Archive of Our Own ^beta

Jayce had a complicated relationship with his status in Piltover, and in the Undercity. He was lauded as Man of Progress, the man who people were enthusiastically crediting with every success under the sun, unparalleled genius who had done what no one else ever could have and created Hextech from nothing. But the Undercity had been where he got most of the materials for that creation, and where he had been given rather pivotal direction in his work. Piltover was happy to ignore its other half but unwilling to let it separate, and here was Jayce, told to forget the only thing that let him succeed as he had.

And the calls to forget it were never so overt as when Jayce went back to his same teachers. But that was the problem: until Jayce, magic had been desperately illegal in Piltover, and where else was he going to find people comfortable breaking those laws? The only person who encouraged Jayce’s continued collaboration with the Undercity was, of all people, Professor Heimerdinger – but that was probably because they actually both knew the same researcher with a lax regard for the Ethos.

Jayce only really knew him by the name “Singed” – a clear alias rather than given name that Jayce had no interest in prying further into – while Heimerdinger had coughed and demurred knowing anyone by that name at all, only for the strange doctor to mention Heimerdinger’s regular but insistently concealed correspondence the very next time Jayce saw him. Singed was strange, sly, and objectively dangerous, but he remained one of the few people who knew Jayce before his startling success, and who continued to give him useful critique, rather than admiring agreements born of seeing his face on blimps and mugs. There was a disinterest about him, a not-quite-mentorship that seemed to be waiting for a return on investment more than desire to see Jayce succeed, and he was full of secrets and implications that helped remind Jayce that his work had to help people – no matter how big Piltover was determined to inflate his ego.

In fact, as Jayce’s star ascended higher and higher, Singed’s workshops seemed to be moving deeper into the depths of Zaun. That was what he always called the Undercity, an early stipulation in working with him was to name it that too. So, to the Council, Jayce called it part of Piltover, but with Singed, it was Zaun.

Now, they were in a corner Jayce had never been to before. It was not impossibly deep, but dangerous, with the great runoff pipes of Piltover’s storm drains positioned directly above. Singed was quiet as he always was, leading them through creeks and caverns, into a damp cave filled with strange purple foliage.

“You moved again,” Jayce finally commented, looking around the cavern that could well be a deathtrap, if the storm drains were overloaded.

“I have many places I work,” murmured Singed. “This is my own place of study, not one tied up with others.”

“You’ve never brought me here.”

“I have never needed to, before.” He pushed open a door to the structure built within, windowless and well defended against flooding. As always, he never invited Jayce in, but simply expected him to follow.

Inside was a space that could only be described as a mad scientist’s lair, and that was being generous. Dim lighting obscured seeing too much, and what strange glowing light there was illuminated rows of shelves filled with bottles of chemicals and viscous fluids, and tables and desks stacked with preserved bits of animal in jars.

“Why bring me here? Why…now?” Jayce asked, glancing toward a human hand in a jar. It had scraped knuckles. He was fairly sure Singed wouldn’t kill him – he was too well known, and if he never came back from Zaun, Heimerdinger knew who he kept company with. Any death would be traced back to him, and Singed was much too private as to permit something so public as a trial for the murder of Piltover’s favored son.

“Heimerdinger wrote to me of your aspirations towards medicinal uses of Hextech,” said Singed, drawing Jayce further back into the dark space. “That you have had successes.”

“Minimal ones, with plants only. They don’t last very long, not yet at least. But Miss Young had a great idea, she’s –”

“What have you tried?”

That was Singed’s way, he did not care for etiquette just as much as the Ethos, and was more than happy to interrupt to get what he wanted to know. And so, Jayce told him, explaining the ways that things like the Hexgates worked with objects as a whole, but could be scaled down to interact with specifics, like chemical structures.

“It was just to detect and prevent contraband from travelling at first,” explained Jayce as Singed glanced over the proffered notes. “Install something like a hopper under the Gate proper, if a ship passes through carrying something, the containers don’t teleport, just get caught and logged of what ship they were on.”

“You think bodily ailments can be removed in the same way.”

“Not the same way, bodies are too much of a whole to just remove parts of it. It was an early idea, pass through a teleportation maybe a half a foot difference, and let things like tumors be prevented from going. But it’s not as if cancer has a uniform structure.”

“Modern medicine does much, but I cannot imagine it would be able to fix the wholesale removal of the lungs.”

“Yeah. Exactly. We’re looking into runic interactions, which is going to be more specialized, if it works. But probably not more than any other medicine is.”

Singed was quiet, drifting through the notes Jayce had brought him. Jayce, unsure how much more to explain before it would be too much for Singed’s mercurial tolerance, turned his attention to the shelving half-carved into the wall above his not-quite mentor, filled with stacks of worn notebooks. This was apparently his private place of work, not the work done with the Chem Barons of Zaun, what were those notebooks filled with? Jayce had, despite what Caitlyn might think, a sense of self-preservation, and prying any further than what this man allowed him would absolutely be testing the limits.

“This won’t work,” said Singed at last.

“What?”

“Your theories are an ouroboros – they survive, for now, through eating themselves. But autocannibalism runs out of sustenance quickly. What happens when the system fails?”

“The system is self-contained, not autocannibalistic.”

“You note that your plants thrive, then die. The same system that grants them strength then takes it from them.”

“In early stages! Look at the runic work, Sky had the idea to diagnose each plant, rather than just filling with energy –”

“If you are simply specializing the type of energy applied, it will fail in specific ways. Perhaps not total death, but in degeneration of the very thing you strove to heal.”

“Everyone else thinks it has promise!” protested Jayce, realizing as he said it that it wasn’t the right thing to say to this man, who did not care what anyone thought. He was not contrarian to opinions of others, but Singed would never be convinced by group consensus.

“You come to me because I am no sycophant,” reminded Singed. “As it stands, your idea will fail. But you will fix it.”

This was where Jayce was supposed to ask Singed for his help, but this wasn’t Jayce alone in his sponsored apartment furtively breaking the law every night to work with fractal equations of the hexcrystals. These were Sky Young’s ideas that were being disparaged. Yes, she was working within a framework that Jayce had created, and one could argue that it was only a variation of his own idea, but she wasn’t here to stand up for herself. (And he probably wouldn’t let her come. Yes she was also from Zaun, but there was a difference between being from Zaun and spending time with a man who kept body parts in jars. Jayce didn’t let himself dwell on what that meant for his own choices.)

“Maybe you just misunderstand. Miss Young has run models that are very promising, we’re going to test them next week, as soon as the apparatus is built.”

“Hmm, is it the one you drew here?”

Jayce had to look to make sure it was the updated version he had copied out, but confirmed it. Singed looked it over again, before the ominous shaking of the head began again.

“You aren’t in our lab, you’ve never actually worked with the hexcrystals,” defended Jayce. “How can you know it won’t work?”

“I have known your work since it was a felony, and you have not worked with medicine as I have. Biology is not crystallography.”

“Yeah, you have more of that lying around than I do,” muttered Jayce.

Singed made a quiet noise of amused approval, as he sometimes did. Jayce was never sure at what point snark would cross a line. Sometimes he seemed to approve of Jayce’s pushback, and sometimes he would shut down and instruct Jayce to leave.

“This theory was made with no doctors, no biologists, no anatomists. It will fail.”

Jayce rubbed a hand over his face a second, before sighing and asking, “Any suggestions, then?”

Singed had a loose idea of ethics, was perhaps the man who coined the very phrase the end justifies the means. But he was brilliant, and Jayce could see where he would have to amend some of the suggestions to be accepted by just about anyone in Piltover, but as he spoke, the flaws became clearer and his solutions neatened the problems.

Of course, at one point, Jayce had to firmly shut down the idea of using Singed’s own mystery drug, a denial to which the man merely shrugged and murmured something about Jayce someday understanding.

“You care about this,” Jayce finally said, as Singed locked away his upsettingly fluorescent purple drug. “More than you have cared about anything else I’ve done with Hextech. You brought me here to talk to me about it. Why? You’re not magnanimous enough for it to be for public good or for progress.”

“True,” agreed Singed. “I work to an end. Your work might enable that end.”

“That end being…?” asked Jayce, unsure that he actually wanted to know. The less he knew about Singed, the safer he was, but the scientist in him couldn’t help but ask questions anyway.

The doctor turned to Jayce, and the hard intensity of that gaze made Jayce realize, very suddenly, that if he had asked that question any earlier than this visit to Singed’s private workshop, Jayce would not have returned to Piltover. A bright but largely anonymous Academy student would have gone missing with none but his mother to push to look for him. The bold scientist who harnessed the Arcane would have been deemed destroyed by his hubris, and laws against magic would have been strengthened. Even last week, Singed may have risked the publicity of a trial, merely come here to this hidden workshop to wait out the manhunt, and simply decline to write back to Heimerdinger.

