All that I am

by FatherBroken

Summary:

The distant look in the Mage’s eyes snapped to the gap of the roof, to the near-silent tuttering of other, watchful machines down below. “No, it doesn’t matter. You will be safe up here. It should be simple enough, to lay protective wards into the earth of the tower. I won’t let anything happen to you,” he vowed.

Promises held no impetus in this world, where nothing happened, nothing changed.

The Machine reset its position on its knees and replaced its hands on the weapon of a fallen era. I can’t stop you from making useless promises, can I?

Somehow, without doing anything, the Machine had gained a visitor and protector.

Notes:

• Translation into Español available: Todo lo que soy by hcxwuv

Chapter 1: I'm on my own, remember me

Summary:

“Have I ever told you how I fear the blizzards, Jayce?”

Notes:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

 

-from ”Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

“Have I ever told you how I fear the blizzards, Jayce?”

‘Jayce.’ The Machine focused on the cloaked man. It hadn’t heard that name called upon it in...some time. Hadn’t heard much of anything, really, other than the wind. No other voice but the Herald’s, which had gone to sleep after the end of Evolution.

“Every time I jump to a different universe,” the new voice continued, walking over dirt and discolored floor with the help of his staff, “I have to find you there, somewhere. You are so small, and so tired from the long trek through the mountains, that your voice barely cuts through the winds. I hear you, still. I always find you in time. The rune guides me, unfailing, to you. And yet I still fear the blizzard.” 

It — the thing so fondly being called ‘Jayce’ by the man — had no eyes. Did not need eyes, for it was perfect, and it knew the smile blooming on the Mage’s face anyway. 

“Isn't that wondrous?”

The descriptor held no logical shape. Wonder was a human emotion. To know wonder was to also know deception, disappointment, scorn. 

A perfect being had no need for those things. 

“I visited a dozen worlds today,” the man continued, unconcerned for the fault in his emotional logic. “In the last one, I believe, you were traveling with your father, instead of your mother. You have his sense of curiosity, and his eyes. Did you know?”

The Machine...did know this. At one point. At one time. Eyes the same color and shape as its progenitor’s. There was no reason to be amazed at the statistical likelihood of genetic heritage.

With the light of the sun intensifying over the horizon, the cloaked man closed his eyes — colored amber with flecks of gray and pink, the Machine categorized. He seemed to bask in the rays. Drawn to their warmth like a heliotropic flower. Many such species of florae disappeared with the Herald’s final leap of Evolution: common daisies, poppies, sunflowers, morning glories, they all failed to evolve into Part of the Whole.

Because the Machine succeeded in its transformation, it did not waste any such energy. It remained still as stone, its hands clenched upon the handle of the great hammer, a once proud symbol of progress and innovation. False attempts, the floundering of blind men to the true finality of progress.

“Do you remember the blizzard, Jayce?”

I do.

The blizzard had been a harrowing climb. Legs, once so small and unaccustomed to crossing so long a distance, had ached for days after rescue. During the storm, there hadn’t been any time to dwell on the pain and exhaustion. Fear had pushed them forward, until mother collapsed in the snow. 

The voice of a child could not penetrate through the whipping winds. It was frail, weak, cracked from hours of breathing and coughing in the chill. The child should have died, then. Death afflicted all flawed beings. 

And yet, the voice of the child had carried far enough to reach someone.

The Mage.

“I am...glad to meet you there, every time,” the Mage said, dressed in the same light robes of the Machine’s memory. It’s you, it recognized, my once savior. He swept careful fingers through the moss clinging to the Machine’s lower immobile limbs. “Everywhen.”

 

---

 

The Mage stayed for hours and days at a time.

Often he knelt beside the Machine, “Just for a moment, to rest my old bones,” passing the time with the inconsistency of a broken clock. He would sit, empty-handed save for his ever-present staff, and tell of his travels.

Other times, he would bring trinkets, for longer periods of wait. Rune stones, gears, half-finished tokens. He would show them to the Machine, piece the trinkets together, and then take them apart. Just for the idle amusement the action granted him.

The Machine did not understand, but it listened all the same.

“This I learned to make from a young girl from Zaun, clever and talented in all realities.” The animal-shaped contraption clinked and banged tiny cymbals together. “You would hate the terrible things she’s been capable of with Hextech.”

I do not know hate, it didn’t say. No need to defend its flawlessness. It simply was. Hate, love, apathy, all those impurities had been cleansed from its mind and body.

“Oh, but don’t be upset.” Did the Mage not understand? It was perfect, beyond emotion, beyond attachment, it wasn’t upset— “Have I told you? How in some universes, she is your pupil at the academy? So much destructive force, capable of good under the right set of circumstances. It is her ingenuity and heart which often unites Piltover and Zaun. You...admire her brilliance, given the possibility.”

Wound up and set, the small contraption bobbed and tripped over itself a mere foot’s distance away. The Machine could not envision how this inventor girl could evoke its admiration. There was no finesse to the creation. No purpose apparent, except to produce a distracting amount of noise.

The Mage laughed from it. It was not a mocking sound. His lips curved upwards into a wide, teeth-shining grin, the purpose of which the Machine couldn’t figure out.

With a wave of rune-etched hands, the toy creation righted itself to walk another foot. It stopped before the Machine, small cymbals ringing. Clacked. Burst explosively. Glitter smoked from its head to rain over the dilapidated grand roof and color the vast rows of chrysalis and membrane in pink hues.

It’s not very intelligent, or pretty, the Machine decided. Not very pretty at all. Clever? Sure, but a ridiculous use of someone’s ‘brilliance’.

The Mage straightened and stood. Short peels of his previous laugh still affected his voice when he asked, “Would you watch the little thing for me, Jayce? I must see to more worlds again.”

Strangely, the Machine found itself inquiring, When will you return? A question that could not be heard, for the Mage was not Part of the Whole. Neither was It, not exactly, not like the Rest. 

It didn’t sleep like the Rest.

Something inside its left wrist twanged, like a cord pulled taut.

The Machine was different. It knelt here, above the world, watching, waiting, always waiting for—

It no longer knew the thing it waited for, but the reason behind it must be born of importance. So it did not truly matter when the Mage would return, because the Machine would be here to welcome him back. For tomorrow. For a year. For a centennium. It would wait.

The Machine still inquired — When will you return? — to a man who could not listen, could not see what it saw behind hollowed eye shells.

Instead, the Mage answered, “I will bring you something of yours next. Perhaps that will be appreciated better.”

His staff rose. Circles drew themselves out of air. Runes pulsed into being. The magic caressing the Machine’s outer shell swelled as it always had, protectively, from inside a blizzard. Its wrist burned from the inside.

Then, in just a stolen sliver of time, Mage left in a wild spectacle of blue. 

 

---

 

The Machine waited.

Now and again, other machines roamed the lower levels of the ruined Hexgate tower. No part of it barred them from entry, not even the destruction beaten out of its facade. The world belonged to them, the graceful, clockwork specters that moved wherever the Whole took them. 

Not that they had reason to move often.

The Machine observed the lower levels through a cracked gap in the floor. It waited. The slightest vibrations of movement let it know of their approach. If they got close enough, whispers of the Whole reached it — One of us — Strange — Resisting — Part of the Whole — in an inviting mantra.

Today the whispers grew louder. Closer. They had never climbed to its platform before, but it could sense the vibrations strengthening along the tower. The clamber of metal-encased limbs over stone and broken framework. More erratic than usual. 

One of us — Low, along the curve of the roof, husks of once-people clawed their way to the surface. Their bodies gleamed in the faint light of the moon. Two, at first. Then six. Then, too many to bother counting. It didn’t matter how many came. They were all One — One of us? Strange. Resisting — As the figures observed the Machine silently, it observed them in return, with wariness.

Webs of hollow points marked them everywhere, head, torsos, limbs, their distinguished silhouettes hacked away. It was as if their bodies were falling apart at the seams, but how could the perfect union of organic matter and Hex technology unravel like...like sugar in water?

Twitching, they approached the lone sentinel atop the world. It did not move. Even as gold-tinged hands wrapped around its frayed inorganic body, as they tightened and tugged harshly, as the whispers became shouts and screams of Resisting, Resisting, as something struck hard at its arms, and the heat kindling inside its wrist prickled, crawled insect-like all over, it waited. It needed to wait. 

Just as its grip was being pried away from the hammer’s handle, the sky exploded.

The heat inside its arm swelled into a fire. Every invasive touch suddenly lifted away, and the Machine quickly raised its head to inspect the hot-burn of the limb, to find — nothing wrong. Unblemished smoothness, it was.

The others were not so lucky, as waves of arcane magic battered their hovering still forms. Metal peeled away in violent bursts, to reveal organically-patterned layers of under-skin. Like flaying a creature down to muscle fat.

The sky shimmered. Magic runes wrapped around each machine. With a final glow, they were sent flying, careening off the curve of the edge.

The sound of a staff thumping the floor drew its attention. 

“Are you alright, Jayce?”

Of course it was fine. It could not be wounded or hurt. Even under the pressure of a whole sea couldn’t crush its body. 

And yet, only when the Mage — his glowing eyes brimming with power and surety, and concern — set his hand on the Machine’s shoulder did the tension of its mechanical form release. 

“They meant to tear you apart. Have they always...?” The distant look in the Mage’s eyes snapped to the gap of the roof, to the near-silent tuttering of other, watchful machines down below. “No, it doesn’t matter. You will be safe up here. It should be simple enough, to lay protective wards into the earth of the tower. I won’t let anything happen to you,” he vowed. 

Promises held no impetus in this world, where nothing happened, nothing changed.

The Machine reset its position on its knees and replaced its hands on the weapon of a fallen era. I can’t stop you from making useless promises, can I?

Somehow, without doing anything, the Machine had gained a visitor and protector.

The Mage huffed a sigh, shook his head and sat with the unbeing. Power still thrummed between them. The staff remained hovering upright in place, a fancy trick. “You are probably thinking I’m being ridiculous, saying that,” he acknowledged, as he began drawing runes in a wide circle around the Machine’s chosen waiting spot.

No, I think you’re being human. 

And ridiculous.

 

---

 

After laying down an arcane shield at the tower base where the Hex vault cut into the bone of the city, the Mage left, again. 

The Machine waited. Though it had been remade in perfect form, it didn’t track the passage of time when alone. It simply waited. For how long, it didn’t bother to know. Only when a familiar white robe reappeared in its fullsight did it realize the two weeks spent in meditative tranquility.

Only when the Mage returned, did it realize it missed the sound of his voice.

“Do you remember, Jayce, how we changed the world with this?”

That was something the Mage always did. Speak as if their conversation had only paused for a breath. Two weeks, come and gone, and the Mage knelt beside it as he made the custom to, with his staff poised magically on the roof, and his hands brushing away the residue of persistent nature claiming the Machine’s form. As if no time had passed at all.

Today, the Mage held something preciously in his palm. A glowing, smooth marble, so blue it tinted the Mage’s skin in pale powdery colors. A Hex Gemstone.

“It was your dream to give this to the world. Magic and science, harnessed for good.”

Hextech could neither be good nor evil. A tool does not bear the defects of morality. Only the hand that wields it can deliver the judgment.

The gem rolled inside the Mage’s palm, between fore and middle finger, then over knuckle and the back of his hand. Before it fell and pulsed with unbridled power, the Mage caught it in an effortless twist of his wrist. Static danced coyly over the gem’s surface.

The familiarity he showed with it eased the strange urgency that awoke inside the Machine’s shell, to angle its hollow head toward its light. To track the gem’s movement. Like a heliotropic flower, facing towards the sun. 

“Ah, I knew you'd appreciate this more. You are quite predictable sometimes, but...then again, a man who signs every page of his own journal would spare any opportunity to admire his own work.”

I am not that narcissistic.

As if knowing he had annoyed the Machine, the Mage laughed. At it. What a rude human. He ought to speak more, laugh less. Words could be made sense of.

Even more rudely, the Mage let the Hexgem finally drop, the impact vibrating briefly through the Machine’s body, before everything stilled — dusty wind, living breath, motes and moss — and lifted.

Fixed into place by hammer and overgrown membranes, the magic did no such effect on the Machine. Rather, it observed with inorganic eyes as the Mage manipulated wind and breath and motes beneath his airborne feet. The air turned blue with runes. Cloth loosened, long strands of hair fanned out like water waves, as he floated above the Machine, serene. 

A voice of a different time, born of memory, rose out and asked, You used to love that weightlessness, didn't you?

Blinking was not possible, not practical, and neither was memory. And yet, the Machine’s vision flickered behind eyelids that weren’t there. To a braced leg. Flickered, to a roomful of equations, half-finished tests, testing, hoping it worked. They floated above the machine, serene.

Over the broken up remnants of the Hexgate, there was no braced leg. When the gem’s gravitational suspense ended, the Mage did not buckle and fall under his own weight. Years of practice, or, fixing the imperfection? What had the Mage done to correct the osseous flaw of his leg? (You were never broken—) The Machine couldn't recall the transition of broken — But you were never broken — to fixed. Couldn't recall the name that came with the vision.

What was the man's name? It kept...slipping through his fingers. Slipping away—

Soft, white fabric draped on the Machine’s left side, where chrysalis webs stained the Mage’s hood in wild pink-teal-greens. He sat so close, that the faint heat of his human frame misted the Machine’s face. 

Staring at the gem, he said, “I would leave this with you...but, an old friend would call such a suggestion too dangerous, too risky.”

