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Tell me when my hunting days are done
When he wakes, it is with the unsettling absence of pain setting his spine on fire.
There is something to keeping a bone-deep ache as a constant companion. You may make room for it, or rather— it makes a home out of you. Your days become a marvel of balancing it, ignoring it, working around it, but it is always, always there.
It lies under every conversation, every choice—stool or bed, stairs or the stench of a drunkard’s urine in the elevator shaft—and before you know it, this is what your life has become. Moth-eaten and half-lived, only you’ve never known otherwise, so there’s no way for you to see how much space it has taken for itself.
So it goes without saying that the first thing Viktor notices as he opens his eyes and adjusts to the dark—and it is dark. The lab feels almost underwater, lights dimmed, flame-lit but dull to his senses—is, yes. The absence of pain.
The second is gut-wrenching hunger.
Something’s wrong. Something’s terribly, terribly wrong.
His throat croaks out a miserable yelp as he gets up from the steel table, vials and frightfully large syringes surrounding him like offerings on an altar. He has never felt anything like it—not even on his worst day in the fissures, stomach full of clay and bitter bugs he swallowed without giving it a second thought.
His feet wobble, spine stretching, limbs following with little protest, and he takes a few steps as he takes in his surroundings.
It is their lab, careful mess of papers and notebooks, molten bits of metal shaped into little nothings, but it is strange, off-kilter. Darkness shrouds it in a dull blanket, a theatre stage empty of life past play time, and its silence feels unnatural, muffled.
He’s so, so hungry.
There might be food in the fridge still, he thinks, vaguely aware that his cane is nowhere to be seen, nor does he feel the need to find it.
He must have been under for days, to be so ravenous.
No, that’s not it.
He knows it’s different. He rummages through the fridge unceremoniously, eyes adjusting to its once again faded light. Something’s definitely wrong with him, and he frowns as the smell of cold soup almost makes him gag.
It’s putrid, it’s dead, it’s beets that should feel bloody and red but end up looking just as gray as the rest of the room.
He throws the box to the back of the fridge, clatter alerting something in the far back of the lab.
Something is, following barebones logic, someone, which most definitely means Jayce.
Viktor hears him before he can see him, which isn’t exactly a first. Piltover’s man of progress moves through life like newly minted machinery, gleaming, loud—and just as precise.
A pounding accompanies it, this time, which he cannot quite place.
In the depths of his mind, a voice—one that’s used to paying attention out of survival more than curiosity— heeds a warning.
He follows the sound, wincing as salt and sweat hit the back of Viktor’s throat, notes of familiarly warm warm warm skin coming to mind. Saliva pools—maybe he’ll throw up.
No.
That’s not it.
He takes a step closer.
“Jayce?” he calls, voice raspy, almost metallic. He can still talk, at least. He squints. The large window by Jayce’s desk is basking everything in shrouded light, smoky blue, and he groans, raising a hand to adjust to the pinhole it creates for him.
Has his vision been impaired by the
—blast?
Right.
There was an attack. Shrapnels and rubble. The vague recollection of panicked breaths and hurried footsteps.
Splayed across the desk, his back bloodied and bandaged, Jayce is still coming to, eyes bleary until landing on Viktor.
Whatever he sees gets lost in the potent pounding beat in Viktor’s ear, so disorienting he nearly keels over—Jayce Talis’ poster-ready body the only thing to steel him.
“Viktor? God, I—you’re alive!” Jayce stumbles —skin and flesh and spit and burning, forge-hot blood. The hug he brings Viktor in would be enough to throw him off-balance on a good day.
He stands stick straight, rigid as Jayce’s bare arms circle him—sweat again, blood, arteries pumping into an erratic heartbeat—and allows himself a brief, minuscule moment of comfort.
This is Jayce.
Then breathes in and opens his eyes.
He’s the only thing remotely colorful in the whole place.
“What happened?” he croaks. No. Wrong question. “Where is my brace?”
“I had to take it off,” Jayce whispers sheepishly. “Scar tissue was starting to grow around it, and—” he shakes his head, running large hands over his shoulders. “I can’t believe it worked,” he says, same look of awe in his eye as the day they broke into a lab not much further from this one. “Are you okay? Are you cold?” He paws at him, thumbs at his cheeks like Viktor’s either a prized horse or a lofty grandchild, and he would step back, save for the fact that he is cold and Jayce’s fingers sift blazing paths across his skin.
The warning grows urgent.
“Jayce,” he starts again, cautiously reeling back, searching his eyes for answers. “What did you do?”
Guilt flashes across a face he’s seen a million times, in a million angles, and he knows before Jayce’s hands fall to his sides that Viktor’s not going to like his answer.
“I went to the Undercity.” Shame, he can smell it in the air now like ozone on a hot summer day. The anger that’s threatening to spill is just as thunderous. “I went to see your friend.”
No.
No, no, no, no, absolutely not—
“You went to Singed?!”
Now Jayce is defensive. Ah, the pride of a man certain of his god-given right to trifle with forces unknown, so long as the experiment proves successful. He used to love that about Jayce.
It is a lot less becoming when he’s the one under the microscope.
“I had to do something,” Jayce retorts. “You were— there was—” he rushes through his words, seemingly unable to find the right ones in the haste. “I couldn’t, I couldn’t—Viktor. You’re my best friend. You know that, right?” he says, reaching to him again.
The step Viktor takes seems to hurt Jayce like a knife.
“What did he do to me? What promises did he rope you in with? He’s a liar, Jayce—All he does is butchery—”
He takes a deep breath. Eyes zero in on the flush of Jayce’s face, descending to his clavicle, and something in Viktor coils.
It’s hunger, again.
It hammers at him like the beats he hears in his ears, which are not his own.
Hunger.
