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It’s been two days since Jayce climbed out of the fissure. Two slow, miserable days, heaving himself along with his makeshift crutch as the pain in his injured leg pulses through his body like a second heartbeat.
He doesn’t startle at the flickers of movement in the corner of his eye anymore. If the automaton husks wanted to hurt him, they’d have done so already. As unnerving as they are, they’re more watchful than threatening. Occasionally a spindly limb will twitch, or a head will turn, following his movement through the silent, ruined streets of the city. Jayce keeps his eyes down.
He spends the first night huddled in the shell of an abandoned building, shielding a tiny fire from the wind with his hands. It’s barely enough to soothe the chill in his fingers, but it’s better than being alone in the dark.
Jayce is cold. The unnatural swirling clouds overhead block out most of the sunlight, and the wind bites through his clothes with the hollow teeth of some long-dead animal. He finds that the longer he spends looking at the horizon, searching for landmarks, familiar sights, memories, and finding them all empty and destroyed, the colder he feels.
He starts counting each weary step, up to ten then back down to one. Ten more paces, he tells himself. Then, after that, ten more. On and on and on.
It rains the second night, blowing thick sheets of water across every inch of ground, and even the best shelter Jayce can find is too damp for a fire.
He’s in the market district now, he thinks. He and Cait probably ran down this street a hundred times when they were younger. She tried to get him to scale a building with her on Progress Day one year, he remembers, something bittersweet aching in his throat.
She wanted a better view of the fireworks. Jayce was afraid she would fall. And so he stayed on the ground—he wanted to be there to catch her, just in case, he said. But Cait didn’t need him to catch her, and he knew it. Her ire was just easier to handle than admitting that he was scared of heights.
Jayce hardly sleeps that night either. The steady pounding that’s been building behind his eyes for the last several hours is congealing into a sharp pain that radiates through the entire front of his skull. The clammy chill in the air doesn’t help, locking up his injured leg and leaving his muscles stiff and achy from shivering all night.
He has one fitful dream: where he’s warm and not in pain, laughing with Viktor in the lab. When he wakes he looks around with bleary eyes, yearning to his bones for the briefest sign of life. A voice, or even an imagined brush of warmth in the dark. Jayce hasn’t felt the touch of another person in weeks, maybe months, after all. Humans aren’t meant to live like that. There’s a primal hunger taking root in his bones, splintering him open bit by bit, pleading for something other than cold and dark and solitude. But there’s nothing to feed it.
Every step hurts come morning as Jayce fights against the wind, making his way toward the Hexgate tower. The pain is twofold—dull and familiar, radiating up from his leg in one breath, then heavy and sharp behind his eyes and pulsing down through the base of his skull. The two meet somewhere in the middle and ratchet up the ever-present ache in his chest until it burns in the back of his throat.
Jayce’s body feels like rubber. The closer he gets to the tower the fiercer the maelstrom grows, tearing through corroded buildings with a howl. The sound sends spikes of pain through his head so sharp that he can hardly see for a few moments. Ten more steps…just ten more, and then another ten after that…and then…
Jayce reaches out to steady himself against the wall. A burst of color, stretching and spiking in the familiar shape of the wild rune, flashes in front of his eyes, and he assumes it’s a manifestation of his swiftly building migraine until he feels his body go weightless for an instant. Then everything is white, like daggers through his eye sockets…and then the world goes quiet.
He’s…in the lab?
Jayce’s own breathing echoes back at him in the silence. No more wind, no more eerie automatons creaking and crackling as their faceless heads track his movement. No, he’s somewhere else now, somewhere he never thought he’d see again.
He takes a faltering step. There’s movement somewhere to his left, a stool scraping the floor, pain lancing through his head, he’s getting dizzy—and a voice. A voice he’d recognize anywhere.
“Jayce?” That familiar accent, honey-warm and hesitant. Confused. “What…I thought you were…?”