Instead of killing Jayce, Singed moved past him, a nod of the head his signal to follow. Singed brought them to a section of wall covered by a curtain that obscured whatever was causing the unsettling glow coming from behind it, and drew it back.

Jayce blinked at what he saw. Even a second prior, he would never have guessed. Two tanks were stood against the wall, one with a mostly transparent greenish glow, a strange giant waverider in it. Beside it, in a silver-gold haze, Jayce was taken aback to see a young man there, suspended in the fluid within.

Long, thin, pale, his skin seemed to be the night sky in reverse – white expanses with dark dots of stars. Brown, fluffy hair floated around a face almost feline in its resting serenity, with two beauty marks, one below the eye, the other just over the lip. His lips were thin, but well formed, his collarbone delicate in its sharpness, his waist the calling card of Zaun’s hunger. There was a hollowness to him, a fragility – this man had known lack in his life and had grown beautiful in spite of it. Jayce wondered what color this man’s eyes were.

He was enchanting to look at, to be certain, Jayce would have stared from across any room this man was in, too clumsy in expressing admiration in any way but observation. But his presence was beyond what Jayce had learned to handle from Singed. This wasn’t an animal specimen, a human hand, an organ of uncertain origin, this was an entire human being.

“His name is Viktor,” murmured Singed beside Jayce, his voice quiet. And then, likely knowing what Jayce had been worrying about, he added, “He is not dead.”

“He’s not?” asked Jayce, caught between wonderment and horror, unable to look away.

“No, merely in suspension. When I wake him, I expect he will never speak to me again.”

“You can wake him up? From this?”

“I can, but I will not. Not while doing so remains a death sentence.”

“What is – I mean, what happened to him?”

“What happens to too many like him in Zaun. The Grey for the lungs, lack of treatment for the bones, lack of opportunity for the mind. He is one of the most gifted minds I have ever met, his death would have been a terrible waste.”

“So…it’s a coma.”

“If you like.” And in his disinterested way, Singed let the curtain fall back over the tank, drifting back to his tables. Jayce was expected to follow, but all he wanted to do was pull the curtain again, and stare at the man inside (Viktor, he mouthed to himself). What exactly was the fluid he was submerged in? There was no breathing apparatus for him, how was he not drowning? How could a living being…be paused?

“You think Hextech’s medicine could cure him?” asked Jayce, following, even as he glanced over his shoulder again and again.

“Your work does the impossible. Saving him was called impossible. If anything could, it is your work.”

“He must be important to you.”

“Viktor is a rarity, his mind too great a loss.” Singed reached to those same dusty notebooks Jayce had noticed earlier, and pulled one out, passing his fingers over it a moment before handing it to Jayce. “That was one of his. Perhaps you will understand, if you read it.”

Jayce held it with all the reverence it suddenly felt due – this was the record of a man considered important enough to a brilliant but morally loose doctor to be suspended, preserved before illness could take him. Was Viktor the reason Heimerdinger denied ever knowing Singed, but still wrote to tell this dangerous man about Jayce’s aspirations to use the Arcane for healing? He might well be, Jayce thought.

Singed dismissed Jayce not a moment later, keeping the notes that Jayce had copied over from originals, leaving Jayce to find his own way back out. Jayce glanced one last time towards where the light from Viktor’s tank glowed at the edge of the curtain, and left, picking his way back up through the caverns and creeks Singed had taken him down.

Returning to Piltover was always a bit of a gut punch, after spending time with Singed. On one hand, relief to be back to familiarity, and on the other, guilt that this was where he got to live. It was one of those terrible lessons that Jayce knew improved him as a person each time he relearned it, as much as he wished he didn’t have to deal with the nauseating guilt.

He pitched improvements to the Council, added his voice as Man of Progress to things like scholarships for Undercity students. But it was never enough and never made him feel better about the noticeable differences in things like air quality.

Jayce was famous in Piltover, but that fame also gave him a sort of social Leidenfrost Effect – a short-lived protective barrier where people saw him and it took a moment to register that yes, it was him. It was long enough that if Jayce moved quickly enough, he could get by unbothered. And carrying Viktor’s notebook, he was moving quicker than normal.

He was going to Hextech’s lab, as he often did after a visit to Singed. Doubly so now that he had the doctor’s input about how he could prevent their medicinal tests from failing, and with Viktor’s notebook weighing him down.

The shape of the man in the tank burned behind Jayce’s eyes with each blink. Who was this man, that Singed would preserve him? That Heimerdinger knew about him too – and he had to, why else would he tell Singed about Hextech’s foray into medicine, and Singed to bring him to where Viktor waited for his own cure. The notebook would explain it, he hoped.

Early evening meant that most people had left the lab, which Jayce was grateful for. He was not as social as people often thought he was, and even more so after time in the Undercity, when the social etiquette of Piltover grated against his nerves. The only people left would be janitorial staff, or Sky Young, who Jayce had once had to trick out of the room and lock the door behind her so she would go home and sleep.

By some miracle, even she was gone, though she had left a note for Jayce chastising him for moving her notes, he could just ask to look at them. (He couldn’t, of course, because then she’d want to know why he was copying over her notes and designs, and then he’d have to tell her of Singed, and he really did not want to do that. He was willing to risk himself, but not others.) The emptiness of the lab was a balm against Jayce’s soul – here was his sanctuary space, quieted and emptied of extra people, all the assistants Singed had dismissed as sycophants (and he wasn’t…wrong, not about all of them, Jayce hated to admit). The potential energy in every equation, prototype, and tool was banked, like a forge shut down for the night, still warm and able to be left, but ready to reawaken to scorching heights at a moment’s notice.

It soothed Jayce’s nerves, made it possible for him to handle the notebook Singed had given him, sitting at his desk, handling it with utmost care.

The notebook was cheap – not leatherbound, and not stamped with a House seal like Jayce’s were. No Talis hammer here, just cardboard, rubbed smooth from handling. It was as perhaps as pedestrian Undercity as it got. He gave it a cursory flip through, seeing scrawling handwriting and sketched ideas, before he returned to the beginning.

Jayce was immediately enthralled. Viktor’s ideas, his writings, they were brilliant. It was like reading lightning, somehow, a magnesium fire that shines so bright it blinds and continues to burn even submerged in water.

Viktor wanted to do good, wanted to help, he seemed devoted to the idea of improving lives, and his work was going to do that. He needed resources not hugely available in the Undercity, maybe, but that was it. Viktor’s ideas were firm, grounded, maybe not operating on the scale of Jayce’s work, but few people had the purse of the Council behind them. This was a notebook that was both work and halfway personal – not a private diary of his thoughts of each day, no, but there were short reflections through his work, things like lamenting the regular power outages in Zaun foiling some of his work, and how if he had a more reliable energy source what changes that would make on what he could do. Jayce looked immediately to the case of Hexcrystals – he was looking at how to stabilize them, it was an ongoing struggle that he shouldered alone, the only crystallographer in the lab. Even a shard of crystal could fix Viktor’s problem for him, who knew what he would accomplish with a crystal, or in stabilized form?

What would have happened if Viktor had gotten to the Academy? With a mind like this, Jayce would have been tapping at his door, begging for the chance to collaborate – but so would most of the Academy, he was sure. If Jayce was right and Heimerdinger knew about Viktor, then this man would by all rights be his protégé, and as the admiration and adulation of the Academy tried to launch him to the same height of celebrity they had Jayce, then from Viktor’s notebook it seemed the man would simply refuse to be anything but grounded, if Piltover wanted to make his man into the Man of Progress and lift him onto a pedestal, then in lifting Viktor, they would be lifting Zaun too.

It was late when Jayce set down the notebook, agreeing wholeheartedly that the loss of Viktor and his mind was too great a blow to stomach. Sure, the way Singed had gone about trying to prevent that loss was in line with his usual methods (illegal and against all moral or ethical codes Jayce knew about, for a start), but the end was great enough that most people would hem and haw and forgive the means. Or at least anyone who read this journal and could understand it.

It wasn’t just the mind, was the thing, it was Viktor’s heart that was clear here too. The way he cared, the way that he was not quite selfless and not quite self-effacing but certainly sublimated into his own science, as though his work was an expression of self.

Maybe Jayce had already wanted to help people through applying magic to the realm of medicine, but now he wanted to be able to cure whatever Viktor had been suffering from, so he could press Hextech into those capable hands and watch what he did with it. Or get to work with him. One or the other.

Viktor’s notebook stayed at his side, a guiding light and reminder of what his work was for, as Jayce made a thousand new notes until the evening could only be called the night. And then the notebook stayed close at hand on the walk back to his apartment. Set far away from Jayce’s dinner, only to be recollected and read through again as Jayce sat up in his bed.

Air filters – added trip to power, cut off when shifting to generator, should keep from overloading
Clinic – Mama Sara’s – Paradise – Scott’s – Last Drop?

