Work Text:
It finally happened.
It turns out, no matter what he told his poor Ma over the phone, Jayce could not, in fact, live off of his student loan forever.
It’s okay, though, because Caitlyn said she can get him some casual, fun, part-time shifts at the coffee place she works at because the manager owes her a favour and one of their supervisors is about to go on extended medical leave because of surgery and literally anyone can make coffee, Jayce, it’s not that hard, you’ll be great at it, and it’ll fit around your class schedule fine. You can do closes only, or weekends, or something like that.
And the idea of skipping the whole slog of being routinely ghosted by job application websites really does appeal to him – he’s already applied to every hardware store in the area because that’s where he has the most experience, Talis family hammers and all, and he’s gotten a less-than-polite rejection email from one and a whole load of jack shit from the rest.
Historically, Jayce has actually been great when it comes to saving his money. He grew up not exactly poor but not exactly well off, either, and with a single mother, so he knows how to penny pinch and coupon clip and compare prices from shop to shop, and he managed it through his whole undergrad, scraping by on what the government dished out to him – but his master’s degree has just … done something to him.
He doesn’t drink really very frequently, the number of girls he’s been taking on expensive dates has dropped considerably the deeper into his school work he’s thrown himself, and he only ever gets take out on special occasions or that week where the gas on his oven broke and his landlord wouldn’t fix it so he kind of had to or starve to death. But somehow, his money has just … poof. Gone. He barely made rent last month. He needs this job – Caitlyn's nepotism be damned.
Cait gets him the interview and asks for nothing in return. Mel, the manager, is gorgeous and exactly his type and laughs at his terrible jokes and asks no questions about the significant blank spots in his meagre resume, and four days later when he’s in the lab, he gets the call asking him if he can pretty please start next Saturday.
-
Here is what Jayce learns during his first six months working at the coffee place;
One – no, Caitlyn, it is not fucking easy to make coffee. It takes Jayce what feels like forever to properly pick up bar work – the espresso machines are needlessly complicated, the recipe for every drink just a little bit different to the last, and customers already love to pretend that they know more than the people who work there so it’s really fucking embarrassing when, in Jayce’s case, they absolutely do. He gets there in the end, though, can make a decent latte and a passable shaken espresso and he rarely ever has to go digging around in Mel’s office like a rat looking for the big company recipe book.
He’s good on the till, though. He can upsell well. He gets mentioned a lot in the reviews people leave online – apparently people think he’s charming, which probably goes hand in hand with being quite well built and conventionally attractive, but he doesn’t bother reading too hard into it. He’s good at his paperwork, too, and his closes are tight and tidy which his coworkers appreciate. He picks up people’s shifts when they have family events. He … likes it there. It’s home for the next … well, who knows?
Until the next ‘he gets a better job’? Until the next ‘he has enough surplus money to not need to work anymore’? Fat luck. Until the next ‘his dissertation is becoming Too Much and he needs to quit or he’s gonna fail’? Until the next ‘he graduates and moves back home with his Ma and tries to convince her to let him take another loan to do a PhD’? Jayce wrings his wrists with his hands and chuckles under his breath to himself.
Jesus Christ, he might be here forever.
Two – having a drunken hook-up with your boss after the staff Christmas party is … not a good idea. Mel is a lovely woman, truly, and in any other time, any other place, under any other circumstances, Jayce believes that they could have made it work, but Jayce was in a tough spot with his master’s research, and Mel was in the middle of a massive row with her mother, and it just wouldn’t be good for her to date one of her employees, not right now, sorry Jayce.
And that’s fine, that’s perfectly fine – Jayce spends a week being awkward around her and drinking himself to oblivion until he accidentally oversleeps on one of his opening shifts and leaves poor Ekko in the cold blowing up the group chat with texts for help, and then he gets over it.
Three – people like him, and they do not like the supervisor he was hired to replace, who’s extended leave is coming to an end very, very soon.
He’s blunt, says Caitlyn, and abrasive.
Sometimes he just … wanders off, says Vi, for no fucking reason, especially during a rush, and you’ll go back of house and find him in the stock room not even pretending to sort anything, just staring at his phone or sometimes even at the wall.
He’s nice to be on shift with if a customer is mean to you and you really, really didn’t do anything wrong, says Ekko, who tries to see the very best in everyone, because he’s not afraid to yell at them for you. He just … will also occasionally yell at you too.
We used to have this regular, says Powder, called Salo – blonde, kind of weedy. Jayce recognises the name - a TA in one of Jayce’s undergrad classes, a politics course he took for extra credits that turned out to be the dullest thing in the world and a waste of a spot in his timetable. Everyone in attendance wore a suit and tie and had their parents paying their class fees and probably voted conservative. He was invited to go out clubbing with Salo and his cronies one night, he vaguely remembers, but turned it down because he had an engineering final. Rumour was they almost got in a drunk driving accident that night.
Anyway, says Powder, there was one time when he was a major dick to Viktor, real ableist. He called Viktor - that's his name, by the way, Viktor, specifically with a 'k' - a slur once so Viktor clocked out just so he could have a screaming match with the guy and not get written up because of it. He’s banned from the premises now, just so you know, but he still tries to weasel his way in sometimes.
He's dedicated, says Mel. He turns up to work on time and he gets stuff done. He’s not the best at customer service but he makes a good drink and he’s been here almost as long as I have. He’s a good member of staff - and no, Jayce, we’re not going to fire you or demote you when he comes back. You’re a good member of staff, too, and we really need more than one supervisor on rota.
