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“Can you play?” asks Jayce, gesturing towards the piano in a dusty academy classroom that Viktor hadn’t even known existed before today.
“Me? Ah, no.” Viktor shakes his head. He amends himself. “Not for a long time now, anyway.”
Jayce grins. “So you DO play.”
“Jayce,” Viktor manages a sort of exasperated fondness, something that only Jayce seems to be able to draw out of him these days.
“It would be hopelessly underwhelming. I’m entirely too rusty to be any good.”
“I want to hear it.” Jayce runs his hands along the fall-board, wiping away the dust collecting there and pushing the wooden key lid up to expose the black and white notes underneath. “I want to hear you play.”
Viktor huffs and reshuffles the papers in his arms just to give himself something to do with his hands. He can feel Jayce’s expectant gaze on him even as he takes extra measures to avoid glancing in his direction.
But Piltover’s Man of Progress Jayce Talis is anything but easily deterred.
Jayce swings his leg over the low wooden bench and seats himself in front of the piano with entirely too much gusto for something so old and decrepit-looking.
“Come on, teach me something.”
He raises his hands and gives the keys a few experimental plinks and plonks, testing the waters. He’s, admittedly, far gentler with it than Viktor had expected of somebody who plays with hammers all day, but the poor instrument is still horribly out of tune. It's something that makes Viktor feel wistful and sad in ways he's trying to avoid thinking too deeply about at the moment.
Jayce is fumbling his way by ear through a popular children’s song, striking more wrong notes than right and blundering his way through the rhythm in a way that should be annoying but makes warmth and fondness bloom in Viktor’s chest above all else.
He casts a backwards glance over his shoulder towards Viktor, who manages to meet his gaze this time, only to make a great show out of rolling his eyes.
“Move,” he says simply, not unkindly. “The poor thing sounds painful enough without the added element of watching you make a fool of yourself.”
Jayce takes the dig with a glittering smile, looking quite pleased with himself and scooting slightly to the left as Viktor takes a seat on the bench. It’s entirely too small for the both of them, and the antique legs creak beneath even Viktor’s meager additional weight. He finds that difficult to care about as Jayce’s strong, muscular thigh is suddenly pressed against his, searing a line of warmth down from his hip to his knee.
He thinks he’d happily stay seated here until the bench splinters in two beneath them.
Jayce nudges him. “Come on, play something, Vik.”
Ever eager, ever impatient Jayce is practically vibrating.
Viktor sighs, placing his handful of documents to rest on the upright casing and settling his hands over the black and white keys in positions so familiar to him once upon a different time in his life.
“I told you, it has been a long time since I—"
He plinks one solitary note out at random in the middle of the keys and stalls for a moment, listening to the resonance as it fades.
“Since I…”
He strikes it again, then once more, and holds, listening as the hammer inside strikes against ancient strings. The noise that reverberates off the dusty soundboard and back towards them isn’t particularly pleasant—Viktor hadn’t been lying when he’d said the thing needed tuning—and yet it's immediately the only thing that he can focus on.
He swallows past a lump of something in his throat and is suddenly, unexpectedly nervous.
Viktor ignores the fact that their arrangement is technically backwards—he's not asking Jayce to switch sides with him and risk losing the feeling of their legs pressed against each other—and rests his good foot against the damper pedal, giving it a few experimental taps with his toe and listening to the squeak as it gives way.
His brows furrow gently as he hesitantly lowers four of his fingers, and the resulting chord immediately sounds more put-together than anything Jayce’s blind fumbling had been able to produce.
He tries for another, and one more, all three chords in quick succession one after another and sustained in between with his foot on the pedal below. It’s not music, not yet, but it’s familiar, and he slowly runs through one and then two scales, if only to marvel at the fact he somehow still remembers how to do it.
