Archive of Our Own

It starts with Viktor shouting, “Are you fucking stupid?”

Though, at the time it happens, Jayce doesn’t know his name yet. Of course, he wouldn’t, he doesn’t know the name of anyone yet, barely even remembers the names of his professors. Much less would he remember the guy sitting all the way in the back of the lecture hall, the only one who still carries around real paper notebooks and pens, always wearing ridiculous sweater vests and dark shadows under his eyes. The guy who has a tendency of interrupting the professors to correct them, with a serene sort of arrogance. The guy whose voice is bone-deep and raspy, his intonation even and mechanical, disengaged in its monotony. The guy who has an interesting mélange of three different accents – Jayce has not yet figured out a single one of them, but he rolls the r a little, overpronounces the last letter of every word, the cadence just a bit off – but never stumbles over a single word. The guy who –

So, maybe Jayce does remember him. A little bit. Maybe Jayce saw him at the start of the year, sitting all the way in the back with his ugly sweater vest and impractical stationary, and thought, Huh. And maybe he heard him call a professor fucking stupid that very first lecture, and thought, Huh. And fucking maybe, he’s just – kept. Seeing him. Noticing him, because he really doesn’t make it easy not to with his increasingly atrocious sweater vests and mockingly attractive voice. Kept thinking Huh. It’s not personal interest or anything like that, not at all. Jayce swore to himself not to get involved, and taking an interest would be counterproductive for that endeavour. It is near impossible not to notice the guy who has a habit of making himself be heard at least twice every single lecture, though, either to correct an outdated information or calling one classmate or another every possible synonym for stupid.

It starts with the guy shouting “Are you fucking stupid?”, except that he is not really shouting because he always speaks with the same unobtrusive tone, at the same unobtrusive volume, even when he’s insulting people. Which is such a regular occurrence by now, Jayce doesn’t even think it’s directed at him at first. It is not an unfair assumption, Jayce thinks, considering that he’s been working – or, trying to – in his desolate little corner, like he always does. Directed or not, however, the voice next to him takes him so off-guard, he drops the soldering iron.

“Ah,” the guy says flatly, seemingly and justifiably unimpressed by Jayce’s demonstration of incompetence. He stands in front of Jayce’s lab table casually, leaning against the counter in a perfect display of nonchalance. Completely unapologetic, too, as if he didn’t almost startle the shit out of him. “Stupid and clumsy. What a combination.”

“What the fuck did you just–”

“The math is wrong,” the guy interrupts, which is honestly not surprising but still fucking rude. Jayce would like to point it out, channel his mother and scold the guy who is way too old to be acting like this, but his mind is still recovering from the unhelpful freeze response upon being startled and the words filter through belatedly, registering in his brain that is still trying to figure out whether he needs to punch someone in the face or not with embarrassing delay.

“No, it isn’t,” Jayce says automatically, more instinct than conscious thought, mainly because arguing is always his first response, but also because it’s true. He hasn’t miscalculated since fifth grade. He also went through this particular calculation approximately five thousand times to verify its correctness because he’s an anxiety-driven perfectionist. How could someone who’s never even seen his notes know –

“Right here,” the guy says, tapping a fingertip against Jayce’s notes with surgical precision. His fingers are elegantly long and mesmerizingly pale, almost translucent, really, which makes the moles littering his knuckles stand out that much more, and that’s a completely normal thing to notice about a guy who’s disrespecting him at the moment. Or, correcting him, apparently, which is honestly so much fucking worse. Definitely a lot more humiliating. “You forgot to change back to the metric system.”

“I forgot to change back to the metric system,” Jayce repeats slowly, incredulous, sounding like a fucking idiot. Fitting, really, because clearly, he is a fucking idiot.

“That is a very stupid mistake to make, no?”

It is a stupid mistake to make, Jayce is aware. Unfortunately, though, awareness is not enough to tamper down on the irritation welling up. Irritation that is completely reasonable and rational and justifiable, because he’s just been called stupid (and clumsy, but that is not as much an insult as it is a simple truth Jayce has given up on trying to deny). By a guy who wears ugly sweater vests, no less. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, the guy is apparently the type to rub it in. Maybe it’s for his own amusement, finding joy in another person’s humiliation, some weird emotional sadist. Maybe he’s just that much of an asshole. It doesn’t matter. Jayce is annoyed. Jayce is irritated. Nothing ends well when he gets irritated.

Irritation makes him unsteady, uneven, unbalanced. Simple annoyance gives way to anger far too easily. Anger that is volatile and ugly and… unseemly, as his mother would say. She’s not wrong, per se, but it is too mild a word for the things Jayce tends to do when he’s angry. He’s worked out a method when he starts to feel like doing something unseemly, a two-step strategy consisting of taking a deep breath and sucking up his anger like the fucking adult that he is.

“Say stupid one more fucking time,” Jayce says instead, his fingers digging into his palms in a poor attempt at not cracking his knuckles, a sick sort of anticipation making his hands tremble.

The guy looks up at him, his face an annoyingly clean slate, devoid of any sign that he is affected by that half-threat in any way. Then, the corner of his mouth twitches, briefly, barely, and he says, very pronouncedly, “Stupid.”

Jayce punches him in the face. That’s how it starts. With Viktor being Viktor and Jayce being Jayce.

xx.

Annoyingly, that is not how it ends. Because Jayce needs to apologize to Viktor, whose name he only learns after his week-long suspension ends and everyone is whispering about him as if he weren’t in clear earshot, talking about how he punched Viktor – yeah, the guy with the cane. Tragically, that is how Jayce finds out Viktor uses a cane.

Jayce needs to apologize. Not because the guy he punched potentially has a disability – a disability doesn’t exempt him from being a bastardly asshole, which he most certainly was by calling Jayce stupid three times. Thrice. That is two times more than Jayce would usually be able to swallow, and some vengeful part buried deep within him thinks he’d deserve to punch Viktor at least two more times, just to make it even. For obvious reasons, he cannot do that. He needs to apologize. It’s part of the disciplinary action. It’s also the right thing to do.

Viktor seems to disagree with that, because of course he does. Because the guy who has a penchant for arguing with literal academics about a topic they studied for decades wouldn’t make it easy.

“If you’re here to apologize, do not,” Viktor says right as Jayce opens his mouth to do just that, effectively cutting him off before he can even begin. He points the tip of his cane at Jayce, a dark kind of wood with intricate and worn carvings around the handle. It looks vaguely threatening, his hold on it too tight, like he’s ready to pull it back and swing at Jayce with one wrong word. It seems like a thing Viktor would do, although Jayce is not too sure how he can know that. Maybe it’s the way Viktor is looking at him right now, narrow-eyed and vaguely disdainful, daring him to continue. Lowering the cane, he taps it against the floor once with a certain sense of finality. “Don’t take away the little respect I have gained for you.”

“If anything,” Jayce starts, going off-script before the conversation even started, and he can almost feel his mother shaking her head at him in disappointment. Jayce was planning to apologize, is the thing, and he was going to be sincere about it. Jayce literally cannot do that, now that Viktor is being a bastard again, is the other. Where would that leave Jayce and his integrity when he lets bastards be bastards without any sort of push-back? Even when he’s objectively in the wrong, his bruised ego simply does not bode well with Viktor’s dismissive attitude. “You should apologize to me.”

“Why, was my cheekbone too hard for your knuckles?” Viktor says, sounding perfectly sympathetic. Then he tilts his chin up in a defiant little half-nod, deliberately steepling his hands over the handle of his cane, looking like – an asshole. He looks like such an asshole and he’s not even doing anything. An attractive asshole, granted, which, quite unfortunately, does nothing to dissipate the urge to punch him again. Viktor tilts his head at Jayce, almost seeming sincere in his inquisitiveness. “Or should I apologize for correcting your mistake?”

“You’re kind of an asshole,” Jayce says, not even meaning it as an insult, necessarily, a stunned sort of curiosity making him ask against his better judgement. Admittedly, it is not the best thing to say to someone he is meant to apologize to, but he just cannot help himself.

“Of course,” Viktor agrees easily, waving a mole-littered hand casually. He says it like he says everything, which doesn’t say much at all. Completely monotone, as he tends to, not a hint of anything in his voice. His eyebrow twitches subtly, the corner of his mouth curls, and just like that, there is something else besides the cold apathy slicing through his demeanour. Something like mischief, something provocative and unbearable. “I do it on purpose.”

“That’s… somehow even worse,” Jayce says, kind of slow with genuine disbelief.

“I know.” Viktor doesn’t sound remorseful about that at all, and Jayce has the faint feeling that this will come to bite him in the ass.

xx.

The faint feeling turns out to be more prophetic than Jayce would have thought at first. Though, how prophetic can it be when Viktor told him point blank that he’s an asshole? Maybe the more surprising thing about the whole ordeal is that Viktor is not a liar. And horrifyingly self-aware. A non-lying, self-aware asshole, and isn’t that a delightful combination. Not that Jayce didn’t know that before, the asshole part was crystal clear from the very beginning, even before it was directed at him personally.

