Chapter Text
Jayce wakes up in an unfamiliar bed.
Awareness arrives slowly, a thread just barely evading his grasp. He feels sluggish waking up, as if it's been a long time since he’s done it, sleep’s tight embrace anchoring him down.
Still, sensations come to him in pieces. Smooth, soft sheets under his back. Gentle, almost serene chattering sounding from a distance. A pounding in his head. A strange heaviness in his leg. The cool press of metal on his skin. The growing awareness that his body hardly feels like his own.
Unsettled by the realization, Jayce peels his eyes open.
And then immediately scrambles upwards in a panic. This room—he’s never seen it before. He doesn’t recognize any of it; not the mosaic of white sheet cloth and metal scraps that make up the ceiling and walls, or the sparse furniture of the same sort of hodgepodge design laying out across the space, the pallet-like mattress on the floor he’s lying on. Or even the pulsing pain that flares through his leg as he pushes off of the bed and onto his feet.
He looks down at his leg and feels his entire heart stop.
The limb is encased in strips of metal, thick plates arching over his knee and upper thigh, connected with rods and screws. A brace, reminiscent of the one Viktor used to wear, stabilizing an injury Jayce doesn’t remember obtaining.
What the fuck?
Heart pounding and brain whirling, Jayce lurches further forward on unsteady feet.
There are two others in the room. Men, a couple of years younger than him, dressed in almost servant-like garbs, camel cloth held together with metal scraps. They both startle at Jayce’s movement, eyes widening.
“Mr. Talis—” one starts as both pull themselves off the floor.
Jayce rotates in panic, instinctively looking for his hammer. It’s nowhere to be found. His breath stumbles in his chest.
He can’t—he doesn’t have time for this. He has a task. He needs to get out of here, so he can finish it. He needs to get back to the…to the—there’s something—he can’t remember—
He has to—
Has to what?
Jayce brings a hand up to his head, gritting his teeth as it pulses in pain inside his skull, the memory he was reaching for falling like sand through his fingers.
“You need to lie back down, Mr. Talis. You are not well.”
Clutching his head between his hands, Jayce bites back a scream. Clearly he’s not well. His leg is broken. His head feels like it's lodged with a thousand pieces of shattered glass. He doesn’t remember anything—not where he is, how he got here, whether he’s safe. He doesn’t know why his body feels so foreign to him, like it’s aged years since the last time he was inside it; or why desperation is clinging to his skin, sinking its claws into his back with fervor.
A hand lands on his forearm, attempting to calm him. “Don’t—” Jayce grits out, jerking away.
The man looks at him with wide eyes. Then his gaze softens, turning sympathetic. “Have no fear,” he says, clutching the hand Jayce swatted away to his chest. “The Herald will be here soon. He will help you.”
Jayce stares at him, breathing heavily. He notices for the first time the odd, almost metallic webbing spotting the skin around his forehead, like his flesh has been peeled back to reveal the glass-like machinery. Apprehension weaves through Jayce’s stomach like acid.
“What…” Jayce blinks. “What is this place?”
The man smiles at him, kindly. “The Herald will explain all.”
“The Herald?” Jayce repeats, mind churning. “Who the fuck is the Herald—”
“Jayce.” A voice cuts through, quiet but piercing.
Time seems to stop around him. The world slows, narrowing like the focus of a lens. All sensations dissipate. Jayce is nothing but the hopeful, hesitant pounding of his heart.
Because that voice . He would recognize that voice anywhere.
Sometimes cutting, sometimes docile. Sometimes teasing, sometimes admonishing. But always, always commanding Jayce’s attention.
Jayce looks towards it, heart in his throat.
And his knees nearly buckle at the sight.
“Viktor?”
It’s not the Viktor that Jayce remembers—not the one from their days together in the lab, nor the one that pulled himself out of the Hexcore’s cocoon that day after the bombing, empty-eyed and gaunt-cheeked. There’s a majestic quality to this Viktor. Something older, something wiser, reminiscent of the ancient mages Jayce would see drawn in the books from his research.