There’s something lingering on the fringes of his memory, very similar to the spots that sometimes float in the corners of his eyes when he’s been focusing too long over his desk. Gone as soon as he tries to look directly at it, but lingering there nonetheless. Viktor thinks he can hear it, a slow, winding melody in the deepest recesses of his…
He trips and stumbles and hesitates to even think of the word heart. An admission like that feels painful and raw and entirely too vulnerable at the moment.
Perhaps the bleeding heart of Piltover’s Golden Boy has been rubbing off on him.
Speaking of—for all his previous eagerness, Jayce has been sitting decently still beside him, observing Viktor with a quiet curiosity that he tries not to think too deeply about. That pleasant line of warmth still sits comfortingly along Viktor’s thigh, and he glances down at Jayce’s hands folded neatly in his lap, wondering if it’s wise to trust this man with the gravity of what he could potentially share.
He glances up and the warmth he finds in those honeyed-brown eyes makes his stomach swoop low as he thinks it’s Jayce , wondering why he felt the need to question himself at all.
Viktor sighs and hums wistfully to himself, gently striking one or two more familiar notes as he sucks in a breath and very quietly draws something up and out of himself that had been carefully, lovingly buried years ago.
“Hmmm…”
He can feel when Jayce tenses beside him, drawing in a breath and holding it to better hear the song Viktor has started humming softly under his breath. It’s quiet—he’s rusty, and his voice isn’t quite what it used to be, but the melody is there, and it’s familiar. His fingers dance above the keys for a moment, tracing ghostly figments of old memories from a time when his hands were smaller, his fingers not quite so long as they are now. The motions remain the same, the muscles in his hands remember.
Viktor continues humming the melody he knows by heart as his left hand settles over the lower octave, his elbow brushing softly against Jayce as he reaches and his fingers cascading over the keys as he begins the accompaniment.
The song is slow and sad, something he remembers fondly from his childhood. He remembers liking the way it felt to listen to—not depressingly morose, but almost… hopeful. Wistfully sad. Like the composer had been remembering something fondly, not bitterly mourning the loss of something else. He’s sure there was a story to go with it at some point—or maybe that had been something he’d made up himself during another in the long list of afternoons spent in the solitude of his own quiet company—but regardless, he’s forgotten it at this point.
His voice fails him once the melody peaks and rises out of his range. Viktor’s right hand lowers in tandem with his left in order to play the full song in earnest, supplementing the notes he can’t reach with his voice alone.
As he reaches the middle of the song, he can feel his memories beginning to flicker and fade. This part is less clear to him—it had been difficult to practice, and he hadn’t liked it as much as the beginning and end of the song. If he concentrates just hard enough, he can hear the sound of his father’s kind voice scolding him. “Practice makes permanent, Vitya.”
Indeed it does, he thinks to himself, and trails off in the middle of the song anyway.
It’s a poor excuse for an ending, and suddenly the spell of whatever has been resting between the two of them breaks, settling and beginning to dissipate alongside the note that Viktor has chosen to linger on.
Even though he hasn’t yet released the pedal, the silence of the room is starting to press heavily against his shoulders, and everything around them begins to feel suffocatingly quiet.
Viktor watches out of the corner of his eye as Jayce opens his mouth—apparently intent on relieving Viktor of the burden of breaking the silence—only for something much more embarrassing to slice a hot, wet trail down the sharp plane of his cheek.
He feels it as it drips off the end of his chin, and Viktor brushes the back of his hand against his face before he even thinks about trying to disguise his tears as they fall.
Jayce tenses beside him, and Viktor tries not to react when his partner’s large warm hand settles gently over his knee and squeezes.
“I’m sorry,” Viktor croaks immediately. His voice sounds much too loud for the room now, and he trips over his words in his rush to fill the silence.
“I didn’t mean to… ah, I mean, I don’t know why… this has never—“
“Viktor.” Jayce interrupts him gently.
He tries not to think of it as pity.
Viktor bites his lip and sniffles noisily in a way that feels entirely juvenile and embarrassing.