Hunger.
Hunger. “Singed said you might wake up different,” Jayce mutters, unaware of Viktor’s inner turmoil. He looks down at his hands once more. “He also said you might never forgive me for this.”
Oh, and it’s too easy, isn’t it, to fall into this demure trap of his, the repentant shoulders and the voice full of sorrow. That crap hasn’t worked on Viktor in a decade. That crap is usually reserved for people who aren’t them.
“And you did it anyway?” Anger unfurls from his chest, ice-cool against his burning craving.
“You would have done the sa—”
“No, Jayce, I would not have done the same!” he rages, pushing him into the desk—easily, his flesh is soft, malleable— “You should have known better than this. I told you I didn’t want this, I would have rather died a cripple!”
There’s very real fear in Jayce’s eyes as he towers over him, arched back and hands gripping the edge of the desk. Viktor thinks his friendship is what Jayce is most scared to lose.
He should fear the other thing.
Whatever concoction Singed gave him is turning his insides rotten with need like an animal. Between their syncopated breaths and the veins bulging from Jayce’s forearms, it doesn’t take him long to figure out the missing piece of the equation.
There’s a reason his borscht smelled like the dead, and Jayce’s pulse feels remarkably alive.
Viktor has always been a covetous man, but he has always prided himself on restraint. You look, you do not touch. Masterpieces can smudge when you run a finger across their canvas.
He’s always been very good at resisting this particular one.
Below him, Jayce remains frozen, even as panic seems to have settled into contrition. “I’m sorry,” he pleads, eyes shining hazel gold—sunlit as the day Viktor first made a note of them. Warm, warm, warm boy— “I just—I couldn’t bear to watch you die. I had to try something.”
And you made me a monster instead, Viktor thinks sadly.
There’s only so much that affection can salvage.
It takes everything in him to step back from his prey.
No, never prey. Not if he can help it.
“There are some things even you shouldn’t play with, Jayce,” he says, words thick as hunger threatens to swallow him down. He retreats to the dull gray of the shadows with great effort, and grabs his abandoned lab coat from the chair next to them.
“Viktor—” again with the begging. He shouldn’t be so cruel. He gets it, in a way. Jayce is losing him for the second time, and this is a shit goodbye for a ten-year partnership.
He stares at him, the only thing sunlit in the entire room, lets the sight burn white in the back of his retinas.
A beautiful betrayer, eyes shining and eyebrows drawn in despair.
“Stay,” there’s a broken edge in Jayce’s voice Viktor recognizes from a day dangling over a precipice. “We can figure this out together. Whatever I did, we can reverse it. We can fix it. Please.”
He draws a careful breath.
“Please.”
There’s nothing to fix. Behind his eyelids, speckles of light dance and die off, fallen stars he reluctantly says goodbye to.
He steps off.
“I should have known better than to hitch my wagon to a Topsider,” he says, soft yet bitter, feet dragging on the doorstep. “You lot could never stand to play with a broken toy.”
The first few days are, to put it mildly, absolutely awful.
He tries waiting it out; arms open to a death that simply refuses to visit him. The irony isn't lost on him, but this world has always been particularly cruel so the surprise is minimal. Sleep eludes him, sunlight refuses to touch him, forcing Viktor into the role of a perpetual shadow. Maybe he’s already dead, permanently stuck in limbo, Jayce’s refusal to let go damning him to an existence of everlasting erasure and anguish.
Habit has him dragging his feet through the streets nonetheless, his blackened limbs leaving a trail of soot only he seems to be able to track, the sight maddening as he slowly paints the city with increasingly desperate footsteps.
When it becomes clear that neither starvation nor lack of sleep will do the job, Viktor graduates from despair to burning rage.
Ten times now he’s thought about barging back into the lab and ripping Jayce’s throat open, sharp nails digging into hot flesh, painting this unbearable new world with color, even if just red.
The thought leaves him retching, hacking up disgust and self-hatred when the horror of it catches up to him, then cycles back to its disturbing allure. This thing in him doesn’t just want blood; it wants carnage, senseless, brutal, beautiful. Guts and gore and the heat of something giving way under his teeth. This is what he’ll spend the rest of his days craving, now. Violence and perversion, the creature within hollowing him out of what’s left of his humanity. It’s already started. He feels it under his nails, itching—makes him dizzy with the thought, warps his mind and wrings it out in hopes of his relent.
He’s refused it so far, clinging to his own remains like a man in mourning. He cannot, will not let go. This stubbornness acts as both a blanket and a muzzle for the perpetual gnashing of teeth growing in, growing out.
His reflection in the occasional puddle offers very little comfort but this—the teeth, albeit sharp, are still his own.
Still Viktor, no last name, wilted seed grown from cement cracks out of pure spite.
It is displeased with him, the beast.
He won’t die, but he won’t let himself live either, collapsing in alleyways a left turn away from their lab, uncomfortably close to his old neighborhood.
It is pathetic. An entire city, and yet he remains bound to the same four blocks—a wretched thing, incapable of moving on from a past too painful to look into.
He hasn’t returned to his apartment. There’s too much left of him there, the place packed with a version of Viktor left for dead in the council room. Jayce’s footsteps have lingered around the doorstep for the last little while, never passing the threshold.
At least they’re both cowards.
A pair of boots walks past him, leather and mud and disgust mingling into what Viktor has come to name Piltover’s average. If they see him, they take him for a beggar, or worse.
To him, their outline strikes too bright and colorful to stand to look at them directly in the eye. If it is shame, or part of his curse, he doesn’t know.
He closes his eyes.
Rest still won’t come.
The beast is ravenous.
Jayce’s callous hands grasping for purchase. Beautiful throat ripped to shreds, beating heart into his hands, iron on the tip of his tongue.
