Chapter Text
There’s a stranger haunting the corner of Jayce’s workshop with all the grace of a particularly focused ghost.
Which, on its own, isn’t exactly odd enough to be unnerving. Strange? Sure. But not weird. Patronage is slow and steady for the most part, and there are precious few faces that drift by often enough to be called regulars . It’s not uncommon for a customer to slip in through the front door and linger a brief while before leaving. Repair work will always be in high demand on Entresol, and Jayce is damn good at what he does.
Some fifteen-odd minutes pass, and the stranger doesn’t leave. He drifts between shelves and prototypes, but lingers. So Jayce pays a little more attention; watches with guarded curiosity and arrives at the conclusion that this stranger is different from the norm.
What stands out isn’t the size of him, nor his bulk. He isn’t like the customers that watch Jayce with wary eyes because they know he’s watching them in just the same way. Caution and tension go hand-in-hand down here, down where the sun barely pierces the smog.
No, what stands out about this stranger are his clothes. They’re muted in color, well-worn. They’re practical down to the seams, and so very carefully Zaunite that he doesn’t doubt that this man could slip into a crowd and vanish in moments. There’s intent in the way the outfit is assembled; a calculated edge remains even if well-hidden, and that edge is the confession of an outsider’s identity.
Topsider, says Jayce’s gut.
So.
There is a topsider in the corner of Jayce’s workshop. He dresses like a Zaunite and acts like a Zaunite and moves like a Zaunite, but has the naked curiosity of a topsider in his gaze and the stubborn pride to wear it like a badge.
Which, again: it’s not unusual. Not really. For all that topsiders posture at being above Zaun, condescending spectators to her conflicts and shameful vendors of her ingenuity, they drift down into the fissures like it’s homecoming whenever rules become restraint and cravings demand satiation. Even Jayce’s workshop, tucked away as it is in a small, dingy, nameless alley on Entresol, sees the occasional topsider looking for comparatively cheap repairs.
Though, he thinks, usually they don’t go to such efforts to debase themselves by blending into the crowds. It’s curious, but not enough that Jayce is going to go out of his way to interrogate the guy. All he’s doing is staring at the neat row of prosthetic prototypes on one of the shelves, anyway.
Weird. But not weird enough to inquire. Jayce turns his attention back to his notebook– all scrawled equations and homework-that-isn’t-homework from the College– and allows himself to lose time to the work, glancing upward only intermittently.
The stranger seems just as content to keep to the silence, like an oath. A strange, abstract camaraderie. Jayce turns a page, the shuffle of paper on paper soft in the quiet, and keeps reading. There’s the sound of shoes on stone, the shuffle of an injured gait. Jayce flicks his gaze up in time to watch a grimace– one he recognizes in his bones– flicker its way across the man’s pale lips as he turns on his heel.
The cane in his hands is elegant in its simplicity, precise and mechanical in design. The brace, however, catches his eyes.
An engineer? Or a scientist, maybe. Either option would explain why a topsider has taken the time of day to drift down from Piltover and down to Zaun’s less than sunny bowels, just to spend what must have been the better half of an hour studying Jayce’s gearwork and painstakingly assembled metacarpophalangeal joints.
So there they are, a shopkeep and a curious stranger, losing daylight in silence. The man studies Jayce’s work while Jayce studies him, and isn’t curiosity just one hell of a thing? It can motivate a topside scientist to brave the gray, and it can bully out years of ingrained wariness to make room for itself.
The man moves again, the necessary three steps left to reach a workbench of works-in-progress. The metalwork of it is rough, all hinges and mechanisms wrought from steel scrap. The beginning of a knee joint, sitting next to the first prototype of Jayce’s own leg brace.
The man’s gaze lingers there, intent and molten in the dimming afternoon light. Then he’s reaching out, reaching forward, his careful fingers tracing along welding seams and scratches in the metal, and Jayce’s curiosity flash-boils.
“Can I help you?”
The man exhales sharply. His focus moves from Jayce’s work to Jayce, brows furrowed and mouth pressed to a thin line, and really, he feels a little like he’s being dissected (or flayed) beneath the weight of that stare. Inspected, for sure.
Topsider, he reminds himself. There are many people whose opinions Jayce cares for, and a lingering stranger– even one who touches his work with a rare, open curiosity– doesn’t make that list.
The man’s expression turns pensive. “No,” he says, at length. “No, I was simply inspecting your wares. You are an engineer?”
Jayce tilts his head. “A scientist, when the college isn’t burying me with work. It’s mostly repairs around here.”
The stranger doesn’t meet him with another question or a continuation; he turns away, abrupt, to focus on another shelf of inventions and display-only prototypes. Jayce huffs, and turns back to his work with increasingly reduced focus.
“Do you not think that this hinge– here,” the stranger says, punctuating his words with a light tap at the joint, “would only reduce overall efficiency in motion?”
He prods lightly at a leg brace as he speaks; one of Jayce’s first, and he clearly isn’t asking a question but rather positing a fact. He’s also right– Jayce knows this from having lived through the resistance and subsequent muscular complaints– but he frowns nonetheless. He stands up slowly, carefully, and perches on the edge of his desk.
“It’s an old model,” Jayce says. “It was designed to reduce the load-bearing weight on the bone as it heals. You lose a little mobility in trade for support.” From his new position, the light catches on the metal of his own brace; a challenge. The man’s eyes flicker down to the steel brackets and then back up to Jayce, to the scowl on his face, and his own expression turns neutral.
“Yes, it would support the injured leg adequately, but the reduced range of motion would require the opposite leg to further overcompensate. It would cause strain injuries, given time.”
Yeah, Jayce is not going to give this topsider the satisfaction of knowing that he’s right. There’s a good reason that model is on the display-only shelf. “Did you come here for a reason? Or do you just charm everyone in the Undercity by insulting their work?”
The man draws back, eyes wide with something that isn’t quite embarrassment, but sure as hell isn’t shame. The change in angle allows daylight to spill through the workshop windows and onto his face, and Jayce meets eyes that are the same color as his own with a scowl.
“It is not an insult. I am merely, eh, correcting a slight oversight that could lead to unnecessary strain upon the wearer of this brace.”
