Chapter Text
“It’s still not working,” Jayce says flatly.
Sighing, Viktor narrows his eyes and leans forward on the desk, bracing himself against it. “The indices are correct according to both of our calculations, the professor’s calculations, and my textbook.”
“We could try every lattice again. All fourteen of them.”
Jayce does not want to try every lattice again, but if it makes Viktor happy, he will.
Fortunately, Viktor shakes his head. “I thought it would be orthorhombic—”
“—and face-centred. But the space group—”
“—doesn’t match.” Viktor leans forward even further, placing his palm over the control mechanism as he peers at the hextech crystal in the centre of the core cage.
“We need to reproduce it somehow…” Viktor tells him, trailing off as he looks back at Jayce. “What are you looking at?”
Jayce shakes his head.
He had been staring at Viktor again. Jayce assumes that Viktor wouldn’t really want to know what he had been thinking — that Viktor is the smartest person he’s ever met — and instead, opens his mouth to suggest that they take another look at the crystal on his leather cuff.
Unfortunately, Jayce’s mouth acts before his brain can catch up.
“You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met, Vik.”
Viktor winces and drops his cane.
It falls to the floor with a loud clattering sound that echoes in the cavernous room that the council recently gave them for their new laboratory. Jayce reaches for it but Viktor holds up his hand, and reaches down for it himself, rising slowly afterwards with his usual dour expression.
“Erm…that’s, that’s a bit…”
“Don’t like nicknames?” Jayce smiles broadly at Viktor, trying to work past the sudden awkwardness.
In the short time they’ve known each other, Jayce has already learned that Viktor will rarely accept compliments. He hadn’t even meant to say what he did, it just came out that way and although Jayce certainly meant it, he didn’t want to make Viktor uncomfortable.
Viktor sighs.
“It does not sound right,” he says, accent curling around every word.
Jayce doesn’t understand what he means — a rarity since they began their hextech research in earnest, or even earlier on that first night where Viktor save his life — but leaves it at that and secretly tells himself to try and experiment with nicknames the more they work together.
***
They run into someone Viktor knows in the Zaun entresol level the first time Jayce visits the city with him.
Viktor wants to talk to a craftsman he knows about the possibility that a crystal could have an asymmetrical structure that would allow it to stabilize at an even higher frequency. None of their attempts with the traditional point groups have worked, but they both know that they’ll need to further increase the oscillation in order to come close to having the power necessary for a sustained teleportation device.
Jayce thinks this, like most of Viktor’s ideas, is brilliant and insists on going with him.
“Viktor Anatolyevich!”
Visibly shuddering at the loud, booming voice, Viktor slowly waves at a large man walking towards them. Jayce looks back and forth between the two with curiosity.
It hadn’t occurred to him until this moment that Viktor would have friends and acquaintances in Zaun. Viktor is naturally reclusive — something that Jayce could have surmised himself, but Professor Heimerdinger also said this of Viktor when Jayce had continued to pester Heimerdinger on any and all information about the professor’s now-former assistant.
”He was one of Zaun’s foremost prodigies,” Heimerdinger says, only half-paying attention to Jayce as he putters around his workshop. “I found him working outside one of the refineries. Such a bright young boy, not unlike yourself, my dear boy.”
“Yes but what is he like?” Jayce asks.
He’s already had several brainstorming sessions and remarkable conversations with Viktor. Jayce already knows that Viktor is smart, likely the first person outside of the professor himself that Jayce feels can keep up with his own intellect.
“Quiet. Keeps to himself mostly. Remarkably curious boy though, again not unlike yourself Jayce. Far quieter than you and less disruptive as well. I was shocked to see him break into my own laboratory of all things!” The professor pauses and finally looks at Jayce directly. “Why? What is it that you actually want to know?”
Jayce holds up his hands in front of his body as a surrender gesture. “Nothing, professor. I’ve just never had a research partner before.”
“Well you can’t do better than Viktor, that’s for sure,” Heimerdinger says absentmindedly. He’s already lost interest in Jayce and returned to whatever it is he was studying. “He’s the best of the best.”
Viktor could have an entire life down here and Jayce wouldn’t have ever known if he hadn’t insisted on tagging along.
“A friend of yours?” Jayce asks, after the man had walked away.
Viktor looks at him curiously for a moment and frowns. He mutters something under his breath that Jayce can’t hear and then shakes his head. “No. No, not at all. A former colleague.”
“Do you have many friends down here?” Jayce presses the issue, realizing how little he knows about Viktor.
He wants to know as much about Viktor as possible.
Viktor shrugs and wraps his free arm around his waistcoat, bringing his cane closer to his body as he walks.
“Not really.”
***
“Excellent work, Mister Anatolyevich!” Jayce says, squeezing Viktor’s shoulder.
Viktor stiffens and looks up from their blackboard in confusion. “That’s…that’s not at all how you would say my name. Where did you learn this from?”
“But that guy in the undercity. He called you Viktor Anatolyevich.”
Viktor lets out a small, brusque laugh. “That’s…erm…how to put this? A middle name, I suppose is what you would call it. It’s my father’s name. He was being polite to his scientific superior. Is this where you ask me for my surname?”
“I— you read that?!”
“You left it in your notes. I also saw your drawing. You are quite an artist.” Viktor says this with a teasing lilt to his accent, lips curling slightly up into a more definitive smile.
Jayce supposes that Viktor is right. If he hadn’t wanted Viktor to see it at all, he shouldn’t have doodled it in his notes. Still, this entire conversation is embarrassing. The only good thing about it is that Viktor is smiling and smirking mere centimetres away from him.
He looks happy.
“So what is your surname?”
Viktor shrugs. “It is not important.”
He says it in a similar syncopation to how he had first introduced himself.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Viktor.”
Jayce sighs and goes to light the lamp at his own desk, leaving Viktor alone at the blackboard with their latest series of theorems.
Every time he thinks he’s getting closer to Viktor, Viktor pushes him away. Although, perhaps family names aren’t really a thing in Zaun. Jayce has no idea and makes a note to ask the professor about it.
It’s so quiet and the room’s size and vaulted ceilings suddenly feel oppressive, like they’re pressing down on his shoulders. He hears a page turn as Viktor whispers to himself.
“Did you say something?” Jayce calls back over his shoulder.
He doesn’t expect an answer, but after another small stretch of silence, Viktor speaks up.
“You may call me Vitya…if you would like.”
“Vitya?” Jayce tests the name out and watches as Viktor’s neck and the tips of his ears flush red. “What does it mean? Who calls you that?
“It…It is the name reserved for one’s friends,” Viktor says. His neck turns an even redder colour where his auburn hair curls around it, and he refuses to look back at Jayce. “No one has called me that before.”
“Oh…”
Oh.
Jayce turns away from Viktor so Viktor can’t see the stupid smile on his face and his blush, despite the fact that he’s not facing Jayce at all and has further buried his nose in notebook pages tacked onto the blackboard.
“Well then, Vitya,” Jayce says, putting specific emphasis on the name and willing his face to return to normal. “Would you like some sweetmilk?”
“Hrm…I will probably be here a while longer,” Viktor says softly. “Thank you, Jayce.”
“No nickname for me?” Jayce pouts as he walks over to their small portable stovetop. “What about something like Jayceya? Jaya?”
Viktor snorts. “Those sound awful. I regret telling you this.”
Jayce looks back across the room and sees Viktor smile to himself brightly as he studies their notes.