Eventually, there pops up a little doodle on the corner of the white board in their break room that says ‘Days until Viktor returns! 13!’ and whoever is manning it erases the date and rewrites it accordingly. Next to it is a – no offence to whoever drew it, probably Powder – very bad stick drawing of a man with spikey hair with a speech bubble next to him that says ‘knee surgery? more like schmee smurgery!’. Next to that is a printed out and taped up note from Mel that reads ‘Gentle reminder to everyone that this is a break room, not a cloak room! Please take your aprons home, or keep them in your designated lockers! Thank you :)’
The number on the board steadily dwindles each time Jayce arrives for a shift – 13, 12, 9, 5, 3, 2. Would it be bad to say that he’s a little bit … nervous? About this new, or not so new, arrival? Especially with all the gossip he's heard. Jayce likes the people he works with. They have a good dynamic going on. What if someone else coming into the equation – someone that they all knew but Jayce had never met before – upset everything? It’s a fucking miracle after half a year that Jayce hasn’t started to dislike his job yet, and he doesn’t particularly want to start now, thank you very much.
That ‘2’ is plastered on the board on a Sunday. Jayce has Monday off, which he spends hopping between the university library and the laboratory from sun up to sundown, taking a single break to go and buy some over priced cold pasta in the canteen and call his mother like a good son. That day, the board should say ‘1’.
On Tuesday, then, the board should read ‘0’ – he’s doing a two to six close.
On Tuesday, Jayce wakes up at six in the morning so he can go to the gym before his three-hour lecture with Professor Heimerdinger at nine. After that, he takes the bus into town with all of his study material and gets to work early so he can sit in the café and abuse his staff privileges by getting a free hot chocolate. He doesn’t really … like coffee. Whenever a customer asks him for a suggestion at the till, he just makes something up or parrots menu items he's heard Cait recommend before. Behind the till is Mel. Behind the bar is Ekko. At one, Vi arrives. Every time Jayce raises his head from his textbook, he scans the scene before him for an unfamiliar face, but consistently comes up empty.
Anxiety eats away at him. His foot is bouncing on the floor so violently he’s convinced the people at the table next to him can hear it. So, he’s fucking nervous? Sue him! From what everyone else has told him, this Viktor guy could turn out to be a real fucking asshole, and he is objectively not prepared at all.
Unable to focus on his work – too much math, too many numbers, all jumping and swimming and entangling themselves with each other across the page – Jayce pulls out his phone and googles his work and goes on their website and onto the page where customers can leave reviews. You can sort, if you know how, by employee name. Sometimes, very late at night when he’s unable to sleep and has had a bit of a shit day, Jayce reads through his own reviews for the ego boost. Into the search bar, he types ‘Viktor’.
Employee(s) who helped you today!: Viktor
Customer Name: Steb
It was just the one poor guy running the whole shop I think. Objectively horrific customer service but to be fair to him it was seven in the morning and dark as f*ck outside and the drink was amazing.
Employee(s) who helped you today!: Viktor
Customer Name: N/A
got there at 5:43. they close at 6pm. manager (or guy claiming to be the manager?) was already locking the doors. tried to tell me i couldn’t come in but relented when i pointed out the closing time on the sign. the whole time i was there he was glaring daggers at me over the bar. swept right under my feet when he was cleaning the café. at 5:56 he turned the lights off so i had to finish my drink in the dark. what the fuck
Employee(s) who helped you today!: Viktor
Customer Name: Maddie N.
i asked for my americano extra hot and the skinny slavic man with the cane behind the bar got into an argument with me saying that was impossible because its made with boiling water so it cant get any hotter? i swear ive been to other places that do extra hot americanos? he was so self-righteous and rude like you could have just informed me politely there was no reason to raise your voice? jesus christ? gave me this look like i'd just shot his dog for sport when i asked for milk with my americano too. unfortunately i will be coming back because i have a crush on another member of staff :/
At ten to two, he packs his shit away, politely as possible pushes through the gaggle of customers blocking the door to the back of house, and clocks in, and heads to the break room to dump all of his stuff. Maybe, just maybe, this mysterious Viktor hasn’t turned up today. Maybe he called in sick. Maybe he even quit, and Jayce never has to meet him at all. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
He puts his hand on the door. Voices slip eagerly through the cracks. Instead of pressing through, Jayce lingers, his ear to the gap, listening. It’s Powder and Vi, bickering, but also -
“Can I touch it?”
“No, you may not.” – a new voice, thick eastern European accent, the only way Jayce can think of describing it being like the vocal version of dragging chalk across a blackboard.
“Powder, stop being a freak.”
“I’m not being a freak! I’m just curious – and this one is custom?”
“Yes, and permanent.” - this must be him. This has to be him. Jayce wipes his suddenly very sweaty palms onto his jeans.
“Cool!”
“No, not cool, Powder! Oh my God, I’m so sorry, man.”
“It’s fine, Violet.”
Jayce steels himself, and finally shoulders open the fire door. The voices fall silent at his arrival. Powder has hoisted herself up onto a counter, her legs swinging violently and the heels of her falling-apart boots clipping at the cupboard doors; Vi is leaning up against the wall, arms crossed, dirty apron hanging limply in her grip; and the third one, the stranger …
“You can’t be back here,” says perhaps the prettiest man Jayce has ever seen in his entire life.