Jayce raises an eyebrow. He then gestures broadly towards the door.
“There is something you can help me with, actually,” Irritating-Topside-Scientist then says, at length. “I have been testing different catalysts for use in a… personal project. Platinum-based, preferably, but nickel would also suffice. I was recommended a number of tradesmen who work with prostheses and augmentation. Apparently, this includes you.”
The guy is a scientist, and probably also an engineer. He works with chemtech– for use as fuel cells, presumably. Somebody had recommended several people, Jayce included, to him. Which means he’s more familiar with the Undercity than most Topsiders would ever allow themselves to be.
Unfortunately for him, Jayce is not a chemtech specialist. “Yeah, I’m out.”
“...out,” he says blankly. Jayce offers a weak shrug.
“I got nothing. Chemical engineering isn’t my area of expertise. I’m a metalworker. I do repairs.”
If he’s disappointed, he doesn’t show it. Some emotion that may be a frown tugs at the corners of his lips, only to be immediately snuffed out. His eyes settle on Jayce for a breath or a lifetime, molten gold in the crucible, and the moment as soon as he turns away.
The silence lingers. Stretches. Jayce is stubborn, and wears the trait like a medal. This stranger with too-sharp eyes and a too-quick tongue is an equal competitor, it seems, and Jayce–
He scoffs, and finds that he’s not as irritated as he should be by the fact that this entire exchange has been weirdly entertaining. A break from the norm, for sure. “Check the Lanes. Benzo’s place. If he doesn’t have what you’re looking for, he can probably point you to someone who does.”
With any luck, Benzo’s suspiciously well informed kid apprentice will be able to squeeze the guy for coin in trade for information.
For a moment, the stranger is quiet– he scribbles something down into a journal. He then tears the page from the book and pushes it towards him. Jayce just stares at it for a long moment.
“For your assistance,” the stranger says. He turns around and makes for the door, the steady tapping of his cane filling up the silence, and slips into the crowds beyond seamlessly.
Jayce stares. What the hell just happened?
He then looks down at the paper.
It’s a correction. For the brace. Hastily scrawled and damn-near impossible to read. There isn’t a name on it; it’s just a crude diagram and a correction that Jayce has already implemented into his more recent models.
“Asshole.”
At least it’s pretty unlikely that he’ll ever have to deal with that guy again.
The stranger comes back at the crack of dawn the next day, because of course he does. Dozens of vendors scattered across the Entresol level and even more of them crowding the Promenade, and the guy ignores each and every single one of them in favor of Jayce’s nameless little workshop.
He’d be flattered if he weren’t still annoyed. As it is, he’s replacing the worn out wiring of a customer’s arm when his half-a-day or so of peace dies a pitiful death. The workshop door swings open with a soft creak because he keeps forgetting the oil the hinges, and in steps a stranger that he unfortunately recognizes.
Jayce, very heroically in his opinion, bites back the sigh that threatens to heave its way out of him. It’s very much still there in the pressure behind his ribcage, and the flicker of annoyance warming him from the inside out.
“I did not expect that you would listen,” he says.
Charming.
“You weren’t wrong,” Jayce replies. Allows, even, because Jayce isn’t some snooty asshole who strides into a workshop just to harass the poor bastard running the joint. “Which is why the later models were updated to reflect that. Being load-bearing enough to keep weight off the injury doesn’t mean shit if you end up injuring the other one in the process. Too much tightness around the joint and moving becomes even more of a burden. So.” He shrugs. “Even though I’d already had the idea– and implemented it– it’d be pretty stupid of me not to listen.”
He plucks the note he’d been handed the day before from where it rests between his journal’s pages as a bookmark and turns it over to face outward. Jayce’s stranger watches him with something in his eyes; some bright spark that could be either amusement or indignation.
“You get points for the effort, but you also didn’t have to be an ass about the delivery. Now: can I help you? I still don’t have what you came in for yesterday.”
“You do aim to charm your regulars, no?” Then, when Jayce scowls at him: “I am browsing. ”
“Browsing my patience, sure,” he sighs. “Just. Don’t scare off the regulars, then.”
The stranger gestures widely to himself, as if to say, who, me?, and Jayce rolls his eyes. Sure, the guy doesn’t exactly make for a threatening figure, but he sure as hell makes for an irritating one, and breaking up any fight that his attitude starts isn’t exactly high up on Jayce’s bucket list.
He goes back to his work.
There’s a build-up inside the arm, he finds. Something like oil and rust, or maybe engine sludge– it’s difficult to tell, but the added stress of movement is what wore out the cables. Jayce spends the next ten minutes with his fingers tangled in the aforementioned wires, and spends the ten that follow trying to scrub old oil out from under his nails with a limited degree of success.
The man’s eyes flicker over to Jayce, momentary but obvious, and settle on the brace wrapped around his leg. He can’t help it; it’s reflexive. He tenses up.
In response, the man just rolls his eyes and takes a step away from the counter so the entirety of him is visible– brace and cane included. He doesn’t say a word, just makes a loose gesture, and. Well. Jayce isn’t sure how the hell he’s supposed to reply to that, he doesn’t. He resumes working, and the only noise is that which seeps in from the world beyond the workshop when the occasional other customer drifts inside.
At some point, his stranger leaves. Jayce kind of misses the silence.
Unfortunate coincidence resigns itself to purposeful pattern the third time this door swings open to the clearing of a throat and the rhythmic tapping of a cane.
This time, Jayce acknowledges his stranger with a terse nod before he returns to the layers of blueprints sprawled out before him that, no matter what he tries, refuse to come together into a viable draft model.
His eyelids are heavy with a weight that he can’t knead away. The exhaustion certainly isn’t helping, but he’d spent his night caught between sleeping and waking with only dreams of bright, haunting blue and the bone-deep ache of his leg as company. Sue him, he isn’t going to make for companionable conversation.
For once, his stranger doesn’t exactly make a nuisance of himself beyond that initial interruption. He idles once again towards the prosthetics tucked away towards the back of the workshop and doesn’t say a word, so Jayce turns his wobbling attention back to the blueprints for a delicate, neglected finger joint that he’s coaxed maybe halfway into functionality.
A work in progress, he’ll tell himself. Jayce sighs. Groans, really, and knuckles at his temples like he can banish his headache and its cause in a fell swoop.