Jayce’s expression softens and he smiles, shifting and replacing the warmth of his hand from Viktor’s knee to run along the sharp line of his shoulders, pulling him in close and jostling him fondly.
“That was great, V!” he says warmly, in a way that assures Viktor he means it. “I mean really, you’ve been holding out on me! Where’d you learn to play like that?”
Viktor takes the kindness and the redirection for what it is, retrieving his handkerchief from the pocket of his vest and blowing his nose in a way that ensures any dignity he has left has been thoroughly destroyed.
“My, ah… my father,” he admits quietly after a moment, balling up the ruined fabric in his fist as he carefully considers the next words out of his mouth.
“And my mother.”
Jayce is listening again, back to a solid stillness beside him that somehow manages to make Viktor feel scrutinized and safe at the same time.
Viktor doesn’t often talk about his parents—both because the topic rarely comes up and because of the additional efforts he makes to keep things that way.
He knows Jayce is curious—of the Man of Progress’s many redeeming qualities, subtlety is not among them.
As he worries the corner of his handkerchief between two of his fingers and mulls over his next choice of words, the heavy weight of Jayce’s arm resting comfortingly along his back provides the slow, syrupy seep of courage Viktor feels he needs in order to continue the conversation.
The sudden blanket of comfort ignites a flicker of bravery that pulls Viktor down, listing slowly to the left and lowering his forehead until it rests comfortably in the crook between Jayce’s neck and shoulder.
If he’s going to do this, he’s not going to be able to look Jayce in the eyes.
He feels Jayce pull in a long sigh beneath him, and Viktor mirrors the action before parting his lips to explain himself.
“My father was a factory worker. Down in the Fissures,” he speaks slowly and clearly, his words weighed down by emotion and the heaviness of his accent. “But before he began work there—or, maybe better to say before he had to begin work—he worked in instrument repair.”
Viktor smiles against Jayce’s collarbone, surprised by how warm the memory makes him feel.
“As you can probably imagine, there was, ah, little use for such a job in a place like the Undercity. But we kept a piano in our house. I’m not sure where it came from—I never asked. But I remember he enjoyed working on it.”
“He taught you?” Jayce asks quietly, like he's not sure he’s allowed.
Viktor hums his assent. “He did. Other instruments too. String instruments, mostly. My c—" he breaks to cough suddenly, the dusty air from the room catching at the top of his traitorous lungs, “—my c-constitution never did lend itself well to the idea of wind instruments.”
Jayce lets out a laugh and squeezes Viktor’s shoulders again.
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be a sight. You. Playing the tuba .”
Viktor smacks his chest with the backs of his fingers, but doesn’t let the joke derail what he wants to say next.
“He passed away when I was eleven.”
Jayce sucks in a breath, sobering.
Viktor hums again. “After that, my mother took over tuning the piano in our house. She would sit and sing to me while I practiced, or sometimes she would just sit there and listen. I’m sure it couldn’t have been that fun for her…”
Viktor thinks of the half-finished song he’d played, the middle and end portions lost to time and vanished alongside most of what remained of his childhood.
“…I was a rotten student.”
He feels Jayce turn and angle his head so that his cheek better rests against the soft fluff of Viktor’s hair.
“I doubt that.” He says quietly. “And anyway… I like listening to you.”
It’s enough for Viktor to feel fresh pinpricks of tears prickling at the corners of his eyes all over again. He swipes at them with the heel of his hand, and Jayce catches his palm on the way back down, threading their fingers together before he has the chance to pull away.
“What’s she like?” he asks while Viktor sniffles and dabs at his face.
“My mother?” he repeats when his cheeks feel drier, before considering his answer.
“She was… smart,” he begins, and Jayce’s shoulder wiggles beneath Viktor’s cheek as he chuckles.
“Obviously.”
“Obviously.” He agrees.
“She was a watchmaker. Well, watch-repair. Among other things. Both of my parents liked to build. Fix. Tinker with things. I suppose it’s where I picked up my proclivities.”