He’s shorter than Jayce by about a head with pale skin and a gaunt face paired with dangerously sharp cheekbones. Above his roughly bitten at lips, a bit rosy with smeared blood, is a mole, with another beneath his right eye, which in the strange fluorescent lights of the break room appear the colour of honey, of ichor gold. There are heavy bags under them that betray a truly startling lack of sleep. Brown, wispy hair sticks out at every angle, and when he turns his head Jayce can just see where the longer bits of it have been tied into the shortest ponytail he’s ever seen. He wears simple black slacks and a brown striped shirt with the collar button undone, flashing a deep, sunken divot of collarbone. In one hand he holds one of the shops little paper cups, steam curling out of the hole in the lid, and in the other he clutches onto a walking cane. On his leg is a sleek, black metal brace, forcing his knee straight.
If Jayce hadn’t had his bisexual awakening sometime last year, he recons that seeing Viktor for the very first time would have absolutely kicked him into gear. His waist is so thin that Jayce is sure that if he wrapped his hands around it, he could touch his own finger tips. His head swims with the thought. That should be fucking illegal.
“Hey, no –,” Vi laughs, pats him hard enough on the shoulder that his entire body shakes with it. He’s scowling at Jayce. He’s actually scowling. It’s fucking gorgeous. “ - this is the new guy we were telling you about! Well, new-ish.”
“Ah,” Viktor’s face softens, and then something a bit mischievous flashes in those lovely, candlelight eyes. Jayce is all of a sudden convinced he might pass out. “My replacement.”
“Hey – hey,” he says when he finally remembers his voice, and his manners, stepping properly into the room and extending his hand, “I’m Jayce.”
“Viktor.” Viktor puts down his cup and shakes his hand. His fingers are long, almost spindly, and purplish with the cold with bony knuckles. They’re perfect. Jayce wants to … well, he wants to do things that would be inappropriate to mention in a work environment, even in the safety of his own mind.
He’s very distantly aware that he might be being what people call ‘insane’. He’s never … this has never happened to him before, this kind of instantaneous, almost vicious attraction. Sure, he’s seen girls and recognised that they’re pretty, that they’re hot – that’s what happened with Mel, after all, and he chased that until the all wax burned watery but this is something else entirely. He needs – and it is a need, something that immediately grows teeth and starts to eat away at him – he needs to know Viktor, needs to hear his voice, memorise his movements, drink in his laugh, worm his way under his skin so he can take in all of the soft, wet bits underneath.
Jayce is fucked. Jayce is utterly, irreparably fucked.
“You, umm, you – you working today, then?” Jayce stutters. He doesn’t have anything to do with his hands. What does he do with his hands? They want to be on Viktor, he knows, carding through the mess of his hair, slipping under the opening of his shirt at his neck. He shoves them deep into his apron pockets, balls all of the already crumpled receipts shoved down there into his fists.
“No. I just came to do my return-to-work papers with Mel.” Viktor deadpans. He’s honestly not sure if he’s relieved or devastated.
“Ah, right.” Devastated. Definitely devastated.
“Speaking of the devil –“
“Hi, Viktor!” Mel shoves her nose around Jayce and into the room. How the fuck did he hear her? Jayce didn’t even hear her. Jayce actually can’t hear anything over the wild beating of his heart lodged in his throat, and Viktor’s responding hum. “It’s so good to see you again! Do you wanna come into the office and we’ll get started?”
“Please.” Viktor picks up his cup and leaves the room. As he passes Jayce at the door, he leans in ever so slightly, so that their shoulders are almost brushing, and he looks up at Jayce, that mischief still bright in his brilliant eyes, and says, “Nice meeting you.”
“And – and you,” Jayce replies, voice no louder than a whisper. Viktor smiles at him with all of his crooked, gapped teeth, and then disappears into the little box of Mel’s office.
Jayce spins around to face Vi, who has this disgustingly smug smirk plastered on her face. Jayce grabs her by the front of her apron, shakes her gently as she laughs and laughs and laughs in his face. “You never told me he was fucking hot!”
Vi raises a hand and pats him lightly on the cheek. “Let’s get to work, pretty boy.”
-
His close with Vi drags. They get about two customers after four o’clock, but are prevented from sweeping and mopping the café by this one old gentlemen who sits in the corner until five to six, nursing his definitely frigid cold cappuccino, and then Jayce has to count the cash, which takes him way longer than it should because he keeps fucking up because ever time he looks down at his hands, the ghostly image of Viktor’s slender fingers appears, slotting perfectly into Jayce’s.
They get out on time, though, just about. Vi speeds off on her motorbike, and Jayce walks the thirty-five minutes in the dark back to his shitty one-bed apartment he can barely afford just off of campus, all too happy to do away with his plans of studying for the evening and instead just collapse on his stupid, thrifted, falling apart at the seams sofa and stick something on Netflix and just … pretend he doesn’t exist for the rest of the night.
He watches a documentary about robotics, and then about eight episodes of a terrible sitcom he’s recently become way too invested in, and somewhere in the middle he cooks himself dinner, one of his Ma’s recipes because he feels like, after the nightmare today has been, he absolutely deserves it.
He hasn’t stopped thinking about Viktor. He fucked up on the bar tonight too many times to count, too distracted just by the memory of him, of the thought of him still down the hall in Mel’s office, sat on that stupid stool she keeps for her guests, cane balanced over his lap, twiddling a pen as Mel pushes paperwork at him. What does his handwriting look like? Cursive, Jayce imagines, and fucking indecipherable.