Instead he earns himself a snort, this rough and decidedly un-Piltovan noise, that takes with it the last of his focus. His stranger walks towards him leisurely, head tilted up just enough to make out the scrawled annotations of Jayce’s blueprints.
Really, if this stranger is going to insist on planting himself firmly into his business, he should probably learn his name. “You know, I’m beginning to suspect that you might even like being down here.”
“It is a wonder,” his companion replies, his amusement blunt as a hammer, “that you retain any customers, if this is how you choose to greet them.”
The blueprints are going nowhere, physically and cognitively. He’ll come back to them later, hopefully with a clear head. Jayce hums, more to himself than anything, and tilts his head an increment forward. “You know, for a topsider, you’re…”
Jayce trails off. If this stranger-acquaintance of his had been caught off-guard by Jayce knowing he’s from topside, he doesn’t show it. He only inclines his head, artificial light catching warm against his hair, and offers a plasticky smile.
“Among your more pleasant clientele, I should hope?”
Jayce snorts. “I was going to say you’re not always an ass. I suppose you’re not entirely incorrect either.”
“Do you afford all of your customers such flattery…?” His words trail off neatly, decisively, in a clear prompt for a name. Jayce makes sure the smile he offers bares too many teeth.
“It’s Jayce.”
“I know. The younger assistant at Benzo’s place– the one insistent on turning haggling into a form of psychological warfare– told me. Repeatedly.” The stranger sighs, and Jayce is still processing that I know when the rest of his words register, alongside the amused huff that he is going to pretend isn’t setting off alarm bells in his head. “The boy had many stories.”
Nevermind. Both he and Ekko exist to make Jayce’s life harder than it strictly has to be. “What I said about you not always being an ass? Rescinded. I take back anything lenient I’ve ever thought of you.”
This earns him a laugh– it’s a thick, hoarse sound. His stranger is as stunned by it as he is, if the awkward cough that follows is any indication, and Jayce isn’t sure what to think of how little he minds this stranger knowing his name or the stories Ekko has apparently told him. Concerned, maybe.
If he’s going insane, he’s honestly kind of surprised that it took this long.
“You got a name?” Jayce says as he thumbs at the blueprints under his palms. “Or do I get to keep on thinking up new nicknames for each annoying thing out of your mouth? Because, let me tell you– I’m running out of neutral descriptors. The clock is ticking.”
The stranger hooks his cane over his forearm as he inspects an upside-down page of scrawled equations. It’s a simple gesture, practiced and thoughtless, but Jayce’s eyes catch and remain there. He’s not going to unpack why.
“How dear of you to collect nicknames,” he murmurs.
“How topside of you to dodge a question with pleasantries,” he shoots right back. It must strike a nerve, because his companion stiffens on a dime, a twitch of tension running across him, and when Jayce next looks up to look at him there’s something– not quite a scowl, but close– to the firm press of his lips.
“If you are going to insult me, Jayce,” he says flatly, “you could at the very least attack the contents of my character.”
Huh. Well, fuck. This guy isn’t just interesting, he’s a puzzle. Great. Jayce smiles wide, curious, and leans forward. “Not all buddy-buddy with the topsiders?”
A raised eyebrow is all the response he gets to that question, and Jayce files that response to come back to later. He can’t believe this asshole is an anomaly he’s going to allow to plague his thoughts even after he drags down the shutters for the night.
“Tell me about these,” the man says, tapping down on the blueprints. As far as redirections go, it’s transparent, but Jayce enjoys his work and he sure as hell enjoys working through a problem. Maybe a second pair of eyes will help, even if they belong to the most frustrating man he’s met in several years. “The internal mechanisms are remarkably delicate.”
“They’re an improvement on an old model,” he says. “When I first built them, I was focusing more on articulation than durability– trying to make up for what was lost.” What she lost, Jayce doesn’t say, because he doesn’t need to know.
The man pulls over the seat Jayce usually reserves for clients who need more complex, live repairs and settles in it like it’s his own.
Against his better judgement, he isn’t that irritated by some topsider taking the initiative to make himself perfectly comfortable among Jayce’s equations and prototypes.
It’s dark when Jayce looks up. The artificial lights outside are shards of neon against the workshop’s window, and the lamplight of the workshop casts flickering shadows over the walls. It’s not even early evening, it’s close to the middle of the night. He blinks rapidly. What the fuck?
Time flies when you’re hammering out the finer details on a ludicrously complicated prosthetic mechanism, or however the saying goes.
His nameless stranger stands, preparing to return to the luminous streets of Piltover, and grimaces– probably at the ache in his leg. Jayce can sympathise; he knows damn well that his own is going to take him to task for staying cooped up at his workbench all day.
Before his thoughts can begin to wander again, he’s asked: “You are not leaving?”
And the first thing that exits his sleep-deprived mouth in response is: “Are you offering to walk me home, stranger?”
The joke falls flatter than the note-covered slip of paper Jayce now uses as a bookmark, and he coughs awkwardly. “I, uh, live upstairs. I don’t have some fancy topside apartment to luxuriate in. I just have to lock up here.”
“For someone so free with his thoughts, you operate under a number of incorrect assumptions about the way I live.” Jayce doesn’t need to know how to navigate social intricacies to hear the very audible reprimand. He’s not abashed. He’s not. When he coughs again it’s because the air quality sucks, and his workshop is full of dust.
“Was that a reprimand?” he asks, just to be annoying.
The man hums again, a soft little ‘eh’ sound that Jayce hears just a little bit too well above the murmur of Zaunite nightlife just outside the walls of his home, and shrugs. “Maybe, maybe not.”
When he makes to leave, Jayce makes a decision. An olive branch, of sorts.
“Safe travels then, stranger,” he offers. There’s a pause. His companion looks a little stunned, then pleased– something warm tugs upward at the corners of his lips.
Then, “It’s Viktor.”
Huh.
There are patterns to Jayce’s dreams. Recursive processes, images shattered into fractals. A lifetime lived over and over, returning to the same defining branches. They’re nonsensical things, his dreams– for the most part.
There are holdfasts to them: the sensation of full-body tremors. Runes, wispy and intangible, dancing in the corners of his vision. Walls of biting cold rushing against a body too small and feeble to endure.
