Viktor has many types of kisses, all depending on how flustered he is in the moment and what’s the occasion.
His favourite are the quick pecks you leave on his face when both of you are busy or focused on something important, yet still crave the affection. There are moments when he doesn’t even notice you approach and the warm kiss you leave on his forehead is a pleasant distraction from his newest project.
He loves to pepper you with those kisses too, especially in the morning when the world is still blurry and vague, and the only real part is your warm body pressed into his own. Viktor would be careful not to wake you up if he opened his eyes first. He’d kiss your shoulders and neck, taking his time to feel the softness of your skin.
He’d press his lips gently to your eyelids and the tip of nose, and his heart would ache when you woke up with a smile.
There are also more ‘awake’ kisses, taken with full intention of stopping the time for a moment. Nothing really matters anymore when Viktor feels the press of your lips on his and you lean into his touch. He has a habit of cupping your cheek before the kiss and a small sigh sometimes escapes him when you lean into it.
Viktor loves to leave those kisses along your collarbone or at the base of your neck. He is so close that he can feel your pulse fluttering and knows it’s because of him. He can press his tongue onto your skin and feel you shiver.
And there are also kisses he can’t control but doesn’t mind it, where all that’s important is to be close to each other. Where hands roam the bodies pressed together and lips open in silent invitation.
Viktor might moan into the kiss if you run your fingers through his hair or grab his shoulders. He loves the way your hands shake, erratically looking for purchase.
Viktor finds himself the happiest when he’s focused on a complicated project, preferably one that requires sleepless nights, copious amounts of caffeine and stacks of notes scribbled in half-mad writing.
Sure, it might not be the healthiest in the long run, but what a joy it is to finally find the perfect solution to a problem plaguing his mind for weeks. It is both joy and pride and makes all the trouble feel worth it.
Every time Viktor achieves it, he gets understandably exhausted, despite his annoyance and constant urge to find another project to focus on.
But no matter how hard he tries to negate it, Viktor (or at least his body) needs the time to recover. If you want him to rest, the crucial part is to convince him to just sit down with you, maybe eat something you’ve prepared for him and he’d feel bad about turning down.
Once Viktor finally eats a proper meal (first in a while) and talks about something other than his project, he’ll start calming down and his weariness will make it more and more difficult to keep his eyes open. He’d slowly lean further back if he’s on a couch, to make his aching joints more comfortable. It usually doesn’t take him long to fall asleep, but once he’s fully unconscious, don’t expect him to wake up anytime soon.
His record is 15 hours straight, and you had to check on him multiple times to see if he’s still breathing.
Throughout the years you’ve been together, you’ve found quite a number of spots to spend a few calm hours at. One of Viktor’s favorites overlooks a river and during the especially hot summer days, the breeze and shadow from the city walls bring a pleasant reprieve. He enjoys the way the sun sets over the river, painting it all shades of red and gold. Even though Viktor is fully aware of just how contaminated the water is, it’s nice to forget about the sad reality for a few hours.
Sometimes, the two of you would stay there late into the evening, not really caring about the passage of time. When Viktor has no ongoing projects and can finally just enjoy himself, he’d often ask you to stay with him and look at the stars. At the very edge of the city, the artificial lights would be left far beyond the walls, making the sky clear and beautiful.
On his lazy days, Viktor wouldn’t mind going out with you somewhere closer to the city center either. During his years spent at the Academia, he got familiar with more shops, bakeries and food stands in the area than he could count. Without the time pressing on him, Viktor enjoys taking a leisure stroll through the food stands, picking a coffee there, a cinnamon bun there, or trying out whatever was new and smelling delightful. There’s a certain pleasure in surrounding himself with a crowd of chattering and bickering people, all focused on their own lives, but being part of something bigger than themselves nonetheless.
Crowds are dangerous for his balance though, so Viktor doesn’t mind you holding him steady. It both makes him walk easier through the cobblestone streets and brings a smile on his face.