Red lips, Red face, red everything—
The pounding in his ears sounds just like a heartbeat.
Stop, he pleads, let me go, let it end.
This monster of his digs deeper, festering around a wound Jayce should have known better than to inflict. Pride may have been a useless thing to cling to in the Undercity— and a downright dangerous one to keep around in his line of work, but it was his. Taking away the one thing Viktor could always rely on, no matter how dire or dicey things got is an affront he should paint his teeth red with.
Red, pulsing, red, the only color in this neverending night, red, red, red—
At his feet, a stray cat mistakenly takes him for a kind soul, rubbing against his ankle.
There it lies, his precious pride.
Red on his hands—
Viktor used to think it was fused to his spine like the bolts digging into his flesh.
Red on his lips—
Everything from the cobblestone to the wall he leans against reeks of defeat.
He grabs onto fur with blackened fingers—sun still refusing to touch him, and bids goodbye to the last scraps of it.
There is a line of corpses following his black trail. Rodents, strays, forgotten pets.
They keep the worst of his moods at bay.
He thought he would feel the loss at the core of his being, resent the absence of principles. He finds out that they have simply reshaped to mold his new existence. It is a terrifying marvel, the human mind. The loops it will go through to ensure survival.
He makes sure he takes no pleasure in it: it is feeding, a means to an end. The blood tastes vile, almost dusty—it is the wrong kind, always the wrong kind— but it does satiate, placate the wild thing inside.
As the wave of hunger finally relents, his mind is returned to him in kind.
Life around him is still dull. Foggy. Color only ever comes with crowds, golden skin and pink cheeks he stays far, far away from.
Scents have begun to sharpen, paint pictures for him where his eyes are lacking.
A tinge of iron as a kid scrapes their knee by the river. A bad toothache a merchant spits out on their way to the Undercity. Butter pastries baking in the dead of night, strangely off-putting with a sweetness he no longer craves.
He blocks them most of the time, disorienting when he has no intention of following through.
What he hones in to are sounds. The initial cacophony of his early days has long stopped, beast quiet enough for him to pay attention to the music of the living again. Wind and blades of grass, spit on cobblestone. Laughter, a cough, a raspy exhale. Viktor splits them into isolated paths, each a song leading to a soul.
Among them, two sing louder than the rest.
One is a song of fire, anvil, and magic.
He has no intention of pursuing it.
The other is built off pain for the sake of science, anguish he knows to name because he feels it fused to his core.
Singed is a hard man to find on a good day. As it turns out, Viktor is all out of those, and it takes him weeks to track down the scientist.
Day after day, he peels off the layers of bait and misdirection— petty traps designed to keep safe from enforcers, or people like Viktor—and retraces his footsteps.
Attuning to his song takes work. That’s okay. He’s got nothing but time.
He finds him hiding in a tin can of a bunker, nestled in the bowels of the Undercity. The smell is putrid on purpose, rot and rusted blood covering walls, a crime scene meant to scare and discourage. On a Piltover man, the clever ruse might have worked. On a guy like him, bred from the dumps and raised on chemical spills, it is ultimately useless.
He steps into the bunker without hesitation, the outline of Singed’s back burning bright in the windowless room.
“Ah. I was wondering when you would show,” the doctor hums, eyes trained on his latest experiment. It is a mess of body parts as usual, spleens stretched across the table, tubes pumping in and out of them in a vulgar display. Around them, jars and their contents sit idle, their eyes empty, mouths unable to speak. A captive audience that used to make Viktor uneasy. Now, he almost considers the fate enviable. “You look well,” Singed adds, briefly looking up from a notebook. “You’ve taken to the Change nicely.”
He pinches his lips. “No thanks to you.”
“I only did what the boy asked,” the doctor corrects, attention back on the swirls of red in the vial before him.
“He didn’t know any better. You did.”
It comes out more bitter than he intends it to, a child rising against a callous parent. In his ribcage, the monster stirs, pacing in place as it awakens. It is strangely soothing, the rumbling it makes, as if to comfort him.
“I warned him you would not want this new life. That you’d resent him for it.”
He frowns. “And you gave him the snake oil anyway.”
“I’m not a monster, Viktor,” Singed sighs, ”I’m a romantic, if anything.”
His eyes widen in shock at the gall. “A romantic?! You turned me into an abomination!”
A furtive glance to a metal casket, then. “Your friend made that choice. Out of desperation. Out of love,” he goes on, gaze lost to the world.
The words scrape at him like nails on chalkboard, and the beast prickles in tune with him.
“That is not love,” he bristles. “That is weakness. Selfishness disguised as a good deed!”
Still, Singed keeps his back to him, staring at that damn casket.
Turn back, Viktor angers, face your creation. Repent for this.
“Why are you here, Viktor?” the man asks, exhaustion wearing at his voice.
“What?”
“Are you seeking answers, or revenge?”
The question is simple. Viktor has an answer all but prepared, but it won’t leave his lips. Instead, he steps closer, until he stands between the man and his precious coffin. Impossible to ignore. “I want you to atone.”
And it is then that he feels it—roll of his shoulders stretching him out as if finally awake from a deep slumber. The thing inside of him thrills, knows it won’t have to claw its way out, just wait til he opens the door. It is imminent. He closes his eyes, breath leaving his lips in heavy rasps. “Do you not see your part in this? Do you not care? You made me a parasite again. Slave to a violence I never craved. Every day I fight it, and every day it gains ground. I cannot sleep. All it wants—”
“All you want,” Singed cuts in. “It is not Other from you. It is you. That was once what you sought to achieve. Transcending your fate.”
It is not him. He knows it isn’t, because he can feel where his mind stops and where the beast’s heart lurches, and the thought makes him bang his fist against the table. Vials clatter and tremble as if in fear, and Singed merely frowns. “I am not your maker,” he bristles. “You look for me to enable your wrath, but your Piltover paramour is the one you should throw it at.”
