#viktor x reader fluff

Viktor’s voice snapped you out of the wanderings of your deranged mind. Oh, and did your mind wander. It snaked itself beneath the leg of his woollen trousers, hugging his tiny ass so nicely. Then up, up his sleeve to place an imaginary kiss on the vein in the crook of his elbow and lick his stomach right where the belt would inevitably leave a dent in the skin.

Then, your imaginary tongue travelled up, making a stop at every freckle, only to leave a nasty bite mark somewhere in the middle of his chest. And maybe on his neck as well. Which was now flexing proudly from the V-shaped collar of his sweater, the tiniest bit of white shirt peeking from underneath it. A dark brown coat on top, framing him into a model example of someone who just looks effortlessly good.

You were kneeling on the bed, ogling him shamelessly, Viktor’s eyes pensive on you as he tried to squeeze the verdict out of your agape mouth. “Well? My eyes are up here, I will remind you.”

“I, uh…” you mumbled stupidly, swallowing a lump in your throat. “Yes, that looks good.” Eyes still fixed on him, because you forgot how to blink.

“I feel like I should change into something less slutty if this is your reaction. We wouldn’t want people at the charity gala throwing themselves at me, would we?” He smirked, looking at his nails nonchalantly, and suddenly you realised your face was burning.

“God, sorry,” you chuckled awkwardly and hid your face in your palms. “I just haven’t seen you all dressed up in a while.”

“No, no need to be sorry, I am immensely enjoying this, if you couldn’t tell by now,” he said smugly, shaking his coat off and throwing it over a chair. “I would take massive advantage of it if Jayce wasn’t picking me up in half an hour.” He took a couple of steps forward and dropped his cane on the mattress beside you.

“Well, maybe you could take a little advantage then?” you asked playfully, rising on your knees and pulling him by the belt to sit on the bed next to you. Straddling his hips, you wrapped your arms around his neck and licked his cheek all the way up to his temple. “I can’t believe you are abandoning me, looking like this, to flex in front of some STEM bros.”

“Ah, I solemnly swear to atone upon my return.” A low, suggestive whisper rumbled against your skin as his hands cradling your ass sent a jolt up your spine, and you involuntarily sunk deeper into his lap, forcing a grunt out of him. Viktor shot you a scolding look and chuckled, “If you ruin my pants, I’m taking yours. And you wouldn’t want that.”

“You better pray I don’t ruin you and that you can feel your legs when I’m done with you,” you breathed out, placing a trail of slick kisses on the tendon of his neck, and Viktor cackled, the pitch of his laugh embarrassingly high.

Playfully, he pushed you away, his lips forming a comical pout. “You cannot crumple me! We’ve been picking those clothes for an hour, ah—” he gasped as your teeth caught his earlobe. A giggle pushed itself past his mouth, and his hands squeezed your thighs firmly. “That’s it,” he stated, shrugging you off of him, only to crawl on top of you clumsily.

He pinned your hands above your head, lifted your shirt with his nose and blew a raspberry on your stomach, making you squirm and kick your legs around. “Please! I surrender, ah!” You screamed as he tickled your tummy with his nose and tongue.

Viktor lifted himself and shot you a look to check if you did, in fact, surrender and regretted instantly as you wrapped your legs around him and trapped him in a tight squeeze, forcing him to let out a startled huff. He landed with his chest flush against yours, your noses bumping each other.

“I am ready to suffer the consequences of crumpling you, mister,” you whispered against his lips, when a concern crossed your thoughts at the sight of a frown on his forehead. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, only my pride,” he snorted, kissing your neck. “If I knew some nice pants and a sweater would make you go so feral, I’d dress up every day.” You were flashed an incredulous grin and granted freedom of your hands, which you immediately used to tangle your fingers into Viktor’s hair and shove your tongue into his mouth.

He moaned, at first surprised, then just welcoming, when his hands snaked around your body to squeeze your waist and cup your ass once more. He rolled both of you to the side, but you wouldn’t have it and pushed him further to trap him underneath you.

“It seems the more I can’t have you, the more I want you. Something to think about,” you smirked and ground your hips into his mercilessly. Viktor groaned, his hands hovering tentatively around your thighs before slapping your ass playfully.

“I told you how I feel about my pants getting ruined or me getting crumpled, but you seem to be completely deaf,” Viktor huffed, utterly bemused by the sudden rush of want in you, as you licked his neck, making all sorts of obscene smacking sounds.

You cupped his face, your fingers digging into the base of his skull as your tongue traced his upper lip and the seam of his mouth, coaxing him to open. A laugh got caught in his throat as your nose pressed against his and you inhaled him deeply, licking the roof of his mouth and sending a content moan straight to his stomach.

His hips bucked beneath you, making a smile bloom across your lips. You tugged at his hair to expose his neck and placed a trail of loving pecks all the way down to his collar bone. Viktor writhed against you, sending threats in your direction, his breathy tone making them sound entirely unserious. “You have no idea what I am going to do to you when I come back.”

“Oh, baby, are you not enjoying my love?” You cooed against his skin, blowing on a new love mark you sucked into his neck.

“I am enjoying it thoroughly,” he grunted, pressing his half-hard cock up to meet your core and you whined into the crook of his shoulder, careful not to drool on his beautiful sweater. “But I have something around twenty minutes before Jayce gets here, and you are making me look like a whore.”

“But you make such a beautiful whore, Viktor, I can’t help it,” you wheezed theatrically into his ear, drawing another giggle this evening. “Also, this will make it look like you really cared about coming to the gala.” Without putting much thought into what you had just said, you resumed your work on spattering Viktor’s neck with little marks of affection.

And he let you, because it felt too great to stop. The weight of your hips so sweet on his pelvis that he could probably get off on it if he let you grind on him for a little while longer. Your hands groping him greedily, your usual roles suddenly switched, as he was the one panting and writhing for his dear life, praying that his crotch wouldn’t be damp after all of this.

He let himself be pulled by the bite on his lower lip, let his shirt slip out of his pants as you explored his stomach and stuffed your greedy fingers under his belt, tickling his navel. He allowed you to palm him through his pants, even though it had earned you a bite on the neck of your own.

You leeched onto his skin, chuckling between the small nips at his lips, a singular web-like strand of drool connecting your mouths. When you finally lifted to gaze upon your creation, Viktor looked like a fallen angel—his hair a complete mess, face and ears a darker shade of pink, eyes molten, lids hooded, and mouth slightly parted in a soft smile. And his clothes, well, crumpled like a thin paper sheet.

He traced his fingers under your t-shirt, rubbing circles on each of your sides. Admiring the mark that had begun to bloom on your collarbone, a realisation hit him. He was going to be a complete hot mess, his neck most likely stained with bruises. He clasped a hand to his mouth and whispered in exaggerated concern, “How bad is the damage?”

You cocked your head from side to side, smiling innocently, and he rolled his eyes, your name falling from his lips in a playful scold. Shrugging you off of himself, he reached to the bedside for your mirror and nearly choked at the state of his skin—red, bloodshot marks covering his neck, a slight swelling around the spots you bit on harder.

“Lásko, you have outdone yourself,” he sighed, tracing his fingertips across each of the love confessions you sucked into his skin. “And what am I going to do now, hm?”

“A turtleneck?” You laughed, waggling your eyebrows at him. “Or a scarf?”

“Yes, let’s make it even more obvious. Other ideas, and please let them be good?”

“I can suck on the rest of you, so the colour matches everywhere, ow!” You winced at the pinch on your ass and batted Viktor’s hand away. “Alright! Alright, I think Sue left something behind after the last time, let me check if it matches you.” Honest capitulation could be heard in your voice, as you slid off the bed to search for Sue’s foundation in the bathroom—the only person you knew that could match Viktor in the ghastly skin tone club.

You grabbed it triumphantly from the drawer under the sink and threw it in Viktor’s direction, before grabbing your make-up bag and kneeling in front of him on the bed.

“Lift, please,” you said flatly, propping his chin up, momentarily fixated on the way his Adam’s apple bobbed beneath your fingers. You gave his throat an affectionate squeeze and murmured, “Bye, bye hickeys,” making Viktor chuckle.

“You will see them again in the evening,” he said warmly, placing his hands on your thighs.

“Oh, you bet your ass I will. I am going to scrub this makeup off you the minute you step through the door,” you muttered absently, your focus fully on pounding the fluid onto your masterpiece.

 “I think this is my best work yet,” you announced proudly, adding more and more product, as the stubborn redness refused to disappear under Sue’s delicate cosmetics.

You had to use baby powder to set it, since none of your humble makeup collection items seemed to match Viktor’s skin tone, making him smell like a newborn, who happened to like birch tar and bergamot cologne.

You patted his cheek affectionately and passed him the mirror so he could evaluate whether the troubleshooting had proven successful, adding in a flat, nasal tone, “We do not accept refunds.”

“Not bad,” he hummed, flexing his neck, which immediately made you weak in your knees.

“I hope you understand I will have to make you squirm for this later, yes?” he said matter-of-factly, slapping his palms flat on your thighs, his eyebrows lifted in expectation.

You nodded and kept nodding until Viktor smiled and your face twisted into a dumb grin. “That’s settled then,” he stated with one final firm pat on your legs and lifted himself off the bed. He grabbed his cane, coat, checked his phone and mumbled something about Jayce already waiting downstairs.

You walked up to him, pinching his ass and picking at his hair, your hands wandering as you tried to straighten his clothes and put his shirt back in place. Before leaving, he pulled you into a tight hug and whispered against your lips, “Thank you. I’m much less nervous than I was half an hour ago.”

“Hmm, no worries,” you murmured between soft kisses placed on his beauty marks. “I am so very proud of you; I hope you know this.”

And yet, he cherishes it. Chases the shock of his very first unbridled weep into the pillow. Clenches his toes and bites, gnaws, tears at his fist as though trying to regain the hum of that very first installment, the seizure-like itch of bones under his sticky muscles—all for the nyloned legs on some raunchy Skin Two cover. 

From then on, he develops fussy tastes. His stance on ‘Playboy’ hasn’t changed: he still thinks it a disgrace, a shiny travesty much too smutty for his liking. No, Viktor prefers a tease. Tawny corsets the size of a wasp’s waist. Stilettos. Thick garters pulling at the welt so it rises in a smooth slope right in the middle of a thigh. A pronounced back seam splitting the calf. He imagines licking along it, thinks of the prickly fabric scraping his tongue dry. 

Every last Friday of the month, he buys an addition to his raunchy collection. Skin Two—a personal favorite—for when he needs a sweet fix. Marquis, for when he momentarily slips towards latex—because Germans do it best and he’ll marvel at anything tight enough to compress a woman’s thigh. He likes the photography, the ritualistic fastening of the garters, the way the legs are captured mid-step, the pointed toes, and the painted toenails seen through the sheer stocking. 

Videotapes, he discards the exact way his precious nylon is discarded in them—cruel, unfazed, and invariably within the first two minutes. He’d rather watch the whole rite: the upward glide of the stocking until it’s pinched by a clip, the dull click of a bra being clasped. Idle fingers spread over sheer underwear to form something damp and heart-shaped. 

He hunts the erotic. Stacks it in his bedroom—the most pretentious of softcore collections—and brings himself to those bone-itching orgasms at the sight of yet another vintage-resembling spread. The daily desecration of his dorm-room is a bold Miller entry—cum-stained trousers and hoarse moans tearing his throat like sandpaper. Though for an engineering student, his perversions remain within decency. 

The scales of room distribution kept tipping in his favor, so the tip of his cock could keep swelling sore. His last restraint had moved out long before Viktor came back for his third year: a timid girl who randomly decided to take a gap year midway through her master’s. With no next-door neighbor to be wary of, he could ease into the habit just so—and ease he did, clammily—alongside his lube and his pointy wrists and his carpal tunnel syndrome swiftly creeping in from being a little bit too besotted with hosiery.

Thrice a day, he sees to the compulsion. Draws out sweet, viscous instances like the slick mess drying in his belly button—just bliss, and blisters, and hand cream shortage, and his innocent deviations in this stifling room. 

It lasts forever (thirty-three sweaty days), and Viktor hopes to secure an entire year of unstifled orgasms. But on October 3rd, when he crawls into his room after a daunting lab class—bones aching, tie wimpled, belt clanking to the floor—everything hitches. He squeezes himself at the base. Wrangles it like a snap of a neck.

