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Invention, weren't you a part of my world? When did my world become you? What happens next when we're all out of breath to breathe in this mirage?
–
They meet, Jayce and Viktor, in the hollow remains of a study.
Viktor tells him that he believes in him, believes in his work when nobody else does. He holds Jayce’s mana-crystal cuff between them with a thin but steady hand, a reminder and an offering. Jayce takes it. They do not ask for permission to change the world.
In each other, they find someone that can match not only their intellect, but the burning desire to know more, do more, unearth the answers to the unanswerable. When you are young and smart and your body can withstand multiple all nighters, it’s easy to think that there is a solution in everything, to dream of endless possibilities for any impossibility. And beyond all of that, it’s simply nice to have someone by your side, to have someone match your wavelength so effortlessly.
Our hextech dream, Jayce calls it. And so, it is.
They hold their breath as Jayce drops the crystal into the machine. The resulting glow is brilliantly blue, a blinding crackle of energy. For a split second, Jayce almost believes that it won’t work. Viktor places a hand on his shoulder, warm and reassuring despite the crystal’s volatility reflected in their eyes, and tells him that the resonance will stabilize it.
Jayce takes that hand in his, knits their fingers together tightly, squeezes his eyes shut and hopes that Viktor is right. He thinks he feels Viktor press their hands together impossibly closer.
He cracks an eye open right as white fills his vision, and braces for an impact that never comes.
The second time he opens his eyes, that brilliant blue bathes the entire room in a softer glow and he’s being lifted off the ground by an unknown force. He looks at Viktor to his right, and Viktor looks at him too, rising up in a similar manner. They untangle their hands as they look up, filled with wonder at the singularity that they’ve managed to create in a lab that isn’t theirs.
They float above everything else, twisting in the air and staring at each other through the fascinating ball of energy between them. They laugh, with their heads in the clouds and cotton candy joy on their tongues.
It’s not love yet, but it could be. It’s not love, they only know love in the form of scribbled notes, the sound of chalk on chalkboard, and in the tiny, tiny spaces between each equation. Love itself, is a theory yet to be unraveled or pondered over, a thought for their distant future selves. It’s miniscule in the face of things that are great, things that are life changing.
(Viktor is Jayce’s something great, something life changing, even if he doesn’t know it yet.)
They only know that love is science, and so this hextech dream serves as a proof of that love.
–
They meet, the defender of tomorrow and the machine herald, on the bridge that separates the topside and the undercity, the radiant city of progress and a city shaped from iron.
The herald’s mask is split in half, damaged in the battle. A golden eye blinks steadily. Smoke spills out of ruined buildings on both sides, clouding hazy amber skies. He takes a shaky breath, air whistling through metal rib cages.
The defender of tomorrow stands just one step away, the planes of his face streaked with lines of soot. It’s just as Viktor remembers it, as if nothings changed after all these years, as if they were back at the Academy, the soot a result of Jayce’s latest experiment related mishap. He’s older now though, Viktor observes, with lines by his eyes and a patch of forgotten stubble on the side of his jaw. Maybe time has been an unkind thing to them, the years stretching a wound that never fully healed like time is supposed to heal things. But what use is time to eternal machines, endless in their cycle of life and repair?
They see the worst of themselves reflected in each other, a reminder of empty classrooms but wildly filled chalkboards, childlike wonder and a naive sense of righteousness. The infusion of man and machine is merely an extension of their twin desire to improve the human condition. The crystal carried in a certain hammer is nothing but late nights spent teetering on the precipice of something great, something life changing.
(Jayce is Viktor’s something great, something life changing, but he won’t say it, can’t bear to.)
He watches the slow, hesitant rise of Jayce’s hand with bated breath. Fingers caress his cheek, skims the top of his cheekbones, carefully avoiding a recent, shallow cut.
It’s so cruelly, heartbreakingly, familiar.
Jayce draws closer, and Viktor lets him, lets him step into a space always left vacant just for him, lets him close the distance until they’re chest to chest, flesh and bone to mechanical core.
Jayce dips his head down a fraction of an inch, and Viktor lets him, lets his own eyes slide shut too. Perhaps it is time that he allows himself to want again too. He presses metal fingers into the arm that holds him, with as light pressure as he can manage, reluctant to acknowledge want, to acknowledge the desire to clutch at something so allusive.
He feels breath trace the visible half slant of his mouth, then a press of lips on the corner there for three gentle seconds. Their painfully human hearts are fragile, and it only takes three gentle seconds for it to shatter quietly for the nth time, broken by the same hands it has broken for countless times before.
This is a melancholy for two, the feeling that swells up from their chests, bursting with everything that's out of reach, infinities, impossibilities, and maybe, maybe love. This is a melancholy for two, the way they eternally run towards the same dream, their dream, on parallel paths.
They part shakily, as if unwilling to let go. Out of all the people in the world and after all these years, Viktor still knows Jayce best, and Jayce knows Viktor best. And because of this, they know that they must part here.
See you again hangs in the air between them, a promise and hope built into one.