Now the beast is gnarling, and a growl sits in the back of his throat. Even then, Jayce’s song and scent burn at his nostrils, ring to his ears. He’s aware of this. They’re both aware of it.
He closes in.
“Viktor. You’re alive. It is no small miracle,” Singed insists, his back hitting the edge of the table. “Why do you see it as plague?”
“I am no more alive than that thing in your coffin!” he seethes. “You should have let it die. What you did—what you two did,” he shakes his head, “you want to frame it as love—that’s not love. That’s obsession!”
The hand Viktor lifts him by the throat with is as steady as his resolve. His eyes narrow. It should disturb, that he barely feels the weight of this man when he holds his very life between his fingers. The beast rejoices.
Patience, he tells it. The anticipation builds in his gut, twists into it with perverse glee. It doesn’t matter that he has decided to take no pleasure in the kill—this body knows, fires on all synapses. Saliva pools and his vision narrows to the prick of a needle. To his credit, Singed doesn’t look too scared. He doesn’t clamber or beg, merely clasps to his hand.
“Viktor,” Singed rattles, “Do not do this. I could still be of use.”
The fact that he is correct does not seem to factor in. It should factor in. It is concerning that it doesn’t, that he would rather punish his creator than keep questioning him—it’s the antithesis of Viktor’s entire body of work. “And what use would that be? Tell me,” he asks, backing them both into the rusted table. Around them, the jars clatter.
“I could help you master your impulses.”
What he means is redirect, control, put to use.
Red pools in the doctor’s eyes.
There it finally is.
He walks, hand in hand with his monster. “I am not a child anymore. I have no need for parlor tricks and promises,” Viktor says, an odd sense of calm overtaking him. His thumb presses, presses into Singed’s carotid like wet clay. Singed’s Adam's apple bobs up and down frantically. Strange, panicked creature. “All your life, you’ve altered, and pricked, and twisted without accounting for soul. And now that you fear for yours, you want to help?”
He squeezes.
Underneath the pad of his thumb, Singed’s pulse quickens rabbit-fast. Fingers try to pry off the claw of his hand. He stares at him, death already shining in his eye.
Keep squeezing.
“You were right,” he says, finally. “I suppose the beast is me.”
He lets the truth tug him far, far down within himself. He smells blood. Viktor is nowhere to be seen.
When he comes to, the room is quiet.
Singed’s body has long lost all warmth, barely a person anymore. Just a corpse, stiffened by death, a desiccated spider curling in on itself, to be brushed away with a broom.
He pictured himself horrified, on his knees, begging for forgiveness.
Instead, he gets up, finally calm, sated.
He feels absolutely nothing at all.
Viktor abandons him by the remains of his still creature, their empty eyes forever locking with their keeper’s, and steps into the night with blood still drying off his face.
The change is complete, the beast is with him, and he understands, now.
It is not cruelty when you need to feed, merely animal instinct. Humans were animals, once, too.
With that in mind, he picks the victims carefully. Plucks them from places nobody’s paying attention to. Learns to savor the taste, rich and thick in his stomach, warmth filling his limbs with strength and his head with clarity.
Whatever he is now, it has gifted him this, at least. A sense of ownership, sitting atop the food chain. All his life spent under a thumb, this city’s, Heimerdinger’s, the Council’s. Jayce’s . Jayce Jayce Jayce Jayce. Aching for scraps and unable to hoist himself any higher than a tolerable, useful ghost to Piltover.
Those legs of his are stronger, now. Should he choose to, he could climb higher without fear of toppling down.
In cheating death, he has defeated fear.
As his eyes follow the silhouette of a man, broad shoulders singing of wood fire and metal, hunger stirs up.
This is the part Viktor has come to enjoy. The trailing, gaining traction, closing in on a prey unaware. In his past life, he always stuck out, a ghastly stain in Piltover’s streets. The cripple from the undercity, the worm who’d crawled up to the ivory tower.
His body is made of shadows, now. Lithe, steps slick and discrete. He slips in between people unnoticed even on a bright sunny day. By the time they do, it is far too late.
Ergo.
He circles the man, herds him to a darker street without him even noticing. Only once they’re alone does he whisper soothing words to his ear. Say your goodbyes, give your prayers, if you need to.
A kindness, to Viktor. A life is a life, after all.
Fear tints the first drops of blood with an acidic, almost stinging flair, zapping through him like a cold plunge.
He counts down. One. Horror. Two. Pain. Three. Acceptance. Four. Abandon.
Like clockwork, the man goes pliant beneath his teeth, calm quieting Viktor’s mind.
Precious peace for the both of them.
He smoothes the dark hair beneath his fingers, final notes of his symphony vanishing into the night, off-key by only a few notes.
It was always going to lead back to this, Viktor infers.
Months he’s spent circling the proverbial drain while his insides poked at the thought.
To become an apex predator is to enjoy the hunt almost as much as the kill. This particular chase is ten years in the making. The old Viktor, the one with a beating heart and a head for science, would have died with the truth burrowed so far down his gut it would have caught on the mechanical vices of his spine.
What he is now returns to the scene of the crime an exact six months, three days, and two hours after the change.
There’s nothing to say Jayce should be here.
The sound of magic, progress, and a beating heart tell him otherwise.
He drinks in the sight like he wants to take his time with it.
With a half-empty glass in his left hand and the other resting on his lap, Jayce Talis remains a magnificent bastard.
His chest rises and falls to a steady rhythm, lips pinkened by the drink, eyes lost in its amber. Viktor notes minute details—he always does— the papers abandoned on his desk, the five o’ clock shadow going on twelve, Viktor’s side of the lab completely untouched. He’s in stasis, waiting for him to come back. Not like he knew Viktor would, but hoped he did anyway.
