Chapter Text
Viktor has no friends his own age.
It is a thought that occurs to him as he’s stepping onto the train. Over the tinny speakers, a man’s voice barks something in English that Viktor’s ears struggle to translate. Something to do with the express to Dorset. Just a final boarding call, he hopes, but he glances around, looking for clues on the faces of other passengers. They all seem to be traveling in clusters, nullifying his data. People, he has found, are much better at disguising their fear when they’ve got at least one companion to split the feeling with. The masses do not care nor seem to notice that this is simply resolution of force, impact distributed; they care only that they are not alone.
The sight of his cane affords him zero sympathy as he shuffles down the aisle in search of a seat. The masses do not stand, coincidentally absorbed by glossy-faced literature and loose threads on seatbacks. Briefly, the way that rot is brief, Viktor entertains the idea of traveling with a companion. The idea is as alien as thinking of someone else wearing his skin. He forces himself to picture it, a violent metamorphosis. No thank you, he thinks, with perhaps a touch of haughty self-satisfaction when making himself as small as possible accomplishes him half of a window seat. That’s something he couldn’t do if he were travelling with friends.
The seat is his own, briefly, in the tide of moving bodies between stations, before the inscrutable voice of the speaker announces that the train will no longer be stopping until Dorset. Which is, after all, what express means. Viktor should be relieved. Dorset is where all of his friends are.
Viktor does have friends. Of a kind. Professor Heimerdinger counts, he maintains, even if their generational gap and certain history have admittedly embedded into its bedrock a one-sided tone of patrony that is far too foundational to their relationship to risk disturbing. If he asked any of his students, Viktor is unconvinced they would be able to tell his and Heimer’s ages apart, but Viktor can still recall how it had felt to sip cognac in his office for the first time and hear the man go on about the first world war. Viktor is old, but not that old.
Miss Sky Young is another technicality that allows Viktor the pluralisation. She is one of the only people at the Academy he can stomach, face-to-face, for longer than five minutes, although this, really, is not saying much. Viktor’s poker face is excellent; his tolerance has always been the problem. A pity that he left before he and Sky could enjoy a legal drink together; they will have to find something else to do now on the handful of weekends she manages to coax him from his room.
No one has ever remarked anything about finding it strange that Viktor gets on so well with a former student. Sky certainly doesn’t seem to care, lacking a stomach for what is so apparently integral to Viktor’s only other relationship. She is an opinionated, unrepentant talker, professedly of the opinion that the shared obviousness of their upbringings—poverty and immigration—means that they share some core wound, too, that makes them equals. Viktor has never outwardly disagreed with her. Best not to: she is no stranger to picking childish fights with Viktor, if it will get him talking at all. She’s well-read, but young enough that more than half of his references are lost on her, rendering their capacity for understanding ultimately finite. Which is fine. Viktor isn’t looking for understanding. More than eighty per cent of what he says to everyone else winds up lost in translation anyway; he can work with Sky’s forty.
Six months. That is how long he has been away from the Academy.
He should really stop calling it that. But no one at the Academy would ever bother spitting out all of Piltover Priory Grammar in one go. Viktor should start; he had planned to, practicing a million times over a long and ambling summer spent forcing himself to read from official documentation in the smudgy bathroom mirror, letters that preferred words like sabbatical over banishment. (The apartment preferred neither.) But he can’t. The apartment was nice, the same way he supposes breathing can be nice, but the Academy is home.
It has always been home, in a way. Although maybe it just feels like that on account of how long he’s been there. Viktor doesn’t know the exact number of hours, couldn’t begin to approximate this without needlessly revisiting an ugly mental photo album of uncherished memories. Long is the part that matters. Long enough to mutate from some obvious, impoverished, shivering boything into a man capable of sprouting (albeit whiteish) facial hair: miracle upon miracles, proof of God, et cetera. Long enough to count another couple wars. Long enough to… well, long enough to not remember how long, he thinks bitterly, how’s that?
Viktor wonders whether they’ve repaired the part of the lab that got destroyed yet. He hopes it was expensive. He hadn’t gotten to see the full extent of the damage before they were already quietly but firmly ushering him away from anywhere he might chance observation, as if to look upon him was to damn the soul. God forbid any trash be left out on the tidy schoolgrounds. Nobody bothered offering to show it to him on his way out, even though the lab had technically been Viktor’s, and they had never discussed it with him either, although he supposes that all makes sense given that Viktor had already taken the blame for it. There’s an assumed knowledge that comes with an admission of guilt that no one ever bothered warning him about. It was, in the end, quite annoying.
