Work Text:
Viktor highlights a paragraph in cheap off-neon green and pauses, dry marker held aloft for effect. Jayce is running the bathroom taps again.
It's the second time in forty minutes. He just lets the water rush on and on and on; maybe splashes himself with it at random intervals, if he’s not just doing it to be a prick— which is, frankly, always a possibility. It's concerning. And at this rate it belies the risk of becoming a tic, if left without sufficient intervention. (Something like a spraying water bottle or a rolled up issue of home magazine, who knows. Whichever gadget they use to keep nasty dogs quiet.)
Whatever. He funnels the thought into a dusty corner of his mind, turns once again to the collection of newspapers and loaned reports. Viktor’s attention lapsed for all of five seconds, but in writing terms, it was just enough time to utterly dismember his trail of thought.
What was he reading again?
Ah, there it is. 'According to professor M. Innes, even the fantastical nature of the doomsday scenario is not, in of itself, enough to dissuade the public from acquiring a heightened sense of impending paranoia. In the majority of cases, the opposite is often…'
There's a loud THUMP from the sink, an echo ringing brittle and hollow in that way only porcelain can ring — how it ricochets awfully off your senses. Jayce cusses something or somebody indiscernible (perhaps himself? Perhaps God? They often sound so much like the same person.) and seems to kick away at the trashcan, judging by the meat-to-metal impact sound and vaguely hurt grunt that accompanies it.
Viktor momentarily shifts his priorities towards seriously considering the employment of a shock collar. It seems perfectly reasonable. Required, even.
Another moment passes. The bathroom door spreads itself open with an operatic whinge. The insubordinate guest marches silently past the sofa and back into the narrow corner of Viktor's bedroom like nothing of note happened.
The true and tested way of identifying a Jayce-Who's-Just-Got-His-Period is this: he is noisy as a motherfucker.
Not that this sort of behavior is unusual for Jayce, the walking, talking cataclysm that sometimes passes as a human person. It just becomes a little more pronounced, if you know where to look. All the bright toxin spots flaring at once, devoid of the barest coordination, blinding you with incredible frequency. Rainclouds of doom and gloom shadowing him wherever he goes. Emotional outbursts so excessive they sound like criminal confessions. And it's not the sort of thing Viktor would mind, usually; Gods know he’s got his own share of eccentricities. He's just absolutely stumped as to why Jayce hasn't gone away to do the sulking in his own dorm room.
It can't be that hard. The privacy would help, surely. Viktor isn't much in the way of a nurse, he has a paper due in two days to make up for a flunked team project, the extra noise is really getting in the way of things and — he can't figure out why Giopara is still over at his place after roughly twelve hours of staring at each other's faces and if it's rude to kick him out now or if that's even what he wants to do in the first place. He can't figure out if what he's feeling is awkwardness, stress, impatience, or some obscure, uncharted variant of fear. All he can and has indeed figured out by now is that the lack of clarity is terribly distressing.
Viktor places his marker down as an exercise in spatial control.
Takes a long, deep breath.
Carefully, he rewinds his memory tape until it snags onto a conversation had early on the previous night, under the guise of pleasantries.
There it is eleven, or maybe twelve in the evening (relatively early to his bedtime and almost nobody else's), and Jayce is throwing his fancy jacket over a half-built brass torso on the floor and huffing out ‘You've got a really nice room.’ like the mere notion is skewering him alive with envy.
'Of course I do,' Viktor had dismissed it at the time, not particularly inclined either way; 'I'm the public relations transfer. This is equal parts my containment cell and life-size rat cage. Highly utilitarian, if you ask me.'
He hadn't been able to quite ascertain if Jayce thought that was funny. Giopara had harnessed the unseemly habit of smiling far more with an odd twist of the lip than with any discernible laugh and in that moment, Viktor thought it'd be embarrassing to be caught turning back to check. (He hopes Jayce thought it was funny. It'd be more embarrassing to have that taken as a serious complaint, in any case.)
