Work Text:
Jayce hasn’t seen the sun in three days.
Maybe four.
He’s stopped keeping track. Time has collapsed in on itself in the dim laboratory turned containment unit—turned intensive care. The furthest sublevel. No unsanctioned visitors. No clocks. No reminders that the world was ripped out from under him.
Everything smells like coolant, rust, old magic, and ozone. The light down here hums in the walls and leaks through his skin. It’s wrong. Pale. Cold. Artificial. But it’s steady.
Constant.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been awake.
His hands are raw, skin cracked open from welding too long without gloves. His nails are blackened from stress fractures and blown circuits. A vein in his temple pulses in rhythm with the low-frequency resonance of the Hexcore now fused to Viktor’s still body in the containment rig. It’s so stable it feels unnatural.
And still, Viktor hasn’t woken up.
It should’ve destabilized the second he collapsed.
Could’ve died with him.
But it didn’t.
It’s still here. Still singing. Still thriving.
And Jayce—Jayce is building something from all they learned and all they feared.
He was going to destroy it.
He promised.
He still sees Viktor’s hand, frail but determined, clenching his wrist with his strength.
“We have to destroy it. In the pursuit of being great, we forgot to do good.”
Jayce hadn’t let him finish. Didn’t need him to.
He’d sworn.
Sworn he’d end it.
Sworn he’d protect Piltover and Zaun from their own years of fighting.
But Viktor is behind glass now. Suspended in stasis. Somewhere behind a haze of arcane containment and tech he can barely control.
And Jayce is still here.
Still working.
Still lying.
He can’t destroy the Core now.
Not when it’s keeping Viktor alive.
Not when Zaun could be readying another attack.
Not when there are no more Council votes. No more orders. No more time.
Hoskel. Bolbok. Cassandra.
Gone.
Jayce survived.
Mel, somehow, miraculously, thankfully, survived.
Caitlyn hadn’t been in the chamber, but she won’t stay safe. She’s already plotting her descent into the undercity. He knows her, knows that look in her eye. She’ll find whoever took her mother from her annd forced her to lead House Kiramman if it kills her. She’ll go back to Zaun, to the Lanes, to their enemies. His Sprout now in the shadow.
And Jayce…he’s running out of ways to protect any of them.
Especially her.
His mother.
He hasn’t written in weeks.
What could he say? ‘Piltover’s breaking. We’re at war. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m building something monstrous. But you don’t need to worry.’
She’s not stupid. She’ll see through him. She always sees through him.
But what choice does he have? He can’t tell her the full truth, not about Zaun, not about Viktor, not about the bright, unnatural light growing hotter every hour in this lab. She’s too far away to help and far too close to be safe. He can’t even guarantee the upper city will hold.
What happens when shimmer hits the gates? When the fighting spills into the markets? When his mother’s windows are lit with fire?
The thought sickens him.
His stomach churns with it.
He tightens his grip on the plasma torch until his fingers ache.
Viktor is alive. But he’s never waking up the same.
Jayce turns away from the pod sealed behind reinforced glass, wrapped in shielding that’s meant to do the impossible: preserve his friend’s fragile body while binding it to the one thing they were supposed to destroy.
The Core.
Their life’s work.
Their shared curse.
He already wrote the integration protocol. Already calculated the risks. If he calibrates the loop stabilizers just right, if the harmonic bridge holds, then Viktor’s neural network will regulate the Hexcore’s output in real time.
And in return, the Core will keep him alive.
Suspended.
Conscious.
Alive.
Jayce tells himself it’s mercy.
That he’s saving Viktor.
But it’s a lie.
He’s weaponizing their dream.
He’s giving Hextech teeth.
Because he’s tired.
Tired of waiting to lose the people he loves.
Tired of pretending the universe will spare anyone next time.
And he is furious.
Furious at himself for being too slow.
At Zaun for playing victim while building weapons in the dark.
At Piltover for watching all its people die while still clinging to elitism and cowardice.
At Viktor for leaving him alone with the one thing they both feared.
At the universe for letting Mel survive the explosion. Because now she can be taken again. And Jayce doesn’t know if he has enough left in him to survive losing her too.
A wrench slips from his hand and crashes to the floor.
The sound cuts through the silence like a blade.
He flinches.
He’s been holding his breath.
The workbench is covered in blueprints. Prototypes. Scattered schematics for energy weapons, exo-tech augmentations, shielding systems: Vi’s gauntlets, Caitlyn’s rifle, attempts to repurpose hextech into an antidote.
Pages are torn, burned, rewritten.
Equations lead nowhere.
He needs more power.
Needs control.
Needs something, anything, to make this worth it.
Jayce drags a shaking hand down his face. His chest tightens. His vision warps at the edges.
Then he sees it.
A note.
Folded neatly beneath a lion-shaped paperweight.
He knows it’s hers. Doesn’t need to read it to be sure.
Mel had been here. Quiet, composed. She hadn’t tried to stop him. Just stood in the doorway and watched. At some point she’d crossed the room, brushed a kiss over the crown of his bowed head, and whispered:
“Come home soon.”
And then she’d left this behind.
He shouldn’t read it.
He can’t.
Because if he feels it, if he lets it sink in, it might stop him.
And if he stops, someone else dies.
But his hand moves anyway.
He slides the note free with trembling fingers.
“You are still light.
Don’t let this city turn you into a weapon.
I need you to stay… you.”
Jayce exhales like he’s been stabbed.
Folds the note in half.
Then again.
And again.
Until it’s too small to hold. His hands won’t stop shaking.
He drops it.
The Core pulses behind him.
Bright.
Steady.
Inhuman.
A frequency. A presence. A will.
Jayce presses both fists to the workbench and lowers his head between them.
“I’m scared,” he says. Quiet. Cracked.
Not a confession.
Not a prayer.
Just the truth.
“I’m scared, and I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing.”
The Core doesn’t answer.
Viktor doesn’t stir.
Mel doesn’t return.
Caitlyn burns.
His mother will never know the truth.
The room is cold.
The light is wrong.
There is no bright star left to follow.
Only him.
Only this.
Only the slow, irreversible transformation of a man into a weapon.
And Jayce Talis, for the first time in his life, finally understands what Viktor and Mel were afraid of when they warned him about war.