He was always a big believer in miracles.
He takes a measured step forward.
“Thought that might have been you.”Jayce doesn’t look up from his drink, merely pokes his tongue at the inside of his cheek. His lips stretch into a tight smile. “Did you come to kill me?”
He seems relieved at the thought. They were always surprisingly in sync, Viktor supposes. With a hand that feels almost tender, Viktor brushes the pommel of his old cane, still resting by Jayce’s desk.
“I’m not sure why I came.”
Right now, jury’s still out.
He’s gotten better at it—figuring what he wants, and what his body demands. But wherever Jayce is concerned, the line remains blurry: there’s skin and bones cracking and pain and pleasure and gasps and a longing that’s deeper than the fissures. There’s blood, because there is always blood, but it’s intertwined with years of sitting side by side and that’s where it gets hazy in Viktor’s brain. That’s where it gets fucked. Hence the six months.
He lets out a breath, inching closer, still— studying. Right now, with his legs open and his chin up to stare at Viktor in a mixture of longing and horror, Jayce looks every bit the willing sacrifice.
“You could, you know. Kill me,” he says, fingers strangling the drink. “I deserve it.”
The self-loathing is no surprise. It is a pendant to this death wish of his, an interesting counterweight to Viktor’s past will to live.
He hums. “Is that all you’ve been doing? Waiting around, hoping I would come back to finish the job?”
Jayce shrugs. “Destroyed the hexcore, too,” he grins self-deprecatingly. “Lost our grant in the process, by the way.”
“If you’re hoping for accolades..”
“No—” Jayce shakes his head, resolute. “Definitely not hoping for anything.”
On Jayce’s desk, there’s a small mirror, one they used to pass back between the two of them when long days turned into long nights and shaving in between testing phases became some sort of silent ritual. Right now, it only reflects his own face.
Once wispy brown hair grown dark, mole underneath his eye, above his lip, still. All of that familiar.
The rest of him is a monstrosity.
There is no other word for it.
The skin is polished, obsidian black, ribs no longer protruding, muscle filling the hollows between his bones, flesh unmarred as if brand new.
It is brand new. It is also his, now. This is a version of Viktor fantasized only in his darkest hours, and even then, he never would have entertained the hope. Too greedy—he would have taken the absence of pain. The rest would have been grotesque then, and still feels absurd now.
He averts his eye.
Jayce doesn’t.
“Do you hate me, still?” He asks.
Yes. No. Never. Sometimes. Trapped between simmering anger and resentment, Viktor still fails to resist the pull of his orbit. Gravitates to him like a magnet, or a moth to a flame. There’s nothing to be done. It is the way they’ve always worked. From his seat, Jayce lets it happen, his head tilted, neck bared. His hands aren’t shaking.
Awaiting his sentencing.
He looks down. “You’ve been keeping track,” Viktor points out, his eyes shifting to a crudely drawn map marked with his latest feeds. “Remarkable.” In his mouth, the praise sounds metallic, ice cold.
“The council is starting to pick up on it,” Jayce murmurs, a warning. “Enforcers are going to start looking for you, soon.”
His gaze trails up the veins in Jayce’s forearms, across his chest, back to his face. Six months, three days and two hours and he still isn’t scared of him.
“Do they know I’m what they’re looking for?”
Jayce’s eyes shine with gorgeous, tortuous guilt. He wants to hold it in his hands like he would his chin.
“Jayce,” he chastises. The purrs of his voice entice him into closing his eyes, painful sigh escaping before opening them again.
Truth shines amongst hazel the way lies have always clouded Viktor’s.
He is three inches taller now—all sharp canines and bloodied hands, but this is how Jayce chooses to look at him. Like a savior, like he has the most wonderful mind in the room. Still.
It is love, it is obsession. And he needs to let go.
“Do you have to kill them?” Jayce’s lips are chapped. “Or is that just you being thorough?”
He tilts his head. “I haven’t figured out how to stop once I’m satiated just yet.”
“Are you hungry? Your pupils are huge.”
He’s certainly something.
He stands still between Jayce’s legs, the other man’s neck craned up, up, up.
Silence fills the room, but Jayce’s song sings louder than bells.
“You would let me do this to you, when you know I cannot stop,” he considers, holding Jayce’s chin in his hand. It isn’t a question.
Jayce’s head barely moves as he nods.
“Why?”
His eyes look like the sunset of the day Viktor tried to jump off a roof, or maybe that was Jayce—they always liked symmetry.
“I’m only alive because of you,” Jayce says simply. “And you’re still around because of me.”
Both are true.
Very well, then.
His lips graze Jayce’s jugular like a whisper. It will be as tender a goodbye as he can make it.
Time stands still, a hand grasps for his wrist to steady him. He bites in.
One. Acceptance. Two. Adulation. Three. Longing. Four.
Desire.
It is both nothing like Viktor expected it to be and exactly like he feared it might. Jayce’s blood—hot, carmine red, is on his lips, in his throat, dripping down his neck and staining his undershirt. Somehow all Jayce seems to care about is that he has him in as close to an embrace as he’s ever allowed.
There’s a gasp, closer to a moan, really, a febrile hand hesitating before getting lost in Viktor’s hair, muscles tensing and relaxing under his teeth.
“God, I’ve missed you,” Jayce rasps out, red in the face and so, so earnest.
The heat of coals laid dormant for about ten years too long suddenly ignites with the confession, and he’s thankful for the blood running down his throat, silencing his answer.
How do you miss something you’ve never let yourself have? How does a body memorize every indent of muscle, the feel of flesh against teeth, sweat on his tongue as if old friends? He’s never touched Jayce before.
