Chapter Text
Ever thought of calling when you've had a few?
No story that starts with an overpass and a bottle of vodka ends well.
Viktor knows this. It blares faintly like some muddied warning in the back of his head as he watches the headlights of the cars under him flash past in bright bursts - exploding supernovas caged in the bulbs of machines. The alcohol is heavy on his tongue but it slides down smooth as oil. His tolerance has hit this terrible equilibrium where he’s still a lightweight but the effects are dampened - it just makes him fuzzy, not numb.
He’s standing on the overpass with a bottle and death wish. He’s a cliche ripped right out of some sad contemporary novel, which is how he knows he’s truly hit rock bottom. It’s fucking freezing this time of year - the wind bites at his skin, locks his muscles into stone blocks. It's the kind of cold that worms down the collar of your shirt and skims across the hem of your pants, pressing flat and ruthless against slivers of skin. The frigid air is only fought off by the bottle he’s incrementally sipping from. Every year he hopes it will get warmer. Every year the opposite happens.
He traces one of the names carved into the railing, spirals like a routine, and here's the big question: is it possible to be disillusioned if you were never fucking illusioned in the first place? Can you really be floored by the crushing dullness of life when you always knew there would be nothing but crushing dullness? Logic says no; Viktor's existence says yes. Life is cruel for serving him debilitating disappointment even with the safeguard of having zero expectations. It’s funny, actually. Ironic. If he had the energy he’d laugh, but he isn’t quite that manic yet.
Zaun's city lights are multicoloured, some imitation of variety and excitement, but Viktor's world is back in greyscale; it had been back in greyscale for a while. Everything about it is washed over in some noir filter: the empty labs. The whiteboard scribbles that trailed off to nothing after the equal sign. The stacks of work to mark, the same rectangle boulders of classes to teach, blocked out in his timetable. The realisation that he was forgetting all of his students’ faces. The chronic pain that became little more than pestering white noise in his life. The loneliness that snarled like an anguished howl. The cold. The dishwasher that didn’t exactly work right, that he did not have enough energy to fix. The same pothole he drove over every morning that he couldn’t avoid. The same Sisyphean routine - reliving the one day again, and again and again.
He presses his forehead against the cold railing and takes another swig of the bottle. Again, fuzziness - static. No numbness. The world is glitching around him. Instinctively, he digs blindly for his phone in his pocket. When he fishes it out his vision is slightly blurry - letters fade into blobs, names become squiggly impressions.
He should probably text Sky. He doesn’t. He forces out a short sigh, more pained than relieving, when he taps into one of the long-abandoned chats - cobwebbed over with age, that conversation. And honestly, what the hell. He’d blocked Viktor years ago, anyway. Whatever Viktor had to say would disappear into the technological void. Another closed door, another sealed letterbox.
Viktor leans over the edge, imagines slipping, imagines the release of the impact. The sad thing is that he has no spectacular reason for wanting to die. He’s not going out with a bang, reacting nobly, resisting some act of cruelty - he’s just giving up; his death is as boring as the rest of his existence.
But it will be a release. For two short seconds he will fly, before he explodes on the concrete. He needs this. He needs the warmth of the blood on his skin. He needs steady arms to hold him. He needs to hear the laugh of a golden boy who doesn’t belong to him. He needs and he’s been needing so desperately, so painfully for years, fucking years –
Viktor opens his eyes and he steadies himself with a sharp breath, takes a step back. Vertigo swarms his consciousness, makes his legs weak. A horn blares and tapers off from under him. The wind kicks up and it’s a sobering slap to the face. His hands are shaking.
He needs to go home.
Funny thing is this: Viktor had met Jayce on the overpass with a bottle of vodka.
Eleven years ago he was strolling on an overpass just like this one - except it had been slightly warmer that night. Eleven years ago he’d met for the first time a boy sitting roughly where he’s leaning now, just teetering over the railing as if the hardness of the asphalt could save him. Eleven years ago his eyes had gazed into the lost, glassy surprise of hazel ones, and his life had bled colour. Rivulets of it, bright and violent and glorious.