The bite of a blizzard. The bite of rubble. A phantom ache like fire, its flames licking along his leg. Bright, brilliant blue on the air, against the walls, in his skin.
Jayce wakes violently, and disoriented. It’s not uncommon.
He’ll roll onto his side and clutch at his leg. His fingers will trail over the fissures of the scar there until pale light bleeds into the room.
That isn’t uncommon, either.
“Your calculation is incorrect.”
It’s the first thing Viktor has said in at least an hour.
Probably several more than that, though. Sunlight doesn’t exactly penetrate deeply into Zaun past the Promenade, but Jayce’s eyes itch like it’s midnight. He leans back in his chair, careful to not knock his outstretched leg into the corner of the desk, and breathes out slowly. Closes his eyes.
“You’re pointing at a notebook full of calculations, Viktor,” he murmurs. “You need to be more specific.”
If sheer force of will could convince equations to leap out of the page and rearrange themselves into something sensible– and decidedly less volatile than Jayce knows the crystals can get– years of study probably would have made that happen by now.
“This one,” Viktor says, and taps down one long, delicate finger on a mostly-illegible scrawl at the top-right hand corner of the page. Jayce squints at it for however many minutes it takes for the symbols and characters to sink into his foggy brain.
In hindsight, it’s probably a miracle Viktor can even read half of Jayce’s notes at all– let alone well enough to believe them to be incorrect. This one is a scrawl, jotted down in what he barely remembers having been a midnight moment of inspiration. But, still: “Nope. It’s not.”
“It is,” Viktor insists, and– to him, yeah, it probably looks that way. Theoreticals and abstractions colliding to make what, to a topside scientist, must look like the regurgitated mathematics of a madman. He’s leaning over the workbench further now, brushing the components that don’t make sense to him as though he can physically rearrange the equation into something that resembles sense.
It’s been a long, long time since proximity has been pleasant. Jayce is tactile by nature, always has been, but those instincts aren’t the kind that life in Zaun has cultivated in him. In spite of this, those dusty synapses are starting to return to life. In a complete betrayal of his mind, Jayce’s body seems to want nothing more than to gravitate towards the promise of touch.
“It’s not,” he says, and returns to his soldering. “On paper, at least. In practice it’s still a little too, uh… volatile. It’s for a work in progress.”
The snap-crackle backdrop of the soldering iron buries the silence for about two and a half minutes as Viktor keeps on reading, tearing through notes and blueprints and the framework of Jayce’s dream as though it’s sustenance enough to fuel him.
He doesn’t remember having given Viktor permission to studiously dissect his work. Can’t find it in himself to mind that the equations they’re working on are the base hypotheticals required to harness magic. Viktor’s eyes are fixed and focused, ember-lit in the low light.
It takes a herculean effort to tear his gaze away, and even then, he only convinces himself by leveraging the very reasonable argument that soldering while distracted would be stupid way to get injured. Especially with an audience.
The outer shell of the prosthetic finger is patchwork and as elegant as Jayce can make it. For now, it’s good enough.
“You are not going to explain your reasoning?” Viktor asks. When he’s only answered by a soft mm-hm, he scoffs. “You are many things, Jayce, but I had not believed you to be cruel before this moment.”
Jayce can’t help it: he laughs. “You break out the psychological warfare with everyone, or is it just me?” And is he supposed to be counting himself lucky? Because Viktor is staring at him now, eyes molten with their intensity, and Jayce– he thinks he could get used to this.
Lucky, indeed.
“A tool should be used when necessary, no?” Viktor says, inching forward. “You would not use a blow torch where a soldering iron would suffice.”
He takes up the metacarpophalangeal endoskeleton into his palm and coils a wire around a delicate finger. It’s loose, Jayce notes absently. Needs to be anchored again. He indulges, for a moment, on the sight before him. His invention cradled in those steady, graceful hands.
“I have a forge,” Jayce says blankly, “and a tool metaphor doesn’t excuse the whole guilt thing you’re trying out over there.”
“You insist this… equation of yours is correct, despite all evidence suggesting the opposite to be the truth. You are confident that this is correct. And you will not explain your reasoning.” Viktor’s tone turns offended, if not imploring. “You would leave me, a scientist, alone with an equation that by all means should not be solved in such a manner?”
“Scientists are exactly who should get stuck with unsolvable equations.” He leans back from the rigging with a soft oomph and pushes his goggles up. They rest at his hairline– keep the longer strands from falling into his eyes– and it’s only the prickle of stubble against the hand he runs down his face that reminds him how many days it’s been since he last shaved. He probably looks like a wreck. “Besides– this isn’t unsolvable. You’re just a victim of topside academic rigidity.”
Viktor pauses. His mouth opens, then closes, and when nothing comes out his eyes just. Narrow. Like Jayce ripped the wind clean from his sails and left him to drift. “Am I supposed to not take offense to that?”
Jayce shrugs.
“You’re terrible.”
“Thanks.”
Viktor rolls his eyes. “Putting aside your impossible equation– which I will be bringing home with me, for your information– your workings are… remarkable. You said you are a student at the college?”
“Part-time. Work the classes around the shop,” he says absently. “Mostly just for the credits. I should probably try to make a few more of them, really, but the work is easy. I’m already doing it.” Then, as an afterthought: “What are classes like up topside?”
Viktor shoots him a glance that’s as magnificently bored as it is irritated. Jayce tips back in his chair and laughs out loud.
Ozone and petrichor hang heavy in the air. They don’t quite manage to outcompete the thick, chemical smog native to Zaun, but Jayce only needs the persistent, dull ache of his leg to recognize the promise of a storm.
Behind him, Benzo’s shutters close. The door locks with a resounding click, and it confirms that promise to Jayce: storm’s coming. Better get back quick. It’s midday and dark enough to be midnight, so Jayce heaves the box in his arms into a better position and starts moving.
The list of problems that come with living in a crack in the earth: extensive. Rainy season adds another dozen entries to that list. Zaun gets her own rain, and then Piltover’s run-off because gravity doesn’t particularly care for geopolitics.