His lazy days are enjoyed in the mornings too, especially after he’s finally out of his coma-like sleep. Viktor loves to see you next to him when he first opens his eyes. He doesn’t mind spending a few hours just cuddling with you and talking about the little things.
Viktor is easy to read, especially once you get to know him better. Even Jayce is able to tell when something starts bothering him.
Viktor enjoys spending time with you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking for hours about your ongoing projects or the two of you are trying to fix issues in one of Viktor’s. He doesn’t even mind when the lunch breaks turn longer and are spent talking about some little things.
He doesn’t always agree with your ideas, but enjoys the whole process of arguing anyway.
When Viktor and you are working on different projects, he’d often suggest you use the same lab. Just to cut on energy costs, of course. And it’s easier to share the tools rather than to have to borrow them all the time. There’s absolutely no other reason for it, and if Jayce doesn’t wipe that smug little smirk off his face, he’ll be the one who will have to find himself a new lab.
Viktor often catches himself staring at you when he knows you’re too preoccupied to notice. He doesn’t know why, but the sight of you deep in thought, or cursing quietly in front of a blackboard covered in writing makes him feel warm inside.
Viktor would listen carefully whenever you mentioned having a particular interest in something. He might not share much with you, but he’d still make the effort to learn a little about it. Watching your excitement is enough of a reward for a short research.
Talking to you makes him happy, but despite knowing you for years, he still gets irrationally nervous sometimes.
It usually happens when he suddenly finds himself too close to you and freezes. Or when you touch him briefly without paying much attention to it. Viktor notices all the small gestures and appreciates them, but freezes anyway.
His fair complexion doesn’t help to hide his blushing, and realizing that only makes things worse for Viktor.
Jayce is having the time of his life. He frequently takes you both to one of the students’ bars near the Academia “for a warm cup of tea or a beer at the end of the day”, and then once you’re all seated in the crowded main room, he conveniently disappears for half an hour. It’s truly a wonder how long it can take to put a simple order, but Viktor isn’t angry.
It gives him a good opportunity to talk to you in a different scenery. If it’s loud inside, it’s all the more reason to sit close together. Just to hear each other talk over all the noise, of course.
Viktor was fully aware that the longer he waited with asking you out, the harder it would get. He thought about it multiple times already, tried to find the most fitting words, predict your answer, prepare for the possible rejection and yet - he was still nervous.
His hands would shake more than usual whenever his mind circled back to what he wanted to do. He’d known you for so long it felt like a lifetime, and by then the lab never felt the same without you somewhere close. He was (almost) sure that the feelings he had for you were mutual.
So why was it so difficult to just open his mouth and ask?
Jayce would notice his distress and (if you weren’t around to hear them) offer to help. Viktor was pretty sure that getting a wingman would make the whole ordeal even more embarrassing than it already felt. Besides, he wanted to make that move himself. He owed it to you.
Viktor would wait until there were only the two of you in a room (Jayce would wink at him before slipping out with some half-assed excuse) before clearing his throat to pick your attention.
It worked. And he forgot what to say.
With your eyes on him and that soft smile playing on your lips, all the polished words Viktor had prepared went into the void. For a moment that felt like an eternity, he’d just stare at you, desperately trying to remember how to speak.
He’d stutter and it would take him a few tries to ask the question right. His hands were ice cold when he waited for your reaction. He has never been more grateful for his cane - it made his panicked grip look almost natural, even with his knuckles gone completely white.
Viktor would be so relieved once you agreed that he’d sway on his legs. He’s never felt so happy, despite his throat drying out and his heart skipping a few beats in his chest.
You’d opted for a walk, which sounded like a good idea in the middle of the day, and more like a rookie mistake once it got dark, cold and slippery. The thin rain that fell during the day turned into a slippery mess once the temperature dropped. Viktor didn’t expect that.
What he also didn’t expect was your arm sneaking its way around his and securing him on the side where he didn’t use his cane.
You were warm. Or maybe it was hus rapidly beating heart that made him feel like boiling.