Maybe the room was the point, Viktor thinks; maybe Jayce's dorm faces the cold side of the building. Maybe his mattress runs a bit thin; maybe his window doesn't lock quite right, and makes an awful click-clack sound whenever the winds hit, and that's been preventing him from getting any decent sleep. Maybe Jayce should speak with somebody in upper management about it, instead of wallowing over his troubles at somebody else's place. Maybe Jayce should get over his holier-than-thou attitude, while he's at it. Maybe then he’d realize stomping around isn't the answer to everything. Maybe this wouldn't even be happening if – hear this – Viktor ever got invited to take a look at the dump, instead of getting his space co-opted on automatic. AND MAYBE! Just maybe, this is none of Viktor's business to begin with, and he should fuck off and let Jayce figure it out by himself.
See, that sounds neat. This particular line of inquiry pacifies the part of his mind that craves easy, clear-cut justifications for everything, even when said justifications only serve to lull him into a false sense of security. Look at him: he’s twenty-something and already in perfect control of all his rational facilities — an exemplary specimen among the dastardly race of Men.
In all of his buck-assed foolishness, Viktor deems that sentiment perfectly appropriate, bins it on the mental shelf nearly with a bow and everything, and promptly refuses to dig any deeper. If he feels any sort of guilty pang, it exists only as an aftertaste to this brilliance.
He looks at the page again. Satisfied with his flawless knack for problem solving, he reaches for the inkpen.
Then his bed creaks.
Viktor immediately recognizes the complaints of his own overly temperamental mattress springs: Someone's rocking on it. And rather forcefully, from the sound of things.
He tips his head back on instinct. Tries to play it as though he wants to listen but doesn't actually care that much about the result, as if there's anybody around to watch and judge him for worrying at all.
From the overlong creak comes a beleaguered groan, pain sound, kept muffled as if bitten; and from the groan lurches a sudden quiet, eerie in its stillness.
The tape unspools again, only this time Viktor doesn't mean for that to happen. It's night. There's a hiccup — the stretch of time that comes before repeats. He tries to cage the length of memory with his fists and the whole thing just sort of squelches out from in between the bars of his metaphorical fingers.
It's night. Jayce hasn't left. He has insisted upon staying, and as a matter of fact, he's the one responsible for transporting half of the ungainly pile of books that will soon come to swarm the living room. Jayce and Viktor, as a vaguely merry plural, complain about an assorted variety of things: that the library closes too soon, that having a limit on what you can loan per person is bullshit, that most techmaturgical fiction sucks, that Professor Pididly has something stuck so far up his ass not even an anointed obstetrician and all novelty oils in the whole wide world could help him; the usual suspects.
Then, still as a plural, they try to work on solving the issue of Viktor having a negative mark next to his bi-monthly assembly evaluation because he refused to work with a lottery group.
As if that was in any way his fault! The project had been sprung upon them on such a short notice, with such high demands. "Design a working prototype that accomplishes a singular, menial task. You have three weeks total to develop, document, and present it to me at the end of the month. The name of the game is daily innovation, folks, don’t you go forgetting it." — Absurd stuff, even for Stanwick.
The other two knuckleheads he'd been sorted with gaped blankly at Viktor like he could carry them out of that hole alone, one on each arm, dead weight evenly distributed on twin sticks. It wouldn't have been the first time, either.
What he had done was more than fair. It was just. Viktor had saved himself the indignity, disappointments be damned.
Now, if you want to get into the subject of truly grossly irresponsible behavior, you have to look no further than the treatment he got for it. It turns out refusing one random project automatically denied him the chance to even apply for a head of foundry position next semester. Which was, by the way, fucking bullshit. He had worked on his pitch for months. He had already collected nearly all the necessary funding permits. He was the only person in his course track this far ahead. It was absolutely humiliating to be now forced to grovel for a chance to earn back a spot that was rightfully his. A supplementary study? Really?
And his instructors had the gall to say his personality was somehow ‘incompatible with a leadership position’ — Vitkor couldn’t believe it. He wasn't self-centered nor antisocial nor bad at dealing with people nor any of the other made-up arguments they peddled back with his rejection notice; people liked him just fine!
