Chapter Text
The world shattered around Jayce.
When he awoke, he was… lying in… bed?
He sat up with a start. Where was he? This was… not his house. They had always theorized that there could be other universes out there, that Hextech could, theoretically, transport them to. Was that what had happened? Jayce’s mind was racing.
“Jayce?” a familiar voice asked, and Jayce’s head whipped around.
He hasn’t… changed. Jayce’s mind halted for just a moment before beginning to race even faster after this realization.
Viktor was still… him. No purple all over his body, no scars from carving runes into himself… he was still Viktor.
“Jayce?” Viktor asked again. “Are you alright?”
Jayce knew he should be trying to find a way back to his universe, but… this was his chance. To have a chance. To…
It was selfish, but Jayce made a choice in that moment.
“...yeah.” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just… a bad dream.”
Oh, how he wished that were the truth… but maybe in this universe… it could be.
Viktor looked at him, and Jayce could see that the man didn’t fully believe him. But Viktor dropped it, saying “Well, we might as well get an early start to our day, since we’re both up.”
Jayce tried to learn as much as he could about “his” life in this universe without raising any suspicions. So far, he’d… actually learned a decent amount!
The explosion in his lab had killed a fifteen year old girl from Zaun. Vi. But his Hextech projects were never discovered. He was told to be more careful, to take more safety precautions, but no one had discovered the crystals.
This made him wonder how he’d even met Viktor. Turned out, it wasn’t so different from the universe he’d lived in. Jayce, apparently, had been so overcome with guilt that he had stood in the exact same place and almost took the same step off the same ledge. And the same man had stopped him.
The man had asked the same question. (Jayce didn’t know how he knew this, but he did.) Jayce responded a little differently, but Viktor… he’d seen some of Jayce’s research and approached him.
“You are guilty. About that little girl.”
“How can I not be?”
“Mm.”
“Why are you even here?”
Viktor had smiled at him. “Well, originally, it was to deliver the list of the safety precautions the dean wants you to enact, but…” he looked around. “Seeing all your research… you don’t want something like this to ever happen again. You want to make the world better.”
They weren’t questions. Jayce looked at him, curious.
“What if you used this to make the world better? To make the Undercity better, so little kids like her don’t have to resort to stealing to survive.”
The memories were starting to come back to Jayce. It was strange. He wasn’t from this world, he hadn’t lived this Jayce’s life, but he was gaining those memories.
From there, Viktor and Jayce had gotten Heimerdinger’s support to work on technology to improve the undercity.
So they did.
Instead of spending seven years developing a technology that would destroy them in the end, they developed technology that helped the undercity.
About three years ago, Heimerdinger had left, and gone to the undercity to help the “bright minds of the undercity” and “forge connections through both places' brightest minds”.
Around the same time, Jayce and Viktor had gotten engaged.
Oh. Yeah. That.
Apparently, Viktor and Jayce had been dating for five years now, and got engaged two years ago.
How? Well, Jayce had a vague memory of Heimerdinger viewing one of their experiments and getting his eyebrows exploded off, and then saying “as adorable as your pining is, do something about it so that I don’t get my eyebrows exploded off again.”
This was the hardest thing for Jayce.
He was engaged. To Viktor.
That wasn’t a bad thing! Wait, why wasn’t that a bad thing? Oh. OH CRAP. He was in love with Viktor. That took… a moment to process. Yet, somehow, it didn’t surprise him as much as it should have.
He was in love with Viktor.
His Viktor. But… this wasn’t his Viktor. No. That was only a bad dream. This was his Viktor.
This was his world.
Before was only a bad dream.
This was his universe.
This was his timeline.
This was his life.
This was his Viktor.
Before was only a bad dream.