Chapter Text
Jayce Talis believed in first impressions the way other people believed in weather: as something that happened to you, inevitable and instructive, and if you were smart, you paid attention.
His first impression of his randomly assigned roommate was this: a boy made of coat hangers and stubbornness, standing in the doorway of Room 214 with one enormous suitcase, one cane, and no one helping him.
No one. Helping him.
Jayce had been in the room for an hour already, because Jayce arrived early to things — practice, class, life — and he'd been arranging his side with the loose, easy efficiency of someone who had moved into six different summer training camps and knew exactly which drawer socks belonged in. He heard the elevator ding down the hall. He heard the drag-thump, drag-thump of wheels and rubber-tipped cane over industrial carpet. And then the door swung open and Jayce’s first coherent thought was, embarrassingly, pretty. Unbelievably pretty. Messy brown hair falling into his eyes, a scatter of two little moles across pale skin like someone had flicked a pen at a portrait to make sure you’d keep looking, narrow shoulders under a cardigan far too warm for late August.
"Hey," Jayce calls, already crossing the room, already reaching for the suitcase, because that was just what you did. "You must be Viktor. I'm Jayce."
"I am aware," said Viktor, in an accent that made the words sound hand-carved. "Your name is on the door. Also on your — jersey. Also, I believe, on that banner."
Jayce glanced at the banner his mother had insisted he hang — TALIS #7, foam-finger orange — and laughed, warm and unbothered, the laugh that made professors forgive late assignments and referees rethink yellow cards. "Fair. My mom's enthusiastic."
"Mm," said Viktor, and tried to lift the suitcase onto the bare mattress himself.
Tried was the operative word. Jayce watched — with a smile on his face and something very still behind it — as Viktor braced the cane against the bedframe, gripped the handle two-handed, and hauled with his whole insufficient body. The suitcase rose four inches. Viktor's arms shook. A tendon stood out in his neck like a violin string about to go.
Jayce took the suitcase from him mid-lift, one hand, the way you'd take a tray from a child, and set it on the bed.
"I could have done that," Viktor said.
"Sure," said Jayce, pleasantly. "But now you don't have to."
And Viktor looked up at him — actually looked, gold-brown eyes narrowing behind an assessment Jayce could feel like a hand on his sternum — and apparently decided he was harmless, because he said, "Thank you," and turned to his unpacking.
Harmless.
Jayce filed the miscalculation away like a gift he'd open later.
Here was the thing nobody understood about Jayce, and the thing he had stopped trying to make them understand around age fourteen: he was not casual about anything. People saw the smile, the shoulders, the varsity jacket, the way he high-fived his way across a dining hall like a politician working a rope line, and they assumed everything came to him lightly. It didn't. It came to him the way everything came to him — through obsessive, granular, joyful attention. He hadn’t gotten a football scholarship by being relaxed. He’d gotten it by running the same route tree eleven thousand times and writing down what happened all eleven thousand times: footwork, break angle, which shoulder the defender turned, what the grass did in the rain. The muscle underneath it all wasn’t even from the gym; it was from ten years of swinging a hammer in his dad’s forge, which the team’s strength coach called “farm strong” and Jayce called Tuesdays.
So when Jayce decided, roughly forty minutes into cohabitation, that Viktor was going to be his person to take care of this year, it wasn't a whim. It was a commitment. It went in the notebook.
Not literally the same notebook as the football. He wasn't crazy. It got its own notebook.
The initial intake data, gathered over the first week through simple observation (Viktor was very observable; he moved through the world like he assumed no one was watching, which was both endearing and, frankly, unsafe):
Sleep: Catastrophic. Viktor's desk lamp went off between 3:10 and 4:40 a.m. Jayce knew because he'd started waking at 3:00 to check, which was fine, because he could fall back asleep in ninety seconds, a skill from training camps. Viktor could not fall back asleep in ninety seconds. Viktor lay in the dark breathing in that too-careful way people breathe when their body hurts and they don't want anyone to know.
Diet: Criminal. Black coffee, vending machine crackers, and — once, memorably, at 2 a.m. — dry cereal eaten by the handful out of the box while reading a paper on materials science, crumbs collecting in the blanket like snow on a mountain.
