Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?

Pairing: Jayce/Viktor (Arcane) Rating: Explicit (in the future) Tropes/Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting; Non-Traditional Post-Apocalypse, Anthropologist Jayce, Author Viktor, Prophet Viktor, Living Gods, Trans Viktor, Cis Jayce, Slow-Burn Adjacent

Summary:

“Can I help you?” “Blacksmith’s balls!” Alarm strikes his tailbone so sharply that his fingers go cold, his body turning before his hindbrain has decided on a course of action, before it’s even identified the possible exits, and for an impossible, delirious second, he wonders when he’s going to learn the lesson that the world does exist, even when he’s not thinking about it. There’s a shadow in the arch of the church until there isn’t, the shape of it stepping into a stream of sunlight that flows like water and wears like silk, draping itself over the head-shoulders-waist of a man that someone has certainly waited lifetimes for in countless other stories. He can’t be any older than Jayce is, at least not by his measure, but he looks like he hasn’t slept much since infancy. His face is flushed like he’d walked at least some distance to get here, his hair piled loose in a bun, strands of it wild. He’s built almost entirely in angles—his cheeks, the small square of his chin, his shoulders, his elbows, his hips. His collarbones jut from under the crease of his buttoned shirt, its short-sleeved cut colored in a subtle purple-blue, a shade shared between dawn and dusk, the contrasting wash of his jeans spinning the flax in his dark hair into gold. “Um,” Jayce says, “what are you doing here?” The man’s eyebrows—criminal in their width and shape—arch high onto his forehead as he leans his weight on a cane at his left side, adjusting the position of his wrist. “I believe I have rights to the first question.” Faiths and failures, he speaks like a puzzle built around a sphere, all whispered rotation and snapped edges, everything sliding and clicking into place. “What are you doing here? You seem,” he pauses, hums, and gestures, encompassing Jayce from the crown of his head to the toes of his boots, “preoccupied.”