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Chapter Text

When Jayce grabs Viktor and folds him into his arms, they collapse into one another like colliding binary stars. It’s suddenly unclear if their time spent circling in an ever-tightening orbit has been moments, or millennia. They don't know if they are merging now, or going supernova.

They become aware of one another, and of what has come to pass.

Viktor remembers, like he’d been dwelling the whole time just under Jayce’s skin, the explosion of the council chambers.

Viktor—Jayce—had sprinted with a limp body to the lab where they had worked tirelessly and together over years to bend the laws of the universe in the hope of improving lives. They had toiled there, together, before they had drifted from one another pulled by their distinct yet overlapping limitations. Their body. Their ego.

Viktor remembers, through Jayce’s memory, the expression on his own corpse as it fused with the Hexcore. Viktor almost remembers this moment himself, but his own memory is absent of all sensation beyond a curiosity and a draw and a hunger, because this particular memory comes from the part of himself that once was the Hexcore.

He remembers Jayce’s vigil in the dappled light emitted by the chrysalis. He remembers the piles of scrawled notes and calculations, and he remembers that they were an excuse because Jayce cannot leave him he is alive he is still breathing he is alive he has a pulse he is alive.

They had stayed like that, waiting and changing and waiting and changing, uninterrupted until Mel had entered the room. Her eyes had roved over the space, taking it in, and she had spoken with Jayce, gently. Promised him that she would handle her mother and the council so he could sit with Viktor. Said, “I won't let them corrupt your dream.” And when she said it, she gripped Viktor’s crutch and pushed it firmly into Jayce’s hands.

Because she’s Mel Medarda. And while most people in Piltover talk past Viktor because they don’t see him, Mel does so because she’s always seen through him (ever since You’re the professor’s assistant, and No, he’s my new partner, and ever since her eyes flicked to Viktor on the last word when she said that she recognized that Any worthwhile venture involves risk). Viktor knows this, and has always felt confident that he could see through her in return. Mel is gilded and gleaming and she angles herself carefully to catch the light; but it’s armor, not decoration. Jayce beams like a star so she positions the board and finds herself both brilliant and a bit blinded beside him.

So when Mel Medarda had told Jayce that she would protect “your dream” she had meant their dream, and she had been promising Viktor too, though she had not looked across the room at where Viktor was—in Jayce’s memory, colored by Jayce’s hopeful reckoning (he is still breathing he still has a pulse)—alive.

Because years ago, Jayce had stood next to Viktor in an exploded laboratory, clasped his shoulder, and said, “our Hextech dream” with an ease that had made it seem like it was a simple recognition of their partnership rather than the creation of it.

Hextech is not just their dream anymore. Viktor is Hextech, as much as whatever he was before. It is half of the alloy that is himself.

“What am I?” he had asked, minutes ago.

Now he’s in Jayce’s arms, and Viktor remembers, as Jayce: a conversation with Caitlyn, a fight at a memorial, crafting weapons in the heat of the forge. He recalls a fitful sleep in the lab interrupted by a noise as screws clinked to the ground after unwinding themselves from a grate in the floor. He remembers drinking tea with Ekko and Heimerdinger, how they had both looked over the frame where a body with a pulse was breathing when Jayce looked up from a leaf under a microscope and confessed the plants in their experiments with the Hexcore “weren’t what we were trying to save.” How Heimerdinger’s ears had drooped, and they’d moved forwards in the conversation.

He remembers that Jayce had said, “Viktor hypothesized that there may be something he called wild runes.” He remembers, as Jayce, looking over to the body in the mold, and Viktor sees himself through Jayce’s eyes in this memory. “He hypothesizes,” he remembers Jayce correcting. Remembers he’s alive he is breathing he has a pulse. “He calls them wild runes.”

That had been the last time that Jayce had seen Viktor, for a long, long while.

Jayce had gone with Ekko and Heimerdinger to the Hexgate, and he had touched an anomaly there. Time and space had shattered until Jayce had found himself retching bile onto unfamiliar ground. He had stumbled through a corrupted landscape and into the realization that he was in Piltover, and that it was destroyed. He had wandered past the husks of people, what remained of their faces twisted in fear and agony. Then they had moved, and Jayce had run, and then he had fallen and then his hammer had crashed into his leg and then nothing.

Months had passed in that ravine. Jayce had survived.

Then he climbed.

And on the summit of a broken world, Jayce had met the mage who saved him as a child.

And Jayce had made him a promise.

The mage had sent him back, across dimensions, to stand where he’d departed, in the core of the Hexgate. The months spent elsewhere collapsed down into a moment spent here.

So when Viktor had pulled himself from the chrysalis in the lab, moments ago, Jayce had been waiting with a stone fuzed into his wrist.

“What am I?” Viktor asked.

“What do you want to be?” Jayce was bearded and haggard and hopeful.

“Yours,” Viktor said, a memory and a realization both, like it was a truth that was woven into each of his metal and organic molecules.

And Jayce had pulled him into his arms.

The rune in Jayce’s wrist presses into the back of Viktor’s neck and their minds cling to one another in the Arcane.

Jayce feels Viktor’s recursive impulse and presses into it, inquiring. Viktor yields to him, and together they parse through a drive for creation and destruction, a curiosity that itches for manifestation, the Arcane that is both embedded in and is Viktor. It takes a shape, almost, in Viktor’s mind. Sky.

Jayce finds a memory there, a journal clutched to Viktor’s chest, dust covering the floor of the lab where he was collapsed and weeping. Only it was not dust. It was all that remained of Sky Young other than a journal and shattered glasses. He remembers shortly after, as Viktor, scattering those remains, then stepping towards the edge of a steep drop. Remembers, as Viktor, that Jayce had found him there. Remembers both of them reminiscing together, and the promise that Jayce had made.

Viktor’s recklessness and the Hexcore had killed Sky, and Viktor and the Hexcore are one, now. He has new metallic hands, and already they are covered in blood.

“She had such dreams,” Viktor says, muffled into Jayce’s shoulder. They both know that her journal sits on a desk nearby. That it’s filled with schematics and research: Plants that could grow in the depths of Zaun, at once clearing away the grey and providing a source of food. “You promised me that you would destroy it.”

Jayce holds him tighter.

“I can’t destroy you,” Jayce says. “And it would not bring her back.”

Viktor feels Jayce’s determination, and he remembers the lifetime of the mage unfolding before him in an instant. Only you can show me this, the mage had said, and Jayce and Viktor have both seen it, now. The empty fields of dreamless solitude at the end of all equations.

It cannot come to pass, Viktor thinks.

It won’t, Jayce promises.

They wander together into Zaun. Jayce clutches his hammer, and Viktor his staff. Between the two of them, they are imposing enough that appraising eyes slide over them as they traverse the city, passing repeating displays of violence and desperation. Jayce has never been this far into the Undercity before, not in this dimension, and he feels astounded by what he sees. His horror is blanketed, somewhat, by his relief that there are people here, not automatons. That Viktor is here, and alive.

They reach the bottom of Zaun.

“Here,” Viktor says, and he brushes the back of his hand against Jayce’s, lingering so that Jayce can share in Viktor’s understanding. There is a part of Viktor’s mind that nudges his awareness of the Arcane into the shape of Sky again, standing in the center of a curving metallic structure.

It’s not her, Jayce thinks into the space between them. It’s not a firm correction, but it’s enough to shift Viktor’s understanding away from the hallucination, to recognize the impulse for what it is: a pull from wild magic.

No, Viktor thinks in return. But this is where what she dreamed of might begin.

The world I just climbed out of starts here too. We need to be careful.

There are people nearby, they realize together, between a flicker in Jayce’s peripheral vision and a sound that Viktor catches. The most desperate of Zaun are huddled into the shapes and structures of the surrounding tents, watching.

“So much senseless pain,” Viktor says. There is a charge that starts then, drawn out from deep within the part of him that connects to power through the Arcane. It buzzes over the metal of his fingers. He feels a pull to reach, to fix what is broken here. Jayce turns to him, fully wraps Viktor’s electrified hand between both of his own.

“We’ll help them,” Jayce says. “But not with the Hexcore.”

Then how? Viktor asks without speaking.

I don’t know right now. But we’re scientists, Jayce thinks, then he passes a memory to Viktor of his own words: We seek discoveries, ways to make this world a better place.

Viktor has the notebook that Sky Young had filled with her years and her dreams. The ground is grey but there are strains of plants that she developed to grow here.

You said that you wanted to be mine, Viktor, Jayce shares, in a thought that is pained, but also soft and full of wonder. Jayce lifts Viktor’s charged hand. When you feel like this, reach for me. Viktor stares as Jayce brings the metallic fingertips to his mouth, closes his eyes, and kisses them gently. Only me.

When Viktor’s hand draws away, there is a metallic, pearlescent sheen that lingers on Jayce’s lips.

They can grow something here.

The work is the opposite of easy.

Viktor does not have an easy time resisting the pull of the Arcane, escaping his drive to help the people of Zaun heal using the source of power that now rests within him; the Hextech that he had devoted much of his life to. Viktor’s good intentions and the hum of the Hexcore pull him to what he knows would be disaster.

Jayce does not have an easy time pulling Viktor back. It is not easy, holding for both of them the memories of the consequences. It is not easy for Jayce to discover a scale of suffering that he could not have imagined and to mandate that they stick to the winding path to ease it.

It does not help them if it dooms them, they remind one another.

Together, they do the work that is hard.

Their connection has changed, solidified by the moment Viktor touched Jayce’s lips in the center of those metallic archways. Their thoughts and experiences find one another across any distance, blending into one whether they are together or apart, in Piltover or Zaun. In the space where their minds connect, at the speed of awareness they pass ideas and theorems, memories and emotions, sensory information. They push and permit and sometimes draw back, collecting themselves as individuals for a time before returning to their new shared consciousness.

There is the work of Sky Young for them to build upon.

And there’s Shimmer. It’s a weapon in the hands of the chem barons, but it is often the only technology available to those who dwell in the Undercity. Where it is applied to a cure an ailment, it too often forms a dependency and horrific side effects.

The rest of the problems that they face are complex and time-sensitive. They have the faint memories imparted by the mage to use as a map, layers upon layers of conditionals and potentialities that have been thought through by all of the minds of the City of Progress and the City of Iron and Glass, who in that destroyed dimension had been combined into a collective for a duration that Jayce and Viktor could only guess at.

It’s enough to give them a few specifics they might not otherwise have known about their current circumstances: Caitlyn has assembled a team that is releasing the grey back into the Undercity while chasing down Jinx. Topside, Mel Medarda might already be missing and Ambessa is maneuvering Salo into position to seize power.

Together they make a plan.

When Viktor steps hesitantly into the lab of his old teacher, he glances around at the liquid containers full of their many oddities, and is swept into a series of memories.

He thinks of his steel oasis: the water treatment facility that moved one of life’s primary ingredients through the pipework of the city. The massive metallic organs of his subterranean home were housed there; cleansing the water like a liver, like kidneys. Pumping it back out, like Zaun’s beating heart.

The technology of Piltover is cerebral, metallic gears catching and grinding, electrified and glittering. Zaun’s technology is wet. It is blood and shimmer and brackish water, meaty and organic and alive.

He remembers chasing his toy boat, unable to catch it as the water swept it away swifter than he could run into the hidden cave where he would meet his first friends. And he remembers, much later, after the Hexcore’s flickering structure transformed the flesh of his leg into metal, sprinting through the shipyard, adjusting to the weight of a nature that he’d changed with those friends’ contributions.

Viktor looks down and notes that it is this same bare and metallic foot which has crossed the threshold into Singed’s lab. Purple light shines from under its metal plating, and here, in this place, it reminds him of Rio. Not as the creature with her playful nature and expressive eyes, but as a specimen, crying and twisted by tubing and veins, pulsing with a bio-luminescent, sickly glow. Purple.

Viktor remembers asking, as a child: You did this? Remembers: The mutation must survive.

Remembers, as a man, hearing: They will despise you. Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress. Remembers saying: Jayce will understand.

From somewhere high above, in Piltover, Jayce’s consciousness nudges against Viktor’s and he cards through the shared memories, softly. Jayce returns a recognition, a sadness.

Yeah, Jayce thinks, and he offers, gently, a sense of the weight of Viktor’s limp body in his arms as he had sprinted to their lab and kicked open the door to reveal their creation: purple light and dancing runes. I understand.

Viktor closes his eyes.

“Do you believe in fate, doctor?” Viktor says, quietly.

Across the lab, Singed looks up from where he is seated at a desk strewn with beakers and samples.

“Viktor,” he says, looking at his pupil intently, but only for a moment.

Singed turns back to his desk. He puts down a vial, carefully, and then his bandaged hand reaches out towards a small stack of papers. He spreads them out over his desk as Viktor crosses further into the room. Viktor recognizes the schematics of the Hexcore that he had brought down here somehow both days and lifetimes ago.

“I wished to see the device, so I would say that it is fortuitous you have brought it here,” Singed says, voice crackly, and he turns back to Viktor. “But perhaps you would not agree.”

Singed stands then, and walks in slow circle around Viktor. There is a scent that follows him, old and familiar: an unsettling concoction of formaldehyde and a floral, cloying sweetness.

“Incredible,” Singed says, “what I wouldn’t give to glimpse the world through your eyes. To know what you know.”

His wrapped hand shoots out to grasp Viktor’s, suddenly, and the Hexcore within Viktor lurches, reaching.

But Jayce is already there, and slams into Viktor’s mind with his own. Jayce is both firm and somehow louder than the Hexcore: No. Only me.

So Viktor does not reach, does not fix, he only observes. He is thrust into Singed’s memory. There, Singed sits and reads aloud to the only one of his subjects that will never be a specimen to him, because one cannot be both a specimen and a daughter. Viktor comes to realize that Singed’s goal is not exactly to overcome death itself. It’s to give someone life.

Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress, Viktor remembers Singed saying. But where Viktor’s mind touches Jayce’s, he understands there is an equally true inversion: Progress is the sacrifice we make for legacy and love.

Viktor pulls his hand away, takes a breath deep into metallic lungs. Are you okay? Jayce checks. Viktor doesn’t know the answer to that question.

“Knowledge is a paradox,” Viktor says, eventually. “The more one understands, the more one realizes the vastness of his ignorance.”

Singed pauses in his steps and clicks open a golden pocket watch, glancing down.

“There is something that I must attend to promptly. Join me, we may continue this conversation.” Singed walks over to a heavy iron door, and grabs at a metal hand wheel to crank it unlocked. It creaks open to reveal darkness broken by a soft green glow. There is a sound coming from within. Deep breathing.

Singed walks into the darkness. Viktor follows.

“Hey, sprout.”

Catilyn is swirling a tumbler of whisky held loosely in her fingers and staring into a fireplace when Jayce walks into her office. She looks up at him, and her eyes go wide, gaze darting over him like she’s examining one of her evidence boards. He watches as she takes in his clothes, ripped and filthy. Then her eyes draw a line from the brace on his leg up to his beard, connect it over to the length of his hair, rest on the metallic mark on his lips.

Whatever conclusion she reaches, it makes her put her whiskey down. She stands and moves to a cabinet nearby and picks up another tumbler and the decanter, and she returns to the side table and pours amber liquor into both glasses until they are filled well beyond two fingers. She holds one out to Jayce.

He moves towards her and takes it, then sinks into the other armchair. Caitlyn stays standing, and her eyes return to the fire as she takes a long drink. Jayce follows suit.

The fire resettles twice over before one of them breaks the silence.

“I hurt Vi,” Caitlyn says.

Jayce shifts, puts his leg up onto the small footrest, and asks, “Why?”

The fire crackles.

“She told me to take the shot if I had it.”

“On her sister?”

Caitlyn nods.

“Did you have the shot?”

Another nod.

“Did you take it?”

Cait raises the glass to her mouth, says, “Vi stopped me,” and drinks deep.

Jayce drinks too. It’s incredible whiskey. “Why?”

Caitlyn sits down in her chair, brings her hand up to her forehead. She sighs.

Jayce waits.

“There was a child,” she says, finally.

Jayce reaches over and places his hand on Caitlyn’s shoulder. She inhales shakily.

“There was a child protecting Jinx, and I tried to take the shot.” When she looks up at Jayce, her eyes are watery.

“Cait,” Jayce says, voice soft. He looks at her, intently. “Did you have the shot?”

“I don’t know,” she admits, and it comes out as a sob. “I don’t know.”

Jayce’s chair tips over with a thud as he moves, pulls, and shortly they are both on the floor in front of the fire as Caitlyn weeps into Jayce’s shoulder. He holds her, tightly, rocking slightly as the tears wrench through her frame.

“She stopped me,” Cait bawls, and she sounds lost somewhere between furious and grateful.

Jayce thinks back to years ago: standing on the ledge of his exploded workshop, pulled away by Viktor’s soft words. Somewhere deep in Zaun, Viktor notices the attention, pushes back his own memory of stepping back from the edge of his steel oasis when Jayce had found him there.

“Sometimes,” Jayce tells Cait, as her tears pour into his shirt, “when pain has taken over, love looks like an interruption.”

It takes a long while, there on the floor of Caitlyn’s room, before either of them say anything else. Jayce holds his friend close as she works through several waves of compounded grief. When Caitlyn’s tears stop, there is a long stretch of sniffling, and then another stretch of stillness while the fire pops contentedly near them.

Eventually she peels herself from Jayce’s shoulder, and he fishes out a handkerchief to pass her. It’s ripped and weathered from his months of survival in a shattered dimension, but she takes it with a wet laugh. When she notices his wince as he adjusts his stiff leg, she stands and reaches to help him up off of the ground.

They right the chairs, and settle back into them. Jayce refills their glasses from the decanter, and Caitlyn knocks hers back.

Eyes red and smiling shakily, she draws up the composure to ask: “Dare I ask how your day has been?”

Jayce shrugs, runs his hand over his beard, props his braced leg back onto the footrest. “Can’t complain.”

Caitlyn chucks the handkerchief at him, and he bats it away, laughing. It’s Jayce’s first laugh in months, and it comes out a bit hysterical. Somewhere in Zaun, Viktor closes his eyes to listen.

In the dark room behind the metal door in Singed’s lab, blood courses through tubes. It moves from Singed’s veins and into the canisters of glowing green fluid that are embedded into a large creature.

“He was once a man,” Singed had told his old pupil, as he placed the needles for the extraction into his own arm with an ease that indicated practice. “A victim of great tragedy. He had a ferocious will to live. An incredible tolerance for pain. With him I was able to make strides impossible with any other specimen. But his mind, I could not recover.”

Viktor had waited by the door while Singed started the transfusion, then watched the sanguine flow course thickly through organic veins into veins of glass and rubber.

He was still at the threshold now, swept up in meditations centering his initial question upon waking: What am I?

Viktor doesn’t know if his own veins are meat or metal. He doesn’t know if he has veins. If his blood is blood still. He rotates his wrist, moves his fingers, staring down at his own hand and watching the light course through the joints with a curious, scientific detachment that almost blankets the yawning chasm of emotion that he cannot begin to parse through at this time. His mind drifts to Jayce, and Jayce’s drifts back, and when Viktor peers through that impossible open door between them, he finds himself looking instead at Jayce’s hand: tanned and strong and callused.

If you’re mine, I’m yours, Jayce thinks. If you need a hand, take mine. If you need blood, take mine. If you need a body, take mine.

Viktor shudders, and up in the high towers of Piltover, Jayce’s hand is clenched into a fist by a will that is not his own.

Viktor blinks back into sight from his own eyes. He moves closer to the lupine form chained to the ceiling. He feels the thrum of the Hexcore, an electrification that courses down to his fingertips.

Viktor holds faint memories passed from mind to mind, and though it is a fourth-hand account, it is with the compassion of a life that he has not lived and a bond that he has not formed that Viktor recognizes this animal as a person (through Jayce’s connection to the mage that Viktor might have been, and the mage’s connection to a man from another universe who had once been loved by people who remembered him by name).

“He is a man, still,” Viktor says, but he does not reach out to Vander. “Not a specimen.”

Singed doesn’t respond immediately, instead rubbing his thumb over the glass face of his stopwatch. His eyes are lidded, hazy from exsanguination, and they roll back into his head as he closes them.

“You asked me if I believe in fate,” he says, roughly. “I do not. I believe in evolution. Nature’s greatest force, forever in flux.”

Viktor feels a deep weariness.

Evolution. Progress. Ceaseless movement, an unending march through time, clawing and grasping for survival in the face of death, sacrificing life to overcome it. To what end? When does it end?

“I would, once, have told you that you were wrong.” Viktor says, slumped over his staff. “That evolution has a destination. An end. That there is a final point, at which evolution does not combat nature, but rather supersedes it.”

Singed peers at him, fighting for focus. “And now?”

The paradox of knowledge: Viktor knows more, now, than he did in a different world. His understanding of the vastness of his ignorance has grown.

“I am uncertain.” He says. “I’ve seen it, now. What I would have called the final, glorious evolution. It was the final point of one path, but it has become the first point of this one.”

Viktor stares at the network of tubes and pipes. They branch like veins, like pathways. Like roots that draw out water from grey dirt as an offering. Like the sprout that stretches out collecting light to offer back.

“Some paths are carved out before us by a guiding hand,” Viktor says. “I know this. That hand has, on occasion, been my own.”

Singed stares and says nothing.

“Do you remember telling me that nature has made us intolerant to change, but that we have the capacity to change our nature?”

Singed nods and says nothing.

“I am changed, doctor. I am more metal than flesh, but I am not certian that I have changed my nature. I am still myself. Still a man. Just one who has glimpsed another world, one where I believed that I had transended my nature completely only to discover that I was wrong.”

Singed closes the watch and says nothing.

“And it makes me wonder. Perhaps nature is change. Perhaps evolution is transformation. Perhaps progress is re-creation.”

Singed extracts the needles from his arm, then wraps it in a bandage, and says nothing.

“Perhaps evolution cannot supersede nature, because evolution is nature.”

Singed ties off the bandage with careful fingers and says nothing.

Perhaps it doesn’t end. Viktor thinks, and he feels so very tired.

“Perhaps.” Singed says, breaking his long silence. “If so, you have your answer.”

“Do I?” Viktor asks.

“Evolution. Nature. Progress. All different names for a thing which has no final destination. A thing which does not end. But,” Singed says, and he stands.

