hear about your rough patch. Ironically, most of my stories were written while I was going through one too. Isn't it strange how good for our own it can be reading about a fictional person's pain (and healing!)? Humans are weird.
I'm glad you've been loving IWHO, because it's all I can currently think about. I have a really (I hope) tender ending coming soon for you - it was complete, and I ripped it up and started over from scratch, which is why it's been delayed. I can't wait to hear what you think of it. Please take care of yourself (tea! lots of tea & soft things) and happy reading!
too soon for this (jayvik, modern au, post-hookup medical emergency)
wordcount: 5.2k (oneshot)
tags: hurt/comfort, sickfic, fluff, humor, caretaking, idiots in love
summary: Jayce finally gets Viktor into his bed. It, of course, becomes a situation.
Jayce is having an excellent dream.
Or, he was. It's already receding by the time consciousness returns against his will; but he remembers enough to mourn it. Smooth skin. The sweet smell of someone else's shampoo in his spare pillow. The astonishing, humbling fact of waking up with a real person in his bed for the first time in almost a year.
But before he can work out what woke him for himself, someone is shaking his shoulder.
"Jayce. Get up."
He opens his eyes. The room is blue-black and unfamiliar in that middle-of-the-night way, all of his furniture reduced to silhouette. His mouth tastes like cheap red wine and a half-assed attempt at brushing his teeth. He squints at the glowing digits of the clock. 4:17.
He rolls over; then he smiles. Viktor is sitting up, cross-legged under the blankets.
Jayce follows suit, the top sheet pooling around his waist as he stretches.
“Morning. Sort of.” He sounds like he drank a cup of gravel. He reaches for the water on the nightstand. “I forgot how offensively early you wake up.”
He takes a long drink then leans over, pressing a sloppy kiss to the base of Viktor’s throat. It’s sleep-soft and sweltering. Jayce hums against it, pleased, then drifts upward, following the line of his neck. He inhales as Jayce catches his chin and turns his face, kissing along his jaw and up behind his ear. His breathing has gone ragged - a good sign, Jayce knows, remembering the euphoric moment several hours ago when he finally, finally got to learn what Viktor sounds like when he's turned on. He continues to nip at his skin, feeling himself starting to get hard again.
If Viktor insists on waking up at four in the morning, the least he can do is convince him to stay in bed a little longer.
“Jayce - please.”
“Mm. I know.” He shifts closer, bracing one hand on the mattress beside Viktor’s hip, the other sliding down his stomach.
He allows himself the brief, dizzying revelation that this might be the most ridiculous stroke of luck of his entire adult life. Three years of shared grant deadlines, late-night experiments, unresolved tension between two overworked, nearly-thirty-year-old PhD candidates, and it ends here, with his best friend, naked and pliant under him.
He drags his hand lower. Viktor catches his wrist.
“Jayce. Stop.”
He pulls back. Something’s wrong.
Viktor doesn’t sound like he’s enjoying himself. He sounds like he's panicking.
Grey light sneaks through the blinds, and Jayce finally gets a good look at him.
He looks...terrible. So white he's almost green. His heavy breathing not, as Jayce assumed, the shallow pants of arousal, but distress. His eyes go wide.
“Woah - Vik. What is it - did I -” He cuts himself off, recalibrating, suddenly hyperaware of his size, and the way he’d had Viktor pinned beneath him earlier. “Did I hurt you?”
Viktor swallows, a weak I'm so sorry all he can manage.
Jayce frowns, alarmed. He wants to touch him, but doesn’t. “Hey. It’s alright.”
He inspects him. Nothing obvious, other than the fact that he's still holding Jayce’s forearm away from his stomach.
His other hand is clamped over his mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. “But I…ah. Think I am going to throw up.”
Jayce scrambles back instinctively. “What-”
He makes a strangled sound, his gag reflex taking over, and Jayce lunges for…things. Trash can, hoodie. His own cupped hands, apparently.
But before he can even find the side of the bed, Viktor politely gathers the duvet out of the way, folds in half, and vomits all over it anyway.
There's a stretch of profound silence. Then Jayce says, very intelligently: “Okay.”
It's not, technically. Viktor's dinner is on the pillows and the comforter and, judging by the sensation of liquid dripping down his thigh, on Jayce too. The smell hits them a second later, stomach acid and cabernet and the takeout they’d split at midnight before promptly getting distracted from the meal by each other.
Viktor makes a sound of absolute, annihilating shame.
“Okay,” Jayce says again, because he is a man of immense verbal range under pressure. “Hang on. Uh. Hang tight.”
He fumbles for the lamp, misses, punches the solid oak headboard instead, cusses, then finds the chain. Yellow light spills across the room.
The damage is biblical.
Viktor is hunched over it, eyes wet and horrified. His hair is deranged from sleep and sweat and sex, and he's still naked, too—ribs and moles out, and that pale, lovely sternum Jayce spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time exploring just a few hours ago.