The threat of a washout does little to dissuade people from the Lanes. It’s one of few circumstances in which Jayce can be glad for his stature; his height that allows him to tower over the majority of the crowds with ease. At the very least, he makes for an imposing figure– especially while wielding a heavy crate of assorted scrap metal.
Because his drifting thoughts abide by a gravity of their own these days, Jayce wonders, idly, how Viktor navigates the Lanes. With mechanical grace, probably.
It isn’t that Jayce had been able to pinpoint Viktor as a topsider because of his clothes, after all. Like recognizes like. Even if it had only been for a few short months– there’s a certain shape of wariness the constant weight of expectation impresses upon the mind. It straightens the spine, even when it aches.
Viktor is the type to disappear into a crowd.
Jayce wonders if they’ve ever crossed paths before.
In the morning, he’ll comb through the pile of trash and treasure he salvaged from Benzo’s. The scraps can be repurposed into prosthetics and prototypes, turned functional with some time and effort.
The real treasure comes in the form of old, yellow-paged tomes and weathered scroll papers. The wandering thoughts of a travelling mage. Illustrated instructions in a language Jayce can only read pieces of that detail methods to invoke potential energy into crystalline matrices. Alchemical manuscripts. Old notes on planetary alignment. Everything and anything that might, in some shape, further his research.
The silence of the workshop, Jayce finds, feels out of place. Disjointed. It always has– the presence of another living being is a balm of sorts– but now, it glares more than ever.
Jayce dreams of a storm, and of old magic, and of a shadow that defies recollection.
He wakes, restless, in the middle of the night. This isn’t uncommon.
Jayce dreams of a workshop, and of metalwork, and of pages of notes he could never forget. This is… new.
It’s a few weeks later that Viktor tells him, without warning: “It was the prosthetic fingers.”
Viktor doesn’t look up from his work as he says the words. His focus remains somewhere between equations and paper, the abstract of the dream versus the tangible reality presently insistent on saying, no, you will not be violating any laws of physics today , and it’s as unerring as the line of tension that he carries in his shoulders more and more often recently.
Hell, the pace of his handwriting– elegant, sloping and eager to the point of occasional illegibility– doesn’t change in the slightest. Jayce blinks away the flecks swimming across his vision, and by the time he processes those words that were, in fact, intended for him, Viktor has already picked up the prosthesis in question. Each of his movements are careful, fingertips trailing carefully over etched patterns and swirling vortices Jayce only fuzzily remembers carving into the metal, and something in Jayce just… thaws.
Even without knowing the reason why Jayce has kept such an outdated model of prosthetic– without knowing that he’s holding one of very few tangible reminders of Jayce’s mother with the reverence Jayce had built them with in the first place– his consideration remains the same as it is for any other piece of Jayce’s work.
This affection is a splinter, Jayce thinks, embedded into some soft and aching part of him. He hopes he heals around it. He hopes it fuses into him until his body recognizes the racing of his heart as home. A single word barely does justice to the gravitational pull this man has, to how effortlessly the thought of him occupies his mind. Affection is a fractal of an emotion that stubbornly insists on evolving until it permeates the paperwork scattered across his desk, the two empty mugs and half-full journals tucked knowingly away from the chaos; a dream of magic and the ambition demanded to reach for it.
For a long moment, Jayce finds himself staring at the delicate metal resting in Viktor’s palm.
Then he realizes that he’s staring blankly, and that Viktor is staring right back at him, still waiting for Jayce to get back to him within the next three business days, and some part of his brain that’s been firing backwards for the past minute kicks into high-gear again.
“You feel like sharing context cues today, V?” he says, and maybe if he pretends to be entirely normal about his heart taking his brain to task, Viktor won’t question the way his voice has jumped up an octave. Except they’re both scientists, and not only is it in the job description to take note of interesting discrepancies– one of Viktor’s hobbies appears to be finding as many of Jayce’s buttons as he can, just to find out what jamming each of them will do.
So to save himself from the teasing he can feel in the air like the barometric pressure drop before a storm, Jayce shifts in his seat– and winces at the featherlight ache that trails its way up his spine. It’s followed by a sharper pain in his leg, a complaint for the hours spent rigidly hunched over but otherwise still. He hisses out a breath between gritted teeth and stretches out the limb, slow and tentative.
He doesn’t need to turn his attention up from the brace to know that Viktor has traded his wry cut of a smile for a frown. In fact, Jayce doesn’t need to look up to know that he’s currently being nailed with a piercing stare, even in the low light. It’s second nature in Zaun to be painfully aware of when you’re being scoped out– some ancient, wary survival instinct flaring to life.
These days, Jayce’s sympathetic nervous system is fairly robustly attuned to the man sitting less than a meter away from him. Go figure.
A natural consequence of a prolonged period spent immobile, he can just about hear Viktor say. One easily prevented by taking breaks, he would be unable to resist adding, snide and entirely aware of his own hypocrisy.
“Yeah, yeah.” Jayce waves a vague, dismissive hand. “You don’t need to say it again.”
“Perhaps if you deigned to listen,” Viktor chides, like he isn’t just as bad as Jayce is when it comes to losing time to science and good company. Jayce tells him as such, and Viktor stiffens, then huffs out a breath that’s as much a laugh as it is a sigh. “Anyways.”
Jayce turns a page. The sound is soft, just like the amber-warm lamplight they work by in the evenings.
“It was the design work of your prosthetics that caught my attention,” Viktor says. “I did not necessarily frequent the Lanes, prior to you. But there are certain… materials, here, that are far easier to come by than they are topside.”
What.
Jayce blinks, because what the fuck? What’s he supposed to say to that, this admission that the quality of his design work is the reason he now spends most of his evenings with a partner, hunched over his (their?) desk while they flagrantly– and unknowingly, in Viktor’s case– try to burn the rulebook that governs the majority of physics?
For a fleeting moment of probably madness, Jayce indulges the thought of just. Leaning over the desk. Taking Viktor’s stupidly expensive-looking tie and dragging them together so that he can breathe in the air Viktor exhales.
Less than a meter. The only things keeping him from kissing Viktor are the dying dregs of his sanity, and the awareness that there’s no way his leg is going to allow him to run away from the situation once his brain catches up to his body. And he’s not going to address that impulse any time soon.