The crutch falls to the ground with a reverberating clatter that nearly drops Jayce to his knees with the agony it rips through his skull. He’s shaking, he realizes dimly, probably has been for a while. Chalkboard scribbles and blueprints swim in and out of his peripheral vision. Fear coils its way up his throat—this isn’t real, it can’t be…
“…Jayce. Look at me.”
And that voice, so sweet and familiar, burns straight through the fog with nothing but the sound of his name. Jayce takes a blind, desperate step toward it, forgetting his injured leg, and goes down hard with a pitiful gasp for air. There’s a soft, iridescent halo at the periphery of his vision, pulsing along with the pain in his head.
Before he can move, before he can even breathe, warm, gentle hands are cupping his face. Tilting his chin upward with such care. And when Jayce looks up he sees Viktor’s face, pinched with confusion and worry.
One spring afternoon, a lifetime ago, the two of them had been startled by the loud slam of a bird flying into one of the Academy’s large, vaulted windows. Viktor tried to reason with Jayce when he jumped to his feet and hurried to check on it—“it’s dead, Jayce, don’t bother.” But the click of his partner’s cane followed him all the way down to the courtyard, where a tiny, feathered body lay. A starling, iridescent black with pinpricks of white like little stars.
Viktor’s hands were so gentle as he scooped it from the damp earth. Cradled it in his palms, gingerly smoothed ruffled feathers with his thumb, tender, even though he didn’t have to be.
He’s holding Jayce’s head the same way. Like something fragile, something beautiful and sad.
A white-hot surge of pain behind Jayce’s eyes precedes the tears that surge down his cheeks, cutting paths through the grime on his face. He heaves out a wretched sound. Half sob, half gasp of relief.
Viktor’s thumb traces a steady arc across his cheek, back and forth, warm and soft.
“Jayce…” Honey-gold eyes flicker over his battered body, lingering on the leg brace before finding their way back up to his face. Jayce can almost hear the gears turning in Viktor’s head as he tries to puzzle it out. “What happened? How…?”
Jayce is nearly blind from the pain in his head. He wraps an arm around Viktor, fingers scrabbling desperately at the back of his waistcoat. Propriety is nothing more than a phantom in the wind in his mind. All at once there’s a heartbeat beneath his ear, real, human warmth pressed against his skin, and it’s more than he can bear.
***
It had been an uneventful day for Viktor, up until now.
Jayce was off on Council business—some series of meetings that would keep him away for a few days. He’d tried to cajole Viktor into coming with, stubborn and naive as ever in his insistence that Piltover’s elite would spare Viktor so much as a second glance if they only got to know him a little.
Though, Viktor suspected Jayce’s pleading was equally, if not more so, driven by a desire for familiar company. The look he gave Viktor when he turned him down was so reminiscent of a scolded puppy that it was almost funny.
Jayce didn’t push any further, though. He never does. He knows how much Viktor hates social events full of rich people who look at him like he’s the dirt on the bottom of their shoes.
And so the lab was quiet for the rest of the afternoon. Too quiet, if Viktor was honest with himself. Maneuvering about and assembling the prototype they’d been working on without Jayce beside him felt a bit like writing with his non-dominant hand.
But still, as the sun began to dip lower in the sky beyond the large windows, Viktor fell into somewhat of a rhythm. He managed to get so absorbed in his work, in fact, that it took him a few seconds to realize that the gemstone on the table in front of him was levitating.
The little blue sphere is vibrating in midair, throwing off tiny bursts of energy. Viktor nearly drops the tools he’s holding, fumbling for his cane as he shoves his chair back. A few bolts are swiftly pulled into the gem’s energetic field, spinning and flashing in the light. Viktor only has a moment to consider that maybe he should duck and cover when he hears a considerable thump behind him. The gemstone drops back to the table, along with the bolts, and bounces to the floor.