“Don’t,” he says immediately, because Viktor’s entire face has collapsed. “Nope. None of that. It’s just a bed, V.”
“It’s your bed," Viktor whimpers. "And I have destroyed it, like some sort of cautionary tale.”
"A cautionary tale for what?"
"Fucking me."
Jayce snorts, blushing. “That is absolutely not the lesson here.”
Viktor looks bleakly down at the sheets. “Regardless. These are ruined."
"They're not! Well, maybe the pillowcases."
"It's on you, too.."
Jayce peels the corner of the soaked duvet away from his leg with two fingers. “In my defense, that happened really fast.”
Viktor looks away, ears red. “Oh God.”
“Nope. Still not doing that.” Jayce swings his legs out of bed. “Can you walk?”
Viktor nods too fast, knocking himself sideways.
Jayce comes around to his side of the bed. “Here, let me just.”
“I can walk.”
“Great. Love that for you. Stand up for me anyway.”
Viktor glares, a wan and unconvincing thing. Then he lurches for the foot of the mattress.
Jayce squats, shoving the waste basket under him. One hand resting on Viktor’s bare back, the other keeping him from toppling off the bed by the elbow. The muscles under his touch are taut as a rubber band. “Easy,” he mutters.
When he’s done, Jayce hauls him up under the arms, kicking the can aside. He helps him step into a pair of boxers, and they make it three steps before Viktor stops dead, fingers curling against his belly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.”
“Viktor.”
“Fine. My stomach hurts."
Still operating with the faculties of a man who has had exactly two medical emergencies in his life and handled both of them badly, Jayce says, “Well. Yeah.”
He scowls, but there’s no bite to it. Jayce waits for him to catch his breath, watching him more closely this time.
Viktor’s always been prone to getting sick, but this is...a lot. Even for him. Definitely too much for a hangover. And Viktor can handle his alcohol.
Even the pain feels different than his usual. Viktor looks dazed by it, instead of merely irritated.
When they finally get him into the bathroom, he drops in front of the toilet with all the dignity of a broken telescope. Jayce props his cane against the vanity and opens a drawer, pulling out two washcloths.
He runs one under cold water, wrings it out, and lays it across the back of Viktor’s sweaty neck. He’s trembling, but his cheeks are flushed.
“Hang on.” Jayce speedwalks to the living room, swiping a clean blanket from the couch.
He comes back and drapes it over Viktor’s shoulders, then wets the second washcloth in warm water and kneels.
Far more gingerly than his earlier onslaught, Jayce takes his chin and tips his face up. The shadows under his eyes are so dark they look bruised, lids fluttering as Jayce wipes his face clean.
Too soon, apparently.
There's nothing left in Viktor’s stomach, but his body has yet to receive the update. He retches once again into the toilet bowl, heaving up bile as Jayce holds the towel in place and tries not to feel useless.
When it finally passes, Viktor stays bent over the seat, gulping down air like he's just run for his life.
Jayce flushes the mess with his free hand. His other pushes the damp hair back from Viktor’s forehead. He moans a little.
It’s the opposite of romantic, the intensity that fills the bathroom. Vomit, bare shins on cold tile, Jayce’s "excitement" from earlier long gone to whatever heaven receives those. And yet something between them splits open anyway. “You’re okay,” he says softly.
“I have my doubts.”
He sounds miserable.
Jayce rewets the cloth and dabs at the corner of his mouth. Viktor lets him. That alone is enough to make Jayce’s chest ache. He must really be hurting. “Can you sit up?”
“With my reputation in tatters and my digestive tract in open revolt, I suppose anything is possible.”
He slumps against the tub. Jayce tries to get him to drink some water, but he pushes it away. "No point."
At that, Jayce is finally wide awake.
The timing is bizarre. Sure, they had too much wine. The Thai place had looked a little suspicious, yeah. But Jayce feels fine. More than fine. Fifteen minutes ago, he'd been dead to the world, with Viktor asleep on his chest--something he’d stopped letting himself want a long time ago.
Indigenous Arrowheads, from Southern Ontario, Canada (The traditional territory of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, Mississauga, Attiwonderonk, and other First Nations).
With Progress Day fast approaching and his pain getting harder to hide, Viktor goes looking for relief in the Undercity. Jayce handles this…badly. | Or: Viktor goes to a gala high and shit gets messyyyy.
chapter preview: “I really am sorry, V. I just…I had a feeling you'd come back here. And I wanted it to feel like home. Or—” he huffs softly, embarrassed. “A fresh start, I guess.”
Viktor can’t answer. His teeth are chattering too hard.
“Are you…cold?”
No response.
Jayce hesitates, some internal battle playing out on his face. He grazes Viktor’s lower back before pulling away.
Finally: “Can I…”
Viktor presses his lips together, willing his body one last time to behave.
It refuses.
“Jayce,” he breathes, permission in his voice.