There’d been an Orientation Week event in their second semester of university. Viktor was dragged there by Sky - in all their years of friendship, that was the evillest thing she’d ever done.
“You need to put yourself out there,” Sky had said. Viktor had no idea where “there” was, but regardless, he didn’t want to be out anywhere. “There”, by the by, turned out to be a makeshift club in one of the multi-purpose rooms on campus. Viktor would hesitate to call the music music - not a fucking semblance of a tune, there. It sounded like a power tool mating with a jet engine.
He’d told Sky such upon walking in, to which she’d replied: “what did you say?!”
“I said–” His voice drowned immediately. It was a curious effect; if he screamed nobody would hear. Like outer space. “Never mind.”
He’d spent three whole minutes in the room, barely surviving the bass track that rattled each of his individual bones, and then promptly left, picking up a whole bottle of vodka on the way out. He did not have patience like the other students who were clearly out of their depth - they bobbed awkwardly to the not-music, waiting for the high to kick in. Viktor could not afford to have patience. He was living on a ticking time bomb. He only had one life and he was not spending it jumping up and down like a rabbit at a half-assed rave. He knew that Sky likely would only last another ten minutes in there - clubbing was not her scene either - but she could deal with it. He was in no mood to be gracious to someone who had literally hauled him off his couch and out the door.
Drink and spite emboldened him to trek around the city like a crazy person, just waiting to be kidnapped. Well, who was he fucking kidding? This was shiny golden Piltover. People didn’t get kidnapped. People walked around at night like psychos. Felonies were probably the stuff of fiction.
Fear of kidnapping gone, and body numbed considerably by the vodka, the walk was marginally pleasant, so long as he pretended the world around him was a movie set. The stretches of preserved historical buildings were made from plaster and foam; the sky was painted, each star formed by a paintbrush dipped in the white. The people he passed and their blurry faces were extras. He was an actor. He was not Viktor. This was not his real body, and not his real life; only the shell of whatever role he had been cast in in this universe.
Floating and not quite on earth, he had already wandered down the highway and was halfway up the ramp to the overpass before he registered that his leg would be dead in the morning, burning with pain. He faltered for half a second, decided he could blame Sky for it, and continued. It was nice up here, a little closer to the moon - the city lights blinked over the bridge, close-up manmade constellations. The traffic roared under him; he could feel the vibrations through his shoes, the restless hum of the night.
A buzz from his pocket - he slid his phone out. It was, as always, Sky.
Where are you???
I’m sorry for forcing you to come but are you safe? Call me I’m being fr rn!!!!
Guilt trickled in slowly, a tepid stone in his gut. He threw her back what he hoped was a reassuring response: I’m fine. Taking a walk. Sorry for abandoning you.
Realistically, he knew why Sky had dragged him out, although he kept those thoughts boxed up in some dusty corner of his mind. Viktor did not exactly have friends, or a circle. He’d tried, but apparently he had a resting bitch face, a poor attitude and no patience for meaningless conversation. The fact didn’t bother him, not entirely - admittedly there were moments where he spotted two people with heads dipped together in conversation in the university courtyard, or watched a group of laughing students hurriedly hushing their tones before entering the library, and felt the disorienting reminder that people lived like this. People had friends in real life. To some extent in his mind, they were also just actors.
Legs numb and thoughts temporarily stymied, he stopped at the top step of the overpass and froze. There was somebody sitting on the railing, head dipped, legs swinging. For a moment Viktor thought he’d imagined it - his vision was blurring in and out like a camera lens struggling to focus. The wind whistled around him as he ventured closer, strategically leaving a few metres between them. (Piltover may not have kidnappers, but he wasn't taking any chances.)
He squinted again - that was definitely a real person.
He blinked the fuzziness out of his eyes. Raising his voice to be heard above the muted bustle, he asked pleasantly: “am I interrupting?”
Clearly Viktor was, if the leg-swinging death wish's reaction had any indication. The man’s head whipped to the left to stare at Viktor, surprise melting almost immediately into annoyance. His expression was crystal clear. He was not an extra. “What the hell’s your problem?”