Something deep inside its husk mind persisted in it to think, Leave it anyway. You’re not a rule follower.

“You’d say to leave it anyway, wouldn't you? As remembrance...or curiosity?”

Was that why? The Machine’s thoughts whirred and paused like never before. (Like how they used to, before... Before. What was the name?) It did not have need for remembering anything. Nor was curiosity useful to a being so fully realized.

If you leave it, you would have a better reason to return, than misplaced affection.

The Mage could not hear its words. He wasn’t Part of the Whole. He could be, but the odd protective influence of the arcane on his person must be shielding him from absolute Evolution. It was as if the Herald’s work had already transformed him, branded him a complete being. Or so did the magic clinging to him trick.

“The responsible thing would be to return it. But,” the Mage whispered in a conspiring voice, “would you ever reprimand me?”

When have I ever stopped you? it thought rather indulgently.

Carefully, the gem was inserted into the core of the hammer, replacing the older one. The Mage twirled that one a few times, before slipping it within the safer confines of his robe, in a pocket, somewhere. 

He gave the Machine a conspiring wink.

“Keep it safe for us, Jayce.”

 

---

 

The Mage did not always come in relative time.

The Machine could surmise that the Mage wished to. To maintain an order of sequence, an expectation of patterns within the world carved to perfection. Patterns were...appreciated. It did not matter much, to the Machine, so long as the Mage spoke to it of the different timelines he had seen, or showed it another gift.

Time did not matter much, while he was away.

It was only when he returned that the Machine felt it.

Years. Moss and grit had climbed over the tower to its legs and torso, into a blanket of vegetative growth. Harmless insects buzzed and fluttered here and there. They lived to an age, laid children, died, and then those children lived for an age, laid their own children, to die themselves. 

Years. The hammer’s smooth headpiece defected into something near foreign to its original use. The borrowed Hex Gemstone at its core, long unused, had hummed and smoldered into a white-hot light. It didn’t remember its purpose.

Years. The perfect shell of a once mortal body did not corrode, exactly, but its surface reflected more and more opaquely, more hollow. Gold emerged through the gaps like blood scars. Stubborn new life clung to its frame, in greens, teals, coral reds. Flower buds that bloomed in the morning and whose faces followed after the sun, again and again. 

Years, that the Machine was not privy to acknowledging, until the Mage reappeared above the sky to it.

“Jayce.”

It could never quite associate itself with the name. In the Mage’s long absence, it had forgotten the word. It didn't matter so much, if no one was there to call it.

The Mage stepped toward it, slowly. Again, he called, “Jayce,” as if to remind himself of the word, too. The strange catch in the Mage’s breath grew rapid, louder, the closer he drew. “Oh, I’ve been gone for longer than I intended to, haven't I?”

The Machine could not fathom what it was like, to travel between realities like the Mage did. It could not picture the equations, nor the experimental models of runes and science to make such magic possible. It might as well have been a day, to the Mage, while the city ruins withered away, and the other Machine forms continued sleeping in dreamless stasis, waiting. Waiting.

Always waiting. 

Though it shouldn't be possible, the Machine tired of waiting. Why? Nothing ever happened. Nothing ever would happen. Only the Mage when he came, when he stayed, and when he left. 

And he’d been gone. The Machine finally saw and realized its own disrepair, the gap points that would never fill in, the emptiness of its body, the nothingness. You were gone. You were gone and nothing happened. Nothing. Nothing. I am nothing—

It did not expect the Mage to fall to his knees in front of it, on the other side of the hammer’s fixated rest. It should not expect anything at all, so why did the fallen hood and sad amber eyes stir a terrible hum through its husk body?

“You’re still in there...aren't you?” Wetness glistened out of tear ducts — what a wasteful use of water, how biologically contradictory. “Aren’t you? Please. Jayce.” A trembling hand removed the few traces of old dirt clouding the Machine’s blank eyes. It did not need that. It could see just fine. “Please tell me you're here with me. Tell me. Please—”

Why couldn't it speak? Its flesh had been remade into perfection. Just as the Herald remade humanity into something without flaw, without pain, without end.

But why can’t I speak? Why can’t I speak to him? Am I not perfect?

It could only bow its head to touch the Mage’s. 

The touch drew a shuddering wet breath. Thin hands clung to the line of its jaw. As if afraid the Machine would vanish, if he let go.

“Did...did I ever tell you, how there are timelines where Hextech is never made? I search for you in the blizzard, but you are not there. You were never there. I still search. For days, sometimes. Just to...to make sure I didn't miss you.”

The Mage bore those blizzards, for days? Searching for me?

But you're afraid of the blizzards. The being it was now wouldn't suffer in a blizzard. It wouldn't even care, wouldn't feel the blistering cold, or numbness, or fear. Yet the knowledge that the Mage faced it so often, for so long, it agitated something in the Machine. But you’re afraid of the blizzards.

Warm, firm hands cradled the Machine’s head. They seemed to sink deeper without moving or squeezing any further. Strange, familiar-unfamiliar magic strands gripped the Machine from the inside, where the vestige of its pruned humanity hung suspended in a vast, everlasting astral plane.

Something threaded into the filament of its wrist shivered blue-cold.

“Yes, I am afraid,” he spoke, both within and around its being. “And I will still go there to find you, in every lifetime. No distance will be too great for me to cross, I will save you. I promise. I promised. I will never give up on you.”

It was the easiest thing in the world, to believe him.

 

---

 

This time around, the Mage remained. 

He had no gifts or trinkets to share, as if having planned to only linger a short moment, and yet he stayed. He had something far better to offer than inconsequential objects anyway, in the Machine’s fair estimation: words. Words that were not of the nothingness, of the vast plane, neither repetitive nor disappointing. 

And so, this time around, they established a dependable routine.

The Mage would speak of his journeys, which were evocative in their uniqueness, and the Machine would listen.

“There’s a world where music flows through magical veins and people invoke its power with instruments.”

He would card careful fingers over the foliage overwhelming the Machine’s form, cleaning up some of the worst without creating more cracks, and the Machine would analyze the pattern of affectionate occurrences.

“There’s a world where everything is the same, except the planet spins backwards.”

Usually, the affections became more frequent when the Mage felt distressed to remember his need to travel through the worlds, yet delayed himself on excuses. 

For a man who has all the time in the world, literally, you act like it's always running out. Always running.

“There’s a world where your family settles and lives in Zaun, while mine is born into the Piltover guilds.”

Human flaws. The Machine could not blame him for them, any more than one could blame vegetation for regrowing. Even as the days abnormally collected into weeks, the stories never ceased to capture the Machine’s attention, mostly because of how absurdly so many started. 

“There’s a world where we kiss at the two-hundredth anniversary speech of Progress Day. It upsets the councilors, but only because we distracted attention away from the inventions—”

Then suddenly, one day, the Mage stood and told it, “I will be back soon,” and blinked away. 

The Machine did not appreciate this sudden change in routine.

You’re always running where I can’t follow, it complained to no one. 

And, of course, it waited.

Eventually, the Mage informed the reason for the shift in his focus.

“Something’s different. I sense you here, and I sense you...away. Two separate points in space and time, converging. Do you not feel the paradox?”

Fire and cold twisted in the Machine’s left arm. Whatever had dug beneath its metallic shell all those years ago, reached toward somewhere, down in the Undercity. 

“I have to see,” and, in an anxious fit of energy that summoned butterflies from the overgrowth, the Mage left.

Again. 

The Machine waited. It knew well how to wait. Curiously, when the Mage returned, he did not bring tales of otherworlds, but spoke in entangled, confused utterances.

“You’re broken, Jayce. Should I help you?” The Mage had lowered himself to the ground, staining his robe further in the membranes that surrounded the hammer. He laid on his side, his eyes trained on the horizon. The angle hid his face from the Machine, though it could hear the disquiet in his voice. “If you fall, if you’re alone in a world without kindness or love, who will help you?”

I haven’t fallen. I’m right here. And I’m not alone, I have you.

The Mage’s hand went to carefully lay atop the Machine’s, ever locked around the hammer’s handle. The press of his nimble fingers fit perfectly in some gaps, but less comfortably on the whole. The Mage's were entirely flesh, after all. Not compatible with it. Not perfect.

“It is not the blizzard, but I promised. I... Where have you gone?”

I’m here. Have your flawed human eyes gone bad so soon? The Mage was not making sense. 

With him present, the Machine could understand the passing of days better. Days. Weeks. He’d mutter, “You are suffering,” draw the outline of protection runes at nightfall. And then, in the morning, he paced the edge of the cracked platform and mutter again, “You are strong enough to understand now, to climb out, climb out.”

I don’t understand anything coming out of your lips. You...confound me.

The lack of knowledge should alert it more. It should upset it.

No, it shouldn’t. Nothing upsets me. Knowledge is a summit without satisfaction.  

And yet, it wanted to know. What a troubling fault, to...want something.

What is this? I’m not as perfect as I once was. 

Was it ever? A perfect being did not lack knowledge. It also did not have need to learn, to expound on curiosities. On concerns.

The Mage’s distraught questions concerned it.

“Do you think it is not too much? To wait for you for once?”

I don’t know. I don’t think. A pause, as it watched the Mage worry in the silence. I don’t think, but maybe I’d be relieved. Someone else doing the waiting for once.

“Would you know where to find me?”

No, how could I know somewhere I have not ventured to? But I would recognize you anywhere. The world is a finite plane of reality. It thought, Yes, maybe I could.

The Mage stood beside it, staff patting the moss-grown ground. For some reason, the Machine got the sense he was nervous. 

“It is strange. I find myself with so many important things to say, and yet I cannot find...all the words.”

It is not strange. I wait here for something I’ve forgotten. We do strange things.

“What would comfort you to hear me say?”

I don’t know. The thrum inside its wrist beat like a heart as the Mage laid a hand on its arm. Anything. Anything would do.

Something was building inside of it. The thrum. The heat. It beat harder against its chassis, with every hour that passed. Like anticipation. 

Vibrations echoed over the roof. But it wasn’t the other machines. It couldn’t be, because the Mage warded the tower. 

A man walked toward them.

A real flesh-and-blood man. Dressed in weathered clothes, perfumed in blood and infection. A brace on one of his legs — Brace design finished, something to support the adjustments of a new cane, “Please, don’t feel obligated to accept it, I just wanted to help any way I could.” — He reached a good height, even hunched in his careful walking. Even dropping to his knees hard before the hammer’s other side. 

There was something about the man. Like, staring into a warped mirror, staring back. His shoulders wielded gravitas — Woman in gold and silks taught him how to do that — and his face, rough-shaped and bearded, desperately needed a trim — “It might look good on you,” the Mage told him. No, not the Mage, the young man he used to be, the broken one—(But you were never broken)—

“This is where it all started, isn’t it?” The man was wracked with exhaustion, as he spoke. “The end of Piltover.”

This is where humanity concluded its chapter, the Machine did not say. Couldn’t. 

The rune stone banded to a left wrist was held tighter by the man. “Why did you ever give me this?” Emotionally, desperately, “Why?”

The Machine could not pity. Neither could it provide understanding. Instead, it observed as the Mage turned to him, and shrunk the distance in a few measured steps. 

The recognition visible in the man’s face was peculiar. Recognition? — “You’re my partner.” Fear. Connection. A response, “Our paths diverged long ago.” — A familiar-unfamiliar name hit him from within a bittersweet memory. ‘Goodbye, Jayce.’

This man was Jayce. A Jayce that thrummed with pain, hunger, fear. Hopelessness. Detrimental human emotions and conditions. Still Jayce, different from the Machine so fondly named after him.

New energy emanated from the Mage’s body. His own likeness colored with relief, with fondness and trust. “I thought I could bring an end to the world’s suffering.”

Thought. But you did. Didn’t you? There is no suffering. The Herald made sure. A feeling, tangled in memory, quartered in time, broke through. Of the Herald binding them all to the Whole. Betrayal and dismay, talking, talking, but nothing worked. The Herald wouldn’t listen anymore. Couldn’t. The face of the Mage had split in two. No eyes, no ears, no heart — “I won’t fail,” he vowed — a husk of a man left on its knees for the rest of eternity, waiting for—

What have I been waiting for?

“When every equation was solved...” Haven’t I been here before? Was I too late? “All that remained were—”

—fields of dreamless solitude.

Alone. 

There was no suffering. No pain. No flaws. No love. 

No joy. Trinkets and baubles, colors, noisy cymbals. No curiosity. ‘You have his sense of curiosity, and his eyes.’ No more fear. No more relief. No more— 

“Viktor,” the man named Jayce breathed, and—

— “I don’t even know your name,” which was, ridiculous! This man, this stranger who knew nothing of his life, just saved him from ending it all, and he didn’t even know his name. 

“It’s Viktor.” —

You. 

He realized the Word for what he’d been waiting for, the instant it spilled from the man named Jayce’s lips.  

I forgot, it was always You. 

Jayce breathed faster, as he listened to wisened words continue, “There is no prize to perfection. Only an end to pursuit.”

Didn’t they used to spend days and nights pouring over plans to change the world? Frustrated when Hex tests went wrong, but determined to find a solution? So many hours lost, headaches and back cramps suffered, meals skipped, all for the pride in seeing their work finally bear fruit. The excitement in completely stabilizing their first Hex gem. Trepidation, at being denied their presentation. Pursuit, after pursuit, after the next, never an end to it.

But Jayce had reached the end of pursuit. He’d come into perfection. Died for the Machine to be born in his place.