              Filters in a school, yet they still have to shut them off in favor of light to see. But still a few hours better air. They deserve more and better, this should make the ask on private generators a little easier, just a little more time to breathe.

Jayce read until his eyes burned and closed on their own, and dreamed of silver-gold hazy light, and the feeling of someone standing just behind him. It felt somewhere between protective and collegiate.

The next morning, he had a thousand questions from his employees about the thousand ideas he had written up after reading Viktor’s notebook for the first time. They generally fell into two camps, one much larger than the other: the majority had bought into the Man of Progress ideal, and their questions were mostly along the lines of how did you come up with this? and when do you want to get started? The smaller faction in the lab, the one that was willing to push back just a little bit, asked the question where did these ideas come from?

Sky Young was the unofficial leader of that skeptic bunch, which alone made her a great scientist in Jayce’s opinion. Science didn’t care about celebrity, after all.

“We aren’t doctors,” Jayce explained. “Luckily I know an anatomist, he helped change my outlook on the problem.”

“We had trials scheduled for next week!” she protested, clutching at her notebook.

“And we’ll still run them! We can still learn a lot from them, of course, but I think there’s another direction we can look in now.”

There was a wounded frustration in Sky’s expression, something Jayce could only follow up on in the late afternoon, finding her listless at her workstation and scowling down at her notes. He had the fleeting thought to sit down with her, but she never really did like having someone assume they could enter her personal space, and so he stood at a familiar but respectful distance the way she liked best.

“I offended you,” Jayce said, shaking his head at Sky’s polite denials, and insisting, “no, I did. It was your idea, and I completely undercut you this morning. It wasn’t fair to you.”

“I read over your proposals against our work,” she said with a dejected tone. “And it’s right, our system was going to fall apart.”

“Whether or not it will, that’s not reason for me to have done what I did to you. I’m sorry, Sky, and I really want you to take the lead on whatever comes of our test of your original idea next week, and whatever we get out of new trials.”

“Why?”

“You’re a great scientist. You defended your idea, and you’re willing to ask questions and push back against me. Someone recently dismissed this lab as being full of my yes-men, and I thought of you first when I shut them down.” Okay, so he hadn’t shut Singed down about it, but the idea had been there, and he figured the white lie could pass. Especially when it made Sky perk up a bit.

“What anatomist do you know?” she asked, nodding to the work she had been doing, teasing apart the new theories Jayce had sprung on them all. “I think it would be useful to get them in here. I can see how their input made you change course, but I have some questions.”

“Ah,” hemmed Jayce, feeling the back of his neck prickle the way it often did when he was cornered into admitting his semi-regular journeys to the Undercity. Let alone Singed. “Well, he’s not really interested in getting all tied up in Hextech, you know? He has his work, and we’ve got ours.”

“But he’d have to be familiar to be able to say anything about our side of things, not just the biological.”

“True, and he is, just not…officially. Look, he’s from the Undercity – from Zaun, he’d kill me if he heard me not calling it that – and he really doesn’t want to get tied up in things with the Academy and with the Council and…”

“A Zaunite?” asked Sky, with a totally different tone of voice. “You – you know a Zaunite?”

“Yeah. I mean, doing anything with magic was really illegal until Councilor Medarda got Heimerdinger to hear me out about it. Most of my materials and sources came from there, and he helped me get some early wrinkles straightened out. I talk to him about my work sometimes, just to get his thoughts.”

“If he calls himself a Zaunite, I can see why he wouldn’t want to come here. Okay. You’ll still let me test my original theory?”

“Of course. You sound…a lot happier about that.”

“I think your friend would tell you, there’s a big difference for us between someone from Piltover dismissing our work, and someone from home being brusque with an equal.”

It was a relief to see Sky confident again, and even more of a relief that she didn’t push for a name or identity at all. Viktor’s notebook, with all its care and brilliance, was like a magnesium filament buried in silicate sand, and any question Sky had posed a little too close to things would be like fire heating it up for the inevitable explosion.

Jayce knew he couldn’t breathe a word about Viktor to anyone, but oh he wanted to. He wanted to explain where this new direction he was trying to take Hextech came from, to say that it was inspired to help one of the greatest minds Jayce had ever come across. But that would require explaining who Viktor was, and how Jayce had come into possession of his notebook, and ultimately, how he was kept in suspension by a mad scientist. And Jayce really did not want to have those conversations.

The lack of alternate outlets for his excited admiration meant that Jayce found himself making his way back to that curious cavern, with the excuse of telling Singed about the data gathered through running Sky’s experiment and the progress they were making on the new ideas. In truth, he wanted to extoll Viktor’s genius to someone, and maybe see if Singed had another notebook he would be willing to share?

Singed was not present, not so far as Jayce could tell, but that was fine. Instead, Jayce placed Viktor’s notebook reverently on the table, and drew back that same curtain, revealing that silver-gold tank once more.

And there was Viktor, in weightless sleep. If Jayce had thought him to be captivating at first blush, then having read his work, Viktor was magnetic. He was a livewire with the current cut off, that was all. Jayce had a choking desire to talk to him, to hear Viktor’s voice, to listen to him express his ideas. He wanted to know the quality of his voice – was it a tenor or baritone timbre? Were vowels elongated, were consonants clipped? His notebook had had brisk ideas that elaborated wildly, did Viktor ramble in the same way, or was that reserved to his writing? Could Jayce prompt him and then sit back and get to listen?

When Singed did arrive at the cave, he found Jayce sitting at the base of that silver-gold tank, reading the notebook through again, murmuring questions to the man in suspension. At once, Jayce looked at his strange mentor and said, “I know you’re not a man to exaggerate, but I think you might have been downplaying his ideas. They’re extraordinary, he’s just…brilliant.”

“You understand why his death was not an option,” rasped Singed.

“Of course. I mean…look at this – the air purifer systems are inspired, if they could be installed inside the Kiramman vents…”

“You will not take his work.”

Jayce looked up, startled at the tone, and now Singed loomed over him, the competing glows between Viktor and the strange waverider casting weird half-shadows over his face. He looked every bit as dangerous as Jayce knew he was, but also not dangerous at all, because his threat was about an impossibility.

“Of course not,” Jayce said. “I only want to see him get to finish his work. Some of the problems he’s running up against, Hextech could fix in an instant, the power supply issues, and here, he’s struggling with entropy entering the system and causing breakdown, but runic work can help create guardrails against that – I want to be able to see what he would do with it.”

Wordlessly, Singed reached down and took the notebook from Jayce’s hands, ignoring his strangled squawk of protest and simply moving to put it back on the shelf, pulling out another worn notebook in its place. “The air filters are installed in a few places, and they are known for having the best air. But Viktor has other ideas too.”

Jayce choked out a delighted noise, taking the notebook and immediately flipping it open. Singed let him be, disappearing into the depths of his lair as Jayce devoured Viktor’s writings while the man himself slept behind him.

If the air purifying systems dominated the last notebook, this one seemed to pick up the projects that had hovered in the background. Instead of small notations Jayce desperately wanted to tease out, here were the full ideas. Jayce had always been too much of a scientist to really appreciate the subtleties of literature, his mother used to warmly tease him, because he always hated having only implications rather than explanations, or themes that supposedly wove an image instead of outright showing the idea. Science showed your work, while literature hid it – even failures were excitedly documented in Viktor’s notebook, the only disappointments being the struggles of getting materials.

He did not move from the tank, reading through with the same fervor as he had the last one. The only time he even looked up from Viktor’s writing was to look up at the man himself, in semi-awed admiration. He couldn’t fully convince himself to fall into his usual trap of hero-worship with other great minds he wanted to meet, because the journals were too human. They were not written with any future readers in mind, the way Jayce’s were, no signatures to lay claim to each page so no thief with a penknife could claim any part of it. Instead, there were notes in the corners about replacing lengths of leaky pipe or even needing groceries.

And yet, these notebooks surpassed everything any of Jayce’s peers had ever done. Cheap, worn, every bit of space used but for need of legibility, and they were spectacular.

Singed reemerged from whatever back corners of his lair he had been working in, carrying a set of vials of alarmingly fluorescent colors, to find Jayce tracing a finger over schematics and plans, enraptured.

“You may take it with you,” he said, nodding to the notebook.

“I’m afraid I’d lose it,” admitted Jayce. “There’s too many people in the lab, and it’s too important to risk it.”

A pleased sort of approval crossed Singed’s face, a sort of look that said I knew you would come around.

And so it was. Jayce pushed other projects to the side, focusing on the medical application of Hextech with Sky helping lead the way. He courted parties interested in investing, worked with the Council with the Hexgates as city property and traveled through them to act as a liaison to other places, a show of confidence that the inventor himself would travel through it regularly. He was a celebrity, right on the edge of political as Hextech was bound up in the Council of Piltover and Councilor Medarda in private investment, and somehow being a celebrity also was a job.