Footsteps next door. It takes him long enough to register what they are—his blood is still sticky with agitation, there’s still sweat in the dip of his lower back—heady evidence of his postprandial horny. A vacant taste of grease and soup on his tongue as he tucks himself back into his pants. 

He hears heels and wonders what kind they are. Stillettos? Cones? Ankle-straps? Peep-toes? He hears the sharp snap, the reverberation of old furniture when the click lands into a parquet dent, each one coming down with a shake. But that’s just the price of winning a scholarship somewhere moldy and European: sixty-centimeter walls and windows so back-to-back they’d bump glass panes if opened outwards. He smiles—bitter, morose. There goes his agape-mouthed splendor. There goes his end of the world. 

As the clicks relocate somewhere numb and distant, he has no trouble pinning the direction. More so when the hinge screeches hoarse and slow, and he rushes to grip his cane in his sweaty palm, belt hanging so low it’s as good as lost—and yet a dumb excitement in his lurch to the window, a slippery, shapeless thing like the one he commits over his pile of pornos.  

Right away, October scratches at his every membrane, heady with festering earth, wet soles, and a secret third thing—a steady aim for his nose, reeking not just yet discernible. Viktor cranes his neck to the right and finds it—all of it. The smell, the heels, the culprit—a handbook of safety hazards. Legs carelessly dangling from the sill. A scraped knee framed by a hole in the stocking. Mildly sallow teeth in a wide, lipsticked mouth and full-on sallow fingers stuffing it with a Lucky Strike. 

“Hi,” you say, and he notices the dab of lipstick on your front tooth, one that makes him swipe his tongue over the gap in his own—perhaps to draw blood so he can match you. 

“Cigarette?” You offer him a less gory way of being on a par—a passing of a pack akin to those fine artsy parodies of The Creation of Adam where God’s nails are painted black and he’s squeezing a joint. “I’m fairly certain smoking is strictly forbidden in the dorms,” he tells you, and imagines you prying the window open, the sheer, black length of your legs climbing up the sill. In your mouth, the cigarette smolders, prickly sparks eating at the end when you inhale. You wince and swat some mascara out of the corner of your eye, then rub it into your fingers until it’s a grey smudge. Leaning back, a flash of a garter, and Viktor’s blood flow halts to regroup his every cell into that one muscle. When your left shoe (a mere oxford, by the way) slips just enough to dangle off the toes, he thanks evolution for not letting aneurysms form inside cocks. 

And it’s easy enough to put off his pervy confession. To remember that you’re not one of his porn-mag girls—because they don’t giggle with a squawk this canine and don’t pick at the scabs in their sliced knees. And, most importantly, he doesn’t owe them a mental apology for leering at their thighs.

So Viktor feels his shame wrap around his neck, a fuzzy feeling like choking on a cherry pit—a dark, panicked yawn, a gulp of cyanide. He clutches the offered pack before the thought becomes as concrete as his hard-on.

A plume of blue smoke in your hair, and he marvels at the privilege of his lungs expanding unitedly with the girl’s in a ripped stocking.

“What are you?” he asks, and the shame prevails, plants in him a hope that you’ll reach out and slap him. He fills his mouth with bitter spit and waits for the blow, takes a drag so long it soaks the filter. 

When you introduce yourself, he laughs a lumpy cackle of relief. “No, er… Your major?” He clarifies.  

“Oh.” You flick the ashes with a broken nail. A gust of wind spits it out onto Viktor’s sweater. “English.” 

“English?” His voice rounds up, and you note the slight lisp to his sibilants—stunned and lovely. “How come you were given a room in this building?” 

“Gap year. There were no rooms left in mine.” 

“Oh?” “Writer’s block. Didn’t want to half-ass my paper.” 

He nods at you with a giddy smile of somebody who’s just been trusted with a secret. “Aren’t you interested in what I am?”

“An engineer, of course.” 

“Well, yes, but—“

“Mechanical?” 

“How did you guess?” 

“God, you—“ You laugh, and point to the cuffs of his shirt peeking from under the woolly sleeves of his sweater, “your folk has a look about you.” 

He swallows and reaches to pull at his sleeve. Beckons a curious magpie by crumbling ashes all over the concrete. Tentative, it tries at them with its beak, then looks up to blink with beady-eyed accusation. You chuckle—deep and crispy, voice cracking, a click of phlegm peeling at the back of your throat. 

The magpie screeches and takes off. Viktor nurses the filter with a drawn-out suck before mumbling, “A look about me. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The haircut,” you explain. “Or, rather, the lack thereof. And this poor-blood-circulation-sedentary-lifestyle way of dressing—”

There is a sudden commotion in his chest, and his heartbeats become longer, itchier. He ditches his furtive smile, and you put it on as if it’s a relay—only you’re wearing it febrile, churlish. And by that smile alone, he knows exactly who you think you are, can just picture the kind of titles you keep on your bookshelf.

“What have I ever done to you?” He manages. 

You shake your head, plucking hair out of your eyes, nails and lipstick matching. “Oh, I’m not insulting you. You’re a lovely specimen. Your lot arrives here, gifted and clueless, with your technical mindsets and clinical bashfulness. Hell, it’s written all over you as we speak. And you always,” You stress, blowing out pretty, sinewy fog, “always graduate with honors and a two-digit body count.” 

Viktor’s cock throbs. Sends through him a nagging tow like the pinch of a nerve—one he knows intimately and by rote. “You seem suspiciously cultivated about men in my department,” he says when it’s over, gripping the windowsill for fear of all the nicotine catching up to him. “Am I to assume you’re speaking from experience?”

And the throb prevails, for you choose to cross your legs and grin at him again, showing teeth. “Go figure.” 

“I’m afraid I… wouldn’t know,” he confesses. “I rarely partake in sleeping with fellow engineers.” “Who do you sleep with, then?”

With girls that look ike you, in the private ambiance of my imagination, he thinks, shrugging his shoulders. 

That calls for a nod—the closest to awkwardness he’s ever seen you. “Well,” you say, tongue-in-cheek, orotund, “that must mean you don’t have people over often. You’ll have no problems keeping it quiet for me, then.” 

Upon finishing a smoke, he brings you the slapstick ashtray from his desk. It’s a cut-off bottom of a tin cup, precisely the type people dunk their stubs into in his home country, and you whistle at the invention, asking if one’d need a tetanus shot if poked with that thing. He shrugs before answering, “Probably. How quiet do you want me to be, exactly?” 

Swift, you throw the chewed-on filter into the ashtray, a lipstick smudge where you mouthed at it with chic violence. It bumps against his with a hiss, a sizzling sound of an indirect kiss. 

“Well, obviously, I don’t expect you to walk around on your tiptoes all the time,” you tell him, throwing one leg inside the room. 

“Good. Not that a request of that kind would be attainable—” A beat, to make the punchline land smoother. “My cane isn’t soundproof, you see.” It lands. You stop mid-turn and laugh, the depth of your throat the color of rotten plum—the kind he’d like to push his fingers into if you let him. 

“What was your name again?” You ask, staring him down one last time. 

“Viktor.”

“Right. Well, Viktor—just try to keep quiet late into the night. That’s when I usually write. No orgies,” you warn him, slipping away; and he blinks, twice and feverish—so contrived that his eyelids make an oily, tired click— en route to snap a mental shot of your wound in its nylon vignette, the exact shade of black on the clasp of your garter, and the shape of your nose when you scrunched it, wiping smoke out of your lashes. 

Later that night, he cracks open a fresh edition of Skin Two and flips through it until he finds a model smoking a cigarette. And when he cums to the sight of her spread legs, he obeys your order and muffles his moans with a pillow. 

— October 5th. Midday. Minutes before thunder, the sky is eerie and methylene blue. When he was eight, Viktor tells you, a bottle of it exploded in his hands, and his fingers stayed this exact color for two weeks. “What’s methylene?” You ask him, yawning into your collar, and Viktor wonders what he’d like to be more: the boy with a missing tooth and shaky limbs stained blue, or the man who’s going to slip those very limbs under your faux fur. He settles on the boy. The man is still under construction, too cowardly to reach across windowsills and ask to be let inside. 

He does lean forward, however. Feels the synthetic cheetah pelt and circles a cigarette burn at the fluffy seam—tries a hand at inducting audacity. Which you don’t reward—not verbally, not just yet. Instead, a scoot closer and a glossy wink. Torture hand-outs, he calls them. He tries to swallow his pulse away, thinks that if only he gulps fast enough, you won’t notice the bobs below his jaw. 

You notice.

He stares at the black lumps gathering at the corners of your eyes—salt, sweat, and shimmer staining the crease with a greasy line and mascara flakes so big it looks as though your pupils bled them. Mean wives wear their makeup like that, Viktor thinks. Uppity, they squint their smoky eyes and reply I know to I love you. He finds he doesn’t mind—not in the slightest. Matter of fact, he strongly prefers it: the cold slap of acknowledgment when you angle his head back and ask him to open up—just so, just with the tips of your freshly-painted-Revlon-Streetwear nails. 

He chokes on the drag you make him suck on and tastes turf; October incarnate spilling over his taste buds like moldy cheese or giving head to a stranger: two preposterous things he’d only tried once and has been sporadically itching for ever since. 

You perch for him, almost falling over. It’s a tad too early to come into his room or let him inside yours—you want to keep it within a window's reach, to draw out the next-door fantasy and the abstinence that comes with it. All for constructing the tease of being separated by this paper-thin wall, which he picks up on and teases you back—as best he can, with his contorted mouth blowing smoke into your face so you can retreat into it while his eyes are watering. He keeps the cigarette, and you light a new one, silent during your exchange of what Viktor hopes are mutually awkward coughs.

“So,” you prompt. “Methylene. What on earth is that?”

“It’s an antiseptic. An ultramarine sort of thing. Almost like, er…” He points to your hand, smiles a charming, asinine thing that makes you roll your eyes, “your nails. Yes, I suppose your nails are methylene blue today.” 

You hum, spreading your fingers over your knee, and Viktor notices the tiny wound again, feels the prickly nylon rub it raw. “I might have some. In my room,” he mumbles before his throat goes parched. “For your injury, if you’d like some—”

“Please,” you cut him off, voice cracking, which only catches up to him mid-reach for his cane.

Fumbling inside his medicine cabinet, the time drags on shapeless and cruel, vials and thermometers clattering while he digs for the infamous blue bottle with the white cap. “Found it,” he announces after his groping proves accurate. 

When he comes back, you’re halfway ready to be patched up—one garter clasp undone (the thick, vintage kind he adores). He pushes his tongue into his cheek and finds the deep molar cut; marks the flavor of his regret coin-like. How could he have missed it? How come he wasn’t there to see the belt lose tautness and dangle free?

But the consolation comes shortly—a deterrent never to berate himself again. Despite the shaky fingers and the friable ash, you hook your thumbs into the band and peel it off your thigh. Only then does Viktor notice what your nails were supposed to match today—and the answer is not methylene blue, nor the lovely pre-thunder sky. 

He finds the shade match between your legs. A sliver of blue lace peeping out for a quick flash of what, incontestably, is the gusset. He squishes the cotton swabs he brought you and hears their plastic bases crack. And you detect him detecting the bait, aiming for a timorous, phony leer. Spreading your legs just a touch wider—with precise show-girl fashion, a mechanical sort of arch. 

When you roll the stocking down, Viktor’s brain resorts to sibilant reprehensions: sex, salivation, slick, and random salacious pictures—a whole lot of S that he’d like to be allowed to do to you. It hits him then, whiplash-force, those very itches you are scratching for him—the dampness of mold and the brusque exchanges before one of the parties gets undressed. The soft, and the trashy, and dreamy, rigorous trysts. 

He holds onto the thought when you stretch your leg out, grazing his sleeve with your shoe. 

“Careful,” he whispers, and instantly regrets the artifice, “wouldn’t want you to fall over, now, would we?” 

You laugh at him again—that canine, aggravating sound. But the pliancy is refreshing—a case of carrot and sticks, mockery and indulgence. “This building is really quite bizarre,” you say, pointing your toes to back up the observation. “I could really just climb into your room if I wanted to.”

“Or—“ He opens the blue bottle and dabs the cotton swab around the rim. “You could simply knock at my door and ask to be invited in like a normal person.” 