Impossibly, though, it’s gotten worse. For Jayce, too. For Jayce, specifically. One would think getting punched in the face would deter anyone from talking to Jayce again. Which it did, sort of. It keeps everyone away, at an arm’s-length, an uncomfortably obvious radius around him wherever he goes, because not a lot of people get punched in the face around here and news travel fast. His classmates barely even dare to look at him anymore, presumably too scared of potentially becoming the next recipient of his violent tendencies. It doesn’t bother him very much – he never wanted to get involved, invested, intertwined. He doesn’t want to get distracted. Which is not something he has to worry about when everyone walks around him with a truly ridiculous circumference.

Everyone except Viktor, that is.

While everyone makes a point of – perhaps deserved – avoidance, Viktor seems to seek him out, now, which is such a stark contrast to the indifference Viktor usually operates on, it’s a little disorienting. That he’s doing it while his face is still bruised and Jayce’s knuckles still ache from Viktor’s unfairly sharp cheekbone would usually lead to a conclusion of some weird sort of masochism if Jayce didn’t already know that Viktor’s… well, weird. Despite his overall inconspicuousness, Viktor is very combative in nature, apparently. In his own verbally brutal but otherwise completely disinterested sort of way, flawlessly emphasising the volatility in his passive-aggressive words without even changing his intonation.

There is nothing Viktor doesn’t question, nothing he wouldn’t try to disprove, nothing he wouldn’t scrutinize with his sharp eyes. Not one days goes by where he wouldn’t pick apart people’s work until he gets dangerously close to getting beaten up for it. Jayce would know, he’s been the one most often at Viktor’s throat recently. Figuratively, of course. Even when it is hard to hold back from strangling the bastard when he starts correcting formulas Jayce worked on for weeks. Like it’s nothing. With barely a split-second of pause, Viktor can look at Jayce’s notes and see every mistake make along the way. It’s insulting, really, how effortlessly Viktor skims Jayce’s notes and point at every little embarrassment with a delicate finger. It’s – humiliating, is what it is.

Jayce doesn’t do well with humiliation. It reminds him of when he was younger, of people pointing and laughing; it reminds him of something he’s tried really hard to forget. Viktor doesn’t know that. Cannot know that, but he can see Jayce’s fists clench at his sides, Jayce’s eye twitch, Jayce’s reaction. And he still pushes. Viktor likes to push; prod, poke, provoke. until Jayce cannot hear rationality over the blood rushing in his ears anymore, ugly and lived-in feelings of anger crawling underneath his skin, making him numb. Viktor pushes, and Jayce has no other choice than to push back, because his ego has always been fragile like that.

xx.

It becomes a habit, impossibly. The world’s most annoying pattern. Fighting with Viktor is a steady part of Jayce’s daily routine, now, and isn’t that wonderful.

Viktor seems to… enjoy. That. The first time Jayce yells at him after reaching a breaking point, he sees the corner of Viktor’s mouth twitch upwards, like he’s entertained. Like he’s always exactly where he wants to be, or maybe more accurately, like he has Jayce exactly where he wants him. For whatever sick reason, Viktor seems to enjoy fighting. With Jayce specifically or just in general is unclear as of now. It’s… very fucking weird, is what it is.

It’s also interesting.

Viktor is so interesting, existing in such a unique way that begs to be inspected, dissected, which is tragic because he is such an unlikable asshole. Even more tragically, the fact that he’s an asshole doesn’t make him any less interesting. Jayce is so interested, he’s intrigued; he wants to cut open Viktor’s head and poke at his brain, just to understand. The way Viktor works, the way he functions; the direction his gears turn and how many of them are loose. The interest has become so severe that it’s completely disruptive of Jayce’s capacity to act rationally. It makes sense; Viktor is generally very disruptive, just in the way he takes up space. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he would take up space in Jayce’s mind, too.

Rationally, Jayce is aware that Viktor provokes fights purely for his own enjoyment at least half the time. Not even someone as dead-set on being a bastard can realistically find enough reasons to start an argument as frequently as Viktor does. Rationally, Jayce is aware that he only gives Viktor what he wants when he responds to the provocation with anything other than pure indifference. It’s real fucking difficult to stay indifferent when Viktor starts talking, though, and the urge to rip him apart is so physically overpowering, Jayce really has no other choice than to at least scream at him a little bit. Rationally, Jayce is aware that it doesn’t make any sense, it makes no difference who has the last word in their senseless little fights in the end, there is really no reason to even indulge, but he reciprocates Viktor’s jabs with truly unwarranted ferocity every time, anyway.

Viktor will make some snide remark, his voice curling around mocking words while sounding perfectly neutral, something like You sign each page of your homework? A bit self-important, don’t you think?, and what is Jayce meant to do, ignore it? Absolutely fucking not. Jayce will turn to Viktor with poorly repressed anger already tearing at his seams and he’ll see Viktor casually poised on his cane, completely unapologetic, and Jayce will very nearly jump at his throat. He cannot do that, obviously, because he doesn’t need another disciplinary action and Viktor also doesn’t deserve being victim to Jayce’s disproportionate anger that has ultimately nothing to do with him specifically. As a compromise for the strangulation Jayce usually contemplates, he will resort to verbally snapping back, something too sharp, too cutting, and Viktor will be forced to respond to that because they’re similar in the worst fucking way, and it will end in an almost-altercation, Jayce’s hand nearly around Viktor’s throat and Viktor smirking like he just won a game of chess.

It’s weird. It’s concerning.

Viktor brings something out of Jayce that he thought he had buried a long time ago. Something deep, something heavy. Something wild, something Jayce used to struggle to restrain, back when he was young and stupid and angry. Because he used to be so angry, all the time, without pause, whenever; at his father and his mother and the world and himself. He used to be so angry about all the things he didn’t understand. Why his father left. Why his mother always cried. Why Jayce had to go hungry through school and why he was laughed at for it. Subsequently – why everyone else was laughing while everything always seemed so humourless for him. Jayce used to be angry, and he used to just – burst. Just as easily as the touching the surface of a bubble, lightly, barely even tangential, Jayce would burst with all the big feelings he didn’t know where to store, how to hold back.

Jayce used to be so violent, even after he learned he couldn’t just go around punching people in the face. There are other ways to be volatile, Jayce has learned. More silent ways, the ones that go inwards, like inhaling instead of breathing it out. He learned to internalise, after at the last time he made his mother cry with words he didn’t mean but screamed at her, anyway. It’s maybe not the healthiest thing to do and it’s certainly not the healthiest way to do it, but it’s served him well so far.

Jayce used to be angry – and he’s still a little angry sometimes, sure, who isn’t angry to be alive sometimes, when sleep isn’t being merciful and the pitch black of the night starts to feel suffocating? – but he’s not like that anymore. He isn’t. He learned to keep his ugly feelings to himself instead of splattering them over everyone who happened to be unlucky enough to be in close vicinity. He learned not to make his mother cry anymore. He grew the fuck up, is what happened, and he has been holding it together so well. Until – well, Viktor.

Until Viktor came along in his ugly sweater vests and insulted him in his stupidly attractive accent and just kept pushing, subtly but blatantly, in the very Viktor-specific way that forces itself underneath Jayce’s skin and stays there. Incrementally, Viktor has clawed himself in between the tight spaces of Jayce’s self-control, digging up everything Jayce has tried to bury. Viktor makes him angry like no one ever managed, pulling something out of him that no one ever reached before. He does it simply, easily, almost disinterestedly, with sharp words wrapped in his lilting, laryngeal voice. Reaching into Jayce’s ugly inner working with his translucently pale and mole-littered fingers, gripping the rawness between his ribs and splitting him apart. On purpose, Viktor does it on purpose. Assiduous, ardent, alacritous, and then he smiles, almost genuinely, almost sincerely, when Jayce’s skin inevitably splits and ugly anger spills out of him.

It’s honestly ridiculous how angry Viktor makes him because Viktor is not even that – bad. Underneath all the unbearable obstinacy, behind the truly infuriating smirks, Viktor is not a bad person, he just likes to provoke. For whatever reason, he just likes to fight a little, which is really stupid for someone so smart. Viktor chooses to be an asshole, in ways that are methodical and never too far, but he’s not actually an asshole.

Jayce had to deal with assholes. He’s had to deal with a whole fucking lot of them, and Viktor isn’t one of them. Assholes don’t carry themselves in the way Viktor does; hunched, cramped, looking a little like he’s recoiling into himself, like he doesn’t want to take up too much space. Assholes don’t string along their words so delicately, stirring without ever actually hurting. Assholes also don’t do it on purpose, they just are. And although Viktor wears assholery like a perfectly tailored second skin, he still isn’t – like that. Viktor might even be the only decent person around, the only one with a working brain and something interesting to say, which makes fighting with him so fucking absurd. Bizarre, ridiculous, senseless. It’s weird.