There was science, there was celebrity, and in the best moments, he snuck deep into the crevasses of Zaun to reread or copy ideas from Viktor’s journals.

The copying required explanation to Singed, which managed to feel like he was at the cusp of adolescence again, when he thought that his peers were peers but their parents wanted to know why he wanted to see them. But worse, because instead of looking at them and saying it was for class and only later realizing they thought he had intentions, now he had to look Singed in the eye and say I want to work on some of the things he was stuck on, so when he wakes up I can have solutions for him.

Jayce did cease going to any of Singed’s other little workshops and laboratories, which was also something of a relief given that the Chem Barons knew those places and while they wouldn’t have cared about Jayce-the-student, they absolutely cared about Jayce-the-Man-of-Progress. Besides, he was coming to terms with the fact that he was not really visiting Singed anymore, he was visiting Viktor.

Each time he visited, he drew back the curtain to see Viktor again, using the light of his tank to work by. Singed, if he was working in that same space and not producing concerning noises from back rooms, often joined him. The longer Jayce knew about Viktor being under Singed’s care (for the given value that this man cared about anything), the more he could see the echoes of whatever relationship the two had. The first time Jayce had been shown Viktor, Singed had murmured that upon waking, Viktor would not speak to him again – so once they had spoken. There was a reason he had all of Viktor’s notebooks, or even was close enough to the man to have put him in suspension at all.

At last, Jayce plucked up the courage to ask about it – not to Singed, who he knew better than to prod for fear of what he might do – but to Heimerdinger, in one of their private meetings.

The Father of Piltover was a cheerful man, who looked at Jayce interchangeably as a student, a colleague, and (Jayce had a feeling) a problem. His habitual distrust of magic had put a crack in their relationship when Jayce fully dedicated himself in pursuit of the Arcane, but the scientific harness Jayce had fitted it with had helped.

They were meeting at the Academy, as Heimerdinger preferred – his home was sized for himself, not for tall visitors like Jayce, and then he could simply get back to work as soon as he dismissed his visitors. Jayce had an office like that too, with a back door that let him slip right back into the lab and back to work as he pleased.

After the required pleasantries, Jayce set down his teacup to balance on his knee as he started hesitantly, “I wanted to ask you something, professor. About our…mutual friend.”

“We have so many, Jayce, you might need to be a bit more specific,” Heimerdinger said, but the sudden tension in his body made it a weak lie.

“The one you contacted to help me with the medicinal uses of Hextech.”

A twitch to the moustache and a heavy sigh, and Heimerdinger nodded slightly, giving his acknowledgement of it. So long as Jayce didn’t say the name, he was probably in the clear, unless Viktor was a sorer subject than he thought.

“We met to talk after you wrote him, and he was immensely helpful, in a way he usually isn’t with me. And I asked him why.”

The yordle’s moustache gave a sad twitch as he said, “He told you about Viktor.”

Despite the rush of triumph that poured through him, it was tempered by immense caution. He had his theory, and Heimerdinger at least knew about Viktor, but the question was did he know Viktor could only have been cured by Hextech, or did he know that it still could be cured.

“He let me read some of his writings, and, professor, they’re…his ideas are unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, he is quite a rare one.” Present tense. “The decisions that were made…” Passive voice? “I wrote to our mutual friend to help you, Jayce, because he has quite an interest in the medically impossible. As do I.” He knows.

“He showed me where…where Viktor…”

“Hard to describe, isn’t it?” agreed Heimerdinger with the lamenting cheerfulness only the guilty could laugh with. “Our friend can do many things, but only your work can set things to right, I think.”

“Professor, that was what I wanted to ask about. You…you have never agreed you know him, but you wrote to him about me and my work, all for Viktor’s sake? Do you not…”

“Viktor was not what separated my old friend and I. That split happened many years ago, he would have been just a boy. But he did bring us both back together, if only for a moment.”

Jayce didn’t say a word, didn’t move, was almost afraid to blink, just watching and listening intently as Heimerdinger sighed and poured himself another cup of tea, which he took a bracing sip of before he continued his tale.

“My friend and I parted ways over a number of disputes. Put simply, he believed that I had become too much of a Councilman, that I was politicking more than I was experimenting and that because of that, I was blinded to what his research was meant to do. You see, to him, love is the central force of the universe, and that so long as actions are done with the strongest love at their core, then those actions should be justified through that same love.

“You see what he does. All of that is in the name of love, even still. For his little girl. He should have been exiled, for breaking the Ethos, but he saw the signs and disappeared before any official charges could be made. I did not hear from him for many years, after that.

“And then, one day, I got a message. I won’t bore you with how we used to mark our messages for each other, but it was a trick only he could have known, and it came quite out of the blue. The message was simply a place to go, not even a formal address. I thought it was him, finally reaching out to me, telling me where to find him, so I went quite on my own, ready to find him and talk at long last. And instead, I found a young man.”

“Viktor,” murmured Jayce.

“Exactly so. Quite a brilliant young man, at that, but not one I would have met on my own. My friend wanted me to meet him, and so he made it happen. I was very impressed, I offered him a place at the Academy right there and then. Anyone who could do half of what he did with so little support more than deserves it.”

“If he came to the Academy, how did he end up…?”

“He…Our friend wanted me to meet Viktor, to get him into the Academy, because his time was limited. The air he grew up breathing, and his struggles with his leg and spine, the Undercity was not an environment he would be able to survive in for very long if he were to stay, but none of us quite realized that the damage had already been done. Even in the clean air we are blessed with here in Piltover, it could not fix anything. I wrote to our friend when Viktor was admitted to the clinic, I told him that I would not ask what he planned to do, I would simply take it as a miracle, if Viktor were to get on his feet again.”

“You didn’t know he would do what he did.”

“Worse, Jayce. I guessed that he might do what he did, but I judged it worth the chance anyway.”

“Professor, it’s…it might not be such a bad thing? He can still wake up, when we get Hextech to work medicinally, he can be cured.”

“He did not want to be an experiment, and I fear that I made him into one. It is something that our friend and I must both live with.”

“Yeah, he did say that he completely expected Viktor would refuse to speak to him again.” A terrible thought occurred to him, and Jayce worked his jaw around the question for a second before he asked, “He’ll hate me too, won’t he?”

“I can’t imagine that he will react well to anyone at first. It will likely be traumatic when he wakes, but I might hope that he will feel more generously to someone who woke him up rather than put him to sleep.”

“I want him to like me,” admitted Jayce in a whisper.

“You stand a better chance of being liked than either of us foolish old men.”

The conversation sat in the back of his mind for days, twisting his smile when Councilor Medarda lightly commented on Heimerdinger being strict in his ways and making him change the subject quickly when Sky mentioned the Ethos at all. Heimerdinger, the man who wrote the Ethos in the first place, had closed his eyes and looked away so that it could be violated, like the doctors at ancient duels who would stand behind a tree to be able to rightly claim they never saw the wound be dealt. It broke his understanding of his mentor, and that change was reflected in their relationship, which was simultaneously closer and cooler. Jayce knew Heimerdinger’s great sin, now, his hypocrisy to charge anyone with violations to the Ethos at all.

That knowledge sat poorly with him even as he and Sky (and the other assistants) made great strides with the application of magic to medicine. They had an official anatomist and even a couple specialist surgeons join onto the project in minor capacities, mostly to fill the role that Singed had done to tell them if they were severely misunderstanding something about medicine. But even then, there was always something magical about medicine, at what the body could do with just a little assistance and prompting. Maybe that was why it was melding so well with Hextech, everyone joked.

On a rare day off, scheduled before Caitlyn had to beg off seeing him that afternoon, Jayce stole down into Zaun again, with enough copies of Hextech’s trials he could justify the visit to himself beyond what it really was. Picking his way down through caverns and creeks that were swollen with rain, Jayce arrived at Singed’s lair with the look more of a bedraggled stray dog than the Man of Progress. But water would dry, and while it was certainly cold in the cave, it wasn’t going to kill him. He was pretty sure.

The lair was empty, at least in the parts that Jayce was allowed into. Still, he called out in the way that he often did, just to inform Singed if he was hidden in the back, so that he would know it was Jayce and not someone who stumbled across this place by mistake. And as he always did, Jayce moved to that wall with the curtain, and pulled it back to reveal that tank of silver-gold, to visit Viktor once again.