“I don’t think normal is what you prefer, Viktor.” 

“Neither do you, it seems.”

“Mmm,” you answer, an interplay of a hum and a hiss. He starts working around the scab, tries not to dribble sweat from his forehead onto your skin. He makes sure to get the raw, pink parts, hunching above you like a squinting jeweler—stunted, endearing. Indeed, this building is quite strange. The walls have ears here—an eavesdropper's wettest dream, yet there’s always an obtuse delight in him at the possibility of you stretching your leg over his windowsill.

For that, he boldens. Lets his cotton strokes gain a shape—a dumbed-down, stock standard one of the organ thrashing inside his ribs at the thought of you ever overhearing his lube-covered endeavors. When he’s finished, you bend your leg to observe his work, and the fear of overstepping turns up—has him looking up at you with wintry, bulging eyes. 

But you smile, all gums and teeth. “Look at that. It’s like a heart-shaped bruise.”

Viktor finds he agrees, steering his thumb through your skin until it presses into the dent of your kneecap. For a beat, the air becomes spiky, and the sound of him choking on it whistles above your wound. If it weren’t so unhygienic, he would kiss it better. If he weren’t such a cum-stained loser, he would already have ended up with his tongue wetly asking for mercy against your shoulder. 

Words don’t come out of him until he rinses them with saliva, the rush of unctuous froth coating his throat as he stifles a coughing fit. Maybe that’s what having rabies feels like: fevered and gooey, with his knuckles pale from pawing at a girl’s calf. 

“A bruise. Is that a bad thing?” The wet pop of syllables makes him as gauche as when he undoes his pants to the sound of your keyboard typing away next door. 

“No.” You catch your coat mid-roll off your shoulder. The slope of your breasts squishing together cognate with what he imagines upon hearing about Madonna-whore complex. “I like bruises.” 

—

October 7th. The night is starless, with a skyline shaped like a cavity. You’re climbing inside Viktor’s room while he’s crooking two fingers into your garter belt, thinking of the intervals between your dates corresponding with his choice of equipment, the inevitability of the third encounter leading down south. Duos, trinities, and a single seven all aligning so he could get lucky —but he doesn’t redeem it, chooses to teeter at the edge of combusting into his pajama pants as you throw your leg around his waist and guide his palm under your cheetah-print coat. Laughing, when he finds his methylene blue heart still perfectly unsmudged under your stocking.   

Between your shoulder blades, sweat is drying a milk crust bead, and Viktor wants to claim a lick; swipes his thumb there twice like a slither of a tongue. Inside his head, a Portishead song is stuck on loop from when he listened to you play it thirty times back-to-back—must’ve been a glorious crisis, or the very sultry act he indulges in behind that thin wall. He hopes for the latter, holding you tighter while you step inside. The slap of your laughter under his jaw, spit drizzling everywhere. On your breath—chalk and coriander. On his—that same rabid salivation. 

He finds he’s leading you by the hand, the whole outline of you a big, imbiding blemish with glowing eyes. “Insane,” he mumbles through a swallow. “You are utterly insane.”

You seem to mark that an endearment, pinching his palm with your nails so hard he can’t help but imagine them slicing his shoulders. Groping for the lamp, his room grows disemboweled of every corner—there’s only you, claiming his sheets with your legs crossed tight and bitchy, shedding off your coat extra slow so he can’t make out what’s under it before the light bulb flickers. 

When it does, the shapes and colors don’t come back. All is corpulent heaps and eye floaters—all but you and the dress you’re wearing as you smile at him with your lipstick smeared over your chin. 

He feels gluttonous at the sight—craves to sink his teeth into that sweet spot where the stocking ceases the thigh; to marvel at the blue mark he’d left on your knee, that perfect little bruise. Instead, he starts blabbering. “You are simply…” He searches for the most English-major word within his range, then chuckles as the option emerges. “Farcical.”

You twitch your head towards him, unimpressed. “Farcical?” “Yes! What is wrong with you? Why don’t you use the door?”

“I prefer the window.” “And I prefer you with your limbs intact.”

“Oh. Not a huge ‘Crash’ fan, then?” 

“Enough!” He runs out of breath, recalling your shoeless leap, your knocking on the glass so sudden and so macabre. He closes his eyes and sees you slipping on his beloved nylon, a dozen gruesome what-ifs settling in with a hypothetical shrill. The entirety of you finally within the walls he commits his crimes of passion in, and yet he’s mortified at the thought of your spine jutting out of that little dress, of those thin nylons ripping if you were to fracture the very legs he’s trying not to ogle. 

It rewards him with the crushing weight of being the bigger person, lifts the heaviness off his boner to migrate into gawky shoulders. Only he can’t tell what it reeks of: nobility or hopeless celibacy. 

“Don’t do that again.” Viktor sighs, leaning his cane against the bed frame and sitting down next to you; your hands instantly in his hair, inspecting their newfound entitlements. “Please,” he whispers, “just come over whenever you like. We both know the hall advisors don’t care about—”

“Fornication?” You are chuckling in his ear, and he finds himself sentenced to the noose of your arms—a willing participant, eager for the strangling. 

His throat contracts against your shoulder, a spoon-worth gulp of phlegm when he mumbles, “Yes, er. Fornication. No use risking a broken neck for it. Nobody cares.” And you smile again, reaching under the waistband of his pajamas. Whimpering, when the pang of your glass-cold fingers gets to him. Through him and around the base. “I know they don’t care. But it’s so much fun to pretend they do.” 

When you bend down to kiss him, he clenches his teeth and keeps his lips shut: not to resist you, but to stop his drool from seeping into your mouth, which he already knows is going to feel silly in hindsight. He feels your fingers claw into his face, a press on his mandible like the berating of a dog that’d just snatched something off the dirty floor. Wide-eyed, he lets you hold his mouth open, hears a slurp before he gets to consider blushing. Your tongue goes at it—all of it—the wet, the foamy, the toothy. For a second, he even thinks you’re about to add bloody to that convergence, with your grip on his lip all needles, all sampling copper. 

You grin: shiny gums and pink saliva bubbling in the tooth gap. That’s when Viktor reaches for his lip and realises the bloody is already there—a dab of torn tissue that has his balls griping a little tighter every time he probs the wound with his tongue. Yet his hands are shaking—a funny impulse to pin you down and stick his teeth into your clavicles. To have the girl with a kiss like every transition metal, with a spine like a scythe blade—a perforated, downward curve. “So voracious,” you call him, and he moans at it, moans and sucks in a charged, spitslick breath, craning his neck so your laughter can uncoil straight into his cochlea—deafening, sultry. Ticklish. “Can I?” He asks, unsure what for. There’s still a belief in him that all fucking, however blithe, must mean something—anything at all—irrespective of the bodily fluids involved. Since you chose blood, he expects a kind of meaty love, fitting his fingers into the gaps of your ribs. Leaning backward, the garter belt pulls taut, a dress-proved-nightgown riding up where thighs could kill if clenched in a headlock.

It comes to him, then—an almost-punch to the crotch. 

“Can I go down on you?” Viktor blurts out—no, spews, really—driving his nails over your skin until you squeal and pull away. It startles him, shakes him out of his cunt-drunk stare, and he rushes to kiss you—a redemptive, soft-mouthed thing. Lazy tongue. 

“Maybe,” you sneer, but it’s a toothless snipe, one that gets lost in his hair when you take a whiff of it. “If you promise not to bite it off, hm?” 

“I can’t promise you that. I really can’t.” Viktor laughs, yet means it—pivots his knee in between your legs and jerks at the sound of flannel scuffing against the nylon like an unzipped fly. Foreshadowing, he hopes, and knows that you’re hoping for it too, guzzling into his neck as if trying to dig his vocal cords out. 

Peeling off your dress, your skin gains a warmer edge, and when he licks it—navel to underneath your bra—his first porn-mag aisle beckons him again, offers him fishbone legs in black tights and flipping through Tropic of Cancer in a banned literature class—a confluence of your-his world where cum and sweat and being obnoxious are the common denominators. 

He watches you writhe and lets his hand writhe with you: over your chest, inside the hook of your bra, tugging but not opening, then dabbling into contours under your tendons—neck, clavicle, ribs. But what he’s really after are ankles—the passage to finding out whether your toenails are painted. Shapes, shades, shadows—so many things to discover, and so he grabs you—thigh, ass, doubling up on thigh again, unsure of what to look for first, what to put his tongue on before sticking it up your cunt. 

The filthy S comes back to him with all its dirty alliteration—sex, salivation, slick, and something else salacious he can’t recall the substance of. Trying to unclasp your bra, his anxiety bubbles over, covers you with a slobbery, scared kiss as he whispers, “No, no, no, don’t.” Instead, he tugs it aside and shoves his thumb into the aureole, itchy lace getting caught in the nipple, prompting a moan, then a slutty chuckle. Dark, hardening flesh, in his pants and inside your underwear: nagging, blood, angry—a profanity-filled slam poem. On top of you, his hands are losing strength, itching to be twisted behind his back, brusquely pushed into orifices, ridden, slapped, broken—perhaps concurrently. He yanks you upright and makes you lick his fingers: a dry swallow to the base until you’re leaving a red smudge of lipstick around it and letting him tickle your throat—the first step to finding out what the inside of you feels like.

Shielding your eyes from the lamp, splitting fingers for a drowsy peek from beneath fluttering lashes—still sweat, still shimmer, still sticky mascara smears. He hauls his shirt over his head and treats you to the slopes of his neck hollowing before a gulp. Has you smiling like people do through a drunken rendition of a well-known song, bending your knee and accepting a kiss where he’d just painted it blue the other day—lips on nylon, his breath on your wound and straight into bloodstream. “My—” He trails off. Ventures into kissing your knee again just to buy himself time to pick a sexy endearment. Girl gets discarded—too frivolous, too precociously possessive. He thinks again, awkwardly shaking his head while scraping slut, whore, and their accomplices—too close of a verge on disrespect, too bold of an assumption. And he’d rather you call him that anyway. 

“Your?” you prompt. Fingers inside the garter belt, and right into a smooth, knowing tease—pulling it just low enough to show off the swell of your stomach and the small trail of pubic hair if he cares to squint. Which he cares, of course—if only to twirl his thumb into it. If only to imagine his fresh, hot cum soaking those thigh-smothering stockings.

His balls start to hurt again, yet this time it’s far from that dull ache—this one’s more like testicular torsion or getting stepped on. Viktor remembers touching himself to the latter and feels the ache worsen exponentially, his embarrassment showing up in a damp stain on his thin pajama pants.

Way down, where ankle bones become palpable, he noses their swells while stretching against the sheets, cock down. Painted toenails almost in his face when you squeeze your legs together to make room for him.

He snatches your feet before you get to push them apart again. Sucks out what appears to be a sample vial load from his tender cheek. Another kiss to the ankle before he lets you throw your thighs on his shoulders; the weight of them slushy, flouting death to block his airways. 

Cognisant, your eyes find him, and his bed becomes a pitfall. He has never been a bellicose boy—has never felt blood gushing out of a broken cartilage; but as he takes a whiff of your underwear, he thinks he knows how being punch-drunk feels. He longs for his capillaries to burst over the garter, grinds his tongue against the gusset before pushing it to the side and aiming for a lick so deep the tip of his nose ends up damp, too.

In his mouth—just you and shuffled dirty talk, and he glues it together, sucking, and groaning, and pushing back, and offering his hair for the yanking.

“My,” he calls you, stares daggers from beneath the curls on your pubes, “my favorite worst nightmare.” 

My personal porn-mag girl. 

When he eats you out, it’s a sloppy endeavour gone rigid and his chin hurts from just how acidic you turn out to be—singy enough to bleach whatever facial hair his razor might’ve left behind. It’s imperfect: a pressure-less swirl, raw tongue missing your clit in a way that snitches on his being out of practice. Yet he likes the scolding you subject him to, smirks and wonders if fucking up on purpose will receive him another nape-yank. 

It does.

“Stop that,” you warn. He pushes hair out of his eyes and finds you knitting your brows at him: bleary-eyed, furious—a proverbial ante-slap. For a never-bellicose boy, he has surely been drooling at the prospect of getting punched a bit too densely in a span of ten minutes (just where does the time go when you’re trying to make a girl cum?)