It is a waste to bother wondering whether Jayce Talis is grateful. He’s not.
It doesn’t matter; Viktor is the one who strung himself up and decided to be a martyr. The mortification of submitting to it is enough. The less anyone knows the better.
He can’t help but feel as though he’s returning from exile, tail tucked and ears back. The feeling only grows stronger the closer the train edges to Dorset. He had thought it would feel triumphant; he had thought himself clear-headed, healed from his time spent hermiting in the city like one returning from a fabled seaside respite. He would be lying if he did not acknowledge that his mind is at the very least a fraction quieter after twelve weeks spent self-isolating in Hemerdinger’s city loft. He had been kind, to rent it to Viktor. The stay was unexpectedly peaceful. Viktor is—had been—writing again.
Suffice to say, things are looking up as a result of his quiet pause, or as up as things are as capable of looking to someone in his position. He hasn’t touched a drink in twelve and a half weeks. That’s an achievement, something to be proud of. A feather in his cap.
Viktor shivers. Cold already. The apartment in the city was always warm; Viktor had the freedom to control the temperature there whenever he wanted. He should scold himself for being so negative. What does he have now, if not academia? He has wasted his life on it if nothing else. Science taught to silver-spooned brats who would shed the knowledge like mud on their way out the door. But not all of them have been like that.
It’s not like Viktor has anywhere else to go at this point, short of returning to his dead mother’s home in the countryside and retiring to total isolation. He would rather return to a place that would let him take the blame for something he had obviously not done than seal himself away in that tomb. He cannot imagine braving the terror of being alone with his own thoughts that way, nothing but the scream of nature and a hollow rebounding emptiness to answer back to him if he ever decided to use his voice again.
Every time he thinks of selling it, he is forced to remember his earliest memories in that house, before it was a tomb: his Máma and Babi in the light of the kitchen, a fat grey kitten sleeping on a tea towel at the foot of Viktor’s bed. He’s not sure how many of these memories are real and how many are simply distortions of time and misused neural pathways; he lacks the primary sources to consult on account of everyone involved being dead, up to and including the kitten. Viktor is too old to feel sad about it now. Conjuring it results in nothing more than a faint shudder of discomfort, an ache like pressing an old bruise.
The stranger he’s sitting next to on the train is spreading carelessly into Viktor’s space, smothering him. The Academy is always so crowded—but his room there is small and tidy and quiet, flanked by unoccupied rooms in small clusters on either side, tucked between the manual elevator and the bulging curve of a stairwell. Viktor is looking forward to being reunited with it. He is less so looking forward to being reunited with his students, which he would have found alarming a decade ago, if not earnestly depressing. But he simply does not care enough for the kinds of boys who end up in his classroom to feel anything. Nothing revolutionary going on there, not these days anyway.
The man beside him can’t be older than twenty. A recent graduate, perhaps; he spreads like an invasive taxon across Viktor’s seat, into his lap, forcing both of his knees to turn in at an angle. It’s hell on Viktor’s bad leg. Never mind the fact that, like this, he’s forced to sit with his cane crushed between his own body and the wall, digging in where he’s boniest and likely to bruise. Recent Graduate doesn’t care. He’s probably on his way to some thrice-inherited coastal summer home for the annual ritual sacrifice, or whatever it is the well bred do for fun in Dorset.
He disembarks with Recent Graduate at the final station. Viktor doesn’t see where he goes; he’s too busy sighing in trembling relief when he realises that Mel has sent a car.
The ride back to the Academy is surprisingly short and mercifully free of conversation. Viktor counts the tops of houses the steeper they climb the hill until he can’t see a lick of civilisation anywhere, only wet marshy earth and grey sky, until finally they mount the top and the ancient face of the Academy breaches the horizon, nestled at the edge of the cliffs that watch over the sea with their blunt godly faces.
Viktor despises the ocean. He had once found it mesmerising the way that all city-born rats find novelty mesmerising, but even now the signs of it—air hewn rough with salt, cloying to the airways, briney-wet-pruning lick of moisture to everything—grate like sandpaper to the senses, overwhelming him the closer they near the edge. Viktor wishes the driver would roll the windows up. It is impossible not to feel depressed, strapped down in the backseat with his lungs rattling wetly, as the natural green around them gives way to a brutal grey rise. There, he thinks hopelessly, at least now the sky matches the architecture.