When Viktor whirls around, heart pounding, there’s a man standing a few paces behind him. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with dark, shaggy hair and an unkempt beard. His clothes are tattered and filthy, but the red and gold emblem on the shoulder of his jacket is impossible to mistake. So are his wide hazel eyes, gazing at nothing between the two of them, a shuddering breath hanging in the air like a thread of spider silk ready to snap.
“…Jayce?” Viktor’s voice is hesitant. Disbelieving. He can’t make sense of what he’s seeing. “What…I thought you were…?”
Something is obviously very, very wrong. It briefly crosses Viktor’s mind that the man in front of him could be some sort of imposter, intent on causing harm, but the thought flits away as quickly as it came. No, this is his Jayce, as impossible as it is. Viktor knows it just as surely as he knows that his heart is beating. He bites back the logic scrabbling at the back of his mind, the desire to bombard Jayce with questions, to understand how he’d grown months’ worth of hair and beard in the span of a few hours. All of that can wait. Especially as Jayce starts to tremble, eyes darting around wildly as a strained exhale rattles his chest.
“…Are you all right?” Viktor queries. When his words get no reaction, he lowers his voice to something firmer, still as soft as he can bear, but with the strength to draw his partner’s fragile attention. “Jayce. Look at me.”
And look at him Jayce does, his head immediately snapping up to meet Viktor’s eyes. His face is pinched and contorted in a way familiar to Viktor, lines etched through the dirt on his skin to show every grimace of pain. He lurches forward, one arm swinging out a little for balance, but his leg buckles beneath him before he can take another step. The sound that escapes him when he crumples to the floor is breathless and cut short by pain.
Viktor drops to his knees. His bad leg throbs sharply in protest, but he ignores it. His heart is in his throat as he softly cups Jayce’s face in his hands.
“Jayce…” he murmurs again. What else is there to say? Wetness begins to pool in the soft curve between his thumb and index finger—tears, chasing one another down Jayce’s cheeks—and Viktor swipes his thumb back and forth rather uselessly, trying to wipe them away. “What happened? How…?”
His only answer is a solid weight against his chest, nearly knocking him backward as Jayce slumps against him.
“A-All right…all right…” Viktor soothes. His arms fall into place around Jayce’s violently shaking body and squeeze gently. “Can you tell me if you’re hurt?”
He’d seen the oddly constructed brace on his leg, of course—only a glimpse, but enough to tell that it was strikingly similar to Viktor’s own, and that was a train of thought he didn’t need to follow right now. Not when Jayce is clutching onto him, broad shoulders heaving, pressing himself closer as though he’s trying to crawl inside Viktor and curl up beside his heart.
And Jayce is an emotional person, sure—Viktor’s seen him cry before, but never like this. Never in a way that made him feel cold and helpless. All he can do is hold him, draw a hand up and down his back in a slow mimicry of the casual touches Jayce so often gives him.
Viktor has never been good at comforting people. It’s the sort of thing people like Jayce seem to do as naturally as breathing—and, really, the best Viktor can do is mimic his partner’s effortless care. Jayce is a tactile person, always there with a soothing touch and kind words. Viktor feels as though he’s holding something small and fragile for a moment, and he’s terrified to break it.
“…My head.”
Jayce’s voice is choked with tears and so muffled by Viktor’s shirt that it’s barely audible.
“Your head hurts?” Viktor inquires softly.
Jayce nods. Viktor can feel how tightly his brow is furrowed, the strain in the back of his neck as he rests a hand there. Viktor is deeply familiar with the shapes that pain takes, how muscles knot and stretch against the pulse of it. He thinks he knows this particular pain—for him it starts in his back on bad days and creeps up his spine into his skull.
It’s…strange to be on the other side of it. Suddenly all of Jayce’s infuriating concern, the determination to help that Viktor always finds so grating, make a lot more sense. The knowledge settles uneasily in the pit of his stomach.