He can’t name what he’s running on when he props himself on his elbows to present a cheek. All that matters is that he wants it, almost intrinsically, with every feature of his calling for a spanking: those droopy eyes, this slick, swollen mouth. This pathetic infatuation with hosiery. The deep pain slicing his cock when he stalls two-fingers deep inside you and listens to the soft pluck of you being stretched. 

“Slap me—“ he begs, “please,” and the mental pitfall swallows him the second you comply.

What a glorious slap it proves: how precise, how cinematic. It blurs Viktor’s vision into water color swirls and sieges oh so freakishly in turn with his stomach acid. 

“Thank you,” he says, jaw clicking, lungs threatening to leak out of ribs. Above him, you are smiling with every tooth unexpurgated, hair a yellow gloriole at the edges when you throw it back, blocking the lamp. Chest heaving, nipples out and dark. It doubles the slap’s recoil and punches the sublime in him instead of out.

And he discovers he likes it, pushing his mouth back against you. A lesson learned—defter, more refined, sweatier. Trying a new pattern, one that goes up, around and straight in, curling in a suck while he smears you all over his face—so sultry, so swollen, so slippery bordering on the very vampirism he’d promised he’d omit. 

He licks a spasm out of you and feels his mouth expand with everything he derails: cigarette-strained vocal cords, a half-swallowed moan, more pH than he’d ever tasted in a girl before, crooked fingers, calf cramps, fancy adjectives like crepuscular, seditious, and (his favorite) arduous. That just about convinces him the devil herself climbed into his bed to finally satiate him—sexually, semantically and whatever else he comes up with. Viktor’s only regret is that handprints don’t leave welts: he’d love to stare at the aftermath in the mirror after you leave. 

“Right there,” you wheeze, a burst at the seams. Right there, which is a pulp-like spot exactly at the entrance—softer than the rest of you, a hot, almost fluffy thing. With his tongue within it, he reckons he’s messing with your nerves and pretends you’re leaking not slick but cytoplasm. 

“Right here?” Tongue out and showing off the burn of you through his taste buds, yet his fingers stay, voluntarily wound tight, spreading, curling, pulling among other suggestive participles. Stockings in his face again: shiny, new and possibly just purchased, for when he nuzzles your thigh it smells like fresh Spandex. 

You press your foot into his shoulder and shove him away, asking for a breather. He uses those boneless seconds to sit up straight and shyly cover his cock with his hand—a gesture utterly ridiculous given he’d just engaged in something far, far filthier than mere nudity. Climbing on top of him, your mouth creases into its umpteenth laugh, and Viktor is convinced that soon enough he’ll be able to discern the frequency of you laughing at him from with him. 

“Don’t hide from me now,” you whisper, kissing sweat off his brow. “What a strange boy you are. Are you always this capricious? A tease, then a virgin?”

He’s not sure how to answer that. In truth, he’s none and both of these interchangeably, but his tongue feels too heavy to mince that into a clever response. “I suppose,” he simply says, kissing you back—never too tired for kissing, even if it’s just a lazy smack under the earlobe (which tastes like copper because of course he forgot you’ve got earrings on). 

Peeling his palm off his cock and placing it on your hip instead, you both bump foreheads and watch his tip peek out of the waistband—a sort of fleshpot pink that looks like it’ll feel good pressing into you. When you take him out of his pants, he groans, slack-jawed and a little dizzy. He stares at your hand around him with blown-out, first-year-meets-his-first-weed pupils, and thinks that sex has never been more terrifying. But he knows he’s going to manage—has always been an avid horror fan after all—and, judging by your bruising tendencies, you might just dig terrifying, too. 

Part of the reason Viktor indulges in touching himself so much is aesthetics. His cock is a lovely, thick one that looks nice with a fist wrapped around it—possibly his most (and only) narcissistic put in one sentence. “What a pretty thing. No wonder you jerk off every day,” you joke, thumb swiping over the slit.

Shame glues his pants to his buttocks so airtight that he stops feeling the beads of sweat individually. All is wet like landing in a puddle after a swing to the solar plexus, but he finds it in him to look you in the wild eye and bite back a betrayed, “How did you—?” 

“You aren’t exactly subtle, you know.” A kiss to the mole under his eyes. Prickly lashes getting caught in the tenderness. “So loud. So whiny. Didn’t I specifically ask you to cancel your orgies?”

“It seems to me like you’re just indignant because you weren’t invited.” 

“There you go again. So rude—” Biting his lip for god-knows-which-time, drawing blood and chuckling as he groans. “Whatever do I shut that mouth with?” 

The answer comes down with one garter clasp clicking undone. 

Viktor watches you tangle your leg out of the stocking, and it suddenly registers that he’s never seen one being taken off not in the pretext of glossy pages. Or maybe he has, just before the obsession hit, so the memory was rendered inconsequential and got lost in his prefrontal cortex. One thing he knows for sure: he’s going to remember this forever. The reveal of the exact shade of your toenails (vampy-plum), the sultry crack of your voice when you tell him to open up. 

Nylon scrapes his mouth as you swab it nice and tight. 

After that, an inevitably awkward search for a condom and an even worse coil of limbs gone gangly in a trice: your bent knees, his taut thighs, stockpiling, detangling, then shifting to be thrown over each other again. It has Viktor drooling through the texture of his makeshift gag; his full veins suddenly flaccid and hollow. You have to stroke him hefty again—torturous pace, steady fist, a bite to his shoulder just to remind who he’s dealing with. Inside you, heat is narrow and liquid-flat. He bottoms out and hums gratefully for the stocking in his mouth, knowing that otherwise he’d be all up in your ear, thanking deities he doesn’t believe in for those millions of years of evolution aligning so that he got to fuck you tonight.

Nails, everywhere. In his scalp, in your buttocks, stretching, and slipping, and stretching again, now slower. When you moan—tight-lipped, a jolt before a convulsion—he knows to try and make up for the earlier tease, spreads you with two fingers for better friction and tries to angle the heel of his palm in a way that would make you hit it. All is wet again. His hands, the back of his neck, your pubes rubbing against his. No orgies, he thinks, and the irony of it grabs him by the balls and makes holding on for you even harder than it already is. No orgies is his last coherent thought before he cums so torturously balmy it feels like his nerves are on fire, and he can no longer tell if it’s drool or froth seeping through the nylon.

You, your sweat, your garters are all he prays to before the duration of his performance sinks in, swelling like the full condom inside you.

· · ────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ────── · ·

"She does not like me."

Viktor's voice was low, barely discernible from the hum of machinery in the laboratory. He sat hunched over his desk, pen never once faltering from the sharp angles of his scrawled equations and head never once raising from his intense focus on the notepad before him; he made the statement as if it were a simple fact, as he accustomed himself to speak ages ago when he first learned that people only listened when you at least seemed like you had something to say. Jayce, from across the room, paused his welding to peer at his colleague, flipping up the metal protective mask only to knit his brow at him. "Who doesn't like you?"

Viktor jabbed his pen into his paper, placing a dark decimal dot in-between the digits of his derivatives. "The new assistant."

"What?" Jayce scoffed, smiling disbelievingly. "That's--- Viktor, that's silly. Everyone likes you."

That only earned a sideways glance from Viktor.

Jayce deflated. "Well, I mean, most people like you," he corrected. It was true that Viktor had become a rather popular man during his time at the Academy; he was handsome in a slender, angular manner, and was gifted an intelligence that put even the sharpest professors to shame.

Jayce had heard, more often than not, whispered swoons and giggles from students and scientists alike across the campus of the Academy all about the qualities of his face and body--- even his voice, accented with flipped 'R's and soft consonants and shrouded in soft-spokenness became the subject of flirtation and fawning that would, ironically, rarely ever reach Viktor's own ears.

Yet Jayce was also no fool--- he understood that Viktor had his fair share of detractors, too. Although without proper basis for their dislike for him apart from their dislike for Zaunites, it was no secret that not every Piltover native enjoyed Viktor's involvement in Academy affairs. Still, from Jayce's perspective, Viktor wasn't doomed by any means of social standing. "Maybe she's just shy," he offered.

"Shy?"

"I mean, sure. Hextech's pretty big now, and I'm sure that working with one of the founders could make her a little nervous."

"She's plenty friendly with you," Viktor said, sharper than he intended to be.

Jayce blinked. "Since when does that matter to you?"

Viktor turned in his chair to frown at Jayce. "Excuse me?"

"People liking you," Jayce said, crossing his arms. "You never cared before."

"I do not care," said Viktor defensively.

"You seem concerned enough about it when it comes to her."

"I am not. I am very unbothered, actually. I could not care less about whether or not she finds me enjoyable so long that we accomplish what we're supposed to. In fact, I would find no disappointment in acknowledging that---"

"Viktor, your pen."

His gaze snapped down at his pen to find that he'd pressed the tip so hard into his notes that ink had begun to leak from its cartridge, blotting his work black. With a hissed curse he tossed the pen away into the waste bin beside his chair and crumpled the now ruined paper into a tight ball. Jayce raised an eyebrow. Viktor glared.

"I do not care," he repeated. "I would just rather have a work environment without unnecessary conflict."

"...Alright. If you say so." Without another word, Jayce flipped his mask back over his face and went back to welding.

With a heavy sigh, Viktor fixed himself a fresh piece of paper to start his calculations over on. Whether you liked him or not, he thought to himself, was irrelevant. Never before had he caught himself up on matters of popularity, and he wasn't about to start now.

Even if you had turned right around and fled the scene earlier that day when he first entered the lab, squeaking something about needing a refill on your mug of coffee.

It was irrelevant, he repeated. He did not need your approval. In fact, he did not need your opinion. Whether you liked him or disliked him, it did not pertain to Hextech and thus deserved no place in his consciousness.

Yet no matter how hard he tried he could not push the notion of your resentment to the back of his mind, much less quell the way that every time it intruded on his otherwise cool thoughts, it made his stomach twist.

And for a moment, when he allowed his mind to wander into the what-if of you truly having a terrible dislike for him, he found it impossible to ignore the rush of dread that chilled his chest, followed by an insistence of burying the thought beneath denials and the equations he regurgitated onto the page in front of him.

Viktor, after all, was a man of heart more than mind, despite the impression that his brilliance and logical schemas guided every one of his actions. Indignant at himself, Viktor curled further over his desk, dedicating all his self-control to fixating on the work to be done.

He did not need your approval.

He did not need your opinion.

Most certainly of all, he did not know that your skittishness was instead a result of a mortifying, intense infatuation for him. It didn't even cross his mind. As admired as he was throughout the Academy halls, Viktor never thought himself worthy of such things.

So when you returned later on, barely able to meet his gaze as you rattled off reports of the results of Hextech's latest experiment (which once again made his heart lurch in his chest), Viktor could only think of what it was he might have done to irk you. And afterwards, persistently, what he could do to make it right.

· · ────── ꒰ঌ·✦·໒꒱ ────── · ·

“Why do you always wear that?” Viktor’s soft question floats through the lab, his voice quieter than you’d heard all day.

You don’t pull your gaze away from the notes before you, the red pen highlighting the mistakes you made from your previous experiment, and dear gods, there are many. Each equation had some sort of marking, whether in yours or Viktor’s messy scrawl. It is safe to say the experiment had not been successful, but it is still in the early stages and no one was injured so it can technically be counted as a sort of win.

“Wear what?” 

“That ring.” Within your peripherals, you see Viktor point a finger towards your left hand. “Even when you work you wear it.”

The thin metal ring on your middle finger seems to heat up under the scrutiny, branding itself into your skin so even if you were to quickly remove the jewellery, the evidence would be damning. 

“Oh.” you finally tear your eyes from the journal to find your partner staring at your hand, question simmering in golden eyes. 

“That is not an answer.” he tilts his head, eyes focusing on the metal you are now twisting out of habit. 

“I know it’s not an answer,” your reply is mumbled as you turn back towards the journal before you, eyes set downcast not in returned attention but in hopes your inquisitive partner would drop it. 

Silence fills the space for a few breaths before Viktor presses on. 

“Are you going to give me an answer?” 

The whine of wheels on stone pierces the room, the hex-core humming in response to the sudden noise. 

“Do I have to?” 

“No.” he hums, inching closer to you with squeaking wheels. “But I would like you to.” 