(Not perfect. It was never perfect. Everything’s gone wrong. I feel—)

The prickle of sensation in its left wrist spread to its elbow. It had to focus. Like Jayce, listening in wonder to the Mage, to Viktor. “In all timelines, in all possibilities—”

Only Viktor could show him this. How far it had come, how much it’d given up. Did I give up? Did I have a choice? Hadn’t I fought? It would’ve made sense, to fight. The hammer, it had been wielded to the bitter end. Hadn’t I done enough? But, I failed. I didn’t show you. I failed—

The Mage settled his hand on the Machine’s shoulder.

A sudden presence emerged within it, gentle. More gentle than the magic which wisped around it, upon every return. ‘Will you relinquish it, Jayce?’ the presence asked, not demanded.

The swelling turmoil in its mind quieted. 

I’ve been waiting for you for so long. But you'd been waiting for me, too. Waiting for me to remember.

“I won’t fail,” the Jayce vowed.

Chapter 2: you know you’re in my heart

Summary:

In this timeline, Jayce did fail.

Notes:

COOPER: You’re a scientist, Brand -

BRAND: I am. So listen to me when I tell you that love isn’t something we invented - it’s observable, powerful. Why shouldn’t it mean something?

COOPER: It means social utility - child rearing, social bonding -

BRAND: We love people who’ve died ...where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means more - something we can’t understand, yet. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of higher dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen for a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t yet understand it.

-From “Interstellar”

In this timeline, Jayce did fail. 

They could fix the other ones, but here? There was no undoing what they’d allowed to happen. Piltover had collapsed. Life, topside and bottom, froze up and withered. Evolution ran its course.

The Jayce from an otherworld would attempt to prevent it. If he got lucky, if time was on his side, he might stop this from happening. In his world.

“I hope you are not pouting because he took your hammer, Jayce,” Viktor said. “What could you plan to do with it, anyway? He needed it more than us.”

Yes. The hammer was gone. Jayce was gone, too, though he had died a long, long time ago.

“Though, I suppose now your hands look a bit...empty.” Viktor mused with a strange sadness. 

The sun had set hours ago. Chill night air whipped through his cloak. The staff floated on its own, as Viktor wrapped his arms around his middle. He looked cold. 

— “You must be cold!” he stammered and fumbled for the sheet on the cot he’d been sleeping in, unwilling to leave Viktor alone, even in the safety of the lab. After the explosion —

The leftover fragments of Jayce stood.

Viktor’s eyes snapped to it. 

Flower buds and weeds slowly broke soil and peeled from its hollow body. It shrugged off most of the hardened membrane on its back as well. 

“...Jayce?” He stared at the unexpected change, blinked. “Did you wish to...do something?”

It had no hammer. It didn’t have to stay kneeling, waiting, watching.

For once, the Machine-that-had-once-been-Jayce did what it wanted to.

It extended its hand.

Viktor took it in an unconscious way. Like their hands inevitably should connect like this, fingers laced in each other’s, attended to by Jayce’s infallible strength. It drew Viktor into itself, inside the corroded circle of its arms.

Viktor hugged it back.

“Oh, Jayce.”

I’m here. I’m sorry I failed.

It was tall, like the other Jayce was tall. The curve of its chin pressed over Viktor’s nose, smushing it a bit. His muffled, “I’m here, Jayce,” sounded soft. “If you do not want me to go, I won’t go anywhere. Time I have plenty of.”

Its grip loosened again, but hand-shaped metal lingered on Viktor’s shoulders. The touch brought a subtle lift to his lips. 

Now, it felt as if Jayce couldn’t stop. Couldn’t possibly leave Viktor’s side and risk that smile dropping. It belonged at Viktor’s elbow, where it could support his strength if necessary. Protect him. Old instinct, resurfacing against the Machine’s coldness.

No. My name is Jayce. I’m Viktor’s partner. I am his—I’m your partner. Don’t forget this time.

Startling as it might be to have an inorganic being all in his face, Viktor took it in stride. “Did you want to go somewhere?”

Yes, it—he nodded. 

Viktor considered the universal, wordless gesture. “Where...did you want to go?”

Anywhere you want.

But Viktor couldn’t hear it—him. My name is Jayce. So he, tossed a hand somewhere westward, at the horizon.

His message was received.

“Alright. Then let me show you the beauty of this flawed world.”

 

---

 

It wasn’t all scenic wonders outside the city ruins, was the thing.

Jayce appreciated the vast, rare landscapes of sand and water, and even storms. He observed their rarity with...awe, perhaps. The world beyond had impressed less than a couple memories into him. And those couple? Weren’t positive.

Outside Piltover might as well be pure novelty to him. Viktor certainly treated it as such. On encountering something noteworthy, he would explain the names of all its places, the history weathered on crumbling facades. He was thorough like that, erudite. Jayce prided himself in being able to keep up. 

There was a lot of ugliness in it, too, though. 

Signs of extinguished ecosystems. Rows of evolved, still life beings, frozen in creation. They had to step over the tangles of bodies, bones. Shadows and imprints of those who failed to join the glorious remaking.

But even those things could be called beautiful. Because it was Viktor sharing them with him.

“Isn’t it incredible?” he said, about a terrible, smelly swampland that required a lot of navigating, and a lot of patience. “There are very few landmarks like these left. Do you see the old rusted piping down that stream? It used to connect to an enormous aqueduct that supplied fresh water back to Piltover. Actually, you might have been quite familiar with it, when you drew up the blueprints for the Hex gates... You’re staring, Jayce.” 

At the sound of his name, Jayce’s body shuttered to a clanky halt, his facial features casually turning to take in the ancient aqueducts. Oh, yes. Blueprints, aqueducts, of course, his non-expression seemed to say.

In hindsight, the forced-on casualness was probably more damning than if he’d simply continued staring.

To his relief, Viktor humored and gestured at himself. “What is the object of your curiosity today?”

The question begged an answer, one that Jayce had trouble forming. It was like something hungry awoke in him. Something that wanted to speak.

He saw the remnants of the arcane, that had touched Viktor. The pattern on his temples and neck. How did that happen? In your timeline, did you merge with the Hexcore, too? Did you find a different solution for your decaying body? And the stones, the metallic ring of Jayce’s fingers bent and pinched one of the armbands that dangled from under Viktor’s sleeves, a collection of small runes strung through it. Where do you obtain these stones to give away in all the other timelines?

“It is you in there,” Viktor mused, so softly, that Jayce couldn’t be sure he was supposed to hear.  “You are always drawn to it. To magic.”

Well, who wouldn’t be? It’s beautiful.

Even if Viktor couldn’t hear him, Jayce considered it important to try. To remind himself. 

They walked on, for half a day. The path took them out of the marsh and up to a darkened rocky passage, which led to the edge of a wide cliff. The land had cut into a small mountain, Jayce could see. The cliff had eroded one half of a fork in the pathway. 

Jayce didn’t have to be mindful of his step. He walked with a perfect stride, one that glided over gravel with unwasted momentum. Nor did he need to mind Viktor’s, who balanced himself fine on steady legs, with the aid of his staff. 

Jayce’s broader perception for possible dangers still heightened at the sight of the cliff. 

He picked up a noise. 

A sound, chirped from above, before wings and feathers dove through airstreams, over the rockside. The beast moved with precision and ferocity.

Viktor spoke, “I believe that was an eagle. No, two. They’d tangled their talons together, did you see? If they survive the dive, they were destined to be.” 

The birds danced to a rhythm only they heard. Admirable, how they trusted not to let the other fall. Jayce quite liked watching them spin in a plummet, at first. Until they dove far too close to the trees. If they survive, Viktor said. If. He almost dreaded imagining they would be a pair fated to crash, but their wings snapped open at just the last second and caught them in an updraft. 

“It appears their trust was well founded.” Viktor glanced at him, his expression at ease.

Below their flight, Jayce could see huddled corpses frozen in time. Some had died before their transformation and left behind corroded silhouettes of half-metal flesh. Stuck faces grimaced in pain and fear. Some were machines, twitching their faces up towards the cliffside. 

Strange, one said of him in a metallic voice of the Whole. Stranger. It shuddered and watched him watching them.

In the dusklight, firelights swarmed the lower valley. Their green-glow light painted a tranquil scene out of the horror.

Oddly, Jayce’s stiff hand-shape was picked up in Viktor’s. 

“It happened. It’s over now.”

But I didn’t stop it from happening. So much’s been lost, because of my failure. Don’t you blame me? Aren’t you disappointed in me?

His head jerked up at the force in Viktor’s grip, pulling him away from the valley of loss.

“Is this what you really want to focus on, the death and the decay? Come,” Viktor persisted. 

It’s in your nature to persist, came the thought, without judgment. Human. Contradictory. Inefficient.

And it worked, of course. They had the whole rest of the cliff to explore, at the end of which they came across the eagle nest and, suddenly Jayce had to carefully fend one off from nesting on the shine of his inorganic top half. He didn’t want to hurt the damn bird, and Viktor, the traitor, simply stood there and berated him, “Don’t hurt it, Jayce.”

Does it look like I’m the aggressor here? Maybe help me?!

“Would you like my help?”

A brief pause, where Jayce braced his head between his forearms and nodded. Angrily. 

“All you had to do was ask,” and with a poke of his staff on its tail, the bird squawked and flapped off. “There. What?”

Jayce willed his thought to be as transparent as possible. You’re having fun at my expense. Aren’t you. 

“Hmm.” Viktor kept walking, a lopsided smile quickly shrouded under his hood. “Majestic creatures, eagles.” 

Birds cannot be part of our world’s beauty. 

“Want to keep going?” 

If Jayce had lungs, he’d sigh. Yes.  

 

Neither of them tired on the first day’s journey. Jayce’s body wasn’t capable of exhaustion. Viktor’s was sustained by a power beyond comprehension. The arcane may have touched them both, but it worked through them differently. Whatever guided Viktor couldn’t be perceived by a machine. Couldn’t be tired.

As night encroached darker, more firelights buzzed to life. A surprising amount of them. They, unlike the birds, lazily flew around a safe distance. Once a few began climbing higher to brush the treetops, he knew they wouldn’t be a bother.

Jayce longed to speak about them. The tenacity of these insects, so common now, below and above ground. Do you think a different sort of life could re-evolve from a wasteland? There were bugs and creatures living in the Undercity, and moss and flowers atop the Hexgate tower. Even the birds, they live and migrate across nations, far from the influence of the Herald. 

The questions piled up, with nowhere to go. He followed in step to the staff’s fall, turned to his company. What do you think, Viktor? Is there...hope, for this world? Can my past mistakes be amended?

Viktor couldn’t listen. He had his own questions that Jayce couldn’t answer. Like, “What is your favorite destination so far? I have seen so many places in my ventures, I could show you the best. Or, we could leave it to random choice. I find the freedom of so much, often, overwhelming. Do you?”

Yes. No. I’m not sure. I guess I’m not really paying attention.

He wasn’t. He kept staring at Viktor like it was the first time. Kept forgetting he had legs that could move and follow beside Viktor, rather than wait for him to go somewhere and come back with curiosities. That he could tug Viktor’s hand in his and guide him, for once. 

It was probably good Jayce didn’t need to breathe or he’d forget that too.

The air grew colder. Nights tended to freeze quickly here, and even though Jayce had no sense for the cold — “How’d you find me?” The forge blazed with reassuring heat — he knew he didn’t like it.

Viktor stopped and did a circle. “Here, it’s perhaps time to catch up to the sun.” And without delay, Viktor raised one of the runestones in his possession in his fist. 

The world whirled in a mirage of blue. Space bent around them. Jayce clung to the staff, just under where Viktor held to it confidently.

They reappeared to a land in late midday.

How did you learn to wield the arcane like this? Which timeline are you from? It couldn’t be that this Mage Viktor came from his, after all. Jayce had failed to reach his Viktor. The Herald achieved finality. The end of pursuit. 

Somewhere among the Others, he must be in dreamless rest, too. 

Without pursuit, there was nothing more. Nothing. They were nothing. They were perfect.

I should be too, except I’m different. Did you make me different? A vibrant section of his wrist flashed and pulsed warm. He’d made a promise, just like the Jayce-from-Before. But he’d failed in his.

“Why are you still sulking? Nobody sulks when there are sunflowers around.”

Jayce sulked a little longer in defiance. And then the words caught up. Sunflowers? 

Heliotropic species that faced the light rays of sun. A field of them, petals to the late-noon sky.

I...think I like sunflowers. Are they my favorite?

Viktor pulled one large stem free from its siblings. 

“These were your favorite, were they not? I remember the Kiramman girl would drop them by the lab sometimes. Or...was that to remind you to ‘go out and get a little sun’?”

— “I swear, give it another week, and you and your boyfriend are going to turn into vampires.”

“Huh! What—He’s not my boyfriend, Cait.” 

“Oh, so we’re not going to put a label on it?” 

“There’s nothing to—he’s my partner!” but Sprout had found a weakness to jab and, like a stubborn mule who never put down its pack, embarrassed him into accompanying her out —

Disjointed languages, but they somehow found a way to reach the same end. Only now, with each moment building up on the rest lived, Jayce thought, he liked the flowers well enough, but he loved them more against Viktor’s amber gray-flecked eyes. The petals and the dark seed pit at the sunflower’s center brought out the color of him. 

Jayce nodded. Yes, they’re my favorite in your hand.

 

---

 

“Are you tired of walking yet?”

A machine did not tire. Jayce appreciated the worry anyway, and with consideration to Viktor’s old human limbs, nodded.