He stumbles, bloodless. Thoughtlessly, Viktor reaches out a steadying hand to grip Singed’s shoulder.

It doesn’t come from the pull of the Hexcore. It’s just the reflex of a man who knows what it is like to lose his sense of balance.

Singed looks at the metallic hand on his shoulder, sadly. He places his own bandaged hand atop it.

“Perhaps it is an end in itself.”

Jayce and Caitlyn stand over a floor covered in notations.

The decanter of whisky had been swapped for a pot of tea early in the night, sometime shortly before their conversation had been broken, briefly, by a knock on the door. Caitlyn introduced Jayce to one of her officers, Maddie, who had come to ‘offer help’, and who seemed dejected when Caitlyn turned her away. When Maddie leaves, Jayce raises a pointed brow at Caitlyn. She brushes him off with a wave of her hand.

Cait and Jayce continue mapping out the complicated web of the current political situation. Caitlyn occasionally walks over to pull up diagrams on a monitor, and they supplement the case files pulled from her old office with the older information unlocked by her inheritance, the Kiramman Key.

Caitlyn has a system. When presented with new facts, she re-evaluates all of the evidence.

She has relegated Jayce’s “mysterious warnings” to a purple paper, since at the moment he doesn’t seem keen on providing a story that might make his more outlandish claims seem like reliable evidence. She trusts him, so she considers them seriously, but they are purple just in case.

His more general advice she considers without the same reservations. She and Jayce have been close for years, and she had seen him step away from his lab, swept into the dance of Piltovan politics. She’d sat with him as he aired frustrations about fumbled maneuvers and stifling parties. It has been a challenge for him, in a lot of ways, but she knows that he has learned the steps. He knows the other dancers.

“Mel’s not there to stop her, and Ambessa is looking for weapons. If she can’t find it in Hextech, she will find it in you. She will make your grief a weapon,” he tells her. Purple paper.

“Who stands to benefit from the attack at the memorial?” he asks.

Caitlyn kicks herself for not having asked that question herself, and is frustrated that even now she has trouble thinking about it clearly. They start putting together a new section of notes, collecting names and information and articles. Several times, she loses focus as her attention drifts through the same cycle of faces that have been haunting her. Her mother (a statue standing over a memorial-turned-battlefield), Jinx (a laughing, moving target obscured by smoke and mirrors), Vi (her eyes wide with horror, saying, That was a kid. What if you missed?).

But Jayce is there, with an understanding look and a comforting hand on her shoulder, asking simple questions and handing her a file or her tea, drawing her gently out of her thoughts and back into the room to join him. Eventually the new section of evidence sprawled out onto the floor starts to come together. Purple paper is notably absent.

“The Chem Baron who attacked you, she was one of Silco’s,” Caitlyn says, digging through a crate, pulling out a file to pass to Jayce. “Renni, she ran the operations of shimmer production.”

Jayce takes the file, and flips over the first page. He stills. Then he collapses. The green armchair almost doesn’t catch him.

“Jayce?” Cait asks, focus drawn. Jayce is holding his head in his hands, and he is shaking.

“The factory we shut down?” he says, swallowing. “Me and Vi?”

Cait waits.

“I killed a kid.” He says. Cait picks up the file from where it had fallen on the ground. There is a rough sketch of a young boy. “I killed Renni’s kid.”

The fire has died, and only embers remain to cast their flickering light over the room.

“This is my fault,” Jayce says, a whisper. “Viktor died in that room. And Bolbok, and Hoskel. Your mother. But somehow I walked away, and their memorial was a massacre because I killed a child.”

Caitlyn stares at him, jaw clenched.

Viktor’s mind brushes against Jayce’s in that moment, not offering comfort, exactly, but recognition. Understanding. There’s an image that he passes to Jayce, not quite a memory. More like a dream. Barren dirt cracking in the wake of a stubborn sprout reaching for the sky. A field of vibrant plants thriving in grey soil.

Caitlyn closes her eyes. Takes a deep breath.

“Who benefits?” she asks, turning back to the notes.

She remembers the golden mask of a wolf emerging from the smoke: Ambessa Medarda’s well timed arrival. A Noxian General had stood over and slit the throat of a violent chem baron. Both, apparently, mothers. Caitlyn follows the string from Ambessa to the grainy photo of Mel Medarda, and the purple note that says MISSING.

She will make your grief a weapon, Jayce had said. It was written on purple paper.

By the time the dawn light cuts through the curtains, it falls on a wide web of information laid out across Caitlyn Kiramman’s floor. Ambessa Medarda sits near the center, even when Caitlyn excludes the notes on purple paper.

There’s another knock, and Caitlyn opens the door, then reads quickly through the summons she’s handed.

“You reek,” she tells Jayce. She smiles up at him, a flash of cutting teeth beneath tired eyes. “Go use my shower, I’ll send for clothes.” She waves the summons. “We’ve got a meeting to get to.”

“You are not here, I trust, only to indulge an old scientist by exchanging pontifications,” Singed says, once the metal door has been sealed behind them and Vander is contained once more.

“No.” Viktor says. He tilts his head to one side, then the other in a slow, rolling stretch before he continues. “I have seen the effects of Shimmer somewhere that I would rather see something grow. I mean to ease the senseless suffering caused by your creation, but I must avoid the catastrophe that would be brought about by using mine.”

“You must be seeking an ally, then. Or perhaps a rival.” Singed settles back into the chair at his desk, and spins it to face his old pupil. “Which did you hope to find in my laboratory, Viktor?”

Viktor snorts. “Quite melodramatic of you, doctor.”

Singed looks pointedly, brow raised, and waves a hand broadly in Viktor’s general direction. “You are hardly one to speak on the matter.”

“I suppose,” Viktor says, “that is fair.”

The long stretch of silence that follows is not unfamiliar to the pair of them, even after many, many years; they had been, for a time, “loners together.” Singed strikes a match and lights a burner at his desk, then picks up a pipette and begins to siphon liquid from one container to another. Viktor maneuvers around the lab, peering at the various jarred specimens and materials, turning over and reading through the notes he finds. It is a long, quiet perusal. Viktor learns a great deal as he drifts, slowly, through the space of his old mentor.

Eventually Viktor returns to the tank where he’d stood, fixated, for almost the entirety of his previous visit.

“She was my friend, once,” Viktor says, and his metal fingers clink when they alight on the glass. “So were you. I want to help you.”

Singed closes his eyes, sets down the pipette, and rests his hands on his desk. “You offered me your help once before.”

“And I would offer it again, but I have terms,” Viktor says.

“Name them.”

Singed opens his eyes to watch as Viktor turns around and sets his staff firmly on the ground. In the tank behind him, what was once Rio is suspended and elevated. Purple light emanates from the murky fluid, and in the dimly lit room it halos Viktor, turns him into a silhouette against which Singed can only see the matching soft glow that escapes from between the metal plates of Viktor’s body where it’s not flesh and not obscured by a large, draping blanket.

Such as Viktor’s arm, which reaches out to gesture to the closed metal door and the chained man who lies beyond it. “I will not sacrifice his humanity for your cause.”

Singed nods.

Viktor places his palm over his own chest. “I will not sacrifice my humanity.”

Singed nods again.

Viktor levels his arm out towards the doctor, holding out an open hand. “And if you accept my help, you may not continue to sacrifice your own humanity.”

Singed exhales, long and slow. Then he stands, crosses the room.

“Very well,” he says, reaching out.

When Viktor shakes Singed’s hand, it is symbolic, not Arcane.

There is beating, like a heart: a rolling, drumming rhythm.

Jayce stands in the shadow of a pillar, surrounded by enforcers and soldiers who are pounding on their chests.

Ambessa Medarda places a cape over Caitlyn’s shoulders. The beating halts.

The Noxian general leans in and says something to Caitlyn, quietly and privately, before she steps back. Caitlyn turns to face the room. She brings up her hand, open.

“Thank you, Ambessa Medarda,” Cait says, loudly enough for all to hear, but looking at the woman she’s addressing, “for pledging your experience, and your detachment of Noxian soldiers. Thank you for swearing to me that my mother will have justice.”

Ambessa looks, for a moment, alarmed by the public repetition of her own words. But she collects herself and bows her head. Jayce is watching close enough to notice that it’s a prideful motion: a mockery of deference.

Caitlyn turns to the rest of the crowd.

“Is this appointment approved by the council of Piltover?” she asks, looking to Councilor Shoola, then over to Salo, where he is gripped by Ambessa’s guard. She waits for the nods of both council-members, and her eyes flash, momentarily, to the pillar that Jayce is leaning on. He nods his head to her, deep and low.

“Very well.” Caitlyn says, standing tall. She takes a deep breath, and her eyes close for a moment, barely longer than a blink. But when they open again, they are sharp. “It will be my first act as Piltover’s general to recognize the final act of my mother, Councilor Cassandra Kiramman. In this very room, in my mother’s last moments, she and the combined council of Piltover voted in favor of an independent Zaun.”

Caitlyn turns her back to the crowd, facing the open sky through the exploded wall of the council chambers. When she speaks, her voice carries.

“Half of Piltover’s council and the Zaunite crime lord Silco were killed in the same night, by the same individual. I was there,” Cait says, and she points out, down. “I saw the explosive fired by this individual, who calls herself Jinx. And I watched it land here, where I am standing. Several of our city’s great leaders died in this room. My mother died in this room.”

Caitlyn’s jaw works for a moment before she turns around to face the crowd once more. They are silent.

“I am a proud Enforcer. I have led a strike team into Zaun, and I have removed the forces there that remained loyal to Silco. I will continue in the pursuit of Jinx, the sole individual responsible for this attack.

However, I must acknowledge that this tragedy was enabled by the betrayal of another enforcer: Sheriff Marcus. It was a deep blow, one that was struck to all who wear this badge,” she says, pressing her fingers to her own as she looks over the assembled officers, meeting each of their eyes in turn. “But I assure you all, that blow struck deeper to those who live in Zaun. I worked in concert with a Zaunite, Vi, to uncover Sheriff Marcus’ misconduct, and in the process I became familiar with the plight of those who live beneath this gleaming city. Under Silco, and over years, the conditions our neighbors live under have become dire, enabled by our own ignorance and corruption.”

Ambessa’s gaze sharpens. Jayce rights himself off of the pillar, and his palm wraps around the grip of his hammer.

“At a memorial for those lost in the attack,” Caitlyn continues, “in the midst of our grief, we were attacked again. Not by Zaun, but by the forces of a woman named Renni. The citizens of Zaun would call her a ‘Chem Baron,’ a term that they use for the violent crime lords that they have lived in fear of for years under Silco. Two things are true about that attack: First, it was unconscionable. Second, it was a personal retaliation to the unsanctioned actions of Councilor Talis, in which a Piltovan Councilor killed a Zaunite child using Hextech.”

Jayce feels some of the eyes around the chamber snap to him, but he keeps his own locked on Ambessa and the Noxian soldiers.

“The independence of Zaun was a position that my mother considered at my urging. I believe that the path forward from here is clear.”

Caitlyn takes a deep breath, and stares into the eyes of the wolf.

“Ambessa Medarda, thank you for reporting the death of Guild Merchant Amara. I will personally launch a thorough investigation to confirm your information, and deeply appreciate your support and compliance. You are correct in saying that our families should not need fear an assassin's dagger in the night. You would also be correct to say that the families of Zaun should not need fear starvation, or sickness, or dependency on Shimmer, or Chem Barons. Especially when we, their immediate neighbors, have donned the name City of Progress. But they do fear those things. And they have had need to.”

Caitlyn looks at the Noxian soldiers.

“I will not give them the need to fear your blades as well. You have placed your detachment of soldiers at my disposal. I will apply them, graciously, towards the task of returning themselves to Noxus.”

There was a shifting in the crowd, an uneasiness. Enforcers glancing at the stationary soldiers, guild leaders glancing between the two. Jayce braces himself, watching Ambessa’s hands.

Ambessa looks around, taking in the room with calculating eyes. She positions herself to speak, but Caitlyn cuts her off.

“You have sworn to me that my mother will have justice.”

Ambessa looks at Caitlyn like she is both surprised by her audacity and impressed by it.

“I am a Kiramman. My house has espoused forward momentum and progress since the founding of Piltover, and my mother was no exception. When she constructed airways to clear away the grey from Zaun, it was in the name of progress. When she funded the research to allow the development of Hexgates and open wide the doors to trade, commerce, and travel around the whole of Runeterra, it was in the name of progress. The only way to do justice to my mother’s memory is to continue the work that will allow Piltover to move towards a brighter tomorrow.

Piltover and Zaun are sibling cities, and our deepest scars have been opened. We need healing, and medicine. We need to begin the long conversations and the challenging work of rebuilding. Piltover will move forward, in a fashion befitting of our name: The City of Progress.”

Caitlyn looks out over the assembled crowd, notices the nods, the glares, the shifting of eyes and tightening tension. Her eyes lock on Jayce’s, briefly. Then she looks back to the Noxian veteran.

“General Medarda,” Cait continues, “I ask that you honor my decision as the duly appointed General of Piltover during this time of crisis. War will be our last resort.”

Ambessa steps closer to Caitlyn, eyes filled with rage, knuckles straining over clenched fists. Caitlyn looks intently at her.

“This is a conviction that I know that I share with Councilor Mel Medarda.” Caitlyn says, softly, firmly. Then she says something quieter, only audible in the space between herself and the General.

Jayce can’t make out the words, but he’d seen them written out in Caitlyn’s tidy hand when they’d been preparing for this, early in the morning: Your daughter believes in progress, in reconciliation. I want to help her.

Jayce watches Ambessa’s hands slowly fall open. His grip on his hammer loosens when she steps back, away from Cait.

Jayce doesn’t actually know how long he’s been awake, what with the dimension hopping. But by the time he makes it two blocks from the council building, after papers are signed and dealings are done and Cait is the acting ruler of Piltover under martial law, the adrenaline and the caffeine have both worn off, and he’s falling asleep on his feet.

Where are you going? Viktor thinks at him, when Jayce bumps into a trash bin and reflexively apologizes to it.

Jayce hadn’t really put conscious thought into it, but he is walking away from his house, the forge, and the lab, moving in the direction of the Bridge of Progress. He stops.

“You’re in Zaun,” Jayce says, then realizes he’s speaking out loud, and is relieved to find that there is no one nearby other than the trash bin.

Yes. Do you need something I can procure for you here?

Jayce shakes his head.

Jayce, you are exhausted. I can feel it. You must rest.

But you’re in Zaun, Jayce thinks, pressing his confusion into Viktor.

Viktor pauses in the midst of the calculation he’s sketching out on one of Singed’s chalkboards, and lets Jayce’s sensations wash over him fully.

Jayce is exhausted. His leg aches, his hammer is heavy, and his vision is hazy. He needs to lie down and rest, and he’s hungry. He hasn’t had food in ages. But sitting both beneath and above his exhaustion and his hunger is another urge that settles deeper, that charts the steps of his weary body without a thought. Jayce’s arms feel empty, his skin feels like it’s prickling and Jayce has only touched Viktor twice in this body but he has felt the thrumming charge dancing through the metal plates of his partner like a pulse and he needs it. Jayce needs to feel it again, as a comfort. A reassurance. Viktor is alive, and he is in Jayce’s head, but Jayce needs him close and Viktor is in Zaun.

Viktor blinks. They hadn’t considered, collectively, some of the particulars of this new, shared existence. Like where they would be staying and resting as they moved through the steps of their plan. Whether or not that would be something that they did together.

Negating the negative effects of shimmer will take time, and sustained effort. Viktor puts down the chalk onto Singed’s countertop, says out loud, “I will return tomorrow,” and steps out the door.

In the streets of Zaun, Viktor makes it four steps before he staggers into a run.

Stay put, he commands. I’m on my way.

Jayce does not stay put. He closes his eyes briefly, feeling relief wash over him with the knowledge that Viktor is moving closer, and he continues stumbling to the bridge.

You are impossible, Viktor thinks. He is sprinting for the second time in his memory, on his legs of flesh and metal and magic. Viktor visualizes the couch in the lab, pictures settling comfortably into it, runs through memories of Jayce collapsed there, sprawled out and snoring softly in the early days of Hextech development. He shoves the images at Jayce, hoping they may entice him to turn around. Go lie down.

Can’t. You have the blanket, Jayce notes, pushing back his own memory of the couch in the lab: Viktor’s face lax in sleep, the flood of fondness when he muttered something incoherent and curled deeper into the soft fabric, blue and red.

Viktor does have the blanket. It billows out behind him as he tears through the streets of the Undercity.

They reach the bridge at the same time. Orders have arrived from the council chambers and the blockade is being pulled apart by wary enforcers. A small crowd of Zaunites have gathered on the other side of the bridge to look on, equally alert.

The enforcers give a start, some almost reaching for weapons, when Jayce shoves past them. One man, who Jayce recognizes from his expressive scales and gill-like markings (he’d stood beside Caitlyn and Maddie in the council chambers) holds out an arm, says, “Stand down, that’s Councillor Talis.”

There’s some shouts from the other side of the bridge, and jostling as a metal man flashes through the small crowd at speed.

Jayce and Viktor barrel into one another.

Through the contact, in each other's arms, they fall into a tight feedback loop of satisfaction, relief. Affection. It is an impossible combination: both a building pressure and it’s own persistent release.

Jayce lets out a sob that’s a laugh. What now?

Viktor closes his eyes, sees more clearly than ever. His metal fingers dig into the back of Jayce’s shoulders. Nothing. Everything. I don’t care.

Jayce pulls away, runs his hands up to Viktor’s neck, tracing over his jaw where metal blends into skin. His eyes catalogue every shape and hue in Viktor’s face.

You are so fucking beautiful, Jayce thinks, and Viktor’s eyes fly open.

A part of him wants to be incredulous, half-forms the thought it cannot be. But Jayce’s being is overlapping with his, and even in the unlimited space of the Arcane there is no room for uncertainty. Not with Jayce’s earnestness spilling out, miraculously filling a place with no boundaries to the brim.

Jayce isn’t referring to Viktor’s face or flesh or metal, to Viktor’s matter or molecules or any of their configurations. He’s not referring to the energy coursing between them in the Arcane, or even to the memories and ideas that have passed between them. He doesn’t mean that Viktor’s past is beautiful, or his potential. Jayce doesn’t mean that any particular version of Viktor that has been or might come to be is beautiful.

When he looks at Viktor, Jayce doesn’t think of the word beautiful like it is an adjective that can be imparted by an observer. To Jayce, it is an inherent quality, one that is true absent observation. Viktor is beautiful to Jayce, even when he isn’t looking.

But Jayce is looking now, watching as Viktor’s eyes swim with swirling colors.

It cannot be, yet it is. Another paradox.

Viktor kisses Jayce, hard.

Chapter Text

They stay wound in a grasping embrace on the bridge long after their lips part. Jayce presses soft kisses down from the corner of Viktor’s mouth to where the warmth of his skin turns cool, smooth and metallic. Then he simply rests his head in the crook of Viktor’s neck, each breath briefly fogging over the plates that connect to Viktor’s chest. Viktor cards his fingers through Jayce’s hair, lost in the movement of the long strands, lost in Jayce’s sensation of Viktor’s hands moving through his hair as it is refracted and doubled back to him, lost in how Jayce is lost in Viktor’s sensation of Jayce’s sensation of Viktor’s sensation of...

Viktor remembers, suddenly, that they are on a bridge. He casts his eyes about to find citizens of both Zaun and Piltover, united at long last.

At least in staring at them.

“Don’t care,” Jayce mumbles, curling in tight. Let’s just stay here forever, please.

Viktor comes to realize that he’s supporting Jayce’s full weight. Jayce, who is heavy and hungry and needs to lie down.

I’m fine, Jayce lies. Jayce then quickly discovers that lying is a fairly futile thing to do when it’s to someone who is inside of his mind.

Viktor keeps his arms locked around Jayce, propping him up, but mentally he creates distance between them in the Arcane, gently breaking the intoxicating loop they had been caught in. He is attempting to get his thoughts together, but Jayce whines at the loss of psionic contact, which does not help Viktor think at all.

“I think I passed a noodle cart,” Viktor says, eventually, ragged. “It was close by. You are going to walk with me, we are going to get you food, then I am going to take you to the closest place that you can lie down.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Jayce says, then, realizing, “I don’t have any money, though.” He nods down to his leg. “I used the coins I had for gears in the brace. Do you have any?”

Viktor does not. He is a metal man wearing a blanket, carrying a staff.

“New plan.” Viktor says. “We are going to the lab. You are going to lie down. I am going to find you food.”

Jayce looks back behind him, up to the Academy, the crown jewel that sits at the high point of Piltover. The home of Hextech, and their lab. It looks, from the bridge, very far away.

“Okay,” he says, but Viktor is already spinning through other ideas, trying to think of somewhere closer. Jayce reaches for him in the Arcane, trying to follow, trying to help, but he is so tired.

“Mom lives near here,” Jayce says, when it occurs to him. Viktor freezes.

I cannot walk into Ximena Talis’ home wearing nothing but a blanket, Viktor thinks.

You just crossed two cities in nothing but a blanket?

That’s different. That’s not your mother.

Jayce’s stomach rumbles.

THEN

“You seem… distracted, today,” Viktor said, carefully.

“Sorry, Viktor.” Jayce continued running his thumb over the stone of his bracelet.

Viktor was familiar with the texture of it. He’d held the bracelet himself, only weeks ago, as he’d searched within himself to determine how much he was willing to risk to help a man he didn’t know try to prove his theory correct.

At his trial, Jayce Talis had been told that access to the Arcane was a talent only granted by the circumstances of one’s birth, and he had just disagreed. Like it was a simple, provable fact that someone who was given nothing by their birth but access to scraps could cobble them together and build magic. Like it was fact that they should.

Viktor hadn’t held onto that bracelet very long before he’d returned it to Jayce, standing beside him on a precipice.

It was now weeks later, and they were working on an improved prototype. All day, Viktor had noticed Jayce’s attention drifting, and he had identified a pattern. Each time the equations on the board caused Jayce to sketch out an acceleration rune, he paused with a far-away look in his eyes, fingers drawn down to his bracelet.

It seemed possible that Jayce was mentally working through a tangential concept to the prototype equations and had gotten stuck on something. It was possible that Viktor might have the ability to help him parse through it.

“Would you like to discuss it?” Viktor offered.