Air leaves your body in an annoyed sigh, and you click the lid back on your pen as you feel the warmth of his body slide up next to yours. Your heart begins to stutter, breathing an inch too shallow, skin prickling with anticipatory heat. This was a new reaction for you, something your brain has not been able to fully process since the first time you flinched back from Viktor’s touch as though he were a live wire. You know what it is, what is causing these symptoms but there is no time to sit and think of why and how and if. Those what-ifs that kept you awake night after night, mind racing and reeling until the only thing that could calm you down was the cold shock of a shower. 

“Hello?” A finger flicks the centre of your forehead, the thump stinging your skin. “What is wrong with you? Should I call Jayce?” 

You rub at your skin, feeling heat spread through your cheeks at the proximity between the two of you. Not a few feet between your chests, knees touching, fingers millimetres from another on the desk, Viktor’s face right there, so close you could see the barely there freckles that adorned his cheeks like stars on a moonless night. You could reach out and grab him, slide your hands over his jaw and press your mouth to his within a few seconds, within one breath you could kiss him and seal your fate. 

“Why’d you hit me?” you blurt out, brows furrowing as though pain radiated through your skull. 

“I flicked you.” Viktor rolls his eyes,  used to your dramatics and retracts his hand from the desk. “Answer my question.” 

“I was going to before you hit me.” you give your forehead a final rub with your fingers then extend your hand between the two of you, metal glowing in opalescent light. 

“If you are going to continue to stare into nothing, I will be calling the doctor down-”

“Okay! Gods, Vik. Why are you so-” You turn an accusatory glance at your partner. “Why do you need to know so much? Is it yours?” 

Viktor shrugs. “I don’t know, is it?” gesturing to the jewellery with a raise of his eyebrows. 

“Do you really not remember?” you try your hardest to hide the dejection in your voice as the corner of your lip twitches down once before you school your muscles back into neutral disinterest. 

“Do I remember… Are you trying to insinuate that I am losing my memory along with my ability to breathe? That my body is just a ball of degenerating cells-” Viktor begins a what seems like a half-assed attempt at the prepared speech he had given Heimerdinger earlier this week regarding his latest health scare. 

A groan leaves you as you drag your hands down your face, massaging your fingers into the pockets along your nose bridge. “Yes Viktor, that is exactly what I am suggesting since you can no longer remember that you are the one who made this for me when we were kids and I have worn this every single day for the past twenty-odd years.” the words stream from you as your patience snaps. “How you even remember my name is a miracle and I feel as though I should walk down to Heimerdinger’s office and have you taken off this project not because you're sick but because I might kill you if you keep asking me stupid questions.” 

Viktor glares at you, his mouth set in a hard line and you are filled with regret at your outburst. 

“Vik, I’m sorry. I didn’t-”

His stoic demeanour crumbles as a grin spreads across his cheeks, quiet laughter shaking his shoulders. “I cannot believe you are still wearing it.”

“Are you-”

“I had a feeling it was the ring I but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten what it looked like.” he shrugs, leaning in for a closer look at the twisted metal. “It is a lot cruder than I remember. I was so proud of it but now that I am properly looking at it, it is not as well made as I remember.”

Viktor picks up your hand, twisting your palm around to inspect the ring from all angles.

“Did you seriously-“ you attempt once more to form a coherent sentence through your veil of disbelief.

“But I am touched to know that you’ve kept it this whole time, Kočička. It is very sweet.” Viktor smiles, teeth on display as he beams at the unencumbered display of affection you have towards him. 

Your heart squeezes slightly, only a little, at the nostalgic pet name. Little Cat. Something he has called you since your days as kids in the undercity and kept going well into adulthood (his few years as your senior giving him the right to call you little) 

“If it makes you feel better about being sentimental, I do still have the journal you gave me on our first day at the academy.” his fingers entwine with yours, the rough callouses of his palm brushing against your soft skin, as he settles your locked fingers into your lap. “I have not yet written in it but one day I will, when I find something worthy of such a gift.” 

Vi:

Ever since Vi had let you room with her in the shabby excuse for an apartment near the fighting rings, you had been grateful for alpha pitfighter's help. She's already given so much, so you felt extra guilty now as you were curled up on the mattress surrounded by her scent and hugging her jacket, and your pre-heats were extra painful.

"Ugh, that guy would just not quit today, stupid sh-" Vi froze when she saw you clinging to her jacket, realizing exactly what was going on. "That's mine, and I'd like to have it back before I hit the bar." Oh, well this just got awkward, and she wasn't sure how to handle it.

A pained, guilty noise is all that could escape you. "Hey, hey...it's okay," she backtracked, taking a few steps closer, "It's just some jacket. I can always beat up another guy for one. Just keep it until the pain wears off, okay?"

That night, for once Vi didn't stumble back drunk and instead spent the night curled up next to you, like a loyal guard dog, hoping to keep nightmares at bay.

Viktor:

Since Viktor was married to his work, he never really had the experience of caring for an omega in any capacity despite being an alpha. For one thing, he didn't exactly fit the alpha mold, making most omegas uninterested, so when he found his newest lab partner slumped on the desk with his lab coat and the tie he had taken off earlier in some sort of makeshift nest, he was shocked to say the least.

Viktor cleared his throat, "Eh, are you in need of some supplies? You could have always asked for a day off."

Okay, so this was officially the worst day of your life. Pre-heat came early at work and you took your lab partner's lab coat! Not to mention, Viktor of all people!

"Sorry, I'll take my leave," you managed to pull yourself together and away from his scent somehow, already missing it. "I promise, this will never happen again."

As you were about to leave, Viktor spoke up, "You know, I do have plenty of extra coats. Take this one, I can use another."

After that, you knew a large variable had changed, and who knew what the answer to this equation would be?

Caitlyn:

Caitlyn could be as sweet as a cupcake, but you also didn't want to cross her, and it looks like you had.

"Did you really think I wouldn't notice you stealing my things? If you wanted to borrow them just ask!" she exclaimed as she stormed into the room, "I'm one of Piltover's finest detectives! This is nearly offensive!" Then, she caught the sweet scent, noticing the clothes were piled on the ornate bed around you where you laid shaking.

"Oh- I didn't realize! I-" she stumbled over her words, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. "I'm sorry, I should have asked first."

Quietly, you rolled to face her with pleading eyes. One thing Caitlyn couldn't do was resist those eyes for long, and she curled up next to you in the nest. A shudder ran through you as she gently rubbed her finger on your cheek, finally sending you off into better dreams.

Sorry this response took a while! It was fun getting to write for Arcane again! I stuck mostly to the main cast, but I'd like to know what other characters you guys would want added to the next Arcane one!

and as the voyeurish sun is not there anymore, we're in the privacy of the night, our clothes transport to the cold floor beside us. and he will be laying on the floor, on pillows to give himself comforting warmth, in the perfect position to look at the stars. and i would be on top of him, so i can look at the beauty of the only star that matters. dark moles on the paleness of his petite body are a negative of the stars glistening in the dark absolute. and I photograph him in my mind as i make him see twice as many stars as there are in the sky. and the photography shows him shaking, holding tight onto me so he won’t fly away, his eyes coated in haze similar to the clouds on the firmament. and his whole pretty face is shining like clean night from wetness, sweat, tears, everything that i squeezed out of him like out of a luscious fruit.

and after a time of lying to recover i put some of my clothes back on, just to take them off as i carry him to the shower in the bathroom that's lavender tiles wrap around us. and i stand in water, including steam that softens the skin of both of us, as he sits on the shower bench, letting water drip down to the shiny ceramics, while my foam-filled fingers brush his hair, and the water dyes it black for a moment. and when he is clean, the air is filled with the lavender fragrance of the natural soap, then i give my back to his hardworking fingers to rub, to bathe my skin.

and after we both come out naked into coldness outside the shower, i would dry us both then clothe in matching sleepwear sewn out of indigo silk, then carry him to our bedroom, to our royalty-sized bed, covered in pillows embroidered with nebulas, while we would both sink in the blue sheets on the mattress. and he falls asleep with all his boniness, tininess, all his lightness laying on my chest, as i guard him, then fall asleep myself so i can be alive alongside him when i am waking up entwined to him the next day.

okay that was just a drabble and a lil play with words and colors, hope you guys enjoyed

i just want to spoil this man like he deserves, okay?

The humanities faculty room always smells horrible.

It's hard to tell where the pungent scent even comes from; it feels like it's in the air, in all the furniture, in the walls themselves. There's no window to even attempt to vent it out either; it’s in the oldest wing of the university, built at least sixty years prior to the construction of every other unit. Most teachers avoid it like the plague, preferring to work in any other available space on campus, so it's almost always empty.

But it isn't today.

“Melllll,” you moan, shoving your face into the leather couch’s pillows. The smell is somehow worse, imbued into the fabric. If you had to describe it, you would just call it old. Like rancid coffee forgotten on the kitchen counter for too long, or ancient damp books abandoned in an attic. Old. “Why do I always mess up everything I do?”

Mel looks up from the paper she's grading with a sigh, adjusting the small reading glasses on her nose.

“You don't mess up everything you do,” she argues softly. “You wear your heart on your sleeve, and you say what you think without feeling ashamed. That's not something for everyone, but it's not a flaw, either.”

You can only groan into the odorous leather as an answer.

Viktor had been your very first friend at work, but he had been a lot more. Without him, you would have never met Jayce, and without Jayce, you would have never met Mel. And you would have no one to cry your woes to on a Friday evening, a whole two weeks after the most disastrous phone call of your life.

“And I believe Viktor is equally at fault here. He knows better than to play hide and seek with you forever,” Mel hums pensively, crossing her legs. Her olive eyes narrow, her nose scrunching up slightly in thought.

“He's stalling, trying to figure a way out without confronting his feelings or yours. He's smart enough to know there isn't one, but he's stubborn,” she points out, tapping her manicured nails on the wooden table. Tic, tic. Like **the sound of seconds passing on the clock, never-ending and all-consuming.

At first, both Jayce Talis, mechanical engineering PhD and researcher, and Mel Medarda, political science PhD with five peer-reviewed books published under her name, had been two extremely imposing people to interact with. You already felt unworthy enough talking to Viktor, but after learning of the kind of people he usually hung out with, you felt like an absolute loser. Jayce and Mel are both unreasonably attractive and accomplished, and when Viktor joins them, there's no denying he belongs to their world, and not yours.

In those moments, the differences between the two of you seem much more glaring: the university professor with a collection of awards and a PhD in biomechanical engineering, who is dedicating his life to creating life-altering prosthetic limbs and transmitting his knowledge to a whole new generation of scientists… and you.

The guidance councillor who can't shut up.

It’s not that you're ashamed of your job; you love what you do. You love being able to help people figure themselves out, and orient them toward what will make them happiest.

But when you stand in the same space as Viktor, it's hard to see anything other than how much greater of a person he is than you will ever be. He's like a star in the sky, shining brighter and brighter every day, and you get the privilege of watching him through the lens of a telescope. That should already be enough for you to be satisfied.

But it isn’t, not anymore. It hasn't been for a long time. And you want to do so much more than look at him. You want to touch him. You want to kiss him. You want to be someone worthy of shining alongside him; but you never believed that would ever happen.

And for so long, it felt so much easier to just date people whose very existence didn't make you feel like you would never be enough to reach their ankle. People who just wanted something casual and meaningless, some sex, maybe the semblance of a romance. And that's how you ended up with a string of disastrous relationships with men you barely even liked.

You contort your body uncomfortably on the couch to face Mel; it squeaks awkwardly under you, like it's threatening to break.

“Did you know? Did everyone but me know?”

She rests her head on her hand, the hint of a smile on her lips, seemingly slightly amused by the question:

“Depends on who you mean by everyone. No one outside his circle of close friends, for sure. He's not the type to scream about his love life over the phone,” she adds with a teasing glim in her eyes. “No offence.”

You groan, shoving your face back into the roughed-up leather. God, it still smells.

“But Jayce did know,” she confirms, and you hear her straighten her chair to return to work. The comforting sound of her fountain pen starts up again, but you know she's still giving her conversation with your full attention. Mel is like that, able to carry on a hundred tasks at once without breaking a sweat; you wish you had an ounce of her composure.

“Viktor told him after he got drunk last year at the faculty cookout. I believe his exact words were…”

She pauses to do a dramatic imitation of Viktor's voice and tone, “‘Jayce, she is wearing that dress just to put me into an early grave’.”

Not only is it pretty accurate, but God, you know exactly what dress.