He didn’t have to write a stupid paper to prove anything. His score shouldn’t have been affected the way it was just because of one class.
The proof: even Jayce agreed that it was all horseshit of the highest caliber, and he had gone through the sacrifice of cobbling together a whatever prototype three days before deadline hit. It wasn’t pretty nor particularly useful, but it existed, for the purposes of a very futile exercise. (His group had skirted by with a half-baked portable contraption that could be affixed to the front of one's shirt, in the occasion one needed to quickly deal with the buttons. Though they hadn't fully managed to work out how to make it stick strictly to the right order of holes, which ended up earning it a measly 45 out of 100 rating.)
All the more reason why Jayce argued helping wasn’t cheating. And while there were some doubts — this angelic disposition being highly unusual for him, edging towards the painfully uncanny on the broader Giopara behavioral scale — a gift horse was still a gift horse, Viktor decided.
They do the work for as long as it can be done. It’s pretty uneventful, and for the most part, stands in the realm of silent companionship. The brunt of it is reading and notation, the occasional glance-over, summarizing what somebody else has already said into a flat timeline; rinse, repeat. The subject is, ironically, that of responsibility over ungoverned bodies, and the many risks auto-regulated systems could possess.
Trivial stuff. His argument was the most level-headed one, bypassing the primitive noise about mythical toaster revolutions or coups waged against The Man by self-aware sprinklers and coffee pots; that there is no grand rancorous mechanic enmity waiting to be unveiled, no clockwork apocalypse to come. Only tools employed by various someones, to a communal benefit. In an ideal society, all they should and must worry about is ensuring that the ones in control of this intricate web are factually good people.
Of course, he hasn't put it in as many words yet. There's a whole rigmarole about how to make such a thing possible, working out the kinks on the security ladder, traps and failsafes, mostly composed by more notation and once-overs and presenting a dozen other arguments that have to be dealt with. It should be easy, considering a majority of what he has glimpsed so far is bare, fictitious doomsday talk.
Jayce is surprisingly helpful. He keeps unrelated comments to a minimum, reads quickly, catches textual inconsistencies quicker. His handwriting is round and neat. He’s subdued to a state of such open patience that it’s almost unnerving; Viktor avoids thinking about it, lest that too morphs into a distraction. (It is weird, though.)
Only… with the benefit of hindsight, he can interpret the events that followed a little more accurately.
Giopara curses about an ache running down his back and throws the towel first, sliding over a meager list of page numbers and bite-sized lead citations that could, theoretically, turn out useful down the line. Says he'll nap until maybe he feels better. It’s fine. Viktor wishes him goodnight like a second nature, without any pretense or further thought.
He supposes there was a break between actions — there probably was, however small — but it almost doesn't matter, since the next thing registered in his memory is the feeling of Jayce's fingers treading his hair, the fact that he leans in close, and the kiss brushed at the side of his cheek.
Jayce says 'You too.' and leaves. Viktor swears he can hear the crook of his smile.
This is significant, because they're not yet at the stage where they do the kissing thing very often.
By Viktor's metrics, it's difficult to recall if they do much of the kissing thing at all. (Certainly not while the lights are still on. It’s usually in a hush, undercover, spaces hidden enough that it leaves you questioning the veracity of the feeling. Is this a first? It might be.)
He finds that he is not entirely opposed to the prospect of partaking in more of such activities. The urgency of the paper has suddenly burst and vanished, replaced with a more unspoken sort. The tips of his ears pulse with a spark of something electric.
It’s been a very nice evening, hasn’t it? A very nice afternoon, too.
Deliberately so.
It's night, almost one in the morning when he accompanies Jayce's cue to the bedroom. His gas lamp is out. The flicker of the faulty street lights outside his window play heel, denouncing Viktor's transgression; he's quiet on his feet, balanced on hands and knees, kissing a warm mouth with a little too much teeth. Jayce is eagerly receptive, similarly afflicted. They rut. There isn't a better word for what they do. Cuddling sounds too vulnerable, cuttingly personal in a way he cannot bear, fucking is too brusque, implying an ease that simply isn’t present for this tryout stage, and snogging is just plain awful.