“You’d better lie down, then.” Viktor says. He moves to stand up, but Jayce’s grip around his waist tightens. Fearful, disoriented eyes peer up at him through shaggy brown hair, like a pitiful dog seeking shelter from the rain.
“Jayce, I can’t carry you.” Viktor keeps his voice low and patient, carefully untwisting shaky fingers from his clothing. “Come on, it’s not far. Can you make it?”
He feels a pang of guilt when Jayce lurches to his feet, propelled by nothing more than the idea that not doing so might inconvenience Viktor.
He limps heavily as he crosses the room. Something tangled and ugly winds its way between Viktor’s ribs as he walks beside him, one hand resting uselessly on his partner’s lower back.
Jayce shouldn’t have to know what this feels like.
The thought pricks Viktor like a thorn. He watches as his partner’s bad leg buckles, and he slumps forward onto the dingy old sofa in the corner of the lab.
Viktor hastily makes his way across the room, yanking the window shades down as he goes, and rummages through the last drawer he remembers tossing his migraine medication into. There’s a half empty cup of water on the table that’s more than likely lukewarm and a day old. Viktor grabs it too.
Jayce is in the process of curling into the fetal position in the center of the sofa when he returns. Viktor eases down beside him and shakes a few chalky white pills into his palm.
“Take these.” He presses the glass of water into Jayce’s other hand. “For your headache. Slowly…there you go…”
Viktor takes the empty glass back and sets it aside. Jayce’s eyes are red, breaths shuddering through softly parted lips. He sits there motionless for a few moments, silent and overwhelmed, looking at Viktor through the haze of tears in his eyes.
Viktor shifts a little closer. Jayce leans toward him like a flower to the sun, and a moment later he’s huddling against him like a very large puppy, practically in his lap. It’s…admittedly similar enough to a few of Viktor’s more embarrassing fantasies to send a little swooping thrill through his stomach, but he can’t really bring himself to enjoy it. Not when Jayce is hurting.
“Jayce…” Viktor murmurs, keeping his voice soft and even so as not to aggravate his migraine. Silence settles over them as Viktor puzzles over how to put his dozens of questions into words.
On a purely practical level, he needs to figure out what to do when the other Jayce, his Jayce, gets back tomorrow. Would having the two of them in the same room cause some sort of dimension-annihilating paradox? Would they panic and try to kill each other? If this Jayce—presumably an older version—killed the younger, would he simply blink out of existence?
Oh, but then there was the multiverse theory to consider…and the fact that he still has no idea how Jayce managed to time travel in the first place, assuming that’s even what this is—he’s pretty confident in his hypothesis, but his only real point of data is Jayce himself. Viktor forces himself to abandon that train of thought altogether before he develops a migraine of his own.
In the end, he resists the urge to pepper Jayce with questions and simply coalesces them into one all-important, much more pressing one.
“I don’t wish to overwhelm you, but could you tell me what happened?”
Jayce’s breath hitches, and Viktor mentally curses himself. He opens his mouth to retract the question, it’s not worth the distress, but Jayce’s small, shaky voice beats him to it.
“It’s all my fault…”
Viktor lets out a baffled huff.
“I doubt that’s true—“
“Heimerdinger was right.” Jayce’s voice is strangled by tears. “Magic is too d-dangerous Viktor, we never should have put Hextech in the hands of the people. H-He tried to tell us from the beginning, all the signs were there, God, I knew better, but I-I thought—I thought it would be d-different, and I was s-s-so stupid, I ruined everything and I don’t know how to fix it—“
“Easy, Jayce, shhh…” Viktor soothes, smoothing a hand across his cheek. Jayce turns his face into Viktor’s palm, the quivering of his lips like butterfly wings against the delicate skin. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. Never mind all that.”
If it were anyone else, Viktor thinks, he would press until he got an answer. But he can’t bear the feverish misery in Jayce’s voice, or the tears rolling down his cheeks. Answers can wait, he decides. It’s a sentiment he’s expressed only a handful of times in his life.