His partner wraps him up.
Jayce gathers Viktor in close, awkward at first, like a man handling brittle machinery. Soon though his hand slides into Viktor’s hair, cupping the back of his head with a surprising fierceness. After a moment he shifts them both, angling Viktor so the pressure comes off his ribs.
The physical contact is almost too much. Jayce is extremely warm and solid. The tip of his nose presses into Viktor’s overheated neck, and for a disorienting second, he understands that this is the closest they've ever been. Not counting the night Jayce had to resuscitate him, and that hardly counts at all.
His heart skips like a phonograph. Then it jumps the track altogether. He folds, collapsing into Jayce’s chest with a shudder, once, twice, three times, fingers knotting blindly in the back of his shirt.
Impossibly, Jayce tightens his hold.
Something rumbles against Viktor's ear, and it takes him a moment to realize Jayce is speaking.
“You’re alright,” he murmurs. “You're okay. I’ve got you now.”
Hi friends. Like the title says. I'm aiming to publish Chapter 10 of It Wears Him Out tomorrow (3/10) at 8:00 pm PST! Brace yourselves, it's a doozy. Here's a teeny tiny sneak peak 👀
ship: jayce/viktor
wordcount: 8k
tags: hurt/comfort, whump, medical angst, protective jayce, mutual pining
summary: Viktor deals with the nightmare blunt rotation to end all nightmare blunt rotations. Mel builds the equivalent of a sixth grade science volcano in Viktor's hospital room. Jayce gets the feelssss.
Preview: The first time, it's a mother who cannot possibly belong to him.
Salt-encrusted lids drag open, heavy as water under oil, and gods, does she look like someone he’s supposed to know. Gapped teeth. Uneven lips. Something about the eyebrows. The name will not come.
Damp grazes his skin and a cloud of lavender woodsmoke envelops him, familiar and slippery as a dream lost the instant one wakes.
A wet cloth, he understands belatedly.
The mother drags it down his neck and he shivers as she wipes away the fever-sweat, dried tacky along his collarbones.
There’s someone else in the room too: his old companion, pain, perched solidly on his chest. Migrating before he can pinpoint its origin. Ribs? Maybe? Leg? Back? Always.
Everywhere, he decides scientifically.
Though centered for the time being in his abdomen. He's not sure why. Cannot remember. Only that his whole torso feels steeped in sickness: a hot, corrosive thrum through jellied muscles, as though some predator is chewing on him from the inside out.
It's new, and that’s what distresses him. No familiar adversary taunting him from in between vertebrae. This — thing, feels invasive. Parasitic. He hears himself moan a little, and the mother hisses in sympathy.
She’s talking to you, he thinks sluggishly. You should answer. Don’t be rude. Always answer.
But his tongue has gone missing. Strangely this does not alarm him. Why should he need a tongue? When he has no desire to ever speak again.
His ears are stuffed with bees, but words push through anyway. Kind ones. The sort he hasn’t heard since he was very small, and maybe, very recently too.
She hushes him. Calls him cariño, and folds something soft around his hands.
His called him lásko.
For an aching instant, he wonders if it really is her, and if that's why he so badly wants to let go.
But no. His own mother’s voice had been wet gravel, lullabies smothered in the cough that shook her apart every winter. She had no soft things to wrap him in. Only a sewing kit and a sickly boy, bundled tight in threadbare scraps of love.
What would it have been like, he wonders hazily, to be settled against pillows like this? To cry into arms that held him, instead of pushed him out of the way of violence?
The lie dissolves.
Hospital, he thinks dimly. Plasticky sheets. Blood and boiled water. Yes. He's been here before. His head lists.
"It's alright. Just rest now," she soothes. "You're safe. You're safe here."
ship: jayce/viktor
wordcount: 3.6k
tags: hurt/comfort, humor, fluff, angst, canon era, missing scene
summary: a week after their chaotic first meeting, Jayce is still a little unsteady. Viktor, meanwhile, seems to have appointed himself both guardian and occasional brawler. (Part of “Jayvik Misadventures: The Early Years.”)
teaser: Jayce doesn’t even try to stop the bouncer as he clamps Viktor roughly under the armpits and drags him backward, heels trailing uselessly. Just stares, astonished, as his new partner is hauled away to the exit, simpering with indifference, like he's catching a ride on the trolley.
Oh well, his eyes seem to say. What can you do.
He scrambles to collect their things. Swipes up Viktor's cane and his coat from the floor. Wonders briefly who in Janna's name he's just hitched his wagon to.
He shoots the man on the floor a sheepish look as he passes by, clutching his hemorrhaging nose and writhing around in the puddle of spilled drinks. He can’t help himself: “Guess I'm not the only lunatic in Piltover.”
Outside, he finds said madman sitting up on his elbows on the cobblestones, wincing. His knuckles are bright pink but intact, the picture of bedraggled triumph. He swipes, amused but dazed, at his own bleeding face.
