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Ever since Viktor left, Jayce had been shaken. He barely came home. Slept in the lab and made frequent visits to Viktor's place just in case he returned
Then, one day, he was just gone. For five months. While, Viktor was off who knows where doing who knows what. No one told her anything. And that boy didn't have the habit of letting others know his plans and whereabouts.
It would stress Jayce out to hell and back when Viktor wouldn't show up to the lab for a week. The first time it happened, Jayce thought he died. Ximena and Caitlyn took turns assuring him that Viktor was a grown man able to keep himself safe. And Jayce all but spiralled.
He talked about how, “He's the kind of guy who disregards safety regulations, Ma. I'm scared he's going to get himself killed doing something risky. Like committing a crime in the name of science and then being beat up in an alley.”
“Have you even seen him, Mijo,” Ximena tried at comfort, while her own heart fell two stories, “He'd beat people up with that cane of his. He's so clever. A genius. Reckless as he is, he knows how to handle himself okay?”
But, when Viktor did return and Jayce made him visit Ximena, they both gave him a good talking to. Ximena wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake him into understanding why he needs to inform people about his leaves. But, that wouldn't be polite. Or appropriate. So she let him be. Not without bringing sweet milk to the lab for two weeks, though.
So, Ximena felt like Jayce was being hypocritical. He knows better than to leave his mother in the midst of things. It's why she burst into Caitlyn’s office one night and begged her to find Jayce, only to be told she already had a patrol out for him.
“I don't mean to alarm you,” Caitlyn said, “But, it could be someone...against Hextech. There have been no ransom demands, so I can't confirm a kidnapping. We're doing our best, Ximena. I'm sorry it's not enough.”
She went home that night and made a bowl of Jayce's favourite food, empanadas, and stayed up until three in the morning to fry them to perfection. Just in case Jayce would know she's waiting and he'd come right back.
And when he did finally return, he was different. Colored in the kind of blues he experienced as a kid.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” He held her hand, “But, I’m a part of this. And I promised to end it,” were the last words Jayce said to her after he came back five months later looking like he crawled out of hell itself. He refused to dive into anything about where he was.
Something in his eyes was dimmed. A fuse gone out in a bulb as he left her in the dark. So Ximena left it. It felt like touching a bruise everytime she insisted he tell her something, anything.
A knock at her door relieves Ximena as she rushes to let, who she hopes is Jayce, in. Worry spread like rot into her bones ever since Jayce came back from his disappearance and left again, her fingers still trying to clutch at his sleeve.
Both of her boys are so affected by each other, it’s terribly obvious. But, she hadn't seen or heard from Viktor in so long. They've both committed to taking years of her life.
She opens the door, wiping her palms on her dress, “Mijo-”
It’s Caitlyn. One of her eyes covered in a bandage, a woman with pink hair behind her.
Ximena’s heart drops. Down down down into the earth, the soil, oozing. Soul leaving her body and defecating dread onto the floor. Because, where’s Jayce?
“Caitlyn? Oh, honey are you alright?” She brings her hands to Caitlyn’s shoulders, afraid of agitating the wound on her face. Afraid of much more and afraid to show it.
“Ximena…” Caitlyn says. Blue eyes vacillating. Her voice echoing within the empty walls of the volunteer’s dorm hallway. “I’m sorry, but…” A sniffle, then, “Jayce is- he’s gone.”
The rot hollows out her bones and dissipates them into dust. When she tries to speak, her words land with a rusty quality. Creaky. “Gone?”
She grips the door like a lifeline, “What- What do you mean?”
Caitlyn inhales a serrated breath, “He’s- the battle-” she bites her trembling lip for some semblance of composure. “He’s not coming back. I’m- I’m so sorry.”
Ximena’s knees give out. Her lungs wither, air abandoning her like her son.
Caitlyn and the other woman hold onto her elbows, slowly sinking with her to the wooden floors, “No,” she shakes her head. “No… No, he’s not- he’s not!”
***
She hears them before she sees them. The thumping of footsteps, the giggles. The hiccuping noise of happiness flopping down like a lazy cat around the corner.
The door clicks open and Jayce hurtles in through the door, his father behind him, different frequencies of laughter bumbling alongside them.
“Mama!” Jayce squeals. “Mama, I got a magic wand!”
“Aah, that's great, mi amor!”
Jayce starts making whooshing sounds, pointing it around going, “Abracadabra,” deepening his voice as he claims himself to be a mage come to rescue. Ximena washes her hands off the seasonings stuck to her fingers before greeting Thiago with a raised brow, “You got him the wand?”
