Chapter Text
Predictably, it begins with a tremor.
Just a soft shake in his left index, a synapse-misfire in the space between heartbeats. He steadies the hand against the far page of his notes.
Viktor silently records the time in the margins.
It is fortunate, that it is always the left. The right is his dominant, an implement as steady and reliable as steel; an autonomous tool, methodically transcribing more important observations to paper, unbothered by the steady progression of symptoms.
Within the half-hour, he will feel the first curl of nausea, slick and acrid and through his cheeks, a mercury-dense zygomatic flow. It will descend down into his throat like some esophageal eel, where it’ll roil in his stomach, frothing its contents back up, up, up the way it came.
But this ritual is familiar, one he’s performed since his presentation in adolescence, and so his stomach is empty to make what will come that much easier. Approximately four weeks per year, he forgoes breakfast, opting instead for the cold slide of a needle into the meat of his thigh and the slow plunge of chem as it empties from the vial. It is a familiar poison, one that slingshots through his veins, cannibalizes his blood, and claws his digestive and nervous systems to shreds for a while.
And then, naturally, he goes to work.
After all, why wouldn’t he? A few days of the stuff is practically micro-dosing topside, especially compared to the levels of exposure Viktor is accustomed to in Zaun. If anything, the other weeks of the year are a vacation from the rhythm he’s walked to all of his life, and every chemically-suppressed rut is a taste of home. A quick jaunt back for the holidays, one could say. And while the side effects are nothing to write back to the Academy about, they’re bearable, something that cannot be said about Viktor’s ruts.
It helps that the progression of symptoms is predictable, consistent: tremor into nausea into headache into numbness, the timing and severity of each a benchmark for the health of the systems it ravages. He dispassionately logs every effect and its interval into writing — everything into writing, trusting nothing to the fickle whims of memory — and grounds himself in the comfort of predictability.
Besides, in Zaun, one works sick, or not at all.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is a normal day. It makes the same demands of him as it would any other. Rain rushes down topside gutters and into the undercity, where gravity will make it their problem, instead. The lifts up to the communal labs shamelessly boast their out of order signs for the fourth day in a row. And tomorrow, without a rut to excuse him from it, Viktor’s presence will be expected at the Progress Day Gala.
There’s a fleeting impulse to let this one just kick in so that he can skip it, so that Piltover’s heavy-handed attempts at inclusive policy benefit him for once — like Stanwick’s admissions consultant hadn’t breathed an audible sigh of relief at Viktor’s affirmative to their question about self-disclosing suppressant use, like the traditionalist donors that attend these sorts of events don’t still titter nervously at the proximity of an uncollared alpha. As far as they’re concerned, his very pheromones pollute the air — his skin a factory, his scent some miasmatic runoff that serves as proof of the sump’s degeneracy.
It’s almost a pity that they won’t sense it tomorrow, with his suppressants in full swing; it has turned into a game of sorts for him, to watch them squirm. To see the fear collar and control them, more than it ever will Viktor.
The first thing that Jayce ever took apart and put back together again was a toy.
It was some cheap thing, just a trinket handed out to kids on Progress Day: a wind-up scuttle crab, nothing more than a few pieces of scrap-metal shell curved around a mainspring, secured to a wooden base, perched on a few shuffling legs, back skewered by a butterfly key. On lonely days, he would lie flat on his stomach and wind and wind and wind the thing and watch it go.
And when his curiosity was no longer sated by what he could see through the gaps in the shell’s housing, he pilfered a key long enough to use its narrow corners to unscrew the cover from the base. He peered into its guts like he’d cracked open a new world, and dissected it past lights-out by moonlight.
He studied each gear and mechanism. He took it apart and put it back together until it had no more secrets to yield.
And when he was done, he watched it crawl across the table one last time, and then never touched it again.
In his mind, Jayce had no reason to. His curiosity was sated. The wonder was gone, excised like some organ from the metal corpse and left to rot, carried from place to place wherever home was that year. A souvenir of sorts, the first codex in a language that would come naturally to him for the rest of his life: the language of creation, of innovation.
Jayce found himself that day, beneath the glow of a buzzing light. And the rest, as they say, is history.
And that is probably why these kinds of things — the kind where laughter bubbles like champagne up into the humid air, where the low run of the orchestra and the warmth of alcohol winds bodies near with a golden thread — have never interested him. They operate in a language that oft goes stale with disuse for Jayce, curdled thick and bitter on his tongue, spoken only out of necessity to further what he truly cares for.