The bouncer had tossed Viktor on his ass like a rag doll (likely without even meaning to; the Dean’s assistant can’t weigh more than a stack of books soaking wet), but it looks as though his face has taken the brunt of the landing. Blood pours from his forehead and his bottom lip. He grins crookedly, pointed canines dyed a gruesome burgundy in the moonlight.
Jayce crouches down to his level, reaching instinctively toward the jagged skin before stopping short.
“You—” he can barely process the idea of it, let alone the reality. “You punched him.”
“Yes.” Viktor flexes his hand. “He deserved it.”
Jayce snorts, helpless. “You’ve got a mean right hook. Since when?”
Summary: Jayce and Viktor give each other haircuts in the lab before a very important gala. It goes about how you’d expect.
Author’s Note: If you enjoyed this, head over to AO3 and give it some love 🖤 All kudos/comments go directly to Jayce’s mullet repair fund.
In the grand hierarchy of problems Mel Medarda had faced this quarter (elderly envoys with bathwater fetishes; Jayce Talis overindulging and carving a hexhole in the lab floor again; Viktor falling into said hole), this should not have ranked.
And yet, fourteen hours before she was due to serve as a guest judge at the most consequential Distinguished Innovator’s Competition of her career, here she was: with her two riskiest investments looking like they crawled out of the city's most overeducated sewer.
Jayce’s Academy-issued vest bore a not-insubstantial singe mark on the collar, as well as several unmistakably Talis-sized handprints down the front. There was soot on one cheekbone, and a thin line of solder trailing his forearm like a burnished scar.
Viktor, for his crimes, had some sort of machine lubricant on the handle of his cane, graphite dust on both palms, and what looked like dried flux crusted along his temple. His tie had been repurposed as a makeshift cable wrap, and purplish circles ringed both his eye sockets and his forehead where his goggles had been lifted and lowered too many times.
Somewhere, far across the ocean, someone was laughing, and it sounded suspiciously like Mel’s mother.
The sturdier of the pair was currently halfway up a ladder, holding a coil of fluorescing cobaltwire above his head like he was divinely fated to retrofit the sun. The other stood below, holding the bottom rung with his unbraced foot just enough to suggest help while actually doing nothing.
“It’s wobbling,” Jayce hissed. “Why is it wobbling?”
“Because you have the center of gravity of an infant moose,” Viktor said flatly. “And because you refused to let me stabilize it properly with the cart clamps.”
“Because last time you used the clamps you welded them shut! You had to saw my boots off.”
“You are exaggerating.”
“You literally sawed my boots off.”
“Which proves I am very handy in an emergency.”
Jayce started windmilling. “Okay, I’m going down,” he said with false calm. “I’m going down - can you just grab the wire, V?”
“Which part? The live part, or the part that is magnetically attached to your trouser buttons?”
“Both. Just. Gently!”
Viktor made no move. “Gently is not an engineering term.”
Amidst this ridiculous exchange, Mel opted to zoom in further on two particularly offensive points of interest. Namely, their hair.
Viktor had what could only be described as an “academic fringe” that was endeavoring to unionize against gravity. And at some point over the past month, Jayce had evidently concluded that facial hair might lend him the advantage of age while in actuality, had only served to make him look like a first-year who’d overcommitted to an experiment no one asked him to run.
“Fix it,” she said, voice pinging off the metal in the room like shrapnel. "Now."
They both looked up, and that’s when Jayce lost his balance in earnest.
“Mel!” he yelped, one hand flying out as the ladder rocked wildly. Viktor seized the frame - too late, and still not looking up from his notepad - as Jayce tipped backward and fell in slow-motion to the floor.
“I told you it was not stable,” Viktor said mildly.
“You said it would probably hold!”
“'Probably' does not equal stable.”
Jayce sat up sheepishly. “Mel. Hello. Fix what?”
She flung her hand between them.
“All of it. Clothing. Attitude. Rapport. But hair, mostly, head and facial. Especially whatever that is on your face, Jayce. Elora genuinely thought you were part of the janitorial staff.”
“That would be my job,” Viktor grumbled.
***
Viktor had never once concerned himself with hair.
It was an organic overgrowth of keratin; something that sprouted from his scalp, and fell in his eyes, and, if he neglected it long enough, invited remarks from the kind of people who believed a person’s grooming habits said anything about their intellect.
His own routine was perfunctory at best. He had once used the same bottle for hair, face, sheet metal, and floor grease and seen no discernible difference in outcome.
But lately, over the past six months or so, he had become moderately more aware of its function as a basic business tactic. Mostly before affairs of importance - occasions where, without warning, Jayce would slick his hand in some citrus-scented pomade that cost more than Viktor’s entire wardrobe and, after tending meticulously to his own tresses, push the remainder through Viktor’s with the confidence of a man smoothing blueprints.