His hair is longer, grown past his chin, the pieces wisping around his ears turned white. The hollows of his cheeks are still dusted with fragments of dark-purple metal, and his eyes are still silver kaleidoscopes, reflective and void-like. But the despondency that clung to him the last time Jayce saw him is gone, replaced with a quiet certainty, a surety evident in his posture.
He looks like a prophet. A leader. Somebody worth exalting.
Jayce stares. And stares. And stares.
He feels himself stumble backwards in a daze, the edge of the bed hitting the back of his calves. He sits back down without looking away from Viktor.
He can’t look away.
Viktor takes a step forward, inside the circular opening of the house, face impassive. His steps are measured, stabilized by a staff Jayce has never seen before, gold-accented and elegant. It thuds against the floor as Viktor nears.
He steps past the two men, dipping his chin down in a clear dismissal. They bow their heads down and leave silently.
Viktor stops at the edge of the room, where a glass water pitcher sits on a corner table. He reaches for it calmly. “It is good to see you, Jayce,” he says, pouring the water into a cup.
Jayce’s lips part. He feels lightheaded, and it’s from more than just the lack of memories. “I—when did you—”
He cuts off, unsure of how he was even planning to end the sentence. When did you get here, maybe. When did you get so beautiful, more likely.
Shaking his head, Viktor sets down the pitcher. Jayce watches, enthralled, as his long, purple fingers leave a mark on the condensation when they pull away.
Viktor approaches from the other side of the room and holds out the cup for Jayce to take. “Drink,” he commands.
With the sudden proximity, Jayce has to tilt his head up to look at Viktor. He drinks in the sight of him with all the desperation of a man dying of thirst. Then, unable to defy the gentle authority of Viktor’s voice, he wraps his fingers around the base of the cup and raises it to his lips, taking a soft sip. The cold water slides over his tongue, soothing his parched throat.
Still, Jayce doesn’t look away, eyes trained on the planes of Viktor’s face from over the rim. He feels like if he does it will be stolen away from him again. Even the mere act of blinking is a risk he cannot take.
Jayce lowers the glass to his lap, spins it around slowly in his fingers. “I—” He shakes his head. He feels at a loss for words, adrift from reality. The only thing he knows is that if Viktor is here, that means he’s safe. Simultaneously content, and hungry. “I didn’t know—I thought, maybe, I wouldn’t get to see you again,” he says finally, the words echoing distantly to his own ears.
Because that’s the thing he keeps coming back to. Jayce’s brain is muddied, a gap-ridden hedge maze that makes him dizzy every time he tries to step inside it. It’s like he can physically feel the empty space, all the places where answers and nebulous memories hang out of his reach, surrounded in a thick, stifling fog. But despite the confusion, despite the disorientation, there’s some things that Jayce isn’t so lucky to forget, some heartbreaks that can’t be tramped down into anything less piercing. He remembers it, and he remembers it clearly:
The way Viktor had left. The finality of the goodbye. It felt irrevocable, binding, in a way that Jayce hadn’t wanted to accept. But eventually, it came to him, the inevitable, unbearable conclusion that Viktor wasn’t coming back. It swung down upon him like a worn, well-loved book falling into the fire, a knife plummeting into his heart. It was the end, and yet the start—a domino triggering a cascade, lights flickering on one by one to reveal what Jayce had somehow missed for so long. It was the worst timing in the world, to realize that he would spend the rest of his life loving a man who had just chosen not to be a part of it.
It felt cemented, written in stone. Viktor was gone. Jayce would always be a shadow in the wake of his retreat. That was the reality he would be forced to endure until death came for him.
And yet, Viktor is here, in front of him. Changed, but not unrecognizable. Looking, impossibly, at Jayce. And it might not be with the same excited, proud look he used to give him when they were young and high on their own ambitions, but his eyes aren’t full of sorrow and a mellowed-out betrayal like they had been the last time they saw each other either.
Instead, it’s some sort of in-between, and Jayce does not know how they got here, when he was so certain that he wouldn’t ever have those eyes focused on him again.