Jayce hums quietly in thought and agreement.
“My mom too,” he offers. “But not machines. She’s a seamstress. Clothing. Quilting. Any sort of fabric, really. Mending… stuff like that. I remember she worked for a little bit at an alterations counter when I was little. She’d bring her work home and I’d sit on the floor and watch her do her mending.”
Viktor chuckles this time. “You must have kept her very busy.”
“ Hey ,” Jayce trades laughs with him. “I’ll have you know I was a very well behaved little kid!”
“Mnm, clumsy too I’m sure.”
“Honestly… the earful I’d get every time I had to come home and tell her I’d ripped holes in the knees of another pair of pants—“
Viktor laughs earnestly now. “Is that all? You should have seen the neighborhood I grew up in. I don’t think I had a single article of clothing without patches or holes."
He thinks for a moment. "Which was fine," he realizes with a chuckle. "Nobody else did either.”
Jayce jostles him, never one to remain alone in a joke for long. “Come on, I’m sure you got in trouble as a kid.”
“Of course,” Viktor readily agrees, grinning at the laugh that bubbles out of Jayce. “Many times.”
“What for? What’s the worst thing you did?”
Viktor ponders the question and shifts, moving to settle more comfortably against Jayce while he thinks. He stuffs the ruined handkerchief he's still holding back into his pocket before opening the fingers of his opposite hand—the hand held loosely in Jayce’s. Jayce lets him, but Viktor doesn't go far, gathering both of their hands to rest softly in his lap and beginning to toy gently with his fingers while he speaks.
“I snuck the neighborhood cat into the house.”
Jayce sputters. “Of course you did.”
Viktor grins, thinking about the mangy little thing that had ended up wrecking havoc across his parents living room, upending the contents from what was probably a dozen carefully sorted boxes of replacement parts for his mother’s work and knocking into nearly every breakable surface in the house on its desperate flight to freedom.
“Disastrous," he smiles. "I had to sort everything back into its proper place. It took hours, but I don’t think my parents were ever actually upset with me. I remember my father laughing as he picked up a piece of sheet music that had been ruined and marked with little paw prints, and instead of shouting at me or cursing the cat, he had it hung near the piano. It was, eh, his contribution , I think.”
Jayce listens quietly as Viktor recalls his memories, his hand warm and pliant under Viktor’s gentle fiddling.
“But I was still sad about the cat,” he continues. “It was small—smaller than the others—and it was always alone. So my mother started taking me to see it where it lived, down by the river. I’m sure it was her way of making sure I didn’t try to bring it back into the house.” Viktor chuckles, thinking about it. “But it was nice to visit.”
“…she sounds wonderful.” Jayce says, after a moment of quiet thought. “Your mom.”
Viktor can feel the lump of emotion building back up in his throat, bringing with it the urge to cough or maybe cry.
“…she was,” he agrees.
Viktor braces himself for Jayce to ask what happened to her—for what happened to either of them—and he hopes to god he doesn't. He’s not sure he'll be able to bear it. Viktor is already so far out of his comfort zone, and the old, barely scabbed-over wounds of his heart feel raw and flayed open after his poking and meddling. He’d offered up much more of himself than he’d expected to, and the results have left him feeling torn open and sad.
He should have remembered Jayce’s penchant for surprising him.
“What’s your favorite memory of them?” he asks Viktor instead.
Viktor sighs and slouches a little in relief. Jayce shoulders the extra bit of his weight without complaint—ever strong and sturdy amidst the turbulence that tends to cling to Viktor like a storm.
He thinks for a moment about the question. The amount of his childhood that he’s already shared has been surprising enough on its own—words finally flowing freely after being trapped tightly in the spaces between his ribs for so many years.
Viktor feels picked clean right down to the bone, and he thinks about what’s left that he can possibly offer Jayce.
“Our house…” he starts slowly, trailing off as he gathers the words.