The skimpy little sunflower dress that you knew showed way too much chest for a work-related event. You had worn it in the hopes of eliciting any sort of reaction from Viktor; but he had barely spoken to you that afternoon, constantly vanishing every time you entered a room. You assumed you made him uncomfortable with something you said, like you always ended up doing with everyone else.

So you had left the party on the arm of some nameless T.A. from the law department, hoping it would help you forget Viktor, just for a while.

It hadn't.

“And I knew,” Mel continues smoothly in her regular voice, “because I know what it's like to want someone to notice you so badly. To want someone to love you back.”

You detect something very personal in the way she pronounces the word ‘love’, almost like it's painful to even say.

Mel rarely talks about herself, preferring to listen to the stories of everyone around her. Everything about her gives an air of mature confidence and independence, and if she ever has any issues in her personal life, she never shares them with you, or anyone that you know of.

She's not cold by any means, and she helps everyone with genuine care, that, you are absolutely certain of. But you can feel there's a side of her she desperately wants to keep to herself. She's only ever mentioned her mother once, in a drunken haze, muttering something under her breath about never being enough for her.

You wonder if that's the person who’s love she’s longing for.

When she speaks again, there is something akin to nostalgia lingering in her voice:

“You get that special look in your eyes. You both looked at each other just like that, but neither of you ever noticed.”

You open your mouth to say something, but nothing comes. Fucking ironic. You can never seem to stop talking, but now, the words you want to tell her just won't come.

Mel doesn't seem to mind, though, and the sound of pen scrapping paper picks up again. You force yourself out of your leather cavern, sitting up on the couch to look at her directly.

“…Why didn't you say anything?” you ultimately settle with, but it rings much more fragile and hurt than you wanted it to.

She gives a small shrug without looking away from her documents:

“Not my place to. Viktor needed to confront his feelings head-on, and you needed to realize you were never not enough or too much for him,” she states matter-of-factly, “It's that simple.”

Everything always seems so easy when it comes from Mel's lips. But in your mind, thoughts are jumbled, emotions are running wild, and everything you thought you knew about the last four years is falling apart.

Maybe, that time on New Year’s Eve when he told you there was no other place he'd rather be, he hadn't meant at the party. He had meant with you.

Maybe, when he had taken your hand, it wasn't just because you were excitedly counting down the last seconds until midnight. It was because he wanted to touch you just as much as you wanted to touch him.

Maybe, at the end of that night and in those early morning hours, when he had said you would make someone really happy one day…he was asking if it could be him.

“Maybe,” you **exhale bitterly, enunciating the world like a curse, “it would actually be simple if he just answered my texts, or my calls. Or anything I do to try and reach him.”

Yeah, you're to blame for being so blind for so long. For noticing the smallest things about everyone else, but missing all the signs when it came to him.

But so is he for refusing to talk about it now that you finally see it.

“At this point, I’m seriously starting to consider lock-picking their apartment,” you grumble, more in tiredness than anger; you can't even manage to stay mad at him for longer than a minute. “He’s the one who showed me how to do that, did I ever tell you that?”

She lets out a soft laugh at that; but when she glances over to you, there's a hint of something new in her eyes.

“I'm sure he would enjoy seeing you put your training to use, but there might be another way to see him. I think he's had more than enough time playing hide and seek.”

You know that glint in her forest-green stare; she knows something you don't, and she’s chosen to reveal it to you. You almost jump off the couch with your eyes wide, so quickly you almost lose your balance:

“Mel, what do I do?”

She snorts as she motions for you to sit back down with a calming wave of her hand, amusement clear on her face.

“Calm down. I wouldn't tell anyone about this normally,” she begins, lowering her voice in secrecy, as if you’re not the only two in the room, “and I want to make it very clear you did not receive this information from me.”

You nod eagerly in agreement, hanging on to her every word.

“Go to their apartment,” she declares with certainty. “If you keep going after their door and to the end of the corridor, there's a big potted plant on the window sill. An orchid.”

You frown in confusion.

You've only been to Viktor and Jayce's apartment a few times in the couple of years you've known them. Usually for relaxed group hangouts, or an occasional game night. You remember very little about it other than the all-consuming childish excitement of being in Viktor’s home, and the absolutely not innocent thought of his bedroom being barely a few feet away.

Why don't you ever remember the important things?

You try to muster every memory you have of the apartment complex itself instead; they live on the third floor, and their door is the second one on the right after the elevator. The hallway is a straight, narrow line, and you've noticed how dark it always is every time you’ve visited.

Dark, yes, that's right, because aside from a cheap light fixture, there’s only one window that lets any light into the hallway, at the very end of the corridor. One window, that is almost entirely blocked by the world's most decrepit potted plant.

“The… really ugly one?” you ask with uncertainty.

Mel snaps her fingers in confirmation, a hint of perfect pearly white teeth shining between her lips.

“I think you may find something of interest under it. Jayce told me about it for whenever I want to…” she hesitates on her next word, uncharacteristically a little bashful, “visit.”

Oh, you fucking knew it.

“I totally-” you start triumphantly.

“Yes, I know, you knew it for months,” she interrupts, waving her hand in dismissal. Her lower lip sticks out slightly, almost like she's pouting. You've never seen her this embarrassed. “It's incredible how you notice everything about everyone else, but when it's about you, you suddenly forget how to use your own eyes.”

Touché.

You've sensed it for at least a year now, the unspoken electricity between the two of them. How her arm sometimes lingers just a second too long on his shoulder, how his hands seem to always accidentally brush her waist. For as subtle as they were being, there was no mistaking the fire when they looked at each other.

Did Viktor ever look at you like that, too?

Why hadn't you ever noticed?

“Wait, wait,” you interrupt your own train of thought. “The orchid. Why is the orchid…”

You pause when the realization hits you like a bucket of cold water.

Oh.

Oh.

“Do… do they have a set of keys under the orchid?” you ask slowly.

“I didn't say that,” Mel says, bringing her two hands up in self-defence; but the smile lingering on her lips tells another story. “And if you say I did, I will deny it and throw you under the bus with every inch of my power as the advisor for the debate club. Are we clear?”

You could kiss her.

You settle with a tight hug, holding her with as much force as you can muster. The scent of her perfume, bitter and floral, masks the decrepit smell of the room for just a moment. Is there any problem Mel can’t solve?

“Mel, you're the best,” you grin against her ear.

“So I'm told,” she hums. She gently detaches herself from the hug, giving you an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Now go. I don't like seeing you mop around my teacher's lounge, and I can't stand when Viktor performs his little disappearing act instead of talking things out.”

She picks her pen back up, giving you one last genuine look of support, voice soft, sincere: “You two are really meant for each other. Give him hell.”

—

Viktor is much less attentive than people give him credit for.

That’s not to say he’s oblivious or careless. In fact, when it comes to his work, he could instantly notice a tenth of a millimeter discrepancy from a mile away. He could hear the slightest abnormal murmur in the heart of any machine, and pinpoint its exact origin within seconds. Throw a blindfold on top, and he'd still know exactly where to place each and every single component of his prosthetic models.

But when it comes to the world outside his lab, his attention to detail just plummets.

If a bomb went off right outside his apartment, he probably wouldn't even look up from his notes. Jayce usually has to call his name thrice to pull him out of the trance-like state he gets into when he's sketching up a new idea, and that's only because he's used to Jayce's voice; for someone else, he might not hear it at all.

Even walking home from campus, he pays no attention to his surroundings, lost in his thoughts of valves, hydraulic cylinders, and flexion plates. He mechanically follows the same path he's walked thousands of times, a habit so ingrained in him it allows him to fully disconnect and think of nothing but work.

He's glad he has such a strong grip on his own mind, because if he didn't, he would let his practical ideations slowly morph into thoughts of nothing but you. You, who he hasn't seen in two weeks, because he likes to pretend change can't happen if he simply refuses to acknowledge it. It's much better to focus on what he actually has control over, to lose himself entirely in the things that make sense to him. To forget the world burning around him.

And that's exactly why he doesn't realize you’re in his apartment, sitting on his couch about ten feet away from him, until you make a pointed cough to signal your presence.

“Ah,” is the only thing he manages to get out.

He wishes he'd be surprised, but then again, he knew you would find your way to him eventually. He could keep trying to bury himself in work and avoid you with every inch of his power, you would not stop until you got answers to your questions. You’re just as stubborn as he is. That's part of why he fell for you.

So, there's nothing he can do, but let out a defeated sigh.

“I would ask how you got in here,” he starts flatly, taking off his coat robotically to place it on the hanger, “but I have a feeling it doesn't really matter.”

You don't react to his distant, tired tone, your expressive face unusually devoid of emotion when you speak.

“I didn't use your lockpicking lessons, if you're wondering.”

He can't help but snort at that:

“Disappointing.”

You both stay silent as he slowly takes off his boots and removes his wool scarf. The atmosphere isn't exactly awkward, but it's not comfortable either. Like a cheap, stiff version of the warm intimacy you usually share.

You've always been so easy to read, and anything that didn't show on your face always came from your lips. He always knows how you feel: he's observed every single expression on your face, from the slightest pout to the biggest grin, and committed it to memory with the dedication he only ever puts into his projects.

From the day you literally crashed in his life four years ago, utterly drunk and analyzing him with astonishing accuracy, he's felt the need to analyze you, too. To decipher every part of you, understand each component, each reaction. He craved the idea of knowing you like a cartographer knows the maps of the world, like an astronomer knows the place of every star. To understand you as you had understood him, with a single glance.

Right now, he has no idea what you're thinking.

In typical fashion, you're the one who ultimately breaks the ice first:

“You could kick me out,” you declare, staring him down almost challengingly. “I'll leave if you really want me to.”

There's clear apprehension and hurt in your voice, a bitterness you're trying your best to hide, but failing. He despises being the one to make you feel that way. He's become no better than any of your exes.

“We both know I won't do that,” he exhales. He's still standing in the entryway, just a few steps away from the threshold of the living room. There's no hiding anymore, no backing out. You're here, and he has to face you. Even if it breaks him.

“In the kitchen, second drawer on the left,” he says, making his way inside resignedly. “There's a rather large bread knife inside it. It hasn't been sharpened in a while, but it should do.”

Your passive expression falls for a second and you stare at him in confusion.

“Do for what?” you ask, eyebrow raised.

“Killing me to spare us both the embarrassment of this conversation,” he answers unenthusiastically.

You're the one who snorts, this time. If he could forget why you're here, he could almost pretend this is just a regular talk between close friends. Almost.

You get off the couch without hurry, stretching your limbs lazily; he wonders if you've been waiting for him for a while. You're still in your usual work clothes, but your hair is dishevelled, and your makeup is a bit smudged. Had these been different circumstances, this would be the kind of look he would imagine you in when he's alone in bed, but that's exactly the kind of treacherous impulse that's led him to this situation in the first place.

There's a strange shimmer in your eyes when you look at him again:

“You got any booze in that kitchen ?”

He’s starting to realize no matter how many years you give him, he’ll probably never be able to completely figure out what's going on in that brain of yours.

“You want to drink. Right now,” he states in disbelief.

You shrug:

“Seems like you listened to me when I was drunk last time. Maybe that'll get your attention again.”

There's an undeniable bitterness under the light sarcasm. It's deserved, frankly. And maybe a drink would make what's inevitably coming less difficult.

“First cabinet to the right. You can take the clear unlabeled bottle,” he offers.

You hum in approval, making your way to the kitchen without looking back at him. He makes his way to the couch, sitting at the opposite end of where you had been.

You come back with the bottle in one hand, and two mismatched shot glasses in the other. One is his, a souvenir from an academic conference in Marseilles; the silver lettering simply states ‘Ainsi va la vie’, ‘such is life’. He has to wonder if you chose it on purpose, to taunt him.

Although, the other one is Jayce's, and it's shaped like the torso of a woman with huge breasts in a bikini top with the colours of his old college. So it's equally as likely you just grabbed the first ones you found.

He always overthinks when he's anxious.

You put the three items down on the rectangular table in front of him, before sinking into the couch next to him. Your bodies aren't touching, shoulders an adequate distance from each other, but the proximity is still unnerving. The smell of your perfume, usually so comforting, makes him feel slightly ill.

You pour the alcohol into the shot glasses unhurriedly, progressively filling them both to the brim.