“It’s my mom,” Jayce said, sighing. “She’s invited me to dinner tonight. Last time that I saw her was before we stabilized the crystals. Since the trial, things between us have been..." He glanced over at Viktor, his mouth twisted into a small grimace. "...tense.”

Viktor was pleasantly surprised to be confided in. He was also immediately and profoundly out of his depth.

“Oh,” Viktor said, as eloquently as he could muster. Jayce sighed again, putting down his chalk.

“Magic saved her life. And mine.” Jayce lifted the bracelet, turned it towards Viktor. “The mage who saved both of us gave me this.” He said, tapping the acceleration rune carved into the stone. He looked out over the sprawling equations. “All my life I’ve worked for this. I had to give something back. Balance the scales, you know?”

Viktor locked some of that information away for later, but in the meantime he nodded.

“I don’t know why she didn’t believe in me.” Jayce said, and his voice sounded strained. He looked at Viktor, eyes big and hazel. “I don’t know why you did.”

“I read your notes,” Viktor said, clipped. That was a fact, and as such something that Viktor felt he could safely vocalize.

It surprised a laugh out of Jayce, who then said, bashfully, “You fixed my notes.”

“Mm. And my work is far from done.” Viktor took his chalk and moved to Jayce’s side of the board. “This approximation will result in a rounding error down the line, unless you also approximate its inverse variable in the stabilizing formula.”

“Would you want to come with me?” Jayce asked, quietly. Viktor turned to blink at him. “To dinner? You helped me understand. Maybe you can explain it to her better than I could.”

By the time Viktor thought of all of the reasons he should refuse, Jayce was already smiling, because Viktor had already nodded.

“It’s just down this block,” Jayce said, then canted a smile over at Viktor. “You’re running out of time to back out.”

Viktor rolled his eyes. But Jayce stopped in the middle of the street, brought up a hand to rest on Viktor’s tense shoulder. Viktor looked up at Jayce and found the angles of his features catching shadows in the glittering lights of the nearby bridge.

“I appreciate this,” Jayce muttered, earnestly. “But I know it’s a big ask, and I won’t hold it against you if you change your mind. That you even came this far means a lot to me already.”

Viktor let out a tight breath. Jayce had confided in him, and invited him to dinner at his home with his mother. The scales were unbalanced.

“I’m nervous,” Viktor admitted, but that was a feather placed against Jayce’s stone. Viktor inhaled, reached deeper, and added, “I do not have many memories of my own mother. I’m not exactly sure what to expect.”

Jayce’s eyes softened, and his grip on Viktor’s shoulder tightened.

“She’s going to try to feed you,” Jayce explained, gently, his tone fond. “It will not be physically possible to consume the amount of food that she will offer you, but she will not take no for an answer.”

Viktor would try to imagine it, later. Growing up in a home like Ximena’s, with food set out on the table before it was needed, freshly baked with careful ingredients. Growing up not knowing hunger. He would imagine his own mother, in a world where she could have been soft and warm, instead of sharp and bitter and busy clawing out survival for herself and her son in the streets of the Undercity until the air clawed out her lungs. He would imagine being a child in a world where teeth were for smiling before biting. Viktor would chew on the idea, reflect on the marrow in the bones of his being, clench his jaw against his simmering rage and his desperate yearning. He would wonder who he might have been, if he’d been made with careful ingredients.

Viktor would imagine being born with magic, instead of access to scraps. But then he would think of Jayce Talis: the man who had claimed that magic could be made from stones and gears and metal, and how he had looked floating in the air after Viktor had helped him prove it. Viktor would stop imagining, then, and continue working.

Dinner was tense.

Ximena Talis was, without comparison, the kindest person that Viktor had ever met.

She was also smart, asking keen questions as Jayce and Viktor described working out the stabilizing resonance of the crystals. It almost made Viktor wonder about potential worlds in which Jayce wouldn’t have needed Viktor’s help at all; perhaps this brilliant man could have reached a breakthrough if he’d just brought his notes and prototypes downstairs to his mother’s dining room instead of dragging them all the way up to the Academy.

When Jayce and Viktor stood on the threshold, ready to leave, Ximena hugged her son tightly. Jayce’s brows were drawn tight, mouth twitched downwards, but he leaned in towards her and said, softly, “Love you, mom. Thanks for dinner.” She pulled back and ran a hand over his cheek, softly.

Then Ximena turned to Viktor, eyes assessing, and she reached out with two open palms. Viktor glanced at them, then tucked his cane under his arm, and took her hands tentatively. Her metal fingers were cool contrasted with the warmth of the others. Her grip was gentle, tender. Viktor met her eyes and spotted some of the same hues he had noticed in Jayce’s.

“Thank you, Viktor,” she said. “You helped my son when I could not. My home is open to you, always.”

On their slow walk back to the Academy and the student housing they’d been put up in, near the lab they’d been given access to, Viktor stopped, and took a deep breath.

“I would like to say something that it is not my place to say,” Viktor said, turning to Jayce.

Jayce looked over at him, expression open and expectant.

“Your mother will never fully understand why Hextech is important to you, but it’s not because she does not believe in you. It’s because she loves you, and she will never believe that you need to offer anything other than yourself to balance the scales. In her eyes, you are enough. Without magic. Without Hextech. You do not need to agree with her. In fact, for the sake of our work and the world, I would encourage you not to. But do not take her perspective as a lack of regard for you. It is, if anything, an excess.”

Jayce looked at him, eyes wide.

“I apologize if I have overstepped,” Viktor said, and continued walking.

Jayce caught up to him, after a moment. When Viktor spotted Jayce’s hand moving, he found himself waiting for it to land on his shoulder. It did, warm and firm, in a gesture that was beginning to feel sorely familiar.

“Thank you, Viktor. I think I needed to hear that,” Jayce said, softly. “I’m lucky to have you as a partner.”

NOW

In Ximena Talis’ dining room, Viktor sits wearing nothing but the blanket from the lab and finds that he’s not hungry. He’s not thirsty either. Looking over the range of homemade food and cups of tea that Ximena had cobbled together and thrown out for them like she’d been waiting for this specific occasion, Viktor gets the sense that none of it will satisfy. He assumes he will need nutrients, in some fashion, possibly soon. But he’s beginning to believe that that process of getting what he needs to survive in this body may look different than it had before. And that is a problem for another time.

“I’m sorry honey, but I don’t like it,” Ximena is saying to her son, as he shovels food into his mouth. “It makes you look so untidy.”

“Viktor likes it,” Jayce says, shooting his partner a grin as he throws him under the carriage.

Why would you tell her that? Viktor imparts, partially through the bond that has formed between them, partially through a pointed glare.

It’s the truth, Jayce conveys, partially through a half-shrug, partially though psionically presenting a recollection of Viktor’s own impressions: Jayce’s beard when they kissed on the bridge had been rough and perfect against Viktor’s skin, soft and divine against Viktor’s metal.

“I like it because it’s yours.” Viktor says, still glaring at Jayce. “Shave it if you’d like.”

Ximena’s eyes fall on Viktor and go very soft.

“Not hungry, sweetheart?”

Viktor shakes his head, looks down at himself, and pulls the blanket tighter. “I am not sure that I can be hungry anymore.”

Ximena frowns. Jayce presses his knee against Viktor’s under the table.

When Jayce and Viktor had stumbled through her door, Ximena hadn’t spared a second glance at Viktor’s new limbs, or the blanket. He might have walked into her home wearing a tie that she hadn’t seen on him before and received more pointed attention. But she had looked over both him and Jayce on her first glance, intently and incredibly thoroughly. Her hands had fluttered over the pair of them, before her eyes had locked onto Jayce’s beard.

“Tell me what happened,” she’d demanded.

Jayce’s response of, “It’s a long story, mom. Maybe food and some sleep first, if that’s okay?” had mobilized her, instantly. Ximena marched into her kitchen like she was embarking on a holy crusade, and Jayce and Viktor had stumbled through to the dining room, Viktor supporting Jayce’s weight and settling him heavily into one of the chairs.

She reaches out across the table now, for Viktor’s hands, and before he takes hers into his own he tries to coil the power of the Hexcore tightly within himself to avoid intruding on her thoughts.

Her gaze bores into him, through him.

“When you are ready to talk, I will be here. I just need you to know how happy I am to see you again, Viktor,” she says.

Jayce pauses in between massive spoonfuls of food, watching them closely. Jayce and Viktor’s joint visits to Ximena’s home hadn’t exactly been a regular occurrence over the years, but they hadn’t exactly been irregular either. The last time had been well before Progress Day.

“If Viktor likes the beard, you keep it.” Ximena tells her son. “I’ll see if my stylist recommends any care products.”

See? Jayce thinks. She loves you more than me.

Viktor snorts, and goes to pull away his hands, but Ximena holds one of them fast, and looks back to him.

She taps her two prosthetic fingers pointedly against Viktor’s metallic knuckles. The contact produces a clinking sound. “The hand you are holding is my hand, sweetheart. But it took time for me to feel that way. Be patient with yourself.”

Viktor’s hold on the Hexcore slips as he stares at their linked fingers. He falls into Ximena’s thoughts, unintentionally visits the first time she’d seen snowfall again, after the blizzard. Viktor watches her stoking a roaring fireplace as thick flakes fall outside a window. Sees small Jayce, running into the living room in his pajamas, crawling into her arms. Looks at Ximena running her hand through her son’s hair, catches her staring at the metal as it catches in the flickering light. Viktor feels Ximena’s changed nature shifting, settling within herself. There is a sense of loss, one that will never fully leave, but in that moment it grows muted beneath her gratitude. She has survived, and she has a hand that can comfort her son, and there is not only an absence in the presence, but a presence in the absence.

Viktor is flooded with her sense of earnestness, and his own sense of guilt. The mage should have arrived sooner, he thinks.

Jayce reaches over to grab Viktor’s other hand, and shares a firm, unyielding disagreement: You came in time.

Ximena releases Viktor’s hand. She looks slowly, keenly, between Viktor and Jayce, then asks, pointedly, “Will you both be sharing Jayce’s room? Or should I make up another?”

Viktor’s cheeks grow warm. He might still have blood, after all.

“Mine’s fine,” Jayce says, pushing away the empty bowl and staggering to his weary feet.

Ximena smiles and stands, rounds the table, and wraps her son in her arms.

“I love you so much, honey.” She tilts Jayce’s head down with her hands on his cheeks to kiss his forehead. “I’m glad you’re home. Go get sleep.”

When they make it up to Jayce’s room, he’s babbling: “I had some theories about the protective goop in the lab maybe spreading across a wider surface area as a way of collecting some kind of resource to provide you. It wasn’t reactive to most wavelengths of light so I doubt—” He crashes onto his bed the moment it’s within reach. “—that it was literally photosynthesis, but if you start feeling a need for something, the notes I took at the lab might be helpful. Maybe there’s a possibility that…” He trails off and looks up at Viktor, frowning. Says, “C’mere, please.”

“Here?” Viktor asks, then thinks, Or here?

Yeah. “Both.”

Viktor goes to sit beside Jayce, but his attention catches on something that gives him pause. He reaches out, and unties the laces of Jayce’s boots where they sit atop the bed coverings. Viktor pries the boots off of Jayce, drops them to the floor, then looks down at his own bare feet.

“Please,” Jayce begs. I’m so tired, “I need to hold you,” Please come here.

Viktor settles himself, gently, to lie beside Jayce on the tiny bed frame. Jayce’s body curls around Viktor’s like ivy taking a trellis for its home. He does the same in the Arcane, consciousness wrapping around and through Viktor’s.

Thank you, Jayce shares, where his soul and Viktor’s overlap. Viktor pulls the blanket from his shoulders, casts it over the pair of them, and drifts.

Jayce sleeps. A dip in the metal of Viktor’s chest catches a shallow pool of his drool. In the Arcane, Viktor calls out quietly to Jayce’s wandering subconsciousness, gently guiding his partner away from darkened shadows into soft dreams.

Chapter Text

The following few days, they fall into a rhythm.

Though they go different places, Viktor and Jayce use their shared awareness to work together. 

Jayce pops up to their lab in the Academy, continuing his theoretical research on the Arcane and the Hexcore’s alterations to determine what his partner’s bio-magical needs might be in his new form. Then he shifts over to the council chambers to aid Caitlyn. Viktor goes to Singed’s laboratory to continue refining a reversal to Shimmer’s negative side-effects.

They rent a room near the bridge since it falls between them. It’s on the Zaun side, on the same block as a noodle cart.

It’s sparse. There’s no stove and no icebox, but between the noodle cart and Ximena’s proximity across the bridge and the fact that only one of them eats anymore, that hasn’t been an issue. It’s only a bathroom and a bed, really. When night falls they both climb into it and tenderly chart out the characteristics and boundaries of the connection that has sprouted in the space between them.

One evening Jayce is sitting with Caitlyn and her group of informal advisors, going over plans for the distribution of food and medical shipments into Zaun. Jayce sits at her left hand, looking over Kiramman maps.

Jayce, Viktor thinks, and he focuses Jayce’s eyes to a specific marker placed on the map. That distribution point will be impossible to get to, the alleyway has been blocked by a collapsed building since I was a child.

Shit. Is there an alternate route? Another spot for the neighborhood?

I can scope it out on the way home. It may be better over here, and Viktor moves Jayce’s eyes to a point a few blocks away.

Got it, thanks, Jayce thinks, then, moving his hand over the map, says aloud, “Viktor says that this alleyway is not traversable, and moving this point a few blocks over to here would make it more accessible.”

Jayce looks to Caitlyn and finds her staring at him, expression unreadable.

“Everyone out,” she says, and the look in her eyes makes it clear that it is an order directed to everyone but Jayce. Looks are cast about, but without any question people stand and leave until they are the only two remaining in the room. Though between the two of them, there are closer to three people.

Cait takes a deep breath and closes the tome she’d been making notations in. “Talk.”

“It’s not really—”

“Jayce. On the night that you came back looking like you’d fought with the gods, you told me that Viktor died in the council chambers.”

Jayce blinks, thinks back, and realizes that is true.

“I trust you. You’re my dear friend. I did not want to push before you were ready. But I need to know what happened, because if Viktor is speaking to you, there is either something otherworldly going on in the city I run, or you are not well and I need to get you help. Talk.”

Can I tell her? Jayce checks with Viktor, only to receive a wave of confusion from across the bond.

Of course. Tell her anything that you wish to. I trust you.

Jayce talks.

He talks for a long time. Caitlyn listens, eyes locked on him. She blinks, once in a while. Gives a couple of sharp nods.

When Jayce trails off, his earlier warnings to her have been put in context. Caitlyn’s expression stays closed off as she grapples with her own disbelief and the weight of a dead world.

She looks at the map of Zaun.

“This map is old, then,” she says. She takes the marker from the distribution point, and moves it to where Jayce had indicated. “This might be what Zaun looked like before Vi was even born.”

“Maybe,” Jayce ventures, carefully. “Any word on her?”

Caitlyn huffs. “Steb says Loris is looking out for her,” she says.

“Cait,” Jayce starts, but he doesn’t know what to say.

“I told you that I saw how easy I thought it was to hate them after one vicious act.” She places her hands on the table. “I’ve been a vicious actor. I took your weapons. I used the grey to clear the streets. I gave her that badge to put on, and I hurt her. Even if she doesn’t hate me, maybe she should.”

“I don’t know if more hate really helps.”

Caitlyn shrugs. Then she stands up straight. “Vi still has the gauntlets, but I will be bringing you the remaining weapons you created for my strike team in the morning,” she says. “You will safely dispose of them.”

“Yes, General.”

The next morning, Jayce slides out of bed. While he buttons his shirt, he looks over at Viktor, and thinks, Try it again, maybe I’ll have an easier time now that I’m rested. Then he raises his guard.

He thinks that he puts up a better defense than he usually does when they attempt this. Viktor’s eyes go molten as he slides into the Arcane and the space between them. He considers the metaphorical door that Jayce has closed, and the metaphorical lock that Jayce has placed.

Cute, Viktor thinks, and he presses his Arcane hand to the lock. It clicks. Viktor opens the door, steps through, and runs his awareness over Jayce’s. That was a bit better. May I?

Jayce grunts in frustration, but he nods. In their tiny room by the bridge, Viktor takes Jayce’s hands into his control and slowly uses them to undo the buttons that Jayce had been working on. Jayce freezes, watching his own hands move and his shirt fall open, exposing more and more of his skin to the air. When Viktor gets to the bottom and realigns the fabric to re-do the last button, Jayce realizes he’d been off by one. Viktor smirks at him from the bed, and gives him his hands back by returning through the door in the Arcane.

“Thanks,” Jayce says. His mouth feels dry.

Your turn, Viktor thinks, and closes the Arcane door behind him. Jayce lunges for it, trying to be quick enough to beat Viktor to his defense, but by the time he grabs for the handle, it’s just gone.

Jayce looks around to the empty infinite space swirling with colors, and sighs. He knocks, metaphorically, on the magical door.

Yes? Viktor calls out from behind it, and it’s muted by the barrier, unaccompanied by sensations or emotions. It feels like a note has been passed to Jayce, instead of their usual intimate whispers.

How are you so good at that? Jayce thinks, and when the door between them cracks open, Viktor’s thoughts carry his fondness and his exasperation.

I am mostly metal, Viktor thinks, and the idea of a handle reappears on Jayce’s side of the door. It shouldn't bewilder you that I can be firm and unyielding.

Jayce grabs the handle and closes the door again, softly.

“Still think we can keep that shut all day?” Viktor says. His voice is rough, and when he raises his head from the pillow his hair sticks up at all angles.

“No,” Jayce admits. He reaches out, smoothing down Viktor’s hair. Viktor leans into his touch, eyes closing just in time to miss how Jayce’s mouth arranges itself into a small frown when he asks, “Did you mean that?”

“Hmm?”

“About metal? ‘Firm and unyielding’?”

Viktor opens his eyes and tilts his head. “You disagree?”

Jayce's frown grows. His mouth opens and closes. Then he runs his hand through his hair, and exhales a laugh. “Come with me, today.”

“Jayce,” Viktor says, “the new samples are—”

“Something that you can’t even take valuable readings on until the afternoon. Come on. It’ll help with this separation experiment, if you’re nearby I won’t need to use the bond. Good practice for us. Plus I’ve been meaning to get you around what’s left of that chrysalis to test out that chemosynthesis theory—”

“I am not going to try consuming it if you keep calling it ‘goop,’ Jayce.”

“I didn’t, this time! I also think unless Cait sees you she’s not going to be able to fully believe that I’m not just hallucinating you in my grief and I don’t want her to be worried. Last thing she needs right now is that distraction.”

Viktor considers, sighs, and shifts out from under the covers. He says, “Alright,” and he brushes his hand over Jayce’s shoulders as he maneuvers past him. “Just for the morning.”

When Caitlyn enters the lab, an enforcer beside her is hefting a crate with the weapons she’d mentioned.

Viktor had just finished rinsing his mouth with water. The chrysalis ‘goop’, while apparently not immediately toxic to him, seems distinctly un-nutritious and is incredibly far from palatable.

“Jayce.” Caitlyn says, then she spots Viktor leaned against the sink in the corner and her eyes flood with relief, shoulders dropping.

“Viktor. Thank the gods. It’s so good to see you.” Jayce had been correct, then.

“General Kiramman,” Viktor says, nodding to her. “Likewise.”

She looks over at her enforcer, clears her throat, and stands tall. “Jayce tells me you are working with an associate to produce a sort of Shimmer antidote. When it becomes viable, please know you can count on me to aid in manufacturing or distributing it if that would be helpful to you. At no cost, with no questions. If there is anything else that I can offer to assist you in the meantime do not hesitate to ask.”

“I will bear that in mind. Thank you.”

She nods, and looks at Jayce. A series of expressions pass between them. Viktor doesn’t pry, but he takes satisfaction in knowing that he could.

“I’ll need to bring those down to my forge,” Jayce says, indicating the crate.

Caitlyn looks to the enforcer. “Steb?”

“On it.”

Caitlyn un-shoulders her own rifle, and hands it to Jayce directly. “For the record, I’m sorry,” she says, and she leaves.

After the trek down to the forge, Jayce points to an empty space and says, “Over there, Steb, thank you.” Jayce receives a nod in response, and a small wave as the enforcer leaves.

Viktor looks around. He’s been to the forge before, bringing Jayce notes or diagrams on occasion, but he’d never stayed long enough to take it in. He had started to studiously avoid it once it became clear that it was a place where he would find Jayce shirtless and drenched in sweat more often than not. Back in those days, Viktor had figured that there were more accessible and less complicated ways of torturing himself.

Jayce sets to work on lighting the forge. The fire flares to life. Viktor barely has time to wonder when exactly Jayce’s shirt will come off before it does. Jayce grabs a handle connected to a chain, some kind of pulley. Bellows, probably.

“What are you—” Jayce starts, but then he pulls, and he grunts, and his muscles go taught and he probably says something else to finish the question he’s started but Viktor doesn’t catch it.

“Could you repeat that, please?” Viktor says, after a moment. Jayce spares him a knowing look.

“I asked what you are thinking about,” Jayce says, before pulling again.

“That cannot be safe smithing attire,” Viktor observes, and it’s not a lie, just an obfuscation. Jayce laughs.

“Definitely not. My dad would’ve killed me.” He pulls, flexing and grunting between each sentence. “I think I still have an apron.” Another pull. “It’s probably around.” Another. “Wanna find it for me?” The heat rises, steadily.

“Absolutely not,” Viktor says.

Jayce’s smile fades. He pulls once more, then releases the bellows, and moves over to the bench where he’d set Caitlyn’s rifle. He opens a small felted box and carefully extracts the hex crystal, places it inside and shuts it. Jayce runs his hands over the metal of the barrel where it’s inscribed with runes.

“That’s what you said when Mel told us to consider making weapons. ‘Absolutely not.’”

Viktor’s focus shifts, and sharpens. Jayce grabs a set of tools, and goes about disassembling the rifle.

“You were right that there is always a choice. I chose to make these, and I shouldn’t have. I’m so sorry that I did that to what we invented together. I’ve been in your head, and I know that you’re upset. You’re right to be. I wish that I could change what I did. I can’t. But this?” Jayce says, and he gestures down to the parts of a disassembled gun. “This is metal.”

Jayce walks to a corner, and he heaves out a heavy crucible. He drags it to the forge. Then he takes the parts of the rifle and tosses them in.