At around half an hour into Jayce’s shift, he left the building. He waved to Vi over where she was lounging at the till, and raised his cup and nodded silently to Jayce, and then he was gone.
“What does he drink?” Jayce asked Vi, trying not to sound too much like a desperate maniac.
“I don’t … actually know,” Vi shrugged. “Probably a black americano with, like, seven shots of espresso? I mean, look at him.”
Trust me, Jayce laughed internally to himself, I’ve been looking.
He washes his pots from dinner, and then puts on another round of sitcom episodes whilst he mindlessly scrolls through his phone. Somewhere along the way, when he’s exhausted Instagram and Twitter and is just mindlessly hopping between the two waiting for something new and interesting to happen, he gets a notification that ‘[Mel <3] has added [V] to the [Work Chat] group!’. The speed at which he clicks on the pop up is frankly embarrassing.
Viktor’s profile picture is not, as Jayce was hoping, a picture of himself – well, he can see Viktor’s arm, and a bit of his waist, and a slither, where his shirt has ridden up, of his hip. It’s a picture of him reclined, presumably, on his bed or his sofa or maybe the floor, but mostly of a gorgeous little brown tabby cat that’s curled into his side, paws covering its face, sleeping peacefully.
Jayce resists the urge to throw his phone across the room. He's sweating all of a sudden. It’s so warm in here. Did the heating accidentally flick on? He zooms in on Viktor’s profile picture to look at the cat, yep, just the cat, and – wait, is that a mole on his hip?
Jayce turns the TV off, and retires to the bathroom to go have a nice, long, very cold shower.
-
[Work Chat] Group
Mel <3: Hey guys, reminder to our closers to make sure you clean out the ovens! Stuff really builds up in there if it isn’t taken care of. It’s something that will be checked if we ever get a health inspection! Thanks x
Cait: Vi and Viktor closed last night.
Mel <3; Thanks Cait x
Vi: [thumbs up emoji] will do bossman
Mel <3; Thanks Violet x
Mel <3: @V
Get Jynxed: hey did i leave my school work in the break rm? can some1 check 4 me? physics stufffff
Ekko: [picture attached] This it ?
Get Jynxed: !!!
Ekko: Ill bring it round after shift ?
Get Jynxed: :) <3
Mel <3; [picture attached] Here’s the rota for next week! Can everyone reply with a thumbs up to make sure they’ve seen it? Thanks x
Cait: Got it. Thanks Mel.
Vi: [thumbs up emoji]
Get Jynxed: [thumbs up emoji] [explosion emoji] [explosion emoji] [explosion emoji]
Ekko: [thumbs up emoji]
Cait: Actually is anyone willing to swap my Friday close? Me and Vi have something planned.
Vi: :)
Get Jynxed: [explosion emoji]
Vi: piss off
Ekko: Will do
Cait: Thanks Ekko. You’re a star. Is that okay @Mel <3
Mel <3: No problem x
Mel <3: @Jayce T. @V
Jayce T.; sorry was in an exam cheers Mel!
Mel <3: No worries. Hope your exam went well! x
Jayce T.; thanks! :)
Mel <3: @V
V: [thumb up emoji]
-
Jayce’s first proper shift with Viktor is three whole weeks after they first met.
Jayce usually does afternoons and weekends because of his post-grad classes, whilst Viktor usually works mornings because he is, in Cait’s eloquent words, ‘a bit of a freak’. When Jayce comes into work, often Viktor will have just left, or just be leaving, and Jayce will get to not so subtly watch him pull on his long coat and scarf and fucking leather gloves as he takes off his probably stained jumper and messes lamely about with the strings of his apron. He always has a drink with him. They exchange casual pleasantries as they piss about at the lockers – “Hey, Viktor!”; “Hello.”; “How’s your shift been? Has it been busy?”; “Not too bad. A small lunch rush. Powder dropped and broke another plate.”; “Haha, classic – hey, I’ll maybe catch you Sunday? I’m in at one. Get home safe!”; “Sure. See you Sunday.” – but nothing more than that, and in all honesty, it is starting to drive Jayce a little crazy.
When Mel drops the new rota in the group chat and he sees ‘Wednesday – Mel 7 – 12, Caitlyn 7 – 1, Viktor 12 – 6, Jayce 1 – 6’ the wash of excitement he feels is embarrassingly intoxicating.
He gets a private message from Caitlyn with a cropped screenshot of that day on the rota and a text that says ‘My condolences. I’ll pray for you’ and he also gets a message from Vi, in her infinite wisdom, that says ‘ayo dont fuck it up pretty boy’. He replies to Caitlyn saying ‘haha thanks ill need it’ and to Vi saying ‘im going to make an absolute fool of myself im fuckin sure of it’. Vi replies with ‘just dont get bricked up if he yells at you lmao’. Jayce sends back a bunch of middle finger emoji’s and begins to count down until next Wednesday.
He gets there early to do class work, again, his morning unclouded by lectures but with a tricky engineering final looming on the horizon scheduled for the end of the month, but this time he holes himself up in the breakroom rather than the café, unwilling to study to the background noise of couples on awkward first dates and whining children and the hissing of the steam wands echoing out from behind the bar. He hunkers down with a hot chocolate that’s more whipped cream than drink and a muffin from the pastry case that he picks at with his fingers in between balancing equations and copying notes down from his textbook that’s so thick it could kill a small animal if he dropped it on them.