Events like these are for people still searching for what Jayce believes he has already found.
But they bake mandatory attendance into nearly every benefactor contract, and so he obliges; there has never been an expectation set by the Gioparas that Jayce did not exceed, and he does not plan to change that now.
Whatever it is he lacks in fluency, he makes up for in methodology; he approaches it like an engineering problem — or a transaction, an exchange of goods and services. Action and reaction, cause and effect, desire and delivery. He tries his best to dissect the unspoken syntax that rules these kinds of things and props up the entire event and the expectations that come with it.
On the surface, it seems simple enough. They mandate attendance for networking and, most importantly, for dick-measuring: for the families to peacock their prized apprenta; for the professors to exaggerate their role in those apprenta’s results; and for said apprenta to subtly assess their prospects with other houses, the search for funding never-ending for some.
Jayce’s work, however, speaks for itself — and the Giopara Clan’s allowances agree. So all that remains is to groom the egos of his superiors sufficiently enough to make it so that his presence is remembered, and then he can quietly bail without being noticed and get back to what’s important: work, of course.
He weaves steadily through the clusters of chatting colleagues, nursing the remainder of his drink. It, like the carefully fit suit in his benefactor’s colors, is a tool, a crafted part of his image — slow sips at dredges of champagne communicate that he’s been here for a while, that he belongs here, that he is sufficiently performing the rituals expected of him.
So, he lingers just enough to maximize the number of people who see his face, but moves swiftly enough to minimize the likelihood of someone trying to pull him into unwanted conversation. He doesn’t need to be known, he just needs to be familiar — enough so that when his benefactors ask so-and-so if they saw their brilliant, difficult alpha around anywhere, they’d answer yes, and he was perfectly charming and polite and handsome!
Or, something like that.
Unfortunately, he’s working against a burr in his reputation that he simply cannot shake: that Jayce doesn’t work well with other alphas.
He considers this interpretation uncharitable.
Ask, and he’ll tell you that other alphas don’t work well with him. But he lets the assumption stand, because trying to explain that he didn’t do anything except be right when they were wrong tends to reinforce the rumor in an undesired direction.
He holds the truth stubbornly to his heart as he dips through the crowd.
The academy hosts and sponsors a variety of folk; the room cloys thick with the over-saturation of perfumed lapels and jackets and dress collars, the Piltover-polite attempt at scent-masking niceties. It only goes as far as one pretends it does, however; he brushes by one alpha oozing pheromones as she chats up an omega, and the scent sours unabashedly as he passes. Jayce’s fingers tighten around his glass, and then ease — a fleeting impulse, born and dead in the span of a heartbeat.
His drifting ends when he’s flagged down by a familiar figure, one whose station regrettably does not allow Jayce to ignore him: Professor Stanwick.
A widowed beta with deeper pockets than sense, the man spends every Progress Day party flaunting a fresh and promising apprenta, only to end up spinning the same spiel with a brand new one a few months later. Always with a good excuse for the old one, always something that goes awry — bah, he couldn’t tell pliers from a crescent wrench! one year, sticky fingers, had to let them go the next. Between that and the rumors of the Professor’s brutal expectations for project outcomes, Jayce prepares himself for a droll meeting with another short-lived protégé.
Jayce arranges his face into a confident smile and steps in to greet them both.
His nostrils flare in a quick inventory — another beta, tall and a bit top-heavy, broad around the shoulders, lanky in the legs. Dark hair, narrow features and a raptor’s sharp golden eyes. A silver glimmer of piercings in the light of the chandeliers, bridge and lobe and helix. A careful, calculated poise. Older than the last one (though that wasn’t saying much; Piltover plucks them as early as they can shape them), more Jayce’s age. Handsome, if Jayce were more inclined to such a thing on first impressions — were desire some hardy stem poised to bloom at the first sign of spring, and not some careful thing to be nursed with easy laughs and simmering affection. But Jayce has always been good enough at pretending, and so when the man returns the firm shake of his hand, he lets it linger for a moment too long, trades the fleeting contact of their fingertips with a wink and an attempt at a self-assured smile.
Something flickers across amber eyes, appraising, and then it’s gone.
“Ah, here we are!” says Stanwick, all pomp falsetto, “Viktor, this is Jayce — Giopara’s most promising apprenta, if I may be so bold as to say.”
