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Jayce now knows what it is to be driven mad.
That is to say – he knows what it’s like to be driven. Piloted. To have his yoke yanked unto the edge of sanity. The stone in his wrist throbs through his nervous system, a steady hand between his shoulder blades. Fingers wrapped in his hair. Behold, it murmurs to him, pain and visions striking in tandem. Look and see.
Other versions of him turned back. He doesn’t. It’s not to his credit.
(Is it the vow? Is it the stone? Is there a difference?)
He shouts. The hammer groans in his hands.
Viktor’s eyes. Viktor’s eyes. He falls like a rock and Jayce staggers with the weight of his breathing. The first step in this strange choreography is executed, yes, by his hand. The stone is quiet except there’s a scent in the air now, the tang of the hammer’s blast and the sterile, metallic rot of Viktor’s nest.
A hard breath in, a hard breath out, a hard breath --
in --
He’s in the lab again, and the silence tells the story. The empty tomb – cradle, maybe – where Viktor was rebuilt. There are indentations in the air that might be footsteps retreating. And the smell, of course, a sharp odor coming from the discarded… from the burial shroud made swaddling cloth. The same odor.
Hextech has only one end.
He’ll make it right, he’s making it right, but he’s alone in the lab with the smell and his own selfish despair, and they are the same.
The unearthly screams call him back to the commune, to the violence. This part of the fight isn’t for him; his price won’t be paid here. He flees.
-
Caitlyn has the spare key to his apartment. She’s a different person now, steeled and poised, another Kiramman matriarch volant – and yet. There’s a vulnerability in her face, and she keeps moving it, hiding it in different places, the corners of her eyes, a twist in her lips. It’s for the vulnerability as much as the order that he stays, allows himself to be shepherded into a bathroom.
Interdimensional travel was not weirder than this. The clean tiling, the shiny mirrors, the orderly bottles of this and that. An alien landscape that warps uneasily around him in the mirror.
So much of his life before was spent in rooms like this, in pursuit of not just cleanliness but – what was it – something like certainty. A cultivated superstition that a perfectly straight line with the clippers would ensure success. That if there were no visible flaw, there might not be any invisible ones, either.
There is no room for perfectionism anymore, but without it, he hardly knows where to start his ablutions. He keeps getting lost. Eventually, he decides that hot water is a good place to start – and he’ll remember what to do after that, it will remind him.
Jayce limps into the shower fully dressed, leans to the side to avoid the spray, and turns it on, hot all the way. The steam billows out and embraces him, tugs gently at his rags. He’s down to his bare chest and working on the makeshift brace when his hearing shifts, and the rush of the water becomes louder, engulfs him.
He’s at the waterworks again, listening to the pumps and the murmur of water as it trickles past and falls into the reservoir. The sky is the courageous blue of late morning – all of that day, really, it had been… the gentle hand of the sun, the clouds… the guilt in his chest nurtured by a lie of omission. He had never managed to look directly at it. There was a plan to concoct, one last gambit before he could shed the role of councilor, and then... there would have been time, right? They would have turned the corner and walked together until there weren’t any more steps to take. At least, that’s what he thinks. It was so clear then and so muddy now.
But it was his fault: his love cast too long a shadow. The first promise, abandoned, shattered without a thought. The second, knowing better now, written into his body, a countdown with sheet music provided.
Somebody bangs on the bathroom door, asks if he’s all right.
The steam clings. He’s sweating, his skin is tight under the dirt, his muscles tense in anticipation. His scalp itches.
Soon.
-
The encounter in the council chamber is as unsettling as it is unsurprising. His neck hurts, and his bones know that he deserves it. The stone burrows further into him and it consumes and clutches and supports, a paradox with an expiration date.
Many years ago, at a funeral, Jayce had watched the mourners, the way their faces peeled back in agony as they keened. He couldn’t see the origin of the contortion, imagine the emotions that would tug on flesh like that.
Now he knows anguish, though his is tinged with anger. He wants to bare his teeth at everything, at time, at himself, growl in his ruined throat, howl until it ends. He knew Viktor would come. He didn’t need the show of force, the fight, or the argument. The foreknowledge didn’t matter. Somehow, he had hoped it might.