It’s also a little fun. It’s so stupid that it’s circling right back to hilarity. The inconsequentiality of their fights – and it is, it is completely meaningless, in the end – allows Jayce to lean into it. Reciprocate Viktor’s cutting words with a voice he hasn’t raised in years. The simple fact that it doesn’t matter allows him to vent. Where he usually always swallows and inhales, stretching out his insides until it feels like it’s going to rip, he feels a lot – well, a lot less like he’s going to tear apart. Feels a little lighter, too. Maybe Jayce understands why the corner of Viktor’s mouth is always twitching when they’re yelling at each other. Maybe the corner of his own mouth started twitching, too, at some indefinite point in time.

It never goes anywhere. The fighting, the arguing, the bickering, the back and forth. It never goes in any other direction – until it does.

xx.

“Are you fucking stupid?” Viktor whisper-yells, pointing a long finger at his temple, demonstrating what he means in case Jayce is too stupid to understand with words. Viktor seems to be very concerned for Jayce’s intelligence with the regularity of that particular phrase coming out of his mouth. That’s what it feels like to Jayce, anyway.

“No, Viktor, I am not,” Jayce says, going off-course instead of bristling and taking the obvious bait. They have been going at it since the first class ended. It being whisper-yelling at each other, not – the other thing. They’ve been at it for a while, is the point, and Jayce really can’t be bothered anymore. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise, would I?”

Viktor – snorts. In amusement, this time, not exaggerated mockery like Jayce is used to from him. With a wide, all-encompassing kind of gesture, he says, “There are plenty stupid idiots here, Jayce.” It’s the first time he calls Jayce by his name, which, again, a totally normal thing to keep track of. “They were merely lucky enough to be born rich, so it doesn’t matter for them.”

“You’re not wrong about that,” Jayce says, and now he snorts, too, because Viktor is not wrong. It’s also ironic that Viktor would think he’d have to say that him, of all people. For some reason, it’s important to Jayce to correct that. “Without my scholarship, I would be doing a blacksmith apprenticeship right now, though, so I’m certainly not one of them.”

“Ah,” Viktor says, and stops. His dark eyes are narrowed, his eyebrows raised, and he looks at Jayce like he’s trying to slice him open. Like he is trying to understand something about Jayce he didn’t previously consider. It would be a little insulting if there wasn’t… something. In Viktor’s eyes. Something like acknowledgement, like recognition. Minimal, miniscule, but there. “Me too.”

“No offense, but you wouldn’t survive a blacksmith apprenticeship,” Jayce says, although he knows that’s not what Viktor meant.

“What do you mean, I have a strong right arm from dragging around my weight all day,” Viktor protests, a hint of genuine, non-teasing amusement in his voice, swinging up his cane and tapping it against his shoulder like a sword. It’s the first time Viktor even acknowledged his cane, usually ignoring it so completely, Jayce forgets about its existence. At least until Viktor raises it to threaten him with it. For Viktor to acknowledge it so blatantly, so casually, mentioning it as the continuation of a bad joke Jayce started – it feels like… something. Like the start of something. “It makes sense now. Why I never had to correct you as often as everyone else, I mean.”

“You still correct me a decent amount,” Jayce says – admits, for the very first time. Because not even his unhealthy stubbornness is enough to ignore the fact that Viktor did correct his mistakes on several occasions. In a very rude way, always said with an unbearable hint of self-satisfaction, but always helpful, anyway.

“Significantly less than all the other idiots here,” Viktor says, strangely insistent, and he says it like Jayce is – different. From all the other idiots. As if reading his mind, Viktor waves a hand shapelessly and adds, “You’re still an idiot, of course, but less so.”

“I’m honestly not sure whether you’re being an asshole again or if you’re genuinely trying to compliment me,” Jayce says, slightly bewildered by this sudden shift in the air.

“I don’t usually need to give compliments. Be patient, I’m sure I’ll master the art of complimentary in no time at all.”

“Complimentary is not a word.”

“Of course, complimentary is a word, Jayce, are you fucking stupid?”

xx.

Weirdly enough, something changes after that. Viktor still incites, blowing at the glowing embers in Jayce’s chest until the low simmering escalates to a wildfire, letting him scream at him, letting him get it out of his system, just to rinse and repeat the next day; annealing him, making him hot and letting him cool off. Not that Jayce is – hot. Around Viktor. Because of Viktor. Not that it’s Viktor’s intention to make him hot in the first place. Bad analogy. The worst fucking analogy, actually, and he smothers the thought, lest he’ll have to look at it. Looking at it wouldn’t help. Having the thought at all doesn’t help, really. So, he turns his head away from it like he does with all the things he doesn’t want to inspect too closely.

They still fight, they still argue, they still get kicked out of lab when Jayce threatens Viktor with a Bunsen burner and Viktor tells him not to be a coward and just do it already. Viktor doesn’t correct Jayce’s work anymore, though. Or, he does, but there is no prelude, no Are you fucking stupid. Instead, he tilts his head, lowers his voice in an unexpected display of sensibility, points delicately, says, Here, explain this to me, yeah?, and then he quietly listens to Jayce’s elaborations until Jayce inevitably stutters to halt when he notices the mistake himself. And when Jayce’s mouth clicks shut in embarrassment, Viktor doesn’t smirk or grin or anything. He just goes back to say whatever bastardly bullshit he was saying before. Bastardly bullshit that, recently, inexplicably, doesn’t include calling him fucking stupid anymore, apparently.

There is no hostile edge to it, anymore. No animosity. Not that Viktor ever was malicious. He wasn’t – he isn’t –, not consciously, but his words were too cutting for Jayce’s fragile ego and he heard malice, anyway. Viktor merely saw that fragility, saw it as the weakness that it is, and dug his fingers into it. Just to get a reaction. He never said anything to actually hurt Jayce in any way that mattered, because, as stated, Viktor is not actually an asshole. Case in point, he doesn’t call Jayce stupid anymore. No jabs at Jayce’s intelligence at all, although Viktor must know that it’s the path of least resistance if he wants to rile him up. Which he does, because he’s still a bastard who finds a perverse sort of enjoyment in making Jayce angry. He uses other methods for it, now, ignoring the shortcut and detouring over five different corners. He reaches the same destination one way or another, so it hardly even matters.

Except it does. Matter. To Jayce, at least, for whatever sick and twisted reason that may be. It bothers him, like an itch in his brain every time Viktor doesn’t call him an idiot after pointing out a miscalculation, a splinter of annoyance at the back of his mind clawing itself deeper and deeper. It’s disconcerting, as if everything were tipped slightly to the left with the absence of attacks on his intelligence. And, honestly, how weird is that? How strange is it of him to be bothered by not being called stupid by the guy who calls everyone stupid? Maybe it’s the pattern recognition flaring up, confused panic pounding against the walls of his consciousness with an increasingly irritating rhythm of whywhywhy.

Maybe Jayce is just losing it.

xx.

“Why don’t you call me stupid anymore?” Jayce is definitely losing it.

“Oh? Do you want me to call you stupid?” Viktor says, resting his chin delicately against his knuckles. Somehow, he manages to sound perfectly inquisitive and horribly suggestive at the same time, voice dipping into a register so low, Jayce feels it down to his bone marrow. His fingers tap against his cane, uneven and undiscernible in rhythm, which is almost annoying enough not to get stuck on the image of Viktor’s fingers wrapped around wood. Almost, but not quite. “I didn’t peg you as the type to like things like that, I think I need to reassess.”

“Are you insinuating I have a thing for degradation,” Jayce says, too mortified at the prospect of Viktor possibly thinking that to even feel embarrassed. It’s fine, he can be embarrassed later, when he’s burrowed underneath his covers and out of range of Viktor’s – well, everything. Viktor’s too-sharp eyes, Viktor’s too-deep voice, Viktor’s too-pale fingers slowly moving along dark wood. That has to be on purpose.

“What am I supposed to think if you tell me you want to be called stupid?”

“I don’t want to be called stupid, Viktor.”

“Just in general or by me, specifically?”

“You, specifically.”

“Ah, pity,” Viktor says, smiling something razor-sharp and dangerous. His fingers stop tapping. “We could have had a wonderful time together.”

“Are you into,” Jayce starts, and immediately cuts himself off. That’s not a question he should ask. That’s not an answer he wants to know. Except that he does want to know, sort of, out of sick curiosity. Fuck his curiosity, and fuck Viktor for making him curious.

“No, Jayce, I am not into degradation,” Viktor says evenly, smoothly, with the easy insouciance of someone who speaks about degradation every fucking day. Maybe he does. Maybe for someone like Viktor, shame is simply nonexistent. It would certainly explain a thing or two. “I am more the praise type of guy.”

“I could have gone my entire life without knowing that,” Jayce says truthfully, but his skin feels too hot, too tight. His chest, as well. Traitorous little shits. He prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that Viktor doesn’t notice. Proven right in his atheism instantaneously, Viktor does notice – recondite eyes squint, pale lips stretch into something amused, intrigued, and Jayce knows he just gave something of himself away that he really should not have. To Viktor, of all fucking people, because Jayce is lucky like that.