It’s so very easy to slip into his own world, surrounded by the useless, empty cupboards and the overflowing bin and rickety, creaking iron lockers and even more of Powder’s drawings plastered up on the whiteboard, that he doesn’t even notice Viktor come in until he jumps and swears incredibly loudly in what Jayce thinks might be either Czech or Polish.
“Shit, man, sorry!” Jayce cringes. “Someone probably should’ve warned you I was in … here …”
Viktor’s headphones are hanging limp around his neck, leaking some truly brutal, deafening foreign metal music, and his cheeks are flushed red with what is most likely a mixture of the early spring cold from outside and the fright of finding Jayce cooped up in the break room when he expected it to be empty. He’s wearing slacks again, like for some reason he always does, but this time, instead of a tantalizingly partially undone button up, Viktor’s wearing a band t-shirt so old that the collar is riddled with holes. He’s got those damn leather gloves on, too, and is dragging his coat on the floor behind him. He fumbles in his pocket for his phone, and Jayce kind of dimly realises that this is the first time he’s ever seen Viktor not perfectly put together, like he’s something pretending at being a human being instead of an actual person. He finds his phone. The vocal fry screaming of the music stops.
“Apologies,” he says after a while. Jayce huffs out a laugh.
“No – no need, man. I’m sorry I scared the crap out of you.”
“Not quite the crap,” Viktor smiles, “perhaps just the living daylights, hmm?”
He bullies open his locker, pulls out his apron, shoves in his coat, and Jesus Christ he has his ears pierced, not just studs but a fucking industrial bar at the top of his right ear. How the fuck has Jayce missed that? How the fuck could he ever dream of missing that?
He forces himself to look away from Viktor and back to his work – something, something, carry the one, right?
“Is that … mechanical engineering?”
Viktor looms over his shoulder, straddling the line of too close but also not close enough. Jayce can feel his breath ghosting against the shell of his ear. Viktor extends a graceful hand down onto the desk and pushes his papers about until he finds something that interests him and snatches it up.
“Umm, yeah. I’m getting my …,” Jayce swivels his chair around, too fucking elated by all of a sudden being gifted Viktor’s attention to care about the way the uneven legs grate loudly on the floor as he turns. “I’m getting my masters over at Piltover University.”
“Do you have Professor Heimerdinger?”
“Yes, yes I do – did you go …?”
“I have a PhD in Biochemistry,” Viktor announces casually, like everyone just has a PhD in Biochemistry. Gorgeous and a genius, the little voice in the back of Jayce’s head sings, how perfect. “I favoured genetics. He was my thesis supervisor.”
“That’s – that’s so cool!”
“You are probably thinking ‘well, what are you still doing here, then’, hmm?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to say it out loud, but …” Jayce laughs. Viktor gives him this soft, kind of aching smile that Jayce immediately finds he wants to photograph and frame and have it live on his bedside table until the day he dies.
“I was actually set to apply to be his assistant, after I graduated last year, but I knew I was getting my surgery soon, and the recovery would be long and arduous and not particularly conductive to long hours in a lab doing research, so I opted out.”
“That’s …,” Jayce is overcome with the urge to stand, to reach out his arms and sweep Viktor into a hug. In this fantasy, Viktor does not go rigid and tense, as he probably would in the real world, but instead falls softly closer, tucking his head into the curve of Jayce’s neck, and they find in this comfortable silence that their bodies fit perfectly into one another, like they were made for each other. Instead, Jayce just lifts a broad hand and pats Viktor’s shoulder. The other man grimaces, a little, but he does not shove Jayce away. “That’s horrible.”
“Ehh, it is what it is.”
“He still doesn’t have an assistant, you know? He goes on and on about it all the time.” Viktor puts Jayce’s worksheet back down onto the table, affixes both his hands to the head of his cane. “I can put in a good word for you – if, if you still want to give it a shot, now that your surgery is over and done with.”
Viktor makes this face that many people have made at Jayce throughout his life, where his brows furrow and his eyes squint and his lips part ever so slightly to show off his teeth. It’s a face of ‘that’s too much, that’s too kind, don’t do that for me, why would you ever go out of your way to do that for me?’. Too many people have told Jayce too many times throughout his life that he’s too nice for his own good, and he agrees with them, he does, it’s gotten him in a lot of fucking trouble over the years, but faced with Viktor – beautiful Viktor, wonderful Viktor, apparently such-an-asshole-to-everyone-else-Viktor-that-he-hasn’t-made-any-other-friends-at-work-Viktor-so-why-me-why-me-why-me-Viktor – he just can’t help himself.
“You – you do not have to,” Viktor stutters.
“Yeah, I know, but I think I’m gonna do it anyway,” Jayce shrugs. Viktor gawps at him a little bit, and then smiles, a wide, genuine thing, and Jayce’s heart goes funny in his chest. Viktor gathers up his apron and his cup.
“I – I should probably get –,” he walks backwards, straight into the door, and Jayce tries his best not to flinch when a flicker of pain dances across Viktor’s face as his spine connects with the heavy wood, “ – my shift is starting.”
“See you in about an hour, then.”
“Goodbye, Jayce."
Jayce opens his email on his phone and begins to draft - 'Dear Professor Heimerdinger, I wanted to talk to you about the research assistant position you have open. While you might be disappointed that I'm not writing to apply myself, I think I have someone who is perfect for the role, if you don't mind me making a suggestion. I work with an old PhD student of yours called Viktor ...