“Metal, Viktor, is not ‘firm and unyielding.’ In the right hands, metal is malleable. And depending on how it’s forged, it can become a lot of things, and take on a lot of characteristics. Brittle or strong. Lustrous or dull.”

In the heat of Jayce’s forge, Viktor feels frozen in place.

Jayce turns to the bellows and pulls again, twice. Then he goes over to a shelf in the rear of the forge and looks through a stack of old molds. He pulls one out, takes it over to a large workbench, and pops it open.

Viktor recognizes the hollows in the mold as the rough shapes of the parts of the leg brace that Jayce had made for him, years ago. Viktor watches as Jayce takes out a piece of paper, looks over the mold, and sketches from the design, inverting it and adjusting the measurements. While the metal heats, Jayce carves the new shapes into a fresh mold.

Viktor loses track of time, watching Jayce move through his forge, occasionally snapping into keen awareness whenever Jayce returns to the bellows.

Eventually, Jayce opens the forge door, removes the crucible, and pours the molten metal into the mold he has sculpted. Viktor watches it cool from white-hot to red-hot to shining silver.

“I use the mold as a starting point. Gets it into the basic shape,” Jayce says, wiping sweat from his brow and propping himself against the workbench near where Viktor has been frozen. Viktor wonders if Jayce is casting a spell, somehow. It feels like he’s inscribed a series of runes around Viktor and is about to press power into them, evoking some impossible effect. “From here it’ll be a whole lot of hammering. But by the time the day is over, I’ll be walking home to you a little faster, because I’ll be wearing this.”

“Jayce,” Viktor says.

“Try it again.”

“What?”

“Blocking the door,” Jayce says, and he moves closer. “Try it again.”

Viktor stares a moment longer. Then, in the Arcane, the door handle on Jayce’s side of their bond disappears. Jayce reaches out, places his hand against the door, and melts through it to the other side.

Their emotions and sensations crash into one another. Yearning and sorrow and tenderness and heat and attraction and an almost overwhelming vulnerability.

Cute, Jayce thinks, eyes sparkling.

How?

You’re mostly metal. Jayce brings his hands up to Viktor’s face and draws him in, slowly. I’m a pretty decent smith.

It’s true. In Jayce’s hands, Viktor feels infinitely malleable.

It’s also true that Jayce’s hands are Viktor’s, when he wills it. Like now, when he uses them to bring their mouths together just a little faster.

Chapter Text

“I think that we are almost there,” Viktor says.

“We are,” Singed agrees, moving from the microscope to allow Viktor to peer at the cellular structures of the sample. 

The tissue on the slide had been infused with shimmer directly, but after they introduced their ‘antidote’ the substance had been filtered out by the cells themselves, secreted in a pale purple fluid absent its previous glow. 

Singed peers at Viktor. “You are certain you wish to take this topside for production?”

“I’m willing to work out alternatives, but hopefully it won’t be necessary. I’d prefer not to walk around Zaun with a collecting hat.”

Singed hums and asks, “Where will you bring the first batch, when it is ready?”

Viktor doesn’t respond, but he thinks of the clustered tents around metallic curving archways. Huddled inside of them are the same people he had known down to the fabric of their being in a different, doomed world. He remembers and imagines the passage of time there: grey soil giving way to plants.

It won’t be the same, he reminds himself, and it’s both a consolation and an ache.

No, Jayce thinks, both affirming and comforting. It will be different.

Viktor is still turning it over in his mind, dreaming of it, as he walks from Singed’s lab to their room by the bridge. It had been their home for a few weeks, but was still fairly barren. There were a few exceptions: a potted plant Jayce had bought to place near on their yellowed windowsill, and a small watering can Viktor had bartered for that they kept filled near the rusted radiator.

If his awareness had been limited to himself, Viktor would have missed the figure collapsed in the corner of an alleyway against a dumpster, surrounded by a number of broken bottles, bundled in black leather with shocks of pink hair where it hadn't been dyed dark.

As it is, Jayce is looking warily through Viktor’s eyes as his partner wanders distracted through the streets of Zaun. He does notice Vi, and he thinks, Shit, into a shared mind.

Viktor stops, taking in the sight more thoroughly. It’s not pretty. Vi’s sporting a nasty bruise on her jaw, there’s blood dried under her nose and splattered on the wraps around her knuckles, and she’s slumped over at an awkward angle.

Shit, Jayce thinks, again. Up in the high point of Piltover he stands from a lab stool and begins to move rapidly towards the door.

Viktor steps closer to the dumpster and the slumped figure, staff tapping on the ground. She’s breathing, he thinks, after bending low to check. He moves out a hand to check for a pulse, just to be sure, but the moment he gets close, Vi’s eyes roll open.

“Don’t try it,” she says.

“What happened?” Viktor asks, pulling his hand back.

“Fuck off.”

“Were you mugged?” His eyes rove over her face.

“I already told you to fuck off.”

“I’ll help you get—”

“Help me? I don’t fucking know you,” she hisses, eyes flashing as she leans in close.

This is, Viktor realizes, their first time meeting.

“I am Jayce Talis’s partner,” he says. 

Vi’s eyes narrow, then she scoffs, and reaches out to rifle through the un-broken bottles while she says, “Didn’t take Pretty Boy for the type.”

Viktor’s not sure exactly which aspect of his she has focused on, but he finds a diplomatic truth to share in: “His interest took me by surprise, myself.”

She ignores him, and brings the first bottle she finds containing liquid to her lips.

Oh, shit. Jayce stops mid-step in his trek towards Caitlyn’s office. This actually might not be a ‘tell Cait’ kind of situation.

Perhaps not, Viktor responds, then asks Vi, “Do you have a place to stay?”

“I’m not telling you to fuck off a third time, asshole.” Vi’s hand curls into a fist.

“How kind. In that case, I shall join you,” Viktor says, and sits on the ground beside her.

She blinks at him, then asks, “Are you trying to get hit?”

Viktor hums, looking at her fist. Then he considers his own hand. “I’ll admit a degree of curiosity. I’m not actually sure what would happen if I was struck as I am now.” He tilts his head, considering. “Perhaps not the face, if you wouldn’t mind. I’ve retained typical sensations there, and that likely extends to my pain receptors.”

Oh my god. In Piltover Jayce grabs at his own hair, and begs, Please, please do not let her hit you.

In Zaun, Vi’s eyebrows shoot up, and her face twists through bewilderment and rage to land firmly in annoyance.

Viktor selects one of the bottles, hefts it and sniffs. “This one seems fairly full, if you’re fond of lighter fluid?” He holds it out to her, and she snatches it from him, glaring.

“I don’t need your fucking help.”

“I am actually hoping that you can help me,” Viktor admits, thinking of Singed’s lab and the chained man locked behind a metal door. Vi glares.

“Look, I don’t know what you want,” she says, “but your Piltie boyfriend should have warned you I’m only good for punching shit and bad choices.” She drinks deep from the bottle she’d snatched, as if to prove a point.

“I have no need for either of those at the moment, but there may be something else,” Viktor says, then he trails off because he’s trying to work out how he can possibly get from this point in the conversation to one where she agrees to help him help Vander.

Vi gets the wrong idea, looking him over during the long pause. She looks disgusted, then briefly contemplative, then disgusted again. She lets out a derisive laugh. “Not interested. Even if it might mean pissing off the Man of Progress.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Jayce growls into the empty far-away hallway he’s pacing, deeply affronted in three different directions on his own behalf and Viktor’s and Cait’s. Then, to Viktor, Leave her there.

Viktor snorts at both of them.

May I have a moment, Jayce? You’re being quite distracting.

A flood of guilt. Shit. Yeah. I’m sorry. Jayce conjures up the familiar idea of a door in their bond and eases it partially closed. Let me know if you need anything. Please don’t get hit?

Thank you. Viktor pushes a wave of understanding and affection through to him before he shuts the door.

Viktor and Vi sit alone by a dumpster in Zaun as he thinks. 

Viktor has considered many new perspectives, recently, whilst sharing a consciousness with Jayce Talis. Viktor looks at Vi’s bloodied fists and considers hammers. 

The correct tool to achieve specific outcomes is, occasionally, a blunt blow.

“Vander is alive,” Viktor says. 

Vi steps into Singed’s lab and Viktor realizes suddenly how utterly breakable most of its contents are. Including Singed.

“Would you excuse us, Doctor?” Viktor asks. “Our patient has a visitor.” 

Singed spots Vi, directs an imploring look at Viktor, then hurriedly stands to make for the back door as she looks around the lab with distaste. Viktor goes to the metal door to the dark room and stands before it. 

“As I told you,” Viktor says, “his appearance will be unfamiliar. He is unaware of himself, he is dangerous, and he is restrained. I believe that your presence will spark a degree of recognition, but be cautious.”

Vi sniffs disdainfully from where she’s eyeing a tank, then she rounds on Viktor. “As long as I’m playing along with this bullshit, you might as well tell me everything. What is wrong with him, exactly?” 

“A number of things, at this point. Prior to my involvement, the Doctor fused Vander’s physiology with a Valoran creature, a murk wolf, in an attempt to fortify him. Vander has taken on certain physical traits of that animal and I believe that the creature has taken a presence in his mind. But his original mutations were brought about through ingestion of a large amount of Shimmer.” 

Viktor looks over to the desk with the microscope. Vi follows his gaze. 

“We are nearing the end of our work on a compound that would reverse some of those effects. It may help make him less dangerous and more receptive to a personal approach in remembering himself, when it’s finalized.”

“Why haven’t you used it on him already?” 

Viktor looks behind himself at the door. “There are, frustratingly, always more things that we could do than things that we should do. At this stage the compound is experimental, and it is my position that he has been the subject of enough experimentation. The compound may be helpful. It may also reduce his strength and throw the balance in favor of the wolf such that he is lost entirely to his internal struggle.”

“You’re telling me he’s in that room?” Vi asks, pointing at the door.  

“He is.” 

“This is a trap.” She spits on the ground. It lands closer to a set of important samples than Viktor would like. “I’ve spent enough time locked up, thanks. I’m not going into your fucked up freak science cage.”

Viktor calls on Janna for patience. 

“Very well,” he says, turning the wheel to crank open the lock, “Make yourself comfortable. I will be going inside this room because I know that your father is fighting to control a powerful force that is deeply intertwined with his psyche.” 

Viktor considers the part of himself that once was the Hexcore. Its drive and its pull and its curiosity are his own, as are the momentary slips in which he finds himself considering using his magic to pull and incorporate and fix. He thinks of Jayce’s gentle nudges and more forceful reminders. He considers the warmth emanating from behind the closed door of their bond, acting as both a balm and a guiding hand, and he remembers the cold isolation of the world that came to be without it.

“I know from experience what that is like.” Viktor says, pulling open the door. “You may not need help, but your father does.”

Once he’s inside, Viktor considers the chained form before him. 

Vander is no longer elevated. The massive wolf-man lies in a pile on the ground, in a heap of bedding that Viktor had sourced from the home of Ximena Talis. He is sleeping.

With Viktor’s aid, Singed had found a way to replicate samples of Vander’s regenerative tissues without extraction, and together they had removed some of the embedded components specific to facilitating experimentation, but there are still enough to cast a soft, green glow. He almost looks peaceful. 

Viktor hears Vi step into the room behind him, and he watches as Vander stirs. The green glow shifts into a different color. 

Viktor remembers that Vi has blood on her knuckles.  

“Wait,” he tries to get out. 

Chains snap as teeth and claws lunge from the darkness.

Viktor’s hands shoot out, not to pull but to push. They land on corded muscle and Viktor’s mind swims with a fury and a rage that are not his own. Something slams into Viktor’s abdomen, hard.

“Vander!”

It’s distant. Viktor can barely hear Vi’s call over the ringing in his ears but he’s not just himself right now. 

He’s someone else, too: a wolf, a fighter, a father. A man who remembers a name that he’s always liked.

“Violet.”

Vi sits beside her father for hours and hours, talking to him softly. Viktor stands, at a point, and leaves the room. He leaves the door hung wide open, but for all of her talk of being trapped, Vi takes no notice.

There’d been recognition in Vander’s eyes, and a flood of hazy memories that Viktor had witnessed, but after that Vander had sprung away from the two of them, cowering in a corner. When Vi had pressed further into the room, Vander had pressed himself against a wall.

Viktor, somewhat dazed, takes the time in the adjacent room to continue some of Singed’s work where it had been left off, as an apology for kicking the man out of his own laboratory. 

At some point early on, Jayce arrives in person, knocking on the door to the lab. 

“Hey,” he says when Viktor opens it, and his voice is tight and his eyes are watery.

“I’m alright,” Viktor says, taking down the barrier between them in the Arcane entirely and placing his palm over Jayce’s bearded cheek.

Jayce’s eyes well over. 

“I’m alright. Nothing happened,” Viktor says, and he pulls Jayce into his arms. 

It’s a mantra of sorts, one he repeats many times. I’m alright, Viktor thinks, over and over, to Jayce’s That was so dangerous, and What were you thinking, and What if that hadn’t worked, and I was so worried. 

I’m alright. 

Please be careful, Jayce presses the request into Viktor’s being, pairing it with a soft kiss to his jaw. 

I’m alright, Viktor reassures, and he wipes away Jayce’s tears with humming fingers.

Please. I can’t lose you again. 

Viktor aligns his lips to press softly over the metallic mark he’d placed on Jayce’s mouth. 

Viktor has satisfied one of his many curiosities. When he’s struck, it hurts. 

Viktor sits quietly in the laboratory, waiting. Jayce had left back to their room by the bridge, but only after Viktor’s gentle urging and shared worry about the plant on the windowsill going unwatered. 

It’s almost morning by the time Vi comes out of the dark room, and her eyes are rimmed red. 

“I will need to close the door behind you,” Viktor says. 

She nods, and once the wheel has cranked the lock back into place, she crumples to the ground and leans her head back against the metal. 

“It’s really him,” she says. 

Viktor settles beside her, like he had in the alleyway. 

“He doesn’t remember anything,” she says, and she pulls her knees up to her chest like a child. 

“He remembers you,” Viktor says. “And others. Blurred faces.”

“What?” she asks, focusing on Viktor as her brows knit together in confusion. 

“I touched his thoughts.” 

Violet sobs, “Sure,” and drops her head to her knees, shoulders shaking. “Why not?” 

Viktor waits for a while.

“Who else?” 

“Your mother,” Viktor says. Vi’s eyes pinch shut. “And your sister, but she’s… clouded.” 

Vi sniffs, then after a moment: “What if he saw her? Powder. Do you think it would help?” 

“It’s possible,” Viktor says, warily. “Do you know where she is?” 

“No.” 

Viktor breathes in, and looks at Vi’s fists. Blunt blows. “He remembers Silco.”

“Oh good.” Vi says, voice dripping with sardonicism as she drops her head back against the door with a thud, adding, “Maybe I can find my dad a sweet memento of the man who fucking killed him.” 

Viktor waits a beat, and then says, softly, “Maybe you can.” 

Later, before she leaves, Viktor presses his key to the lab into her palm, saying, “When you have time. Talking to him seemed to help. Please don’t disturb the experiments.” 

Vi gives him a nod, then sets off on the trail to find The Hound of the Underground the scents he needs to track his own memories. If the first clue is Silco, she’ll start with Sevika. 

Viktor returns to the small room by the bridge, slips under the sheets, and wraps himself around Jayce. 

Stay in Zaun with me, for a while. Viktos thinks, pressing his forehead between Jayce’s shoulder blades. We can start working on Sky’s plants. 

Jayce recognizes the excuse, and knows that it’s primarily for him. He nods, and winds their fingers together to lift Viktor’s knuckles to his lips. Thank you. 

Jayce and Viktor are both working in Singed’s lab when Vi returns wearing the Atlas Gauntlets. It’s been two days. 

She’s not alone. 

The most wanted person in the region steps into the room behind her, blowing blue bangs out of her face. 

Viktor blinks. Jayce stands. 

A child in a hardhat peeks out from behind the sisters as Singed sighs and leaves through the back again. 

“They found me in the old mines,” Vi tells Viktor. “Got wind of what I was up to from Sevika. We brought these.” She holds up a large leather jacket, and Viktor spots a smaller one draped over Jinx’s shoulder. 

“Good. Though I’m afraid this is quite time sensitive,” Viktor says, using the forceps he’s holding to indicate a seedpod dipped into a bubbling solution. “I’ll need a minute more. Jayce?” 

Are you serious? 

Of course. 

Jayce stares at Jinx. She killed you. 

I got better, Viktor thinks, and he turns the seedpod 45 degrees inside the solution. 

Jayce breaks the ensuing silence when he takes a deep breath and steps towards the metal door. His brace clinks. He begins to crank it open, then stops. 

“Either of you hurt?” Jayce checks, glaring pointedly at Vi. “Blood is bad.”

“Spick and span,” Jinx says, stepping between Vi and Jayce. There’s a hextech gun held loosely in her hand, and her eyes flash purple. “Sweet sister here couldn’t even land one on me in the mines.” 

Vi scoffs. Then adds, “Just open it, Pretty Boy.”

Jayce does, but he also thinks, Remind me not to hit them with my hammer. 

Do not hit them with your hammer. Viktor rotates the seedpod again. 

Thanks. 

As the metal door hinges open, Jinx turns to Vi.

Something changes. 

“I can’t kill my own ghosts,” Jinx says. Her purple eyes are wide and tremendously sad. 

Vi looks at her, expression shifting into a horrified understanding. 

Jinx smiles waveringly, raises her gun, and says, “But maybe I can help you kill yours. Sister.” 

Then there’s an arc of energy as she flashes past Jayce into the small room.

“Powder, no!” Vi shouts. “It’s him!” 

The green light pouring out from inside the room shifts to red. 

Viktor stands. Jayce goes for his hammer. 

“You have to trust me!” Vi is screaming.

Between one breath and the next, the light in the small room goes dark. 

The Atlas Gauntlets hit the ground and Vi stares into the darkness, trembling before a problem that she knows she cannot solve with her fists.

Slowly, achingly slowly, a soft glow re-emerges. Green. Vi pitches forward a few steps, until she can make out the shape of her sister. 

She’s looking at Vi, eyes brimming with tears, caught in a massive embrace. Her voice is quiet, almost small, when she asks, “He’s real?” 

Vi gasps through a sob, nodding. Purple eyes close for the duration of a long, shaking breath. When they open, tears fall and a hand extends. 

“Then stop standing around. He’s your dad too.”

Jayce and Viktor stand together, watching as Vi stumbles into the arms of her family. The child in the hardhat nearly bowls the inventors over as she rushes to join in. 

Viktor looks at Jayce, then at the object in his partner’s hands. Do not hit them with your hammer. 

Thanks, Jayce thinks, dropping it to the ground. He seems close to tears himself when he meets Viktor’s eyes.

Between themselves they spend a moment in the Arcane, lost in a soft swirl of colors and achievement and hope. It feels, for a moment, like they are weightless and floating and back in Heimerdinger’s office.

Then Viktor looks over at the burnt seedpod, swears in his mother tongue, and presses metallic fingers to his temples. 

We’ll start over, Jayce reassures, eyes warm and hand tight on Viktor’s shoulder. We have time. 

Time passes in Singed’s laboratory. 

Eventually Vi trails her hand over Jinx’s arm as she separates from the rest of her family. With Vi’s absence, Vander stirs, but Jinx runs a soothing hand over his head. He shifts, sniffing at the jacket slung over his daughter’s shoulder. 

“Silco,” he says in a low growl. 

“He’s gone,” Jinx says, voice pained and impossibly small. “I killed him, Vander.” 

In the eyes of a man wrestling a wolf, there is a brief moment of clarity. Then a rumble as a large clawed hand settles over blue hair: “I did too, Powder.” 

Then the glowing eyes lose focus again. 

Vi watches them, then turns to Viktor and Jayce, who are doing a rather poor job of acting like they are not watching while gathering what they need to begin the modification over again.

“How long can he stay here?” she asks. 

Viktor meets her gaze, and confesses, “I don’t know, this is not my laboratory. I intend to leave soon, myself.”

“Where?” 

He thinks of Vander’s fuzzy memories, two sisters running around an old house in a deep ravine, and says, “There’s a place in the fissures that I believe was once your home. If things had been different, it might have become mine.” 

Jayce holds out a new seed. It's one he’d pried gently from their house plant’s reaching fronds. Instead of taking it, Viktor places his hand over it in Jayce’s and takes a deep breath.

“We would like to build something there,” he says, and after a nod from Jayce he looks at Vi and adds, “We could use your help.” 

She stares at them, and looks back into the room where her father and her sister are holding onto one another. 

“Can you help him?” 

Viktor and Jayce look at one another, and between them flashes the mournful memory of an ancient mage; a version of Viktor who had heard the same question and promised, I will do all in my power. Viktor closes his eyes, grasps the seed and Jayce’s hand tighter.

Jayce turns to Vi and says, “We will try.” 

For the first time since the day they twined their minds together in between the metallic archways at the base of Zaun, Jayce and Viktor return to them. 

It takes some inquiry, but eventually they find Huck, who watches them cautiously through his cracked spectacles as they offer him the first dose of the completed formula to reverse some of the lasting effects of Shimmer usage. The three of them stand together on the grey dirt as he injects it in full view of wary onlookers. There are many eyes watching as the substance takes effect on its first human subject. It acts quickly, and the veiny boils from extended shimmer usage shift, flashing purple before melting away from his face. 

When he falls to his knees, Jayce and Viktor sit down with him on the ground.

Jayce reads the man’s vitals and takes notes as he asks questions that Huck answers in tears.

Viktor presses a modified seed deep into the dirt with his thumb.

The inventors fill the following few days with movement and labor in the fissures. They start bringing things down from both labs as they administer more of the new treatment, engage in conversations, and begin sketching out ideas with help from friends new and old.

In that time, things set in motion around them as well.

Somewhere above them, after an extended update from Jayce, Caitlyn utilizes the established distribution points to aid in spreading the compound throughout Zaun. Politically she presses support from the remaining council members and houses of Piltover (it helps that the terms of her martial rule are such that she will be in power until such a time as the crisis in Zaun is “resolved” or until she reinstates the council). There is not, at present, centralized leadership in Zaun that she can formally recognize, but after the sisters make some recommendations to their own contacts, Caitlyn is approached by Scar, the current leader of the Firelights, and finds a begrudging ally in Sevika. In just a few days, Cait vastly improves her understanding of what needs to take place in order to support Zaun’s independence and she drafts up the plans to put her political and personal assets towards those efforts.