“Well, you know now,” Viktor says, and he sounds almost mean in his nonchalance. It’s not fair that he’s sitting there with his long fingers wrapped around his cane, around wood, his deep voice wrapped around words that don’t sound dirty but feel obscene with the implications, utterly unaffected. Utterly unashamed to share something like that with Jayce, who, again, really could have gone without knowing. Viktor’s right, though, as per usual, because now he does know. And he’ll probably never forget it again. I’m more the praise type of guy, carved into Jayce’s mind forever.

It’s too personal, is the thing. That’s the problem. They don’t do personal, usually. They keep it politely superficial while they scream profanities at each other, within a strange interspace of rudeness and detachment. Keeping their voices loud and their words vague, they fight about whether sweater vests are ugly (“I wouldn’t expect someone who dresses like a church boy to understand.” – “First of all, fuck you, Viktor–”) or about the correct way of taking notes (“How do you find anything in this nonsense? Honest question.” – “I wrote it down, Jayce, I know where it is.”) or sometimes they argue about inane things that don’t matter at all (“Say energy drinks are better than coffee again and I’ll crack open your skull with my cane.” – “Makes sense that a bitter fuck like you likes bean water.” – “Bean wat– are you fucking insane, Jayce?”) with truly unnecessary fervour. They keep it simple, easy.

This, what’s happening right now, is not simple, nor is it easy.

“Ah, don’t look at me like that,” Viktor says, lifting his chin off his knuckles in favour of waving his hand dismissively. In an instant, the suggestive undertone is – poof, gone. Switching up from borderline torturous to fucking annoying, just like that. He’s just unbelievable, Jayce can’t stand him. “I told you I’m into praise, not that I like getting fisted to the elbow.”

Viktor says shit like that a lot. Crude, vulgar shit. He is downright filthy with the way he likes to say things, how he likes to word things, always finding a way to cram an unreasonable amount of obscenity into as little words as possible. It’s truly disgraceful that he uses the gift of language like that. Jury’s still out on whether he does that on purpose or, more terrifyingly, if it’s just how he is – shamelessly comfortable with saying the vilest things, straight-faced and nonchalant. Jayce thinks his mother would be horrified to know someone speaks like that in his presence. If he had known Viktor as a child, she would have probably told him to stay away from him. She would have been right, then. She would probably still be right, now.

Somehow, it feels like it’s too late for that already.

Jayce laughs, despite himself. The corner of Viktor’s mouth twitches again.

xx.

“Look over my notes,” Viktor says – demands, really. Jayce stares. Viktor clicks his tongue, either in exasperation or in impatience, it’s never really clear with him. He waves his notebook in front of Jayce’s face until he takes it, hesitant and unsure how to proceed. Viktor clicks his tongue again, and this time it sounds amused. How he manages to make the same noise sound so vastly different is beyond Jayce. Apparently feeling gracious – or merely taking pity –, he adds, “I need a second pair of eyes.”

Jayce – doesn’t know what to say to that. So, he just nods, slightly bewildered, and looks over Viktor’s notes. There is not a single number out place but Viktor nods and thanks him when he takes his notes back, anyway. And the next day, he asks again. Materialising out of thin air, like he tends to, eerily quiet for someone with a cane, holding out his notebook to Jayce, and says, “Look over my notes.” There are never any mistakes, but he asks every day, nonetheless. It’s weird.

It’s a little flattering.

It’s a whole lot flattering, if Jayce is being real with himself, which is ridiculous. The audacity he has to feel pleased when he doesn’t even do anything. But somehow, for some reason, Viktor, who is probably the smartest person Jayce has ever met, maybe the smartest person at this whole damn school, decided that Jayce is – adequate. Intellectually adequate enough to share his notes with, his thoughts. As if Jayce were anywhere within that range of genius to contribute something, anything. Like Jayce is good enough for that. Viktor seems to think so, to a certain extent. And Jayce hates to be real with himself, but it is flattering. Asking him to look over his work while Viktor must be aware of his faultlessness is like Viktor saying, See, I don’t think you’re stupid.

It’s like Viktor is acknowledging him, in a symbolic kind of way, deigning him worthy or something. Worthy of what, exactly, is unclear, but the notion that Viktor could possibly consider him good enough for anything sends a jolt of something through Jayce. Something warm and sticky, clogging up lungs.

xx.

“Why are we always fighting?” Jayce wonders out loud, interrupting himself mid-argument. It’s something he has avoided asking himself, much less ask Viktor, but it’s – he’s curious, against his better judgement. He doesn’t really know, himself, and he dislikes not knowing things, and although he shouldn’t care all that much about the reason, he’s still curious. Fuck Viktor, for making him curious. Again. Fuck Viktor, just in general. Figuratively, of course, not – literally. Maybe he just shouldn’t be thinking about fucking Viktor in any sense, that would probably be for the best of the intactness of his sanity that is already barely hanging on a thread whenever he’s around Viktor.

“Because you’re the only capable fucker here,” Viktor says, seamlessly following Jayce’s sharp change in conversational trajectory. Then he points at himself with a crooked smile. His right canine is a little crooked, too. “Besides me, of course. You’re the only one I can fight with.”

“You think I’m… capable?” Jayce asks slowly, bewildered.

“Do you think I would waste my time on someone stupid?” Viktor asks back, seemingly greatly offended by Jayce’s bewilderedness.

“You’ve called me stupid so many times, the only reason I didn’t make a drinking game out of it yet is because I would never get sober again,” Jayce says flatly, trying his hardest to sound sincere. It’s not a joke, not really, and Viktor probably knows that, too, but he snorts like it is, anyway.

“I haven’t called you stupid in a while, Jayce,” Viktor says, faintly patronizing, though, at this point, Jayce knows that it’s just the way he sounds like when he opens his infuriating mouth. Everything would sound patronizing, probably, wrapped in that voice, coming from that mind. “I may be an asshole, but I am no liar.”

“There you go, messing up a compliment again,” Jayce says, rolling his eyes on instinct while his pulse spikes embarrassingly, pathetically. Ill-advised, really, to react like that to a barely-compliment by the person he is supposed to hate. Or, mildly dislike, at the minimum, given the circumstances. Clearly, Jayce has finally lost it.

“There had to be something I’m bad at or it wouldn’t have been fair,” Viktor says, taking the admission of a flaw and turning it right back into arrogance. It’s as impressive a skill as it is fucking annoying. Though, perhaps, the annoyance merely stems from the knowledge that Viktor’s not wrong.

“There are a lot of things you’re bad at, Viktor.”

“Name one.”

“Standing up for longer than twenty minutes,” Jayce says, and – snaps his mouth shut. Slaps a hand over it, for good measure, as if he could somehow retroactively hinder the words from coming out of his mouth. The urge to apologize is already pressing against the back of his teeth, guilt making his tongue feel sticky, but Viktor – laughs. Doubles over in his chair, clutching at his ugly sweater vest, and laughs. Very fucking loudly. The thing about Viktor’s laugh is that it’s – kind of ugly; raspy, croaky, more cough than laugh, bordering on an asthma attack. It’s also the best thing Jayce has ever heard. If he’s not careful, he’ll memorize it, want to hear it again.

Jayce watches Viktor laugh, his mind stuck on the sound of it, the sight of Viktor crying at a stupid comment he made burning itself into his retinas, and he realizes that he already missed his chance to be careful.

xx.

“You literally cannot be serious, Viktor? Chopin over Beethoven?”

“Shut your fucking mouth!”

It’s been going like this for – probably closer to an hour, judging by the drastic change in the sunlight filtering through the windows of the library since the argument started. Jayce doesn’t even remember who started it – probably Viktor – and who let it escalate like that – probably Jayce –, but he’s always been more of a forget but never forgive sort of guy, anyway, so it hardly matters.

That’s how it’s been going, just in general.

Fighting over personal preferences is obviously stupid, subjectivity is a thing and tastes are different, but it’s – fun. It’s entertaining, screaming at Viktor for liking Chopin better because he’s so clearly in the wrong. It’s entertaining to have Viktor scream back instead of merely watching Jayce lose his shit on him. It’s entertaining to learn things about Viktor when they fight, argue, spit insults at each other, like their very own and very backwards way of playing twenty-one questions.

Viktor likes Chopin over Beethoven. He prefers cats over dogs (“That is probably why I don’t like you.” – “Excuse me?” – “You’re like a dog.” – “Excuse me?”) which is clinically insane but wholly unsurprising. He likes whiskey because it gets him drunk the fastest while tasting the best, which made Jayce laugh hard enough that he couldn’t even tell Viktor how wrong that was. He prefers taking notes manually because it helps him absorb the information and he ranted about the negative influence of laptop screens for a good ten minutes. Jayce actually agreed with him on that one, but he couldn’t tell him that. Instead, he told Viktor he never turned on the blue filters on any of his devices, nearly making Viktor cry with that information. Then, Viktor demanded of him to turn them on, said, “You really cannot afford to lose the brain cells.”