“Our little wizard needs one, don't you think?” He leans in, “And doesn't he look cool?”
“Yes, but last month you told me you didn't even have enough time for the plumber. You do this for your kid, not for your wife, eh?”
Thiago's eyes trail after Jayce, who's now jumping down from the couch, only to climb back up and jump down it again. Lord knows what goes on in that child's mind. Thoughts jumping like electrons. Just like his father's.
“I have to go back to Frejhold next week,” he says.
“Again?” Ximena raised her voice. “How many times have I told you to stop taking those forging classes? You think we have the time and money to spare for those? If we did, I'd be a professor at the academy already, instead of being married to you!”
“Lower your voice, Ximena, Jayce is right ther-”
“And he has a right to know! I'm not raising our kid to dilly dally in life.” Her lip trembles, “You're not lying to me, are you? You're not faking these classes to go off with another girl, no?”
“God, Ximena, not this again,” he rolls his eyes, rubbing his eyes with the back of his palm. “Look at me!” He gesticulates to himself, the exhausted sag of his clothes, the stain of sweat permanently living in the threads of his collar.
Ximena swallows the guilt at the accusation, but she's been around women who let things go and let them drag on and on until it carved a ditch between them. She has to be sure. She has to. There's only so many reasons a man stays away from his family, and she needs to cross each of them off, just in case.
“I'm trying out on expanding the Talis business! These classes will help us!”
“This business is keeping you trapped. Your kid barely ever sees you. We don't even go out! The neighbors go out every weekend to some place, and you can barely spare a week in the same house as us!”
“You know that's not true, and I'm done arguing about this with you,” Thiago runs a hand through his hair.
“Sure, walk away! One day I'll die the same way your mother did, out of the stress of a man like you.”
He never came back after that. Wrong place, wrong time. He was coming back with some groceries when he got trapped and fell on the stairs. Hit his head and died. The fucking stairs took her husband away from her. And the last conversation they had was a fight.
Ximena regretted that forever. She'd stay up late into the night looking at the fireplace wanting to dive face first into it. Wanting to burn her tongue off so she could never spit another foul thing again.
But, she stayed for Jayce. Her little boy who missed his father more than ever. Who cried when she did and watched her so closely, she had no choice but to change. To become kinder and softer. To let her bones feel soggy and let them seep through her until they dried themselves back to a sturdy quality.
***
The wooden ceiling comes into focus when she escapes the grogginess of unconsciousness. Ximena slowly sits up onto her elbows with a groan.
Hands at her back usher her into a seated position, “Are you feeling okay? Should I call the nurse back?” Caitlyn asks, delicate red veins have creeped like ivy over her eyes.
She had fainted, Ximena realizes. And the miserable reason ushers back into her.
Her son is dead.
The emptiness within her stirs, churns her stomach into knots and makes her wheeze.
“Tell me it's not true,” she whispers to Caitlyn. “Don't tell me- don't tell me he's-” the words get caught up in her airway.
“I'm sorry,” Caitlyn’s face twists, her face creased with emotion. “I'm so sorry. I- I can't say that.”
Ximena muffles her sobs behind her hands, her spine spasming with the effort to stop, but she can't. “How?” She asks.
“I don't really-” Caitlyn sniffles, “I don't understand it either. But, it's like he was sucked into the arcane. It wasn't the battle that took him, but him and Viktor-”
“Viktor?”
“Yeah,” Caitlyn nods, tears brimming on the edge of falling, “He was a part of this too. After the explosion-” she takes a deep shaky breath. “Sorry, I just gotta-”
Ximena watches Caitlyn try and fail to stop herself from shaking. She winces, when her breath comes back with a hiccupping sob. She wipes the hair away from her face, gulping down a breath.
Ximena would have hugged her, in other times. Caitlyn’s like a daughter to her. But, right now her bones won't stop ringing, screaming, sending chills through her marrow. Her veins feel like flimsy bubble wrap protruding through skin, one wrong press and she'd pop. Leak out of her pores and turn into whatever primordial puddle humanity spawned out of.
“Sorry. Um. After- after the council room was bombed. Viktor died.” Caitlyn says, fiddling with the hem of her sleeves.
“What? What do you mean he-”
“Jayce saved him.” Caitlyn continues tracing the golden embroidery on her sleeve. “Something about the hexcore and shimmer adapting to his injuries, I don't know. We never- we never got to talk about and now-” her jaw clicks.