He’d heard that one before, and he had half a mind to laugh, vodka toggling the faucet of endorphins open in his brain. “Do you want an alphabetised list?” Viktor had peered over the edge of the overpass. The traffic was light that night. The lights on the freeway were quite pretty, especially when he squinted to muddy his vision. He leaned against the railing, taking the weight off his leg. “Nice night for an attempt, no?”
The man stared at him like he was an idiot.
Viktor raised the alcohol like a peace offering. “Vodka?”
The man squinted at the bottle like Viktor had handed him a raw placenta, before his shoulders had dropped. “Sure. Why not.” His fingers brushed Viktor’s when he took the offering. He took a painful swig, wincing as it went down.
Viktor hummed when the man handed the bottle back, and he took a graceful sip. “What was your plan, even?”
The responding voice had been flat. “Wait til a truck comes up and then throw myself over.”
“You’d have to time it well,” Viktor commented. “Or else you might land on the truck and not in front of it.”
“Yeah, I know.” The student swung his legs. “I did calculations.”
Viktor had been impressed by the man’s dry wit, until he pulled out a small notebook from his hoodie pocket and flipped it open to reveal extremely literal and extremely precise scientific diagrams on the trajectory of his hypothetical fall.
Viktor stared at the notebook, brain swinging like a volatile pendulum between horror and deep fascination, and startled a laugh, looking up to meet eyes flickering with mossy green. “There’s something very wrong with you.”
“Well, I was planning to jump off a bridge. So, yeah.” The words were grim but something lighter had entered the man’s voice. He’d asked: “what’s your name?”
“Viktor. That’s– a very professional diagram.” The equations were perfect, the arc of a sharpened pencil clean. Viktor tore his eyes from the notebook to the man’s earnest expression. “I assume you’re a STEM student?”
“Yeah. First year engineering.” A short pause. “Well, formerly. I’m…getting expelled.”
That explained the bridge. “Within one semester?” Viktor asked. “Impressive. What did you do?”
“Blew up the new lab on a stupid project,” the student responded vaguely. There was so much self-loathing in his voice that it was startling - painful.
Some memory in Viktor’s tipsy mind clicked into place, and his eyebrows raised in recognition. “Ah. You’re Jayce Talis.”
“Unfortunately.” A self-deprecating smile. Talis reached out for the vodka again, and Viktor passed it over. “I’m sure you’ve heard everything about me.”
Anyone in Piltover University with a pair of functioning ears knew who Jayce Talis was - he’d become something of a microcelebrity in the past few weeks, ever since the entire wall of the newly opened engineering wing had been blown off. Apparently things like that simply never happened in Piltover. Viktor felt the aftershocks from across campus and determined that it was an average Tuesday. Everyone else around him collectively lost their shit.
Perceptions of the perpetrator were mixed. It ranged from domestic terrorist to heroic protestor of institutionalism to terminal dumbass. In Viktor’s Foundations of Engineering lecture, one of his classmates had said: “I had an evening class and I saw Talis from across the lawn when I walked out and I swear to God, my soul left my body. I thought he was going to kill me.” Another person next to him had said: “I wish I was in that lab when it exploded, dude. I got a fucking 27% on my midsem.”
For every article the news pumped out, Piltover University's PR department shot out its arm of Suing Power and snatched it back down. It was actually quite funny. Viktor would observe the tug-o-war every morning, watching articles appear and disappear on his news app.
Viktor observed the face behind the name. He looked beautiful. He looked young. He also looked terribly lonely. Viktor was not excellent at reading people, but he could read misery - the way you spot your own darkened eyes in the mirror, the way you magnetise to a like force in a crowd.
“I have heard everything about you,” Viktor conceded, fingers tapping along the railing. There was a heart carved by some spontaneous lovers - he traced the clumsy etchings. “But I know nothing about you.”
Jayce shrugged, gaze unfocused. “There’s not much to know.”