“A pleasure.” Viktor offers, the ease in the elegant incline of his head belied only by the sheer control of it. Not a muscle over-extended, not an ounce too much of tension in his jaw as he speaks or as his head tilts. Efficient, to-the-point. He raises his glass of champagne to his lips, tips the liquid to touch, but Jayce — too used to artificially prolonging the lifespan of a drink at these kind of events himself, where it’s more important to appear as if you’re imbibing than it is appropriate to be drunk — catches immediately that he doesn’t actually sip. Curious.
If Viktor notices Jayce tracking his movements with eager attention, he doesn’t show it.
Stanwick prattles on, bragging about Viktor’s accomplishments — safety innovations in the undercity, the start of some promising chemspill cleanup tech. What really catches his ear is the promise of the most efficient adaptation of a hextech battery we’ve seen since he’s been topside, but Jayce is careful to school his reaction to such. Stanwick’s almost certainly brought it up because it’s on the faculty grapevine as one of the major blockers to Jayce’s current project for the Clan, so well-known because it’s what Jayce has dismissed three other incompetent apprenta assigned to co-work with him for. It’s a nudge, one he won’t fall for; if anything, the fact that Stanwick’s suggested it makes him even less inclined to want to try.
But where other iterations of Stanwick’s apprenta have blushed and stuttered around the praise, this one takes it in stride. Doesn’t downplay his accomplishments, but doesn’t dwell on them, either, with a cutting knack for smoothly reminding his benefactor that thanks to his generosity, it’s only up from here. It’s the kind of ego-grooming that wouldn’t work for the Clan, Jayce is sure — or hopes, because he’s not good at that type of ass-kissing — but works for Stanwick. Viktor has the Professor preening and bashful within the first few minutes. At this rate, Viktor’s practically getting paid to be here; Jayce wouldn’t be surprised if Stanwick opened his wallet right now and let him reach in and take a handful.
Frankly, it’s fucking annoying. It’s the kind of daft, baseless groveling that Jayce cannot stand to watch, let alone with debase himself doing. It’s exactly why he’d preferred Giopara over his other options — they speak in results, not flattery. And it’s exactly why he’s not gotten along well with the other non-Clan apprenta assigned to work with him. All that effort spent on pretense, on talk, and with nothing to show for it but snobbery, as if they started to believe all the shit they were spewing about the graciousness of their benefactors, the superiority of their house, their unparalleled results when it’s just shit that Jayce could accomplish in his sleep. But no, it’s Jayce that’s hard to work with.
Jayce’s irritation prickles along his skin, itches under his collar. He’s about to look for an opening to dip when someone waves Stanwick over. But Jayce’s palpable relief stalls when Viktor tips his head to Stanwick to wish him well rather than accompanying him. And so Jayce watches the Professor go, chewing on the inside of his lip, toe tapping inside of his dress shoe. He checks his watch, opens his mouth to utter a polite excuse when—
“Thank Janna,” Viktor snorts as soon as Stanwick is out of earshot. He flags down one of the wandering catering staff to gracefully abandon his untouched glass of champagne on the proffered tray. And with words masked behind a low tone and unreadable lips, Viktor leans over and murmurs, conspiratorially: “I thought he’d never shut up, and that I’d have to pretend to enjoy his company for another three hours.”
Jayce blinks. Once, then twice.
And suddenly, he’s possessed by the urge to know everything about him. To know what else lies beneath all of those layers of careful control. To know who he is, what makes him tick. To lift the mask and peer underneath.
Maybe it’s the mechanical precision of him, the manufactured kind that makes Jayce see the mannerisms of machine in a man and want to reverse-engineer him from the inside-out.
Or maybe it’s the performance, the contrast between act and actor — the charisma of it, of being invited behind the curtain of what others see. The undeniable thrill that knowledge gains when it’s whispered like a secret. The irresistible draw of being chosen, being identified as exceptional and worthwhile all in the span of a few moments. Being seen as the first step to being known.
Distantly, Jayce wonders if he’s behind the curtain at all, or if he’s simply stepped behind the set to reveal another stage. The same song, the same scenery, but pitched more to his liking, choreographed more to his pace. He doesn’t think he particularly minds — it’s a puzzle that poises him to get his ticket’s worth, either way.
Whatever it is, it works. Jayce leans in and laughs, low and easy. The tension in his chest bleeds away. The comfort that replaces it is soft, hopeful; a dangerous thing, complacent; the kind that only comes when there’s no way to recognize the beginning of the end.