Jayce’s lax fingers curl against his, slotting back together and giving him a fixed point to return to should he want it.
Viktor appreciates it.
“I like to remember our house." He says softly. "It was always noisy, but it was gentle—we had many clocks, as you can imagine. Lots of ticking. And my father’s instruments were well-maintained. He would tune them regularly, even if he didn’t play. You could usually hear him.”
Viktor sighs again, and closes his eyes.
“It was a well-ventilated house… well, as good as you could get in a place like that. My parents were sensitive to my… well, to me. They tried. Close to the river, like I said.”
He can feel himself rambling, but for once the pang of loneliness in his heart doesn’t deter him. The words keep tumbling out of him, and Viktor’s sure he’s never spoken this many of them at once to Jayce in the entire time they’ve known each other. But as much as digging through his memories stings, there’s an underlying warmth singing though him that he hasn't felt in years when he talks about his parents.
“There was usually a breeze in the summer months, and my mother would let me build ah, wind-chimes , out of the boxes of spare pieces she couldn’t use for work.” He recalls. “Among other things. It was generous to call them that—they were nothing more than a few pieces of metal and glass tied together with string on a wire mobile. But I liked making them. And my parents hung them in the windows, and they did make a pleasant noise in the summertime.”
He almost stops there, but keeping the final lingering memory that rests on the tip of his tongue locked tightly behind the cage of his teeth feels cruel in light of what he’s already shared.
Ah well. In for a penny, he supposes.
“We used to… sleep in one room, if you can believe,” he starts slowly, forcing the words out around whatever emotion it is that’s creeping its way back into his throat.
“The three of us did. My father slept above—I remember the sound of him snoring the most.”
In spite of the emotion he can feel bristling and threatening to break through the glass cage of his heart, Viktor cracks a grin from where he’s still resting against Jayce’s shoulder.
“Actually, he sounded a lot like you do after one-too-many sleepless nights in the—“
“Alright, alright, I get it.”
Jayce jostles him and it has the intended effect—the warmth blossoming in Viktor’s chest helps to break up the looming storm of emotion brewing just below.
He hums again in thought.
“I remember that and… the way he would always hold one hand over the side of the bed, so that I could see him. And hand or… or part of the blanket. Just something so that I knew—"
The lump in his throat is becoming exceedingly difficult to swallow around.
“—so that I knew he was there.”
He knows he’s going to need to get the next part out quickly before he loses his nerve and never finds it again.
“My mother and I slept below, even after he died. I didn’t like looking up and knowing that he wasn’t… that he wouldn’t be…”
Viktor stifles a mortifying noise in the back of his throat and feels the first few traitorous tears squeeze through his defenses before sinking into Jayce’s shirt collar.
“It was much quieter too,” he manages. “It was difficult to sleep. I didn’t like the silence, so my mother she…”
He sniffles embarrassingly, absolutely positive that Jayce already knows what he’s about to say and doubly so that he’ll wait patiently for as long as it takes for Viktor to say it himself.
He shudders and clings to Jayce’s hand as more tears trail scorching paths down his cheeks, grateful that he’d at least been correct in having the foresight to hide his face.
He takes a deep breath, suddenly feeling all of eleven years old again.
“My mother used to sing for me. That song.”
His bottom lip trembles, and though his voice has already given him away, he sinks his teeth into it in a valiant effort to keep his composure.
“She would… every night, until I fell asleep. She would tell me—" his tongue tumbles over the long-buried yet intimately familiar phrase. He can hear his mother's voice speaking to him clear as day, and knows that any stumbling over his words is due entirely to the fact that he's blinking through tears rather than a lapse in his memories.
Jayce repeats the phrase after him reverently, considering.
The syllables are clumsy in Jayce’s mouth for entirely different reasons than his own, though Viktor’s tone had made clear that this was something special—a fragile part of himself that he was sharing with Jayce and something that demanded delicate care.