“Did you know Mel and Jayce are together?” you ask, not looking up from your task.

“Unfortunately so,” he mutters sourly.

You pause at that, perplexed.

“No, that is not what I meant, I am very happy for them,” he clarifies quickly. “But their decision to keep it a secret has been rather… precarious for me.”

You slide a glass towards him and give him a smile; the first one of the day, the first one in two weeks.

“You walked in on them fucking, didn't you?”

He groans, and you laugh. God, he missed that sound.

“I have never been more embarrassed in my entire life,” he complains, wrapping his hand around the shot glass. He notices with gratitude it's the plain one and not its heavily endowed sibling. “Being able to run had never seemed more appealing.”

You grab your own glass, the smile on your lips genuine, but fragile. The words still left unsaid hang above you both, and he's forced to remember this is but a moment of respite before everything falls apart.

“Maybe a drink will help you forget,” you joke, holding up the glass in his direction.

How he wishes it would.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he simply answers, bringing his glass to yours until they hit with a light clink. “Cheers.”

Your gaze holds his captive as you speak, like you're reaching into the depths of his very being.

“Na zdravià.”

You throw your head back and down the shot before he has time to voice his surprise, so he does the same, not wanting to break the unspoken rules of the toast; his ancestors would roll in their graves.

The liquid burns his throat almost instantly, the familiar warmth of alcohol settling into his body. It’s strong, powerful, but there’s a recognizable hint of plum and almonds that's comforting to him.

He can’t help a discreet, fond smile as your face scrunches from the sharp taste.

“I-I don't think I've ever had that before,” you cough out, your eyes slightly watery. It's endearing that no matter how much you drink, you never seem to build a tolerance to the sting of strong spirits.

“Slivovice. Plum brandy. The homemade ones are noticeably sharper than what they sell in stores here. Although… perhaps not as legal.”

You let out an amused cough, wiping away any tears before they get the chance to fall, smudging your mascara even more. But you're still smiling at him, decided, bold, never letting yourself be defeated by anything. It's like he's falling for you all over again in that single moment, outside of time and space.

Even in his darkest moments, when all else crumbles, you remain the unwavering light he can always find in the sky.

“I am a little surprised you remembered how to say that,” he admits softly.

What he had meant as a compliment seems to come off as a reproach in your eyes, and the smile falls, ending the magic of the instant.

“It may not always look like it, but I listen to you, Viktor,” you mumble, hurt. “I'm not an idiot, either.”

“I did not mean to imply-” he protests, but the words die in his throat. He opens his mouth by reflex, before closing it again; the sentence lingers incomplete in the air.

“…Why did you hang up?”

Here it is.

“Ah, so we're jumping into the questioning already. Alright,” he sighs. He chooses to stare at the bottom of his empty glass to avoid seeing your reaction. It's pitiful, but it'll spare him some of the pain and embarrassment. “I did not want to listen to what you would say, this once. I was scared if I heard your answer, it would all be real. Unchangeable.”

Change. Viktor had never been scared of the concept before. Change means something new, passing from one state to another, an evolution. It means progress. Nothing could ever be as gratifying, as glorious, as making the changes you want to see in the world.

But he didn't want you to change. He wanted you to stay just as you are, always excitedly talkative and brilliantly observant. Always shinning. A star brighter than any other, that could never fade no matter how the world treated her.

Revealing his feelings for you would have put that in harm’s way. You might think he had never truly been interested in your conversations, in all those ideas and words you feel so self-conscious about, and lose the trust you had in him as a friend.

He couldn't take that risk.

“So… you avoided me for two weeks ?” you scoff in disbelief.

He lets out a short, bitter laugh:

“I would have attempted longer if you did not break into my apartment.”

The poor attempt at a joke doesn't seem to land very well with either of you. The atmosphere feels still and heavy, the strange tension palpable.

“Ok,” you exhale, leaning your head back against the back of the couch. “You can ask me a question now.”

He glances at you in surprise:

“A question? Why?”

“So it's equal. I ask you one, you ask me one,” you explain simply, like it's the most basic rule of conversation in the world. “I haven't been attentive to what you were trying to tell me, for a long time. I need to change that.”

He hesitates for a second. There's a lot he wants to ask you. Had things been different, would you ever have considered him as someone you could fall for? If he could change the timing, the place, the words, would anything have made it so you could have loved him?

“You read people so easily,” he almost whispers. “I always assumed you knew how felt for you, but were too nice to tell me off. That you did not want to break what we had.”

It’s time. It's time for change. There is no other choice than to move forward. He continues:

“I am… sorry that I fell in love with you.”

Ah…

The weight seems slightly lighter on his chest. It's not a good feeling, exactly, but there's a certain peace that comes with finally having said it.

The expression on your face is yet again one he doesn't recognize.

“I'm not. I’m not sorry, Viktor,” you breathe out, hardly any louder than his respiration.

Your hand touches his, just barely, and he flinches, pulling away. But you refuse to back off. You reach for him again, your fingers timidly touching his own.

“Maybe I did know, in a way,” you reflect, a single digit moving across his knuckles, the ghost of a caress, “but I wouldn't let myself believe it. I didn't want to lose the only person I’ve ever felt wanted to listen to me. So… I stopped listening to my instincts, I guess.”

You let out a shaky laugh.

“I talk all the goddamn time and I don't even listen to myself.”

He turns his hand around, letting your index trace the lines of his palm instead.

“A fortune teller who can't read her own cards,” he teases gently. “Ironic.”

You scoff with a smile; your fingers intertwine, tentative.

“You're one to talk, asshole,” you huff playfully, “the big smart professor who can't figure out when someone is in love with him.”

His heart stops beating in his chest.

“Ah. You... you lo-” he stops himself before finishing his sentence, scared of pronouncing the word. He takes a shaky breath before he attempts again: “You feel the same way I…?”

He leaves the question open. He's still hesitant to make it real. Of saying the words that'll shift things. Because damn it, yes, Viktor is scared of change when it comes to you.

“I’m in love with you, Viktor,” you smile, like it's the most natural thing in the world. “Did the part where I broke into your apartment just to talk to you not give that away?”

What a strange feeling. He's dreamed of hearing those words from your mouth for so long, never believing they would, and yet it feels so right. As if you had told him a thousand times before this moment.

Maybe you had, in your own way.

He squeezes your hand, the sensation of your skin against his making it all feel impossibly real.

“I suppose we're both idiots,” he sighs gently, eyes locking into yours. “The blind oracle, and the clueless teacher. What a dynamic duo we make.”

Your forehead meets his, your nose just barely tickling his.

“I'd say we make a good duo. You and me,” you grin. You're so close he can feel the warmth of your breath on his lips. He smiles.

“I'd say so as well.”

How virtue may best lodged in beauty be

So here he was, following you through the dark university buildings as you, for the lack of a better word, broke into the arts lounge.

“It’s not breaking in if I’ve got the keys,” You justify, keys jingling in your hands. Viktor studies you as you fiddle with them, your face scrunched and tongue poking through your lips in concentration. You hadn’t taken off the lip oil you usually wore for moisture, and it glittered under the flashlight’s scrutiny.

“Hmm?” He says, realizing that you had said something, and that you were standing.

“Is the sleep deprivation getting to you, Viktor?” You tilt your head, eyes roving over his face, searching for the obvious signs of exhaustion painting his features. The purple under his eyes, drawing his face in even harsher lines, the line of tension between his brows. The way his features tended to draw into themselves like a plant unwatered. He watches you watch him, tracing your lips, touchless, trying to remember a word that wasn’t your name.

“I think it is,” He admits softly, afraid of letting you catch onto him.

You smile, hands finding the doorknob and twisting. You leaves the lights off, navigating through memory and the stray light of streetlamps streaming in. Viktor stumbles behind you, feeling his way through clumsily.

The doors to the balcony had been left open, a major oversight you grumble about as you slide them open. The air is chilly, making you shiver as it slithers past the warmth of your sweater. His sweater, Viktor notices. He had lent it to you a week ago, at your last session.

 Let him but learn of love to read in thee,

You had shown up to the library soaked through, the rain outside painting the world gray with its weeping. You tried to hide the shivering, but it was clear in the way you clenched your teeth, body drawn together with tension as you laughed off his concern.

“I don’t need my sweater, go change in the bathroom,” He had offered, both pitiful and exasperated at your lack of planning. With a sheepish smile, you had accepted the help, promising to return it as soon as possible.

Sunk into worn leather couches warmed by the nearby fireplace, you’d almost disappeared under the wool. As your hands danced across the page of the textbook in your lap, underlining and annotating the poem as you explained the basics of close-reading, Viktor couldn’t help but notice how you halted to push the sleeves up now and then as they got in the way.

It was supposed to be an easy class, but as of late, it had been taking up more time than his core courses. Not that Viktor could be bothered. You two had been in the library for hours now, on the couches near the fireplace—a frequent haunt. It was the best place to curl up with your anthologies in your laps, the lack of tables allowing  forcing Viktor to lean closer to see what you were pointing at, and—unbeknownst to him, for you to sit so your thigh would press up against his. Though he wasn’t aware of your design, he was plenty aware of the electricity firing up his nerves, even when the warmth of the fire threatened to drag him under.

He yawned, confused. Not only because he couldn’t make sense of your explanation or the sonnet itself, but also because he wasn’t used to the extreme bouts of fatigue that overtook him around you. It must be the literature, he had thought to himself, the words were literally putting him to sleep.

Stella, those fair lines which true goodness show.

“Tired?” You’d asked, sounding equally exhausted and perhaps a little hopeful. But Viktor had shaken his head—he’d needed to get through it that night, for the test was less than twenty-four hours away. The first one, his chance to set a standard for himself and to make an impression.

“Confused. I still do not understand what this last line adds to the poem. It is so…” Viktor had sighed, mouthing the line. “…random.”

“Well,” You’d started, tucking away a stray strand of hair. “If you look at the rest of the sonnet, Astrophil has been focusing on the virtuous parts of his love for Stella, basing it in admiration of her character and beauty from this very pure, respectful perspective. Almost like he was worshipping a deity rather than, I don’t know, loving a person. Keeping that in mind, what do you think the sudden interjection of desire might mean?”

Even half-asleep, you made the perfect teacher. Viktor wondered if he was making you question your decision to be an educator with his idiocy. Mulling over your words, he’d tried to formulate a response that would please you.

There shall he find all vices' overthrow,

That was the most difficult part of this subject—finding an appropriate answer. In his field, there was only ever one. But here? It felt like he was shooting in the dark, randomly putting together semblances of analysis in hopes of making the puzzle fit. It frustrated him.

“Hm,”—is what came out. Sighing, he’d tried again.

“Well, desire in this case would refer to a…carnal feeling, would it not?” The word was awkward against his tongue as he’d looked to you for approval, lighting up slightly when you nodded. Congratulations, you absolute genius, you remembered a basic definition, he thought sarcastically. It was a clear testament to his skills that even such a rudimentary recollection made you happy.

“Desire expresses, well, a desire for sustenance,” He’d continued. “So, it is being starved by the virtue of Astrophil’s love for Stella, then? Is that it?”

You smiled, teeth peeking out from behind your gloss-painted lips. “That is one interpretation, and a pretty good one at that.” Then, you’d paused, leaving Viktor confused again. A good interpretation did not mean the best one.

Not by rude force, but sweetest sovereignty

“Some might say that it’s a reminder that any true love can’t just be focused on virtue and purity, but also needs to encompass more carnal, ‘lowly’ aspects to be complete.” You explained, noticing his look. “But it really doesn’t matter what interpretation you argue for, as long as you have a strong argument.”

“But which is the better answer?” Viktor had asked incredulously, a hand threading through his hair.  

You laughed lightly. “There isn’t one, I suppose. Just whatever you can argue for.”

“That makes absolutely no sense.” He said with finality.

You shrugged as you scribbled down the analysis in his margins, leaning over so your hair was too close to Viktor’s face. He drew in a sharp breath, smelling the fresh scent of your shampoo.

“It’s just an exercise in close-reading, Viktor. The entire point is to discover the poem,”—you’d punctuated this statement with a flourish of your hand, rings glinting—"not to tie it up and beat it until it gives you the ‘right’ answer.”

Your voice had taken on that trademark gentleness, the tone it always took when you talked about anything you loved. Poetry, your favourite book, even a particularly good cup of coffee. It made Viktor’s chest ache, like it was pulling into itself, trying to shy away from you. He wondered if you could ever talk about him in that tone.