Viktor looks at him. His face is impossibly impassive. Jayce tries to decipher it with all the success of reading a blank page. “As did I,” he says, after a moment. He moves to take a seat next to Jayce on the pallet, resting his hands in his lap as he stares forward. Mere inches lie between them. “Perhaps our paths were never quite as diverged as I had thought.”
Jayce turns to study the side of his face. Years ago, in the lab, if Viktor had pulled his chair this close to him, Jayce would’ve been able to feel him—tendrils of warmth reaching across the small divide, heating up the side of Jayce’s body nearest to him as Viktor looked over his shoulder at Jayce’s notes. But now, there’s nothing. Everything about Viktor is completely silent, devoid of presence. An inhuman sort of vacantness.
A distinctively guilty feeling creeps up Jayce’s spine at the thought. He knows he was the one who did this to Viktor. He was the one who made him into this machinery, straddling the line between authentic and artificial.
“I am glad,” Viktor continues, when Jayce does not speak, “to have been wrong.”
A couple years ago, Jayce probably would’ve quipped something like that’s a first. Now, he stays silent, chewing, trying not to let hope spread its wings inside of him like a kite that can’t be reeled back in. Viktor is glad to see him. He’s glad that their paths were not finished crossing. Does that mean there’s a chance that they could be partners again?
It takes a startling amount of strength for Jayce to remind himself that he has much more pressing questions.
“Viktor,” he says, haltingly, rolling his tongue over his top teeth in hesitation. “What…where are we? How did I get here?”
Viktor turns to look at him, finally. Silver eyes study him intently, calculating. “What do you remember?” he asks, the thinnest veil of apprehension lining the words.
Jayce frowns. Steps into the fog of his mind, trying to think back.
He remembers Viktor, in front of him, staring down at his hands with no recognition in his eyes for what he had become. Remembers hugging him, laying a blanket over his shoulders, feeling metal under his skin. Remembers watching him go. He had sat there for hours, staring at the door, waiting futilely for him to return. Eventually, he had fallen asleep in his desk chair, spine twisted and uncomfortable, his cheek buried in the open spine of one of Viktor’s old notebooks.
Then, he had woken to…what was it? He thinks he remembers—there was Heimerdinger. And a boy. Yes, a boy. What was his name? …Ekko, he thinks that’s right. They had come…there was a problem with something…with a tree…and Jayce took them to the…to the…
God, why can’t he remember?
He loses the thought completely, whatever hazy memories he managed to momentarily retrieve slipping out of his grasp. Lost, irretrievable.
Jayce shakes his head, frustrated. “I don’t remember much from after you left,” he admits, his knuckles white where his hand is clenched around the glass.
Viktor watches him carefully for a couple seconds, verifying. And then he nods, face twisted in a thoughtful expression.
“What—” Jayce’s hand trembles. “What happened to me?”
He watches as Viktor’s gaze drops to his braced leg, something unreadable passing through his eyes. Jayce’s leg twinges, a reminder of the underlying pain that’s been present in the limb since he woke up. He wonders how long he’s had the injury. If it’ll ever fully heal.
“After some time,” Viktor begins, looking away, “I began to regret how we left things. My own callousness.”
“You weren’t—” Jayce interrupts in protest.
Any dismissal, any cruelty Viktor had shown him that day was well deserved. Jayce had broken not only a promise that day, but Viktor’s trust. He had thought he was saving him, but the new life Jayce had given him was not one he had chosen. Jayce will live with the guilt of that for the rest of his life, even if he’ll never bring himself to fully regret the decision.
“I was overwhelmed,” Viktor cuts him off, his sharp eyes silencing. “The body I had woken up in was new. Different.” He looks down at his hand, flipping it over, the gold accents flashing with the movement. “Many sensations are dulled, but some emotions are heightened. I did not know how to deal with it then. But if I had been in my right mind, I would have never let go of our partnership so easily. Such carelessness has cost me.”