“The hexcore harnessed the arcane. And it had-” Caitlyn grips the air, “possessed him? I just know that it wasn't Viktor anymore. Jayce knew that and he was blaming himself for it. And I told him to stop that. I told him that he was just saving him and he didn't know any better. But, apparently Viktot had warned him before. And now he was going through with that promise.”
Caitlyn grabs Ximena's hand like a lifeline, “I swear I didn't know this was going to happen, Ximena- if I did- I'd never have-”
It feels like throwing up in reverse; this information. Like a hundred wet lungs shoved down her throat and expanded with every breath, bulging out of her clogged throat.
Ximena clasps Caitlyn’s hand back, “Can I see them?” She asks. Her voice an ache of a thing strung together by devastation. She doesn't want to see their faces sunken and soft. Devoid of the light of the kind of life and passion those two stirred in one another.
“There's no body,” Caitlyn exhales the words and Ximena wishes she misheard it. But, it was clear as day. There could be no other meaning to what the walls of this infirmary absorbed and rebounded back to her.
“What do you mean?” Ximenas grabs Caitlyn’s shoulders to face her. “What do you mean?”
“He-” she gasps for the next sentence, “They got sucked into the arcane. I don't know either, but we've asked the academy researchers to figure out something.”
“I can't bury them?”
It's like Jayce and Viktor have been erased. Extracted. Exiled from the very world they wanted to save. Her boys will get no safe space to sleep.
Jayce has always been afraid of the cold winds and now he's turned into one. Just a breeze. Just a burn left after the cough.
Viktor would hate that, Ximena thinks. For someone so reserved, he was loud. He wanted to leave a mark. He wanted people to know. To know him and their work and the people of the Undercity.
Caitlyn holds out her hand, Jayce's crystal in it. “This was all that was left behind.”
Ximena holds the cold, muted blue thing. And she remembers. They'd been returning from picking up Thiago's things in Frejhold when a blizzard hit. Everything was destroyed but Ximena held onto Jayce's little hand until hers lost feeling. Whispered assurances until she passed out.
When she woke up, Jayce was clutching the crystal, crying his eyes out and rambling about what happened. He asked if she was okay, little face morphing into concern. Then he talked about the mage, then asked about her fingers, then talked about the colors in the ‘portal.’
This was all that was left of him. An absence of magic.
***
Ximena packs up her things and is escorted home by Caitlyn. Just before she leaves, she places an envelope in Ximena's hand, “We all wrote a letter before we left. This is his.”
Ximena doesn't want to read it. She doesn't want to know what he hasn't been able to say to her face. She wants to throw up.
Instead, she clutches it to her chest, sending Caitlyn off with a wordless goodbye.
When Ximena reads the letter. The sobs stick like glue in her throat, clinging to her vocal chords. This wasn't how it was supposed to end for them. She had never imagined such a tragedy to befall them. Never thought they'd become a goddamn cautionary tale.
But, at least they're together. God, at least they're together.
Hi Ma,
I’m sorry you're reading this and that it's all I’m leaving you. But, know I’m content. You could hate me for it, but I know you won’t.
I did a lot of wrong things. Things that ventured farther from not writing to you often. I’m sorry. You raised me to be better. I'm sorry.
I’m sorry I went to fight knowing I wouldn’t come back. I needed to fix it. I started this because I was selfish and I couldn't let go of Vik - desperate to be good. And someone I love once said, “In pursuit of great, we failed to do good.”
So, I wanted this to also be my will. I’m sorry, I don’t have much time to write it separately, Ma. I have to go soon.
But, if hextech survives. Destroy it. It may be magic, but it’s the ruination of humanity. I’ve left my notes on its anomalies as evidence in my notebook. It’s in my room.
And Viktor was a victim of it. The hexcore possessed his mind and used him as a vessel for its way. He told me to destroy it before. And instead, I used it to change him. You could say it helped him live, but Viktor died that day in the bombing. I’m sorry I shouldn’t have done that.
Don't worry about me too much, okay? Think of me sometimes, but forget me other times. I think you deserve that after the mess I've put you through. With the whole almost getting exiled thing. And then disappearing. I couldn't really explain I was in a different dimension in such a short time.
I love you, Ma. More than you could ever know. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you this face to face. I couldn’t watch your heart break. I love you.
-Your son,
Jayce
***
When Ximena makes her way to Jayce's room, she sees the mess all about it. Papers strewn across the bed, a pile of books on his desk beside the leather bound journals he'd honed his mind into ever since a therapist suggested it. She recalls how bereft he'd become at seventeen. When kids his age stopped believing in the magic that brought them to safety.