The driver stops in front of the entrance to the west wing teachers parking lot, where Viktor will have to parade himself and his luggage over the uneven stone before proceeding down an endless corridor, which will no doubt be swarming with staff and students alike at this time of day. It’s fine; he was planning on speaking with a few colleagues before he settled in tonight anyway.
Headmistress Merdarda meets him by the car, paying the driver with a pre-signed cheque at the window. She doesn’t bother disguising her blatant appraisal of Viktor’s physical state as he’s clambering out: blank from the waist down, forehead creased by the time she reaches his eyeline. Whatever impurities she detects, she deems irrelevant to Viktor’s ability to return to work tomorrow. “I trust you received your allotment and schedule in the mail already?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“There are copies at the front desk. Admin staff can have them faxed to your office.”
“Ah. There’s no need.”
Mel smiles tightly. Viktor doesn’t dislike her. He wasn’t exactly thrilled when she replaced Heimerdinger—more upset at the idea of the old man being quietly asked to step down than he was focused on the quality of his replacement at the time—but the science department has run more smoothly in the years since old Heimerdinger was put in charge of it, and Viktor is far from too proud to admit that Mel does a suitable job of overseeing the school. It’s not her fault the council is like that; the problem predates her.
“How are you, Viktor?”
He’s unsure whether she wants him to be honest, so settles on, “A little tired,” prompting a good-natured aren’t-we-all type of laugh that those in education tended to excel at.
“Well, you’d better make sure you get plenty of sleep tonight. Start of a new semester, there’s bound to be chaos.”
“Yes, they do tend to start and finish the term like animals,” Viktor agrees, and does not miss the way that Mel’s smile twitches. Ah. He is no longer permitted to make jokes, then, in light of his sins.
“It can certainly feel that way. I used to teach; I know it can be an overwhelming job.” Her pause lasts all of two seconds. “If you should ever find yourself overwhelmed again…”
The again is unnecessary. “Yes,” Viktor finds himself saying, “thank you, I’m aware of the overwhelming amount of resources at my disposal. What a relief I decided to go into education, eh?”
Mel is back to smiling tightly, successfully outmaneuvered. “Yes, how fortunate. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling supported, Viktor. Although… if I can just be candid for a moment, on a personal note…”
“I’m feeling fine,” Viktor emphasises, trying not to sound impatient. “Better than fine. Rested, honestly.”
“I’m glad to hear it. These children need you.” Viktor is definitely imagining the misplaced emphasis in her voice. “You’re an excellent teacher.”
“That’s very kind of you to say.”
“I mean it. Never allow an impulse to stand in the way of something you were born to do.” When she smiles at him, it is Heimderinger’s smile. Viktor feels an odd stab of fury; she is fifteen years younger than him.
“I appreciate it,” he says, careful to enunciate in perfect English, and gestures to excuse himself and his luggage.
She insists on helping him through the door, and then instructs the first subordinate she can locate to escort him to the eastern wing’s staff dormitory. Viktor is left with the excruciating task of convincing the man, a first-year English teacher, that he does not actually need his help. He does not manage to stumble across either of the two people he was hoping to speak to, but the act of trudging across the halls of the Academy on the last night of the summer holidays is such a sensory nightmare that he decides it can wait until morning.
Finally, at the conclusion of what feels like a genuine hike and leaves his leg screaming, Viktor reaches his island paradise. The door is reluctant to unlock. A single lightswitch flip reveals the ever-familiar portrait of asceticism Viktor missed so much: scuffed wooden floor and single unmade cot, white walls bare except for the single cross sitting above the metal headboard, its wood a few shades darker than the floor.
Viktor unpacks his meagre belongings into the closet and the nightstand, then sets about making the bed. By the time he’s done he’s too exhausted to even flirt with the idea of walking all the way to the showers. He’s clean enough, anyway, and there is a sink in the cramped ensuite toilet hidden behind the other door if he wakes in the night feeling less so. A luxury, and the main reason he sleeps all the way in the east wing.
Perhaps it’s a little pathetic to be spending his first night home—for this is certainly what he should think of it as—alone, pale legs folded above untouched white covers, entombed in silence save for the distant hum of activity and the sigh-like turning of pages. By the time he returns the battered novel to his nightstand, it is just about late enough to permit sleep.