Vi and Jinx alternate between sitting in Singed’s lab sharing recollections with Vander, and starting on a reconstruction of their old home down into the fissures to move him into. In the infant foundations of the community that will sprout from the grey earth, the hardhat worn by the child that trails after a disguised Jinx (Isha, the inventors had learned) begins to look less and less out of place. 

Even Singed comes to the fissures, mostly to escape his own laboratory as it is now generally occupied in an extended father-daughter reunion. Though it is not the reunion that the doctor had been working towards in that space, he has learned, in a long life, the virtue of patience and the value of replicated outcomes. So he spends a few days crafting small remedies alongside the young inventors, and occasionally he looks around and finds himself thinking that when he is successful, his daughter might just live again in a better world than the one she’d left.  

Viktor’s attention catches on something in his peripheral vision, and it holds. 

“Excuse me,” he says, dismissing himself from the conversation he’d been having about something he has, at the moment, fully forgotten. He begins stepping towards the central point of the arches. 

Jayce, he thinks, reaching. 

I see it, Viktor, Jayce thinks. I’m on my way. 

Viktor falls to his knees in the grey earth, the world and the Arcane spinning about him as he stares at a tiny seedling stretching from the ground. 

When he raises his eyes, he sees Sky Young kneeling opposite him. 

Viktor knows that it’s not actually her. The real Sky is dead, torn away from the world when she’d brought him her dream, her research on plants that could grow in the fissures. 

He knows that this Sky is a memory, and she’s the Hexcore within him straining for change and growth and manifestation, and she’s the shape of his own guilt and grief. She stares at him.

“It’s growing,” Viktor hears himself say. And with her soft smile, Viktor feels something within himself shift and settle. He’s sorrowful. He’s satisfied. 

When he looks back at the plant, his vision goes blurry and his breath feels tight. 

Oh, he thinks, as he tracks the sensation of the first tear slipping down his face. That’s interesting. 

And while part of him is busy wondering, How is that possible? I don’t drink anything, and thinking, I should test the salinity, maybe it’s not water, and theorizing, Mercury? a familiar grip falls on his shoulder.

He’s pulled tight against Jayce’s chest, and in his partner’s arms, Viktor cries. 

Chapter Text

“Jayce!” 

When Jinx calls out in a familiar sing-song tone that he knows means trouble (or at the very least, irritation) she somehow stretches his name into multiple syllables. He has inhaled a deep breath with every intention of using it for a heavy sigh when he realizes she’s said his name.

Not Jack, or John. Or Jay-Bird or J.T. or Hammer or Mace or Face or any of the other variations she’d come up with in the month that they’d spent as neighbors, but Jayce.  

In a bizarre string of connections, she’s almost family. She’s Jayce’s partner’s alternate-future’s mind-linked wolf-man’s kid, though she did kill Jayce’s partner. She’s Cait’s “It doesn’t matter anymore, Jayce. Please stop asking” ’s sister, though she did kill Cait’s mom. 

She’s a brilliant engineer. She’s incredibly annoying. She’s never once called Jayce by his name. 

“Come lift this for me, would ya?” she says, pointing at one of the broken carriage engines that she’s been repurposing into batteries that collect power from the winds that rush through the high-points of the ravines. “Need to get under and I can’t find my scissor jack.” 

He brushes his hands on his pants as he walks over to her. He adjusts his brace so it will lock in to support the weight, finds a grip, and lifts, grunting. 

“Good?” he asks, as she crawls under the frame. 

“Just a teensy bit higher,” she says. 

He lifts it a bit higher, and then a compartment springs open between where he’s placed his hands on the frame as a popper goes off, and he finds himself spitting confetti and staring at a painted pink and purple scissor jack that has a bow wrapped around it. 

“Powder,” he hisses. 

“That should be just fine,” she says, from underneath pounds and pounds of steel. “You comfy?”  

“What is this,” he demands. 

“A friendly conversation, Muscles! One where you have a choice. You can drop this thing on me and invoke the ire of a very punchy pink-haired sister, and maybe even my bloodthirsty dad if he’s feeling like remembering me today. Or you can listen and talk. Maybe kinda quickly, if you start feeling tired.” 

Viktor, Jayce calls, reaching for a third option. Viktor’s thoughts are concerned but distinctly amused as he takes in Jayce’s situation, and shares his own. He’s fitting a child for a prosthetic he’d designed. 

I could come to your rescue, but Ted is very excited about walking. What do you think?

I should have helped you destroy the world, Jayce thinks, as he says, “Talk, then.” 

“You’re close with that Piltie Vi’s busy mooning over.” 

“What about it?”

“Why doesn’t she come down here?” 

“Because Isha’s here. And Vi’s here. And you’re here.” 

“Does she know that I’m here?” 

“No, but she knows that she would know if she came down here.” Jayce is gritting his teeth. “You familiar with plausible deniability?” 

“Why is she protecting me?” 

“Not your business.” 

“You know,” she says, and her tone is suddenly sing-songy again. “Someone left my favorite pillow down here.” An exaggerated yawn. “I could take a little nap.” 

Jayce gets angry. His knuckles are white where he grips the metal, muscles straining. “She’s not protecting you, you absolute shithead. You blew up her fucking mom in front of her.” 

There’s silence from under the frame. 

It lasts long enough that he starts to understand, and without an ounce of humor, he laughs.

“You didn’t even know, did you? You had no idea who was in that room. You want to? I was there, let me tell you.”

Jayce.

“No, Viktor, Powder wants to talk. Let’s start with who walked away unscathed. That would be Mel and me that’s fucking it. Shoola lost half her face. Salo had his legs crushed. They survived, though. Torman Hoskel and Irius Bolbok did not. Cait’s mom didn’t survive. Her name was Cassandra Kiramman. She hated sugar in her tea and she liked lemon cakes and her husband Tobias made her one for each day of the week, every fucking Friday.”

Jayce. Viktor is focused on him entirely and he’s hovering his will just above Jayce’s hands like he’s worried he might actually drop the steel. Please try to calm down. And through the Arcane Viktor is tentative and careful and affectionate and trying to help and it has the exact opposite of its intended effect. 

“And you fucking killed Viktor!” Jayce is yelling and his muscles are trembling and he doesn’t care at all. “The man I love got his spine snapped in half because you took the magic that he gave me and you used it to shoot him.” 

His breath heaves out of him for a short while. Jayce realizes he’s crying. 

“Why haven’t you killed me?” Her voice comes quietly out from under the frame. “You could. Right now. It would be easier than it is not to, actually.” 

Jayce laughs through his tears. “And what would that fix?” 

“Why should it fix anything? You hate me. That should be reason enough.”

Jayce Talis is a scientist, and in their strange new home in the fissures he’s something between a forgemaster, a repairman, and an amateur agrarian. 

But he’d once been a politician. He stares at the exposed machinery, tries to shake away his tears while he sniffs, and says, “You see the gearbox from under there?”

There’s no response. He shifts his grip, takes a breath, and continues. 

“You do. And you know how they work. It’s all cycles and rotations, one turns, so does the other, and they’re all interlocked. One breaks and the whole thing shuts down. Say I kill you. Then Vi kills me, then Viktor kills Vi, then Vander kills Viktor and then Vander keeps killing until someone puts him down. Maybe that someone is Cait. Maybe she’s the last one standing, when everyone else we love is dead.

I understand that you’d make it easy for me so that you can get out of moving forward, but I’m not interested in giving you the satisfaction or letting you off that easy. You’re not the only one here figuring out how to shoulder your regrets. We’re all doing that together.

I’ll tell you what I hate, Powder. I hate that Viktor tried to share magic with the world and I tried to keep it safe and we couldn't do either. I hate that I don’t know where we went wrong. I hate that I don’t know if the world broke our magic or if our magic broke the world. I hate that none of us asked for any of this. I hate that there’s confetti in my fucking beard. And I’m mad. 

But I don’t hate you, because that’d be a choice. If I chose to hate you, I’d have to hate myself, and I’m too fucking busy. So get out from under there, so I can step away and we can both keep going.”

He waits. He waits for a while.

“That's how she feels too, isn’t it?” Powder sounds satisfied, but tired. “Vi’s Cupcake?” 

Viktor, Jayce thinks, like he’s reaching for a higher power. 

I’m here, Viktor thinks back, softly. I’m alright. 

Jayce strains, but something gives and he tells Powder, “Yeah, probably. Cait’s not perfect, but she’s good, or at least she’s trying to be. Like me, and like you. And she cares about Vi, so she won’t let anything happen to either of you.” 

Powder slides out from under the frame. 

Jayce lets it drop to the ground with an incredible thud and then he leans against it, gasping. He cards his hands over his face, wiping away tears and shreds of pink paper. Jinx unfolds her long limbs to stand and lean next to him, fiddling with the gun on her belt. 

After a moment, she reaches towards him, and her hand falls open to reveal a glowing blue sphere. It’s the same crystal that Jayce had left hidden behind a curtain on Progress Day along with Viktor, while Jayce had made the choice that they would share it later. When the time is right. 

His heart clenches, and he meets focused purple eyes. He takes the crystal from her hand, and rolls it between his calloused fingers. 

“I need to talk to Caitlyn,” Powder says. 

He closes a fist over the crystal. “No.” 

“Yes. I do. Because you’re right, Jayce,” she says. It’s the second time she’s ever said his name. “We all have a lot to be sorry for. And believe me, I love a demonstration. A lil’ spectacle, if you will.” 

Jayce snorts, raises his brows in mock-incredulity, and flicks a piece of confetti at her. 

She catches it, smiling cautiously, and says, “But someone around here needs to be the first one to actually try saying ‘I’m sorry,’ and I think that’s gotta be me.”

It’s edging into the afternoon when Jayce and Jinx make it to the bunker of the council chambers. It’s no longer in active use by the leadership of Piltover, with the reconstruction of the chambers themselves now thoroughly underway. 

“This is not normal,” he tells her, as he locks her into a cell. “Or a good idea.” 

“You’re the one who said she’d only hear me out if I was ‘buried somewhere deep in the earth’ Jay-Jay.” 

“I’ll try to be back in under an hour,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Don’t… do stuff.”

When he marches into Cait’s office, he checks to make sure they’re alone. So far as he can tell, they are.

“Jayce,” she starts, “How have—”

“Are we alone?” he interrupts. She’s always been better than him at detecting prying eyes and ears.

“Yes,” she says, and her fingers flick in a signal that confirms her verbal answer instead of contradicting it. “Well, except for Viktor, I presume. Tell him hello for me.” 

Tell her thank you for the biscuits. 

“He says hi, and thanks for the biscuits.”

“That’s all my father,” she says, waving her hand, “but I’ll pass it along. I’m glad that Ximena brought him on board with her project. It’s been nice to see him baking again.”

“He makes a great loaf. It’s appreciated by everyone working on the reconstruction.”

“Enough small talk yet?” she asks, smiling. 

“Jinx is in the council bunker.”  

Her smile drops. 

“She’d like to talk to you.” 

“Explain.”

“I locked her up in there, because she asked me to. She’d like to talk to you.” 

“Explain better, Jayce.” 

“She’s been living with us in the fissures. You knew that, even if you didn’t want to. She sucks, but she’s not a monster. Her family is looking out for her, and it’s helped. She’s helping us. A lot. Key’s here.” He places the brass keyring on the desk. “If you don’t want to talk to her, I’ll go get her out by myself and keep her out of your hair. Or you can stop me from doing that, but Vi will probably find her and break her out and also kill me. It might be a set up. I don’t think it is, but just in case, if you do want to talk please take me with you so I can kill her for making me part of it.” 

“Jayce,” Cait says, head in her hands. She doesn’t say anything else.

“I’m talking to my friend right now, not my General. Tell me what you want me to do, Cait.” 

“We can’t just erase our mistakes. None of us.” 

“No. We can’t. But sometimes we get a second chance. And other times, we give one.” 

After a brief and tense exchange in the bunker and a long walk back down to the fissures, Jinx finally removes her hood and turns to Jayce. 

“Thank you,” she says, without any of her usual irony. 

“Yeah.” Jayce scuffs his boot. “Thank you, too.”

“Sorry I trapped you.”

“Sorry I yelled.”

They both look over, past the buds of new growth in the fields, to where Vi is doing push-ups with Isha balanced on her back. 

“Maybe she can come down here, now. Sometimes.” Jinx says, eyes locked on her sister, but she's talking about Cait.

Jayce thinks of the look in Cait’s eyes whenever Vi is mentioned, and says, hopefully, “Maybe.” 

At the end of the day, when Viktor joins him in their tiny residence, a metallic hand runs through Jayce’s shaggy hair and pulls out the last lingering piece of confetti before tucking the strands behind Jayce’s ear. 

You’re hiding something, Jayce thinks, working very hard not to worry his curiosity around the obscured space in their bond like it’s a newly-missing tooth. He’d been ignoring it most of the day, but he’d been occupied in a way that he isn’t any longer, in the quiet of their small home. It has made ignoring whatever Viktor is keeping from him more challenging. 

I am. 

Jayce angles his face into Viktor’s palm and presses his lips against Viktor’s inner wrist. There’s a pulse there, a hum of sorts that courses through metallic plates. 

Jayce closes his eyes, closes the Arcane door between them, and asks aloud, “Do you want to talk about it?” 

“I’m not actually sure.” Viktor sounds lost. 

“It’s about my ‘friendly conversation’ this morning,” Jayce says, opening his eyes. It’s less a question, more an observation. 

Viktor nods a confirmation anyways. 

“You wanna sit?” Jayce asks. 

Jayce expects Viktor to sit next to him on their small couch, but he instead finds his arms filled with a metal man as Viktor crawls on top of him, straddling Jayce’s legs and knocking their foreheads together gently. Viktor brings his other hand up so that they’re both cradling Jayce’s face.

“Are you upset with me?” Jayce asks. 

“You said something,” Viktor says.  

“I said a lot of things.” Jayce lets his hands fall on Viktor’s hips, thumbs tracing lines over the soft fabric of the blanket that Viktor had decided to fashion into a permanent staple of his wardrobe. “I did a pretty bad job at staying calm. I’m sorry.”

“I understand, Jayce.” Viktor leans further into him. “That’s not what I was referring to. You said something. Something specific. Something I don’t believe that you noticed.”

He pulls back and looks at Jayce. 

Viktor’s eyes swim with colors, and he says, “I heard it, though. And I want you to say it again, and that is what I am hiding.”

Jayce swallows. “Tell me. I’ll say anything you want me to.”

“And that is why I am hiding it.” 

“What did I say, Viktor?”

“You do not owe me this.”

Jayce blinks. “Owe you what?” 

“Anything. You are enough, Jayce. You are everything. There is no scale between us for you to balance anymore. Maybe there never was one.” Viktor pauses to kiss him, softly, then says, “You do not need to say things simply because I want to hear them.” 

“Viktor.” Jayce runs his hands up Viktor’s sides. “Tell me what you want me to say.” 

“I will not,” Viktor says. Then he takes a deep breath. “But I’d like to tell you something else. Something true, and close to it. Perhaps you’ll remember.” 

Jayce looks intently into Viktor’s eyes as his partner steadies himself, and they both try, for different reasons, not to feel afraid. 

“I love you,” Viktor says, and Jayce does not exhale, like he is still waiting for Viktor to say something else. 

It takes a moment, but then Jayce does remember something he had said this morning. Screamed, actually, with tears running down his face as he held a massive metallic frame over the most irritating person he’d ever met: The man I love got his spine snapped in half. 

“Viktor,” Jayce says, and he sits upright and hauls Viktor closer. “I love you too, and I am really, really confused. It is genuinely not even remotely possible for that to be a surprise to you.” 

“It’s not a surprise, Jayce,” Viktor says, and he’s smiling at Jayce in a way that’s so bright and beautiful it might actually be dangerous to look at full-on. “But you hadn’t said it before.” 

“I love you,” Jayce says, once he finds that he can speak again.

“I love you, too.”

Viktor leans back into him, and for the next while in their small home, in between breathless kisses and clasps coming undone and metal sliding over skin, Jayce begins to make up for lost time. 

He says, “I love you.” He says it over and over and over. 

Chapter Text

Within Mel Medarda, the Arcane is stirring. 

When she steps from a ship into Piltover, she looks up to the glittering towers of the city she had once made into her own and she finds herself following an awakening sensation that draws her in a different direction. It draws her down. 

The way is clear. There is no barricade, only a bridge.

She moves through an Undercity that, had she spent any time there before, would have been hard for her to recognize. 

The half-year since the explosion in the council chambers has changed its nature. The air is different, the very colors changed. Neons are now dimmed during the day and shine brighter at nightfall instead of casting a constant glow. 

Mel wears a hood, and she casts her discerning gaze out from under it. Her eyes flash golden, like her magic is wound into the very act of observation. 

She comes to a bright field of flowers that bend around a community. Small houses, clear rushing water, spinning turbines, voices. The laughter of a child. Somewhere, the ringing of a hammer. 

She closes her eyes to listen. The Arcane winds itself about and through this place like a warm breeze. Touching it softly, gently, like a caress.

The Arcane here feels content. It feels satisfied. 

Unlike how it feels within her, where it is writhing and has been set to brutal purpose by another’s will. 

There is an anger that rises within her, looking at the sparks of energy at the edge of her perception that dance almost playfully in floating motes. A bitterness as she follows them to a place where they swarm in a density that feels almost too-bright. 

Her personal experience with magic has been limited, terrifying, and painful. 

When she finds Jayce Talis working a forge and Viktor bent over a diagram on a workbench nearby, Mel sees that magic can look very different. It courses between the pair, tender and soft, spinning out from a body composed of it to loop through a body touched by it and pass back and return somehow brighter. Like a spinning wheel made of its own spun fibers. Like a loom that is weaving itself. 

It makes Mel Medarda feel dissatisfied. It makes her feel resentful. 

But that doesn’t mean that it makes her happy when Viktor spots her and she sees exactly how it all shatters.  

“Where is my mother?”

“She’s looking for you,” Jayce says.

He has just finished throwing on a shirt and breaking up the fire in his forge to let it die faster. His arms are folded against his chest, and he’s standing with one braced leg crossed over the other. 

Viktor had rolled the wide door shut to seal Mel and Jayce inside when he’d left, departing with a muttered, “I’ll leave you to your conversation.”  

The temperature is near-sweltering, but it’s slowly dropping.

“Caitlyn will have the most up-to-date information,” Jayce says. “Ambessa set off after giving her the mantle, but they’ve been in correspondence.”

“She left?” Mel asks, lowering her hood. “Without Hextech?”

Jayce shrugs. “We think that she wanted it as a weapon to protect you, but she came to understand that Piltover and Zaun are stronger as a united ally than as a broken conquest. There’s a deal in writing that Cait had to actually bleed on. When Ambessa calls, we’ll answer, but only if it’s for you.”

“What do you mean, for me?” 

“Piltover’s decided to be protective of their remaining councilors. We’ve resources and manpower at the Hexgates ready to fly out at a moment's notice if you’re found, to ensure your safety. When we codified that formally, Ambessa set off to try to figure out where you’d been taken.” He tilts his head, hazel eyes narrowing. “Where were you taken?”

“Nowhere physical,” she says.

Jayce looks down to his braced leg, runs his hand over his brow, sighs, and says, “Been there.” 

“What happened to you?”

“Doesn’t matter.” 

“Something… happened to me too.” 

Jayce nods, goes to say something, and stops. He tries again after a moment, with more success, and says, “You’re the reason we didn’t die.” He’s holding himself close. “In the explosion up there.”

Mel nods. “It started then. Feelings I couldn’t explain. But this?” She turns her own hand, considering the branching gold that rests over her skin. “I still don’t fully understand.”

“Why just me?” Jayce asks, and he’s not angry, exactly. He’s tired. “Did you have a decision?”  

“No,” Mel says, and she sounds grieved and exposed by the admission. “I had no greater awareness.” 

Jayce nods again. “Do you think,” he says, and he maybe actually is a little angry, “that reflex was to protect one of your ‘investments’? Or were you protecting me?”

“Jayce–” 

“Because you called Viktor an investment too, and you didn’t shield him.”

“You’re upset.”

“You used me, Mel,” Jayce says, in a hurt rasp. 

Mel Medarda is adept at bending the truth, but she does not lie. So she doesn’t try to deny it.

Jayce huffs, and sighs, and looks at the ground. “Maybe I let that happen. I’m not even sure anymore if I knew that you were doing it, at the time. And I’m not even sure you knew that you were doing it. Maybe you forgot. Maybe you fell for your own game.”

Mel doesn’t deny that either.

“It can’t be like that, Mel. Not anymore.”  

“I understand.” She says this because it is true. So is: “I do care for you, Jayce.” 

“I care for you, too. You’re incredible, Mel. No more games. I'd like to be your friend.”

Mel lets out a relieved breath and shares another truth in, “I’d like that too.” 

“Good.” Jayce Talis smiles, wide and earnest and gap-toothed. “Are you in trouble? How can I help?” 

“I need to kill my mother,” Mel says. “Or I need to learn magic.” 

“I will help in any way I am able,” Viktor says, when Jayce and Mel find him in the greenhouse. “But my magic is manufactured. I am uncertain it will behave similarly to yours, Miss Medarda. And the foes you describe will undoubtedly have a capacity well beyond my own.”

“We do have some practice just between the two of us, though,” Jayce contributes. “Shielding and obfuscation within an Arcane pocket is something we do a lot of. Viktor’s doing it right now, even.” He smiles at Viktor.

Viktor’s expression doesn’t shift. 

Jayce’s brow furrows, and he clears his throat before he continues, to Mel, “Maybe we can describe it to you, or if we’re really careful Viktor could show you. If you get pulled into another pocket of the Arcane by this magic user you’re dealing with, it might give you an edge.”

Mel and Viktor look at him, then at one another. Jayce feels like he’s missing something, but when he goes to brush against Viktor in their bond for some insight, he encounters once more the barrier that had slammed into place the moment Viktor spotted Mel stepping into their home in the fissures.

It’s cold. Solid. It feels distinctly new from any of the barriers that had occupied that space before.

Those had been doors. This is a wall.

“That could be possible.” Viktor says, then to Mel, “I will need some time to prepare and research. We wouldn’t wish for your Arcane gift to become corrupted by my own.”