With his planned line of questioning abandoned, Viktor finds himself mulling over their predicament in the heavy silence that follows. Jayce sniffles, hiding his face in Viktor’s chest. His body is slowly going lax, pressing both of them deeper into the lumpy cushions.
Viktor’s heart is still racing. Must be the leftover adrenaline.
“…I was so cold.” Jayce’s words are slurring a bit. It’s hard to say how much of it is the medication kicking in, and how much is sheer physical exhaustion.
“I know.” Viktor soothes. His heart twinges, thinking of a very small Jayce alone in the snow. “I know you were, but you’re warm now, aren’t you?”
Viktor tightens his hold a little and rests his cheek against the crown of Jayce’s head. His hair smells of smoke and iron.
A sluggish nod against his collarbone. Jayce’s eyes are closed now.
“…Mmhmm…” Jayce nuzzles softly at his throat. Viktor wonders if he can feel the sudden galloping of his heart. “…Wish I told you sooner…”
Viktor’s pulse hammers even harder at that, much to his annoyance. When Jayce doesn’t elaborate, he swallows hard and whispers:
“Told me what?”
But Jayce is dead weight against him, motionless aside from slow, deep breaths, and Viktor mentally shakes himself. People say strange things when they’re nearly delirious.
I wish I told you sooner.
Viktor pushes it to the back of his mind, alongside all the endless worries and questions. Later. He’d get to it later.
When he kisses Jayce’s forehead, it’s faint and uncertain. Then, when he doesn’t wake, Viktor kisses him again. More solidly this time, but reverent, like a moment stolen from a dream.
***
The Mage stands in a field of yellow flowers, leaning on his staff.
It’s quiet up here. The kind of quiet he used to crave, back when the city was still standing and its people filled the streets with noise and chaos and color. Endless distractions that he used to shut out in his single-minded focus.
Now it’s only him, atoning forever in this desolate place. There was a time when all he wanted was to survive, for his failing body to give him a little more time.
Well. If nothing else, he can appreciate the twisted irony.
The Mage closes his eyes. He feels the presence of another soul far below him and knows it’s almost time. A soul he would know anywhere, even beyond the end of the world.
Jayce is in pain. He’s exhausted, stripped bare of everything he thought he knew. The Mage has learned by now that giving in to his own base instincts and pulling Jayce out of that ravine too soon will lead to failure. Or, rather, failure at an earlier point.
It’s just another facet of his torment. The only hope he has of preventing the future he built, the world he destroyed, and he must allow Jayce to suffer with him. Again and again, with no end in sight.
But the Mage is weak. He is weak, he always has been, and deep down at the heart of him lies his greatest weakness, and it wears the face of Jayce Talis. And he can’t bear to watch him suffer any longer.
A brief swirl of Arcane energy opens up a gap just large enough for Jayce to stumble through. The world on the other side is little more than an echo of the one he left, a reflection of the past that will disappear like smoke soon enough. But it’s warm, and it’s home, and for a moment the Mage can feel the echo of a weight falling against his chest. A desperate embrace.
It’s not enough. It won’t ever be enough. But it’s all he has to give.
The Mage turns away. At his feet, a crumbling figure of ivory and gold kneels in supplication. Moss and flowers grow over him, filling in the gaps that time has eaten away.
The Mage cups the statue’s featureless face in his hand. Elsewhere, he feels an echo of himself from a lifetime ago do the same. A thumb stroking across warm flesh instead of cold metal.
A tear rolls down the Mage’s cheek. Like so many times before, he whispers an apology. And like so many times before, he closes his mouth before he has the chance to say anything more. There’s too much of it. Too much, and far too late.
A butterfly meanders through the still air and lands on the statue’s head. Tiny, iridescent wings shimmer in the hazy light. Somewhere Jayce is warm and safe, even if it’s just for a moment. Somewhere, Viktor still knows how to love him.
Perhaps for now, nothing else matters.