He wakes earlier than usual, starving, and is unable to find a suitable excuse to avoid the dining hall. This, too, is located an inconvenient hike from the plumbed dormitory. Viktor tries to invoke some pleasurable feeling from it, the way he had used to enjoy his morning walks through the cloysters while the seasons were busy changing, but this morning the most he can conjure is a muted dread.
When he was younger, Viktor was much more susceptible to beauty. He is not braindead enough to try claiming the Academy isn’t beautiful. It is; it has to be; it is an elite private boarding school in the middle of nowhere; beauty is unavoidable. Set against the saintlike cliffs, caught in a climate famous for its unbearably muggy summers and winterlong whiteouts, the schoolgrounds, formerly the old Dorset monastery, are huge and draughty. Old yew trees stand in sentinel lines outside the open-sided cloysters between buildings, which even when packed with bodies are as cold as tombs in the winter. As he rounds the corner and the sharp scent of Hawthorn fills his nostrils, Viktor turns his face and encounters, as expected, the sight of a bell tower rendered miniature by perspective, just visible in the far distance over the rise of a grassy hill. Proof of life elsewhere.
Beyond it, he visualises the cliffs; even farther, the lighthouse. On some days the sea and sky become a mirror of each other, that same barren shade of grey, both cut apart by strips of white like runs through fatty meat. There are small things, like this, that Viktor likes about the Academy—and others, like the cloister garden that cooks into a hothouse in the summer (and as such can be found reliably abandoned); the wooden chapel; the science block, where Viktor spends most of his daylight hours, in the ugly stone building they added in the sixties. He enjoys the peaceful design of the old dormitories, the beautiful library and its almost-silence. His bedroom. The lab.
The dining hall is located within the bowels of the labyrinthine main building, already filled at this hour with rows of grey uniforms. Viktor proceeds to the teachers’ bench without stumbling into any uncomfortable eye contact, a victory, which leaves him in a regulated enough state not to startle when Sky arrives to claim the empty spot at his side a few minutes later.
“Have you seen your schedule?”
He adores that she forgoes any small talk. They are, the two of them, very famously bad at attempting it together. “Of course.”
“Have you checked out the classes?”
“Why?” He feels his eyebrows cant up. He thinks, helplessly, of the one year he got stranded with what the council have cheerfully requested that teachers stop referring to as the Purgatory parade, a shameful (but inevitable) assortment of students whose attitudes and poor academic outcomes should have meant expulsion, but who remain inexorably bolted in place by daddy’s money. Wicked, every last one of them. Viktor had pursued teaching with all the youthful positive ideations in the world, but there’s no helping every child. Some of them are just rotten. It’s the same rot that infects all the trees they’ve fallen from, Viktor would confidently wager, not that he ever met the parents of these sorts, always strangely absent until the question of expulsion came up. Oh God, he’s going to be stuck doing that again.
But Sky is grinning with her teeth, and Viktor doesn’t think it’s the sort of grin that means he’s about to be sent to the guillotine. He’s been wrong about these things before. Her elbow digs into his ribcage. “Few promising boys in the Upper Sixth this year. To be fair, I got one of them. You pretty much got the other four.”
“Oh.” Not an execution, then. “I’m on a reduced schedule. I only have two classes, and nothing until the afternoon. I was going to check my class lists later.”
“You should check them now. I’m surprised no one’s started bugging you about Golden Boy yet.”
Viktor’s blood congeals.
His mood, which was admittedly fragile to begin with, is instantly ruined. Jayce Talis is in one of his classes. He can’t be—but then, of course he can, Viktor thinks, pulse racing helplessly—why not?
His first instinct, the routine of a trapped animal, is to go to Heimerdinger—but he can’t do that. What on earth would he say? There’s nothing he can do about it now anyway, classes have started, and oh, Jesus. Oh, God. Viktor is having a panic attack, he realises. He doesn’t usually have panic attacks in public.
He’s spared scrutiny by his unflinching ability to internalise every single one of his emotions in an instant. If Sky notices, she keeps any reaction from her face. “I forget, have you taught him already? Or was it just that you were grading his papers… they’re not still making you do that, are they? On your reduced load?”
“It was, ehm, just the papers,” Viktor mumbles, appalled with himself for losing composure at a single mention of Jayce. Sky hasn’t even said his name.