You were close enough to secure him whenever Viktor lost his footing. It made the whole walk much more pleasant than Viktor had anticipated. For once he didn’t mind the length of the bridges or the uneven stones of the walkways.
Deep in the conversation, Viktor didn’t even realize how fast the time had passed and he almost regretted not taking an even longer path.
His regrets melted away pretty quickly when you wished him a goodnight with a peck on his cheek and a promise of more walks in the future.
Viktor is fully aware of his limitations and doesn’t lie to himself (or you) about how much he has to offer. Of course, he has good days and bad days that also affect his overall stamina or strength.
However, Viktor has lived with his sickness for as long as he can remember, and not even once allowed it to stop him from doing what he has set his mind on.
On his good days, Viktor will take advantage of however much stamina he can muster, and try to please you in whatever way you want. He doesn’t have much experience, so he’ll gladly take any guidance from you.
He is quite open minded, even if easily embarrassed, and would encourage you to teach him what works for you best. A part of the reason why Viktor is so eager to try new things in bed is the happiness (and satisfaction) it brings you. He doesn’t have many kinks himself - he’d rather just watch you be happy and know he is behind it. It doesn’t take him long to finish anyway.
But Viktor has bad days too, when his leg or his back is acting up more than usual and makes simple things exhausting.
As annoyed as he is with his body, Viktor quickly learns how to best utilize those days.
He might be an amateur, but is making up for it with commitment. The first time he asked you to lay down on your bed and kissed his way down your body, Viktor wasn’t sure if his poor attempt at oral pleasure would go well, but it quickly became apparent what a great idea it was.
Viktor isn’t really into spanking, but he likes to use his hands on you. His long, slender fingers feel amazing inside you. His hands raise goosebumps when he brushes them over your stomach or holds your hips.
Not only does that position allow him to watch your every reaction, but it also strokes his ego - to see and feel what every stroke of his tongue does to you and see you come completely undone. He loves to hold your legs when you get close, just so he can feel them shake when he finally pushes you over the edge.
It’s also great for his back and leg. It turns out, when Viktor can just lay flat on his stomach, settled between your legs, he gets comfortable enough to stay there for hours.
And he does.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Jayce sighed when Viktor finally marched back to the lab.
“I was busy.”
“For 3 hours?”
“Well. I was thorough too,” Viktor shrugged with the proudest little smirk.
people read Viktor as this purely altruistic character whose core drive is helping “the people”. But like, it’s muddied by his urgent, pressing self-interest, to save his own life and survive. Which is understandable, but still self-interest.
And my first reaction, yeah but isn’t that a good thing? I tend do think that pure unselfishness is a pretty boring character driver/trait.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think as a society we are pretty fascinated with “goodness” and altruism. And even I think shows and characters that can really make you believe in their goodness are still really touching (and the reason why I think we are fascinated by goodness is because most people do feel some inner drive towards altruism personally).
Anyway, Arance gets a lot of praise for “nobody is just one note evil”, but I would argue the more interesting thing about Arcane is more about how even the most “goodish” people aren’t really one note good. Almost everybody has at least one additional personal drive.
Viktor has this element of self preservation, Jayce potentially wants to be a hero and fame, Caitlyn wants to rebel against her mom, Ekko has arguably revenge and even with him the show through that line about the hoverboard shows that there is also an element of wanting to have fun/wanting to look cool
“Good heart” Vi also wants to assuage her guilt and arguably get revenge and maybe prove daddy Vander right?
Almost all of the characters who want to do good make terrible mistakes, have lapses in judgment, are just plain wrong about things (Caitlyn is wrong about the enforcers not being corrupt, Jayce accidentally kills a kid, Vi goes on a mostly illfated anti-Silco crusade, Viktor gets Sky killed, Ekko whether almost kills or spares the wrong person).
But at the same time, Arcane doesn’t really feel cynical about goodness. Like it’s all “haha, all the people who pretend to be good are actually awful, you should root for the bad guys, because they aren’t hypocrites and they actually do less damage”. To me it feels like the show still appreciates people trying to do/be good even if it sets up a world where doing/being good runs into a lot of obstacles.