He’s touched him a hundred times.
Jayce’s hand drops from the nape of his neck to his back, a caress they both know Viktor would have never allowed.
He is Viktor, and he isn’t. Jayce is still Jayce.
His lips part, soft and plush to Viktor’s ear, begging his name. Reality shifts from feeding one vice into indulging another.
There’s a dark thrill, sinister as his own breath gets caught in his throat, a moment where the hand roaming down Jayce’s torso doesn’t stop and fire threatens to burn them whole.
This is what you wanted, he admits to himself. This, more than anything, more than science, more than magic fixing his shit life and his shit spine, more than air entering his lungs and leaving them unscarred. More than blood.
It scorches like a branding, searing into Jayce’s skin with vengeance. It says you’re mine, you’ve always been mine, and you’ll always be mine. Touch isn’t enough, thighs tensing underneath his barely scratch the surface.
Jayce’s moans only add kindling to the fire.
He wants and he wants, and he wants. He’s a beast of monumental desires.
The enormity of it is what makes him pull away in the end.
Viktor winces as he does, willingly and regrettably ignoring the clear outline pressing against his thigh as he gets up. Jayce’s head chases after his in vain.
“Wait, Viktor—” he starts, skin flushed, hair rumpled, a debauched mess.
Painted red, just like Viktor wanted.
The sight scares as much as it arouses, and Viktor trips back before eyes brilliant gold and blood smeared across Jayce’s chest chain him in place.
He rasps out a sorry goodbye, shame and black dust sticking to his feet as he disappears into the street.
His hunger beats to the tune of Jayce’s pulse for the remainder of the evening.
He sinks his teeth into petty criminals and housewives alike, going on a rampage in the darkened streets of Piltover.
Nothing wipes the taste of his transgression.
There are some lines you do not cross.
Long ago, when all he had to grapple with were smoked up lungs and searing pain in his right leg, he had made himself a promise.
It had been an easy one at the time, to neither covet nor cross the distance between their desks. Viktor was a creature of impossible wants then, and Jayce unintentionally solar. He had held strong, surprisingly so—only stealing glimpses, enough to sustain, enough to keep the fire lit. He never stared directly at the flames, and preferred to ignore the burn.
Had anyone performed a vivisection on Viktor’s brains before the Change, they would have found the following: rows of equations, furiously etched notes, and a meticulous, borderline pathological account of Jayce’s every move and word.
Partners.
Cold cynicism meeting boundless hope should have been a recipe for disaster, nuclear fission, an inevitable event horizon.
Ten years down the line and they’d finally come close.
In the fraying corners of his mind, sanded down to the bare essentials, the account lives on, amended with new information: Jayce, his blood, his skin, fingernails digging into the coal black of his limbs, his mouth catching on the side of Viktor’s ear.
A tantalizing hard line digging into his flesh.
He cannot do this.
He wants to do this, so, so badly.
It is a terrible idea.
He shakes the thought and tries to banish it with a hunt.
He has fed every single day this week.
Enforcers have finally caught on, forcing him to be careful. He will find ways to ditch them, just like he’s done every other night.
His next prey is a pudgy man with a pocket watch he cannot stop pulling out of his pants, forcing the shine of its chrome onto what he clearly hopes to be impressionable women. He is no saint nor savior, perfectly average. It wouldn't have changed much if he was. He will die today, on his way back from the bank, his sweat-slick hair taped to his forehead and a scream stuck in his throat.
His song is muffled, dwarfed by another’s, fire and brimstone an insistent aftertaste.
Above them, as if mocking, an old banner sporting Piltover’s finest clamors for Progress.
Closing in on his victim Viktor feels like he’s taking five steps back.
The blood sours in his mouth before the guy even drops dead, and Viktor pulls back angrily.
Nothing. Nothing satiates, the bite is all wrong, wasteful.
Fire crackles in his ear, magic sparks. A half-whispered name and a melting embrace.
If he goes on like this, enforcers will find him.
But it’s something to do, a clock to reset so that for those ten blissful minutes, he’ll stop thinking about Jayce Talis’ skin.
He was right. This is not love. It's obsession.
Wherever Jayce is concerned, they are one and the same.
The city has enacted a curfew, dwarfing Viktor’s supply, intentionally starving him. The animal traps he keeps finding confirm what he already knows to be true: Jayce still has not told a soul.
Hunger wakes again, blankets his reason.
A clever man would return to the Undercity, hide until the storm passes.
Viktor and his monstrous heart circle Jayce’s apartment for eight nights as he plots their next encounter.
He takes his time with it. Hides in the shadows of their old haunts, studies the patterns of Jayce’s comings and goings even as he knows them by heart. He looks better. Has taken to shaving again, and seems inhabited by purpose. A new project, no doubt. He could never stay idle for long.
The footsteps Viktor follows him with are soft and measured. This is not a hunt, more of a stroll, actually, and he waits outside of Jayce’s home until the last lights in the windows are out.
The door being unlocked tells him all he needs to know.
He slips in quietly, taking in the surroundings with an avidity that borders on greed. Much like his students quarters, Jayce’s walls are covered with runes, papers stapled directly onto the walls and wild markings in both pen and chalk dressing up the rest. Books take more space than plates on the kitchen table, and the furniture is remarkably sparse. It is a mirror of Viktor’s old place in almost every way, clothes strewn here and there, following the path of a thought. All in all, the apartment is much like him—a mess of contradictions shaping a man Viktor has been silently obsessed with for the better part of a decade.
On the coffee table, a framed copy of their first patent rests, weathered and well-loved.
He pushes on.
The door to Jayce’s bedroom stands wide open, a beckon, and he follows the call knowingly. His song rings insistently in Viktor’s head now, murmurs of sleep and peaceful heartbeats unrelenting.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.