He barely had any friends, except Caitlyn, who he tutored for extra credit when he applied to the Academy.
He'd been quiet, Ximena had noticed. But, she knows how Jayce needs to mop up the grooves of his thoughts so he doesn't trip on them when he speaks. Her little boy has always been tongue tied. His nerves wrapped around him and burned too easily.
So, she was going to give him some space. But, he hadn't had a proper dinner in a week. And even then, she had to yell at him until he did.
The knock on his bedroom door is answered with silence. She tries again, “Jayce?” He doesn't answer. Something is wrong, Ximena knows this. Something is very very wrong.
When she steps inside, the bathroom door is open, fluorescent light vomiting bleach onto the carpet. In the silence, her heart thumping louder. The soft carpet that came with the house, its fluff matted now, muffled her steps.
Briefly, out of self preservation, she thinks she should call out and tell Jayce to vacuum it. Or to clean his room and pick up the screws and coils and clothes scattered across the floor like impulses.
She peaks over into the bathroom and sees Jayce's reflection. He's just staring at himself, eyes hollow. The bags under his eyes looked sharper with the dimming tube light hanging above the mirror. He's just looking. Rooted in place. Ximena almost whips her head around to look for his thoughts, they always run around like horses with fire lit underneath their asses.
She's been staring for one stretch of an elastic second when it snaps away as Jayce's eyes snap to hers.
“Ma?” His face changes in motion as he steps out the bathroom. “Why are you in my room? You didn't knock?”
He closes the light and leaves that sharp emptiness of an expression behind the bathroom door. “I told you to knock!” His hands keep tugging his sleeves over his knuckles, his cuff with the crystal lying across the room on his desk.
“What were you doing?” Ximena asks, lips pursed, a prayer behind her teeth.
“Nothing? I was just thinking?” His eyes darted between his hands to behind her to finally, her eyes. “Why are you in my room, Ma?”
“I came to call you down for dinner,” she stalls, waiting for the courage to plow further. Not knowing what to ask and how to say it.
“I'm- I'm not going to eat,” he sighs. “I'm full.”
“But, you didn't even have breakfast, mijo, you ne-”
“I'm not hungry, Mama,” he grinds the words between his teeth. Mouth like a pestle. “Can you leave my room now?”
Jayce walks past Ximena to his desk, the one they took from his father's study in their old house. The notches from his tools and the engraving of names scratched in by a child who just learnt to spell his own name.
Ximena almost hears Thiago's ‘dad voice’ as he chases Jayce away from the tools. He'd act so stern just to melt into laughter when Jayce would grin that grubby, gap toothed smile.
“Tudo bem?” Ximenas asks, all her concern made clear in the language she was born to.
She hopes Jayce knows she'd unravel his pain like the yarn she uses to knit him his winter scarves. The ones he finds to be warmer and softer than anything found in Piltover's gold-white streets.
“I'm fine. Mama.”
He wasn't fine. She knew that and let his pain linger until it clung to him like mold and drove him to an edge he almost steered off of.
An edge he can't come back from now. Ximena digs her nails into his bedsheets. Perfectly tucked under the mattress like Jayce's existence.
Would she find a piece of him in the old bedframe? A leftover candy wrapper from when he was eleven years old and discovered Piltovan sweets. A lonely coil from an invention he forgot about.
***
Ximena stands among the crowd, feeling less lonely for the worst of reasons. All of these people in this crowd lost someone they loved. People from Zaun, from Piltover, from Noxus. Mothers, daughters, sons and siblings. Friends and lovers. All of them collected on the bridge, the name of their lost ones folded into pieces of paper they place into a tray.
This is what her boys died for. Togetherness. Her heart beats against her breast bone, begging to see Jayce and Viktor here. Have them see their dream come true.
Ximena wrote both of their names on one piece of paper and placed it onto the piling tower of small notes.
Silent tears stream down her face. A group of people in a far corner sing a song in a language she doesn't know. But, the lilt of the words, the stretch of the syllables, the melody of their music is all achingly familiar. It's grief.
Caitlyn and Vi, her girlfriend, as Ximena only just found out, stand further into the crowd. Vi lost her sister in the battle. They've wrapped their arms around each other, staring at the ashes of burnt names sparking and floating towards the stars.
Ximena hopes the wind carries farther than the world she's tethered to for a few more years.