He keeps at it, though. It is only logical to assume the natural outcome of practice is to improve.
And he’s not very far off. Not at all; Viktor’s efforts are soon rewarded in the shape of breath coming in quick bursts to his cheek. The curl of a willing, living body against his own. Calf to calf, hand to scalp. Fingers that grasp the back of his hair just hard enough for him to get the stars he likes seeing so much lit under his eyelids; stirring of hot breast for when he wants a spot to sink in and melt, burden of waking hours nearly gone, if not for the hand he keeps active between legs. The drum of the barest heartbeat.
It should have been fine. By now he has a vague idea of what Jayce likes, how long, how fast, how rough to take it. He's confident enough in that notion to wage an internal bet over the timing; but that's when he starts to get a feeling something isn’t quite right.
Jayce's thighs are disconcertingly stiff, for someone who should be at his most relaxed. When his chest contracts — a detail he only notices by virtue of having his face mushed on it — it's unsure, rather than unwound. The wetness that sticks to Viktor's palm is inconsistent with the memory of what it was before. Sickeningly sweet. Too heavy to be water, dispersing like a fractured link on the occasion he parts his fingers.
The last one is the death knell: the texture is throwing him off.
Viktor pulls his hand to a wisp of the streetlight, and his fingers are coated so dark it’s as though they’ve been burned black.
His immediate shock is suppressed by an even more immediate need to make sense of what he’s seeing. He examines the stains – some of it has been smeared on his wrist. There's a matching dark mark on Jayce's underbelly; runny angry-red splotches on the bedding, inking the tangles of his underwear and the lines of his inner thighs, rapidly accumulating to something akin to a violent stabbing scene.
Their eyes meet. By the look of horror on Jayce’s face and the way he glances down Viktor half suspects he already knows what will be said before he says it, but for the sake of being the guy that is always stating the obvious:
"You're bleeding.”
It’s amazing how quickly chaos spreads. Viktor has so little idea of how to react to this particular altercation that he begins to apologize for something he hasn’t done. Jayce tumbles off the bed, searching for his pants, all but telling him to please shove a fucking sock on it. And Viktor has it in himself to argue, because of course he does, it’s practically what he’s made for and he finds great joy in it; but a second look at Jayce’s face reveals it to be nearly green with sickness, so bickering is not fun anymore.
The mood undergoes a drastic flip. Jayce is at minimum irritated with his questions, at most actively resentful that anybody should see him like this and still get to live. He locks himself in the bathroom for what Viktor supposes will be a soak. He runs the taps.
Viktor waits twenty minutes before he realizes someone should probably change the bed. He wastes another five fixing the bedside lamp, then waits another ten before he musters up enough bravery to knock on the bathroom door. No response. (Can't hear a thing inside, either, and he does press his ear in.)
He decides to kill a little more time. Searches his closet for something clean for Jayce to wear that isn't a size too small, belatedly remembers his hand still needs tending to. Paces around a bit. Sits on the side of the bed and begins to feel somewhat aggrieved at how things keep playing out around him. (None of this is his fault, frankly. It just isn’t. It would be great if he could only stop feeling like it is.) Finally knocks again on Jayce's door to inform him a change of clothes will be left outside, in case he wants them, and this time — screw it, he won't even try listening through the gaps.
All the pacing and rambling has a steep price. Sleep gets the best of him, at some point.
Jayce stays there for enough hours that Viktor won't see him again until morning.
So the issue comes to this.
He's not exactly able to tell when he gets up. Only that, with one damn thing and the other, when Viktor next takes stock of himself he's standing right by the foot of his bedroom door.
Jayce's back is the only thing that faces him. He holds it clenched, arms closed at the front. (It seems uncharacteristically defenseless, he thinks, like something waiting to blow up.)
Viktor is stuck on what to say and how to say it for a good minute.
"Your whining is distracting me." is what he ultimately goes with, when he speaks. "If you really need to make a noise, consider using the pillows."
Jayce's reply comes quick: "Go throat a fork, Viktor."