It is probably a lost cause, at this point—patently, Viktor has gone on enough impassioned rants to Heimerdinger in the past that word of his twisted, prolonged obsession has likely reached other colleagues by now. Viktor spent a little under a year, prior to the incident, helping Heimderinger grade papers. Among those, some of the most depraved and ingenious writing he has ever encountered, the kind that led him to hours-long battles against Heimerdinger on the subject of marking them against the traditional academic rubric. What Jayce Talis wrote—and dutifully submitted, often late, always boldly emblazoned with his name on every page—was beyond the boundaries of anything Viktor would consider academic. It was almost as if somehow imbued into the thing had been the very essence of Jayce himself, all the drama and science of his every challenging belief laid out in imperfect, jerky handwriting. Viktor detested the handwriting, at first, as well as the signing of pages. But he had fought every battle nonetheless.
“Oh yeah, Heimer said you were a fan,” Sky recalls, which is plainly humiliating. Viktor cannot be known as a fan of a student.
“Hardly. There’s no denying that he’s smart, but it’s not exactly the first time I’ve butted heads over the rubrics. I am against rigidity in education as a rule. You can’t possibly tune out during all of my rants on the subject.”
“I don’t! Viktor, I’m sorry, I don’t. I’ve got him for extension bio, I was hoping you knew what his deal was, that’s all. I heard he’s here on a full scholarship ride. Apparently he’s got a reputation for being a bit of a handful, but that’s all coming from the phys ed department, so who knows if that’s a load of shit. I can handle argumentative kids. It’s the ones that have got so much money that they’re bored that’s the issue, don’t you think?”
Viktor hums. Jayce is probably exactly like that. Scholarship aside, Viktor has witnessed his steady climb to reach the crown that marks him the proverbial king of the Academy’s social order, as though some mythical provocation of fate, King Arthur at the helm. And he seems so smug about it, too—he is undeniably brilliant, Viktor knows that from reading his papers, and it is not unheard of for those geniuses in history whose ideas were deemed too controversial for the masses to suffer a bad reputation, but reputation is the least of Jayce’s problems.
Viktor has formed his own opinion of Jayce, nonetheless, from observation over time. His first impression was loud. American, after all, so just about as loud as you’d expect, but often Viktor will hear his voice floating above the otherwise raucous chaos of whatever hall he happens to be passing through, prompting Viktor’s eyes to seek their target.
He shrugs, affecting an overly defensive neutrality. “I have heard he likes to push buttons. Those types always do. It takes a lot for a student to impress me, though, and I have graded many of his papers. I’m afraid I might be somewhat biased in the end.”
“Oh, for sure,” Sky agrees, hand-waving away the issue of Viktor’s sick and singular fascination as if it means nothing. “I know we’re not meant to, but everyone’s got favourites. I’m glad you got so many good ones this year. Hopefully it makes things a little easier.” She picks at the edge of her tray. “Have you seen the lab?”
It is the first time Viktor turns to face her fully. “No.” The implication is clear: show me. Sky rises with her unfinished breakfast.
“Just so you know, it’s a little dodgy-looking.” Which could mean anything. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No. Please. I’d like to go alone.”
She leaves him to it unquestioned, which gives Viktor almost ten minutes to work through the panic attack in his head while he’s walking. He cannot believe he let it slip his mind, that he did not think to check on the lab before now. Viktor will still be teaching classes there. He cannot accommodate a practical unit unless they replaced the side that Jayce Talis exploded.
To say that he and Jayce have a peculiar relationship would be unfair. Relationships, Viktor reasons, tend to have at least two sides—what he and Jayce Talis share is almost certainly a product of Viktor’s mind, which makes it even more embarrassing that he has let it go on for this long.
He first became aware of the fact that Jayce was using the lab a week before he started marking his papers.
By the time it clicked for Viktor, he’d seen Jayce there twice—he can’t even remember now what the paper had been about, only that it had shifted his opinion of Jayce in an instant, transforming him from a rich, popular boy too proud to admit he needed to stay back and work on his homework and into some daring visionary terrorist hero of fables, a figment of every single one of Viktor’s hopes for the future. He wanted to teach a student like that, he remembers thinking, and so he had not minded Jayce using the lab after hours and he had continued to say nothing.