A functional roof was far too much to ask for in this failed world. They’d stopped with the stars above their heads and dilapidated ruins at their disposal. It would do, for the night. Jayce knelt down, his palms nearly clenching around empty air. The position came naturally. How many years had he spent like it, slowly unravelling?

The first minute of lying there bothered him, until it didn’t. Why should he add shame to his imperfect-perfect body? 

He didn’t like it as much when he turned and saw Viktor lying alone under a wasteland pilfered blanket. 

“Oh,” Viktor greeted with surprise, as Jayce lifted the worn fabric to glide beside him. “I don’t suppose that is necessary.”

No, I don’t need to do this. All of his limbs bent to fit the gap between them. I want to.

Jayce wasn’t warm, but neither was he freezing to the touch. The temperature of inorganic matter regulated to something human enough, just this side of cold. He wanted to learn how to hold Viktor, how to make his un-humanness tolerable.

One of us, his mind whispered in retaliation.

Jayce carefully settled down. The slot of his body wouldn’t be comfortable, he could see. Metal yielded poorly to flesh. I’m not hurting you like this, am I? That’s the last thing I want to do.

But Viktor hadn’t, and didn’t, mind. His half-lid eyes, half awake, followed him lazily as Jayce battled with where to best lay his hands. “I should have remembered you were once starved for this sort of affection,” he softened.

Are you complaining, you heat-sucking octopus?

He quickly had Viktor draping himself under and around him. Just as clingy. Just as starved. 

Perhaps, in some illogical sense, he did need to hold and feel his warmth, his physical company, the weight of his arm over the empty chassis of his torso. Jayce needed it, because when he didn’t have Viktor at his side, everything seemed a pointless exercise. 

If the rest of his eternity were to be spent minutely adjusting to avoid drawing blood with his sharp cracked edges, he would gladly do it and sleep.

But he didn’t sleep. Couldn’t — One of us — his mind howled. The Whole should welcome his Part in easy slumber. It never has. 

Tonight, it cut harsher at his senses. Puzzled and angry. 

Something was wrong. 

Why do you Resist? — forced its way into his head — Why are you Strange? — Strange, Strange, Jayce didn’t have muscles or nerves to be able to tense up, and yet he flinched. Folded smaller into himself as the Many and the Whole prodded — Why?

Some of the stiffness of his frame lessened under Viktor’s searching touch. It tested his immoble face, his open-shatter back, the unique bands of converted metal that wrapped on his left calf. 

“Jayce? What is it? Are you in pain?”

Am I? He felt he should stay still, or something terrible would happen. Nonsense, because true danger couldn’t stir the pot at his table. They made sure of it. The Hexgate tower had been fortified with wards of protective magic. They... 

They weren’t near any of its protections. No runes laid out on the soil at his feet. 

Machines swarmed the run-down home. 

It caught them by surprise, too suddenly to react. A wall of white-gold bodies crashed onto Jayce, ripping him from Viktor’s hands.

“Jayce—!”

Jayce fought, struggled, resisted against the tidal wave of metal. But he couldn’t stop it from yanking him through the room, through halls into a roofless foyer. The wave drowned inside his head — Part of the Whole, but why is it not with us? — they prodded the ghost of fingerprints on his forehead — Part, Whole, Part, Whole —  

In a second, he tore his face away. His kick connected hard with a machine’s half-melted head.

Another second, then a sickening crack. He jolted to the side. 

His right arm fell.

It fell to the ground.

Jayce stared at it, confused why it had. Why were the other machines wrapped around him, with no room to pull away?

Don’t. Submit — the voice pleaded. It almost had a familiar voice. But he didn’t listen. They were tearing him apart, cracking his lesser-than-perfect body, trying to remold him — Don’t resist. Why do you Resist?

Gold sharp limbs reached for his left arm—

No, don’t take it from me — His left arm hosted a singularity of being, blue-hot and feeling-cold. It had been there since his childhood. There, fused into him ever since he made a final vow — Please, it’s all I have, all that I am. Heavy dread blinded him. 

Oh, no, that wasn’t the dread’s doing.

It was a shield of pure white.

From the cage of metal, Jayce saw a rune swirled violently in Viktor’s palm. The mage stood at the epicenter of the swelling rush of magic — a force shield shoving off all things used with destructive intent — The Shimmer grunts darted in for the kill, inhumanly fast, but Jayce didn’t falter. He knew his tech and the power that flowed through it. The Hammer thrummed, thrust into the ground. Just as a blade threatened to slide his head off, a barrier of static energy circled him —

Viktor threw his arms forward and pushed the shield out. He shouted, grit his teeth. 

Surging, ferocious magic knocked the dozens of lashing hands away.

To Jayce, it was anything but. The magic enveloped him, tenderly. Where the lifeless husks flinched, broke apart and fled, he floated in the energy of the protective wave, weightless — The enforcers finally broke down the doors to stop the experiment, but Jayce... He’d done it. He’d figured out the pattern in the Hextech. Everything seemed, so simple, after the fact. After Viktor believed in him. They were floating above the machine, serene. — I wish I could go back to that moment, I wish I could tell you how you changed me —

“Jayce.”  

He had no eyes to close, or open. Still, Jayce felt his surroundings shift and refocus. What was left of him lay down on the floor of the ruins. The home had exploded into rubble. Fresh warding runes blipped in the air. They lit sparks of blue, illuminating the furious hands scrambling to fit torn off limbs back to their place. 

Similar to flesh, they weren’t reattachable. 

Viktor.

“I can fix this. I can...” The angry pinprick dot of his pupils lit up white, burning. Then, the membranous fold over Viktor's temples and jaw shone with an inner light. His eyes gazed off to a point, neutral for the briefest blink, and then rekindled with rage—

The arcane shot out from within Viktor. 

Ever expansive threads of it sank to Jayce’s inorganic shell, at first forcing his useless pieces to fit an invisible jigsaw puzzle. Heat and cold and blue raised up the cracks, filling the gaps, old and new. It was giving him shape. Reminding the body of what it had been like, machine and perfect. 

No, not perfect. Whole.  

Jayce couldn’t pull away. It had him by the wrist. His entire self wrenched as Viktor pried himself and the untamable force of the arcane off.

When the blue lost its blinding shimmer, Jayce realized that the flux of the arcane had webbed him together. 

And Viktor, fallen to his knees, panting, still had spools of rune magic connecting them.

Slowly, they faded. Jayce sat up from the ground. He found no impediment in the effort. 

You changed me. 

Unequivocally, in every moment possible, Viktor had changed him. 

Here, right now, he made him whole.

“Ah, I thought I could only do that with organic beings,” came Viktor’s wistful observation of it all. Just before he fainted.

 

---

 

There was no other word for it — Jayce panicked.

Viktor had only been out for a couple minutes. More than enough time for Jayce to spiral in his newfound fear and conclude that, in helping heal him with the raw essence of magic, Viktor’s previous mortal condition had resurfaced. Which would be another notch on the list of things that were rightfully Jayce’s fault. 

Notch one, Viktor, sacrificed to the Hexcore. Notch two, the world ending. Notch three, Viktor dying, again.

“I know you cannot help this about yourself but Jayce, you’re heavy.”

I’m sorry. He scooted back and allowed Viktor to sit on the raised crop of a ruin rock wall. A few seconds passed, Viktor rubbed his dust-smudged eyes, breathed. 

Seeing him move without strain did alleviate some of the restlessness in Jayce’s new joints, though not completely. 

More mindful of his weight displacement, and the positioning, Jayce wound re-fused arms around a slim robed middle. His softened edges could press tighter without risk. His head, patched of its cracks, laid easy on Viktor’s lap — He’d been so worried for Viktor, after hearing the news of his health’s decline. Didn’t know where to go, or what to do about the pit growing in his stomach. The comfort She reflected was both compassion, and advice. “You should be with him, Jayce” —

Sometimes, those slivers of memories made him feel worse. They belonged to someone else, and yet were such an inextricable part of what he’d become. He didn’t know what to do about the hollow cold carving impossibly out of his chest. 

Viktor thumbing the curve of his neck-shape helped. 

“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere,” he reassured. “I merely overexerted myself.”

Well. Don’t do it again!

It was an unreasonable, unheard demand. Illogical on all fronts, really.

Viktor cupped one half of Jayce’s face. “I apologize if I scared you. I’ll be more careful.”

Just as illogically, the hollow cold stopped carving. 

Jayce was different again. He felt lighter and heavier both. Felt the skin-textured scratch of Viktor’s hand on his shoulder next. 

Emboldened, Jayce put his feet under himself, and stood. The slight glimmer that curled through his right arm and lower middle meshed outwards like scars. Beautiful, he understood. They were proof he’d survived, thanks to Viktor.

“You should be careful too with...these.” An uneasy frown wrinkled his brow, after he’d run his thumb over the new marks. “Wounds weaken the base—”

Whatever else Viktor intended to say stunted into silence, when Jayce picked him up in his arms.

It’s not so weak that I can't do this.

The form of his scarred arm held firm. His strength was never in doubt — Running, just keep going for the lab, Viktor can’t be dead, he was right next to me, he was right there, how, I can fix this I can —

His joints tensed a fraction. The metal of them clinked. 

A dissonant gratitude warred in Jayce’s mind, faced with the memory. To experience it was to know regret. To know regret, was to also accept the outcome of his choice. 

Even if it changed you, I could never regret saving you. I hope you don’t regret changing me.

“...I don’t need to be carried.” 

Just as Jayce started setting him down, he heard, “I’m already up here, Jayce, are you really going to make a feeble, faint man walk?”

Feeble? You haven’t been feeble a day in your life, but he carried Viktor all the same. 

A lot of dust and debris had been kicked up in the chaos. He was covered in it. Viktor himself hid a cough in his fist. So, he crossed to the fields outside into the wild, fresh air. 

The splotch of color on Viktor’s robes had progressed further, into an artful aberration of fabric. It looked moth-eaten, but obviously it couldn’t be. The nearby stream — the evidence of water that down the valley would connect into a marsh which itself connected into Piltover — might maybe help to wash it clean. Or, at least clear up the dust.

Viktor’s mouth opened as if to say something, but quickly gave up the attempt once he noticed where Jayce was taking them. Feet touched the mud-soft ground. It unbalanced him a second, without his staff’s unconscious use. Flesh warm fingers had to pinch around Jayce’s bicep-form.

That was more than fine. The husk body stood strong and immovable.

Could I? his waiting hand asked, hovering over the cloaked sleeve and the wrappings tight on forearms. 

Viktor huffed something amused. 

Is that a yes?  

“Help me with these?”

He had never seen Viktor without his chosen garments. Unwrapping the white cloths revealed more rune signs, lines that trailed from fingertips to elbow, then seemed to sink into the skin of inner arms. As was his habit, Jayce stared.

This time, Viktor let him without comment.

How did you get those? Jayce shook the wrappings free of dust and studied how Viktor shed the top layer of his cloak into the water. His hair skirted down to shoulders, longer from what Jayce remembered. But it looks good on you.  

The aftermark of the arcane was much broader as well. It swirled pearly and bronze-like over much of his exposed neck and chest. Under the cloak were purple robes — “You must be cold!” he stammered — which were pinned and tucked over that patchwork of healed, rune-marked skin.

It was human. But also not. It was...healed. 

He caressed one rune sign on Viktor’s chest. He knew its shape. 

Viktor laid his hand over Jayce’s there. “I’m here. It’s alright.”

Standing in the stream in the dead cold of night wouldn’t count among his favorite scenic wonders. Frost crawled up his wet legs, and his fingers, which constantly reached down and scooped up handfuls of water to wipe away dust from himself and Viktor’s face, stiffened up from the chill. It hindered his finesse. He was loving every second of it. 

Viktor’s lips twitched to one side. It was subtle, the smile. Subtle like all his expressions. Jayce couldn’t help but caress its edges and, to his delight, the smile became clearer. 

But then pressure eased over Jayce’s own stone rune. The one sunk protectively into his left wrist.

Jayce pulled back, clutching his wrist. No, don’t take it.  

But Viktor wasn’t taking the rune embedded into his not-flesh. He was...running careful fingers over its surface. Adoring it.

“I never noticed how...small you were before.”

Jayce contemplated if he should angle his chin even lower, in spite. Small he was not. 

Viktor cradled the rune-fused limb. “So small, yet you carry so much in you.”

There you are again, speaking in confounding riddles.

 

---

 

Time began blurring together again.

They’d crossed so many places now. The sun set and rose and set and rose, and Jayce paid it no heed at Viktor’s side. He didn’t have to.

“There are cities like Noxus, see,” Viktor pointed at a far skyline with winding structures, “that continue to survive. Their mages were able to stop the Calamity from hitting the most valuable of their people...”

Jayce really, really wasn’t paying attention now. He noticed the movement of civilization, but his vision locked onto Viktor and thought, He is so beautiful, that nothing else, for as wondrous or intriguing, could tear him away.

Jayce remembered what this feeling was called. Admiration. Affection. The magnetism that first pulled him into Viktor’s orbit, and there remained for the rest of time. Like a loyal moon in the sky.

It made him want for things. To touch, to hold, to be as close as possible without their atoms collapsing. Jayce had to stew in it for him to realize, Why am I holding it back? What did he have to prove? Or not prove? Who, in this world without shame or promises, could judge him?

Viktor was speaking. He was probably telling him some very interesting stories about the land of the Noxians and their empire of the fittest. Powerful conquerors once roamed and warred here, even without eyes Jayce could see the scars of their expeditions on the land. Magic made the strong, terror. In terror, there was respect.