Seeing Viktor angry for once, dead-set on dying on his stupid hills as much as Jayce is persistent on dying on his, no matter how small and insignificant they are, it’s – well. Refreshing. Good. Having Viktor tap his cane impatiently when he’s getting frustrated, having him raise it to Jayce’s throat when he’s really getting pissed-off, it’s – well. It’s a fucking delight to witness. Because that’s not Viktor’s usual modus operandi, is it, which mainly consists of starting shit without ever participating. Viktor likes to be an annoyance, migraine-inducing and as much of a pain in the ass as he can possibly be, and then he simply leans back, crosses his arms and enjoys whatever shitshow he caused.

“Beethoven is culture–”

“Beethoven is pretentious!”

Now, however, he is participating, loudly and ferociously. Defending his opinion on classical music as if his life depends on it. It’s – well. Well.

The thing is – there are a lot of things, with Viktor. But the thing is – Viktor is pretty. It’s not a thing Jayce wants to think about, because that train of thought would crash and burn before even leaving the station, so in Jayce-typical fashion, he simply decided not to notice for his own well-being. It was relatively easy at first, because Viktor made anger override any other emotion, even something as unconscious as attraction, that’s how much he used to piss him off. Viktor hasn’t been pissing him off as much lately, though, consequently letting things besides unbridled rage filter through again. Things being the fact that Viktor is, unfortunately, very fucking attractive. That’s something Jayce has always been aware of, abstractly, detachedly. A fleeting acknowledgement, at most, because Jayce tends to get tunnel-visioned in his anger and also because the carapace for his fragile little emotions couldn’t bear the burden of admitting to himself that Viktor was – is – pretty.

Viktor was pretty with his rough edges and sharp bones, his messy hair, his unnervingly dark eyes. He’s even prettier now, angry, riled up, alive. He looks so alive, halfway across the table, hair dishevelled from tugging at it in his irritation, pale skin flushed. Jayce wants to reach out and touch Viktor’s face, see whether he feels as warm as he looks, which is probably cause for concern. The thing, among many other things, is that Viktor was pretty before, in a quiet sort of way, closed-off and doll-like, and he is even prettier now, the monotony of his entire being cracked open with their stupid debates, something else seeping through, something genuine and real, and it’s getting harder for Jayce to pretend not to notice.

He will damn well try, though, because his mother raised no quitter, even when it’s about something as stupid as pretending not to like the way Viktor’s lips curve up unevenly when he smiles or how his eyes look whiskey-honey-gold when the sunlight hits them just right. And, yes, maybe he’s doing a shit job at it, the whole not-noticing-thing going disastrously, but he’s still trying. Viktor, the bastard, doesn’t make it easier for him by sitting right by the window, the soft evening sun bathing him in gold, softening the sharp features of his face. He looks like he’s glowing; bright and blinding and beautiful.

Jayce bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes iron while Viktor insults him over his classical music preferences.

xx.

In a strange turn of events Jayce never would have seen coming, they’re sort of – well. They’re kind of friends now, Jayce thinks. He’s actually not too sure what to call this weird little thing in between them. It doesn’t look like friendship, from the outside. It doesn’t look much like friendship from the inside, either, but then again, Jayce’s only ever had one friend before who was also the daughter of his mother’s best friend who was also more of his babysitter than anything else, so what would he know, really. Maybe it’s his fate to form unconventional friendships with unconventional people. Kind-of-not-really friendships. Half-friendships, perhaps? He likes to think they’re half-friends, at least. Messed up, slightly dysfunctional, sure, but friends, nonetheless.

They are definitely something different from what they were at the beginning, whatever the fuck that was. Rivals? Not really, Jayce doesn’t even come close, and Viktor must know, and their unanimous, albeit unspoken, understanding of Jayce’s inferiority cancels rivals out. Rivalry seems like a mutual thing, an exchange of recognition and acknowledgement in between the resentment, more competition than violence. Nothing is a competition for Viktor, though, and there was virtually nothing but resentment back then, so that falls flat. Enemies, maybe? But then again, feels like a much more mutual thing, not the one-sided spite Jayce quietly directed towards Viktor who would only smirk in mild amusement.

It’s not one-sided, anymore. Not – the spite, that’s not it, that’s not what he means. Whatever the fuck they were at the beginning, whatever weird thing they had – Jayce bursting and spilling and seething, and Viktor laughing at him –, was one-sided. Whatever the fuck they are now, though, whatever weird thing they have, currently, is not.

They still fight with each other, sometimes even genuinely, albeit a rarer occurrence as of recently. They still argue about stupid shit that doesn’t matter at all, because that is just the fucked up way they choose to communicate with each other. But now they do it at the library while studying together, at the little hipster coffee shop in the inner city because Viktor is trying to condition Jayce into drinking his disgusting bean water. They’ve argued at the bar, a few times, because Jayce wanted to settle the fight over alcohol that one time and Viktor said You’ve already lost that one, but I’ll like to rub it in and then Viktor bought him a glass of his disgusting whiskey which Jayce barely managed to choke down and then Jayce ordered them a round of colourful vodka shots and then Viktor called him a fucking frat douche, are you serious, Jayce? The fight never settled, in the end, so they have just – kept. Going out together. Drinking together, under the thin guise of being too proud to let it be a draw.

Jayce likes to think they’re friends, kind of, sort of. Jayce doesn’t really have a word for it. Chances are that a word to encapsulate whatever the fuck they are simply doesn’t exist, so he shouldn’t even bother to try and find one. Maybe it doesn’t matter what it is, maybe it doesn’t have to have a name, as long as it is something.

Jayce likes to think that it’s something; that they have something, even when it’s weird and inchoate and undefined.

xx.

“Are we friends?” Jayce asks, despite himself. Because his stupid fucking mouth has always been dangerously big. Around Viktor, especially. Around Viktor, specifically. He can’t really help it, either, his brain-to-mouth filter simply ceasing to exist whenever there is Viktor, making him think things. Making him feel things, too, though that is not something Jayce really wants to think about. Thinking would mean acknowledging, and that would bring a litany of other problems Jayce doesn’t necessarily want to deal with right now. Or ever, really.

“Do you really want to have the what-are-we conversation? Right now?” Viktor asks back, because he’s a cryptic bastard who would not be found dead having the disadvantage in a conversation. Always asking instead of answering, a master of deflection, and always in a way that leaves Jayce sputtering and fumbling for purchase.

“You make it sound like we’re–”

“Fucking? God, Jayce, pick your mind out of the gutter for once, yeah?”

“I’m going to strangle you.”

“I might like that, just as a warning.”

And that’s that.

xx.

That isn’t that.

Jayce cannot let it be that, because it’s not enough. It’s too indefinite, too blurred. He is a dirty fucking liar, he would like it to have a name, actually. He likes clear lines, is the thing. He likes to put a name to things, he likes to label and categorize and know. He likes to be sure, that’s why he goes through his calculations excessively, neurotically, that’s why he checks if his door’s locked seven times each time, that’s why he pats himself down each morning in a routine of phonekeyswallet, although he’s been carrying all those things in his bag for years now. He needs to be certain of things, because his brain likes to scream at him, shake at everything unsteady, until everything comes loose and each crevice of his frantic mind is filled to the brim with doubt.

There are no clear lines with Viktor. There is no name and no label and no category, with him. Everything is ambiguous, vague, kind of, sort of. Half-friends, half-something-else. That’s the problem, isn’t it; in the spaces between their arguments, when they both take a breath and stop fighting, there is something else. It’s subtle, subliminal, like an undercurrent. It’s in the pauses, in the silence following their argumentative climax – which, absolutely terrible way to phrase that, and Jayce is really doing it to himself at this point –, when they’re both breathless from screaming at each other. It’s in the way Viktor makes jokes about what he likes in the bedroom that never sound much like jokes at all, unprompted and unprovoked. It’s in the way Jayce reacts to those jokes – his breath catching in his throat, his heart stuttering in his chest. And Jayce may not have an extensive frame of reference for how normal friendships look like, maybe too honest-sounding dirty jokes are, in fact, common practice, but he’s sure that friends don’t react like that. Jayce is also sure that friends don’t look at each other like – well. That.

The way Viktor looks at him, sometimes, when they aren’t throwing profanities at each other. The way Jayce looks back, each time, without fail, the moment hanging between them like a question, heavy and heated and unspoken, because Jayce is too much of a coward to ask it.

It’s weird. It’s confusing. Discombobulating, obfuscating, and whatever other fancy word there is for it. Jayce does not particularly like being confused, which is reasonable, he thinks. He likes knowing what’s going on, being in the loop. Whenever he isn’t, he starts to feel unsteady, unsettled.

He’s been feeling unsettled, around Viktor; off-kilter, off-balance. Like the ground is dissolving, like falling through the sky. Which, quite accurate, actually – Jayce is falling, has been, ever since Viktor stopped calling him stupid, perhaps even sooner than that, and isn’t that fucking delightful. In short, he’s fucked. Even more tragically, he’s fucked himself over.

He didn’t want to get invested, because that would only mean distractions he cannot afford, and he was doing so well, and then Viktor came along and got him intrigued. And Jayce, being the stupid fucking idiot that he so clearly is, somehow managed to convince himself that he could indulge in Viktor’s insanity without getting hung up on it. Without getting stuck. Intrigue is one thing, he thought at the beginning, still trying to justify and rationalize and calculate, infatuation another.