The mattress barely dips under his weight as Viktor sits down, and takes in the sight.
There is something to be said about the way Jayce relaxes in sleep. Like most Talis men before him, he is carved of blocks and angles, hammered features built for the forge. On him, they are softened by long lashes casting soft shadows over his cheeks, and plush lips that only part to let out quiet breaths. There is an innocence in there, still, that Viktor himself has lost long ago and he can’t help but envy.
“You didn’t kill me,” Jayce whispers, his eyes still closed. Too intimate, in this setting. In any setting.
He sighs. “How was recovery?”
Sheets ruffle as Jayce twists in them, body angling closer as if to reach for warmth.
Viktor, as always, is ice cold.
“Not bad,” He rubs his eyes to rid them of sleep, or make sense of Viktor’s body, still sitting on the edge of the bed. “A little woozy for a few days. Some minor anemia. Have you—is this—”
His mouth draws into a thin line. No, he hasn’t fed. Yes, he’s here because he’s hungry.
One would be a lie, the other a half-truth.
“There are enforcers all around your house, did you know that? Every exit.”
Jayce grumbles. “Mel’s idea.”
He hums. “She knows.”
“She suspects.”
“Are you two still involved?”
He couldn’t care less.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” Jayce replies, somewhat cold.
“Ah, lovers spat,” Viktor nods.
“You kind of have to be together for that.”
He hums. Whatever transpired between them, she clearly cares enough to protect him regardless. Good—were he left to his own devices, Jayce would hold the door open for any monster to come in. Case in point.
“I was wondering if I took too much,” Viktor says, fingers trailing across the sheets, smoothing a crease. “You seem okay.”
“Was it enough?”
The grimace twisting his lips is as clear an answer as Jayce probably needs.
He could bleed him dry and it wouldn’t be.
On the wall next to his bed, a faded picture of Jayce’s mother judges them, certainly judges him.
He sighs.
With an arm stretching across the mattress, Jayce pulls a notebook from under his pillow. “How much do you need, on average?” he asks, hoisting himself up on his elbow before gesturing for the pen on his nightstand.
Viktor hands it to him wordlessly.
“Probably a body’s worth. Five liters, give or take.”
Jayce nods. “Only human?”
“Other mammals work if I’m in a pinch.” Chasing and killing stray cats carries too demeaning a touch, and the payoff is worth neither the humiliation nor the hassle. “Why are you writing all of this down?”
“Research—” Jayce mumbles as he scribbles the answers in his awful chicken scratch. “And you feed weekly, right. Bi-weekly? The pattern isn’t clear.”
He flips through pages, each kill documented, annotated. The thought sneaks down Viktor’s navel, possessive, pleased. “I usually wait until it gets too painful to ignore. I’ve ramped up, lately.”
Left a litter of corpses around Jayce’s place like a cat with dead mice.
“Give us an average.”
“Isn’t this repulsive to you? Wouldn’t you rather not know?”
The shrug Jayce gives him is nonchalant, quoting an old family saying with ease: “You can’t blame wolves for killing.”
“You should,” he chastises. “Everyone does.”
“I’m not everyone, though, am I?” Jayce replies. There is a knowledge in his eye too enthralling to ignore.
“No, you most certainly aren’t.” He clears his throat. “Fine. How many more of these do you have?”
“Just one, really.” Jayce’s gaze lowers to his notebook. The thumb he rubs over the corner of the page is a nervous tell, they both know this. He braces himself for what will follow.
Jayce’s eyes flicker up. “How does it feel?” The question hangs in the air long enough for his cheekbones to grow persimmon red and his teeth to worry his lip. “Last time, it looked—”
“I know what it looked like,” Viktor cuts in. “It is… I have no control over it. The moment I start, it all fades. Shame, fear, anger. It becomes about the blood,” he purses his lips. “It is all about the blood.”
Jayce takes that in, stares at him then the page, pen tapping on it, hesitant. They stay like this for a while, Jayce eventually writing down in relative silence. Studious, Studious boy.
Finally, he sets the notebook aside, and looks to Viktor with one more question.
“Are you hungry right now?”
He should lie.
He should tell Jayce he’s more than fine, that this was just a courtesy call and he’ll be on his way.
“I am,” he replies, honest as can be.
Another ruffle of sheets, then. Covers pulled as a silent invitation.
“Jayce,” he warns. “I do not want to kill you.”
“Then don’t.”
It’s as simple as that. Falling into old patterns, as distorted as those are. Used to be Jayce nudging a forgotten container his way, Viktor kicking cold coffee cups out of his reach, the both of them truly awful at noticing anything but the work in front of them.
He offers his neck once more. Neither of them mention the lack of clothing. Less of a mess, Viktor argues.
A hand softly braces his shoulders. An embrace, again.
This won’t be about the blood. This was never about the blood in the first place.
He bites in tenderly, like a lover. Against him—under him, Jayce immediately goes molten, limbs soft and flesh supple, perfectly subdued. Warmth unfurls at his core with every sip he takes, encased in the crook of his neck.
“How does this feel—for you?” Viktor eventually mouths against the skin.
Call it research.
“Ah,” Jayce keens, the vibrations of his vocal chords echoing down Viktor’s throat. Beautiful, beautiful song. “Good—”
“Good?” he smiles. The memory of a boy spewing a million words a minute contrasts with that of a man struggling to keep his head above the water, and he holds back a chuckle.
“It’s hard to focus,” Jayce writhes. “It’s like my brain is aware I need to run, but the rest of me wants to stay here—” he gasps. “Give you everything you want.”
