"Please Stay" - Arcane Viktor x Reader

Chapter 45

A/N: GOd damn this one took me long. Sorry about that... Anyway... The Viktor hiatus will soon be over so keep your head up for the new chapters 👀

Anyway, without further ado...
Enjoy!

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In the end, you ended up staying for almost an entire week.

Partially because of your father's hoarding habbits and partially because it just felt good to stay.

It finally felt somewhat comforting to be at home and wake up to a steaming cup of fresh coffee. To get nostalgic while walking around your old neighborhood and looking through your old things. It had lifted a weight of your shoulders you didn't even knew existed.

When you'd still be living in your family's house and under your father's strict supervision, resting always felt like something enforced onto you by common sense, rather than something you enjoyed. You'd always feel guilty afterwards, regretting wasting so much time on trivial things such as sleeping or eating, when you could definitely get more work done in the mean time.

After you went to the Academy, that feeling eased up a little, allowing you to party and socialise, make meaningful connections that could prove useful in the future. But that pressure still lingered somewhere in the back of your brain, making it hard to sleep at night and pushing you to work on Unity over any other project you've had at hand at that moment.

Now, that your father was six feet under the ground, you finally felt like your own person. Like you were somewhat in control.

The feeling still came back from time to time. While looking through your old notes or while reading your father's journals. It felt like an electric current, traveling from the tips of your fingers and all the way into your brain, pushing you to finally get some work done, to stop slacking.

Most of the times you repressed it, telling yourself that it was okay to take a break from endless calculations and sketches. But sometimes you'd find yourself laying on the floor of your father's office, copying and comparing his notes to yours, expanding on concepts he started and translating them onto your designs.

Yeah, your father was an asshole, but he sure as hell wasn't dumb. The paperwork you had managed to retract from your his messy collection would push Unity at least a couple of weeks forward, saving you quite a lot work. You had just wished you'd known about it sooner.

Before, you've only had your grandfather's journal to go off, but now... All the knowledge your family previously had on the Project was in your hands, teasing you to just drop everything you were doing and allow the days to slip through your fingers as you'd let the work devour you whole. It felt natural, it felt right. But you resisted it, gathering it all up in a box to be savoured later in the comfort of your own lab back at the Academy. Besides...

You wanted Viktor to enjoy it with you. Although he and Jayce had their own thing going on now, he was still curiously involved in your thing, oftentimes asking for updates or whether you needed a second opinion. When the Project reached its impasse, that partnership loosened a bit, but now, that there were so many references to work off again, you just couldn't wait to see his reaction.

~

You were currently sitting in the small resting area, your father's journal in one hand, a cup of steaming tea in the other. You were enjoying a book marked with a year '948', around the time when your father was about 20 years old.

After the tragedy, he lived under the custody of his governess who, from what you've read, wasn't much better than your grandfather. The moment your father turned 18, he spent a major part of his family's fortune and sailed out onto the see, in search of a way to bring his family back to life.