It's so brisk it verges on infinitely amusing. Viktor feels his lip quirk a centimeter.
"You take a painkiller for that yet?"
Jayce's shoulders shift. He looks back for a total of two seconds — brows furrowed, elbows bent in a knot — and twists his face the other way. "I guess." His voice sounds hoarse. Not the feeble-and-frail variety, but instead the kind of noise you'd expect as the aftermath of gargling a fistful of rocks. "Looked under the sink. Your shitty medkit just ran clean out."
Viktor makes a mental note to ration his usage better. There is an undercurrent of suspicion to Jayce's tone, an implication of mistrust he dislikes when applied to his person. He dares to approach the bed, casually as one might, growing a little more confident with each sounding step.
Then Viktor nudges him with his knee.
"Move." he vocalizes, somewhere in the vast range between 'request' and 'demand'. "I want to lay down."
"Tough luck. Quit pushing my— Fuck off. Get on the other side if you're dying for it!"
"It's my bed."
Viktor pokes a little harder, so sudden that the shoulder under his leg bounces with it. Jayce resorts to madman-like grumbling. Maybe it's the truth in the statement or the simple weight to it that makes him eventually cave in. He has no recourse for when things don’t go his way.
He's less than chuffed about it, but Jayce drags himself to the side, allowing Viktor to cling to his absence.
Years from now, what Jayce will remember from that day is that Viktor can enact an awful lot of softness, when he wants to. Their feet brush first. Then it's a hand snaking around the chain link of his arm, soft chest to spine, hip to hip. There's very little space that can be still counted between them; even less when Viktor's nose rubs at the nape of his neck, his breath a soothing constant on Jayce's shoulder.
"You smell like a hemorrhage." he huffs, somehow still fondly, and Jayce feels divided between a mote of affection and the budding desire to kick him hard on the shins.
"Very reassuring, thanks."
"Anytime."
Eyes have been rolled.
Viktor's hand brushes his stomach; wandering. (He distantly notes that the skin there is very warm, courtesy of the blanket.)
Jayce decides that whatever he is feeling doesn't have a name.
Neither of them is completely sure of what the other is thinking, but neither of them makes much of an effort to move away.
They are both very uncool.
"Isn't this shit supposed to have stopped already?" Giopara asks after a stretch of time, physically incapable of staying still. "It’s been long enough. I don't get why it's still so… much."
"Rest in the knowledge you could always be a freak case." Viktor replies noncommittally, and Jayce glares at him.
He's as stiff as a goddamn blade.
"–It was a joke." Viktor spells out, more self-defense tactic than anything.
"Hot tip: jokes are funny."
"Right. That was a bad one."
He shuts up after that.
The little of what Viktor will remember (on the occasion he can bring himself to suffer the memory) is that Jayce is terrifyingly hard to read.
He feels a creeping sense of shame, afraid he's turned the whole scene bitter in a foiled attempt to play the little smartass. Worse yet: Jayce's body remains preternaturally tense, nowhere as present as Viktor wishes it would be. In the blink of an eye, he seems to have become so distant he might as well still be locked in the washroom, time-broken on a continuous loop of the previous midnight.
The rational part of Viktor's mind tries to cheer him up by noting that, at the very least, he hasn’t been pushed away. There are worse outcomes.
There’s ways to prevent them, too.
Viktor's nose is pressed to the back of Jayce's ear. He nudges on, tracing the roll of the shell. Simply because he can, and because the unrevoked permission to just touch somebody whenever and however he sees fit is a license that still hasn't lost an inch of its novelty. Jayce shivers but doesn’t protest, defensive stance broken by the involuntary need to curl all his squishy bits into a human ball.
One of his legs wraps back around Viktor’s, entrapping it with his weight. This is good. This is Encouragement.
He slips a hand under Jayce’s shirt, kissing what’s reachable of his naked shoulder, and is surprised to find that his top is still bound. That just can’t be comfortable. There’s some sort of gordian knot at the back that Viktor has to make sense of; this challenge takes some fumbling to solve, and one very dexterous little finger to pull apart. At least when it’s done Jayce finally seems able to breathe.