There he was, in endless dreams as always. The circulation of fluid was gentle, all it seemed to do was gently rustle his hair, and cause his hands and feet to drift – like a dreamy treading of water, but even less than that. Jayce knew his mind, admired his work, but it was difficult to lie to himself and say that his beauty did not draw the eye. Heimerdinger had mentioned he had struggled with his leg and spine, and Jayce wanted to know and understand this man. Anything with his spine was obscured by being suspended in liquid, but as Jayce looked a little closer, he could see that one of his legs had a natural inward turn, not just from the fluid circulating about him, but an entire rotation of the leg. Suddenly those little sketches in the corner of one of the notebooks made sense, they weren’t a branch of a mechanism, they were idle ideas of what bracing might help. Had he found something? Could Jayce find his finished design, make it for him, and have it waiting for Viktor when he woke up so he could walk out of this cave on his own power?

Viktor, as always, only prompted more questions, more wonderings, with each time Jayce saw him. He had been reading the man’s notebooks and could hardly reconcile the difference; the fervor of the notes, the determination, the need to help people now, and the absolute stillness of the body, the serene slackness of his features, the quiet forever implied in his suspension. Did he dream?

Singed had implied that Viktor would resent him upon waking, Heimerdinger had admitted that he had looked away to let this happen. The way they phrased it, it sounded like Viktor hadn’t been…part of the conversation. The implication had been that upon reawakening, this man would snarl at the methods meant to keep him alive. But there was a fear of the end, in Viktor’s notebooks. A clock that had lost its winding key, ticking ominously over Viktor’s shoulder. Perhaps he would resent Singed’s actions, but would he try and rectify it? Jayce wasn’t sure.

He really hoped not.

A noise behind him, from the depths of the lair, and Singed appeared. A quick glance showed no spots of blood, no strange chemicals, and no obvious frustration. Good, he was probably going to be allowed to stay.

“We made a lot of progress,” Jayce told him. “I brought some copies, if you wanted to look.”

Singed said nothing at first, merely brought Jayce a towel to dry himself with in a fit of compassion. When Jayce’s hair was no longer dripping onto his shoulders, the doctor spoke in his measured way, saying, “You spend much time with Viktor. When he wakes, he will not know who you are.”

“I know that,” defended Jayce.

“I wonder if you do.” Singed still took the copies of work to look over, leaving Jayce to stand beside Viktor, looking up at the sleeping genius that he was doing half of his work for, at this point, and wondering if his dangerous mentor was right.

He stole another glance up at Viktor’s peaceful face, and tried to imagine it twisting into fury and horror when he woke and learned what had been done to him. In his imagination, Jayce could imagine all sorts of reactions towards Singed – snarling, screaming, mute horror and tears – but whenever he imagined how Viktor would look at him, all Jayce could conjure was gratitude that he worked so hard to wake him, curiosity, maybe even recognition of an equal mind (he hoped).

But Viktor wouldn’t know all that. How could he, upon waking?

Uncomfortable, he followed Singed to his cluttered desk below the shelf of Viktor’s notebooks, hovering with arms behind his back as he always did, ready to speak when prompted. The silver-gold light of Viktor crept along the floor towards them, and even with gnawing of unease in his guts, Jayce couldn’t pull close the curtain. He just couldn’t.

Singed looked pleased, in his own way, with what progress they had made, and in a move Jayce had not anticipated, bade Jayce wait before stepping into a back corner and returning with his own papers wrapped in wax paper. To be kept safe, Jayce recognized.

“Some notes on Viktor’s condition, before,” he said, passing them to Jayce. “So you can make certain it will work.”

Emotion, nameless and complicated, choked Jayce, who swallowed convulsively before stammering out his thanks and a thousand promises to keep them safe, to prevent prying eyes from seeing anything, until Singed grew tired and dismissed him back into the rain to climb back to his lab.

Leaving, Jayce stole another look at Viktor in his dreaming silence and made a promise in the depths of his heart. Soon.

The notes were anonymized, of course they were, which was a relief in case they should ever be seen by anyone. But it did mean that there was a little seed of pride in Jayce’s chest whenever he read them, that he knew how important this patient was, he was privy to the secret.

And while he was no doctor, even Jayce would tell that Viktor had been dealt an unfair hand. There was also, he realized having spent months working with anatomists and doctors in the laboratory, a lot missing. Singed had edited these notes down to only what Jayce needed to know to apply Hextech’s medicinal properties. Even as the man had been made all but a specimen, Viktor was still given some amount of privacy.

He probably would still feel it a violation, Jayce thought glumly. Now that Singed had reminded him that no matter how close he felt, Viktor still would not know him, Jayce had fallen into a bit of a slump. Not one noticed by many, but certainly by his mother, when he came to visit her at the Talis home.

“You may be the Man of Progress to the world, but you are still my Bluejay,” she told him firmly over a demitasse of coffee after lunch. “Is it something with work?”

“No, we’re making really good progress, we’ve gotten to animal testing faster than some of the doctors thought we would,” assured Jayce. “That’s all going great. It’s just personal, mom, that’s all.”

“Was it a boy or a girl who turned you down?”

“Mom!” he protested with a laugh.

“I don’t see why they would, even if they’re nervous about the celebrity of it all, you’re a very handsome young man.”

“It’s not that, mom. I just got a pretty necessary reminder that even though I feel like I know someone because I read their work, they don’t know me. I just think he’s brilliant, and I want him to like me.”

“Of course he will, Jayce, how could he not?” Jayce gave a noncommittal shrug, trying not to say too much. Blessedly, she seemed to realize that he was done talking about it and let it go. She had seen him obsess over worse, over the years. Instead, she let the conversation move to a dinner party she was going to host, which was much less fraught as a topic.

Jayce was invited to attend, as he always was, and told to bring someone. Sky, perhaps, she was a bright, polite young woman. Or anyone else, if his friend was busy…

He knew his mother only wanted his happiness, and he could have claimed work was enough, had there not been a night of teenage heartbreak where he had cried into his mother’s arms I just want something like what you and dad had. I just want a partner.

It made guilt steal into the flood of relief when he had to have a message sent to her that he and Sky couldn’t make it, there had been a big breakthrough in their work and he couldn’t spare even an evening. It wasn’t a lie, but he felt bad about being relieved.

The mice they had been testing on were entirely healed. The lab was full of a babble of voices, all extolling the miracle of it all, some were blinking back tears about what this could do. Jayce thought about fragile lungs and declining health and a wash of silver-gold, and wanted to cry with them, but he knew he had to push the team forward, keep his head over it.

The results were compiled, and Jayce stayed long after he dismissed the team who spent more time complimenting Jayce than doing anything with the treatment. Sky stayed, sitting by the cage of mice who were no longer ill, crying silently.

“Are you okay, Sky?” he asked cautiously, a hand hovering by her chair. She wasn’t, he knew, but the question was the only opening he had.

“I hate animal testing,” she said, voice thick. “But I’m…I’m so glad that it’s worked. This will help so many people, back home. There’s so many people it could have helped.”

“I know. It’s why I wanted to push towards curing necrosis first.”

“Your anatomist from Zaun?”

“He may have given me some anonymous data on lung decay.”

Sky gave a teary sort of chuckle, before sobering herself and saying, “You can’t let them use it for anything else first.”

He didn’t ask what “they” she was talking about – it was the combined force of Piltover, always moving up and away from its sister city. It was the Council, that august body that seemed to exist beyond its own members. Even Councilor Medarda, with all her political control, would speak about the Council as if it was something she was powerless to, not something she had a voice in.

“I won’t, Sky, I promise, the very first person we cure with this will be from Zaun,” swore Jayce. And it would be true, no matter which metric. He would make sure of it.

She closed her eyes a moment, before taking her kerchief and wiping her face dry, a brave smile on her face. “It’s late, I should probably go home. You, too.”

“I’m going to stay a bit longer. You know me, I need to get a lot of work done at night, everyone wants to see me during the day.”

Sky took her leave with one last smile towards the group of mice, and left Jayce alone in his lab. These late evenings were a relief to him, when he didn’t have to be the Man of Progress but could be just himself. He sat and soaked in the silence for a long moment before he sighed and leaned to rest his mouth into his hands, staring at the mice.

“I’m getting close, Viktor,” he murmured. This was his outlet, he couldn’t write it down for fear that someone would read it and ask questions he didn’t know how to answer. He couldn’t talk to anyone about it, Singed was not tolerant of this sort of thing and Heimerdinger grew somber and withdrawn whenever Jayce even made vague mention towards his work and what it was meant to do. So all he was left with was speaking aloud in the silence of his lab, muffling his speech into his hands in case anyone heard it so he could wave it off as just thinking aloud.

“I won’t do anything to you until I know it’s safe, you’ve had enough done to you by now. But I can tell, I’m getting close.”

If he was reckless, if he was less of a scientist than he was, Jayce could see himself taking this first success and running with it, rushing down to where Viktor slept and absolutely banking on it succeeding. But if he was allowed pride in any aspect of his life, the fact that he was a good scientist was it.

“A few more trials, Viktor. Let us see how these mice do long-term. Just wait a little longer.”