(my personal theory is that within Arcane the strongest element of “goodness” is actually all about nurturing. That’s why Silco moves us because is capable of some nurturing. That’s why Ekko moves us because he is one example of not cleanly familial nurturing. Vi’s entire quest is about her failed/disrupted attempt of being nurturing to Powder. It’s what endears Vander to us and what is shown to leave a legacy. Vi and Cait arguably bond strongest when Cait is nurturing to Vi. Heimerdinger is not very likable because his nurturing of Jayce and Viktor feels fairly distant and he becomes more likable when it becomes more believable with Ekko.
By comparison, I think Viktor and arguably also Mel’s more cleanly cut, but also more distant way of altruism doesn’t hit as hard because again it feels to me like nurturing is the topic the show is most passionate about)
1.) I would argue that “listen to the strange otherworldly spinny thingie you don’t understand” is a little bit insane ;) But of course that doesn’t happen that early in the story.
2.) I think City of Progress has to be seen in context of the world around them where their comparison are things like “ancient egypt world” or “tribal Viking society” or “half theocracy half monarchy” I think it can still be believable that just because they aren’t progressive within our eyes doesn’t mean that they aren’t progressive within their setting.
3.) “If it was, people in the undercity wouldn’t side or tolerate Silco and his idea of independent Zaun.” You are not wrong, but at the same time I think that’s a very simplistic way of seeing it. For one 1.) we don’t know how many people other than Silco and Sevika really believe in an independent Zaun 2.) we don’t know how much they really tolerate him versus they don’t have much of a choice 3.) just because people feel that way it isn’t really proof it’s great (or even that the alternative is worse). Lots of terrible ideas exist and are popular. Like you could similarly say “well, lots of people are really racist so there must be something to it, otherwise it wouldn’t be as popular” or “well conspiracy theories are really popular, there must be something to it or otherwise people wouldn’t flock to it”.
4.) While I personally don’t think that that this is a conversation the show is having (and it might never have it), I think in general “you are just standing in the way of progress because you want to preserve an immoral status quo” vs “move fast and break thing can often be an incredibly shitty and dangerous attitude to have”.
My main association with “move fast and break things” are the modern tech giants (because it is a defined intentional strategy in modern tech, rapid prototyping, fail fast etc). And the main example given is usually tech people introducing things to society without sensible protections (think introducing a medicine without testing and then figuring out “ooops it kills people”). One genre being all the “disruptive technologies” like uber and amazon with again the idea “oh the taxi people and the small business owners just want to preserve their shitty and unjust status quo” to which the answer is => well yeah, but the ones replacing them are ALSO shit and often shit in an extremely large scale insidious way (ie amazon workers peeing into bottles).
Now Jayce and Viktor aren’t really an example of that because they aren’t really motivated that much by profit (though I would argue there are tech people where this relationship isn’t as cleanly clear either with other motives such as dick measuring or “just see what happens” also figuring in).
The other frequent example if facebook going into places and being all “wheeeeeee, connecting people” and some people going “errrr, you promote the spreading of conspiracy theories and the organizing of lynch mobs”.
I actually think that the more measured discussion of progress actually plays out in Zaun where Silco is the source of progress and change and the change is seen in a lot more mixed way. Where “the old ways” of Vander are being held up by a lot of characters and are also to some extent drawn in an idealized “cozy” way by the show itself.
Now the “bad” of Silco’s ways of course is a lot more about capitalism rather than so much technology. But it’s still him introducing a new element to the system and us seeing some sort of decay because of it (the recent post about how Viktor’s childhood playing place got polluted and ugly, the Shimmer addicts and Ekko’s complaint about how they came to be).