He’d been silent too long, eyes resting on your face absentmindedly. You laughed, snapping your fingers in front of him. He startled, sheepish. You’d been talking.

“Wanna call it a night?” You’d asked, shifting to face him properly, knees still tucked under your thighs.

Viktor had shaken his head. “No, I still do not feel entirely confident about this test,”

“Relax, Viktor, it’s only worth four points. Have fun with it,” You yawned, leaning your head against the couch, right beside his shoulder.

He’d mimicked you, leaning his head back to relieve the ache in his neck. “I would have thought that our semester-long acquaintance would have shown you how impossible that is.”

You had shrugged, blinking slowly. “Worth a try,”

Silence was a blanket over the two of you, your eyes shut lightly while Viktor tried to draw his away. He’d dreaded the end of this quiet, when you inevitably opened your eyes and sighed, a complaint about how you still had to go home and make dinner slipping from your lips. And Viktor had, once again, been too afraid to betray himself, to ask if you wanted to come over for dinner, to punctuate that question with the fact that his place was closer anyway. Instead, he’d stolen glances as you packed up, stopped you from returning his sweater, assuring you he’d just take it later.  

Of reason, from whose light those night-birds fly;

“Do you remember when we first met? You looked exactly like how you do right now,” On the balcony, you pull him out of his thoughts, leaning against the railing. He steps forward to join you, the cold metal a welcome shock compared to the nearly uncomfortable warmth your presence inspired in him.

“Are you trying to tell me I look horrible?” He replies flatly.

You shrug, smiling. “Maybe,”

He laughs, swallowing the faint bitter taste of self consciousness as he takes his place beside you.

That inward sun in thine eyes shineth so.

He’d been late on the first day, having to brace far too many stairs for his liking. The night before had been spent sleepless with pain in his leg, and the stairs that morning only made it worse. The only seat left was beside you, in the second row of all places. Cane thumping embarrassingly as the professor paused, Viktor had dropped beside you, trying his best not to disturb your arm as he settled in. The old hall, tucked away in the windowless basement of the Arts department, had creaky chairs and tiny pull-out desks, quite different from the state-of-the-art labs Viktor was used to. Despite his best efforts, his arm bumped against yours as he brought out his notebook.

You’d startled slightly, throwing him a small smile as he muttered a hasty apology. He began trying to decipher the page number by looking at your book, half-hidden by the arm you rested your head on. Unfortunately, you’d noticed that too. With another kind smile, you’d reached over and turned the book to the right page, pointing to the exact sonnet being discussed.

Though he thanked you, the lecture still flew over his head.

He could feel your eyes on him as you put your things away extra slowly, as if to match his pace in an attempt to not embarrass him further. If so, it didn’t work. He’d been painfully aware of the delay he was causing.

 “Are you in this faculty?” You’d asked as Viktor stood up. He was a deer caught in headlights as you swung your bag onto your shoulder.

“No, this class is, eh, a required option,” He’d said, feeling the paradox of the category.

“Really? The engineering students usually take the lower-level literature courses.”

“How do you know I’m in engineering?” Viktor had asked. Being easily discerned didn’t sound like a good thing.

You’d laughed. “Don’t worry, it’s only because I know most of the literature students, we’re a pretty small group.”

“Fair, but I could be in maths, or biology,” He’d titled his head. Around him, new students had started piling into the room. The two of you had been standing here for a while now.

“Well, you smell like motor oil and formaldehyde, so I think I got it half right.” You’d winked, stepping past him. You smelled like jasmine and books.  “I’ll see you around?”

And, not content to be perfection's heir,

And you had seen him around. The next lecture, you’d grabbed a seat closer to the entrance, saving the one beside you for him. He saw you as soon he entered, drawn to familiarity. Stopping just a step away, he noticed the bag, self-consciousness seeping in for a second as he wondered if he wasn’t as welcome as your last conversation had led him to believe. Perhaps that was just politeness, to help him save face? He had taken up a lot of your time.

Somewhere in the middle of his internal conflict, you had looked up from your book.

“Oh, hi, I saved you a seat!” You’d said cheerfully, a hint of tension in your smile. Later, you would tell him you were afraid to come off as too eager to be his friend. He found it unbelievable that someone could be embarrassed of wanting to be kind.

Viktor had never been so grateful for both his inability to decipher literature or his disability than the effect it had on his friendship with you. After the egregiously long reading list was distributed, you’d turned to him:

“I was thinking of going to get the books after class, do you want to come with? There’s quite a lot of them, so it would be easier for us to carry them together.”

Only when you were walking back to his dorm did he realize that in his eagerness to form an acquaintance, he had skipped over something quite obvious.

“You do not need help carrying these,” He said, slightly accusatory.  In one arm he carried a tower of half of the total required books, and, he realized again, only the thinnest ones.

 “Well, I didn’t want to come off as patronizing by asking you if you needed help,” You said, voice strained. From embarrassment or the effort, he could not tell. “Besides, my reasoning was so half-assed, I thought you saw through it.”

Viktor’s annoyance had only lasted a second before he noticed the breathlessness in your voice, no doubt from carrying almost double the weight you’d have to if you’d bought only your own books.

“Well then, I think I owe you for this,” He’d said, trying to keep his voice even. The truth was, even with you taking on so much of the burden, his arms and legs ached. There was no way he could’ve made it all the way back without your help. “Thank you.”

Now, you were definitely embarrassed. “You don’t have to thank me, any friend would do the same.”

Friend. He had other friends, but Viktor had still warmed at the fact that you’d decided his company was worth pursuing.

Thyself, dost strive all minds that way to move,

Now, here you were, a semester’s worth of study sessions and late-night talks later, still finding each other’s company worthy. Even as you stood silently, admiring the city’s skyline, basking in the presence of the other wordlessly.

“I must apologize,” Viktor begins suddenly. You shoot him a quizzical look but let him continue.

“For missing our last session,” He explains. Now your lips part, but Viktor continues. “No matter how busy I had been, I should’ve let you know I couldn’t make it. But I had just returned from an exam after two sleepless nights and fell asleep despite myself.”

You turn towards him, concern drawing your eyebrows together. “Viktor, why would you need to apologize for getting sleep? Speaking of which, why are you depriving yourself of rest?”

“I need to study, you know how it is,” He waves a dismissive hand, trying not to get anxious over the fact that he was currently wasting time.

“I must admit, I do not know how it is,” You reply. It was true, Viktor had noticed the delicate balance you struck in your own life, somehow always finding the time to socialize and keep yourself healthy without failing all your courses. Though you always said it was because your degree was easier, Viktor didn’t believe it.

“Unfortunately,” He sighs exaggeratedly, “we cannot all be gods of excellent time management.”

You laugh. “Not time management, just an easier program,”

Viktor shakes his head. “After taking just one of the courses that make up your schedule, I must disagree. I would have failed without you.”

You roll your eyes. “Yeah, sure, Vik.”

The nickname makes his heart stutter, even though you’d used it a thousand times. The lack of sleep truly was getting to him. In the silence that followed (because he couldn’t think of how to continue), you sigh.

“What’s the end for you, Vik?” You ask, looking at him sideways. “What’s the point of all this—the sleepless nights, the skipped meals, the self abandonment?”

The question was uncharacteristically heavy, and he wonders for a moment if he should inquire after you. But then again, it was half-past two and you were here, with him, instead of getting the minimum eight hours of rest you subscribed to, so perhaps that was a non-question.

Instead, he ponders the question you’d asked, mulling the words over in his mouth before speaking. He hadn’t really vocalized it before. “Well, I want to help people, I suppose. Help them and be remembered for it.”

You hum in understanding, expecting him to continue. And he does.

“I suppose I’ve felt…invisible. For most of my life, that is. Most people were embarrassed of looking at me, and the universe itself seemed to be telling me that I didn’t matter. So I made myself matter. Became the smartest in the room, the most accomplished, excelling intellectually so that no one had a chance to notice anything else.”

“Did it work?” You ask, barely above a whisper.

“I…do not know,” He admits, laughing slightly. “The recognition, the awards, the opportunities—they help, but the attention only lasts a few minutes, and it’s always…incomplete.”

“How so?”

He hesitates slightly, scared of the words about to leave him. “People don’t see all of you, I suppose. Just your mind, and your work. They still shy away from all the parts of you that don’t fit in,” He motions towards the cane still clutched in his hand, and the leg that now ached tenfold.

You hum in understanding, your eyes now finding his. “Like people only value you for what you can do, rather than who you are.”

“Exactly.” For a moment, Viktor is in awe of your ability to understand people, before he notices the tension in your shoulders and the tight way you’d said those words.

“What about you?” He asks. “What do you hope to achieve from all this?” 

Who mark in thee what is in thee most fair.

You take a breath, exhaling deeply as you look around. “Same as you, I suppose.”

“I was referring specifically to all this,” He waves a hand, gesticulating to your surroundings. “Taking care of so many people, in so many small ways. It must add up. It must take time away from studying, from actually working towards your goals.”

You laugh, but it’s more of a formality than genuine mirth. “I don’t really have big goals like you, a need to be remembered in history for doing something great. I don’t care about a classroom of kids studying history decades in the future, I care about my siblings remembering me the moment they’re, I don’t know, illegally drunk and have no ride. I want to love and be loved now, in the immediate. Screw legacy, or whatever,”

 Somewhere during your brief monologue, the fire behind your eyes had started blazing again. The traitorous ally that was the air in his lungs betrays him, as it usually does around you, but Viktor wouldn’t be surprised if he could just survive on the sight of you alone. Your shoulders tense, face taught, defenses raised, a vestige of having to defend your choices and your life from those who could never truly understand you. As much as he wished to reach out, ease the tension holding you tight, it was exhilarating to witness—the ferocity that inspired your love.

“What?” Your eyes meet his, finally, after roving everywhere else for the past few minutes. He realizes he’s been staring too long, too quietly. Licking his lips, coming up empty for words. Woops.

“Is there something on my face?”

A shake of the head. “No, no. You’re fine,”

“Alright,” You say, suspicious. “You don’t think I’m stupid, do you?”

“Of course not!” Viktor scrambles to correct you. “I was just…at a loss for words.”

“Whatever you say, Vikkie-boy,” You sigh, faking exasperation.

Viktor cringes at the nickname, which was novel.  “Please never use that term again.”

You pout, a teasing glint in your eye as you lean towards him. “Aw, you don’t like my new pet name?”

“Yes,” Viktor replies, deadpan. Partially because he cannot, with any self-respect, entertain such a monstrous butchering of his name, and because you were entirely too close to him. Close enough that he can see the pores in your skin and the pupils of your eyes, and the glittering liquid in your waterline.

So while thy beauty draws thy heart to love,

He catches the exact moment you notice it too, the proximity. Your gaze flits somewhere lower, and though he would like to flatter himself, Viktor resists the thought that comes. He hears your breath falter, tripping before correcting itself, your lips parted slightly.

Another thought, loud and overwhelming. Much harder to resist. Much harder to think past. So he doesn’t—think, that is. Doesn’t speak. Lets the silence and your confusion stretch on for a few more moments as he takes you in.

“You’re acting a bit strange,” You say, voice and eyes low. It sounds divine.  He could listen to it all night. “You wanna go to bed?”  

As fast thy virtue bends that love to good:

Viktor shakes his head. There’s never been anything he was surer of. Perhaps he should feel a bit guilty that through your profession of your morals, your defense of your values, he could only think of stepping closer to you. Of taking your breath away. Of, perhaps, taking care of you, for once. Repay you for all your favours. Perhaps he should feel guilty that instead of engaging with you intellectually, he could only think of softness, in your hair, your lips, your skin. But then again—

He recalls dimly the poem that started this all, its lines blurring past him to the beat of his own heart.

But "Ah," Desire still cries, "Give me some food!"

He could do it. Step closer, quiet the tidal waves in his mind that left him so mute. There was a ninety-five percent chance you wouldn’t mind, a similar chance you would enjoy it.

It wouldn’t feel like a forest fire, he could imagine that much. A hearth, perhaps. Steady and warm and comforting, the warm space between your lips where your breath mingles with his—peppermint and coffee, the taste of the chocolate you’d been nibbling before a palimpsest he could trace with his tongue.

He could do it.