Evidently, he was wrong, because here he is, infatuated. And, really, Jayce should be smarter than this, he should have seen this coming from a mile away, should have recognized the spark of interest and stomped it out immediately, but he didn’t, because Viktor was right and he really is fucking stupid. Maybe he’s just a huge masochist, which would be just another one of the many things Viktor was right about. Though, maybe – most likely, most definitely –, it’s just Viktor. An unreliable variable he never could have predicted when he first calculated the emotional risk of getting involved, combined with Jayce’s horrible habit of overestimating himself, resulting in – this. This.

Leaning against the counter of his laboratory bench, idly letting Viktor insult him over one thing or another – at some indefinite point during the conversation, Jayce’s brain, ever so helpful, decided to latch onto the way Viktor’s mouth forms words instead of actually listening to what he’s saying – and just looking at him. Looking, watching; gazing, really, which is fucking disgusting. It’s warranted, though, with Viktor sitting there on top of his worktable, cross-legged, ruthlessly ripping into Jayce about – whatever they were talking about before Jayce tunnel-visioned onto Viktor’s lips. It’s probably something stupid and inconsequential, anyway, as per usual.

His abandoned notes are getting crinkled underneath Viktor’s ass, because Viktor decided the best way to get Jayce to take a break of his work would be to hop onto it. Admittedly, it is very effective; Viktor hasn’t moved an inch yet and the only way to get him to would be by touching him, and Jayce isn’t about to do that. Jayce can barely even think about Viktor, much less would he ever think about touching him. Though the thought itself is really not that unpleasant at all, he would never actually consider it. Touching Viktor is probably just about the stupidest thing Jayce could do.

Maybe Viktor knows that; knows where that reluctance to touch him comes from, has observed Jayce’s valiant efforts not to touch him ever since that first punch and has made probably pretty accurate assumptions, and that’s why he decided to sit on top of his notes. That’s a terrifying door to open, so Jayce simply doesn’t.

“I’m not afraid to touch you, you know,” Jayce asks, and opens the fucking door.

“Why aren’t you doing it, then?” Viktor asks, and it’s unfair how nonchalantly he asks that question, like it doesn’t perfectly accumulate everything Jayce was trying not to think about. The question is brutal in its precision, and Jayce hates him a little bit for that.

“I don’t want to accidentally break your fragile little bones or something,” Jayce says, consequently sending Viktor on a lengthy tangent about bone structure and genetics and Not everyone was blessed to be a giant, Jayce, what did they even feed you–, slamming the door back shut like a coward. Mentally locks it, too, while he’s at it. Swallows the key and barricades it, just to be safe.

Quite unfortunately (and quite dooming, for Jayce specifically), that’s not how it works. Simply refusing to acknowledge something doesn’t make it go away – he would know, he tried that already. Buried things never stay buried, in his experience, and Jayce has never been as good at swallowing down his fragile little feelings as he’d like. Everything climbs back up his throat sooner or later, begging to be let out like vomit, pressing against the back of his teeth.

Biting the inside of his mouth bloody doesn’t work, anymore, the pain too little to distract his body from reacting. Every time Jayce looks at Viktor, his stomach drops. His heart does, too. And every time a litany of curses spills from Viktor’s mouth, his hands twitch with the urge to – do something. Anything. Shut him up, mostly, but instead of punching him he’d like to kiss him. And, sure, maybe kissing Viktor quiet has crossed his mind before, in a parodical and self-punishing kind of way, but it’s getting physically difficult to restrain himself from jumping over the table. Jayce is breaking, very slowly shattering from the inside out, while Viktor sits on his notes and cheerfully insults him, either miraculously oblivious to or frighteningly uncaring of Jayce’s inner state of crisis.

He doesn’t know how long he can keep up the pretence. It’s like a sick endurance test – how much longer will his stubbornness be able to hold out until the sheer amount of want Viktor’s making him feel makes him break? What will cave sooner, his ego defences or the hormonal chaos of his body whenever Viktor’s around?

xx.

“What,” Jayce says, “are we doing here.”

“What, did you forget your brain at home again?” Viktor says, sounding perfectly sympathetic, like that’s something that happens regularly. Using sarcasm in a way that almost seems sincere is probably the most useless skill ever, but it’s Viktor, so it makes sense. “We were having a rather productive study session until you decided it would an intelligent thing to say that Oscar Wilde was the most influential gay writer.”

“No, I know that. I mean,” Jayce says, and suddenly, he can’t stop, because no matter how many wooden planks he nails across the door, the cracks were already there. “What are we doing? Why are we sitting here, studying together and fighting over literature when that is completely inconsequential? Why are we acting like friends when it’s unclear if we are? Kind of friends, I mean. Half-friends, maybe.”

“Jayce, what are you talking about?”

“Like,” Jayce says, and his eloquence is truly astounding. “Why are we spending so much time together, mostly just to argue? Do we dislike each other so much we made fighting a pastime activity?”

“I don’t argue with you because I dislike you, Jayce,” Viktor says slowly, like he is trying to explain something important to a child. Jayce might have found that offending, a while back. He’s come to recognize it as Viktor’s unintentionally insulting way of treating something seriously. “It’s quite the opposite, really.”

“You like arguing with me?”

“There you go, being stupid again,” Viktor says, rolling his eyes, but the corner of his mouth is twitching again like he’s fighting the urge to smile and losing. Jayce hates himself a little for being able to distinguish the miniscule twists in Viktor’s face. It attests to the absurd amount of time he’s spent looking. Makes it harder to pretend that he wasn’t. “I argue with you because I like you, you dumb fuck.”

“I’m not a dumb fuck, you fucking asshole,” Jayce says – starts, because arguing has always been his first response to everything even before Viktor came along, and then stops immediately after. The words register belatedly in the face of being insulted, but when his overly defensive brain finally catches up, it feels like he’s getting slapped across the face. Viktor’s mouth curves one-sidedly, like he was waiting for the moment his words would fully settle. Knowing Viktor, he probably was. “You – no, you literally cannot like me. That’s like, an insane statement to make.”

“I make insane statements all the time, Jayce.”

“Evidently.”

“Jayce.”

“No,” Jayce says again, holding up a hand as if that were ever enough to make Viktor stop talking. “If you ever felt anything slightly more positive than mild displeasure around me, why would you – be. Like that. Right?”

“Like what?”

“A huge fucking asshole.”

“Ah, that,” Viktor says, waving a hand dismissively as if that absolutely detrimental aspect of their weird little dynamic were only a minimal matter to him. “Being an asshole is the only way I know how to talk to people, and because I knew from the beginning that there weren’t any chances of you liking me very much, anyway, I decided to just stick to it. Maybe I leaned into it a little too hard.” Viktor waves that infuriating hand again, and he sounds entirely too casual for the borderline sociopathic insanity he’s spouting. “It worked out splendidly, though, didn’t it?”

“Splendidly,” Jayce repeats, both incredulous and impressed at the uniquely strange way Viktor’s mind works. It’s a little terrifying, honestly, but it’s also interesting, and if that doesn’t perfectly encapsulate the whole damn reason this disaster of a relationship even started. He doesn’t know what to say, opting for gesturing wildly and shapelessly between the two of them like a weird game of emotionally constipated charade. “This – splendidly?”

“I got you to talk to me, didn’t I?” Viktor says with a certain sense of simplicity, shrugging one shoulder, not even bothering to shrug both. It’s borderline disrespectful how flippant he’s being about this entire conversation, speaking with a serene sort of confidence, like he’s not bothered by any of this at all while Jayce is teetering dangerously close to going into cardiac arrest.

“You wanted me to talk to you, and the first instinct you had was to call me fucking stupid and get a fist to the face?” Jayce says, because it’s infinitively easier to acknowledge the specific circumstances than addressing the implications.

“It wasn’t really important how I got you to talk to me, as long as you did, so I thought I might as well,” Viktor says, easily following along Jayce’s methodical avoidance of the delicate core of the matter. Jayce is almost inclined to thank him for his compliance if that didn’t mean admitting to himeslf that Viktor knows exactly what he’s doing. “Although, to be fair, I couldn’t have known that you would react like that. Getting punched in the face was not part of the plan.”

“The plan,” Jayce repeats, because apparently, verbally regressing into the parrot stage of speaking is just a thing that happens when subjected to Viktor and his special brand of madness.

“To get you to talk to me,” Viktor clarifies, as if that is the part Jayce is stuck on. Not that Jayce is not also stunted at that, but he simply doesn’t have the brain space for more than one crisis right now. “It consisted of waiting until I found a reason to – well, call you fucking stupid. Imagine my annoyance when you never made any mistakes when getting called up, your notes were perfect every time I passed you and you never once violated lab safety rules which I could have reminded you of. I was getting desperate.”

“Must have been real excited when I forgot to change back into the metric system,” Jayce says, feeling like he’s going to burst. With what, exactly, he’s not too sure.