Frankly, Viktor had never known what to do with himself in those moments. The touch itself wasn’t unpleasant (“disorienting” was the word that often came to mind), but it left his hair feeling strange and stiff and distinctly Jayce-like for the rest of the night. Which was destabilizing. And for reasons best left unexamined, something he actually looked forward to now.
The man Councilor Medarda sent had no business wielding scissors. His hands, though clearly experienced (they were gnarled with age) had neither the spindly precision of Viktor’s own, nor the steady warmth of Jayce’s, whose strength, Viktor thought dimly, was much better suited to holding things up than soldering.
He arrived mid-afternoon, introduced himself with a sweeping bow and a name like “Roderique” which Viktor could not for the life of him manage to pronounce despite a sincere attempt, and promptly tried to take a straight razor to Jayce’s cheek without warning.
Jayce flinched, the blade slipped, and a shallow line of red bloomed along his jaw.
Viktor’s chair scraped back sharply against the tile. He was at Jayce’s side before he even realized he’d stood.
“You made him bleed,” he said, utterly serious.
“It’s a nick,” the old man protested, eyes wide.
“Get out.”
“V, it’s fine,” Jayce said, starting to stand.
“Just let me-” the barber reached for him again.
Viktor stepped between them. “Touch him with that again and I will break your hand.”
“Viktor.”
The man froze. “Surely you are not serious.”
“I can assure you I am.”
That did it. The man fled, leaving behind his dignity and, crucially, his clippers.
Jayce pinched the bridge of his nose. “What’d you go and do that for?”
“He hurt you,” Viktor said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Jayce touched the cut on his cheek. “It’s barely a scratch.”
“That is hardly the point,” Viktor huffed, nudging the clippers with the toe of his boot like they’d challenged his research.
Jayce sat back in the chair. “So what do we do now?”
“You can't expect me to believe you have never shaved your own face before, Jayce.”
“Not about that. This," he said, shaking the too-long mess of his hair. "And that,” he said, pointing at Viktor's.
Viktor offered no reply. Instead, he picked the abandoned clippers up from the floor and examined them the way one might examine a live grenade.
“I could try,” he said, tone deceptively neutral.
Jayce, still shirtless with an oil cloth now pressed to his jaw, regarded him like a man being prepped for experimental surgery with a butter knife.
“You let me fall off a ladder this morning.”
Viktor shrugged. “Your landing was exceedingly graceful.”
“I bounced!”
Viktor chose to ignore this. He turned the device over instead, moving warily between the dial settings. They clicked with the unpromising sound of nickel and plastic. He flipped it on. It whirred and emitted a brief high-pitched squeal; he frowned, adjusted the blade guard, and clicked it off.
Jayce was still watching him from a distance with visible distrust. His partner was perspiring now, black hair starting to unfurl from its gel in that telltale way it did when he was anxious or overheating. Viktor approached with the clippers as he would a feral animal cornered in the lab, circling the chair clinically as he assessed.
“Short on the sides, long on top. Functional.” He gave an ironic little punch at the air. “Aerodynamic.”
“I’m not a glider,” Jayce said.
“Stop moving,” Viktor said, and began.
It was the kind of delicate work he usually reserved for intricate repairs. The clippers vibrated evenly in his grip. He followed the curve of Jayce’s skull like he was tracing a schematic, adjusting his angles for the slight asymmetry of the cowlick. The left side dipped more than the right, a natural variation. Arguably charming, though Viktor refused to assign emotional value to a hairline.
Still, he made the correction, his focus narrowing entirely to the pattern in front of him. Snip. Angle. Glide. Even distribution. When he paused to evaluate, he noted with objective approval that Jayce’s head had a surprisingly efficient composition.
Jayce didn’t speak. He stayed perfectly still, gripping the seat like he was waiting for something sharp to slip again. His breathing was deep and manual, in through the nose and out through the mouth, as Viktor had instructed him to do before in moments of panic or distress.
When Viktor finally stepped back, he clicked the clippers off and set them aside gingerly.
Jayce blinked up at him. And?
Viktor handed him the piece of scrap metal that doubled as their mirror. Jayce tilted it back and forth, squinting at his reflection.
“Holy shit,” he said.
“Yes,” Viktor said. “Holy shit indeed.”
Jayce ran a hand through it and whistled. “You’re wasted in academia.”
Viktor beamed. "A revelation worthy of publication. Do be sure to cite yourself."
***
Jayce thought about hair constantly.
His own, obviously - he’d secretly memorized half the formulary of Mel’s prescribed grooming boutique by now. Serums, hydrating pomades, exfoliating rinses. The works. His mother had hammered it into him: dress for the job you want. And don’t stand in front of the Council with a cowlick.
But Viktor? Viktor’s hair was different.
While his own was dense and mostly stick-straight, Viktor’s was silky and bendable, like a moth's wings. Chestnut brown and perpetually unruly, especially at the nape of his neck, where — when it grew long enough — it curled in such an engaging way it left Jayce feeling like he’d licked a nine-volt battery.