And with each trial, with each test, the signs were positive. Everything was improving. Jayce stayed late to push the work just that little bit further, came in after late nights attending whatever new frivolity his reputation depended on (they were fun, yes, but they didn’t stand up to the more important work he had to do, for the greatest mind they had yet to know). Copies of notes were shown to medical professionals in Piltover, and Jayce ferried them down to be read by the one doctor whose patient it was being conceived for. The doctors above complained that Hextech was making their readings of the trials more difficult, while Singed, reading by silver-gold light deep below, made measured critiques and suggestions, and offered up his drugs yet again.

“We can’t use that, and I don’t know if I…want to,” said Jayce, eyeing that strange fluid. “What does it even do?”

“Have you ever read the memoirs of hunger strike survivors?” asked Singed, rolling a vial of purple between his fingers.

“Uh…no.”

“You should. What they and their dead fellows experienced was a testament to the strength of the human body, beyond the limitations our minds put upon them. How long, do you think, you can survive starvation?”

“I imagine the number is going to be higher than I think.”

“One man I know of survived seventy four days before his death.” Singed held up his vial again, and said, “Shimmer unlocks those limits, gives power where one could swear there was none. It unlocks potential, helps the body realize it can withstand greater hardship than the mind believes. Your work asks the body to withstand immense stress.”

“All medicine does, that’s what the consultants tell me.  Besides, that man lived seventy four days off of his own conviction. I think Viktor can withstand more than you’re giving him credit for.”

That was a gamble. Jayce felt the spin of the roulette wheel as soon as he spoke, and he really hoped he had placed his bet correctly. Singed did not admit defeat, as such, but he did put away the vial of Shimmer, turning to look at the man suspended in dreams.

“If Nature had her say, he would have been dead long ago,” Singed murmured. “I do not let Nature win, if I can help it.”

“My mother would be dead years ago too,” said Jayce. “Magic saved her. Magic can save him too.”

“If it does not, you are the one who will bear blame for it. I kept him stable all this time. Suspended, where disease cannot touch him.”

“That’s why I’m taking as long as I am. I could have come down here when the first group of mice were healed and called it ready, but I can’t risk someone like Viktor.”

From his writings, not that they ever got personal, Jayce had the feeling that Viktor would protest against that idea. That he was nothing special, at least not in terms of being more or less worthy of a miracle cure. Jayce wasn’t sure if he’d tell Viktor the cure had been made for him, when he woke up, or just tell him that a cure existed, and so it had been used on him too.

Given the amount of time in trials, he had time.

Before he could account for it, it had been a year. An entire year since Jayce first laid eyes on Viktor in all his brilliance and beauty. A year of hushed visits to Singed’s lair where he ignored whatever specimens floated in jars around him in favor of rereading Viktor’s journals, working on answers to the questions Viktor had been wrestling with, and just standing before that tank and thinking soon, Viktor, you’ll be awake soon.

The medical professionals Jayce worked with back at the lab in Piltover had all wrung their hands about timelines of testing and animal trials and human trials, but half of what they were doing was Hextech, and half of Hextech was Hex. Magic pushed forward timelines to the impossible, and the work they were doing was going to have its very first human test.

Finding a patient was the hardest part. Between Sky and Jayce’s vow that someone from Zaun would be the first cured, and the natural distrust a lot of people from Zaun had at the idea of being a literal test subject for Piltover, it had taken Jayce every ounce of goodwill he could wring out of every person he knew before someone cautiously volunteered.

His name was Huck. A small, nervous man who stammered through his cough and still shook Jayce’s hand with intention when they met. He predated some of the vent systems down below, had breathed his fair share of stinkdamp and smog that mixed into what he only knew colloquially as the Gray.

“I don’t know what it’s made of, not really, just-just that it, uh, it doesn’t kill you right away, not when you’re an adult, but kids…we teach the kids to run, if they start to smell it,” he had explained, when going through his medical history and diagnosis.

Viktor had a bad leg. Maybe that was why he had been stricken so much younger than Huck, because he couldn’t run?

Putting the man out of mind for a moment, Jayce focused in on the work. Most of the medical talk was handled with the doctors, but Jayce was the expert to explain to their volunteer the process from the magical side of things. And after two meetings, Huck signed all the papers, and was admitted to the clinic.

He was anaesthetized and brought to the operating theater as the best place to work. Sky and Jayce took over the magical side of things, while their medical colleagues handled Huck’s wellbeing.

The process took five minutes. A biopsy of the lung was taken, and the results for that would take a few days. Another would be taken in a month, to make certain that Huck’s body actually accepted the arcane energies he had been exposed to. But there was a lot of hope when Huck woke up and in the post-anesthesia confusion reportedly commented that there was “more air than normal.”

The biopsy came back clean. Sky broke down in tears in Jayce’s arms when they heard, and he bit his lip to try and keep from crying too, but it didn’t really work. The medical professionals around them, the ones who were familiar with the Gray and all it did, they were crying too, so Jayce let himself go. It had been a messy thirty minutes in the lab, until they all pulled themselves together.

Huck cried for an hour, when they told him the lab results. As far as Jayce was concerned, he got to cry as long as he wanted.

The month that Huck stayed as an inpatient for consistent observation went by achingly slowly for everyone, waiting for the follow up proof that he really was cured. Jayce annoyed everyone on the team by being too involved in the early writeups of their work, and when he was shooed away because they couldn’t write any conclusions until they had conclusions, he went and annoyed everyone at the events the Man of Progress was expected at.

“I don’t think half of the people here care all that much about lung treatments,” Caitlyn told him after stealing him away under the pretext of fetching him for her parents. Instead, she secreted them away in the minstrel gallery that the band was not yet using, both careful not to knock over any instruments to give away their position.

“They should,” insisted Jayce. “The amount of lives this will change, it’s…it’s humbling to be part of it.”

“Well, yeah, but these are people at a Kiramman party. You know. Of the Kiramman ventilation system.”

Jayce shook his head, saying, “And Florey expanded on Fleming’s discoveries, my work isn’t undoing hers. Isn’t this supposed to be a city of scientists?”

“I’m not a scientist.”

“I know. I just want people to be excited about the possibilities of Hextech being able to help people, not just the Hexgates.”

“The Hexgates are easier to understand,” said Caitlyn, shrugging. “You go from here to there. Medicine is hard for a lot of people to understand. You’re lucky my father is a doctor, he’s excited enough about this that I think most people won’t think you’re undermining mother.”

Maybe he should be, was the uncharitable thought that whisked by – after all, she had made the vents but they clearly weren’t enough. Viktor’s first notebook had proven that to him.

No, that was unfair, he knew Cassandra Kiramman, she wasn’t evil. She just…hadn’t spent time in Zaun like he had, hadn’t read Viktor’s work, she just didn’t know that her work had been a start not a solution.

Instead, he offered a smile and said, “Yeah, he keeps asking that he be part of the peer review of our study. He’s not even a pulmonologist.”

“Neither are you, and you’re still involved.”

“Hey, it’s too late to kick me off the project, I’m the one who started it in the first place.”

They stayed there, a little bubble of just the two of them, perhaps longer than they ought to, but half of Jayce’s attention was deep below in a tank of silver-gold and the party held little distraction in face of that.

The day of Huck’s follow up biopsy, Jayce had no reason and no excuse to be at the clinic. But four days afterwards, when the tests were returned, he was the one to go see the nervous man and just give him a smile.

His lungs were a little weaker than they would like, but the disease was gone.

Huck wept aloud, prayers to a goddess of wind and fresh air choked out between heaving breaths. Jayce would let the doctors take on the extended care from that point onward, but in that moment, he just sat with the man brave enough to hope for the impossible.

The papers had to be written, had to be submitted for peer review (tricky, as there were no peers in Hextech, but a problem Jayce was familiar with), all manner of things had to be done before the cure could be put to use for the public. A few more human tests, just to be certain that Huck wasn’t anomalous. Then it could be adapted, worked into a cure for lung cancer of long term smokers perhaps, or the easier cases of lung disease in veteran Enforcers who had spent time down by the mines in the Fissures.

But there did not need to be such strict guidelines for a doctor who was willing to throw out most ethical boundaries in the name of the end his means were justified by.

Heimerdinger was a hypocrite, but he was no coward, Jayce had to admire that in his mentor as they picked their way through creeks and caverns, down to the lair Singed had tucked his most important work within. The yordle had quivered only a moment at the prospect of seeing Viktor, but only a moment. It was his duty, he had said, to bear witness to what all his choices had led to.

Singed was waiting for them, sitting on a cropping of rock, one of Viktor’s notebooks open on his lap. Jayce stopped, hanging back, he had a feeling his two strangely connected mentors would want to speak to each other, for a moment.

It was only a few seconds, really, before Singed beckoned Jayce to join them. Neither looked disappointed in the momentary reunion, but Jayce did suppose they had been somewhat in contact through writing anyway.