Viktor doubted that, truly. His eyes flitted down to Jayce’s Piltover University hoodie. “Nice merch. Still loyal to advertising the university after they kicked you out?”
Jayce had laughed, resigned. A shade of what a real Jayce laugh sounded like, Viktor would soon learn. “I thought it would be pretty scandalous if people found a Piltover kid dead on the road. Might shake their reputation a bit.” He sounded slightly ashamed when he said it, as if he was becoming awfully self-conscious of how far he had fallen.
Viktor kept his voice calm. “You have a fascinating mind.” And he meant it entirely - Viktor did not say things he did not mean. He was acutely aware that Jayce was still sitting on the railing and very much at risk of falling off. So he’d said: “tell me more about this project of yours.”
Jayce turned to him finally, and stared blankly. “We’d be here all night.”
“Yes. And I cannot stand for one whole night,” Viktor had quipped simply, cocking a head in the direction of his cane. “So I suggest we go back to the student dorms so we can make ourselves comfortable.”
Viktor held out a hand. Jayce faltered for a moment before he took it. Viktor had not let go until they were fully off the looming stretch of the overpass.
Viktor doesn’t think about that night often. He doesn’t try to think about Jayce, period, even though there was a long time in his life where he was the only thing Viktor ever thought about.
He wakes up the next morning sick from vodka and with his ex-partner imprinted across his consciousness like an iron-hot brand. He has to remind himself that he is, in fact, not dead, that he did not throw himself over the railing. He’s stunned at his ability to fail every task he’s attempted.
He doesn’t have the liver and pure insanity of a first-year university student anymore. But his brain is largely the same - volatile, mean, depressed. The fatigue and sadness presses like a pile of stones. He calls off sick for the next few days. It’s the biggest service he’s done himself in a while, although he tells himself it’s really for his students, whose names and faces he cannot remember.
The worst thing about his depressive episodes - emotional damage notwithstanding - is that it strips away all of the things that make him him - the tenacity, the passion, the discipline, the routine. The dry wit. The quick thinking. He’s wrung dry and empty like a threadbare sheet ghost and it’s a harrowing feeling, to be conscious of your own nothingness. All that’s left is a collection of bones and skin and flesh that hates the world and hates himself to the core.
He’s been lying in the same position for far too long - his hip burns and his shoulder is going numb. The sunlight struggles through the thick curtains. He doesn’t move. He cycles through every mistake he’s made in the past few weeks, a scrutinising and loathing probe. He thinks about the overpass again, both of them.
He gets up only once to refill his glass of water, and then he crawls back into bed. There’s no point sleeping - he is too sad to do that, even. He just lies there, cold.
Viktor is not a poet but the actor analogy makes sense to him. He is a puppet in a pre-written film by a director who languishes off of his misery.
Here’s how it goes: boy is lonely. Alcohol and overpass cliche. Boy meets boy. Boy loves boy. Boy does not say a word about it. Happy montage. Slice of life montage. Sad montage. Boy and boy grow further apart. Boy leaves boy. Boy does not get over it. Alcohol and overpass cliche returneth. Boy is lonely.
Sisyphean indeed.
It has been two hours lying here. His inbox is flooding with emails, and he knows he has three missed calls from Sky. He rolls over to give his other hip a turn at bearing the weight of his whole body. He wants this movie to end.
Viktor’s brain rolls into consciousness some hour in the afternoon, shaken lethargically into alertness by an insistent pounding at his door. The voice is frantic, pitched higher than it usually is. No matter - Viktor would recognise it in any corner of the earth, in any chapter of his life.
“Viktor?”
For a moment he thinks he’s dreaming. It’s not uncommon for him to hear his long-estranged partner’s voice calling out to him after too many all-nighters - sometimes a soft echo just behind him, sometimes an anguished scream from across the country. He’s not sure which iteration is worse. Sky had said with the half-suppressed grief of a message sent too late, Viktor, that means you love him. Vi had said, oh my God, bitch, you have schizophrenia.