Pleasure and pain and Jayce’s pretty face undone. Jayce’s insides silky soft, everything soft, cracked ribs ready for Viktor to nestle into. Lips pleading to Gods neither of them believe in. A mess of limbs and pleasure, pleasure, pleasure—
There’s a growl, building at the very core of his lungs. Something distinctly Other, and Viktor holds it back with everything he’s got. He exhales, probably louder than he wants to, nose angrily pressed against the side of Jayce’s face.
Under his hand, Jayce’s chest rises and falls rapidly, blood running from the wound in a tortuous trail.
An inch. That’s all it’s going to take. His thigh slotted more firmly between Jayce’s, a hand fisting his hair, another one bruising his hip.
Time slows, stretches like molasses, and they lay still, teetering on the edge of the precipice.
He wants to. He wants, and wants, and wants—
“Are you going to run again?” Jayce murmurs at the corner of his lips.
He looks at him. Liquid gold in his eyes, liquid gold dripping from his neck, probably from Viktor’s chin, too. No hesitation. No fear, unequivocal about the offering.
He shakes his head. “Not this time.”
The moan Jayce rasps out as Viktor’s mouth finds his courses through him like a wild rune.
Finally, his beast sings, finally.
They tumble down the deep end without bracing for the fall, Jayce’s lips tasting like day old coffee, the vile thing. He wouldn’t trade that for the world. Red smears across their chins, messy kisses half-devouring, half-desire, and he takes to drinking Jayce’s moans as if ravenous in spite of the feast, unbelievably greedy. More, he almost purrs, never satisfied. He wants it all at once, the years piling up between them a brick wall he’ll gleefully toss Jayce’s ridiculous hammer into.
This was never a pious longing. Even before the Change, that thing had teeth aching for a bite.
Jayce’s nails cling from his shoulders to his hair, crescent shapes branding like iron, deep, almost painful—and Viktor’s roam down, drunk on the little hiccupped breaths Jayce lets out as he rakes them across the planes of his stomach. Supple flesh and bronze skin Viktor could flay if only to be closer, closer to him, still, to taste the warmth of his insides where he’s the softest. He wants him open, pinned like a butterfly, wings willingly clipped. He wants him with his neck strained back and his jaw open, tensing and pleading. Wants to lick the salt of his sweat and tears til there are none left to cry. The worst of it all is knowing he cannot blame this on the Change. This was always Viktor.
“Jayce,” he pants, half of the name getting lost in his mouth. “Jayce—” Like a prayer. It is only fitting. He’s the one who built him anew.
Desire builds and burns like tinder, black hands grasping for purchase.
Tell me to stop, Viktor pleads silently, making fast work of him. Tell me to stop before I eat you alive, or worse—
“Take what you need.”
Jayce kisses him like he’s been waiting for this his entire life.
It’s only fair to reward him for the wait.
With a light press of his mouth to the side of his jaw, Viktor starts his descent, following the drying trail of blood from his chest to his navel, nosing at the hair curling at the root of it.
He’s so beautiful like this, splayed out, pinned down. Viktor makes sure he commits the sight to memory, lowers his mouth to bite down the soft skin by his hip.
The blood from the inside of Jayce’s thigh tastes so sweet it could give him a headache if he still got those. The sweat he tastes as he briefly takes him in his mouth is even sweeter.
Around them, the world is still a resounding gray.
Around him, Jayce glows gold.
Time unspools unto itself as they tangle into a mess of limbs, writhing, pent up til soon teeth and mouths and hands aren’t enough of a taste anymore.
He takes it all in. Jayce’s glassy eyes, the flush across his cheeks, the hand he grips the back of Viktor’s neck with to steady himself. The beating heart, pulse hammering, blood everywhere.
He still wants him pried open, still wants to wear his bones and kiss the carcass.
“I have wanted to do this since you nearly cracked your skull on the academy’s pavement,” Viktor confesses, keeping the worst of it at bay. Pressing his forehead to Jayce’s, he hums. “Wish I’d done that before you turned me into this.”
“Wish you did, too.” Jayce breathes, eyebrows set, suddenly serious. He waits a beat before his own shameless confession. “But I don’t regret it.”
This would have angered him, once. Jayce’s selfish love, the only part of him that is, greedy heart hiding under a sunlike smile.
“I know,” he simply replies, biting the flesh of his lips til he tastes blood again.
Damnation and a sunless sky seem a meager price to pay for the chance of burrowing into his heat.
And through it all, fucking him shallow or deep, it is no more about hunger than it is about Jayce, unraveling as he himself feels frayed at the seams.
He comes undone like a man.
Jayce’s eyebrows gather in supplication like a martyr.
Outside, the first lights of day shine through, pale and dull, as always.
In his arms, Jayce is battered, bruised and content.
“Don’t leave,” he whispers against the back of Viktor’s spine. “Please.”
He stretches, admonishes. “Jayce.”
He will have to feed again. And again. And one day, enforcers will catch him. Throw him in Stillwater, or worse.
“Don’t you have work you want to do? A city to run?”
Jayce’s breath tickles the side of his ear. “All I want is my partner back.”
Sorrow catches the crevices between his ribs. “He’s half-gone already.”
“Then let me enjoy this while it lasts.”
So stubborn. So proud, his Jayce. A heart so easily broken.
Viktor will do it a hundred times, and Jayce will let him.
He turns, pressing a light kiss to his temple. “Come. We need to at least wash some of this off of you.”
There is a man, standing in his doorway. He takes the shape of a familiar friend.
He kisses like an old wound.
His footsteps are quiet, black as soot.
He watches him with cool gold eyes, and wipes blood off Jayce’s guilty, guilty heart with something akin to tenderness.
Had he been stronger, he would have stood in his shower alone, with Viktor’s ashes encased in a box, waiting to be spread across the true city of progress.
But he is a weak man, in love with a ghost, and Viktor’s hands hold him in place.