“Jayce’s work has been remarkable,” said Heimerdinger as they adjourned inside, to where the curtain was covering Viktor as always. And as always, Jayce moved straight to it, unable to stomach the idea that the man was put away, somehow. “He has been quite single minded in his pursuit.”

“I have seen that myself,” murmured Singed, as Jayce pulled sharply on the curtain, pulling it back.

Whatever else they were saying, Jayce didn’t hear it for a moment, just looking up at Viktor. He was as unchanged as ever, sleeping in enforced statis. Over a year now, Jayce had known that face in all its angles, the slope of his shoulders, the movement of his hands in that dreamy drifting. And soon, if all went well, he would know the color of his eyes and the sound of his voice. He placed a hand on the glass of the tank, pressing his weight against it for a moment as he thought remember when I used to say soon? That’s now.

Singed demanded Jayce walk through exactly what they were going to do to Viktor three times over, asking different fiercely probing questions each time. It felt like an oral examination back at the Academy, forcing him to prove he knew his subject inside and out and even upside down. The fact that Heimerdinger was there too only strengthened the association.

Heimerdinger himself just sat still and quiet through it all, looking quite taken aback by Singed’s lair. Jayce had gotten too used to it, the body parts and whole animals in jars didn’t make him flinch anymore.

At last, Singed agreed to begin. Jayce set up his work while Heimerdinger solemnly went to help Singed start to wake Viktor up. The liquid noises were intriguing, but Jayce could not let his attention falter. Any tiny slip up, and Viktor would suffer the cost. And from the sound of it, he did not have much margin of error to start with.

“Are you prepared?” asked Heimerdinger at last.

Jayce took a deep breath, willing his nerves to settle, because he was never really going to be prepared, and nodded.

“Ready.”

Viktor awoke wet, choking and shivering and cold, so cold. His lungs felt strange, and his whole body was shaking in uncontrolled tremors. Immediately, he rolled over onto his stomach and vomited up water, the only thing he had reliably been able to keep down.

The doctor – the doctor had been there, at his bedside, promising that he wouldn’t die. How did he get there, to Piltover he had abandoned long ago? His voice had been that regular dry monotone as he spoke, and Viktor had been too sick to protest that he wasn’t Rio. Too weak to dream of being able to put up any meaningful resistance if it came to it.

And then what happened? He wasn’t in the clinic, he was – where was he?

He was on a hard surface, not the clinic bed that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be firm or soft. He had been moved, but moved where?

A gentleness floated over his shoulders, and he startled, badly. He hadn’t realized he was undressed until the sensation touched his skin. He jolted his hip, banging his knee against the hard surface he was on as he twisted and flailed. A choked swallow of pain escaped his throat.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay! It’s okay!” a voice tried to assure him, a voice that was warm and broad. A man’s voice, soft and firm. “Viktor, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

Hearing his name, it settled him, reminded him that he was alive, that others could perceive him, that his name had meaning. He was a person. He was Viktor. In that moment of calm through human connection, Viktor took stock.

A blanket, he realized, soft as his dreams, across his shoulders and down his back. A hand, wide as the river, pulling him back to his body, warmth against the cold.

Blearily, Viktor squeezed and reopened his eyes, trying to clear his vision, trying to understand. The man who had spoken, the hand, it must be the same person, and it must be the person in front of him. Viktor’s eyes weren’t focusing no matter how he blinked, and he rested them a long moment as soon as he was assured that this man was not the doctor.

The man at his side, through a few seconds of experiencing him, was nothing like the doctor. Not in build (not wiry and cold, but broad and warm) and certainly not in bedside manner (in that this man had some, keeping contact and murmuring assurances instead of standing on the other side of the room, making silent notes in his journals).

Viktor slurred and stammered, his voice hoarse and frail, stumbling as best he could to ask the question Where am I?

The man seemed to pick up on that, somehow, because he said so firmly, “You’re with me. You can go back to sleep, Viktor, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

The man was so certain, not the halting sadness of doctors who all seemed to wish someone else could tell Viktor the inevitable bad news. It was childish, but he chose to believe that voice. It believed in itself, firm in its conviction that Viktor would be okay in a way that no one in his life had ever been, and he wanted it to be true, just once.

And he didn’t really have much of a choice, he could feel himself fading out anyway.

His eyes were golden.

When Viktor woke next, he was warm and dry, nestled into a bed too soft to be truly comfortable. He didn’t open his eyes right away, just trying to piece together the timeline, breathing. He had been dying in the clinic, forced to play gracious and accepting of his fate in the face of Heimerdinger’s sorrow. Then the doctor had been there, with his apathetic care, promising he would live. Then…somewhere else. Somewhere cold and hard, but with a man there who promised him it would be okay.

The experience didn’t make sense. Somewhere along the line, something happened, something broke down without his realizing it, otherwise he should be dead, not breathing easier than he had in quite some time. His lungs could expand freely in a way that last he knew them should have been impossible.

His leg hurt. It was familiar, and he let that pain ground him, adrift in the uncertainty of whatever had been done to him.

There was the distant sound of a door opening and closing, footsteps. They were small, rapid. Familiar.

Viktor opened his eyes, blinking them into focus to see Heimerdinger, endlessly distracted between a thousand duties as always, nose buried in papers as he made his way to sit beside Viktor’s bed. The room they were in was plain, but no decoration could locate him quite so quickly as Cecil Heimerdinger. Viktor said nothing, drew no attention, just watched through half open eyes as the yordle settled into nominal vigil over him.

It was quite an honor to have the Father of Piltover sit by one’s bedside. Given the breaks in his understanding, Viktor was just grateful that it meant there was some amount of safety to the situation.

Thus assured, he let sleep take him over once again. He stirred again to voices in quiet conversation, Heimerdinger and that same man’s voice from before, calling him to wakefulness. Like Zenatello’s ship sounding its horn to call to Ciocio.

“Has he woken again?”

“Not yet, my boy,” assured Heimerdinger, cheerfully incorrect. “Not fully, in any case.” Maybe not so incorrect.

“Good. I can be back in a bit – Sky’s taking on the write up on Huck for now at least until it goes back to the clinic for the medical side of things, but Councilor Kiramman could only meet with me now, and –”

“And you will do no good to anyone by running yourself into the ground. Meet with Cassandra, get something to eat, I have plenty of work I can do right here.”

“If you’re sure.”

The man’s voice had somehow become tied intimately to the idea of safety, and even as the sound of his voice had called Viktor to wake up, the timbre of it was soothing enough that he could settle into a doze. He was just so tired.

Maybe it was because that safety was explicitly leaving, even if he didn’t want to go, that Viktor dreamed about that cold and wet and dark place he had first woken in, where he didn’t know what was happening. The experience in his dreams made just as little sense as it did in his memories, but it did mean that he woke with a snapping open of the eyes and a short, sharp inhale.

The sound must have drawn Heimerdinger up from his work, because the yordle spoke to him, his voice a little choked. “Viktor, are you…?”

“Professor,” he croaked in greeting.

“Oh good. Oh good. Here, you must be thirsty.” The cold glass of water helped wake him a bit more, and Viktor looked around the room. Through the window he could see the sunset angling from a distant break in the clouds, turning the rain into golden falling stars.

“What happened to me?” he asked, turning back to face Heimerdinger.

There was guilt in his face, as Heimerdinger folded his hands solemnly. “What do you remember, Viktor?”

“I was dying, and then the doctor was here. He told me I wouldn’t die. And then…I was cold, and it was dark. And now I’m here.”

“Your old mentor, he…he kept you alive.” The way he spoke, Heimerdinger knew that Viktor knew exactly what that implied. Horror twisted his guts, even as a terrible relief tried to thread through him. He jolted, as though he could get up and leave the conversation, leave the reality of what happened.

The gurgling shrill cries of Rio, so many years ago, still echoed in his head.

“I was his experiment,” said Viktor, his voice choking in this throat in horror and anger. “A specimen.”

“Oh, Viktor…”

His voice was stolen from him, a hand fisting into the soft blue blanket over him, quivering somewhere between wordless screaming and abject weeping. What could he even say? What would it do? Silence strangled him in its totality, the lacuna of the experience overwhelming him with impossibility. He wanted to express his horror somehow, be heard, but Heimerdinger already knew, so he couldn’t explain it to him. All he could do was curl into himself and wish for the impossible, that it had never happened, that he had never been ill in the first place, that he had been whole and unbroken from the start. He wouldn’t have ever met the doctor if he had been able to keep up with the other children, he wouldn’t have gotten sick enough that his survival apparently depended on violation of his autonomy.

Or failing that, wishing that that mystery man’s warm hand was on his back again, and his voice in his ear, firm in his conviction of Viktor’s safety and wellbeing.