Jayce stares at the side of Viktor’s face, silent. He can’t help but be surprised—and warmed—by the implication. Viktor has always kept his emotions close to his chest, and Jayce was perhaps the only one in Runeterra who got to catch more than a momentary glimpse of them. In their years of partnership, Jayce had never once doubted the fact that Viktor cared for him, but sentimentality wasn’t something the man offered easily. The image of Viktor regretting his decision, missing Jayce is enough to send Jayce’s stomach fluttering, but it's the admission of it that really shocks Jayce, as much as it flatters him.
He likes it, knowing that he’s someone Viktor missed. It makes him feel important. He hasn’t felt important since the bombing, since the last time he was sure his place was by Viktor’s side.
“Still,” he says, lip caught between his teeth. “I’m sorry.”
Viktor shakes his head. “I was angry, to be turned into something I did not understand. But now, I do understand, much more than I ever have. There is no longer a reason for anger, or apologies.” He meets Jayce’s eyes. “You have given me a great gift, Jayce.”
“A gift?” Jayce questions, brow wrinkled. “What do you mean?”
The way the corners of Viktor’s lips stretch outwards before returning is not a smile, but it’s near one. “Soon,” he says, laying a careful hand on Jayce’s thigh, “you will understand too.”
Jayce stares at the hand. He can just barely feel the press of his fingers through the fabric of his pants. He wants to know what it would feel like on bare skin, wants to know what Viktor’s skin would feel like under his palm—if it would feel like cold metal, or something else, something warmer, something softer.
Viktor pulls his hand back before the thought can develop fully. “But we have veered away from the topic at hand,” he says. “Back to your question.”
Jayce blinks several times, having nearly forgotten about his initial inquiry about how he came to be in this state, broken-legged and empty-minded.
“After I had brought myself here,” Viktor continues, “it quickly became clear that I had been unfair to you, and moreover—unfair to myself. My isolation from you brought me loneliness I had not been prepared to experience. Although I was willing to make sacrifices to further my mission, I began to wonder whether that one was truly necessary. Whether, if given the choice, you might leave your station in Piltover and join me here. And if not that, if you would at least allow me one last meeting to remedy my less than satisfactory goodbye.” He pauses. “So I sent someone to you.”
Brow wrinkled, Jayce repeats, “Sent someone?”
Viktor nods. “I would have gone myself, but my work requires me to be present here at all times,” he explains. “Dispatching a trusted associate of mine to speak with you was the best I could manage. But he could not locate you in Piltover. It appeared you had left, and, according to the word on the street, you had already been gone for some time. Nobody knew where, or why. My associate was forced to leave empty-handed.”
Jayce’s brow furrows further. He tries to remember it, leaving Piltover, but his memory splits, fractures. There’s nothing.
“I suppose it was only by mere chance that he stumbled upon you on his return to me,” Viktor goes on, measuredly. “You were injured and near unrecognizable, lying unconscious in a field only a few miles from where we are now. The nature of your location leads me to believe that you had been trying to find me, just as I had been trying to find you. But I can only speculate.”
He looks at Jayce, his expression softening slightly. “I was hoping that perhaps on your awakening, you would be able to explain the circumstances that have led to your current condition. But unfortunately that avenue seems to be futile. It appears that in addition to your other injuries, you have also suffered some head trauma that has resulted in the loss of your recent memories.”
Jayce’s head spins, attempting to process. Him leaving Piltover to find Viktor—that part makes sense. He doesn’t have the memories of most of the time they spent apart, but he doesn’t need them to know that he was miserable for its entirety. Life without Viktor wasn’t much of a life at all. Even though chasing after him would have been just another case of failing to respect his wishes, if he had thought there was a chance they could be together again, he probably would’ve taken it.
But what could’ve happened on his way to find Viktor that would leave him like this? How did he get from heartbroken to broken-legged, from passed out in his lab to unconscious in a field somewhere?
There’s so many questions, so many gaps in the equation. Jayce doesn’t even know where to begin.
He reaches for his wrist to thumb with his bracelet, a nervous habit he’s developed after years of constantly wearing it. Instead, the pad of his thumb touches bare skin.
Frowning, he looks down. His breath catches.
The rune…it’s fused with his wrist.
He runs his thumb over the jagged edges of his skin where they meet the gold plating surrounding the clear, blue stone. His mind races as unease unfurls in his stomach.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can feel Viktor watching him silently.