His second thought is that he might be dead, and that he’d actually fallen over the railing of the overpass and not realised. Whether Jayce’s presence indicates heaven or hell is yet to be decided.
The knocking continues. Viktor had specifically not installed a doorbell to deter visitors. Somehow, he hadn’t considered that the alternative would be people hammering his door down. An uncharacteristic oversight on his part. He hauls himself out of bed, almost immediately wants to flop back down, and fights that urge with the very little strength he has left. His apartment is not big, but he might as well be trekking the Sahara, the amount of time it takes to get out his room and across the living room and to the front door. The dishwater that he still hasn’t fixed coughs mournfully when he walks past it, floorboards cold and loud under his feet.
He opens the door with a learned cautiousness, claps eyes on his visitor and he dies on the spot. Well, no, he doesn't really, although it’d be welcome - he just blacks out for all of two seconds before scraping some semblance of cohesive thought together in his brain.
He feels like he's been gut-punched and pulled into an embrace at the same time, which feels as terrible and confusing as it sounds. The world suddenly makes no sense - time trickles backwards, the sun is dead, Jayce Talis is on his fucking doorstep. They are both five years older yet simultaneously, no time has passed at all.
“Jayce?” His name sounds foreign in his mouth - out of use. Viktor’s voice is pitched up at the end like a question, which to be fair is what Jayce has become in the past few years - an unanswered query, some abstract concept blurred at the corners, uncertain. An unsolved equation long given up on.
Jayce’s expression falls slack with relief, his shoulders heaving with a shaky sigh. He’s so real, it’s startling - all these years and he still hasn’t become an extra. Viktor feels slightly faint.
“Viktor.” It comes in a reverent exhale and Viktor’s entire body seizes up at the sound of it. “You’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive?” That one sounds like a question too. The air between them is profoundly awkward and uncomfortable; as if they’d tried to fit into a coat long outgrown.
“Yeah, I just didn’t think I’d…” Jayce’s voice tapers off and Viktor reads, with practised precision, every ambiguous emotion he cycles through in the next five seconds. Relief, confusion, fear, grief. Relief again. Something close to care and affection that Viktor doesn’t want to delude himself into believing is there. His voice is impossibly gentle. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
Weird, weird, this is getting too weird– So he does exactly what a sane and healthy person would do. He slams the door in Jayce’s face, narrowly missing the man’s fingers. Jayce’s yelp of surprise would be comical if Viktor wasn’t so incredibly fucked right now.
Jayce, true to Jayce fashion, doesn't waste a minute before he starts talking.
“V, please.” Viktor’s throat tightens at the familiar nickname, thrown out without thinking. “Can I– You can’t just shut me out–”
“I just did.” He’s been doing it for years. Viktor forces the words out through gritted teeth. “Why are you here?”
There’s a moment of agonising silence, and then a deep breath. Jayce's voice is remarkably even. “You asked me to come.”
“I did not,” Viktor answers calmly, even as his heart rate spikes up traitorously. “I don’t believe there’s a single universe where I would have–”
Jayce’s voice comes exasperated, and Viktor knows the exact expression he’s making, the hand he’s running down his face. “Open your messages.”
Viktor is so above taking orders from this motherfucker, but some sordid feeling - close to dread and skewing dangerously towards horror - is already creeping up on him. His hands are stiff when he slides his phone out of his pocket and taps silently into the messaging app.
Ah.
“So I did,” he says, keeping his voice steady, even as the fabric of reality twists around him and folds itself into some origami middle-finger because what the hell. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you.”
That’s a stupid thing to say. Viktor doesn’t say stupid things. He assesses the solidness of the wall and considers knocking himself out.
“You don’t have to apologise.” Jayce’s voice is soft. Not even consciously - as if he just naturally has this instinctive tenderness reserved for Viktor after all these years. “I just– Can I come in?”
Viktor considers the closed door in front of him. He considers the many nights he’d wanted - needed - Jayce to be on the other side of it, waiting. After so many years, still waiting.
Viktor considers that he was literally going to jump off an overpass one night ago, and he doesn’t really have anything to lose.
Because I always do