“Or the other way around,” Jayce says, frowning.

Mel looks between them for a moment. “That is gracious of you, Viktor,” she says, pointedly. “I know it is not ideal, but I am afraid this is my best option. I cannot turn away the aid you have offered, and I am grateful to you for doing so. I will leave the timing to your discretion.” 

She turns to Jayce then, and says, “In the meantime, I will go gather what information I can from Caitlyn Kiramman, and see how I can make myself of use to her.”  

“Need a hand?” Jayce offers.

“No,” she says, and she looks at Viktor. “Tomorrow?” 

After his nod, she makes for the door. 

Once past the threshold, she turns, says “Thank you both,” and leaves. 

Jayce sags into himself and says, “That could have gone worse. You alright?”

In the Arcane he reaches for Viktor again, and finds the icy wall. 

“I am,” Viktor says. “But I need time, Jayce.” 

Jayce looks at him and nods. He understands that his partner is asking for space, and he makes to leave, but not before he offers a soft smile and reaches out to grab Viktor’s shoulder.

Viktor flinches away.

Jayce’s hand hovers in the air for a moment, arrested in a wrenching halfway point.

Slowly, Jayce pulls his hand back. 

“Viktor?”

“I know you were mid-project at the forge,” Viktor says, “I left the schematics on your workbench before I left. They were not completed but you should have no trouble from where I left off.” 

“Viktor, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Jayce.” 

Jayce lingers. The colors in Viktor’s eyes are strangely static, grey and icy blue. Jayce steps forward, closer, hands open and reaching. 

Viktor steps away from him, sharply. 

Jayce doesn’t breathe. 

Jayce turns, after a moment. He leaves.

He does not go back to the forge.

Their residence in the fissures is small and comfortable. It is a couch and a table in a living space heated by a small wood-fire stove, and a side room with a large bed and a bathroom. One of the walls is slate, and covered in chalk notations.

Jayce sits rigidly on the couch, staring blindly at their houseplant. He’s waiting for Viktor to come home. 

It’s not until the sun has set and the neon lanterns flicker on outside that Jayce allows himself to think that Viktor might not. 

In his mind, he considers the Arcane barrier between them and places a hand tentatively against it. 

It freezes him, and the cold is not real, not physical, but Jayce stands anyway and moves to start a fire in their stove. It takes a moment before the flickering light cuts through the darkness, before the sound of crackling flames cuts through the quiet. Even once they do Jayce feels like he is shivering.

Jayce goes to the bedroom, gathers the bedding to drag in front of the stove fire, and waits.

Viktor has held him each night since Jayce crawled out of a dead world. Jayce knows that Viktor doesn’t sleep, exactly. He doesn’t need to. But he holds Jayce. 

He held Jayce. 

the ravine is cold and the fire does not cut through it at all because the popping cinders are quieter than the drip of the stalactites and the fuel is running out and the scratches on the wall are schematics that he cannot finish because he cannot reach high enough because his leg is broken and bleeding and wrong and burning and hurting and his mouth tastes like bile and the guts of an amphibious creature linger bitterly on his tongue and and he could wash it away or wash it down so that maybe he can survive but he would need to crawl to the puddle of still cave water and away from the fire that isn’t even warm but it looks like Mel until it looks like Viktor who is not here but he is somewhere and he’s alive he’s alive he had a pulse he was breathing but maybe he’s not and Jayce is in the ravine 

When Jayce wakes up, he is screaming, and there are hands shaking him by his shoulders. 

They are not metallic. 

“Fuck, Talis! You’re awake, it’s okay,” and Jayce gasps and flails and wonders only briefly how Vi got into his house before he notices that he’ll have to repair the door. 

Jinx is standing behind her sister, holding a massive wrench, and she meets his eyes for just a moment before going to the small sink in the corner and grabbing a cup to fill.

Vi doesn’t let him go. Her grip is solid and warm on Jayce’s shoulders. 

“Where’s Tin-Man?” Jinx asks, when she hands Jayce the water. 

“I don’t know.” Jayce’s voice sounds hoarse even to his own ears. He drains the cup and Jinx takes it back from him to refill while he runs his hands over his face. He’s still on the floor in the living space, curled in front of the stove.

“Trouble in paradise, huh?” Jinx says, and Vi throws an elbow at her. 

“I woke you?” Jayce asks, ignoring her. “From over here?” 

“Yeah.” Vi sounds sympathetic and cautious and she lets go of his shoulders. “Thought you might need help. Sorry about the door. Night terrors?” 

“I guess,” he says, and he tries to laugh but it doesn’t quite work. “Sorry about that.”

“You’re good,” Vi says. “You’re pretty quiet neighbors, most of the time.” 

“Usually too busy smooching in your brains to even bother talking out loud,” Jinx agrees. Vi glares at her. 

Jayce feels at the wall in the Arcane and curls in on himself, hands shuffling through his hair. 

“Thanks for checking on me,” he says.

“Yeah, glad you’re okay.” Jinx hands him another glass of water. 

Vi stands and asks, “Do you need anything?” 

Jayce drinks the water, then tosses the blankets from his shoulders to stand as well. 

“Need a new door hinge,” he says, and tries a smile. He can tell from the way the sisters look at him, that doesn’t quite work either. “I’m gonna head to the forge.” 

Thanks to the work he’d left off the day before, he’s still smithing when the afternoon rolls around and Cait comes down to the fissures.

“Hey,” he says, when she steps around the anvil. “Hold this for me?”  

She takes the proffered hammer from him, and he lifts the curved metal lattice from the anvil to put it back in the flames so it slowly starts to heat back to pliable. “I saw Mel, yesterday,” Cait tells him, spinning the hammer in her hands. 

“Yeah, hope that went okay?”

“We’ve decided to hold off on contacting Ambessa, for now. We’ll need your help keeping Mel’s return fairly quiet.” 

“Of course. She can always come stay down here, if she needs to lie low.” 

Cait tilts her head, and her eyes glint. “Can she?” 

Jayce takes his hammer back from her hands, and asks, “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“I also talked to Vi, just now,” Cait says. “Did Viktor come home last night?” 

“No,” Jayce says. “He used to do this, though. Disappear, sometimes. When he needed to think.” 

“Did you talk, first?” Cait asks, and she leans against the anvil. “About Mel?” 

“Yeah. He’s going to try to help her with her magic.” 

Caitlyn stares at him. 

“Jayce,” she says, and she starts to say something else, but Jayce cuts her off.

“I can’t do this right now, Cait. I didn’t really sleep.”

Cait stares at him some more, then she sighs, and asks, “Have you eaten?” 

“No.”

Cait reaches out, touches his arm. “Vi has to get ready for her match tonight, we were going to get a late lunch near the arena beforehand. Come with us. If you’re feeling up for it you can stay for the fight.” 

Jayce looks back at the lattice in the fire, down at the hammer in his hands. Thinks of a roaring crowd and warm food and how alone he feels with the wall in his mind where Viktor should be.

“Yeah, that sounds nice,” he says. “Let me finish up here.”

Viktor has been sitting silently in his steel oasis. 

He’d watched the sun set and then rise, and had counted the rotations in the machinery behind him. At some point he had decided that he would leave when that number reached ten thousand. It’s getting close to that, now.

He knows that there is one rotation every seven seconds, approximately. 

That means that Viktor allows himself almost nineteen and a half hours before he goes to find and help Mel Medarda. 

It’s not sufficient time to repair whatever has fractured inside of him. It’s not even enough time for him to properly identify what it is. But he tries to convince himself that it’s a start.

In Zaun, Jayce stands pressed between Jinx (who goes mostly by ‘Powder’ when it’s out loud, partly due to all the crime and partly because it makes things a bit easier for Vander) and ‘Matilda’ (Cait is the de-facto head of the re-instated council now and can’t really be seen in an underground fighting ring). They both holler raucously as Vi makes her entrance. 

Vi’s fist is punched in the air, makeup pulled in dark streaks down from her eyes. Isha tugs at Jayce’s hand, and he smiles and adjusts a gear on his brace before lifting her up onto his shoulders.

In Piltover, Viktor follows the nudge of the Arcane to the council chambers. The click of his staff echoes through familiar empty hallways, evoking old memories. He’d been an assistant to the dean of the academy. It had once been his job to move quickly and unnoticed, and he knows all the proper passages to avoid prying eyes. 

In all his years stealthily navigating the Academy, Viktor had only made the mistake of being caught once. Jayce Talis had proved a holistically distracting presence on the night they made their Hextech breakthrough. He’d thrown off Viktor’s every rhythm. Mel Medarda had pressed the advantage, and she had gained a definitive upper hand when she shined her spotlight on their break-in. 

If there hadn’t been a wall between them in the Arcane, Jayce and Viktor would have known that Viktor steps into the council chambers to encounter Mel Medarda at the same time that Vi steps into the ring. 

They would have known that the brief, civil exchange of “Hello, Viktor” and “Miss Medarda. Shall we begin?” was contemporary with Vi’s opening left hook and a jab counter from her opponent, both successfully blocked. 

Jayce would have known that Viktor moves through the Arcane, casting forth the thought, Can you perceive me here? That Mel concentrates, furrowing her brow, and returns, I can. That Viktor nods, and says, “I will attempt to conceal myself from you. Stay focused.” 

Viktor would have known that Vi leads her next combo with a feint, and smiles gleefully when her opponent catches her bluff and swings away from her uppercut. 

Mel and Viktor stand stock still as they dance through the Arcane in a series of rapid steps. Viktor flashes from new directions, advancing until she spots him, and once he’s close enough, he directs, Attempt to shield this, and within him the Hexcore reaches and it does not land. Mel Medarda’s magic rises to meet it and her eyes glow golden and a shield shines around her.

Vi lands a hit, but it’s an exchange that leaves her guard open. Her opponent’s stance shifts. 

Mel’s shield drops, and from behind it her magic lashes out. She staggers reflexively into Viktor’s awareness of the Arcane and looks around at the glittering expanse and points of light. It’s almost featureless, with the exception of the massive wall carved into the sky. She raises a brow at him and thinks, What’s this?  

Vi’s opponent swings with a left hook that lands. ‘Matilda’ yells loud encouragement. Jayce feels Isha’s grip tighten in his hair. Vi’s smiling, and in the tightened space, her fist flies out from below with a counter. 

Viktor regards the arcane wall and tells Mel, It’s a protection of Jayce’s privacy. Then he summons a new wall, surrounding her, giving the newly contained room the flavor and texture of the council chambers within the Arcane while he looks on from above. You are in a space that is mine, now. Can you discern the distinctions from the exterior?

Vi’s uppercut lands and her opponent reels. Then they steady themselves and launch at Vi.

Mel looks around, and her eyes flash golden, and she reaches out in the Arcane to brush against repeating symbols and runes in places that Viktor had not intentionally placed them. A subconscious effect of the workings of his magic. Mel Medarda swiftly picks his illusion apart by fraying the underlying runic structure within the Arcane, and as she finds one rune hidden in the gilded cracks of the illusory council table, she thinks, I don’t know that Jayce is overly fond of magical protection. He certainly didn’t seem pleased with mine, given I didn’t also extend to you.

From almost nowhere, Vi takes a body blow, and doubles over. She keeps her guard raised through a rain of punches. 

In the Arcane, Viktor’s eyes narrow. Would you have protected me? If you could have?

Vi twists and drops her guard to a jab for an opportunity to deliver a stronger blow to her opponent. Jayce’s small section of the crowd cheers loudly when it lands. 

Mel looks hurt, but she finishes unwinding the illusion until they are standing once more in Viktor’s swirling expanse of stars before she says, I would like to think so. It has been a valuable tool to me, but I believe it is a personal failing that on occasion I consider people as a means to an end. Its utility makes it a hard thing to unlearn. I doubt I will ever be fully free of it. 

Vi’s opponent lashes out with another body blow, and Vi dodges it with a quick back step.

You have been an investment to me, Viktor. And you have been a risk. You have always been beyond my control. But you have never been beyond my respect.

Vi and her opponent both find their footing and circle one another. 

Mel steps around Viktor’s Arcane awareness. In the council chambers, they regard one another carefully. Viktor looks her over to ensure there is no metallic mark beyond her own gold patterns, and is relieved to confirm the absence of his own influence. 

“I hope,” Viktor says, aloud, “That you do not apply that tool to Jayce any longer. He deserves better than that from a person he loves.” 

You, thinks Mel Medarda, looking sadly at the wall in the Arcane. Are very foolish, Viktor.

Vi closes range, and lands a quick series of blows until her opponent falls against the wall. She delivers one final uppercut, and Jayce and Cait and Jinx all holler as her opponent falls to the ground. In her delight, Isha almost falls, pulling sharply at Jayce’s hair while he laughs and holds her steady. Jinx moves to catch her, but Cait is too busy cheering and locking eyes with Vi to notice.

Viktor falls into a memory of Mel’s, by her intention. Red paint slashed over a canvas. 

“Viktor is dying.” Jayce’s voice. “Viktor saved my life once, now he needs me and there’s nothing I can do. I hate feeling so useless.” 

And Mel’s understanding solidified, with Jayce’s head resting on her lap, and it was not a lie exactly when she said, “I had no idea you were so close.” Because this was her first confirmation that it was, in fact, two-sided. “Why come to me with this?” 

“Because nothing feels impossible when I’m with you,” Jayce said. And there, between the lines: Because helping Viktor feels impossible. Being with Viktor feels impossible. 

Because it will be impossible, because Viktor is dying.  

“You should be with him, Jayce.” Mel had said, “We can’t change what fate has in store for us. But we don’t have to face it alone.” 

I have seen your magic at work, Mel thinks, her thoughts as clear and as sonorous as her voice. I was wrong. I can tell that you are both the architects of a changed fate.

They leave her memory. 

Why, she asks Viktor, in his own mind, in the council chambers and the glittering stars of the Arcane, are you making him face it alone?

When Jayce returns home, Viktor is there, waiting. 

Jayce exhales a relieved breath, before his posture tightens once more as Viktor’s eyes trace over him carefully. 

“Sit down,” Viktor says. “You pushed your leg, today.”

“Forge,” Jayce shrugs, but he listens, settling onto the couch, bringing his leg up onto the footrest. He waves vaguely at his own shoulders, “And Isha.”

Viktor nods, then moves. He leaves, then returns from the bathroom with a small tub held in his long fingers. He stands, hovering, almost lost for a moment. Then he gestures at Jayce’s leg.  

“May I?” 

Jayce’s eyes well up, and his voice breaks when he says, “You know you can, Viktor.” 

It’s a new, hesitant step in a familiar routine. The following ones are all correct, in theory. Viktor sits on the ground in his usual spot, clicks open the buckles and straps of Jayce’s brace, and pulls it from his leg. He unties Jayce’s boots and pries them from his feet. He rolls up Jayce’s trousers to expose the scarred tissue of his lower leg. He spreads an herbal cream over the tense surrounding muscles, and even with the wall between them Viktor has done this enough times with the capacity to sense Jayce’s aches like his own that he places his metal fingers and digs into all the perfect spots with the ideal pressure to bring Jayce a sweeping, embodied relief.

Jayce is still in agony, and it has nothing to do with his leg. 

“Is this about Mel?” he asks, and it breaks the silence to replace it with a new one that’s somehow, impossibly, more unsettling.

Viktor’s hands pause for a moment. Just long enough for it to be a confirmation. 

Jayce waits. 

Viktor quietly asks, “Do you remember, in the hospital? When you couldn’t tell me that I was going to die?” 

Jayce’s eyes pinch shut. It’s a profoundly stupid question. Obviously rhetorical. He doesn’t bother with a response, but he’s listening. 

“When I realized that my time was running out I decided that I would be selfish. I decided that even though I was dying, I would tell you that I was in love with you. That I had been for a long time.”

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t. But at that moment, I thought that the rest wouldn’t matter. I thought that my legacy, my contributions, the change that I brought to the world, and the fact that none of it was enough ? None of that would matter if I could be yours for just a little while. If, just for a moment, you were mine. I thought that might be enough. Maybe I could face the impossible, if I had you there beside me.”

Jayce opens his eyes, and they lock on to the houseplant in the corner but they are too watery for him to really make out anything beyond a green blur. He listens as Viktor continues.

“I didn’t want to tell you while I was in that bed, though. I decided that my time was limited, but not so limited that I couldn't wait just a few minutes. I didn’t want to tell you while there were all those tubes attached to me. I thought maybe, if you were feeling charitable, you would kiss me, and I didn’t want anything in the way.” 

Jayce shatters, and says, “But you didn’t, Viktor. You told me you needed time. You asked me to leave. You disappeared. Just like yesterday.” 

“I had changed my mind,” Viktor says. “About being selfish.”

“Why?”

“Mel Medarda imports a Noxian perfume, I think. It’s lovely, and it’s very particular. They were giving me oxygen through a nasal tube. I took that off last, when you were helping me up, and I took my first unassisted breath as a formally dying man. I started counting, Jayce. I thought, ‘There’s one. How many left, now, I wonder?’ And I went to tell you I was in love with you but in the same breath, I smelled that special perfume. And I remembered that I was dying and you were not, and I changed my mind about being selfish.” 

Jayce doesn’t say anything for a long, long time. He grinds his teeth against his tears, and then he gives up on holding them back. 

“You thought that was selfless, Viktor? You thought making that decision for me was some sort of kindness?” 

Viktor’s hands stop moving on Jayce’s leg. He peers up at Jayce, his brows drawn, his mouth slightly open. Viktor looks wounded. 

“Is that what you’re doing now?” Jayce asks, eventually. His own voice sounds off. “After everything? After all we’ve built, after all we’ve been to one another? You took one single look at Mel and you decided to just give up on me? To disappear?”

Viktor flinches. Jayce runs his hands over his eyes, and takes a few deep breaths. 

“That can’t be everything,” Jayce says. In the Arcane he stands before the massive wall separating them. “I’m not going to let you pretend that you still believe I would want that. At least not fully. Not anymore. What’s the other reason? The real reason? Why did you put this here?”

Viktor swallows. He doesn’t need to, Jayce is pretty sure. It’s just a muscle memory reflected in his metallic form. A vestige of something organic. 

“My jealousy was an eager facilitator of a false interpretation. I blamed Miss Medarda and her timing. That was unworthy of me. The real fault was my own. I was afraid, Jayce. And I am afraid now.”

“Afraid of what?” 

“Then? Of dying. Of loving you too much. Of losing you.”

“And now?”

“We are linked, Jayce. I’m afraid that when you look at her you’ll see her glittering magic and her golden eyes and her perfection. I’m afraid because I will have no choice but to know exactly how you feel about her. I’m afraid to know all of the comparisons you might make between us.”

Viktor stops, inhales, exhales, and confesses. 

“I know that you love me. But I’m afraid that you love someone else the same way. I don’t think I can know that and not fall apart.”

“Take it down,” Jayce says. 

“I can’t.” Viktor’s hands come off of Jayce’s leg. 

“Viktor,” Jayce says. “Take it down.”

“Jayce,” and Viktor’s pulling away again and Jayce can’t have that so he slides off of the couch onto the floor. There, in front of the stove where he woke up screaming the night before, Jayce grabs Viktor's wrists. 

“Please,” Jayce says, “Please don’t do this. Please don’t shut me out. Please don’t push me away. Trust me. Please. Take it down.” 

Viktor looks at him, hard, and in the Arcane the wall between them blows away like there’s been an explosion.

Jayce Talis signed his name on every page of their notes. He forged Viktor’s brace with House Talis insignia and colors. On a particular day when the heater broke in the lab, Jayce felt satisfaction settle as a contented curl low in his gut as his Viktor swam about in a too-big white and red coat. He placed his hands on Viktor’s shoulders at opportunity as if that gave him the right to linger there. 

When Jayce Talis crawled out of the ravine and every pained step was one that he prayed was bringing him closer to Viktor, closer to home, he would stop and breathe and fiddle with the bracelet and the runestone and hope and hope and hope. 

And when he learned that Viktor would doom the world by unifying it in a single collective entity Jayce had walked with him, back down into fissures on a broken leg. He’d stood on the same grey earth outside their door right now and pushed through the Arcane an alternative: Reach for me. Only me.

All of which Jayce shares now in a brief, astounded and momentary recollection as he regards Viktor in the Arcane. 

Do you think I should feel ashamed of that? Jayce asks. Do you think I should push you away to protect you from how much I want you to be mine? 

Viktor reels with it. 

Did you think I wouldn’t understand? Jayce tightens his grip on Viktor’s wrists. Did you think that I’m not possessive, too?

And Jayce doesn’t wait for a response, he sends in a second wave of memories and sensations. Running his own thumb over the metallic markings on his lips. The feel of the word “partner” as it rolls off his tongue. His elation at finding a lingering bruise on his neck in their mirror. Jinx looking around their house and asking “Where’s Tin-Man?” because everyone knows that they go together, Viktor and Jayce. 

Did you think I would mind? Jayce asks. Did you think I don’t love it, being yours?

And then Jayce thinks of the dance and game of politics, shaking hands and false smiles. Move and counter-move and move. Favors traded and bought and sold and owed on a scale so large that it’s hard to notice that it’s just a massive pendulum. And Jayce thinks of when he was trying to balance that scale, trying to shift that pendulum, trying to get his and Viktor’s dream off the ground and into the hands of people who needed it. 

Jayce thinks of when he told Mel Medarda, “I couldn’t have done it without you.” He thinks about how her answer was a kiss that meant you owe me and how Jayce’s answer was a night that meant how much? And Jayce liked to dance, and he liked to play games. He had fun with them, even. But that night he found himself lying in a too-large bed staring at a ceiling and feeling like he had put too much of himself on the scale. 

Jayce decided to be selfish. He decided he didn’t want to play the game anymore. He didn’t want to be a part of it. 

Jayce wanted to go home. So when he left Mel Medarda’s bed, Jayce went to the lab. He went to Viktor. 

And Jayce found him collapsed and unconscious in a pile on the ground, his blood already spinning through the Hexcore. 

We already wasted so much time, Viktor. Both of us. And Jayce is hurting and aching his way through asking, Why didn’t you come home last night?

You wanted me to? 

I needed you to. If you need space, that’s fine, Viktor. But if it’s about us? Come home to me.

I’m sorry, Viktor thinks. And he leans forward, reaching, and tilts Jayce gently back onto the floor. Viktor crawls over his partner, winding his fingers through Jayce’s to press the backs of large hands into the ground above his head. I’m so sorry, Jayce. 