To think now, that he had left his precious lab—the same lab he worked so hard to fight for a permanent residence in, his office tacked onto the side of the building, accessible from both the inside and outside, conveniently located on the eastern edge of the campus—in the care of a child… But that’s exactly what he’d done.
Viktor was often there after hours as well, those days, usually drinking alone in his office. His go-to excuse had often been that he was never in any condition to “catch” Jayce and make him deal with the consequences, which would be public, and besides, Viktor didn’t mind letting him do whatever he was doing in there so long as he got an interesting paper out of it later. Jayce always cleaned up after himself, surprisingly polite, and if he ever noticed Viktor’s presence or the strong smell of Port coming from his office, he was discreet enough to forgo ever mentioning it.
It was a mutually assured destruction, in a way, which had largely been the appeal. He’d been aware even at the time that it was an unhealthy attachment. But during a period when Viktor had seldom seen a reason to get out of bed, he’d taken what he could get, hungry like a thing turning to the light after a period of solitary darkness.
Viktor’s problem, ultimately, is that he finds everything boring—that Jayce had been the first spark bright enough to stray his gaze from the pace at which it had been reading the lines of its life was no small miracle, and Viktor is someone who was brought up with a healthy respect for miracles.
For at least a few months, Viktor had looked forward to the hour he spent every weekday marking papers with his colleague. Then he had looked forward to sitting in his office for most of the night.
He bumped into Jayce, once, during a fire drill. It wasn’t that they never saw each other—Viktor saw Jayce often, in the hallways, in the dining room—but on this occasion he recalls a full-body collision, the sharp smell of Jayce’s deodorant as he brushed past with a careless apology.
It was the way a colleague might have apologised to Viktor, not the way the students apologised—babbling, resentful, most desperate not to earn themselves pointless demerits. He hadn’t seen Jayce again until they were all lined up, lingering at the edge of his form group with a bored, pensive expression.
Viktor had spent ten minutes pretending not to watch him before Jayce detached from his group and began walking over. The other boys in his year level were all waiting in even rows of two for their teachers to arrive, shifting nervously when they noticed Jayce’s careless abandonment. “How much longer will we be waiting?” Jayce asked, catching Viktor’s gaze and holding it with what seemed to be frighteningly little effort.
It was hardly impolite, the way he said it, but everything about Jayce was always so bold; so explicit. Viktor had been speechless. He remembers he’d gotten stuck on Jayce’s eyes, the colour of which could only be described as burning. They were the gold of something ancient; an idol, the sun. Viktor had felt monstrous that it was taking him so long to speak.
Whatever he had ended up answering was pointless when it was not the answer Jayce wanted. He’d walked off, disappointed and disinterested, while Viktor had stood in numb horror clinically weighing all the areas of his life in which Jayce Talis, unknowingly, was wreaking decimation.
He admires the boy intellectually, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem lies in the fact that Viktor has, on more than one occasion, found himself admiring Jayce on a personal level, especially when he has found himself grading journal entries, personal essays, cramped annotations. Jayce bleeds parts of himself into everything, almost more artist than he is scientist.
Once Viktor had discovered that he also excelled at actual art it was over, Jayce deemed too ridiculous to go on obsessing over—a fraud, more than likely. Only then he turned out to honestly be as brilliant an artist as he was a scientist, a fact gleaned from dozens of trips to the art and literature departments, cross-examinations of Jayce’s work. The type of art Jayce made turned out to be the baring one’s heart kind; there he was again, bleeding. It would be repulsive if he wasn’t always right, which is just infuriating, like intelligence is a needle-thin sword he could use to guard against all the hideously vulnerable squishiness of his insides, were it ever to come to that.
Of course, there is a layer of something other than armour that covers that, too, and Viktor doesn’t doubt that Jayce knows it. It isn’t Viktor’s fault that the boy happens to be beautiful. It doesn’t mean anything that he noticed it, either, nor that he noticed it early. Jayce would have turned eighteen over the summer that Viktor was away in the city, which he only knows because he’d accessed Jayce’s files, once, while searching for more papers. It means nothing. It is just something he knows, like the speed of light or the first dozen digits of pi.