Even Jayce’s cautious pronunciation makes it clear that he knows the value of what he is holding.
"What's it mean?" he asks softly.
Viktor sighs. “The whole phrase, it’s… not direct, but… it means 'sweet dreams little one.' It’s something you’d say to, eh, small children.”
He can feel the remainder of his tears still cooling against his cheeks, and he's mildly surprised at the lack of embarrassment he feels admitting this.
“She died a few years later,” he says quietly. “When I was sixteen.”
And there had been nobody left to sing to him then.
He can feel it when Jayce sucks in a careful, shuddering breath beneath him before he begins to untangle their hands. Viktor nearly protests before Jayce uses his extra mobility to turn and pull Viktor into what can only be described as a bone crushing embrace.
It’s a bit awkward—they’re still seated side-by-side on the piano bench after all—and Viktor’s knee and hip are beginning to stiffen after staying in one position for so long. Jayce is a very physical person, Viktor knows—not as good with his words as he is with his actions, preferring to let them speak for him in situations he felt required nuance beyond his capacity for language. That’s what he can assume Jayce is trying to do here—squeeze him within an inch of his life so that Viktor doesn’t have to consider everything else that could possibly be contained in the gesture.
It’s perfect and it makes him want to weep all over again.
Viktor clings back after a moment of awkward floundering with his hands, both coming to rest against Jayce’s broad, sweater-clad back and grabbing fistfuls of the material with the sort of clawing desperation that some distant part of him feels like he should be embarrassed about. Somehow he can’t quite bring himself to care about it now.
He’s grateful for the way he’s able to hide his face in Jayce’s neck, smothering a tortured noise against the starched collar of his academy shirt as something fragile inside of him breaks.
With the great shuddering sobs he’s heaving, Viktor’s sure he must be making an absolute wreck of the man’s shirt by now, but Jayce doesn’t seem to mind. He holds Viktor firmly against him with one hand flat across the expanse of his back and the other buried in Viktor’s mess of brown hair, securing his head against his shoulder and petting him in a way that Viktor wishes he could ask for forever.
To his credit, he cries mostly silently, his body shuddering against Jayce’s solid, unrelenting warmth for only a few minutes of uninterrupted sobbing before growing quieter and stiller as he settles back to calm.
Awkward as their position may be, Viktor can feel himself leaning his entire body weight into the security of Jayce’s chest, and right now he can’t muster up a single ounce of himself that cares.
He’s exhausted.
He hasn’t allowed himself to think about his parents like that in years .
Let alone in front of another person.
Let alone in front of Jayce Talis.
Back in his body, when he starts to feel less like his head is floating off into the distant corners of the room somewhere, Viktor can feel Jayce rubbing wide, circular patterns against his shoulder blades.
He hopes Jayce never stops, because Viktor is absolutely certain that he won’t be able to find the words to ask him to do it again.
“With me, Vik?” Jayce murmurs from somewhere against his hair.
Viktor hums his assent but makes no motion to pull away or move. He doesn’t think he’d be able to if he tried.
His body feels heavy, but also somehow lighter than it has in years. It’s a strange feeling, but he welcomes the catharsis that settles between them with a calm resignation.
He breathes, leaning against Jayce for several moments of stillness until the syncopation of their breath begins to fall into an easy rhythm against each other. Jayce’s chest expands beneath his, inhaling serenely and breathing for both of them as Viktor begins the slow, arduous process of pulling himself back together.
“…I’m tired, Jayce.” Viktor finally murmurs.
He feels Jayce pause his ministrations, hesitating for only a moment before the hand on his back glides up to the junction between Viktor’s neck and shoulder, giving a comforting squeeze.
“… I know, V," he says.
And doesn’t he?
Viktor allows himself a few extra moments to bask in the attention but eventually, because all things must come to an end—and especially because Viktor has never been particularly good at indulging himself—he slowly sits up and begins to pry himself from Jayce’s careful hold.