“This better?” he ventures a careful hand over nipple, just barely brushing.
“Yeah,” Jayce blurts out. “Just don’t squeeze me.”
Then Jayce reaches for Viktor’s chin. He brings their lips together while fingers close around his breasts, palms wide enough to hug them close to his torso without spilling. His cheeks spike with heat. Taking the advice into account, Viktor doesn't actually squeeze them (though he won’t deny the urge exists; the brain’s molar-first response to facing something vulnerable and taking it as wild prey for teeth,) but he freely tugs at the tips. Jayce squirms, satisfied noise pressed mouth to mouth, a mimicry of secret keeping.
Viktor snugs up to him like a serpent. He’s high on the exhilarating right to lay claim — the allowance to try if he so wishes. I am allowed to do this? You will not punish me if I do this? You may even enjoy the fact that I am doing this? No catch? No reprieve? (Jayce’s answers to these questions being, in order, non-verbally divulged; 1.Yes 2.Yes 3.Yes 4.Yes and 5. Well, not unless you want one.)
And maybe he strays from the plot. There's a warming candlelight in the pit of his navel and he half wants to press it to Jayce so the wax joins them both. In his overeagerness, his arms tighten as they travel down the other's torso. The bed dips with his weight. Viktor, mind occupied with the give and take motions of a kiss, doesn't notice it all.
But for the obvious reasons, Jayce does.
The bubble bursts.
"—Okay, stopping now," dazed and freshly out of breath, he slips away from the grasp, putting some space between their chests until he can turn away in the pillow. "Let's just. Take a break. Right here. I think right here is fine. We can resume this in, like, five days - put that on the calendar."
"What?" Viktor is utterly dumbfounded. "Why?"
"What do you mean why– because I can't handle you smashing all your bones on me, for one!"
"Ah,"
"It hurts."
"--I'm sorry." rapid peelback. Viktor leans on his shoulder, wrestling with his newfound impropriety.
"It's fine. 'twas going to happen anyway."
"But the rest feels… good, right? You like it." implicit in that statement: I did read this right, yeah? I'm not a complete fucking tool, correct? "I mean, you like it? Makes it hurt a little less?"
"I don't get where you're going with this." Jayce narrows his eyes a bit, promptly looking elsewhere. "I obviously can't, you know, the whole deal, don't be stupid. Can't do it."
"You didn't answer the question."
"Well, yeah, what's the goddamn point?"
"Are you unable to answer the question? A yes or no does it, if it's that hard."
Desperate appeal to ego. It's not that he wants to sound like an asshole, but if there's one thing Jayce cannot ignore is the threat that he might not be smart enough to get something.
Jayce purses his lips, jaw set. Viktor is eerily sure he spends the next five seconds vividly picturing a rocket bursting through the window and ripping his skull clean off his neck.
It's a little bit arousing, death threats aside.
"Yes, genius." Jayce bites. "I wouldn't be swallowing your spit if I didn't like it. You can crack your head open on the bridge now."
"Oh, perfect.” lateral thought: you like swallowing my spit? “So we can keep going."
"— did you seriously not hear the last two minutes of this conversation? What, do you just wipe it out?" Viktor puts a hand up, and Jayce accepts it for a request of peace, temporarily holding off on the argument.
"I don't mind. I don't think the matter is particularly gross, either. I’ve had it before."
“You’ve got to be fucking kidd–”
“What I am saying,” and here he promptly covers the other’s mouth for the delivery, not risking an interruption; “Is that perhaps you’re just angry because you never got a chance to come.”
A surge of blood rushes up Jayce's cheeks. "If you try to stick anything in me right now I'll kill you."
"Acknowledged,” Viktor shrugs. "I can work around that. Anything else?"
Jayce assesses him for the beginning of a prank. He seems to give it some good thought, mulling something inwardly with his lips. Finally, the verdict; "I'm not taking my pants off. You're absolutely not putting your mouth on it. Nobody hears about this. Ever. Under no fucking circumstance— You’re taking it to your grave." Viktor instinctively smiles, nearly replying with another ’sure’ before that, too, is cut off. "And lose the shirt."