Knowing the end of the story doesn’t abrogate the telling.
When he rushes to catch Mel, the light of the Arcane leaving her ordinary and devastating, and he catches her – the pressure of a body against his gloved hands --
He’s back in the lab again, in another pair of gloves, looking up at a small jungle of dead plant matter.
Alone as before, and though the Hexcore isn’t here, either, the light and shadows show where it should be. His right hand tingles with the memory of touching Viktor’s shoulder, his presence ghostly and undeniable, like the Hexcore’s, indicated by the Mobius play of love and pain in his own chest.
Touch, his first language. It is so hard to lie with his hands, with actions. He craves the sincerity of doing, unpolluted with word choice or rhetoric, a close infinity that unspools between him and his loved ones. Being with Mel only sharpened this – the poignancy that finally found a channel to the surface, a place to lay its animal head. And so the tenderness was there, purring, belly exposed, ready to thrash and turn and leap at Heimerdinger, ready to root him out of his place of power.
The stone in his wrist reads ACCELERATION. This moment in time is inscribed with it, too.
The Mage chose well.
He catches Mel.
-
One more oddity – Mel’s desire to hide her face. She pulls her hood up soon after the fight, demure.
The ornamentation is absent from her clothes, now carved into her skin. She took off the mantle of a councilor, but can’t remove the markings of magehood, and this… Jayce thinks it troubles her. He asked to be sent back, took the mission for his last. Mel shines with literal light now, her beauty a medium for Arcane conflagration, and yet uncertainty dogs her steps. This is the only crown she is unprepared to take, in his eyes, but he knows she will assume it anyway.
One more fork at which they diverge. The last one. But the path had been sweet, once.
She turns to say something to him, her lovely eyes peeking out from underneath her hood, and he falls into their greengold color.
The lab, one more time, littered with open cardboard boxes. Pens and pencils, already caught in their eternal migration between the pen pot on the workbench and wherever they actually need them. Old tomes mingling with fresh, empty notebooks. One, open on the bench, is not so empty. It reads, in Jayce’s (mmm, a little egotistical, don’t you think?) practice-perfect handwriting:
The future will be made here.
This lab will become a battleground when he isn’t looking. He will be there and not see the conflict, oblivious unto the end. But in this moment, potential uncurls and spreads her arms across the room. He can see it: the way every day will be made fresh like bread when his eyes meet Viktor’s – a luxurious happiness, to look up and see his best friend, his savior, whenever he wants.
(His savior. He didn’t see. He sees too well.)
Mel is saying something. He blinks, falls upward into his body once again.
-
The address to the assembled Houses of Piltover isn’t his finest, but he has a more important speech to work on.
(Would that have made a difference? Is his address shit in every timeline? Or is the content simply too dire for it to matter?)
(Focus.)
Many walk out immediately. Some stay to talk, concerned. He and Caitlyn take pledges from them, and though he has an entire bag of tricks for this very purpose, he reaches for none of them. Fight, or run – a serious binary none of them are sturdy enough to bear.
(A note about his catalog of ploys: every single one relies upon a kernel of truth – the sincere belief of the speaker. And once, he himself had been that kernel, so willing to be diced and seeded into the hearts and minds of a city of believers.)
(See where that got them.)
There’s a charge in the air as he opens the doors of the chamber one last time. He can’t tell if he’s imagining it, or if there’s a summer storm coming – perhaps both. Imagination and reality were continuous for him as an inventor – his job was to reach into his brain and pull out a dream, shape it with metal and energy. As the Man of Progress, he did the same conjuration with words and hearts. With magic in the mix, who knows? His urge to batten down the hatches, poorly-written as it was, reflected his own steeling for the the worst.
As he passes the threshold, the air thickens in his mouth. He can feel the heaviness, taste the rain on the edge of falling, as his braced foot plants on the floor of the blown-out apartment.
It had stormed the night after they cracked Hextech, and Jayce, hysterical on coffee and two days without sleep, had returned with an armload of tarps. There they are, actually, dumped in a pile near some boxes already filled with paper.