“Fear moves their hearts deeply,” Viktor said, as Jayce weaved a glimmer-scarred arm to the dip of his waist. Viktor simply moved his staff to his other hand, so as to avoid knocking Jayce in the face with it. “Fear is what has kept them afloat for so long. It sounds awful, but,” he paused, for a breath — unfazed to Jayce hooking another arm atop his shoulder, “but I am glad they have it. It keeps them alive and inspires them to new ways of living...”

He finally trailed off, as Jayce leaned down to rest their faces together.

A machine had no proper face. Jayce alone was special in the features he bore, with eyes that didn’t see, a voice that couldn't speak. No muscles clenched beneath his mouth. And not a thing of it stopped Jayce from skating his lips over the top of Viktor’s hood, to where his hairline fluffed with baby hairs.

Pressed this close, Jayce could just about feel the amusement in Viktor’s asking, “What has gotten into you?”

Both arms tightened where they rested. When I’m with you, I feel I can enjoy living.

Viktor hugged him back, though he had to stretch to meet Jayce’s higher shoulders. “Not to complain, but your height is unfairly ridiculous. Absolutely of no help to—oh!”

Jayce picked him up by his waist and raised him so he had to look up to Viktor’s surprised face. Is this better? I like this angle more anyway. 

“...Don’t even think about bragging,” he warned.

Tell me to set you down then, but Viktor didn’t. He huffed and sighed, and yielded to the whims of his machine partner with a knowing, “Have you had your fill of the world, then? Gotten bored of all its beauties?”

Never. All the beauty I could ever want, I have, right here in our arms.

It was alright if Viktor couldn't hear him. 

They understood each other, eventually.

Chapter 3: It’s just like seeing [him] for the first time again...

Summary:

Do you remember the same things I do, Viktor?

Notes:

VALKA: Oh stop being so stoic, Stoick! Go on... Shout, scream, say something!

(Stoick gently reaches a hand toward her face.)

STOICK: You’re as beautiful as the day I lost you.

 

-From "How To Train Your Dragon 2"

Do you remember the same things I do, Viktor?

Giant skeletal structures faded in and out of the dark fog. The once City of Progress, with its technological wonders in every corner, had been stripped of its metal during the Final Evolution.  He could recognize the ghost of Piltover, across the bridge.

Jayce’s rounded heels crunched on the dry, dead earth he walked. The spots that had been laid in cobblestone and brick were now eroded to uneven rock.

“Jayce?”

Viktor had paused ahead. The thud of his staff echoed eerily in the space, as he changed hands with it. 

There wasn’t any utility in jogging the brief couple of steps to him, but Jayce did anyway.

Do you remember that day in the Council Room? he asked, knowing he wouldn't get an answer. When the decision was made on whether I’d be exiled from Piltover, or expulsed from the academy? They called me dangerous, mad. No one believed in my dream to create magic.

Freed of the staff, Viktor’s hand caught Jayce’s left. The rune buried inside Jayce’s wrist, so very close to the circle of Viktor’s palm, pulsed warm.

“Do watch your step, the last thing we want is a tumble down to the Undercity,” Viktor helpfully reminded. 

So much of the city was being held together by a crystallized shockwave. Entire buildings threatened to cave in on their own weight, but just managed to cling to the strongest parts of each other. One of Viktor’s eyebrows scrunched up curiously, the longer Jayce took to inspect the corner of a dilapidated building. The Kiramman crest still adorned much of the block. 

That day, do you remember how you saved me from the ledge? Do you remember it, like I do?

“Stopping to recognize old haunts?” Viktor hummed. “You can do that and walk, you know.”

Uh-huh. Always in a hurry with you. 

The city perpetually held onto its last breath. It wasn’t quite dead, but suffocating so, so slowly. What remained of life couldn’t be told apart from fossilized stone until it twitched with mechanical chitters.

Those husks followed at a distance, their whispers null and voiceless today.

Despite the horrific decay everywhere, not a lick of wariness brewed in Jayce. He was too excited. 

They were going home.

 

---

 

There was only so much they could do back at the Hexgate tower.

The sun rose. Bugs buzzed, the moss overgrew. The winds of an ever-present storm’s eye howled below, where it wouldn’t disturb the peace of the rooftop. 

Rather than growing comfortable in the numbness of inertia, Jayce put all his mind into watching Viktor. Watching how he rubbed the rows of rune stones along his forearm, up and down, up and down. Lightly, at first, and as the hours progressed, rough enough to leave angry red welts.

The nudge Jayce gave Viktor’s shoulder snapped him out of it.

“Yes, Jayce?”

Don’t brood, Jayce wanted to say, though the usual tease in it felt flat. Viktor wasn’t made for the long wait, never had been. Already the light in his prismatic eyes was dimming with some unvoiced emotion. Why don’t you talk to me, about anything? Anything to spend the time? You stopped talking. You can't possibly have run out of worlds to tell about.

Perhaps something in his hovering posture tipped Viktor to the nature of his thoughts. “I should apologize. I am not making much pleasant company right now. It is just...” He thumbed a spot under his covered collarbone, where Jayce knew a rune mark lay inscribed. “Is it selfish of me to let time pass?”

No of course not, Jayce immediately thought, though he didn’t quite understand why it troubled Viktor so much. Time was meaningless arithmetic, to a world ended. To hear Viktor speak like it was running out. Always running. It puzzled Jayce.

“Ah,” Viktor huffed a laugh without joy. “I am not making sense either, am I?”

Not any more than the usual, but Jayce wanted to understand. He tilted his head to the side, a visible cue of question. Help me understand, please?

It was only the second time Jayce had tried to express himself in such a way, mirroring how Viktor would seek clarification from him and his mute, more vague gesturing at things. It had worked the first time. He waited.

Viktor’s eyes narrowed in thought. His thumb drifted from his chest to the armband of stones circling one of his forearms. At the faintest touch, they glowed, charged up erratically, for a split second threatening to explode. 

Then, a second later, the stones were calm. 

Something about them seemed, off. Jayce perceived the change — charged, then calm — without an actual transition between the two states. 

He didn’t think much of it, after spotting the small teardrop stone pinched between Viktor’s fingers.

“Do you remember the blizzard, Jayce?” He waited for Jayce’s nod, paused a moment longer when gold-tinted hands eagerly raised up to show his own wrist’s rune. “Yes. I find you there. In every lifetime. I have to. It is a promise etched into my very being. And yet,” The fondness in his voice hardened, “here I am. Staying in one moment.”

Before Jayce could ask what could be so terrible about that, Viktor continued on, “Time is plentiful here, but... How is it fair of me to ask a promise from you, if I cannot keep my own?”

Promises. They’ve made many of those to each other — “I won’t fail,” he vowed — “What about your disease? Without the Hexcore,” he pleaded, but Viktor’s scratchy cough interrupted him. “Promise me” — many Jayce himself broke.

It was important to Viktor that he keep this promise. 

Okay. Okay, he nodded. Do what you need to do.

But Viktor scrunched his face in confusion. He didn’t understand what Jayce nodded for.

There had to be a way to show. A clear way to tell him that it was alright. That Jayce knew Viktor wouldn’t leave him forever. He would come back, like he always had.

So, Jayce did what he knew to do. 

He knelt. 

Viktor’s eyes widened. 

I’ll wait for you. Right here where you can find me. See? 

Viktor’s hand came up to thumb Jayce’s temples, down to the pronounced carving of eyes and old gleaming fingerprint divots. “Jayce... Do you want me to leave?”

He shook his head no. He could do that, at least.

Viktor studied him long. Jayce waited for him to get there.

Then, with understanding, his amber gray-flecked eyes softened.

“I do not know how long I might be gone for. It could be a day. It could be months... The arcane does not draw a stable path through timelines. I have to step where it tells me to step.”

It’s alright. Then I’ll be waiting for when it takes you back to me.

Viktor had never been the kind to favor physical displays. Words were more of his domain. Thinking one step further, Jayce could see acts of giving one of his favors, too. All the stones he’d given up across possibilities, all the days of journeying, the trinkets...

Jayce had to brace himself at the last instant when Viktor’s whole frame tumbled onto him, or they’d have both rolled off the roof.

The hug was clumsy, constricting him from properly returning it. Kneeling, he did his best to curl his head to where Viktor buried his, on a gold-spotted shoulder piece. Arms tightened on his back. Both un-men refused to be the first to let go.

“I will see you again,” Viktor didn’t have to say, but promised anyway. Jayce had already understood. This was not the end of them.

He prepared himself.

The swirl of blue magic took Viktor away.

 

---

 

Only when Viktor returned did Jayce realize how quickly time had slipped away. 

Except, now, Jayce had learned the passage of time. 

Don’t forget again. My name is Jayce. Stagnance led into devolution. Devolution progressed into forgetfulness. I’m Viktor’s partner.  

He needed to remember for when next Viktor came.

So, Jayce stayed busy. 

He explored the Hexgate tower. He made sure to stay within its protective grounds. The failsafe vault, he found, was cold yet inviting, full of rune-etchings, traces that Viktor had left scattered behind for Jayce to hunt down. Like the project notes he often left around the lab. Here is a Guidance rune. Here is a Barrier rune. Here is an Acceleration rune. All linking together to create an impenetrable fortress against outside machines.

It was, however, a pretty bare fortress. Desperately in need of repair. With an eternal storm roaring from inside its Globe. The force of its winds howled through the cracks. Support beams were falling out of the side of the giant clock. Columns hung suspended in anti-gravity. 

The Hexgate may have been built to last, but one day, it would crumble down and take out what was left of the city. 

Jayce could still do something about it.

In this pursuit, he lost himself to time again. Just a little. 

But it was worth it.

The sky opened to runic symbols. Jayce turned away from his task and gazed at Viktor’s entrance. One second, the arcane mirage of a hooded man popped the air, spiderwebbed out in spirals and flashes, tore through space. In the next, there Viktor stood, looking as if he’d only been gone a moment and not for eight sun rise-falls.

The stoic set of Viktor’s jaw eased into something warmer once Jayce eagerly pulled up to him for a hug. 

“Jayce,” he breathed in welcome. His staff hovered untouched beside them. Then, his gaze moved with curiosity past Jayce’s shoulder. “Oh. Have you been busy?”

Jayce took the slightest backward step and swept animate hands to their object of attention. In the last eight days, he’d racked up metal mesh and usable fiberglass from around the tower’s lower floors. Hauled it to the roof for patching up its smaller, negligible cracks. Without the need for rest or sleep, he’d gotten it done in about two days. 

Now, his current task required more fine work.

Viktor quietly inspected the fresh bed of yellow yarrow. It was framed by the crystalline shell of Jayce’s old kneeling spot. The small perennial flowers had somehow outlived the weeds and the grass. Hardy plants, they were, and resilient enough to have grown over him and the hammer during the years and years of waiting. 

Jayce thought, Well, a stubborn seed like that deserves to have its own piece of earth, and started cultivating it in a square yard-length.

There was the moss, too, of course. And the coral-like cropping of succulents — Mom! He’d nearly cried out, but when he got up from the snow-flecked grass bed, she was there. Alive. Relief watered his eyes. The field was so blindingly bright, too. So warm — Mom had always kept a small gardening planter for her balcony, opposite to his windowsill of stones — He’d managed to relocate the buds all to one spot without accidentally killing them. 

Once the tiny white flowers were finished regrowing, he’d call it a success.

“What is this?” Viktor’s voice lowered to a whisper. Jayce had to draw closer to hear, “A garden?”

It’s home. Do you see? A home has life.

It wasn’t much. The few layers of mulched earth repurposed from the roof’s surface wouldn’t make a garden. But it was a start—

Viktor’s right leg faltered and gave out. 

Jayce rushed to catch him before his knees could crack on the tough soil-metal. 

Oh no. No no, Viktor? He patted and searched for any sign of injury. Are you hurt? Your staff, should I get it?

He fretted, perhaps a bit too much, he thought later, as Viktor looked up at him with watery, pleasant eyes. 

“Still with me, Jayce?”

Yes. I’m here. He never wanted to forget, so he repeated it. My name is Jayce. I’m your partner.

Chilly winds ruffled through the greenery and Viktor’s cloak. “Always surprising me,” he muttered in good humor. He brought Jayce’s left hand up to the heated side of his face. The simple touch caused a ripple of energy around Jayce’s wrist. “So you had a green thumb all along? Let’s see, inventor, forgemaster, councilor and horticulturist... What is next, artist?”

Hey, I used to be pretty good with chalk. ‘Very precise lines,’ you said once. ‘Good for the lab assistants.’

Viktor’s other hand shuffled around a pocket. He smiled, “Well then, show me what you’ve made, and I will show you your gift.”

 

---

 

Knowledge was a paradox. The more Jayce learned, the more aware he became of how little he understood.

And yet, it was wonderful to learn, and relearn.

“Incredible how you actually have a knack for everything. I once believed it was a, eh...symptom of your perfectionism.” 

Oh, like you’re not stubborn to a fault too?

It was also wonderful to have Viktor comfortably seated inside the circle of his arms, in the cradle of his reshaped body, despite the acute frustration of the cylindrical puzzle box taking up base in Jayce’s handgrip.

I’m supposed to ‘crank’ this open, you said. There’s clearly a loose piece.

“Stop brute forcing it. It has a solution—” Viktor helpfully entwined his fingers with Jayce’s and guided him a few steps. He didn’t solve it for him. He only clarified how the toy operated. “Would you prefer I open it?”