And Viktor bites at the junction of Jayce’s neck and shoulder, and Jayce’s tears fall in relief now, as he shudders beneath his partner. 

You’re mine, Viktor, Jayce thinks. And I’m yours. 

Viktor trembles. But he shows Jayce that he understands better, now. 

While Jayce sleeps Viktor counts his partner’s breaths and presses his adoration through an open door. 

When Jayce blinks awake, Viktor charts his hands over his partner’s skin and presses softly into each of the bruises that dot his neck and shoulders. It’s more worshipful than apologetic. Jayce hums against him contentedly, and does not seem to mind whatsoever. 

They stay in bed for most of the morning, and it’s afternoon all over again when they drag their notes and computations and a large blanket outside to sit in the fields of swaying flowers. They use the excuse of taking readings. All the values they gather continue to chart the decline of gasses in the air of the fissures, filtered out by the yellow buds surrounding them.

A large shadow passes over them, at a point, and they both look up on a massive wolf-man. 

“The girls are worried,” Vander says in a rough growl. “You two sort things out?” 

“Yessir,” Jayce says, and Viktor nods. 

“Good.”

When Vander walks off, Jayce turns to Viktor.

I’m glad you came home, Jayce thinks. He kisses Viktor, then adds, lightly, He would have killed me if he thought I drove you off. He’d even work with Singed to do it. 

Viktor smiles and draws Jayce closer. Let’s make that our last resort in helping them find common ground. 

Chapter Text

Jinx has Viktor cornered. 

“You just left him.” She’s hissing at him. “Alone.” 

“It’s not–” 

“Don’t tell me it’s not a problem anymore. He was a mess, Viktor. Why did you just leave?” 

“It was a mi–”

“I’ll show you a mistake,” she says, eyes flashing purple. “What were you thinking?” 

Just now, he’d been thinking ‘misunderstanding,’ not ‘mistake’. He tries, “Powder, this doesn’t–”

“Like hell it doesn’t concern me.” 

“Stop–”

“I will stop interrupting you, when you say something that isn’t stupid.” 

Viktor inhales, and looks warily at the bomb pressed under his nose by a telescoping arm. He’s relatively certain that it is one of her glitter contraptions, but there’s a small chance he might actually die here. Both would be an inconvenience. He sighs, musters his patience, and says, “I thought Jayce might want an opportunity to reacquaint himself with a friend.” 

“That doesn’t count, Tin-Man. That’s something stupid.” 

“Yes, well.” Viktor huffs. He shrugs. 

Jinx stares at him, then glances over her shoulder, and says, “Close your ears, kid.” 

Isha takes a break from her post to pout at Jinx instead of dutifully glaring at Viktor from the beanbags in a corner. But she does, eventually, cover her ears. 

Jinx wheels back towards Viktor, and says, “You just stepped out in case he wanted to bang one out with his old flame? In your house? You were okay with that?” 

Viktor glares at her, then looks at the bomb. He says, quietly, “I was attempting to be.” 

There’s a long pause. The lights on the bomb blink through the dimmed light, casting an intermittent glow.

“I would still be attempting it,” he admits, “if that had been what he wanted. Likely unsuccessfully. But it was, eh… an unnecessary accommodation. Stupid, as you say.” 

The telescoping arm retracts, halfway, when she hits a button on a small remote with a loud click.

“No kidding,” she drawls. “Look, buddy. I’m the village crazy lady. If you’re ever considering doing something that might cause dear Jason to take my dang position, maybe run it by me first. Or him. Or literally anyone.”

“That is my intention, in the future.” Viktor rubs metallic fingers into his temples. He gestures at the bomb, which is still blinking. “Did you actually have something to show me, or is this why I am here?” 

Jinx looks at Isha and gives her a thumbs-up. The child uncovers her ears and Jinx jabs the thumb towards Viktor to inform her, “This chump’s never heard of multitasking.”

Lights flicker on. Viktor steps warily around the mechanical arm that had thrust out towards him the moment he stepped into Jinx’s domain. Housed at the base of a large blimp lodged in the fissures, it is an intrinsically chaotic space. Jinx waves him over as she falls into a stool that she pushes to roll back towards a cluttered worktable. 

Viktor looks over a ledge to check how far the fall would be, and finds that he cannot assess it properly given it fades into darkness. His metallic hand magnetizes to a handrail as he follows her deeper into the laboratory. It’s less an artifact of his own fear and more a side-effect of his experience with Jayce’s. After scaling a rock face and the floating debris of a decimated Piltover with a broken leg and a makeshift-brace, Viktor’s partner had come away with a well-earned wariness of heights. 

“I’ve been getting some super funky readings while working on the new oscillator. Check out those patterns,” Jinx says, once Viktor draws near. She points at a massive list of numbers, and over to a chalkboard where she’s mapped them on an axis. They shape a spiraling series of nested circles looping through and around one another. “Pretty, huh? They’re similar enough sequences that I keep waiting for them to become fractal, but there’s always a teensy shift in the pattern that keeps it from being a perfect recursion. It’s almost like the whole point is–”

“Chaos,” Viktor says, and before his eyes it becomes something colored, swirling, vivid and magical. “Flawless, exquisite chaos.” 

Jinx nods, watching Viktor trace over the drawings. “At first I thought it was something related to the corruption on the Firelight Tree and the Hexgates, but since you and Beardy installed my lil’ projects up at the gate, those have stayed localized. I went and checked. The corruption hasn't spread. And I’ve dragged this around all over the place.” 

She waves a modified barometer carved with runes and holds it out to him. Viktor takes it to turn over in his hands. 

She watches him, and says, “I’m only picking up these readings sometimes, and only here. It seems like it might be spatially localized, I’m just not sure why it’s happening in the ol’ stomping grounds.”

“The pattern looks familiar,” Viktor says, nodding to the board. “The anomaly that Jayce encountered at the Hexgate had similar sequences, but this looks distinct. An inversion, almost.” 

“But he says that he popped right back out and that anomaly disappeared. So why am I picking up readings of it here?”

She looks strangely hopeful as she watches Viktor look over her notes. 

“You have a theory,” Viktor says. 

“There’s no anomaly here,” Jinx says, and she props her chin up on her hands and smiles at him. “Not yet.”

“Hm.” Viktor considers, fiddling with the barometer. “The anomaly did create some temporal distortion in Jayce’s experience. I suppose it’s possible these readings are some lingering impression from another anomaly that was or will be in this place.” 

“Exactly,” Jinx says. She snatches the barometer back out of Viktor’s hands, then cradles it against her chest and says, quietly. “An echo, kinda.” 

“Are you saying that you want to create an anomaly? Here?”

She nods.

“J.T. said it scooped up your Professor Somebody, and my–” Jinx pauses. Viktor watches, surprised, as she flounders. She stands, loops around the space with no apparent purpose, then falls back in her stool. She abandons her last sentence and blows the bangs from her eyes. “Whatever. Maybe if we recreate it it could scoop them back.” 

She peers up at Viktor, expression no longer hopeful but instead stubborn, like she’s daring him to disagree. 

What do you think? Viktor asks, opening the door to the bond he shares with his partner and sharing the pertinent information. 

Jayce’s directed focus washes warmly over him in the Arcane. Viktor feels him take note of the drawings and diagrams and the rest of Viktor’s environment. He jolts, and requests, Maybe don’t stand that close to the edge? 

Viktor takes two small steps to be more centered in the platform. 

Thanks, Jayce thinks. I guess it’s possible, but it’s a big assumption. Maybe we can poke around with some rune combinations, see what– 

Viktor’s attention shifts, drawn to a deep, thrumming pulse in the Arcane. 

“Look, there it is again,” Powder says, as the modified barometer starts fluctuating. She turns, scrambling for a notebook where she begins to chart out values, pencil flying rapidly over the page while her eyes stay locked on the needle flying around the meter.

Viktor’s vision flashes. He looks to Powder and watches her form fade and shift and shimmer. Her long hair has been dyed new colors every other week since she moved down to the fissures, less as an actual disguise and more as a nod to one. No one in Zaun has tried to turn her in since Smeech, and Caitlyn's efforts to capture Jinx have been for show. Today, her hair is red, as is the coordinated streak in Isha’s. But for a moment he swears it looks blue again, the only color she avoids. And it is pulled up into buns. 

Alarmed, he glances over at Isha where she’s stopped her doodling on a beanbag and is watching Jinx. He’s horrified to find the child dancing in and out of existence, along with several features of her surroundings. It seems almost like there are, somehow, two spaces flickering and interposing atop one another.

Down in the fissures, Jayce leaps to his feet, and starts moving. Viktor, get out of there. Now. 

Instead Viktor whirls about the Arcane, looking down on himself and Powder’s workspace. He tries to focus, peer through whatever overlap is surging here. He glimpses, somehow, a different suite of machinery, wires winding into and charging something small and magic and bright. Viktor raises his hand to shield his eyes on a reflex, but it’s not actually visual. It’s a dense point of raw energy in the Arcane that is reaching out, entwining with his own magic.

Viktor tries to focus on it, to adjust whatever sense he’s using around it. He’s not perceiving here. He’s perceiving an elsewhere that is, for the moment, nearby. There, energy is coursing through cables and up into coils, and flowing around a small, contained anomaly in a capsule held by a young man. Standing beside him Viktor makes out the silhouette of his old professor. There’s a larger anomaly springing into existence around them. 

Fragments of crystals generate magical energy that loops about in this nearby dimension, and Viktor perceives it because there is a tunnel being made, because a portion of elsewhere is coming here using an inversion of the magic that he invented with Jayce. There’s a mechanism creating an invocation that’s a replication of something that’s familiar, thanks to the ancient mage who saved Jayce as a child.

Viktor’s own magic would look something like this, if he crossed the line instead of giving it a wide berth. It’s still close enough that Viktor can sense it when something goes horribly wrong.

A plate flies away from levers, and they shift out of order, and Viktor watches as Heimerdinger removes his goggles and starts to speak to the young man. Viktor can feel that there’s not enough charge, that there’s a misalignment. The professor begins to step away from the anomaly. Viktor makes a sudden, impulsive decision. 

But first: Jayce, I have to–

Okay. I trust you. Do it. 

I love you.

I love you.

And so Viktor reaches with all of the magic he can summon to his fingertips and presses through a narrow gap in reality to elsewhere and closes his eyes and feels for the snag in the inversion where it’s out of alignment because it’s skewing towards order instead of chaos, and Viktor makes a firm suggestion for it to change. 

Ekko and Heimerdinger fall into their home dimension. Viktor falls. 

When he comes to, Viktor is being fussed over by a yordle and he feels, for the first time since stepping into his current form, diminished. In his time occupying a body that is built from and wound into the Arcane, all of his efforts and applications of magic have been characterized by restraint. Viktor has been holding back. He has never pushed his capacity remotely close to any sort of limit.

As he stirs on the arm of Jinx’s blimp in a chasm, he learns what it feels like to have that resource within himself depleted rather than raging against his tightly held control.

It feels, strangely, like being massively hungover.

As he sits up he can feel his own pulse as a hum thrumming through his aching temples. He senses the Hexcore within him spinning in slow, heavy, and lurching movements. He wonders, idly, if he will throw up, then he realizes he likely cannot. Part of him wishes he could, for some potential relief.

The lights around him are too bright.

“Viktor, my lad!” Heimerdinger’s voice is far louder than it has any right to be. Viktor winces, shushes him, and hangs his head heavily between his knees.

Softer and more comforting is Jayce’s gentle concern, winding through the Arcane and surrounding Viktor like a caring aura. 

Tell me you’re alright, love, Jayce presses, from deep in the fissures. Viktor reaches for him, parses through Jayce’s surroundings. Jayce had been charging in Viktor’s general direction like a compass yanked North, but once he’d made it near the edge of their village, he’d redirected his focus to being with Viktor in the Arcane instead of in person. His large hands are straining where they grip his hammer, tightly. His knees dig into the grey soil.

Viktor tunes into his partner's senses of air and light and movement. The bending of yellow blooms in the breeze. Viktor inhales, deep, into Jayce’s lungs, noting the fragrances, floral and earthy, then he exhales for Jayce, long and slow. He thinks, I’m alright.

Somewhere near him, Powder is having an exchange with Ekko. Both of their words are quiet and careful. Viktor spends a moment considering listening, partly out of a bitter sense that it would only be fair, given how invested Powder seems to be in his own personal life. But he glances at Heimerdinger’s wide, searching gaze and decides to direct his focus elsewhere. Inwards. 

After a moment, he notices that he can feel the Arcane slowly replenishing the diminished force within him. Incredibly slowly. 

Every part of him aches. 

It’s nice that this sensation is surprising. I was once overly familiar with discomfort.

From a field in the fissures, Jayce exhales in relief, and tries to help Viktor shoulder it.

“You’re deceptively heavy, Tin-Man,” Jinx says, voice strained, as she gets an arm under Viktor to pull him off the ground with the help of Ekko.

“Easy, now,” guides Heimerdinger, unhelpfully, though he had been the one to redirect the pair’s attention. 

“Here, try leaning on me,” Ekko says, from under Viktor’s other arm. 

Viktor grunts at him, and Ekko responds, “Nice to meet you,” as the trio stumble over to drop Viktor gracelessly into one of Jinx’s beanbags. Viktor’s eyes are closed and his head is still pounding but he is measurably more comfortable than he was on the ground. 

When a small hand lands on his, he peeks his eyes open to meet Isha’s. They are comically large. 

She passes him a thought where their hands touch. Not words, just images and intent and worry. Enough that Viktor tries to smile at her while he nods, before she scampers off to a corner and starts rummaging through a cabinet. 

“Thank you,” Viktor says, closing his eyes again and tilting his head to fall back. “Nice to meet you also, Ekko.”

“What was that?” Ekko asks. 

“Perhaps you should be telling us that,” Viktor says, “but do so quietly, please.” 

“It’s quite the story! I fear you would scarcely believe it!” 

Viktor groans, and raises his brows at Heimerdinger.

“Ah, yes, apologies.” Heimerdinger drops his voice to an exaggerated whisper to say, “We have come from a parallel dimension.” 

“Yes,” Viktor says, fingers back on his temples. “The anomaly you encountered with Jayce at the Hexgate had that property. As he did not encounter you in the dimension he occupied we presumed you were elsewhere.” 

“Jayce made it back already?” Ekko asks. 

“Yes,” Viktor says, then he glances at Isha, who is holding up a range of ribbons near the cabinet. He says, “Pink, I should think.” 

She nods seriously, and puts the rest of the ribbons back in the drawers. 

“How?” Ekko asks. 

“Also an implausible story.” Viktor says. “As an abbreviation, the dimension he occupied was one where I had gained the capacity to send him home.”

“Fascinating,” Heimerdinger whispers. 

Jinx makes a frustrated noise from where she’s perched on her stool. Ekko and Heimerdinger and Viktor all look at her. She crosses her arms, and explains to Viktor, “It took me months and so much whiskey to get Jayce to fess that up. I could have asked you and you would have explained the whole thing in like thirty seconds, huh?”

“Probably not,” Viktor says. “It was not as pertinent to you as it is to our present company.”

Isha settles herself on the beanbag near Viktor and grabs a fistful of his hair to start braiding. 

Ekko stares at Jinx, stunned. “How long have we been gone?” 

“A little over six months, here,” Jinx says. She looks at Ekko warily, carefully. “This must feel pretty topsy-turvy. We can explain some, but I bet there’s people you’ll trust more right now who can catch you up too.”

“Mostly? I’m just glad to see an old friend,” he tells her.

Viktor’s still feeling petty about the probably-glitter bomb, enough that he breaks the following laden silence himself with, “You’ve been missed by the Firelights. Jayce is on his way now to let Scar know you’ve returned.” 

Ekko starts, and looks at him. “Is the tree okay? If Jayce got back here early, did he figure out how to stop the corruption?”

“No,” Viktor admits, then nods his chin over at Jinx to say, “Powder did.” The movement fumbles the start of his small braid out of Isha’s hands. She grumbles and lightly swats Viktor’s head. 

“How does Jayce know we’re back?” Heimerdinger stage-whispers. 

Jinx seems to be looking for a way to avoid Ekko’s bewildered gaze, and says to Heimendirger, “The Man of Progress and Tin-Man here make up a two-man hivemind.”

Jayce thinks, Tell them I’m sort of sorry for smashing the anomaly with a hammer.

“He says hello, and apologizes for his role in your interdimensional travels,” Viktor obliges, when the professor looks to him for confirmation. 

Viktor had been Heimerdinger’s assistant for years, ending when he invented mechanical magic with Jayce Talis after breaking into his office. In all that time, he’d never seen the yordle look so floored. But he seems to recover quickly.

“No trouble at all, gentlemen.” He’s not whispering anymore and is looking at Viktor like he can see the two of them, now. “It was quite enlightening. And not altogether unpleasant. I’m relieved that you are safe. Both of you.” 

“You stopped the Hextech corruption on the tree?” Ekko asks Jinx. 

Viktor looks and notices, with some alarm, that she’s blushing.

“It was no biggy,” she says, twisting her stool back and forth. “The hardest part was getting the story of what happened to you out of Jay. I don’t actually like whiskey.” 

That’s a lie, Jayce reminds Viktor. She just prefers to drown it in juice, because she is a criminal.  

“Do you remember that old arcade we used to hole up in?” she asks Ekko. 

“Yeah,” Ekko says, and they both look, briefly, sadly, like they’re lost in the same memory. “I do.” 

Jinx clears her throat. “Well, I worked on an arm a while back using parts from those machines. I gave it a buncha bells and whistles, ya know? It did whatever it felt like doing.” 

Jinx goes to her desk and draws a stack of diagrams out of a drawer to hand to Ekko. 

“Jayce said that you’d basically figured out that the Arcane was creating wild runes because it was getting huffy about the demands that Hextech made of it. So I tried figuring out ways to ask nicely. Give it some other outlets. The Hexgate has a bunch of runes that basically say, ‘Put this thing over there.’ I gave it some more options. ‘Launch some fireworks’, ‘Take a breather,’ ‘Spin,’ that sort of thing. The Arcane has a choice, now. It’s not a super reliable transportation system anymore.” She shrugs. “Sometimes a ship goes where we want it, sometimes the Arcane tells us to get bent. But it’s still convenient enough to be useful, and the Arcane is a lot less pissed. The wild runes stopped spreading.”

Ekko stares at the diagrams. It doesn’t look like he’s seeing them. 

“Why?” Ekko asks her. He looks lost.

“That tree must have been pretty important to you,” she says after a moment, with her gaze fixed on her shoes, “if it made you put up with an explanation of runic theory from Jayce Talis.” 

Everyone listening waits. Isha ties a pink bow around Viktor’s completed braid.

“Look. You tried to save me, Ekko,” Jinx says, quietly. Her voice is raw. She shrugs with one shoulder. “You couldn’t. But you tried.” She nods at the diagrams in Ekko’s hands. “That’s a thank you. And it’s the start of an apology.” 

Viktor watches as Ekko showcases the Z drive after explaining its origins. He offered a description of an alternate timeline and admitted that a different version of Jinx had helped in the contained anomaly’s creation. She had, apparently, done so just in order to help him win a competition. Jinx hadn’t really seemed surprised by that.

Ekko hands the device to her, carefully. Then he takes her pencil and drops it while she holds the device. Nothing else seems to happen except that she’s suddenly surrounded by a few blue-green sparks and is looking at Ekko with her eyes wide and teary. Because the device works, and she’s returned from a four-second time loop. 

Heimerdinger is engrossed in Jinx’s Hexgate diagrams. Isha has started on another braid in Viktor’s hair, this time with a purple ribbon ready. 

Through Viktor's eyes, Jayce is watching too. They created and contained an anomaly that influences time. With nothing but shards from the explosion, Jayce thinks. He’s filled with soft wonder and a touch of damaged pride. Time, Viktor. 

We were plenty occupied figuring out space, Viktor consoles, attempting to buff out the scratch in his partner’s ego. 

If they’d been in the Distinguished Innovater’s Competition with you and me, I don’t think we would have won. Jayce is astonished. Then, God. Maybe they can still sweep it from us. They can control time. 

Viktor remembers that competition. He remembers how Jayce’s hair had been falling into his eyes as he notched gears in the carriage over. He remembers how Jayce had asked Viktor to fix it so he wouldn’t lose his rhythm. How Viktor’s hands had been trembling while trying to tuck back the strands and he couldn’t quite convince himself it was all nerves. Though there had been nerves aplenty; enough of them that Viktor had thrown up before their presentation. He’d heard Jayce swear for the first time then, a quiet “oh shit, ” while he rubbed circles into Viktor’s shoulder and asked a passerby for water. Viktor had rinsed his mouth, turned to Jayce, and made one last feeble attempt to help before pleading, “go.” But when Jayce had stepped into the spotlight to present Hextech, stepping up for both of them, one wisp of his dark hair was still stubbornly escaping from his pomade.

Viktor still feels adjacent to ill from the depletion of his magic, and that particular memory doesn’t do him any favors. 

We made the Hexcore, you raised me from the dead, and we didn’t end the world, he reminds Jayce. Don’t get greedy.

But Viktor also thinks of the Firelight hoverboards and the first time that he’d encountered Jinx’s chemtech, when he had barely been able to disarm a crudely crafted bomb with inspired engineering. He looks to the blinking device still in the claw of the extended arm that had sprung out at him quite recently.

What? Jayce startles and halts on the way to the Firelight sanctuary. His eyes narrow. That better be confetti. She ambushed you?

Viktor gives the impression of a shrug, and thinks, She prefers glitter for mine. 

Viktor remembers that while disarming her real bomb, half a year ago, Jayce had asked, “You think they could crack Hextech?” Viktor had said, “Hm. It’s a leap.” Jinx had done it. And he knows, through hearsay, that Ekko had created a small but thriving community in Zaun and had given his people the technology to enable them to fly, and he had done so as a child.

Jinx and Ekko are still looking at one another, like they have stopped time, because they have.

Jayce feels inspired and distressed. Viktor, they are going to blow us out of the fucking water, he thinks. Viktor can’t help but agree. 

“When you’ve settled in, Jayce and I would like to discuss your findings and share our own,” Viktor says, out loud. The young inventors look to him. “If you would be interested in a collaboration.” 