-
An hour later, as promised, Jayce is up on the shop floor, dutifully fiddling about behind the bar, making the Piltover general public their lattes and their cappuccinos and whatever other strange concoctions they’ve come up with and made Viktor figure out how to stamp through the till.
It’s a fairly slow afternoon, thankfully – most people don’t bother staying in, just take their drinks and leave to go wander through town centre or go back to their own jobs or whatever else it is that people do. Every fifteen minutes or so there’s a few precious minutes of quiet, so Jayce escapes from behind the bar to go and collect all of the errant mugs and plates from out in the café and run them through the dishwasher, whilst Viktor wets a rag and wipes down all the mess that Jayce has left on the countertops.
It’s a calm, amiable silence that they work in. They move around each other well. Viktor will be discussing an order with someone at the till, Jayce will overhear it and get the shots pouring and milk steaming before Viktor’s even rung the transaction through, and by the time that the customer has made their way over to his end of the bar the drink is ready to be handed off. Jayce brings the ridiculously heavy dishwasher trays out to the front of house and Viktor unpacks them, putting all their spare mugs away in drawers or on the big, unstable porcelain pyramid next to the sink.
At around four, like most weekdays, their clientele disappears pretty much entirely. They’re bound to get a handful of stragglers at around quarter past five, when people are leaving their office jobs and need something to warm their hands as they walk home, but aside from that little rush and a few stragglers that will wander in every so often, it isn’t long before it’s just the two of them.
Viktor hunches over some paperwork, begins initialling boxes manically. Jayce starts to take apart one of the two espresso machines for cleaning. As he passes Viktor, balancing the grounds drawer and the run over tray and the grate and the shot glass and the steam wand and the cloth tray in his arms, he peeks over his shoulder. Yep, just as he expected – absolutely unreadable cursive handwriting. The confirmation of his suspicion kind of makes him feel giddy.
He wipes the espresso machine, puts it all back together, opens it up to drop some of the industrial cleaning tablets inside and then switches it off. He puts the syrup bottles in the sink and drowns them in hot water until the plastic threatens to warp, then wipes down the little shelf they were on and puts them all back. He turns off one of the ovens and scrubs the inside of that until all the grease and grime has turned his sponge black. He puts their blender through the wash, semi-confident that no one is going to order anything that requires it at this time of night, and if they do, Viktor will probably just lie and say that they’re out of whatever they want so they don’t have to bother cleaning it again.
Time passes somehow both insanely quickly and also like molasses going through a sieve. Jayce tries his best not to check the clock – it always ruins his mood. Someone presses their nose against the glass, spots Jayce wiping down the counter, assumes they’re closed without checking the sign on the door and wanders off.
The music that comes over the speakers is soft, melodic and kind of haunting, mostly instrumentals or stuff that sounds like its from the nineteen twenties. Along the way, Jayce abandons his apron, it becoming sodden from carrying the dishwasher trays back and forth and having all the water drip down his front. Viktor does the same, and then also pulls his hair out of its tie. The longest strands almost reach his shoulders. Jayce stands there for what is definitely too long to be appropriate, watching out of the corner of his eye as Viktor messes with his parting.
Viktor is also massaging at his braced knee with one of his hands, and every so often he’ll crook his mouth in a way that betrays a little bit of pain, or relief, or some mixture of both. Jayce’s traitorous, bastard, overactive brain wills him to sink to his knees at Viktor’s side, put a kiss to the metal, put his hands to the knee and do it himself.
Instead, fucking thankfully, he just opens his mouth and speaks instead.
“You know, I really fucked up my knee, once.”
“Oh?”
“When I was like, twenty, I fell off a cliff during a hike and shattered part of my knee cap. I had to wear one of those big metal cages with the little pins that go into your bone for months. I was stuck in shorts all the way through winter.”
“Wow,” says Viktor. “Ouch.”
“Yeah, it – it healed okay, but if I roll it a certain way it clicks super loud and stings like a motherfucker.” He lifts his leg to demonstrate. Viktor leans in, bending perfectly at the hip as to not upset his knee, until his ear is almost touching the fabric of Jayce’s trousers, and then he looks up through his eyelashes at him, waiting. Jayce stumbles back a bit, off balance, but manages to grab hold of the bar before he falls. He rolls his knee back. A solid ‘clack’ echoes throughout the empty café. Viktor whistles in response.
“Can you do the trick where you predict a storm is coming based off of the ache?” He asks, and Jayce internally begins to whoop and cheer because yes, yes! He’s done it! Viktor’s grinning up at him. They’re having a fucking conversation, and Viktor has on this beautiful, slightly lopsided smile and he’s joking around with him and it’s fucking glorious and Jayce thinks he might be a little drunk, actually, a little intoxicated off of the light reflecting in Viktor’s eyes.
The bell above the door chimes – a customer.
A young, pleasant looking woman walks in, dressed in a pale, blush pink blouse and matching skirt under a white coat and with her frizzy curls pulled up on top of her head. Viktor breaks away from him, wanders over to the till, puts his elbows on the counter and actually leans over a little as the woman approaches. He’s smiling, not quite the same smile he’s been giving Jayce all night but close enough, and it’s enough to make something in his stomach go uncomfortably tight.
“Hi Viktor!”
“Hello, Sky.”
“A large iced latte with five pumps of vanilla and an extra shot of espresso, please.”