“Do you know about this?” he asks him. He can’t even begin to imagine how something like this would have happened.
Viktor shakes his head. “I think you must have encountered the Arcane somewhere along your journey,” he says. “But I do not know anything else.” His gaze turns regretful. “I am sorry I can not give you a better answer.”
“It’s okay,” Jayce says with a shake of his own head. Viktor’s associate found him. Might’ve saved him. And now, Viktor is next to him again, like how things are meant to be. Despite his overwhelming confusion, he’s grateful. “Do you…do you know if they’ll ever come back? My memories?”
“I don’t,” Viktor says. “The brain and all of its failures was never my field of study.”
“Neither was it mine.”
The intersection of magic and science had always been their discipline. Jayce hadn’t paid much attention in his biology classes back at the academy, more interested in the theoretical than the human body. He knows enough, though. He knows amnesia caused by a head injury often goes away with time, and he knows that sometimes it's permanent.
Jayce has no way of knowing which side of the ladder he falls on. All he can do is hope.
He swipes his thumb over the cold surface of the rune stone. What has happened to me? he asks it, as if it can give him an answer.
“Whatever happened,” Viktor says after a moment of silence, “you are safe now.”
Viktor’s voice is soothing. Soft. Comforting in its familiarity. Jayce feels the truth to the words. He’s safe here with Viktor. He’s here with Viktor. And that is the true miracle. That is enough.
Through the arched, open entrance, Jayce can see a bit of the outside world from where he’s sitting, can make out splashes of white and gold and the sheen of metal. It looks like nothing he’s ever seen before, and yet he knows, without knowing anything at all—that this is the sort of place worth remembering.
Some questions are perhaps beyond both of them. But there’s some he knows are simply yet to be answered.
“Viktor,” he says. “What is this place?”
All at once, Viktor stands up. Somehow, he makes even that movement seem elegant.
He holds out a hand for Jayce. “Come,” he says, palm outstretched. “See what I have done with the gift you’ve given me.”
The unfamiliar world that Jayce finds himself in as soon as he dips his head under the low arch of the yurt and into the light is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
Buried between the dark, towering walls of earth and an ash-smudged sky, Jayce knows that they must be in the Undercity from the smell of the smog from the fissures that lingers in the air. He can even see it, not too far ahead, where this community bleeds right into The Lanes—rickety bridges and buildings scratched into the stone walls darkening the nearby horizon. But this place does not look like any part of the Undercity Jayce has ever seen.
The community sprawls downward on a gentle slope, a watercolor painting of yellows and blues and purples splashed on a white canvas. The homes are ragged structures of warped wood, rusted stone, and scavenged metal, and they cling to the earth with the tenacity of weeds, cascading and building on each other. Paths of stone weave through the dense forest of homes, leading down to the base, where rows of crops grow in lines.
It’s not the lavish luxury and innovation of Piltover, but it’s also not the damp, dark pollution of Zaun. It’s something in between, something entirely different. Entirely beautiful.
Jayce goes completely breathless.
“You…” He can hardly form words, watching as people wander by, barefoot and in all the same white metal-encrusted robes, their faces serene as they lift baskets of fruit and gently chat with their companions. “You built this?”
He can’t keep the wonder out of his voice.
Next to him, gazing out into the scenery himself, Viktor shakes his head. “I am the foundation,” he says. He dips his chin towards the people. “But they are the builders.”
Viktor takes a step forward, out more into the open. Jayce follows him. They’re standing right next to a bell, and Jayce watches as someone goes to ring it, signaling the passing of another hour. A little ways to their left sits a giant, metal dome, surrounded on both sides by a spiked, wing-like structure. It reminds Jayce, vaguely, of the design of the Hexgates back in Piltover.
Everything here seems to serve a purpose. Nothing is superfluous, nothing goes to waste. Jayce thinks that, maybe, this is how people were meant to live.
“Every one of these people,” Viktor begins, “found me when they were at their lowest. Ravaged by shimmer addictions. Succumbing to illness. Pushed to the edge by lifelong ailments. Broken bones, broken spirits. For many, their desire to live had become nothing but a meager candle flame, seconds away from being extinguished by the harsh, unforgiving wind of this world.”