“Ecstatic,” Viktor says, nodding solemnly. “I was also horrified because the guy I had a massive boner for forgot the metric system.”

“I didn’t forget the metric system, okay, I made half these calculations running on caffeine and pure spite,” Jayce starts – getting defensive, like he tends to when Viktor is being an asshole. Viktor raises an eyebrow at him, a crooked grin tugging at his mouth, splitting his face like gaps of sunlight ripping through a treeline. Jayce gets stuck staring at his lips for a split second – his smile, he gets stuck looking at his smile. That really doesn’t make it sound any better. His eyes snap back up when Viktor’s grin sharpens at the edges. Then, because his overachieving brain always stutters and stumbles around Viktor, he dumbly adds, “Did you just say you had a massive boner for me?”

“Still do, actually.”

Jayce’s eyes drop down. Reflexively, he swears it’s a reflex. When he looks back up from Viktor’s – non-erection, thank fucking god, Viktor is already smirking at him like an absolute asshole.

“Not right now,” Viktor says, and Jayce can tell he tries to sound patronising, but it falls flat with the undercurrent of laughter lining the words. And because one heart attack is not enough for Viktor, who will probably only stop when Jayce lays dead on the floor, he says, “It could be arranged, though.”

“Are you propositioning to me right now?”

“You make it sound so formal.”

“You said you could arrange a boner–”

“I was hoping you would do the arranging, actually–”

“Stop saying arrange. Stop talking, just in general. I need a second.”

“I’ll be right here,” Viktor says simply, and for once in his fucking life, he actually keeps his pretty mouth shut. Gives Jayce a fucking second, gracious as he is. He leans back against the desk, poised in a perfect display of nonchalance, but both of his hands are wrapped around his cane, his knuckles turning white. Well, wither. Jayce has never seen him do that, and he would know, he’s spent an embarrassing amount of time looking at Viktor’s hands, his long fingers, the moles on his knuckles. It’s awfully reminiscent of Jayce’s own habit of clenching his hands into fists whenever he’s startled or angry or –

“Are you nervous?”

“I just propositioned to you, of course I’m nervous.”

“So, it was a proposition!”

“Will you just hurry up with rejecting me?” Viktor snaps, harsh in a way he has never been before, and Jayce – stops. Halts the looming nervous breakdown for a moment, postpones the hysteria, because – Viktor can’t possibly have said that. Can’t possibly think that. That’s probably exactly what he’s thinking. Jayce can’t have that.

“Are you fucking stupid,” Jayce says, and it is a weirdly gratifying to be the one saying those words for once. Viktor inhales sharply, making an indignant little sound, almost a gasp, like the dramatic fucker that he is. “I wouldn’t even reject you if I were straight. Which – I’m not, by the way, I know we never had that conversation before–”

“I know, Jayce,” Viktor says – interrupts, and it’s still fucking rude, but Jayce can’t quite bring himself to be annoyed by it anymore. He still sends Viktor a pointed look, just to appease himself. Viktor sends one right back.

“Then why would you think I’m gonna reject you?”

“Many reasons,” Viktor says, matter-of-factly, as if there were even the slightest chance of Jayce not getting on his knees for him in a heartbeat. To pray or to suck his dick, either, both. It’s tragic that Viktor doesn’t seem to know that. “I’ve not been very nice to you, for one. I’m not very attractive, for two.”

Jayce can’t help himself – he laughs. He laughs so hard, he very nearly topples to the ground from doubling over so abruptly. It is a sudden onslaught, sounding slightly hysterical. Jayce feels slightly hysterical, this whole situation too absurd, too surreal. Viktor likes him. Or, well, has a boner for him, at the very least. It’s fine, Jayce can work with that. Not that he can work with Viktor’s boner, though, he supposes, he could work with that, too, while he’s already at it.

“Not attractive,” Jayce wheezes, voice shaking with a spill-over of mania and high-pitched. He presses a hand against his stomach, feeling his muscles spasm from the attempt at reining in whatever insanity has taken over him. An unsuccessful attempt, granted, but at least he can say he tried. Shit, his eyes are watering, now, too. He isn’t sure whether it’s from laughing or something else. “That’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t appreciate getting laughed at, Jayce,” Viktor says, low and quiet, all warning, no humour. Obviously, he would not find that funny, he doesn’t have the context, Jayce is aware, but he nearly starts laughing harder, anyway.

“Not into degradation, I remember,” Jayce says, as serious as he can manage, which is not a lot while his face hurts. He didn’t know his face could hurt from anything other than getting punched. Viktor’s eyes narrow, as if he’s trying to decide whether Jayce is worth the trouble. Jayce definitely is not, but if Viktor has not figured that out already, he’s not about to tell him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t laugh at you. It’s just funny that you could think you’re not – y’know. All that.”

“All that,” Viktor repeats, bewildered. He points a finger at himself, raises his eyebrows. “Me?”

“Do you genuinely not know how hot you are?” Jayce asks, starting to feel slightly bewildered himself. Viktor opens his mouth. Jayce holds up a hand. “No, don’t answer that. I don’t care what you think, either, because you are, that’s just objective fact.”

“Attractiveness cannot be objective, Jayce,” Viktor reminds, already sounding like a patronizing asshole again. The nervousness from before is gone, his hands wrapped loosely around his cane instead of white-knuckling it. It’s honestly a little unfair how seamlessly he can switch back to his annoying, smarmy self, while Jayce can barely keep himself from shattering into little pieces.

“Do you really want to have the objectivity discussion again? Right now?”

“No, I know I’m right,” Viktor says, because he couldn’t not be an asshole even at gunpoint. “You think I’m hot, eh?”

“I think you’re so hot, I can barely look at you sometimes,” Jayce says, and maybe that’s too much, too soon, and he will probably be embarrassed about his own recklessness later, but he will be embarrassed, anyway, so he might as well.

“Look at that, we finally have something in common,” Viktor says, and laughs, and then he doesn’t – stop. It’s his turn with the slight hysteria, apparently, as if the situation dawned on him very belatedly, and Jayce can sympathise with that, so he lets Viktor laugh until he chokes on it. “Do you have any idea how hard it is not to jump over the table sometimes?”

“I do, yeah,” Jayce says, because he does, he does know, he’s even had that exact thought before. He says it with all the built-up frustration from several weeks of looking at Viktor, biting his mouth bloody, ripping open his palms with his nails.

“Why haven’t you done it?”

“I thought you’d stab me in the stomach with your cane,” Jayce answers, not at all joking, but Viktor snorts. Then, because he’s well beyond the point of embarrassment, he adds, more honest than he probably should be, “I was also a coward.”

“That’s two things we have in common,” Viktor says, easily, simply, like admitting to cowardice is not in the slightest pride-demolishing for him.

“Three, actually. I agreed with you on the laptop thing,” Jayce says, finally being able to correct Viktor on something. For a moment, they merely look at each other, silent, letting the mutual understanding settle in the space between them. A mutual feeling, too, the knowledge that there is a feeling at all. It’s mutual now, explicitly mutual, and isn’t that batshit insane.

For a moment, they just look at each other, and in the next, Viktor has Jayce crowded against the lab table, Jayce finally gets a hand around Viktor’s fucking throat, and they’re – kissing. Kind of. It’s more of a wildfire than a kiss, really, or a car crash, or a hurricane. It’s definitely too violent to carry such a gentle name, a clicking of teeth and a scrambling for purchase before anything else.

“I wanted to get you out of that ugly fucking vest since the moment I first saw you,” Jayce says, gasping the admission against Viktor’s mouth while doing a piss-poor job at unbuttoning said vest. His hands are shaking too much, which is a little embarrassing but justified. Jayce thinks he’s well within his rights to feel a little unsteady right now, with Viktor pressed up against him, biting at his lower lips like an asshole. An asshole that is very good with his mouth, apparently, which Jayce knew before, in a conversational context. How blessed he is to be privy to the other talents of Viktor’s mouth.

“It’s not ugly–”

“Shut the fuck up–”

And Viktor does. By the grace of a nonexistent god, he actually does as he’s told, and he shuts up for once in his life in favour of sucking on Jayce’s tongue instead. If that is the alternative to him talking, the collateral to him shutting up, Jayce should have done this sooner. A lot sooner, much sooner, at the very beginning, right after Viktor said Are you fucking stupid? that very first time. He wouldn’t have, of course, because he was still pretending that he didn’t want to kiss Viktor back then. Not that he was very successful with it, his stubbornness the only reason he even held out that long, but it was about the principle. Principle being that it’s stupid to want to kiss the absolutely last person he should be kissing. In retrospect, Jayce knows that it was a weak attempt at shielding him from admitting something to himself, like a last resort to keep his sanity from tearing apart.

Clearly, he was fucking stupid, a clinically insane and self-punishing masochist for denying himself, because kissing Viktor is a revelation.