In Viktor’s variegated experience, emotions are merely cues for uncovering thought. He has never allowed himself to prioritise any emotion for Jayce. Beneath every ugly chemical reaction there lies some unseen neural pathway and within that, a promise that he is stronger than what the overwhelming weight of his feelings might have him believe. A constituent element of Viktor’s signature sangfroid is his ability to intellectualise; it matters less what an emotion feels like than it does how one operates, and Viktor has often thought that if he could only apply the scalpel of self-interrogation thoroughly enough it may never catch him unawares again. This is usually motivation enough to dissect even the least comfortable of his emotions concerning Jayce, at least until he understands it in its entirety, down to its component parts: picked apart and laid out for his perusal like a dna strand. Anger is nothing new.
Once Viktor manages to work through the anger, what he finds is usually worse. He had certainly been angry to discover what a talented and sensitive artist Jayce was—infuriating, that he was now appealing in this way too—but it was not without a modicum of shame that he had uncovered the truth, which was that really he was only repulsed with himself, forever deemed the overly-sensitive artist-scientist in his youth, the very reason he’d given up painting in the first place.
Viktor painted a little, in the apartment. He has no plans to pick it up again now that he is back. He still associates the act with shame, that he’d for some reason seen fit to project his compassion for a younger version of himself onto his student—worse, onto someone else’s student—that he’d allowed Jayce to dangerously misuse department resources for such a long time, that it had, like all things do, come back to bite Viktor in the ass.
Viktor arrives at the science building, nothing on the outside to suggest that any renovations have taken place until he reaches his office. That, at least, is unblemished; the other side of this end of the building was not so lucky.
It’s clear from the colour of the paint that they hadn’t been able to match the original. Jayce’s unlucky miscalculation had torn a sizable hole in the ceiling—that, thankfully, has been patched. The inside looks relatively similar, the classroom equipment untouched bar the bunsen burners at the very back, which have been replaced by newer shinier ones, no real loss there. The rest of the equipment is new, too, mismatched to the calming wood and neutral tones of Viktor’s classroom, but that they managed to clear all the shards of glass out is victory enough. He’d flinched horribly when the window exploded.
It is Jayce’s fault, objectively, though he still hesitates to think of the incident in these terms. Viktor miscalculates often. It’s bad luck, ultimately, that Jayce’s miscalculation had led to a small explosion, which led to a fire and, subsequently, his only smart decision: to run. Viktor had been drinking in his office since four-thirty in the afternoon, and he hadn’t even thought about getting in trouble when he called the authorities; he’d only been thinking of putting it out.
By the time the fire department got there, he’d had plenty of time to watch the smoke and make his mind up about what he would say.
Viktor is lucky they didn’t fire him. If anything, Heimerdinger had written to him, the incident was a good thing, a chance to reset. Rebirth by fire. Only here he is, back again already, nothing but the off-white colour of the walls and the ugly mismatched equipment to suggest that anything has changed at all. Here he is, his chance to reset over as quickly as he’d predicted, bitterly, in the cab ride out of town. Here he is, and Jayce Talis is his fucking student.
Viktor closes his eyes. It smells like paint in here.
All year, he’d wondered what this might feel like.
He wonders how many times he’s crossed Jayce Talis’s mind since the lab blew up. Once or twice, at least, surely. Viktor had, after all, taken the blame for him. The cold dread when he imagines that Jayce might want to know why, picturing the confrontation in vivid detail, sets off his panic attack again.
Viktor bears it with gritted teeth. It is unlikely Jayce will confront him. Jayce is, at the end of the day, a kid who has gotten away with something. It is likely he will never want to talk about it again; Viktor will probably miss out on even the daring, boundary-pushing papers that had captivated him in the first place, this year… a shame. But perhaps needed, to free him from this bizarre itching fascination… to have everything just be normal. He is confident he can play the part, if Jayce does.
If nothing else, he thinks, calming himself, he is good at his job. Viktor has always had the ability to switch off the part of his brain that makes him overly tender and focus on what his hands can do. It’s the start of a new semester. There will be plenty to keep him busy.
Jayce Talis is simply one of many students he has to worry about this year. Viktor will manage; he always does.
Viktor’s final class of the day is advanced engineering. Jayce Talis is the first student to enter the room, and he selects a seat right in the middle of the front row.