He raises a hand out in front of him, looks down at it with an unreadable expression. “The Hexcore’s abilities were not confined to merely saving my own life. It has a power beyond what I have yet discovered, and it yearns to be transferred to many. And as its host, I have been imbued with the power to do so.”
Purple tendons stretch, and Jayce watches in a trance as light flashes at the base of Viktor’s arm, like little sparks of electricity dancing around its width. The light pulses all the way down to Viktor’s fingertips. He holds it there for one, two, three seconds, before it fizzles out, extinguished. “The capacity to heal. The opportunity,” he waves a hand out in a gesture towards the community he’s created, “to give a new life to thousands.”
Jayce stares at him, understanding coming to him slowly. “You’ve…you’ve given Hextech to the people?”
Viktor nods. “Just like we always wanted.”
Jayce looks out to the people in front of him. There’s no sign of injury or illness on any of them. Only a pristine peace.
“Viktor,” Jayce begins, “this is—”
Hextech was a dream founded on the principle of changing lives. Helping both sides of their city. It never quite played out the way Jayce had imagined. The Hexgates brought prosperity to Piltover, but Zaun still lagged far behind, a dog on Topside’s leash, tossed nothing but scraps. Just as hungry and resentful as before. And the fate of their gemstone creation was even worse—turned into a weapon to slice a never-healed wound even further open. Jayce had been too caught up in the lights, in the glitter of fame and the chains of politics, to realize how to fix it. How to steer Hextech back to its original purpose and create something actually worth celebrating out of it. But Viktor had seen. Viktor—his beautiful, amazing partner—had done it. Of course he had. He had always seen the world in ways Jayce couldn’t.
“This is amazing,” he finally finishes. He feels his cheeks grow with a wide, infectious grin.
He’s proud, and in awe of the man in front of him, just like he’s always been.
“This is the culmination of all our efforts. Our lives’ work. And all of this, it started with you.”
“It started with us,” Jayce corrects, gently.
Hextech might’ve belonged to Jayce first, but it never would’ve gotten a single wheel off the ground if it wasn’t for Viktor. Jayce might’ve crafted the base of the ship, but Viktor was the one who gave it wings, pushed it into the air. There was no Hextech without Viktor, just like there was no Jayce without him either.
Viktor turns to him finally. “I know you have responsibilities back in Piltover. A council to lead. People you care for: your mother, Caitlyn.” He pauses, his eyes flashing briefly before the look shutters away. “Mel. But selfishly, I want you by my side. So forgive me, but I must ask you to stay. Join me here, in this commune. Reclaim our title as partners. There is so much yet to accomplish.”
Jayce wants to say that it's been his plan to formally resign from the Council for months now. He wants to say that he’ll miss his mother and Caitlyn, but they have their own lives and would want him to be happy in his. He wants to say that he hasn’t even thought about Mel since he woke up, and whatever tentative romance they once had has long since fizzled out.
He wants to say, don’t you know? You’re the air in my lungs. The blood in my veins. The hand around my heart, forcing it to beat. Every step I take away from you is a step toward my own grave.
Instead, he smiles and reaches out to place his hand on Viktor’s shoulder, just like he did that first day, standing in the explosion-torn remains of his old study—the day Viktor changed everything for him.
Clarity strikes Jayce all at once. He’s no different from the people in this commune, he realizes. Just like them, he was at his lowest point, pushed to the very edge of despair, until Viktor found him and gave him a life worth living. Maybe that’s why he belongs here—because, in his heart, he’s just as much a follower of Viktor as the rest of them.
“I already told you,” he says. “My place is with you. Whether that’s in the lab or a thousand miles away from it.” Softening his voice, he adds, “There’s no place I’d rather be.”
Viktor’s face curls into a small smile, the first one Jayce has seen from him in this body. It softens his already gentle face and sends Jayce’s stomach into a flutter.
“Welcome to the commune, Jayce,” he says. “Your new life awaits you.”