And be defeated by a puzzle box? You’ll tease me about it forever. Please, I got it.

A day. Jayce relearned the satisfaction that came after a frustrating endeavor. 

“Congratulations are in order. Now open it. Do you like your gift?”

It was a tea mug. Man of Progress, it read, with an orange skyline of Piltover. Familiar, but different from the designs he’d known ages ago. This one had neither him nor Viktor’s profile, but a young black man with styled white hair. A world where someone else spearheaded Hextech?

If he could smile, he’d be beaming with one. A one-armed hug would have to suffice.

Viktor puffed a breath, smudged into Jayce’s bicep-shape. “I will...aff, take that as a yes.”

Another day. Viktor left on his promise, and Jayce relearned the boredom that sometimes doubled as patience. My name is Jayce. I’m an inventor.

Weeks. Risk and idea didn’t always yield results. Viktor came back, to him brooding over a new jagged cut across the roof.

“...What did you do.”

It wasn’t a question. More of an interrogation. If Jayce could avert his eyes, he would. Unfortunately for him, his right side slightly singed with guilty smoke.

So. I corroborated that the shelf of raw runestone in the Hex vault’s core is still pretty explosive—

Months. Jayce spent the waiting periods reinforcing weakened columns of the globe as best he could, out of the rubble. The storm raged on, dark and thick, above his head, and because of it, he had to work blind and on touch alone. For hours. Tirelessly. Determinately. Until lightning struck the walls. 

Out of the searing metal red-glow, he captured fire. 

Down it went, everywhere with him. Rubble became fuel. Fuel became a pit. Then, a smelting chamber. He built it at the bottom of the tower, brick by melted brick, with heat cooking at all hours of the day. 

There, Jayce could make tools, familiar-unfamiliar shapes and pieces of a greater thing. The rhythmic cracking of steel and rust rattled through his entire frame. My name is Jayce. I’m a forgemaster.

And Viktor would return just as he finished something, to see.

“Very fine work.” Viktor turned the cog gear over in his hand. An experimental variety laid on the forging table. Small pieces, intricate cooling molds, half-completed schematics from dreamed-up memories. “What will this be used for?”

Truthfully, he wasn’t sure always, but they could figure out a use for everything. Maybe we can give it a new purpose. Something for us.

The cog went into a recycled clock, calibrated for longer passages of time.

“You could keep track, and show me,” Viktor proudly praised. “Point at the numbers...use the small hand of the clock for days, the large one for months?”

And twelve’s to be the maximum reach?

“Hm, but an apex of twelve creates an awkward limit,” Viktor already began arguing for him, knowing him. He talked up numbers and possibilities while they both tinkered with the design to fit each other’s needs. The initial sketch had been revised five times, all the while Viktor talked and revised again, and Jayce listened and adjusted on the fly. Like...like old times.

Weeks. The clock went everywhere with Jayce, to the roof, the new forge, the middle crossing grounds of the storm-eye, until, eventually, he realized he didn’t need it to keep time, just to tell Viktor of it when next he came back. 

Similarly, he didn’t need to bring all of his idle-time work up to Viktor, when he could lead him to the things and places he’d fixed up, replaced, or labeled inadvisable to deal with alone. My name is Jayce. I’m a councilor.

Years. The top of the ruined Hexgate had to be cleaned and mended again and again, with new walkways, balconies, new standing and sitting and working stations for him and Viktor (Viktor and him, or him and Viktor, whichever way he thought it, they were a single unit of measurement, even when apart). 

Out of sturdier debris, Jayce made a wall to stack the souvenirs of Viktor’s travels, whether inner or outerworld. A wall that became two, that became four, that became a roof and windows and doors and rooms. A home had life, and theirs became the many flowers and plants that somehow managed to flourish with little earth to share. 

They flourished, impressively. My name is Jayce. I’m a horticulturist, too, he’d tacked at the end of the many titles Viktor kept giving him. 

“There’s a world where instead of Piltover, Zaun became the birthplace of Hextech,” Viktor said. Every night on the days he returned, he’d share more of the worlds he’d seen. The interesting ones, the terrifying ones, the ones that would make Jayce shake his head in disbelief.

Jayce’s arcane-mended body warmed better, and stayed warm for longer than before. He could feel it in the sweat beading in Viktor’s nape, which rested on Jayce’s folded lap. Metal limbs, no longer just metal. They were more. Different. Kinder. 

How incredible, that he could touch and feel touched, whenever he wanted to. And all he had to do was reach out with them.

Glimmery-gold fingers played with Viktor’s hair. There’s a world for everything, isn’t there? Do you think you’ll get to see them all, or is that a paradoxical impossibility? He twisted a delicate thin braid out of the longer strands at the side of Viktor’s ear. Like counting to infinity.

Viktor flicked his eyes to the side there and slowly, contently, cupped their hands together. It messed up the braid. His smile, not even showing teeth, blinded Jayce, because he knew — he learned and relearned — to read the crow’s feet wrinkle at the corner of eyes first. 

“There are so many worlds,” he wondered. Jayce listened. “So many lives of us marching parallel paths, and somehow, you remain Jayce. You are always...perfect, to me.” 

Jayce contemplated the tidal rush of affection washing over him. Impossible to ignore. He touched his forehead to Viktor’s, his fingers to the pearl-bronze patterns on Viktor’s cheek. 

You’ve always been beautiful to me.

Years. The crow’s feet deepened in Viktor’s face. Jayce didn’t know what to make of them, or why Viktor didn’t travel as often. His movements, already economic in nature, became more sparse. 

But the magic was still alive in his every breath. His rune-markings and rune stones pulsed arcane-white, before they settled in familiar-blue. He commanded for his staff, and it came to him. He was the Mage. I’m your partner.  

“You’re fretting,” Viktor’d say, about the wheeled chair prototype not having a proper stopping brake. “We can fix it tomorrow.”

The absence of words no longer impeded Jayce from their halfspeak. 

“Try to dream,” he’d mutter sleepily from under the curve of Jayce’s chin, when Jayce’s thoughts spun circles, circles, staring at the deeper, grayer hairs. “I know, you can’t sleep. Then dream with me until tomorrow.”

They built around his limitation, worked by it, Viktor speaking, asking, pausing, waiting, learning the cues after Jayce’s loud silences. 

“It is only one day,” he’d insist, the day Jayce couldn’t take him down to the forge for its bloom-glow heat. “I am sure later will be just as right a time.”

There were many loud silences in the years that they lived together. 

Years, many more than they’d ever lived apart. Tomorrow. A day.

A day. Viktor didn’t get up from the bed.

You wanted to tend to the garden today?

“Ah.” Without needing to rise up completely, Viktor answered, “Why don’t we stay here a while longer? I hear the storm quieting.”

You’re back to riddles. The storm below us never quiets. It’s stuck in a cyclonic current. 

Another day. Jayce waited with him, waited for the morning to rise and for Viktor to rise with it. But he didn’t rise.

Viktor? Are you still tired? You already slept for most of the last evening. It even took him a while to stir.

“...I apologize. I am not making much pleasant company right now.”

It’s okay. I’m just happy to have you. You see, and there, Jayce pointed at their counting-clock instrument, it’s been twelve-two. You hate resting for more than eight-two. 

“I’m sorry,” Viktor repeated strangely. “I have a hard time reading the clock you’ve hung up.”

What do you mean? There’s no rush to leave yet. Viktor? Viktor, when did your eyes go bad?

It was slow-forming stillness. Like sleep exhaustion. How many years had it been?

“I should have warned you that I was fading, but — Jayce, don’t be afraid,” he quickly interjected between half-finished thoughts. Because Jayce, with springing tension, had flown over to check him. No sign of injury, no pain reflex, nothing seemed wrong, and yet. What do you mean you’re fading?

Pressure sank at the back of his head. Viktor, barely nudging him in, but Jayce followed it down to press their foreheads together. 

He leaned into Viktor. Leaned so naturally, the heliotropic flower to Viktor’s sun.

“You. You gave me a chance at living a full life. I never expected, I never hoped...” Viktor clenched his fingers tighter over the mended cracks. “The storm is quieting. Do you hear it? The silence?”

No I don’t—I don’t understand what you're saying. There had to be something Jayce could do. Being cooped up inside their four walls must be tiring. He lifted him carefully in his arms, to bring him into the sun. 

The arcane web of Jayce’s scars threaded outwards for a split second, erratic and frightful, then calmed. Jayce didn’t let it distract him. He looked for a good patch of light. 

Viktor’s stones were, glowing? He couldn’t completely ignore their white shimmer-pulse, or their harmonizing hum. Whenever he flicked his head away to check that he wasn’t crushing any of the garden’s flowers, the stones looked different. Changing. He saw them. Then, they’d disappear. The rune markings would be gone too. And then, when he set Viktor down on the bed of tiny yellow flowers, everything would be back again.

What’s happening? Is the arcane taking its power back? Is it gone? Is that why you’re dying?

Time was supposed to be plentiful here. How could Jayce not see its end coming? How could he not see it running out?

He didn’t let go of Viktor. The spot of moss-grass under his knees would be comfortable, and his changed, kinder body, too. It cradled Viktor’s slighter frame with unmatched tenderness. He had to think.

“Jayce.”

Jayce could figure a way to help Viktor. Something in this world would cure him, as it had before. Not the Hexcore. A better solution. We could even make it here, in our home. They had sun and wind, and the fragrant scent of yellow yarrow. They had their makeshift lab, the forge, and the gate’s ruined globe. They had Piltover, the lived-in skeleton of the old City of Progress. One of those things ought to grant them an answer.

The barest touch on his cheek startled him. He jerked his face away, and tightened his grip without thought, before realizing that Viktor had been calling his name again. I’m sorry. I, I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do. 

“My brilliant Jayce full of heart,” the lovely low hum of Viktor said. “Don’t be afraid. There is nothing to fear.”

The spot center of Jayce’s torso was hollowing out with a scraping pain. You said fear moves the heart. I’m moved to try and save you, right? I need to try. Please, how can I save you?

But Viktor didn’t answer him. He didn’t understand Jayce yet. He wandered a tangent path of words, and Jayce, Jayce was afraid. He was afraid they didn’t have time to understand anymore. That when Viktor said, “You are everything,” Jayce had already run out of time to follow his reason.

Kneeling atop the world, they waited. Jayce waited to hear Viktor again. He waited for him to help him understand. You are everything, Jayce repeated with a voice that couldn’t speak, eyes that didn’t see, memorizing every little detail he could of the beauty in his arms. 

Until he understood too late.

Viktor was gone.

 

---

 

Viktor was gone.

He was here, in his arms, against his welcoming frame. But he was gone. The magic that had coiled in his being went still. It froze in time, like a held breath. But Viktor had no more breath.

A machine couldn’t bend. It couldn’t break the silence with a cry, or a yell. Nothing. He could be nothing. Viktor was gone.

Jayce lost the passage of time. 

It could have been a day. The sun set. Butterflies and beetles huddled close to his folded legs to fight the night’s chill. It could’ve been a few hours. His palm and chest cooled where they pressed into Viktor’s still body. It could've been...

The sun rose. Jayce did not remember the top of the globe ever being so quiet. The storm really had died.

I never considered it a terrible sound, he thought to the quiet field of greens and brick and steel. It was always just there. Like I was always just here alone. Until you found me.

There was a feeling, growing in him. Worse than the hollow carving of his insides, more terrible than the cold that nearly froze him dead as a child. With it, he could see himself staying here, for the rest of time. He’d already done it once. 

The sun set. 

The storm rose.

Jayce heard it in the barometric pressure. It’s going to ruin the garden, he thought without intention. Then, But the wind is quiet. 

Though it caused him deep terror to take his eyes away from the resting placement of Viktor’s head, Jayce looked at the storm. 

“There is...sorrow here.”

The Herald met him.

He was floating above, out of the central uncovered opening of the roof. One of the few breaks of steel that he and Viktor left as it was, where they could go below to the Vault core with relative ease. 

Jayce stared. 

He felt, he didn’t know what to call it. A merge between terrified and hopeful. Petrified by it. He could only stare.

“So much sorrow,” the Herald said, sweeping a hand toward the prone forms before him. “It can’t be. There is no sorrow in perfection. What is this?” They must look alien to him. A machine, fixed of its old hollow points and breaks, and a man without life, holding all the magic Jayce had ever loved in frozen time.

“Strange,” came the contemplative hum and tilt of the Herald’s sharp head. “Why are you Strange?”

Jayce never understood that himself. Why he, of all those who made part of the Whole, was strange. He’d evolved like all the rest. He had been made perfect — “and somehow, you remain Jayce. You are always...perfect, to me” — 

Ah, when did memories of him start hurting?

The Herald dropped closer, motionless except for the flap of his cloak. 

“Allow me to take these encumbrances from you. I can fix this.”

Familiar words, but there was no recognition in the Herald’s voice. Viktor was gone.

The inkling hope that had been fighting to the rise smothered to a tiny flame. Jayce clenched his arms tighter around his Viktor. Wretchedly, he wanted to go back. He could try to fix this too, his failures to this Viktor. His broken promises, his being too late, his giving up—

“What is this sorrow?” The Herald’s machine feet touched the ground. Jayce almost flinched as the act crushed a couple of new blooming poppies. “And this resentment. Such illogical, unhelpful sentiment. It impedes your perfection.”

He’d never have given up on Viktor. He couldn’t fathom giving up, not even on the Herald before him, with the afterimage of Viktor’s face still carved to the sides of the Herald’s face. Years, years and years had passed, and the Herald still used his staff for support. 