Viktor kisses a little like he’s fighting, like he’s still trying to argue with Jayce without having to use his words, sharp and unyielding, pushing Jayce back against the edge of the worktable with dizzying intent. His hands are in Jayce’s hair, on his jaw, on his hips, as if he wants to touch him everywhere all at once. Roaming, wandering, like Viktor wants to map out his body by touch alone. Jayce might just let him, honestly, he’s certainly not about to stop him. It feels too good, to be touched by the hands he’s been staring at, borderline obsessive, and Viktor could probably do whatever to him right now. Anything, everything, taking what he wants, and Jayce is willing to give and give and give, until there is nothing left. It’s a terrifying thought. It’s a thrilling thought.

“Hey, sweetheart, don’t you know it’s rude to space out during something like this?” Viktor asks, and it’s not a question, not a genuine one, and he probably just wants to be an annoying asshole again, but Jayce’s breath hitches in his throat all the same. Because, apparently, his overachieving mind cannot differentiate what is being said from how it’s being said anymore, and everything Viktor says with his stupid fucking voice just goes straight to his dick. Jayce should be better than that – he is, he is better than that, usually –, but how is he supposed to keep it together when Viktor calls him sweetheart?

“Sorry that I don’t know the proper etiquette,” Jayce says back, aiming for sarcastic but failing spectacularly. He’s too breathless for sarcasm; too unfocused with Viktor’s hands on his body, too scatter-minded with the phantom feeling of Viktor’s teeth burning on his lower lip. Viktor should know him well enough by now to hear the sarcasm, anyway. “I haven’t done this a lot.”

“Hm,” Viktor hums from deep within his throat and it honest to god sounds like he’s purring. He leans in, presses his lips against the wildly pulsing vein on Jayce’s neck, soft and unhurried. It is too gentle a gesture, considering how explosively this started. “You want me to slow down?”

“Fuck no,” Jayce says immediately. Viktor laughs, good-naturedly, like he understands the sentiment. “Or, well. Maybe. That really depends on how far you want to take this.”

“I wasn’t planning on bending you over right here,” Viktor says, close enough for the words to tickle over Jayce’s throat, making him shiver and shudder and shake. Viktor smirks, and Jayce can feel it against his skin. “Unless you’d like that.”

“Shit, I probably would,” Jayce says, half-groaning and half-whining like a virgin, because the thought of that does sound – appealing. More than that, tempting, alluring, good. It sounds so good said in Viktor’s gravelly voice, conjuring mental images that almost make Jayce come into his pants like a teenager. “Maybe another time?”

“Another time, then,” Viktor says, easily soothing Jayce’s fear of there potentially not being another time. Slowly, inconspicuously, he slides his hands from Jayce’s waist down, down and around, until they rest on his ass instead. Lightly, more so a suggestion of a touch. The noise Jayce makes is truly pathetic, but Viktor looks at him with a certain sense of satisfaction, like he is pleased with Jayce’s reaction and doesn’t find it embarrassing at all. “What do you want, then? Besides being fucked stupid, of course.”

There’s a lot Jayce wants Viktor to do, but nothing he could say out loud. He has never been very skilled at giving voice to the things he wants, has a habit of pushing them to the back of his mind and forgetting about them, either to prevent inevitable disappointment or simply because he’s, statedly and continuously, a coward. Though, maybe, perhaps, that is not as good of an excuse anymore, when Viktor is grazing his teeth along Jayce’s throat and asking for what Jayce wants, explicitly, specifically, and presumably plans on giving it to him. God, Jayce wants Viktor to give it to him so bad.

Despite everything – Viktor’s hands on his ass, Viktor’s hard cock pressing against his thigh, Viktor’s teeth on his throat –, Jayce can’t say it. Can’t say anything, tongue-tied and lip-locked, too turned on and overwhelmed. He’s a mess of hormones and whirring thoughts, everything going too fast for him to grasp. Kind of freezing up is probably not exceptionally attractive. Viktor leans in, anyway. Kisses him, softly. Pulls away, tilts his head. Kisses him again, obscenely.

“I thought you would be more aggressive,” Viktor muses against Jayce’s mouth, voice bone-deep and even. He’s not even slightly out of breath, insultingly unaffected. His thumbs are rubbing small little circles into Jace’s hipbones, unhurried and soothing. The gesture is achingly tender, so unlike the filthy things Viktor does with his mouth, and for some fucked up reason, Jayce feels a surge of petulance running through his veins, a knee-jerk reaction to something that vaguely sounds like a challenge. Maybe it’s just a pavlovian response to Viktor’s mildly teasing words.

“Fuck you,” Jayce says, the intended sharpness falling flat with his voice shaking from arousal. He pushes away from the desk Viktor has him pressed into, forcing Viktor to take a balancing step backwards. The quiet sound of surprise is enough for Jayce to swallow down the remnants of doubt lingering at the edges of his consciousness. He grabs Viktor by his sharp hips, reversing their position in one swift movement. Adjusting his grip from Viktor’s hips to his ass, Jayce lifts him onto the lab table. Viktor’s smirk is immediate, smug and a little pleased, and Jayce realized he’s being played like a fucking children’s toy.

“How tempting that sounds, I don’t have the patience for that,” Viktor says, and, delightfully, his voice cracks on a moan when Jayce crowds in between in his thighs. Apparently quite pleased with this position, Viktor hooks an ankle into the back of Jayce’s knee and a long finger into the beltloops of Jayce’s pants, pulling him closer. Jayce goes easily, enthusiastically, even, leaning down to kiss Viktor again. Viktor lets him. Lets him lick into his mouth, lets him bite at his skin, lets him touch. Viktor’s pliancy is short-lived. Without any pretence of grace, his unfair hands come to rest on Jayce’s ass again, using the leverage to scoot closer to the edge of the table, consequently grinding their hips together.

“Ah, Viktor,” Jayce gasps, choking on a groan when Viktor repeats the motion with more confidence. Impossibly, his pants grow even tighter. It is a miracle he can even speak a coherent word with the alarming lack of blood getting to his brain.

“Yes, Jayce?” Viktor asks, perfectly innocent while he rolls his hips against Jayce in a downright sinful manner.

“If you keep doing that,” Jayce says, breathing stuttering in his chest with every vicious movement, his mind blanking out each time anew when Viktor’s cock pushes against his. There are four layers of clothing between them – three, if Viktor isn’t wearing underwear, and that’s a thought, isn’t it – but Viktor’s heat seeps into him, anyway. Burning, scalding, searing, right through Jayce’s skin. “This will end very quickly.”

“I don’t mind,” Viktor says, starting to sound as rough as Jayce feels. “In fact, I’d rather like to see you come into your pants.”

That’s what does it. Out of all the things that could be getting him off, and it’s that. The last cohesive thought before orgasm slams into him is wondering whether it’s the slight feeling of humiliation or just Viktor’s voice that does it for him. He’s saved from pondering which option would be more damning when he comes so violently, his vision blanks out. His mind, too. There is nothing but sensation – the uncomfortable tightness of his pants, the unambiguous hardness pressing up against his cock, Viktor’s hands on his ass and Viktor’s voice in his ear.

The haze settles, very slowly, and he realizes Viktor is talking him through it. Soft little words of encouragement and It’s alright, I got you and occasional hissed curses when Jayce’s hips jolt against his in oversensitivity.

“I’m so sorry,” Jayce groans loudly, dropping his forehead onto Viktor’s shoulder, horrified and thoroughly embarrassed. Viktor, the bastard, coos at him, sliding his fingers up along every vertebra of his spine to grab him by the back of his neck. Rubs soothing little circles into his skin. He realizes Viktor is aftercaring him.

“Why? It was very hot. So hot, in fact, I nearly came myself,” Viktor says conversationally, running his thumb along Jayce’s jaw, tipping his chin up. Jayce abruptly remembers that Viktor is not into degradation, because, as he so helpfully provided, I am more the praise type of guy. Jayce also remembers I may be an asshole but I am no liar. He really needs to stop remembering or he’ll really pass out.

“I fucking hate you,” Jayce says, absolutely no bite in his voice. Viktor laughs at him and leans forward to kiss him again. Jayce meets him halfway, far too eager for the amount of embarrassment he felt mere seconds ago. Viktor laughs at that, too. Laughs against Jayce’s mouth, laughs into the kiss. Stops laughing when Jayce works a hand into his pants. Trousers, because of course he would wear trousers with those horrendous vests.

Jayce learns quite a few things in the little time it takes to make Viktor come with his hand, into and all over his hand; Viktor is a talker – which was to be expected –, rasping absolute filth into Jayce’s ear; Viktor is not an impassive participant, grinding and fucking himself into Jayce’s hand with uncharacteristic enthusiasm; Viktor likes to bite, and not gentle either. At least when he comes, he does, leaving the evidence of that on the juncture of Jayce’s neck and shoulder. Jayce decided for a deep cut shirt today, so he feels Viktor’s teeth directly on his skin, feels the sharp imprints, and he’s weirdly glad about that.

“Fuck,” Viktor gasps after he’s unlatched from Jayce’s skin. “I’ve been fantasizing about your hands for weeks.”

And what is Jayce supposed to say to that?

He says nothing, but he kisses Viktor with genuine sympathy.