Viktor stabs the till screen with his finger. Jayce, leaving an ear out for their conversation, begins to pour the shots into a little glass, and then counts out the pumps of vanilla into a big plastic cup. The woman – Sky – counts coins from her purse into the palm of Viktor’s outstretched hand, occasionally stopping to push her slipping glasses back up her nose. She’s pretty, her face sun-kissed by freckles and her fingers decorated with rings and Jayce is all of a sudden drowning in an uncontrollable wash of pure jealousy.
Viktor knows her name? Viktor would rather die than remember a customer’s name. He must know her from outside of work, then – but how? Viktor’s gotta have some kind of friendship circle, or maybe he knows her from university – she sure looks like the scholarly type. Jayce can picture her putting about a lab with him, moving effortlessly around each other like he and Viktor do here, passing each other tools without needing to be told what the other was looking for, that enviable silent understanding.
Jayce snatches the shot glass off of the bar, upends it into the cup, spills a trickle of burning espresso down the back of his hand. He bites his tongue to keep himself from swearing.
“How’ve you been since getting back to work, then?”
“Ehhh – let us go with ‘wishy washy’.”
“How’s the pain?”
“I miss codeine.”
“Viktor …”
“It is fine. I know my limits.”
“As long as you’re not pushing yourself.”
“You worry too much.” She finally stops piling silver and copper coins into Viktor’s hand. Viktor smacks the side of the till drawer and it pops open. He drops in all of the cash, and fingers out about twenty pence in change.
“Well,” she huffs with a laugh, “it’s kind of my job.”
“I suppose.”
Jayce fills the cup with milk, ice, and pops on a lid, grabs a straw for good measure because you work in a place like this long enough and you get an eye for people who are going to ask for them, and then wanders over to the till to pass Sky her iced latte. If he gets a little too close to Viktor, pretends to lose his balance a little as he leans over the till so he has an excuse to ghost his free hand around Viktor’s waist to steady himself, directly in Sky’s line of sight, so what? Just because he’s book smart doesn’t mean he can’t be stupid in other ways. Viktor goes tense under the soft brushing of his palm, but says nothing. Sky takes her drink and smiles wide at the both of them.
“Thank you so much! Have a nice night, guys.”
“And you.” They both crow in sync. Sky waves, and then disappears out of the door.
“So,” Jayce says, stepping away, nudging Viktor’s shoulder with his fist as he goes, that gesture that awful straight men make when they want to gossip about their friends love lives, “was that your, uhh, girlfriend, then?”
“Miss Young is my physical therapist,” Viktor says, and oh, thank God, “– and I am … not into women.”
Oh.
Thank fucking God.
“So, what Powder says is true, then,” Jayce jokes, “Mel only seems to hire gay people.”
“Ha! Apparently so, yes.”
“What’s the time?”
Viktor pulls out his phone from his apron pocket. The corner is a spiderweb of cracked glass. His screensaver is another picture of that little cat from his profile picture in the work group chat.
"Half past five - five twenty six if you want to be exact about it.”
“So close, but so far,” Jayce grins, and then points at Viktor’s phone. “What’s her name?”
“Rio.” Viktor’s face goes soft. “I got her from the shelter when … well, I tell people when I started university, but it was actually a bit before that, when my health underwent a major decline. She is missing a hind leg. She has a little cat prosthetic."
"It was meant to be."
"Yes. Do you want to see more pictures?”
“Absolutely.”
Viktor takes him on a tour of his entire folder of cat photos. Most of them are of Rio sleeping contorted into various strange positions, either on the arm of Viktor’s sofa or on a random spot on the floor, never in her cat bed, but there’s also a healthy amount of her awake – the majority of those consist of Rio shoving her wet nose directly into the camera. She does not like to pose, Viktor tells him.
Jayce is vaguely aware that they’re stood right under the one of the security cameras, and Mel likes to watch the footage back on her breaks as if its her only hobby, but he can’t bring himself to break the comfortable rambling he’s managed to entice Viktor into. He's pressed up so close to Jayce’s side that if Viktor let his head tilt just a centimetre or two to the left then he would be resting it on Jayce’s shoulder. Do you have a pet, Viktor asks him, and Jayce replies that no, he doesn’t, but he’s always wanted one, a dog or a cat or bugs, even, he doesn’t really mind.
There are a few more customers that squeeze their way in before Jayce finally breaks out the broom and mop and ventures out into the café – a guy on the way to his night shift who orders three double espressos and downs each one without hesitation as Jayce hands it to him, a couple who come in for hot chocolates on the way home from a date, a small gaggle of teenage girls who spend what feels like forever ‘umm’ing and ‘aah’ing over the menu.
Jayce watches with barely restrained glee as Viktor drums his fingers on the countertop, digs the end of his cane into the top of his foot, bites at the inside of his cheeks as he types in and deletes each suggestion from the till, mere moments away from exploding. The first one eventually decides on a caramel iced latte with whipped cream. The second one, after her own extended thinking period that has Viktor pulling at his own hair, decides on ‘what she had, thanks’ and it goes on like that for a very long while.
At 5:48, after the group of girls pile out of the door, Viktor stalks out from behind the bar with his keys and shoves them in the lock, flips the sign to display ‘closed’, and then rests his forehead against the cool glass and sighs. His breath fogs up a nice, neat little circle. Outside, a car goes past. In the headlights, Jayce can just make out the spitting promise of rain. He dampens the mop and begins to clean. Viktor stays like that for some time, Jayce unsure if his eyes are open and he’s watching the trickling downpour or if they’re closed and he’s just … breathing. After all of his other co-workers promising him a day full of mania and stress, it’s almost lovely getting to watch Viktor just stand there, shoulders hunched uncomfortably, seemingly at peace.