Jayce’s brain is full of cotton and companionship and hextech. It takes another minute for Viktor’s words to work their way through his skull.
“Wait. Wait, you’re telling me– the reason you were in Zaun in the first place,” Jayce begins, then laughs, “is because you were buying illegal equipment?”
Viktor scrunches up his nose. “Illegal is such a divisive term,” he says, so clearly unbothered that Jayce hopes there are stars in his eyes right now, because if he’s insane, Viktor is a maniac. Certifiably crazy. He sincerely hopes that the more traditionally inclined topside scientists quake in fear whenever this guy deigns to terrorise his peers with his thoughts.
“Gods, how do you even get that past your supervisors? Don’t mind the extremely experimental power source, it’s perfectly safe for the most part. Probably.” The remark earns him a carefree wave of a hand, then the biting edge of a grin as it cuts through Viktor’s composure.
The sun may as well have risen. Jayce follows his every movement with the absolute reverence of a plant chasing daylight.
“If you are trying to imitate my accent,” Viktor says, his voice lilting heavily with mock-offense, “you do a terrible job of it. And I would have you know that the origin of the materials I use in my work is unimportant, so long as the final product is not unduly volatile.”
Unduly volatile. Jayce cackles. “You’re insane.”
“I am trying to revolutionize Piltover’s understanding of and attitudes towards the use of augmentation to improve lives. And you,” Viktor says, eyes narrow and lips curled around a smile, “appear to be trying to harness a form of energy that was never intended to be wielded by the average person.”
Jayce’s smile slides clean off his face, like meltwater in the spring. He blinks, paralysed; a deer in the path of a carriage– waiting, waiting, waiting for the end. Except this isn’t an end, it’s a beginning, and like he’s picking up what Jayce had dropped, Viktor only smiles. It’s a small and toothy thing. Sincere in a way that very few things can afford to be in Zaun. It pries the line of tension from Jayce’s shoulders in an instant.
“If I am insane, you are a madman,” he says, impossibly gentle. His fingers twitch with restrained impulse. “And I do hope that you intend on sharing your thoughts with me of your own volition. Do not delude yourself into believing that I am going to let you keep this away from me.”
Jayce exhales sharply, and takes the moment to calm his racing heart. “Aw, V,” he coos, far steadier than he feels. “You say the sweetest things.”
A fact: Viktor is well aware that Jayce’s mystery equation is, in fact, far more dangerous than he had initially let on. He’s probably known this for a while.
He also doesn’t appear to give a shit. Jayce wonders if Viktor had taken the memory of his patchwork equations home; poured over them until the puzzle pieces begin to slot together.
Jayce then wonders, distantly, why he cares so much about Viktor bringing the thought of him home.
What a maniac.
Another, entirely separate fact: before Viktor’s work bullied its way into Jayce’s life and across his desk, his workshop was already very small and very cluttered.
These days, daring to rescue any specific page of notes from the papery hell that has become of his workbench functionally guarantees scattering the rest of them to the floor. At this point, distinguishing Jayce’s work from Viktor’s would be impossible. There isn’t a clear divide in the pages anymore– not like there was at first, where a page of notes would bear the script of a single author.
One evening, Jayce rescues a page from where it had fluttered under his desk. The handwriting is his– except for the dozens of annotations crowding his notes. Except for the comments at the margins, above the diagram, enclosing his schematic– all in Viktor’s swooping hand.
For a long, long moment, Jayce stares. Memorises the contours of their handwriting, the small differences that grow smaller each day. At some point, his handwriting has picked up a fluidity that he’s never been able to lay claim to in his life.
Viktor’s has gained an edge. A confident, decisive weight, like a signature. It’s getting harder to find where his notes end and Jayce’s begins, and the opposite is true in turn.
Dangerous, Jayce thinks, only somewhat hysterically. It’s like the proximity they maintain has sanded away at the distinct boundaries of their selves and left behind something vague, something nebulous– something fuzzy, and prone to overlap.
And now that Jayce is aware of it, he can’t make himself not aware of it, like finally paying attention to their decaying orbits has flipped some terrible switch in his brain that shuts off every rational, functional part of his mind and replaces it with: I want more.
Want is a strange thing. Jayce is pretty sure that his is as inherent to his identity as his marrow is to his bones. It’s carried him this far in pursuit of the unknown, after all.
Viktor sat closer to him today than he did yesterday. Tomorrow, he might be closer still.
What is it that you want to do?
Of everywhere you could be– why here?
The questions sit with Jayce for a week. Then two. They refuse to stay confined for much longer than that, and when he voices them on an evening, the sound of heavy rainfall muted by the stone walls of Jayce’s home, it earns him a fond huff– like Viktor has been waiting, waiting, waiting for him to dare to ask.
There’s this electric thrill in the air between them– or maybe it’s a phenomenon isolated entirely to the locking of their eyes, the connection of impulses leading to the same conclusions; the brush of skin on skin.
Or maybe the static in the air is just the storm, and Jayce is seeing meaning where there is none.
Viktor’s leg knocks against his. The electricity returns, and his mind goes blank.
Their braces are on opposite legs, Jayce distantly notes.
Parallel?
No, not when they only seem to gravitate closer and closer to each other each night. Convergent.
“The use of prosthetics– of augmentations– here is… fascinating,” Viktor says, breathy and low. Reverent, almost. Jayce looks up before he can even think to do so– and he’s dropped his pencil, too, prototype schematic long-forgotten.
He imagines that, had his mom still been alive, she would never let him live his infatuation down.
She would have loved Viktor.
“The people here embrace augmentation in a manner that, I believe, embodies the search for progress that Piltover claims to stand for. Be it illness or injury– here, prosthetics and augmentations do not simply function, as they do topside. They become. They do not seek simply to replace, but rather to improve.”
Viktor’s curiosity alights him. Turns collected composure into open wonder; eases away tension to make way for something so delicate that Jayce fears to breathe in case the moment is shattered by the sound, and he thinks– thinks that maybe something very precious and rare has snuck its way into this stolen moment, hidden away in his nameless alley shop on Emberflit.
There you are.