Medication: Erratic. There were three amber bottles on Viktor's desk, lined up with the labels turned away from the room, which Jayce respected as a privacy measure and had therefore only read once, quickly, while Viktor was in the shower, purely so he'd know what to tell paramedics in an emergency. That was just preparedness. One was supposed to be taken with food (see: Diet, criminal), and Jayce had personally witnessed Viktor take it with black coffee, which — per the fourteen-minute phone call Jayce had made to a pharmacist while pretending to jog — reduced absorption and irritated the stomach lining.
Weather compliance: Zero. The first cold snap came the second week of September, and Viktor left for his 8 a.m. in the cardigan. The cardigan. Wind chill of thirty-nine degrees and this genius, this actual certified genius who was already correcting the professor in graduate-level seminars, walked out into it dressed like a Victorian orphan with tenure.
Jayce caught him at the door with a hoodie. His own — the gray one, TALIS across the back, soft from four hundred washes.
"I have a coat," Viktor said.
"You have a cardigan with three buttons missing."
"The buttons are decorative."
"The buttons are structural, Viktor. That's what buttons are." Jayce held the hoodie open like a matador, like a valet, like a man with all the time in the world, and smiled. "Humor me. If you freeze to death, housing will assign me someone worse."
And Viktor — and this was the moment, if Jayce was honest with himself, if he was ever going to be honest with himself, which he'd scheduled tentatively for never — Viktor sighed through his nose, set down his bag, and let Jayce help him into the hoodie. Let him. Lifted his arms slightly, the way you do for someone dressing you, and the sleeves swallowed his hands to the second knuckle, and the shoulder seams hung halfway to his elbows, and TALIS sat across his back like a claim, like a jurisdiction, like the answer to a question nobody had asked yet, and something in Jayce's chest turned over with a sound like a deadbolt.
"It smells like cedar," Viktor observed, muffled, from inside it.
"That's the detergent."
"It is not unpleasant."
"High praise," said Jayce, and held the door, and watched him go down the hallway, and then followed him to class at a distance of roughly forty meters, because the route crossed two streets and Viktor read journal articles on his phone while walking, and someone had to be there. That was all. Someone had to be there, and Jayce's own class wasn't for an hour, and it was a nice morning for a walk that happened to have an object.
He was very good at it, the following. He'd been surprised, at first, how good. But then, it was just footwork and spatial awareness and reading the body ahead of you, and those were his sports, all three, that was literally his scholarship. Viktor never looked back. Viktor never looked back because Viktor had decided the world was a benign and boring place that would leave him alone with his equations, and the fact that this was only true because Jayce was back there making it true — well. That was the arrangement. Viktor didn't need to know the mechanism. You didn't explain load-bearing walls to people who lived in the house. You just made sure the house stood.
The dining hall project began in October.
"You are not eating," Jayce said, dropping into the seat across from Viktor with a tray that could have fed a family of four, "because you think it's a waste of time. But here's the thing — " he transferred, without asking, a dish of roasted salmon to Viktor's side of the table, followed by spinach, followed by a small fortress of sweet potato — "your brain runs on this stuff. Omega-3s. Iron. You want to finish that paper on — what is it —"
"Hextech lattice conductivity."
"— that, exactly, then that big beautiful engine needs fuel. I'm just saying. As your roommate. As a concerned individual."
Viktor looked at the salmon. Looked at Jayce. There was a long pause in which Jayce kept his face open and sunny and did not let it show, whatever it was, the thing under the floorboards of him that was pacing.
"You looked up which foods have omega-3s," Viktor said slowly.
"Everyone knows salmon has omega-3s."
"You said iron about the spinach with the confidence of a man with a spreadsheet."
There was a spreadsheet. It cross-referenced Viktor's medications against nutrient interactions and had conditional formatting. Jayce laughed his easy laugh and said, "I'm an athlete, man. Nutrition's my whole life," which was true, which was the beautiful thing, everything he said was true, it was just that the truth had a basement.
Viktor picked up his fork. Ate a bite of salmon. Ate another.