As Jayce mops, he leaves a little dry strip on the floor so Viktor can make it back behind the bar without slipping and falling. He tells himself as he does this that it’s also for his benefit too, that he’s fucking clumsy when he’s rushing to leave, but, really, who is he fucking kidding.
Eventually, Jayce and his mop make their way over to the front of the café where Viktor still lingers. He leans the mop up against the wall, and puts his hand on Viktor’s shoulder.
Viktor turns his head ever so slightly to the side and looks up at Jayce from under his eyelashes. His lips are parted, flashing the very edges of his teeth, slightly crooked and imperfect, and his face is flushed and so far tonight Jayce has been good, he’s been so good, he’s kept himself tightly on the leash of self-restraint, but that look … he wants to kiss him. He wants to take Viktor’s face in his hands and lean down and kiss him – chaste, soft, drenched in reverence.
In this fantasy, in this false reality, he imagines that when he pulls away, Viktor would frown at him, that same disgruntled, almost offended expression he wore the first time Jayce ever saw him, when he thought he was a member of the general public trying to encroach on somewhere he shouldn’t be, and he would reach up to Jayce and pull him back down and kiss him harder, rougher. Jayce’s hands on his hips. Viktor’s tongue in his mouth.
“Jayce,” Viktor says, voice gravelly and rough and hoarse and fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Yeah,” Jayce breathes, mouth dangerously dry. Viktor turns to face him properly, now, shifting his weight from the door to Jayce. He raises a hand and settles it over the one that Jayce still has clamped on his shoulder. They intertwine fingers. Jayce almost, almost leans in.
“Would you … carry the till drawers back to Mel’s office for me so I can count the cash? Once that is done and we have finished up here, we can leave.”
Illusion shattered. Jayce chuckles to himself, squeezes Viktor’s hand as tight as he can without hurting him. Viktor grins up at him, smug and beautiful.
“Yeah, yeah, of course. Anything to not count the cash.”
“You do not like it?”
“I’m just always scared that I’m gonna mess it up and we’re going to be missing money and it’ll all be my fault.”
“This … makes sense.”
“Hey! What do you mean ‘this makes sense’? Hey! Viktor! Come - Viktor come back!"
-
End of shift – Jayce is stood by the door, backpack slung over his shoulder, arms crossed over his chest, glancing out of the corner of his eye to where the rain has worsened considerably and wishing he brought a coat, or an umbrella, or something – he doesn’t even think he owns an umbrella. A car goes round the corner and the wheels kick up a spray of water from a puddle gathered in a dip on the street, further drenching the pavement. He should probably buy an umbrella.
Viktor is fiddling with a little box inset into the wall where all of the lights and heating and alarms live. It’s the return of that long, almost vampiric looking coat and the leather gloves. He has his cane hanging in the crook of his arm as he works. One by one, the lights tick off, fizzing and flickering for half a second first like they’re in a horror, until they’re left in complete darkness.
Jayce collects his confidence. It’s in tatters, as usual, spread out into all the many different parts of his mind, but he needs it more than ever now and so he tries, tries to summon it, tries to dig it out of its many coffins and caskets. When he has it, he holds it very, very tight up next to his heart, in case it tries to slip away, and opens his mouth to speak before his brain decides it best do otherwise.
“Do you want to go out with me this weekend?”
At the exact same time, the shop alarm blares.
Great, fucking great.
Jayce wrenches open the door, holds it for Viktor whilst he shoves the crooked little key into the box that stops and sets the alarm for overnight and then scrabbles for his cane. Jayce lets the door fall shut and watches Viktor descend upon it like a vulture onto a corpse, locking it up tight. The work day is over. They both turn to face the rain, safe for now under the shops feeble overhang.
“What did you say?” Viktor asks. Streetlights reflect like stars off of the slick concrete of the street. “Sorry, poorly timed.”
“I … I said … I …” Get yourself together Talis, Jesus Christ. Viktor stares expectantly up at him, unblinking. He’s … holding onto one of their to-go cups. “When the fuck did you have time to make that?” Jayce balks, distracted. “Where were you hiding it?”
Viktor shrugs, and then laughs at whatever facial expression Jayce is making. The sound gets absorbed by the rain, so all he can really focus on is Viktor’s smile, and the way his heart clenches in his chest. It’s perfect.
“I said ‘would you maybe want to go out with me this weekend?’ Like, y’know, on a date?”
"Okay.”
“Cool, so -," Jayce stops in his tracks, reboots, "w – wait … really?”
“Was that not the answer you were expecting, Jayce?” Viktor grins coyly.
“No, I just … I’ll pick the place? How’s this Saturday?”
“Go ahead. Saturday is fine, but I must warn you that I am rather picky.”
“Challenge accepted.” They walk home the same way. Every step that Jayce takes is light. Existing with Viktor at his side feels … well, like until this moment he’s been missing something, and now the clicking of Viktor’s cane on the street mingling with their footsteps has filled it in. “What are you drinking, by the way?”
“It is … a concoction of my own making. I call it sweet milk. It’s just warm milk and an unhealthy amount of vanilla syrup.”
“Shit, really?”
“Mhm.”
“You know the others have a betting pool on how many shots you have in your americano? Highest is, like, twelve, I think.”
“Sorry to disappoint them all. I hate coffee.”
“Me too – tell you what, I’ll put on a bet for zero, and then split the money with you.”
“Deal.”