He’d fantasized more than he’d ever admit about touching it. And on sleepless nights, bent over his partner's shoulder as they worked in tandem, he’d memorized the way it smelled too: coffee beans and that raw, industrial-grade soap you could only buy in bulk at mining outposts. Jayce had hunted for it obliquely for months, at open-air mercantiles and on field trips to the Promenade Level for parts; like if he could just track it down, he could smear it on his collarbone and inhale until it sank through, and settled somewhere safe behind his sternum.
So when Viktor handed him the shears, still clogged with the remains of Jayce’s new “functional, aerodynamic” look, he felt the full weight of destiny settle in his palms.
“Your turn,” Viktor said.
He blinked down at the device. “Are you sure about this?”
“Of course not,” Viktor replied. “But you already insisted. I believe your exact words were, and I quote, ‘it’s only fair.’”
Ah, yes. Jayce had said that. Right after Viktor had casually performed savant-level hair artistry with a tool he’d never even touched before.
Now he sat in the chair Jayce had vacated, gazing out the window with a flat but patient expression. He'd prepped thoroughly with the spray bottle, hair beaded with tiny water droplets, and his arms were folded across his chest like someone bracing for a medical trial. He’d left his shirt on, but shrugged out of the vest and tie. Jayce, for some reason, hurried to put his own back on.
“Right,” Jayce said, and immediately started fussing with a piece of off-white lab canvas until it resembled something like a barber’s cape. He looped it around Viktor’s neck, absurdly considerate. “We’ll protect your collar at least.”
“Very solicitous, Jayce.”
Jayce ignored him and picked up the clippers. Then he frowned. It felt moderately criminal, bringing something that cold and rudimentary near something as fine and gossamer as Viktor’s hair. Like trying to prune a rose with a hacksaw.
“Uh, don't move,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
"What is it you think I am going to do, the waltz?"
Jayce found the scissors where he’d left them, lying open on the floor where they’d tumbled from his tool belt during that morning’s ladder incident - forgotten in the scramble to collect himself in Mel’s presence. They were industrial, slightly greasy, and most recently used on cobaltwire, but they were sturdy and well-made, and Jayce could wield them far more dexterously than any set of clippers.
He returned with his confidence restored and promptly wheeled the chair in close, adjusting the height until Viktor sat level with his waist. Then he raked a hand through his mop, plotting his plan of attack while simultaneously relishing the cool slip of water on his overheated wrists.
Somewhere beneath the hum of the lab, he thought he heard a short sigh, low and content, but ultimately decided he’d imagined it.
Then he got to work.
Twenty minutes in and Viktor’s patience had become theoretical. “Jayce, what are you chiseling back there, the Archon of Progress herself?”
"Hush. This masterpiece deserves my full attention.”
“It deserves an actual mirror.”
Jayce pinched a dewy lock between two fingers and trimmed it very, very carefully. “Do you want me to buzz it like mine?”
Viktor did not dignify that with a response.
When Jayce finally stepped back, sweating through his undershirt and vaguely lightheaded from the effort, he barely caught the grimace that flickered across Viktor’s face before it disappeared. It took him a moment too long to realize it wasn’t about the haircut: it was about pain. A guilty twist coiled in his gut as it dawned on him just how long he’d made Viktor sit still.
Viktor’s hand clutched the armrest, knuckles pale, and when he moved to swivel the chair his leg remained, stiff and uncooperative.
Jayce observed, something sour tugging at his esophagus, as Viktor adjusted the limb manually with a serrated gasp and the base of his cane. He dragged it into place with the kind of practiced motion that spoke of routine discomfort, handled too often and too alone.
Finally, Viktor pivoted toward the "mirror."
There was an excruciatingly long pause, during which Jayce had enough time to wipe Viktor's hair from the scissors, clear his throat awkwardly, and start rearranging the already-neat line of tools on the counter.
Then Viktor let loose a sound Jayce had never heard come out of his partner before — somewhere between a whoop and a veritable cackle — and he jumped hard enough to send the whole tray clattering to the ground.
“It’s not that bad,” Jayce said immediately.
“It is worse than that bad,” Viktor said, absolutely delighted. “You have given me a - what is this? What do you call it here, eh, a mullet?”
“It’s not a mullet. It’s a…a textural taper.”
“Congratulations, you have invented an entirely new crime against geometry.” His smile was positively wicked. “One that might have earned me a brick to the head even in the Fissures.”
“It’s not that bad,” Jayce said again, quieter this time, even though it was. It was so, so bad.
The back was hollowed out. The sides were horrifically lopsided. Jayce spun the chair around and punished himself by taking his time cringing at it from every new angle.
“I look like I lost a fight with your nose hair trimmer.”
Jayce wiped his mouth, utterly exasperated. “I really did try.”
“I can tell,” Viktor said, that same funny little smile on his lips. “I think that's what makes it worse.”