Fair's fair. Viktor pulls his tee over the crown of his head, making a show of it dropping off the bed frame.
He feels as if a great hand has scattered five coins on a betting table. Two bronzes are immediately attributed to him, the rest backed to Jayce. He might still be able to double his prize, if he's smart enough to come out of this makeshift duel alive.
Viktor advances a little, placing his arms back on the bed. He flips one of his nickels in the air for show. "Done. Other demands?"
"Nah, I think I'm good." Jayce aims his riposte, immutable. "Have you got any?"
He doesn't see that one coming. Part of Viktor's mind is irrevocably tempted by the perfect chance to ask ‘If I’m so impossible to deal with, why do you stay?’ But that feels ill-suited for the arena.
"Idem." he shrugs instead, and resumes his attack.
It’s easier when both of them are playing. This is a proven fact - better to be a conspirator than a target. Viktor swipes a leg over him, holding his weight, and dives in for a kiss. At this point he’s forced to admit he’s a little bit taken with the gesture; how quickly it monopolizes one’s attention, the slow-going rhythm, the formulaic pull of the act.
Ah, their boobs are touching.
It's honestly not bad.
Jayce gasps when Viktor slips a full hand under the seam of his pants, and Viktor marks that down as a direct hit. (another coin trickles into his pile.) Grabbing his crotch like he's measuring a dick may be a little crude, but he sort of needs to do a broad manual scan if he wants to get a hold of the situation down there.
IMMEDIATELY OBSERVABLE FACTS:
- Pad (x1)
- Slippery (very.)
- It is statistically impossible to pull this off without getting a little messy. (Will take one for the team)
- It is a miracle of science he doesn’t have to wear one of these things anymore.
In truth, he has one very clear goal in mind, and doesn’t care too hard about what it takes to achieve it.
Jayce’s clit is still blessedly easy to access, at least. Carefully, Viktor burrows a few of his fingers into the center of the pad, rubbing it until a dent is done. It’s better to maneuver around with that added flexibility.
This feels… weird.
His legs seem a little rigid.
“Are your cramps usually bad?” Viktor moves his mouth along the side of Jayce’s jaw, seeking to try and ease him into the thing. He smells like the soap Viktor keeps on his shelf, extensively picked; non-intrusive and familiar. He could lose himself on it.
“Uh.” Jayce is befuddled with the question. The hand in the middle of his thighs begins to palm slow and even circles around the swell of his dick, and going by the sound made by the back of his throat, he hasn’t exactly bothered with thinking. “What. Are you my doctor?”
“Would you like me to be your doctor?”
“Hrm. We are most definitely not going there.”
Viktor laughs.
Jayce shifts the positioning of his thighs, growing a little more into it. He closes his eyes, hard line drawn in the middle of his eyebrows, and carefully tries to angle Viktor’s hand so it hits the spot just right.
He’s twitching, but holding himself back. His once elaborately coiffed hair falls with real gravity around the pillowcase, no product in a borrowed cabinet to bolster it in shape. He’s so concentrated in being led he hardly counts as an opponent anymore. It’s a little cute.
“You can move with my hand, if it helps.” and Viktor allows himself to look, while there’s nothing looking back. Jayce tilts into his fingers, little sigh out of the corner of his mouth, reaching to grab the back of Viktor’s ribs and hold him close for support. His nails are tapered; there’s nothing but rough skin to dig in. (Apparently finding the edge, Jayce mutters terribly close to his ear: yeah, right here,)
The sound their grinding makes is an odd mix of raspy material crinkling and wet meat, impossible to fully divorce from the source, once you know it. The scent persists. Viktor swallows hard, delayed embarrassment finally dawning on him. Jayce’s thighs close around his wrist, his breath hitching an inch, and Viktor nuzzles his face down the other’s neck, mouth inexplicably watering. Is this winning? I mean, if this isn't proof he's fit for teamwork, what is.