Holding onto hope with bare, shaking limbs, he tried. You’re still there, aren't you Viktor? Please, tell me. Tell me you’re here. Please.

The hand reaching for him paused.

“That name.” The Herald’s voice tuned metallically. “Jayce?”

Viktor. Viktor, he couldn't think of anything else to say, but that name. 

Something shifted in the space between them. Energy was charging inside his arms. Accelerating. It thrummed out of his passed Viktor’s markings, sparking blue around Jayce’s own mended scars. 

“That anomaly,” occurred to the Herald.

Anomaly?

As he reached out toward the ghost spots of Jayce’s temple, the scarred glimmer in Jayce’s husk burst outwards. It spiraled infinitely, lanced the air, right at the Herald — one last vestige of magic to protect him.

The Herald’s face split from the impact.

Viktor!

A wild sphere of magic swallowed them both. Frozen, the instant before death. A held breath. It beat hard, like anticipation.

The singularity of time coiled into itself, Viktor, and Viktor, and Jayce. Things that have passed, that will pass, that are passing flashed in the membrane of the wild, all-encompassing rune. The weight held carefully in Jayce’s hands unraveled. Runes upon runes exploded into the cosmos — they reversed into a single point of origin, a stone — they were nothing, waiting, waiting —

Jayce saw through the shadows and outlines of runes to Viktor’s face mirrored in the Herald’s, and inside the Herald’s. The crack that splintered through the side of his head revealed surprise. An amber eye the color of sunlight.

“No—” 

The Whole of the Herald spread beyond all horizons. They were together alone in that emptiness, shining among suspended lives and endless cosmos. An enormous cast of the Herald stood before him. He shielded his cracked face. No, he hid the remnant humanity there, the youthful face of a flawed human, from judgment. 

Don’t hide it. Please. Jayce floated above the machine, serene. He persisted, I want to see you.

“Why...? How could you wish to see me? I have been broken back to imperfections.” Despite the chromatic aberration of his voice, there was a depth of fury laced into it. 

Jayce stared at him more. The grand, shadowy silhouette of the Herald shuttered and hunched on itself, as his voice grew louder. Accusing. Hating. Shrinking down. Redirecting, “Do you hear me, Jayce? Do you understand? Have you any thing to say?” 

And to think, now that he could be heard in the vastness of the nothing, Jayce’s words escaped him. 

Once the Herald’s great size curled into something familiar, something beloved, he carefully reached out his arms, and grasped the nebula of the Herald’s outline.

“You...” The Herald was panting. His breathing cut short. “You, what are you...doing?”

I’m waiting for you to let me in. To show you.

All that he couldn’t say, he’d show. He’d promised. He’d failed, before. He would try again.

Silence filled the void. An amber gold eye flicked back and forth where Jayce had touched his shoulders. They hadn't moved closer, but neither did they release him.

Jayce waited. His expression in the vast nothingness was more malleable, fluid. He could raise his brows and purse his mouth to a pout. At the painful scrunch of the Herald’s eye, Jayce did give in and pulled him inside his arms—

— “ Fear moves their hearts deeply,” Viktor said, as Jayce weaved a glimmer-scarred arm to the dip of his waist. Viktor simply moved his staff to his other hand, so as to avoid knocking Jayce in the face with it. “Fear is what has kept them afloat for so long. It sounds awful, but,” he paused, for a breath — unfazed to Jayce hooking another arm atop his shoulder, “but I am glad they have it.” —

What is this?

— “It is you in there,” Viktor mused, so softly, that Jayce couldn’t be sure he was supposed to hear.  “You are always drawn to it. To magic.”

Well, who wouldn’t be? It’s beautiful —

Transfixed, the Herald watched with him. He watched as — the enforcers finally broke down the doors to stop the experiment, a moment too late. They were floating above the machine, serene.

— I wish I could go back to that moment, I wish I could tell you how you changed me — Jayce. — When I’m with you, I feel I can enjoy living —

Memories. Memories of the Viktor who showed him how to be human again. How to fear, and hope, and feel.

— “Only you can show me this.” —

The Herald shoved him away.

Jayce gave him time to understand. He waited, for the Herald to see the world they’d made, extinguished of humanity, removed of choice, thousands upon thousands of people, holding their breath the instant before death. 

He gave himself time, too. To grieve the city of decay — to grieve for the home they made above the world. To grieve for them, for the last of the magic that had kept Viktor and him protected and entwined, and gave him this one last chance to fix things.

“I am the calamity,” he heard, tuned so very similar to someone alive. “The end of life. Me.”

It doesn’t have to be.

The subtle expression of Jayce’s acceptance was met with disbelief. “Jayce, do you understand what I’ve become? What I made you become? How do you not hate me?”

Hate you? You mean the world to me, how could I hate you? I would never, have never hated you, Viktor. 

“Then you’re,” his breath was hitching faster, “you’re a greater fool than I ever thought you to be.”

Call me your fool then. There will never be a moment when you’re not beautiful to me, and Jayce’s eyes lifted with love.

The Herald’s own crumpled. He fell onto Jayce’s arms.

It was just like hugging his old Viktor. The desperate clinging of nails into his shoulders, the deep, regulating breaths, the whispered, “Still with me, Jayce?” It was still Viktor. Not the Machine Herald, but his Viktor.

I’m not going anywhere. He smiled, properly for the first time since evolving.

But Viktor wasn’t looking, so much as gazing out at the expanse of connected husks. His eyes sank with sadness.

“I will try to release them all. They are owed that much, after I robbed them of their rest. We are, all of us, dead.”

Not alone. We do it together.

All through their time-inside-time, in the tangle of astral stars, Jayce’s left wrist had been burning. Hotter and hotter. The rune yearned to leap out of his being and join in their hands. 

It had been gifted to him by Viktor, and to Viktor it ought to return. 

Jayce decided. He presented the rune still in his forearm. Such a small thing but it was all he had.

Viktor knew it too. Perhaps more than Jayce himself could understand, when he explained, “I cannot possibly take that from you. There is nothing else left of you. No body. No mind. You...you’d sacrifice that, so I could fix what I’ve done?”

Not fix. So you get to live and experience life the way you wish to. He thought again, to the freedom Viktor’d enjoyed in his old body. The magic supporting him, protecting him, holding him strong. The rune stone near his heart that had pulsed in sync with Jayce’s wrist. Your leg, your disease. They won’t stop you. I won’t let it. Take it, please.

“Jayce, it’s your humanity,” Viktor began refusing. Pebbles of tears formed in his eyes.

Don’t cry. I am not gone. You have always been a part of me, Viktor, now, I will be a part of you. It’s all I could ever want. It’s all that I am.

A shuddery sob echoed through his being. Viktor’s. His. It was death calling, but it was also life beckoning. To fear was to live, and he feared leaving Viktor’s company alone. He pictured himself kneeling at a hammer, for years, waiting, always waiting for something he’d forgotten but must be born of importance.

So he asked, Will you meet me in every when?

“Jayce. Of course I promise.”

Gently, Jayce relinquished his humanity onto Viktor’s heart.

It wasn't much. Barely bigger than a small teardrop stone. Embedded so deeply into his wrist that when he pulled it away, the rest of him went with it. The outline of his body blurred and shrunk around that tightly-held fist, where the stone pulsed stronger with a desire to live. Let him live.

But it didn't matter how small it was. Jayce wrapped that last vestige of humanity around Viktor, starting at the heart. If a grain of sand was all that was left of Jayce, then a grain of sand he would clothe Viktor with. And that grain would be plenty. 

Every inch it crawled to, shed the metal husk of the Herald away. Light shimmered onto them. The multitude of souls and wild runes swirled, tighter and tighter, infinite and small at the same time. Years, months, a day, a second passed. Magic arched around a single being.

I love you, the grain thrummed. Every second, every instant that passed, I love you. I love you. I love you—

There was no oblivion. 

Only Viktor.

Notes:

Chapter got too big, so I split it in 2. Posted together!

Chapter 4: ...it’s just like seeing [him] for the first time again.

Summary:

Viktor ripped through the fabric of the world with a scream.

Notes:

“So there’s this man. He has a time machine. Up and down history he goes, zip, zip, zip, zip, zip, getting into scrapes. Another thing he has...is a passion for the works of Ludwig van Beethoven. And one day he thinks: ‘What’s the point of having a time machine if you don’t get to meet your heroes?’

“So off he goes to 18th-century Germany. But he can’t find Beethoven anywhere. No one’s heard of him. Not even his family have any idea who the time traveller is talking about. Beethoven literally...doesn’t exist. [...]

“The time traveler panics. He can’t bear the thought of a world without the music of Beethoven. Luckily he’d brought all his Beethoven sheet music for Ludwig to sign. So, he copies out all the concertos and the symphonies...

“...and he gets them published. He becomes Beethoven. And history continues with barely a feather ruffled. My question is this:

“Who put those notes and phrases together?”

 

-From The 12th Doctor, “Before the Flood”

— Give it a decade of careful research, Professor Heimerdinger said about their new direction of Hextech. It zips past you in the blink of an eye.

A decade. A decade. How much would he be sacrificing in that time? “We can improve lives with Hextech now!” —

 

— “We’ve created something new for you. Something that...that we will share with you. When the time is right” —

 

— It was bad enough they’d voted his partner into the Council. Now they were spending hours inspecting inventory reports, Hexgate use logs, the smuggling shipment case. “This is a poor use of our time” —

 

— “There’s always tomorrow, right?” but Miss Young couldn't know. She didn't know how few tomorrows Viktor had left, how could she, when he didn't either —

 

— Despite only just waking up at the hospital, Viktor closed his eyes in exhaustion. Every bone in his ribcage ached. “How much time do I have?” —

 

— A caring hand landed on his shoulder. “We’ll solve this.” 

“There may not be time. We’re in uncharted waters here and... I can feel my body...eroding” —

 

— The Doctor Reveck held the vial of Shimmer back for a valuable moment. “I must warn you. If you take this path, they will despise you. Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress.”

He made mention of Heimerdinger, but that was not who came to mind, at the sacrifice warned. “Jayce will understand” —

 

— “Sky...? Sky? No! That can’t,” It hadn’t even occurred to him, “that can’t, that can’t...” that someone else’s life might be sacrificed for his to be saved —

 

— I could end it. The fear, the hopelessness, the anger. He took a deep breath. It would all go away, into oblivion, with a single step— 

“Am I interrupting?” —

 

— What is this? “What... am I?” What’s happened to me? 

“You’re...alive. You’re alive!”

Then why does your embrace feel...cold? No, not cold. Absence of stimuli. Recursive impulse. Distantly, he knew he should feel horrified. Distantly. “ I was supposed to die. ” I was ready to die —

 

— They called him Herald. A herald of second chances, second lives —

 

— With this new body, he still didn't have enough time. He was declining. The Doctor voiced the crux of his dilemma plainly. “The regenerative qualities of his blood will stabilize you.” 

Another sacrifice, for the absolute solution to the affliction that all organisms suffered. Death —

 

— “Do you believe in fate, doctor?” —

 

— Time passed in increments. The people of the commune became Part of the Whole. Creation was a field of galaxies. The juvenile warmongering of humans below would make do, to expand the Whole. 

The Herald allowed them to lead, for Evolution to seize the day.

Time passed in blinks. He sought Jayce. “Jayce will understand,” he told the Doctor, but it was Jayce who stood against him. Jayce, attempting to change the Herald's mind. Jayce, who the Herald heeded to but for a moment, to listen. Jayce, who the Herald could not yield change to. Under his palm. The last piece of the puzzle. 

“You always wanted to cure what you thought were weaknesses. Your leg. Your disease. But you were never broken” —

 

All this tiresome waiting. Time spent, time wasted, time given, time sacrificed. Time that never once seemed to belong to him, always others, always sliced into halves of halves of halves, until—

 

Time—

Stopped.

Finally stopped. Finally, stopped. Finally, imperfections, wiped clean, eradicated, coalesced into metal-gold-homogeneity, countless Parts of the Whole extending across the world, in a field of hundreds, thousands, millions of nodes, all one, all relieved of pain, of suffering, of death, of the necessity of rest, finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finality. Finality of evolution. Evolution. 

Perfection. 

Perfection.

Perfection was a field of dreamless solitude. Solitude. One of us. Part of the Whole. Absence of flaws. All was finally perfect. Everything, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, was perfect—

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’re still there, aren't you Viktor? Please, tell me. Tell me you’re here. Please.

How could someone harbor so much love, for him?

It’s all that I am.

 

---

 

Viktor ripped through the fabric of the world with a scream.

In the frozen gap between seconds, a body formed. The resplendent shell of wild magic hardened, cracked, and spilled his light out. He had eyes, ears, heart — all aching in the molten fire of rushing blood. He had limbs, a face, skin that pearled with new humanness, and shone the bronze of shed machinery. Muscles jumped with tension. Everything seemed to shake. Violently. His vision, his legs, his breath. His breathing. 

He was alive.  

He was alone. 

“Ah...” The sound grated unfamiliar to his own hearing. Small, trembling, weak. His voice coughed. It rattled more furiously, raged fully into a rasping sound that burned out of his vocal cords. It kept coming. His own hearing rang from it. Wouldn’t stop.

The clench of his teeth creaked to the bone. He nearly clawed the raw, constant feeling out of his face—

His hands were different.

The markings there gave his senselessness pause. 