He walks to the precipice and looks down, the stone tender in his arm. What is he, without an ending he could swan-dive into at any moment? All roads lead here. He just took the scenic route, this time.
The door hinges squeak behind him.
“From the first?” he asks, not needing to look up.
“From the first,” agrees Viktor, here where he had not been that day. He joins Jayce, cane clicking against the floor, and surveys the fall as Jayce looks him over, wary.
“Are you real?”
Viktor hums at that. “I’d like to think so. A vexing thing to check, though.”
Jayce is moving before he can stop himself, reaching out to cup his lovely face in one gloved hand.
“Oh,” he says, leaning in, eyelids fluttering. A delicate blush rises to his cheeks, and his eyes are bright and coy. “Now I am sure that I am.”
Is this an illusion? A hallucination? A memory of another Jayce?
Does it matter? Here they are.
Viktor nuzzles into his hand, and lets his cane fall. Jayce, trained enough to know better, dips to catch it. Viktor comes with him, steadying himself by placing a hand on Jayce’s left arm, which pulses like a completed circuit. A golden chain winds from the stone, leading to somewhere in the ether.
“Viktor --”
“I know,” he says, winding his other arm around Jayce’s neck. “Let’s make it count.”
The tarps certainly hadn’t had this use in his memory, but it’s his coat Viktor commandeers to cover himself. “I think I’ll keep this,” he says, slipping it over his shoulders, burying his nose in the raised collar. “Safekeeping, you know.”
The storm is breaking on the shores now. Thunder and lightning play tag across the coast. A book’s pages rattle in the debris as the wind picks up.
“It’s already yours,” says Jayce, and the chain yanks him forward and back.
-
The day of the invasion.
The hammer is almost impatient in the elevator ride to the base of the Hexgate. It’s been here before. He has too, obliquely.
A mystery he doesn’t have the time to contemplate: why his original hammer failed in the anomaly timeline, and why the corrupted hammer works here. Doesn’t matter: the door opens just the same. Cool air fans outwards, and Jayce steps into it, as he has done, as he is doing, as he hopes he never will again. He turns to close and lock it behind him, which is useless, but still somehow necessary.
The chilly air pets his face, his exposed forearm. When the Hexgate was being constructed, he would bundle up down here, almost to the point of comedy. His body is too sensitive there now. Much like the hammer, the stone is emotional, strained. The cold air against it is a gift, actually; he huffs a small sigh, visible in the cold, and the bright light of the structure shifts and dulls into the all-consuming white and grey of the blizzard.
He’s standing in front of a small ridge of snow, and the cruel wind tears at his coat, his hair, his heart.
“Why are you doing this?”
The wind freezes, the snow halts midair.
“You told me to send you back.”
There he is again, the Mage, Viktor, sorrowful, beautiful beside him.
“I’m almost there,” he says. “Wait for me.”
The Mage smiles, his beard patchy and dear. “It’s all I’ve ever done.”
Perhaps to be Viktor is to await Jayce.
“You’ve already done all the hard work. Wait. For. Me.” It’s his turn to reach up, put an arm around the Mage’s neck. He sighs, and touches Jayce’s face, puts their foreheads together.
Every Jayce has said this. There is no way for him to be Jayce and not say those words wholeheartedly. He is put in check again and again by his own self. “There isn’t anything else,” he realizes aloud.
“I know. I’ve always known this,” says the Mage. “There is nothing to forgive. From the first.”
He backs up, gestures with his staff. Watch.
Time winds backwards. The snow retreats from a child, a crumb of a thing, who gets up and stumbles backwards, until he’s standing in front of his fallen mother.
The Mage changes before his eyes, takes on – a mythicality that Viktor would not choose for himself. The bracelets, the fingernails, the tattoos, the showy display of staffwork. He sees it for what it is, now: a larger than life lodestone for a lonely child.
He’s so grateful.
They land in the field of flowers. The stone is dropped into the child’s tiny, mittened hands. Jayce’s arm pulses joyfully in time.
The tableau burns away from his eyes and he’s back at the Hexgate. He’s reached the end of his past and the end of the present. The future waits.
Jayce approaches the heart, reaches for the first cylinder.
Let’s make it count.