Around them the dining hall did what it always did when Jayce Talis sat down anywhere — oriented slightly toward him, like iron filings, like sunflowers. Teammates called his name. A girl from his statistics class waved. Two guys from the team hovered with their trays, angling for the open seats, and Jayce gave them the grin and the nod and said, "Grabbing a work dinner with my roommate, catch you at practice," and they went away pleased to have been spoken to, and Viktor watched all of it with an expression of anthropological bafflement.
"You could sit with anyone," Viktor said.
"I am sitting with anyone."
"You know what I mean. Why —" Viktor gestured with the fork, a little helpless, at himself: the cane hooked on the chair, the cardigan under the — Jayce noted with a pulse of profound, floor-shaking satisfaction — the hoodie, which he had not returned, which he had worn every day for nine days. "Why this?"
And here Jayce could have said a lot of things. He could have said: because the first night, when you thought I was asleep, I heard you working through pain like it was a math problem, breathing in fours, and I lay there memorizing the rhythm. He could have said: because you are the single most interesting structure I have ever seen, a suspension bridge made of toothpicks that refuses to fall down, and I have decided that it is my job — mine, specifically, no applications accepted — to be the ground under you. He could have said: because when you wear my name on your back the deadbolt in my chest turns over and I sleep better than I have in years.
He said: "You explained my thermodynamics homework in ten minutes better than my professor did in six weeks. I'm not letting the smartest guy I've ever met die of scurvy. That's just good resource management."
Viktor laughed — surprised out of him, a rusty, creaking, real thing, a sound like a door opening in a house you'd been told was empty — and something in Jayce's careful notebook mind wrote it down: October 9th. Laughed. Cause: me.
"You are very strange," Viktor said, meaning it as a compliment, meaning it the way lonely people mean thank you, and having, as far as Jayce could tell, absolutely no idea. None. He thought Jayce was kind. He thought this was what friendship was — a big warm dog of a person who happened to always have an extra granola bar with the exact right nutrient profile, who happened to always be walking his direction, who happened to know his class schedule ("you mentioned it once") and his medication times ("you set an alarm once, I've got good ears") and the exact weight limit past which his cane arm started to tremble ("lucky guess, here, give me the bag").
He thought it was sweet.
It was sweet. Jayce needed that on the record, wherever the record was kept. Every single thing he did was sweet. The vitamins he crushed into the pasta sauce on Sunday roommate dinners: sweet. The tracking app he'd installed on — no. Not installed. Considered installing, twice, hand hovering over Viktor's unattended phone before he'd made himself do a hundred push-ups in the hallway instead, because there were lines, and he knew where they were, that was the whole point, he kept a list of the lines right there in the notebook so he'd always know precisely how far away from them he was standing: sweet. The way he'd learned the gait of Viktor's bad days from the sound alone through the floor — drag-thump slower, cane hitting harder — so that he could just happen to have canceled his own plans, just happen to have soup: sweet, sweet, sweet.
"Eat your spinach," said Jayce.
Viktor ate his spinach.
That night, 3:10 a.m., the desk lamp clicked off early — early, a full ninety minutes ahead of baseline, third consecutive night of improvement since the dietary intervention began — and Jayce lay in the dark of Room 214 listening to Viktor's breathing go long and slow and finally, finally unguarded, and felt the specific peace he imagined lighthouse keepers felt. Everything in the harbor accounted for. Every ship where it should be.
Across the room, Viktor slept in the gray hoodie. He'd started sleeping in it. He probably didn't even notice he was doing it.
Jayce noticed. Jayce noticed everything. That was the whole job.
He closed his eyes and reviewed tomorrow: 8 a.m. class (Viktor's; the walk; forty meters; the second crosswalk was the dangerous one), 10 a.m. class (his own, actually his own), noon dining hall (it was fish day; excellent), 4 p.m. practice, during which he could not watch Viktor, which was the worst part of every day, a two-and-a-half-hour hole in the coverage that he'd partially solved by befriending the engineering building's front desk girl, who now texted him funny updates about "your weird cute roommate" that Jayce received as sacred dispatches and answered with a casual lol.
It was all going so well.
He fell asleep in ninety seconds, smiling, to the sound of someone else's breathing, wearing the peace of a man who has confused a person for a purpose and has no intention of noticing the difference.