My view in this case is to think it’s more nuanced/maybe a bit drinking the capitalism kool-aid in the way of “Vander’s way of life was probably unsustainable/an illusion (even if you don’t care about enforcers [who supposedly were rather inactive under his reign] or as freedom as an abstract concept)” and “you can’t really blame Silco for singlehandedly causing capitalism” and “that’s just kind of life and fate”. But there’s definitely people who come away from the show reading it as a one note “Silco is evil and poisoned/ruined Zaun”.
Anyway, point being that “change/progress leaves people like the Shimmer addicts in the dirt” is a story that does exist within the Acane framework and so speculation could be that Jayce and Viktor have the potential to end up as the clichee of the ivory tower scientist who introduce things without really considering what effect it has on the people (we do have Silco saying the hexgates increase inequality between Piltover and Zaun and we do have this thread of Jayce being an ivory tower politician [same for Heimerdinger]).
5.) For what it’s worth, my theory would be that Viktor’s biggest character flaw in season 1 particularly Act 2 and beyond is lack of communication/too much secrecy. Plenty of it is understandable (it is understandable that he wants to save his own life, and this effort of his likely really is under concrete from Heimerdinger if he wasn’t secretive), but at the same time, you can still see the point where it might bite him the ass (not telling people about the illness sooner, not telling Jayce about Singed, not telling Sky about the experiments)/lead to outcomes that go against his interest.
(in that I actually see some minor parallels between him and Silco since I would argue that Silco’s core flaws in regards to pursuing his own goals are also tied up in lack of trust in others, but of course Silco is a much more extreme case. As Viktor does work with others/communicate with others/connect with others/confide in others, he just sometimes is a bit slow with it sometimes)
(I’m sure others see his biggest flaw more in his lack of confidence/standing up for himself, I can see that too if I read Sky’s death as his biggest problem/lowest moment, and it might have been fixed if he had openly defending his right to his experiments which also in a roundabout way would have led to his experiments not being a secret and hence Skye not walking into them by accident)
(okay so maybe his real biggest flaw of Viktor is not locking the damn door better)
I’m pretty sure from context of act 2 - from the fact that the ‘soon/now we can help people’ argument is the ongoing thread of conversation around Viktor scenes both with presentation of Hextech and later in the Hexgates - that Viktor doesn’t have years, most probably doesn’t have until next Progress Day and maybe already is on borrowed time.
I have to admit that I don’t pay nearly enough attention to Viktor and Jayce scenes, so I just kind of assumed that Viktor might have known for a while that whatever he has is serious so the years he might have had would have been the timeskip of 7 years. Didn’t really think of him only finding out that it was serious rather than just Jayce finding out.
Imo. Jayce & Viktor’s drive is nearly exactly the same at the core, the only reason they aren’t - or weren’t (probably now are) - on the same page is that they are from different social classes and could not agree on the priorities entirely.
Hmm. I think they do want progress and I do think that they have generally similar interests like “helping people”. But I do think that there are still different shades of it. Like Jayce’s motivation seems to be a lot fuzzier and more vague, tied in with his dreams of being a superhero or being bound to very concrete people (I want to save Viktor, I react to the concrete kid I killed).
To give an example, in a more Silco and Vander situation (and mind the show is even more vague on what their motivations were), two people might have the same general interest of “fighting Piltover”, but one wants the general concept of “freedom”, the next one wants “to help people” and the third wants revenge (Vander talked about having been an angry person).
They might agree on the general direction and even on the methods, but they for example would have very different stopping points. Let’s say the person who wants revenge gets to kill the people they consider responsible for killing their parents. At that point, they might walk away even if freedom is not achieved and people are still suffering.
Similarly, the person who is motivated by “helping people improve their lives” might walk away if they feel people’s lives are made worse while pursuing freedom or revenge.
Basically, I’m not fully convinced that Jayce and Viktor necessarily picture completely the same things, the same people when they imagine “helping people” or “bringing progress” even if both agree that progress is a swell or necessary thing.
Again, I don’t think that their positions are so incompatible that they couldn’t be sorted out with a good conversation, but still possible to be a source of misunderstanding.