“I know it makes no difference,” Heimerdinger finally intoned, “but I am grateful that we did not lose you. A brilliant mind like yours…no, I am glad you are alive.”

The stopper in his throat broke, a painful noise escaping him as he turned to Heimerdinger, his form a blur as tears filled his eyes. “How did I get here? If he – if he took me, how did he do that? How was I…how was I woken up?”

“You know that we knew each other, once. That I met you because of him.”

“You…you didn’t. You didn’t give me to him.”

“No! No, Viktor, I didn’t. I wrote to him telling him about your condition, it was part of our correspondence, and when I came to visit, you were gone.”

“You know what sort of man he is, you knew what he would do. Yet you still wrote to him about it, you…you let it happen.”

Heimerdinger was silent a moment, as betrayal rose in Viktor’s throat, before he said, “I suppose I did. I looked away, I did not search for you hard enough…”

“Get out.”

“Viktor.”

“Get out!” He had no ability to actually enforce his will, nothing beyond raising his voice and hoping that he would be listened to. And given what he had just woken up from, Viktor did not really have a large sample size to believe that he would be.

“Alright. Alright, Viktor.”

Viktor listened as Heimerdinger left, relieved in his own way that at least now he was listened to.

He hadn’t wanted to die, of course not. Part of him, despite it all, was glad he was still alive, was relishing the new unfamiliar strength in his lungs. But still and more than that, betrayal and horror was thick in his throat, choking him as he bit down on the joint of his thumb, the meagre flesh muting his wounded noises of fury and lament.

At some point, he must have lost consciousness in the overwhelm of emotion, because he woke again to see the rain had stopped and the evening was settling comfortably into night. He lay there a long while, staring out the window, thinking about the question he hadn’t let Heimerdinger answer: how was he woken up? How had he ended up back in Piltover? If the doctor had taken him, it would have been in one of his hiding places throughout Zaun. So how did he go from there to here?

And how did that man from before fit into it?

He should have asked Heimerdinger who he was, but that had felt secondary to the question of what happened.

There were the distant sounds of footsteps, growing closer, and Viktor felt himself tense in anticipation. The handle turned, and Viktor had a sudden ridiculous desire to feign sleep, just to put off having to exist. Instead, he made himself watch as the door opened to reveal a man there, broad shouldered and handsome.

It seemed the man was just as surprised to see him, leaving them both staring at each other a long moment.

Viktor took the opportunity to look at him. His eyes were a golden hazel, his brows thick and expressive as they rose high on his face. His jaw was well formed, his shoulders wide enough to hold the weight of the world. He was dressed in a variation of Academic dress, with a white tailcoat that exaggerated the line between his shoulders and hips. He was handsome, strong, healthy, and if he was the one who had been a lighthouse to come back to himself, Viktor wouldn’t be upset.

What must Viktor look like, though? He couldn’t imagine that any amount of time in the doctor’s deranged care would make him look much better than he had the last time he had been able to look in a mirror. Gaunt and pale, but perhaps whatever state he had been kept in had been close enough to sleep that the bruise-like bags under his eyes were a bit better.

“Did Heimerdinger send you?” asked Viktor at last. The sound of his voice seemed to startle the man even more, but not in the usual recognition of his accent as belonging deep in the Fissures. It was more that the man seemed to have been lost in his head, and Viktor speaking brought him back to the moment, realizing how long they had been in a silent standoff. Viktor in the bed he was too exhausted to try and leave, this man in the doorway.

At once, he stepped fully in and closed the door with a nudge of his wrist behind him. “I’m glad you’re awake,” he said.

Here was Viktor’s lighthouse. He should have seen it, in those hands as wide as the river.

“I’m sorry, Heimerdinger told me you asked to be left alone, but...”

“I wanted him to leave me alone,” corrected Viktor. And then, because it was ridiculous to let his go on any longer, he said, “You were there. When I woke up. I remember your voice.”

Something twisted the man’s face at that, not the same guilty twist of Heimerdinger’s moustache, but a bit of shame, maybe?

“I was. I’m sorry I wasn’t there earlier.”

“Why were you there? What happened?”

“I’m in the dark about most of the early parts,” warned the man, coming to sit where Heimerdinger had been. “But the part where I come in is that my research was illegal until recently, which is why I knew Singed at all. When my work started to branch into medicine, Heimerdinger told him, and he took me to his private lab to talk about how I could go about curing people. And then he let me know about you.

“It took a year, before the treatment was anywhere near safe enough, I was really tempted to demand I be able to wake you up after the first animal tests. I’m sorry, I wish science was faster than that, but if it’s any consolation we woke you up as fast as we possibly could. The study we did with our first human patient isn’t even published yet.”

It was spoken so matter of fact. As if there had been no other option, as if breaking every medical timeline Viktor had ever heard about was just the next logical step. For him.

“Why? All that…for me?” he asked, stunned at the impossibility of it all.

“Well, yeah. Singed had your notebooks, I didn’t ask too many questions in case he would get fed up with me asking.” Viktor nodded on instinct, he knew the doctor’s temper to understand that choice. “He let me take one and read it, the same day I learned about you. I would have absolutely helped you regardless, obviously, I couldn’t leave you like that, but after I read your work on your air purifiers…you’re a genius. One of the smartest people I’ve ever read the work of, and you wanted them installed in schools. Your work is grounded and real, and it’s only resources that held you back. And more than that, you’re kind. Kinder than most people I’ve met.

“I read everything you wrote, I remember thinking that if I had known you at the Academy I would be driving you mad, knocking on your door every day asking for the chance to work with you.” He gave an embarrassed chuckle, a hand reaching to rub at his reddening ears as he said, “You know, I had all sorts of things planned that I’d tell you, when you woke up. I told myself I was going to be smart and interesting, and maybe I’d have figured out something you had been stuck on. Instead here I am, telling you all of this and probably ruining that chance.”

It was charming, this honesty. Viktor was helpless against the smile that tugged at his lips. This man, who had meetings with Councilor Kiramman, who knew Heimerdinger closely, who by most metrics would be categorized as above Viktor, here he was, ruefully chuckling about an honesty he couldn’t seem to help.

Honestly, it was something of an ego boost, to have someone be so excited to speak with him. As though he was any sort of celebrity and not just an inventor who did his best with what he could, who had gotten to Piltover too late for his lungs. Which felt far too strong in his chest.

“What sort of medicine do you study?” he asked, prodding at the edges of what he wanted most to know. Medicine that had been illegal until recently, the kind of thing that would put someone in contact with someone like Singed, it sketched out not insubstantial danger, and Viktor was no fool.

“None, really,” said the man, accepting the change in subject. “Don’t worry, we had pulmonologists and specialists helping, it wasn’t just me alone in the lab. What I do is…well, it’s called Hextech.”

He explained, and grew more and more technical as Viktor asked questions, as he was able to keep up. At first it was technical, and slowly gave way to passion and poetry, of the beauty of magic and his desire to share it with the world. The first thing he built was a means to teleport whole airships vast distances, and once the purses of the Council were satisfied, he had turned to medicine.

“It was meant to be a sort of panacea, a baseline treatment that could be specialized, but then we specialized in curing lung blight. There’s more people that need that than anything else, right here. The actual treatment is under ten minutes, once we go through peer review and get a few more volunteers to make sure that it works equally well for everyone, we’ll be able to help so many people. And hey, maybe I can help you get your air purifiers scaled up and installed in the Kiramman vents, that way we don’t cure a population just to let them go through it all over again.”

Viktor swallowed, overwhelmed. It was vertigo inducing, to have swung so completely between the horror of what had been done to him and now the creeping awe of what had been done in his name. Cures and collaboration.

“Just because you healed my lungs, it does not mean I am well,” warned Viktor, trying to root himself back into reality. This man, his lighthouse, he had known Viktor only in this bed, and in whatever state Singed had kept him in. He was still a well connected Piltie, his magical cures were just as likely to be a manifestation of some egotistical desire to be a hero as it could be altruism. He had never seen Viktor limping, or the way that his posture listed.

Viktor knew what he was, and he knew how people from Piltover reacted to what he was.

“I know,” said the man, meeting Viktor’s eyes and not once glancing down towards his legs under the blankets. “But you had enough done to you without your consent, all I wanted to do was make sure you weren’t dying. I knew you could make your own decisions once you were awake again.”

Viktor’s hands fisted in the sheets, blinking at this man before him. This man who saw what had been done to him and sought only to help and no further. This man with magic not in his blood but in his hands. This man who had the heights of Piltover at his fingers but descended into Zaun time and again with the desire to help. This man who had fallen into the same dark caves Viktor had as a boy, but was brave enough to free the poor creature he saw mistreated – and then didn’t see Viktor that way at all. Even when Viktor was seeing himself that way.

Overwhelmed at it all, Viktor’s voice was choked as he whispered, “I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Jayce,” he returned, a warm smile on his lips.