The thought burns him, forge-hot and welcome, where he keeps it at the back of his mind. He doesn’t think he would mind if it branded him there– if it were to sear the image of Viktor, lamplit and passionate, into every panicking part of his brain responsible for memory, for comfort, for pleasure. If the image were to haunt him in every future moment of happiness, he’s sure his life would be richer for it.
Viktor’s notebook is closed between deliberate, steady palms. “Jayce?”
The prompt is a catalyst, and Jayce’s last brain cell is primed to backfire.
“I think you–” belong down here, he almost says, and doesn’t. Can’t. It’s too ambiguous. Too unclear. The feelings in his head and the words in his heart are too big to collapse into defined concepts, and there’s too much room for misinterpretation.
I think my mom would have loved you. I think we have the same heart split across two bodies. I think I want to change the world with you. I think we can actually do it.
It’s midnight on a weekday, and in comparison to the magnitude of those feelings, Jayce is very, very small.
“I think you’re incredible,” he says instead, honest and hopeless and so fond that he might die, actually.
There’s this moment after he speaks where the world keeps spinning. The flame in the lamp continues to flicker and dance.
Viktor stills. Viktor also turns very, very pink, and doesn’t say a damn word.
Forget backfiring. Jayce’s last brain cell is now on fire. The blast doors surrounding his heart are open, and that traitorous vital organ of his is now threatening to drown him in the feelings that– until now– he’d been perfectly content to keep safe where they were at the edges of his awareness.
I think I can’t think about this place without you in it. I can’t think of this place without you with me.
The world keeps spinning. There is exactly one thing– one color– occupying Jayce’s mind, and for the first time in some fourteen-odd years, it isn’t hextech blue.
Viktor’s good leg knocks against his, reassurance and reciprocation both– maybe. Hopefully. Jayce is used to letting wild, untamed hopes be the thing to pull him forward. What’s one more? He breathes a little easier for the gesture, and the line of tension called oh my god, what the fuck was that that has made itself at home in Jayce’s shoulders evaporates so rapidly that he slouches in his chair.
Viktor laughs. The world keeps spinning. Crazy, that.
“Goodnight, Jayce,” Viktor says just a few hours later that night (morning, technically). When he leaves, it’s with a smile and the soft click of the door closing behind him.
Jayce waits for a long moment, until he can no longer see a silhouette through the sinuous glass of his workshop’s door.
His head is heavy in his hands, and his face feels like it’s on fucking fire. Oh, Gods. Holy shit. Jayce dares a glance down at his desk. The papers are theirs, intertwined and hopelessly inextricable.
That thought– and the errant, rampant racing of the heart in his chest– leave him breathless.
Chapter 2
Summary:
Bastardizing the scientific method.
Chapter Text
A week passes.
Then two. The days drag on where they never used to, between manning the workshop, manning the forge, suffering through classes that he simultaneously feels too clueless and overqualified for. They pass without a single word– or hell, even a message, because Viktor knows where he lives and could almost certainly break into the workshop, if he so desired– from his, what, acquaintance? Friend?
No. Something more. Something different, something wholly undefinable. If there’s a word for what Viktor is to him, Jayce has yet to learn it.
I think you’re incredible, he had said, drunk on a heady combination of exhaustion and honesty, and Viktor had flushed a shade of red that’s objectively unfair. How the hell was he ever supposed to be normal about that?
And now two weeks have passed without a word. Jayce isn’t sure that his midnight lack of brain-to-mouth filter hasn’t just fucked up the only thing in his life as important as the runestone that literally rests over his heart at all times.
All things considered, he thinks he takes the abrupt radio silence pretty damn well. Like a champion, even. So well that when Viktor next visits, he definitely doesn’t jolt upright and open with a mildly frantic: “Where were you?”
Viktor, in baffled response, greets Jayce with a raised eyebrow. The level of bemusement he’s able to convey through a very minor shift in a microexpression should be turned into its own field of study; another that Jayce can become a leading expert in.
“You are aware that I also attend an Academy, yes?”
Oh. Right.
Like Jayce could somehow manage to forget that there’s an entire cohort of lucky topside bastards that get to recreationally spend their study hours being harangued by a guy whose idea of fun is venturing down into a crack in the earth to buy very illegal equipment.
“Yes, oh.” Viktor drops his satchel down into his chair– his chair, because it is his chair now, and there’s no pinpointing where in the timeline that happened– and shoots Jayce an appraising glance. “Your concern is noted and appreciated.”
“It wasn’t concern,” Jayce lies through his teeth. Viktor doesn’t dignify that with a verbal response, just raises the other eyebrow knowingly, and Jayce folds like a collapsible pocket wrench. Fuck. “It was concern.”
“There you are,” Viktor teases, wry grin firmly in place. Humor, devastating and pointed, lights him up. “Is it not so much easier to be honest?”
Even if Jayce could look away, he wouldn’t. “Has anybody ever told you that you’re an ass? Because it bears repeating. You’re gonna give me a heart attack one day, then who’s gonna generously host you down here?”
Maybe Jayce has always been a creature of wants and desires, of dreams and how to grasp them– but even still, this is new. Terrifying in how simple it is to let himself be consumed by it. Viktor watches him and he watches Viktor, and he doesn’t want to look away.
Selfishly, he doesn’t want Viktor to turn away, either. So Jayce pushes his notebook forward, the one full of notes and sketches and diagrams of the prosthetic models he has already created and the ones he wants to see in the future, because Viktor is pathologically unable to turn down a challenge of this variety.
“I’m thinking I should start trying to make them more lightweight– the framework, at least,” Jayce says, rubbing at the back of his neck. His hair is getting long. He should cut it soon. “Not much to be done about the mechanics. The current models get the job done, yeah, but steel is… bulky. Durable, but tiring. So: any thoughts?”
For a long moment, Viktor is quiet. He pours over Jayce’s notes with a wordless dedication, one that keeps Jayce pretty firmly on the cusp of tachycardia these days, and when he looks up, it’s with a fond little upturn of his lips.
“You are learning,” Viktor mumbles, entirely self-satisfied. Then he returns to Jayce’s notes, ravenous. “If I could drag you through Piltover to peer-review my own studies, I would.”
Okay. There’s nothing weird about Jayce’s heart having packed its bags to take up permanent residence in his throat. Peer-reviews are probably supposed to feel like being stripped naked and found adequate. Probably.
