Organised chaos. His lab, his home, his notebooks. The wooden floors filled with neat piles of filled books, covered in scrap torn paper and bloodied tissues. His mind, bursting with ideas the pain refused to allow him to fledge out.

That’s why he had Jayce, Jayce always managed to decipher what the agony wouldn’t allow Viktor to accomplish. Complicated, the relationship between the two men.

Jayce was more unorganised peace, that’s how Viktor saw him anyway. Always so sturdy and at one with all chaos around him, making peace with it so simply.

Maybe others didn’t see Jayce that way but they weren’t Viktor, they didn’t see him after 48 hours of no sleep, amidst council meetings and lab problems, they didn’t know Jayce like Viktor felt he knew him.

The same could be said the other way around however, nobody had seen Viktor at the lows Jayce had seen him.

He was pulled from his thoughts by the harsh realisation he was thinking about the taller councilman and not the problem at hand, if it wasn’t the pain taking every square inch of his mind, it was Jayce.

A sigh escaped his chapped lips, a hand reaching out for his cane as he stood to his unstable feet. A walk would help, a walk around the grounds, then he would return and finally crack the code on his latest puzzle.

He scrawled a note to anybody who came to the lab about his absence, before setting off to try and get some fresh air into his ever struggling lungs.