Viktor stumbles through his introduction. Autopilot is a gift, and affords him the luxury of keeping his voice from shaking and his hands from trembling, which becomes easier the longer it becomes apparent that Jayce is ignoring him. Though ever the image of the studious academic—upright posture, eyes at the front of the classroom, the pages of his notebook sprawled lazily as if he might at any moment decide to start taking notes—there is an obvious glaze over his expression that Viktor is familiar with, a bored paralysis to his body language. Viktor has been called a boring teacher plenty of times. He’s unsure why it unmoors him, is unsure what he was expecting, proceeding mechanically through the script of his lesson plan like an idiot. He feels wicked, that it even matters how much of Jayce Talis’s attention he has, when there are nineteen other children in the room. He refuses to let it derail their first impression of Viktor; that sort of thing matters, in the final year.
By the time the bell rings to signal that the period is over, he feels frazzled. He is sure, he thinks mildly, that there have been times he’s felt worse about himself, but at present he fails to recall them. He spends far too much time scrubbing the blackboard, fastidious about every little chalk mark, ears pricked to the sound of his apathetic class of soon-to-be graduates filing out, listening for the moment he is safely alone again.
Viktor’s not alone. He doesn’t realise until he has already failed to conceal the misery from his expression, turning from the blackboard. Jayce Talis is waiting, hands folded, beside the desk.
Viktor startles like a wild animal, deer legs fumbling and burdening most of Viktor’s weight onto the shoddy grip he has over his cane. He almost falls, which would have been unbearably humiliating, though the sound his shoe makes scraping over the wood floor as he regains his composure is bad enough. Jayce Talis is staring at him.
Viktor can’t solve the look on his face. It’s startling; it is not the face he was wearing before, the bored one. It is not the face he wears around his peers at all. There is something about its blankness that renders him almost chilling, which Viktor decides to label compelling instead. Jayce is really looking at him, almost searching.
“Can I help you with something?” Viktor makes himself say.
“...Yeah, actually.” Staring, staring, staring. He’s oddly unmoving, other than a habitual thumbing of his leather bracelet. “I have a question. Well, sort of. I guess I have more than one.” Viktor has seen the bracelet before; there’s a flat chip of crystal, amber or citrine, possibly, embedded in the leather, on the side that’s touching his inner wrist. There’s something almost talismanic about the way he’s touching it. The colour of the crystal is not far from Viktor’s eyes; for a moment he imagines it’s those that Jayce has pinned under his circling thumb instead, captured and spellbound. “Mostly, I just wanted to get a good look at the man who took the blame for something he didn’t do.”
Freezing, freezing water. That is what it feels like.
Even having rehearsed the imagined confrontation a million times in his head, Viktor finds that in the face of it he can only stare.
Jayce is moving closer. “That’s what you did, isn’t it? You took the fall for me.” The way he’s speaking isn’t cruel or anything; not yet. Viktor doesn’t think so, anyway. There is something almost like genuine kindness in Jayce’s voice, buried deep under a demanding curiosity. It’s disarming; it’s intense, particularly with all the staring Jayce is still doing. This is not how he acts around other people.
He has taken off some kind of mask, Viktor realises, by the time Jayce is standing in front of him. Only the face underneath is so inscrutable that even when staring straight up at it—it’s an undeniable fact, this close, that Jayce is much larger than him—Viktor can’t even begin to decode what it’s meant to conceal. He can hear Jayce breathing.
“What’s your name?” he asks, very quietly.
Viktor is confused by the question, though he arrives at the possibility that Jayce simply hadn’t been listening earlier. “I wrote it on the board. Prof—”
“Your name,” Jayce emphasises, and then—Viktor swears he does this—as casual as anything, he rolls his eyes. “It feels wrong to call the man who did something like that for me by his last name. You don’t strike me as someone with an ego big enough to disagree.”
Viktor can’t tell if it’s meant to be an insult or not. He doesn’t think so. It sounds disarmingly sincere, but then, so do most things that come out of Jayce’s mouth. “It’s Viktor.”
“Viktor,” Jayce repeats, and ah, as suspected, the sound of Viktor’s name in his mouth feels like running his hand over an open flame. “It’s an honour to be in your class this year. I hope we have a lot to learn from each other.”
Viktor’s heart thrashes wildly in his chest. Too fast, he says, “Yes, I—yes. I also hope—” Before biting his tongue, mortified, which, of all things, appears to charm Jayce the most. He tries again, simplifying: “Yes.”
Jayce is still smiling. It is still not the smile he was wearing earlier, the one he puts on for his classmates. Viktor likes this one far better, likes the timbre of Jayce’s answer, and the shape his mouth makes of the next word, too. “Good.”