He knew these symbols. Runes, and focal points. They started at his fingertips. Thin, blue lines thrumming a relieving coolness. Interrupted color ran down to the back of his palms, then further past his sleeves.

Viktor shed his age-old cloak. There were spiral markings, too. White webs of the arcane that clung to his reborn flesh, up to his shoulders. Magic — true magic — unspooled from his skin and coiled over these new rune-etchings. 

He touched the lines, mesmerized out of the sheer intense feeling of being alive. Of breathing, feeling the air trap in his lungs and sink into his blood. He focused on the texture of his fingertips scratching up the strange, blue traces. 

At the high-center of his chest, there was a stone embedded. A small, teardrop stone. Not quite a rune-mark. And he could pull it free from the flesh without any pain, to hold it in his palm. The magic yielded him to.

It was Jayce’s rune.

Warm-kept, treasured for eons, unique and yet so common. So familiar to Viktor’s eyes.

“Jayce...” He clenched his hand into a tight fist around it. Why? After everything, why did Viktor get to live, when everyone else was lost to time? Why did you leave me with this curse? It wasn’t fair. He knew it was childish to dream, but everything still hurt.

A wild arcane rune rippled white at his feet. 

It encircled him. Viktor raised his hands protectively, but the pulse of power didn’t lash out at him. This wildness of magic, it was the same one that had burst around him and Jayce while he’d still been the Machine Herald. The pieces had cracked through the solitude, born out of a beloved man’s cold remains.

“What...?”

Viktor’s voice died out, raw from screaming himself hoarse. He instead studied the expanse of crackling, wordlessly and carefully. He had to. He couldn’t allow himself the full embrace of it — the pain, fear, hopelessness. They weren’t useful, and robbing him of reason.

The pattern on the orb infinitely refracted out of itself. When he moved his hands, the orb seemed to move with it. Responding to the rune, he hypothesized, and tested. The hand with Jayce’s rune stone was raised high, and with it, magic bloomed brighter, stronger, but...soft to his newborn vision. 

Alive?

“You are at the center of all this.” Could it hear? Could the arcane understand like an intelligent mind? Viktor had to bet that it did. The stone tucked inside his palm burned hot. “How can I fix this? Guide me. Show me. Show me!”

What was magic worth, if it couldn’t fix his mistakes? If he didn't have Jayce, his partner, his everything—

A spiderweb of green-teal-red leaped from the arcane. It cracked through him. It ran through the rune as well, splitting into fractal directions, to refract where Viktor had been thrice reborn.

He’d hugged the stone in his grip closer to himself, near to his heart. It came from Jayce, so he needed to keep it safe. It was all he had left of him—

The instant the stone touched his skin again, his body began shaking. Tears watered in his eyes. It hurt, his eyes, ears, heart — hurt, so much more than he ever remembered hurting. Was he supposed to live? With all this pain? Am I supposed to live with it, again?

“Please, show me what I have to do. Please.”

No one answered.

“There’s nothing to fix. Is there.” The words came in a quiet rumble. No one was left to answer him. He was alive. He was alone. Irrevocably, it was his own doing.

Time unfroze. It continued to pass within the wild rune. Perhaps he should keep letting it. Let time wither him, the way the machines had rusted to fragments. The way he had let Jayce wear away to a machine.

The arcane glimmer clinging to his body expanded, as if sensing the thought — the grain of a soul. Something pulled at him, a tugging force that urged him to look back.

Viktor did not muster resistance. He looked.

There, the shell he emerged from. It was imprinted with the outline of two bodies. His, and Jayce’s. His own outline was sinewy, slim, inhuman. Jayce's could be mistaken for a man. They’d huddled close in the end, with the shadow of Jayce’s arm slung toward the shadow of his head, to touch him closer. 

The membranes of the shell suddenly multiplied in his sight, again and again, covering both their bodies until they completely joined with the wild, lazily-spinning rune around and above — “I just want my partner back” —

Viktor blinked. 

No such thing had yet happened. 

Simultaneously, it already occurred.

He blinked again—

The sky exploded and Viktor emerged to, machines, a field of moss and frightened insects, Jayce being viciously gripped —

No such thing had yet happened.

“A memory.” He surprised himself by the curious touch he gave to the shadowed imprints. When had he reached forward? No, impossible that it was a memory. The barrier between reality and magic thinned here, was all. Time unfroze. It also circled in on itself. But why here? Why, when there wasn’t any Hextech left to wear away the...

Viktor opened his hands where a small stone waited for—

The Machine was different. It knelt here, above the world, watching, waiting, always waiting for—

On and on the prismatic wild rune swirled. Slowly, fast, in flickers of all time. 

Of his time.

“This stone, it’s what broke the barrier of our timeline,” Viktor understood. “And you...move through it. No, you react to it. You react to me?”

The wild rune moved in slow, halting rotations that blinked in and out of comprehensible pattern.

“You are trying to speak to me, aren’t you? But our languages are incompatible with each other.” Like the wind, which spoke in pressure, force, temperatures and elemental molecules. He could no better comprehend how an atom saw the world.

But perhaps he didn’t have to. He could feel the wind, after all. He could feel its press, its strength, its chill and its scent. Just as he could feel the magic. Before, with the Hexcore, Viktor had attempted to tame a wild beast to his will. Tame its healing, transformative properties. Now, he knew better. 

Viktor opened his arms to the arcane force. He took a deep breath. Let it out. At its own whim and joy, the wild rune expanded to a great sphere, all-encompassing. 

He thought only one word, Jayce.

 

---

 

Time was a clenched fist.

Violence and tenderness dug teeth into the magic. They were the cutting and slicing of reality, and the safe guiding touch that sent him whole through.

Into a blizzard.

His leg faltered, his restored knee crumpled—

But the webs of the arcane wrapped tighter on his right, weaker leg. It kept him upright, without pain or physical stress. 

No, not the arcane, Viktor thought. These threads came from within the body he’d reawakened to. Clinging to him carefully, cradling him, supporting him. 

Compulsively, he touched the spot where that one particular rune marked his chest. He felt—I love you, it whispered, and Viktor, his leg folded again at the overwhelming rush of forgiveness that hit him. Forgiveness he didn’t believe he deserved. Not yet. 

"Jayce?"

I love you.

It was there, faint. Constant. Calling to him.

He took a deep breath and followed the whisper.

The blizzard bit cold around his fingers — I love you — until the threads spread pale along his arms. They held him, warmed him better than any fire — I love you — and pushed strength into his muscles, kept him pushing, kept him searching. 

The magic that had returned life to him swelled in his heart, so utterly great, that every step he took nearly threw Viktor to the snowy ground. Jayce, are you still there?

A tiny voice broke through the whisper.

“Help! Someone please!”

Viktor steeled his resolve. No time to think on it. There was pain in his lungs and his legs, burning, old and unforgettably infuriating. But that wasn’t all that was there. I’m here. He trekked on. I will make it to you again. He stabbed his staff into the ground and pushed on. Just wait for me, a little longer.

The shadow of a boy was swallowed into snow.

Without thinking, he touched the rune mark at his chest. 

There were infinite threads of possibilities in that single touch. Infinite branches of times, of past, present, future, all in a crosshair through the stone. He touched the rune, and the rune came away to his fist. But also—

One possibility just a fraction of a fraction of a second in adjacent spacetime, plucked in his palm. The stone was there, in his chest.

And it was also in his fist.

A singularity. Self-replicating. Self-annihilating.

Time folded in on itself.

He found the boy and his mother. “Take us away from here,” he prayed to the stone to please, please work. 

Blizzard winds blew outwards in a great dome. A wave of blue changing runes danced in the air. It illuminated the desolate wintery white, then reshaped into a circle.

For a second, time stopped. Everything loose upon the ground began to float. A sense of serenity washed through the terror of the blizzard. Somewhere safe, wherever you want, Jayce, Viktor asked, not demanded.

The world spun in Viktor’s hand.

He opened his eyes to a field of flowers.

He lost his breath to how beautiful it was. Full of light. Dotted with the snow, still. The mountains in the distance. All the pain and anger and sorrow knotted inside his chest fell away to that indescribable beauty.

And when he turned, there he was. 

The boy who’d saved him, staring at him with wide, sun-tearful eyes.

Viktor almost let out a real laugh. This boy, who couldn’t know the significance of magic yet, had saved him. Will save him. The same boy who looked at him with wonder and curiosity.

“...How?”

Viktor reached out, without a word, as if something in him recognized that the boy who would save him in the future, would always grant him this precious, small gift back. The rune. 

(But what rune did he have but the very one Jayce gifted him? A small, fearful, selfish part of him didn’t wish to give it up. It was all he had left of the Jayce-That-Was-Gone.)

The rune pulsed. It spoke, in the pressure of gifted strength and the unstoppable force of time.

Viktor knew what needed to be.

He chose to let the rune go.

 

---

 

Again, and again. He had to choose.

"Guide me," he'd ask.

The magic would respond.

Like fate, the blizzard would greet him, cold and unforgiving. He'd choose to cross it. And then he’d pluck the rune from his reforged living self, the body born out of time, and choose to return it to Jayce. For just a chance, a possibility of their saved future.

"How?" The boy always asked him.

Love, he didn’t say. One day, you’ll see all magic is, is love.

Love that promised they would always find their way to each other.

Perhaps not at a time when both could understand. But Viktor would save Jayce, and Jayce would save him, round and round across all time and all realities. They would find each other, and they would show each other this:

That time was a clenched fist, and a rune stone was held lovingly inside it.

 

---

 

“Have I ever told you how I fear the blizzards, Jayce?”

The husk of organic and machine matter did not reply. It could not. Words no longer belonged to it, only the words given by the Herald. Kneeling above the world, this perfect specimen retained no opinion of its own silent state. It remained uncaring to its company. 

There was no recognition in its flawless, spotless, hollow face.

Viktor knelt with it, side by side. He watched the sun rise above gray clouds and grayer landscapes. “Every time I jump to a different universe, I have to find you there, somewhere. You are so small, and so tired from the long trek through the mountains, that your voice barely cuts through the winds. I hear you, still. I always find you in time. The rune guides me, unfailing, to you. And yet I still fear the blizzard.” He turned then, to his partner. What was yet left of his partner. With a smile Viktor couldn't explain, he said, “Isn't that wondrous?”

Because it was so wondrous to feel that again. The fear that pushed him to do the impossible? The urgency behind it, the thrum beating in his chest, to the timeless beat? The irrefutable knowledge that he cared, that he wanted to save Jayce from that fear, too?

I love you, it whispered, in the protected swell of his ribcage. 

The Jayce he spoke to now had forgotten it. The face it wore did not move, not even to express inquiry, or confusion. The brilliant, beautiful mind beneath it had died a long time ago. 

Viktor still spoke.

“I visited a dozen worlds today. In the last one, I believe, you were traveling with your father, instead of your mother.” He closed his eyes to the light of the sun and gingerly dusted off the moss growing around Jayce’s feet. Jayce wouldn't like being dirty. “You have his sense of curiosity, and his eyes. Did you know?”

It did not matter if Jayce could not understand yet. Viktor made a promise. He promised to come and keep him company. To believe in them. I love you, it whispered, in the strength of his right leg. Viktor would gladly tell him of all he’d seen while living, for just a chance at rescuing his humanity.

“I am glad to meet you there, every time.” 

They were the entanglement of time and space. I love you, Always and forever, in all timelines and all possibilities.

“Everywhen.”

He would keep this promise until his last breath.

Notes:

Thank you so much to everyone who left comments and kudos! They’ve kept me going through December’s end-of-year work chaos and stress (I JUST started my winter break 😭 thank fuck).

A couple of notes:

 

Tags:

I tried avoiding spoiler tags, hence the content warning “CNTW” tag paired with the “Happy Ending” tag. I apologize for the pain and suffering you went through watching both Jayce and Viktor “die” (does it count as dying if you choose it to give each other a chance at living happily together in a forever-time loop?). I would also apologize for splitting at That Cliffhanger, but Viktor POV went too hard and got out of control. It became its own chapter-length.

About the “Failed Timeline” tag. Technically, there is no Failed Timeline here! Depending on the rune, it just takes Jayce longer to show Viktor what he needs to, to save him. In the Acceleration Rune Timelines, Ekko is the catalyst. In this Unlabeled Rune Timeline, the preserved piece of The Machine’s humanity is the catalyst which creates an infinite loop of Mage Viktors. Which leads me to:

 

Time Loop / Bootstrap Paradox:

The final epigraph note on Chapter 4 is a shortened version of the quote from Doctor Who. The 12th Doctor calls it the “Bootstrap Paradox,” a time paradox in which an object, idea, or thought has no true origin, and gets stuck on an endless time traveling cycle. The position of this story asks: “Where did the rune stone come from?” We don’t know. Without it, we have no Hextech. We also have no Old Mage Viktor who can save all the Jayces, nor a Jayce who can then save all the Viktors. The loop feeds itself.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, because it comes from the same place love does.

 

Fic and Chapter titles:

Originate from songs! Here are the names of the songs used:

The Title: from “Chasing Cars” - Snow Patrol
Chapter 1: from “Remember me” - Arcane: League of Legends, d4vd
Chapter 2: from “Some things Cosmic” - Angel Olsen
Chapter 3/4: from “For the First Time” - Mac DeMarco

“Chasing Cars” is truly THE VIBE of this fanfic. The lyrics *chef kiss* cry myself to sleep to it every night basically.

“Some things Cosmic” in particular has me smashing my head into the pavement over Jayvik, thanks to my internet wife (BrokenVirgin) for showing me this song.