He reached out and scratched at Jayce’s newly shorn scalp, ruffled the longer strands on top and sighed wistfully.
“If you were truly so worried about me upstaging you this evening, Jayce, you could have just said so. You did not need to take such drastic measures.”
Jayce fiddled nervously with one of the neat lines Viktor had carved into his own hair, a line so crisp it made Viktor's disaster feel like vandalism.
“I’ll fix it,” he blurted. “Or - or I’ll just buzz the whole thing, if you want. You can go full…dolphin.”
He physically recoiled from the word before it even left his mouth.
Viktor raised an eyebrow and gestured to his leg brace. “That sounds interesting. I never have been particularly streamlined.”
Jayce let out a strangled sound. “Right, okay. Yeah. This is fine. I just completely butchered your head before the biggest presentation of our lives, but sure. It’s fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Jayce,” Viktor said, still smiling. “It is fine.”
“It’s not.”
“I promise you it is. It is hair. It will grow back. That is the biological purpose of hair, yes?”
Jayce scrubbed a hand over his face, some of the panic ebbing. “I just - I wanted to get it right.”
“You did.” Gentler now. “I mean it. You tried so hard. That is worth more than a decent haircut.”
He practically deflated, looking at Viktor like he'd just folded something precious into his hand. “That’s…thanks, V. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”
“I am certain you will.”
Jayce stilled at that, heart lurching into his throat.
“I’m an idiot,” he finally said with a self-conscious laugh. “I just wanted you to look good.” Which, of course, was absolutely not the thing to say to one's colleague.
“That is very sweet,” Viktor teased, unfazed. “But rude as well, implying I did not before.”
Jayce whimpered at his complete and utter inability to say the right thing. “I meant,” he said, voice hoarse. “that I wanted you to feel good. That I wanted to make you feel..."
He trailed off, horrified that the second version was somehow coming out worse.
Viktor was looking at him strangely now: entirely amused and slightly vulnerable, as if something hot and sentimental had just settled behind his eyes.
“You do realize,” he said slowly, inspecting his fingernails. "That there are other ways to make me feel good, Jayce.”
Jayce’s pulse kicked.
Viktor hadn’t moved, but the way he was holding himself now - shirt stuck to his shoulders and knees spread - was enough to make Jayce's fingers twitch with the sudden and maddening urge to touch. To run the pad of his thumb along Viktor’s collarbone, and press it into the hollow at the base of his throat.
Then, with a wince, Viktor pushed himself up from the chair. He stretched his right leg once, then limped across the room to lean casually against the blackboard. There, he rotated his ankle in deliberate circles before speaking again, dry and deadpan as ever:
"Ways," he continued, "I might add, that pose far less risk to my personal safety - and by that I mean not just the immediate threats to life and limb such as unclamped letters, or electrocution, or being rendered bald by prototype grooming devices - but also, let us not forget, to my increasingly fragile vanity, which has already suffered immeasurably under your so-called 'aesthetic instincts,' and, of course, to the future financial integrity of Hextech as we kn—"
Jayce was already halfway across the lab; he closed the remaining distance in two strides. Then he bracketed Viktor in, forearms on either side of his head and palms flat on the chalkboard. The room was cavernous, but he pressed in close, forcing Viktor flush with the cool surface.
“Jayce,” Viktor said, blinking. “If this is your idea of a counterargument, I must inform you it lacks a certain rhetorical clarity—”
“Janna,” Jayce muttered, “you never shut up.”
Then he kissed him.
Against his lips Viktor was a concrete wall of surprise, brows almost at his hairline as Jayce pulled back reluctantly, cradled his face, and asked permission officially with his eyes. For a beat Viktor just stared, mouth parted in a stunned little “oh.” Then he nodded yes, with so much uncharacteristic vigor it nearly gave Jayce whiplash.
He did not waste the invitation. He surged forward and kissed him again, as hungrily as if he were breaking the surface after months underwater.
Viktor made a sound against him, a disbelieving and entirely gratified little hum of approval which did unspeakable things to Jayce’s self-control. His hands, respectful at first against the board, took the muffled noise as permission to move into Viktor’s hair, where they became absolutely filthy once tangled up in the mess Jayce had made of it. He gripped at the roots with a desperation bordering on obscene, loosening only when the need to touch overwhelmed the need to hold — the need to map out the rugged terrain he himself had created. Jayce let his fingers linger for a bit in the baby-soft dampness, coveting it as well as the scent of that damn soap, finally on his skin where it belonged.
After this exploration, Jayce reached for one of Viktor’s hands – the one still fisted in the back of his shirt – and gently guided it around to pin it against the board instead. Just firmly enough to say stay here. Then he took his time stroking up along Viktor’s side: over his hip, and the length of his spine, and the beauty marks that peppered the column of his throat.