He laps a stripe up Jayce's collar, nips at him when the response is immediately positive. Viktor’s hand feels impossibly warm. He kind of wants to squeeze his legs together, look for a little friction, but not until he's finished his task. Should be any minute now. He's gotten so good at it, it'll only take—
Jayce groans like Eden is just out of reach.
"This isn't working." He sighs, falling out of lockstep with Viktors arm, and he's only got two seconds to mourn his performance before his entire world swings in a hard flip.
Viktor's back hits the blankets with a muted SPLAT, thrown out of orbit via the leverage Jayce previously sought by gripping his ribs. His mind swims. Their positions are reversed in less than a minute; Viktor pressed down on the pillows, centerpiece of the bed, while Jayce draws his sweatpants to his knees.
He straddles Viktor's thigh, one hand pressed down his chest, keeping him safely locked in position. He seems to take great pleasure on the harsh roll of his hips.
"Stay still." He demands, even though Viktor wouldn't dream of leaving.
Important note, scrawled down for later: he's suddenly all too aware of Jayce's capability to snap him like a twig. It's doing weird things to a lot of previously written off areas. How come they don't do this more often? It’s impressive, the velocity with which his mind bursts full of, uh, updated images.
One of Jayce’s hands lands heavy to the side of his head. Right below his left ear, wanting — there’s the frenetic pace of the other’s breathing, rough with the strain of the activity. His bed creaks, soundly, in tandem with Jayce’s passes. He squeezes his eyes shut to ignore how wet he’s getting.
Viktor really wants to grind on something.
Jayce rides his thigh hard enough to come. The noise he makes reaching his peak is unbearable; it sends a jolt running down Viktor’s knees. (He’s a little envious, since this got him off faster than the hand business, but it’s not making a dent on his pride. Mostly. He’s occupied his mind too neatly with the thought of Jayce finger-fucking him to really give a shit.)
The tremors run from the other’s thighs to his navel, and the ripples still go spinning upwards, ending up trapped somewhere in Viktor’s chest. He bites down his lip, managing the embarrassment. Jayce’s chest rests on the side of his as he catches his breath, one heavy pant at a time.
Looking directly at him is a little too hard now. Viktor tries to focus on an indeterminate point of the wall. The throb in the middle of his legs isn’t helping.
“God,” Jayce bemoans, pushing himself off. It’s a sentence that doesn't really go anywhere. Viktor thinks its primary motive is simply clearing Jayce’s throat off in the case of misuse. He hears him swallow, sit back, pull his pants back up.
Their eyes catch sight of one another only when Jayce notices the awkward squeeze of Viktor’s hand in the dead center of his thighs.
Here he does another inquisitive ‘Hmmmm.’ unceremoniously dipping his hand down the belt, as if to test the saltiness of the weather. Internal judgment complete, Jayce withdraws again, tilting his head to the side.
“Want me to suck you off?” and he seems oddly angelic again, when he says it.
Viktor searches for his voice and finds that at some point it has decided to leave the building.
For the sake of not making a fool of himself, he nods instead. (Perhaps a little bit too enthusiastically.)
“M’kay,” Jayce is so mollified he’s smiling back in response. “So, I’ve just really got to pee or I’ll explode, but don’t move, and I’ll be back in a minute.”
Viktor feels a playful slap landing on his knee before Jayce dismounts. He’s not sure he’s processing everything accurately at the moment.
He watches for Jayce disappearing around the corner, the familiar whine of the bathroom door. A click. Once it's closed again, Viktor jumps up, divesting of his bottom half coverings as quickly as humanly possible. He’s not sure why he does that. It seems a little ridiculous in retrospect, but terribly serious when he does it; like he’s exorcizing something.
Maybe it’s to help with the nerves. Who the fuck knows.
Sitting there with buzzing expectation, he seems to find his voice again.
“I HAVE A CLASS AT TWELVE-FIFTEEN,” Viktor shouts over the length of the room. “DO YOU WANT ME TO BRING YOU ANYTHING?”
And he’s not entirely sure why he does that, either, but something has him convinced by the time he comes back, Jayce will still be hanging around.
Just a wild guess. Call it a premonition.