Ekko shares a guarded nod, Jinx spots it and lights up, and Viktor looks to Heimerdinger to meet knowing, wise eyes. In that moment, he and Jayce fall into a deeper understanding of their old professor’s mix of pride and wariness. 

Isha hums happily and shows Viktor his completed purple braid. 

Chapter Text

Jayce accompanies Scar to Jinx’s blimp in the fissures, which Jayce does not step onto because it is a death trap.

The bat-like features of the interim leader of the Firelights shift into a delighted expression as he and Ekko spot one another. Scar does step onto the blimp, and Ekko moves towards him so that they can clasp one another on the shoulder.

“You took your time,” Scar says. “We’ve been busy.” 

“Catch me up,” Ekko grins, but then he hesitates and looks at Jinx. “You said you’re out on the fringes?”

She nods, then indicates Isha and Viktor and Jayce. “All of us, yep.”

Ekko ducks his head, shaking it slightly before asking, “I’ll swing by?” 

Jinx smiles wide, shrugs and says. “Sure. Big field. Weird underground utopia. Can’t miss it.”

Ekko heads with Scar back to the Firelight Sanctuary. They both give Jayce a nod when they pass him where he is waiting on a safely supported section of the staircase. Jayce returns it.

Then Jayce turns to the others on the blimp. His partner is still collapsed in the beanbags, Isha’s returned to her doodling, Jinx is looking at where Ekko has disappeared up the stairs, and Jayce’s old mentor is looking at him dead on with guarded curiosity. 

“Could you all please get off that thing?” Jayce asks, kicking out at the railing from his position on the stairs. It makes an echoing ringing noise in the chasm. He winces along with Viktor, then collects himself, clearing his throat. “Tea, professor?” 

The trek back to their village in the fissures is slow, winding from Jinx’s blimp up through Zaun to cut back down to the fringes. Viktor is improving with time but Jayce can feel through their bond the hollow sensation that sits in him as something like lightheadedness. The Arcane is filtering magic back into him, but it is working slowly. 

Jayce has his arm wrapped around Viktor, partly in case he falls and partly because a little while ago Jayce thought the love of his lifetimes might be about to wink out of existence in a magical surge. Jayce’s fingers rest against the quiet hum and coolness of a metallic body nearly as familiar as his own; a pleasant and reassuring point of contact.

Jinx is on Viktor’s other side, while Isha and Heimerdinger walk slightly ahead of them. 

On their way out the child had snatched Jinx’s “friendly conversation” bomb away from the telescoping arm that had been set up for Viktor. Apparently Jinx had let Isha help with constructing this one, because the girl has twisted it open and is proudly pointing out the gears that work within the contraption to launch glitter to the Professor. Heimerdinger is encouraging, specifically asking her the kind of questions that she can answer with more pointing. 

They are the same height, Viktor observes. Jayce snorts. 

“What?” Jinx asks, purple eyes flashing to Jayce warily. 

Jayce pivots and smiles at her, all teeth. He says, “You and Ekko, huh?”

“Stop. It’s not like that,” she says, looking at the ground. “There’s… too much.”

“You have time, Powder,” Viktor reassures. Jayce chimes in, dryly, “Literally.” 

They walk in silence for a few blocks, transitioning from the colorful bustle of the Zaunite market vendors through to the residential structures on the fringes, filled with signs of new repairs and renovations. Jayce casts a brief thought to how much of that work was done by various determined people, fed by Ximena’s aggressively expanded organization of home cooks and using Talis tools to build and repair the things that people needed. He feels once more the ghost of pride when he imagines how pleased his father would have been that Jayce has found his roundabout way back into the family business

“Maybe,” Jayce says, too casually, too cheerfully, “wherever Ekko just came from, you two–” 

“Not possible,” Jinx asserts. 

Viktor is the only one who catches the twitch in Heimerdinger’s ears and the professor's oh-so-brief expression while he fumbles a spring Isha had handed him. But that means Jayce catches it too.

Oh, shit, Jayce thinks, gleefully. 

Leave that, Viktor cautions.

Nope, Jayce returns, then tells Jinx, grinning, “Very possible, actually. Would that be a problem?” 

Jinx doesn’t say anything. 

Viktor thinks, Yes, it would.

Jayce looks at him. So Viktor imagines, in their shared consciousness, Jayce in his tattered clothes on top of the Hexgate in a shattered Piltover embracing the mage Viktor might have been. He imagines how it might have felt and passes Jayce a theoretical sense of bitterness and anguish and pity and jealousy and a multi-directional sense of inadequacy, further complicating the reconciliation of two versions of himself. 

You hate him, Jayce realizes. The mage.

Somewhat. As much as myself, I suppose, Viktor thinks. 

He was alone, Jayce defends.

And he left you alone in that ravine. Viktor’s thoughts are sharp and full of bitterness. Then a shattered sorrow, and guilt, and I left you alone in our home. I sent you back there. 

Jayce grips Viktor tighter. 

They pass three more blocks of residential buildings. In several of them, Jayce notices that some of the new repairs are temporary supports to ease cracks in the foundations. The houses are not broken, they are safe and warm and full of life. But there is still work to be done to keep them that way. There always will be. 

Jayce, chastised, mutters, “Sorry, Powder. Wasn’t thinking.” 

She glances at him and her shoulders drop from raised and stiff, but then she continues to glare straight ahead as they pass another block.

He lies, “You can always pretend it’s the first time.”

“Jayce," she says. "Shut up.” 

But then there’s a poof and delighted laughter from ahead of them and Jinx’s eyes fall on Isha. The child has covered herself and a spluttering yordle, the esteemed Dean of the Academy and founder of Piltover, in glitter. 

Jinx’s mouth turns up at the corners, and she sighs. She looks at Jayce. 

“Whatever happens,” she says, “I’m glad he’s home.” 

Isha runs off when they make it to the village, and Jinx tilts a salute to the others before following after her.

Heimerdinger walks beside Viktor and Jayce, trailing glitter all the way to their small house. As Jayce sets a kettle on their woodfire stove and works to get it lit, Heimerdinger looks over the equations drawn out on their slate wall, tilting his head when he finds a shopping list among them. Viktor sets out one of the chairs from the table, facing the couch, and waves their guest towards it. As the professor settles in, both inventors resign themselves to sweeping stubborn flecks glitter off of the cushion over the course of the coming months. Viktor sits on the couch.

There is a deep, wary quiet, broken eventually by the whistling of the kettle. Jayce hands a cup of tea to Heimerdinger, appropriately creamed and sugared based on Viktor’s memory of the professor’s preferences. Then Jayce makes one for himself, and sits beside Viktor on the couch, propping his leg up on the footrest.

“You didn’t expect to return here,” Jayce says, without further preamble, after his old mentor takes the first sip. 

He’s met with a startled expression. “What makes you say that, lad?”

Viktor hums, then says, “We saw the lab you were in, and how the Arcane moved through the machinery there. It was a novel invention, quite intricate, but it was familiar enough. The main activation point was a cable, which you had left disconnected.”

Jayce nods, blows steam from his own tea, and contributes, “Even if nothing had gone wrong, you had to step outside of the anomaly to send Ekko here. We saw that you were about to.” 

Heimerdinger looks into his cup. He sighs in a way that ruffles his glittering moustache. He stirs his tea with a spoon. 

“I hope,” Viktor says, carefully, “that you will pardon our interruption.”

Heimerdinger doesn’t respond immediately. He closes his blue eyes.

Eventually, he admits, “It seemed the only way.”

“Would being that close have sent you somewhere else?” Jayce asks. “Or would it have killed you?”

Heimerdinger’s ears droop. He confesses, quietly, “I do not know, my boy.” When his eyes open, they are immensely tired. “I do know, however, that I have been alive for quite a long time.”  

Viktor remembers an old conversation in his steel oasis, one where he’d asked his teacher if he ever contemplated death. The yordle had responded, then: “Only that of friends.” 

It would seem, wherever his old professor had been and whatever he had lived through there, that had changed. 

Jayce’s jaw is clenched, and he shares his own memory with Viktor as a potential explanation.

“I see what this is about,” the founder of Piltover had said, before being stripped of his seat on the council. Heimerdinger had looked at Jayce. “Your Hextech projects need more time.”  

Jayce had spent the previous night watching Viktor’s chest rise and fall from a hospital chair, before Viktor had pushed him away. But Mel Merdarda gave good advice, like, “You should be with him, Jayce,” so Jayce had gone back to the lab to find Viktor working, testing, desperately feeding plants to the Hexcore. Jayce had grasped onto this small spark of hope, alchemized it into an unwavering determination, and promised, “We’ll solve this.” But Viktor had responded, “There may not be time.”

Viktor had said, “We’re in uncharted waters here, and I can feel my body eroding.” So they had turned to their old Professor for help, but the yordle looked at the Hexcore for only a moment, before saying, “You must destroy it.”

So, in the council room, Jayce slammed onto the table with his palms. “Humans don’t live for centuries.” His voice had been clear and angry and echoed through the chambers. “We can’t wait for progress.” 

Jayce had sent his mentor unwillingly into “a well deserved retirement,” then thrust him into a dimension where he had apparently come to the conclusion that his immortal life was worth the risk of forfeiting, for a young man’s ticket home. 

Because the long-lived founder of Piltover intended to share one final contribution with his home dimension: his new pupil, wielding an impossible device. 

A device that created more time. 

Now, in the small home of his former pupils, in the fissures beneath the city he’d founded, the yordle sips his tea, and says, “I have a question for you both, if you would be so kind.”

The inventors wait. 

“Your Hexcore. Where is it, now?”

“It is part of me,” Viktor explains. 

Heimerdinger takes a deep breath. He reaches to set his tea down, the stiff movement dislodging a considerable amount of glitter. 

After a moment, he speaks. “You are far from the first mage I have seen, lad. I first saw the spark of it in you, when you gentlemen showed me the device. As I told you then, I have seen its likeness before. I have witnessed a similar seed grow into the destruction of nations.” He sighs. “But I am keenly aware now that I have not seen everything. I have, in fact, missed that which was beneath my very nose.” 

Heimerdinger peers at Viktor with deep, sad eyes. 

“I hope that I was mistaken,” the professor says.

“You were not. Not entirely,” Viktor allows. “The Arcane is vast, and it touches many worlds. We have encountered versions of ourselves that did not succeed in averting the calamity that you warned us of. It took their perspective and considerable effort to keep our home from sharing that fate.” 

“It will continue to take considerable effort and different perspectives,” Jayce says, and the words would sound grim except they’re voiced in a way that’s firmly colored by that same unwavering determination. “Yours would be incredibly valuable, professor. To both of us. And to this world.” 

Viktor looks at his partner and falls in love with Jayce all over again, like he does all the time.  

“Whatever course you choose to take and whatever the shape of your contributions,” Viktor says, to their weary mentor, “you may consider us available to assist you.”

The professor lifts his tea once more. “I may wish to wander, for a time,” he says, into his cup. He looks at the pair like he is seeking validation. 

“We hear there’s a magic tower, topside.” Jayce says. “Word is, it might get you almost anywhere.” 

The professor chuckles, and sips his tea. Then Heimerdinger asks, quietly, “My companion. Porofessor. Do you know if he well?”

“Oh,” Jayce says, then he laughs. The furry, half-blind creature is well looked after, and still present at almost every council meeting Jayce dropped in for as Cait’s advisor. 

As Jayce composes himself, Viktor tells Heimerdinger, “Very much so, but if you would like his company in your travels, you will have to wrestle him back from Salo.” 

At the professor’s surprised expression, Jayce explains, smiling, “Salo got fixated on some archaic law about founders while trying to depose Piltover’s emergency ruler. Pretty sure he was looking to have some leverage in the event you returned, but he got really attached.”

The next day, Jayce is wrapping up his project at the forge, rubbing linseed oil into a brass rounded shape, when Ekko drops out of the sky. 

Jayce jumps back into a shelf with a swear and a clattering as a sweep of tools find new places on the ground. 

“Sorry,” the Firelight says, shouldering his board. “The air’s less dense down here than it used to be. Gotta get used to that. Down’s fast.” 

Jayce catches himself clutching his chest and moves to act like he was brushing something off. He clears his throat to mutter, “Welcome, Ekko.” 

“Is… Jinx around?” 

“It’s Powder down here,” Jayce informs him. He sets to righting his tools off the ground. “Though it’s more of a formality than anything.”

Ekko quietly watches Jayce correct his shelf. “She’s changed,” Ekko observes, in an almost-question. 

Jayce snorts. “Yes. And no.” He grabs the finished metalwork, decides that it’s oiled enough, and says, “I’ll walk you to the lab.”

Ekko takes in his surroundings, curiously, as they move through the village. Grey dirt pathways up to stonework houses. Iron-wrought benches, woven grass baskets and garden plots. A square with a bubbling fountain. Folks stop Jayce once in a while for hellos, and he smiles and returns them and moves on before they become conversations. 

Jayce says, “Point is, if it comes down to it, everyone around here will stand against whoever might have it out for her, but we’d all like to reduce the chance that we’ll need to.” 

“That include you?” Ekko asks, looking Jayce up and down.

“It does,” Jayce says, meeting his gaze, “You make trouble for her, you’ll have trouble with me. I wouldn’t recommend you do that.” 

Ekko huffs a disbelieving laugh. Jayce tilts a brow. 

“Strange times,” Ekko says. “Never expected shovel talk from the ex-head of the Piltovan Council.”

Jayce claps the young man on the back. “I’m Jayce Talis, kid. I don’t do shovels.” And his voice stays light, but his eyes are hard and threatening. “I do hammers.” 

“Brought a visitor,” Jayce says, as he steps into the lab and three pairs of eyes snap to him. He strides to the corner and hands the metalwork to his old professor. “Size okay?” 

Heimerdinger hops off his chair, which has likely become the permanent home of some of the most stubborn flecks of glitter from the previous day. The yordle holds the brass structure aloft in front of himself. 

“Perfect, lad,” he says, and his blue eyes are filled with emotion. “I have always admired your craftsmanship.” 

“Hand it here, then,” Viktor says, reaching for a pair of goggles. “Powder’s components are ready to solder on.”

Jinx stares at Ekko. 

“Hi,” she says, with a half-wave.

“Hey,” Ekko says, rubbing at the back of his neck.  

Then the door flies open like it’s been kicked, because it has, and Vi is sweeping Ekko into a hug that lifts him off the ground while shouting, “Little Man!” 

Heimerdinger returns to his chair and his work of winding steel wires into coiled strings. Viktor grumbles as he pulls on his goggles and flips on the soldering iron. Jayce leans against the table next to him and lets his hand fall on Viktor’s shoulder. 

Still feeling alright ? Jayce checks with his partner. Viktor takes stock of himself, sharing his awareness with Jayce. He’s not yet fully recharged whatever resource he’d expended to activate the anomaly, but after a full day of the Arcane’s trickling replenishment, he doesn’t feel like he’s far off.

Vi sets Ekko down, beaming. He looks at her strangely, and pulls her back in for a tight hug. “You’re here,” he mumbles. She grips him tight.

“You too. Pow-Pow told me you were back, and I heard word you were stomping around down here,” Vi says, once he lets go. She holds Ekko by his shoulders, looking into his eyes. “Lots of change. How are you holding up?” 

“It’s overwhelming,” Ekko says, with a wet laugh and a hand running over his face. “I think I need a distraction.” 

“You came to the right place,” Vi says, nodding to the lab around them. “These brainiacs have so many ongoing projects, you’ll have your hands full in no time. Shit, my hands are full, and pretty much all I do is move stuff around.”

“Do not discredit yourself,” Viktor says, not looking up from his soldering. “Half of our projects are ones you’ve laid out for us.”

Vi rolls her eyes and tells Viktor’s back, “I just tell you what people want. You all figure out the hard stuff.” 

“We’re fortunate that surfacing the needs of our community comes easy to you,” Viktor says, still focused and maneuvering the soldering iron with precise metal fingers. “But that doesn’t mean that it is easy.” 

Jinx doesn’t take the opportunity to call Viktor 'Fortune Cookie' like she normally would, because she’s occupied watching Ekko and her sister.

Vi shrugs and tells Ekko, conspiratorially, “I give them biased intel, anyway.” She slings an arm around his shoulders and turns him back towards the others in the lab. “Speaking of, how’s the people zapper coming? The commute up to Cupcake is still a fucking nightmare. Put the wiz kid here on it.” 

“Oh. Uh, I started something on it, if I can find my dang–” Powder says. She turns to rummage through the desk that is unmistakably hers, placed in the far corner of the lab, surrounded by scorch marks and glowing drawings. She pulls out and flips through three different notebooks before finding the diagram she shoves at Ekko. 

“Tin Man’s boring," Jinx says, "so it’s a ‘point-to-point personnel teleporter.’ Two structures, constructed in two places. We were thinking of building one down here and one up near the top of Piltover, just for people and messages and stuff. Some cargo, not lots.”

“Looks like a scaled down Hexgate,” Ekko says, looking it over, “But I thought that the path between the gate and its destination needs to be clear to avoid interference. There can only be air. That’s why it’s built so high, right?”

She nods, flips the page for him. “That’s because it's a point-to-anywhere sorta thing, though. I have a few ideas to work around that, but there’s a lot to work out still. They have to stay small, based on the numbers I ran, but if we use some different runes and have two separate gates to link them together…” 

Ekko flips the page again, looks over the runework, and completes, “Then it’s less about shooting an object somewhere, more about bringing somewheres together. Don’t have to worry about what’s between them.” 

“Yep. Like a bridge,” Powder says, brightly. But then Ekko’s face crumples with some memory, and then Jinx's does too. 

Vi looks devastated to see it, her arm still slung around Ekko’s shoulders. She looks between the two of them. “Hey,” she says, soft as anything. Both of the young inventors look at her. Vi takes a big breath and says, seriously, “None of us are drowning. Not anymore. Build your bridge. Try to leave the water under it.” 

When the brass metalwork and soldered components and steel strings take their final, composite form as a mechanized banjo, Heimerdinger starts to tune it.

Vi had stuck around to chat with Ekko, and she’s still taking up a space in the corner of the lab. She’s found that the steel door frame into the room that’s temperature controlled for organic experiments is sturdy enough to support pull ups.  

“The flowers around here,” Ekko asks. “They filter the air?”

“They do,” Jayce says, from across the room. “The work of a great scientist, Sky Young.”

“I saw something like them,” Ekko shares, quietly. “In that anomaly.”

Heimerdinger’s tuning stops. Jayce stiffens where he’s leaning against Viktor’s desk, and Viktor pulls off the soldering goggles to look at his partner. He reaches for Jayce’s hand to wind with his own. 

Jayce had seen them too, in his own experience within the anomaly. They’d been everywhere but the chasm. Thousands upon thousands of yellow blooms, the only living things he’d seen for days. The work of a version of Sky Young, and a version of Viktor who built a commune, doomed the world, and stood atop the Hexgate, alone in a unified consciousness. The same version of Viktor that had left Jayce at the base of the chasm. The same version of Viktor that had saved Jayce and his mother in a blizzard. 

There, in that dimension, the yellow flowers had been left to grow and spread, industriously clearing the air. But there, no one was left to breathe it. No one. Except, briefly, Jayce.

But Ekko had been somewhere else.

“Things were different there. Really different,” the young man says, quietly. “Claggor was working on flower hybrids. Ones that could clear the gasses from the fissures. Mylo too.” 

Both of the sisters freeze.

Nothing in the lab moves until Vi drops down from the doorframe and walks over to Powder to take her hands. After a silent conversation between the two of them, Vi nods. 

“What were they like?” Powder asks, sounding small. Vi tightens her grip on her sister’s hands.

Ekko swallows, and says, thickly, “I can show you. Yesterday I painted them again on the Firelight tree.”

Within a few minutes, it’s just Jayce, Viktor and Heimerdinger remaining in the lab. 

The professor finishes tuning, and strums a few tentative chords.

“Thank you for this, gentlemen,” he says. When he meets their eyes, his own are wide and full of tears. It’s unclear if he’s referring to the banjo. “I meant to head out tomorrow.”

He hesitates. 

“You are always welcome here,” Viktor says. 

“And always includes now,” Jayce adds. 

The yordle runs his hands along the contraption.  

“Perhaps,” says the professor, “I could stay for a short while?”

“We’d be delighted to have you, Professor.”

The slate wall in Viktor and Jayce’s house is normally fairly sparse. Not so at present. It’s densely marked with chalk, covered in theories and ideas of how to test and potentially augment Ekko’s Z-Drive, and how it might be incorporated into several of their ongoing projects. They’d been at it restlessly, packing it full of diagrams the night before, after they’d finished their tea with Heimerdinger and found the old Professor lodging in the village for the evening. There's a massive list of questions to ask Ekko to narrow down the possibilities. They’d needed to move their house plant to a different corner. That gave them a little more free space on the slate.

At the end of the day, when they’ve stepped inside, Viktor wastes no time in pinning Jayce against it. 

We did so well, Viktor thinks, hands roaming. Held back all of that potential science, all day.

We made a banjo. Jayce’s thought is a whine, somehow, as he fumbles with buckles. There was an actual time machine inside our lab, and we made a banjo. 

Viktor mouths at Jayce’s bearded jaw. 

It was important. They need to settle in, and it’s not entirely clear which of them is having this thought anymore, with how much they’d been passing it back and forth that day.

But you tried to intimidate Ekko, Viktor thinks, pulling back to run his thumb over the metallic mark on Jayce’s lips. Viktor’s mouth is tilted into an uneven smile that Jayce wants to bite. ‘I do hammers’? Really?

Just helping him get the lay of the land, Jayce thinks, and he kisses Viktor like it’s an attack. 

Later, while Viktor folds their cleaned laundry, Jayce sits near the slate wall and scrawls out in a minuscule script some of the additional theories and ideas and rough calculations that they’d been sending to one another surreptitiously throughout the day. 

You’ve forgotten an inversion, Viktor notes, after a glance, and he slides through the Arcane to move the chalk with Jayce’s hand, adding a minus sign in front of a precision rune. 

Thanks. Though maybe we accidentally erased it, earlier, Jayce says, less to actually defend himself, more to reminisce.

Wrong side of the wall, Viktor notes. 

Jayce knows from the touch of his mind that Viktor is smirking. Jayce bends around so that he can catch the view. 

“I love you,” Jayce says. 

Viktor’s smirk finds some balance, becoming a wondering smile. 

“I love you too, Jayce.”