Viktor shivered, and Jayce felt it acutely. Savored the rigidity in his frame, and the propriety held taut in his shoulders until, at last, he sagged into him, his whole frame collapsing with the kind of surrender that only came from letting go.
Jayce grunted softly and adjusted his grip, one arm cinching instinctively around Viktor's waist. Only then did it register: his cane, still somewhere across the room. But Jayce was more than happy to take over, fully committing himself to holding him up instead.
And that – that earned him a moan. Sweet and involuntary, and punched out of Viktor like air. It cracked something open in Jayce’s chest and he pulled back reflexively, only to be met with a deliciously frustrated whine.
He hadn’t realized Viktor’s eyes had slid shut until they were blinking open again, hair utterly deranged and brows creased in mild betrayal as he tried blearily to locate where Jayce’s tongue had gone.
Jayce, grinning now at the look he’d managed to put on his face, took a moment to wet his lips – swiping Viktor’s lower one in the process. A shaft of late-afternoon sun caught the dust in suspension, the sheen in Viktor’s mussed hair, and the blown-wide ring of his pupils. Their shared gulps of air scattered all three.
Jayce swayed, suddenly unsteady, and rested his forehead against Viktor’s.
“Vik,” he groaned. “Fucking hell.”
Viktor exhaled shakily. “Precisely,” he rasped, voice shot.
“I didn’t know how else to say thanks for letting me ruin your hair.”
Viktor scoffed. “Perhaps next time, use your words instead?” He was still panting weakly. He traced the spot where the top button of Jayce’s collar had been minutes earlier. “This behavior might be seen by some on the council as…unbecoming of their Man of Progress.”
“Next time?”
Viktor shrugged. “You are already the most disastrous barber I have ever had. Might as well be consistent.”
And despite everything (the nerves, the very real possibility of public humiliation at tonight’s competition, the truly appalling bangs clinging to Viktor’s forehead), Jayce knew he’d remember this as a good day. Maybe the best of his life.
“Next time,” he promised, brushing back the jagged fringe. “I’ll charge you full price.”
And then, with all the reverence of a man who’d just found religion in the worst haircut of all time, Jayce kissed him again.
***
By the time the Distinguished Innovator’s Competition commenced that evening, Mel had already reviewed fourteen proposals, judged three passive-aggressively contentious prototypes, and had her shoes stepped on by two separate professors of substratal ecology.
She was not, by any stretch, in the mood to have the boundaries of her patience further toed at.
And yet.
Far across the exhibition floor, Jayce Talis and his undernourished accomplice stood side by side at their demonstration booth, haloed in bluish luminescence from Hextech’s latest iteration. Both were freshly clothed, clean-shaven, and managing to look marginally off-kilter in completely different ways.
Jayce, to his credit, was immaculate. His hair had been neatened up on the sides and swept back at the top, framing his face with just enough structure to suggest professionalism without erasing his signature brand of blinding sincerity. Mel, momentarily pleased with herself, considered making her way over purely to say I told you so.
Then Viktor stepped out from behind him, and she slapped a hand over her mouth in abject horror.
“Oh,” Elora said beside her, eyes glued to the booth as well. “Oh my.”
Viktor, clearly mid-charm offensive with a potential investor, looked almost philosophically disheveled.
His hair, typically neglected in an abstract but endearing way, had clearly been subjected to some kind of misguided lab experiment. The length was horrendously uneven, the crown puffed out like the feathers of a territorial waterfowl — and a section at the back had collapsed entirely, like a piece of public infrastructure not built to code. He looked inconceivably smug about it.
Mel took a long and steadying sip of her drink.
“Fascinating,” Elora murmured.
“Mm,” Mel managed. “They've survived, at least.”
“Barely, it would seem,” Elora said.
Mel slumped against the wall and closed her eyes. Elora squeezed her arm. “They’ll stabilize,” she said simply.
“They’d better. I did say they were the future.”
“You said they could be,” Elora corrected. “Depending on the strength of their partnership.”
Mel made a thoughtful noise. Her gaze lingered on the sawtooth edges in Viktor’s hair, the telltale absence of gel in Jayce’s, and the matching satisfaction in both their postures.
She hummed into her wineglass, unsurprised.
“It would appear,” she said, “they’ve been working rather closely.”
Set one week after Jayce and Viktor meet on that fateful night at Jayce's apartment.
“Hold this.” He hands him his cane.
The kid stammers. “Uh.”
Then he undoes his top button, rolls one maroon sleeve, and, with no warning whatsoever, calmly buries his fist in the Mountain’s face.
Or: Jayce is fragile, and Viktor is astute; he is also alarmingly good at breaking noses in defense of his new academic associate.
Jayce and Viktor give each other haircuts in the lab. It goes about how you’d expect.
“It’s not that bad,” Jayce said immediately.
“It is worse than that bad,” Viktor said, absolutely delighted. “You have given me a - what is this? What do you call it here, eh, a mullet?”
“It’s not a mullet. It’s a…a textural taper.”
