#older viktor

Was he floating? The world seemed to rock steadily from side to side. “Just wait five minutes and I’ll save you the bother,” he mumbled.

A soft ‘tsk’ that was intimately familiar to Jayce from days spent in their joint laboratory reached his ears and he huffed a laugh before darkness swallowed him up and claimed him.

A dull pain in his abdomen woke him, and the first thing he thought was that he was surprised to be thinking anything at all. The dull pain grew to a sharp throb and he looked up to find himself in what looked like a mechanic’s workshop. It was Viktor’s lab, he realised; rebuilt completely after their last devastating fight in here, though the materials were of considerably poorer quality than they’d been before. The thought crossed his mind that he could have a load of stuff shipped down here in a heartbeat to make up for it. Then he frowned.

There, sitting slumped in a battered and slightly burned armchair on the far side of the room, was Viktor. He appeared to be asleep, his long slender limbs glinting softly in the low light, with that menacing hexclaw looming awkwardly overhead like an unlit desk lamp. He had his head cradled in one hand that glinted with a purple, metallic shimmer, and his mask lay in his lap like an empty saucer. His face was as beautiful as ever, his skin pale and almost translucent, though it had been years since Jayce had actually seen it.

“Viktor?” he croaked, and his former partner twitched awake in the chair. Viktor had ever been a light sleeper.

“Jayce. You’re awake,” he stated. His voice was rasping and thin, his consonants clipped and economical. He didn’t make a move to put the mask on though, and Jayce stared openly. “It took quite a lot of stitches to patch you up, and I should stress that I am not a medical doctor.”

“With what you’ve done to yourself over the years, I’m pretty sure you’re more qualified than most of the Piltie surgeons,” Jayce said with a wry smile. He looked down at himself and realised he was bare-chested, and a patch of gauzed bandage had been secured to his lower abdomen where that git had stabbed him in the gut.

When he looked back up at Viktor, he saw the familiar dark shadows under his beautiful eyes, the melancholic downturn of his lips — now shaded slightly purple from the lingering effects of the shimmer he’d taken all those years earlier to support the mutations — and the slight upward pinch in the middle of his brows that made him look perpetually quizzical. “You look good, Vik,” he said honestly.

Viktor turned his face away and heaved himself to his feet. He still walked with a slight limp, but unless someone knew him well — the way Jayce did — it was easy to miss. He moved easily though despite it, and there was no cane or crutch in sight; no bitten-off winces; he no longer held himself like he was expecting every movement to be an effort, to hurt.

“What were you doing that got you stabbed down here, Jayce?” Viktor asked. “And without your usual… protection?”

“Not jealous, are you, Vik?” he grinned. The pain of the wound was still keen, but bearable now. “You’re the only Zaunite who gets to stab me to death, is that it?”

“That’s not — I wish —” Viktor faltered and turned away sharply. He was clad from neck to toe in his impressive armour, but for once it seemed to swamp him rather than adorn him. “I can’t do this, Jayce,” he said. “You need to leave.”

“Yeah. Sure, ok,” Jayce sighed. He swung his legs off what he now saw was a scrubbed wooden workbench, slid gingerly off, and took a moment to catch his breath. “Thank you, Viktor,” he said quietly. “For… not letting me die. I wasn’t sure where else I could go.”

Viktor still stood with his back to him, and the three ‘fingers’ of the hexclaw were clenched tightly together, as though holding a single grain of sand between them. Jayce wondered idly what would happen if they let that last grain of sand fall to the floor.

If Jayce were a gambling man, he would have bet that Viktor wasn’t about kill him now; not after going to the effort of patching him up. So he pulled on his ruined shirt — freshly rinsed out, he noticed — and crossed the room to where Viktor remained motionless. He was taller than Jayce now, but his presence after their last encounter seemed… diminished. The slant to his shoulders reminded Jayce of late nights in their lab at the Academy, when Viktor should have been abed hours ago; when Jayce would sometimes wander through the corridors in his pyjamas, much to Viktor’s chagrin, to drag Viktor out of the lab and into his bed.

“I miss you,” he said, standing right behind him. “I hate this. I hate what we’ve become.”

“I couldn’t do it,” Viktor hissed.

“I know. I know you couldn’t keep pretending that what we were doing was for the good of —”

“No,” Viktor interrupted and turned abruptly to face him, eyes blazing with all the natural fire Viktor possessed. “No, I couldn’t let you die. I couldn’t be the reason you stopped existing, Jayce.”

Jayce stood there, wide eyed, and stared up at him. He had to crick his neck a little now that Viktor had a couple of inches on him. It shouldn’t have been as attractive as it was, but he couldn’t help the way his body reacted.

Viktor watched his eyes dilate and blinked.

Jayce smiled and dared to step a tiny bit closer. He brought his rough hand to Viktor’s cheek, surprised to find him warm. Viktor had always run cold. “I never stopped loving you,” he whispered, and watched Viktor swallow hard, eyelashes fluttering. “They say you removed your own heart when you became… this.”

Minutely, Viktor shook his head. “I left it with you,” he said, his words delicately enunciated as always by his lilting accent. “I left it with you a long time ago.”

Jayce didn’t hesitate. He pulled Viktor down and crushed a kiss to his lips, melting into the old familiarity of it even as his brain struggled to process the difference in height and strength between them now. Jayce loved it. He chased more and more, giving and demanding in equal measure until Viktor pulled back, chest heaving. His golden eyes had blown dark, and his voice was wrecked and unsteady as he hissed, “Be careful with your wound, láska.”

At the sound of the old endearment, Jayce whimpered and bowed his head, resting his forehead on the cold metal plate of Viktor’s breastplate. “Vik…”

“Rest,” Viktor said quietly. “Rest. We will talk more when you’re rested.”

Quiet and docile as a lamb, Jayce let Viktor lead him through the house he’d once nearly ruined, and tried not to read too much into the fact that it was still standing, and so was he.

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Thanks for the prompt! More on the way :)