Jayce again refuses to let him go far, his arms sliding down with the pull of Viktor’s body and settling in a loose grip around his elbows.
Viktor’s face feels hot, both with the smoldering embers of his embarrassment and the force of his unexpected crying. He sniffles again, certain he makes for an absolutely pathetic visage.
“I'm sure I must look horrid.” He croaks, feeling his lips tug over his sharp teeth as he meets Jayce’s eyes and tries for a lopsided smile.
Jayce returns the action with one that manages to appear much more genuine, the crookedness of his grin still just as charming as Viktor has ever seen it.
“Handsome as ever,” Jayce assures.
Viktor breathes out a laugh and shakes his head, wiping the backs of his hands down his cheeks in a hilariously futile attempt to hide the evidence, before turning his attention to the stack of papers he seems to have placed on top of the piano several lifetimes ago.
“The professor will wonder what’s taken us so long to fetch his documents.” Viktor muses, reaching blindly for any sort of conversational ship in the night that might steer them away from the last thirty minutes.
He rises to stand, leaning into Jayce’s space and bracing his hands against his partner’s shoulder in an effort to combat the numb stiffness in his leg. Viktor feels more than hears Jayce when he sucks in an uncertain breath, apparently hesitating for only two seconds before suddenly blurting whatever had caused him reason for pause.
“Wouldyouliketohaveddnerwhmysmot?!”
Viktor startles badly at the unexpected volume of Jayce near his ear and whips himself backwards to stare at him. His copper eyes wide open with surprise.
“What?” Viktor asks, exasperated.
Jayce has rolled his lips back over his teeth, pursing them tightly against the sudden outburst and apparently visibly holding himself back from repeating his question while his brain catches up and wonders whether or not it had been a good idea to ask at all.
With his hands still effectively caging him in as he balances himself, Viktor watches and is able to observe Jayce the moment the internal battle waging within him settles, and he apparently decides to double down.
“Would you… like to have dinner? With me?” he asks, and then with far more hesitancy, he adds “and my mom?”
Viktor’s lungs suck in a breath before his brain even decides to do so and it catches on the inhale, wringing several dry coughs out of him in his surprise.
Jayce pats him on the back as he chokes, his voice floating above the cacophony in what Viktor assumes is an immediate attempt at damage control.
“Shit, wait , you don’t have to! Maybe it was a stupid idea. I just thought… she’s been wanting to meet you for a while, and winter holidays are coming up, oh —I’m not sure if you do anything to celebrate the holidays, but I’ve just been meaning to visit her for a while now, a-and I really wouldn’t take offense if… if you’d rather not— I just felt like maybe it could… I mean if you wanted to—“
“I’d like to.” Viktor finally wheezes.
Jayce stalls mid-sentence, and the hopeful look in his eyes is enough to force the corners of Viktor’s mouth up into something more closely resembling a smile.
“I’d like to,” he repeats himself, louder in case Jayce needs to hear it again. “And I would love to meet… your mother. Please, let me know when.”
Jayce’s eyes are sparkling and he looks at Viktor like he’s just promised to bring him the moon.
“Okay…” he breathes, then shakes himself. “Yeah! I mean, yes. Okay!”
His enthusiasm makes Viktor chuckle. He pats Jayce on the shoulder twice.
“Now help me up off of this bench so that we may plan what we're going to say to Heimerdinger in order to explain our tardiness.”
Jayce beams at him and his smile is made of pure sunshine.
“No worries,” he says confidently, and passes Viktor his cane before holding out his hand.
He rises to stand and waits until Viktor has both feet steadily beneath himself before brushing the dust from their clothes. “We’ll just tell him the truth.”
Viktor pauses from where he’s picking the lint from Jayce's collar, copper eyes narrowing suspiciously. “And… what is that?”
Jayce stares back at him, unblinkingly.
“That you lured me into an empty classroom to fool around.”
Viktor’s cane strikes him hard across the ankles.