At this rate, Jayce will be the world’s happiest dead man before he even gets to his thirties. There has got to be a limit on how much more of this his poor heart can take.
“Yeah, yeah.” He manages to squeeze out, just as soon as his brain catches up to the reality of Viktor now watching him carefully. “You’re the brightest mind to grace the fissures.”
“Thank you. Your sincerity is palpable, Jayce,” Viktor deadpans, drier than the fucking Shuriman desert. “I can almost feel you patting me on the back.”
In response to that, Jayce has two thoughts in rapid succession.
The first: do you want me to?
The second: can I?
Workplace professionality is dead and Jayce keeps the knife under his pillow, as it would turn out. He hasn’t had a work partner before, but he’s pretty damn sure that working relationships aren’t meant to look– and sound, and act– like this.
For the sake of his own dwindling sanity, Jayce doesn’t let himself think for too long about how the seamless way his hand fits against the small of Viktor’s back, the curve of his shoulders.
In the weeks– weeks, how has it only been weeks– since Viktor snarked his way into Jayce’s life and upended a concerning majority of his brainpower, Jayce has learned enough about the other man to fill a notebook or two. With the sass comes a handful of other, subtle new constants in his life.
Jayce runs into a wall trying to work a problem? Viktor brings a new perspective. Jayce works himself into a nervous frenzy over a calculation that refuses to crack? Viktor offers a reassuring presence in the form of barbed witticism and unyielding understanding.
Jayce finds himself isolated from a wider scientific community because he wants to find a way to harness the arcane? Viktor puts down his roots in Jayce’s life and refuses to be moved.
He understands. If Jayce were to cast his memory back to the very beginning– to the warmth of the sun, then the bite of a blizzard, then harsh light against gilded walls, then shadows at every corner– Viktor’s effortless understanding would remain singularly unique and beautiful.
Jayce’s thoughts move a mile a minute. Abstract, until they aren’t. Pipedreams, until they aren’t. Conversely, Viktor brings a kind of quicklime-passion and spectacularly batshit willingness to stare convention in the eye and say fuck it, illegal equipment for my academy project that Jayce can only watch in baffled awe.
So, here’s a working hypothesis from a mind partially unhinged by exhaustion and hope: whatever the hell Jayce’s soul is made up of, the composition of Viktor’s must be the same. Opposite and complementary.
This is, of course, a hypothesis that can never be directly tested. The soul is a confounding variable, abstract to the point of absurdity; behavior and personality are its only measurable constructs.
Frankly, Jayce couldn’t care less. Shared ambition and a shared need for discovery– that damning, isolating shared hunger of theirs– are perfectly quantifiable stand-ins.
Hypothesis: it’s entirely normal to lay wide awake at night thinking about the single-minded drive with which your work-partner-turned-friend is able to devote himself to your revolutionary passion project.
A secondary, alternative hypothesis: it’s entirely normal to believe that you and your work partner have souls meant to slot together like complimentary cogs.
Jayce should probably stop bastardising the scientific method.
Any time now would be great.
Jayce wakes from a dream of brilliant blue and lamplit amber and thinks, I want to share my dream with him.
This is, of course, a normal thing to think about a man you have known for less than three months. But the thought catches him unawares; it slips into his bloodstream through the arcane fissure of his once-shattered tibia and works its way from there up into his heart.
Jayce has a characteristic weakness when it comes to needing to comprehend that which defies comprehension. Example one: a mage dangles an arcane solution in front of his reaching, childish hands, and he spends the rest of his life chasing that promise.
Example two: a man makes himself at home in Jayce’s workshop, and he brings with him an understanding that comes as naturally as breathing. Weird, but far be it from him to judge.
Jayce was a goner from the get-go, doomed from the very beginning, so why shouldn’t he finally bring Viktor into the loop on hextech? He’s been a second pair of eyes on Jayce’s calculations for weeks. He already knows that the work is dangerous.
He also doesn’t care that it’s dangerous, because he’s patently insane and also– if Jayce dares to make the assumption– fond enough of Jayce to stick around in spite of the risk of a second workshop getting blown up by a hextech trial gone wrong.
Hell, Viktor threatened to inject himself even further into Jayce’s life if he were to withhold hextech from him. Seems like a no-brainer, really.
Okay.
So.
Jayce is a man with an impossible dream.
Unsurprisingly, Jayce was also once a child with an impossible dream. He hasn’t exactly dared to share this dream with anyone beyond his own years-dead mother, because it hadn’t taken a long time for his child-self to understand that, to those who didn’t laugh away the suggestion, his dream was some horrifying aberration. A timebomb with a fuse begging to be lit.
Enter: Viktor.
There’s this shower of sparks between them. Jayce and Viktor. Viktor-and-Jayce. The byproduct of Viktor’s flinty determination colliding with Jayce’s forge-steel drive. Productive enough, maybe, to catch.
Hopefully.
Jayce’s hands tremble– just slightly– as he organises his notes, then reorganises them, because on the long list of things that he currently wants, comprehension sits at the top. This is years of his life, condensed into long, rambling scripts of his runaway thoughts. There’s a clear paper trail to the madness; a distinct evolution to his handwriting over the years.
Above all, Viktor is discerning. Sharp as a scalpel and just as precise. Dangerous. Jayce can picture it now: Viktor, reading through the notes written by a lonely child-genius. Slicing cleanly through layers upon layers of Jayce’s decade-old terminal desperation and into the curiosity that reaches into his bones.
Whatever Viktor ends up seeing in these notes– the daydreams of a child, or the musings of a madman– Jayce hopes it will be convincing. That it’ll be enough.
He’s really, really not sure what he’ll do if it’s not.
Distantly, he thinks that maybe the level of adrenaline crashing through his blood may be overkill. This is just another kind of step forward– a metaphorical step taken while on a ledge that may or may not be overhanging a mostly-metaphorical chasm, sure– and trepidation is reasonable.
Being ready to throw up or pass out kind of isn’t.
I’m really doing this.
Daylight breaks before he finishes organising his life’s work– and his workshop– into something that vaguely resembles presentable.
He probably didn’t need to make a concerted effort to also wrangle his apartment into something close to organised when it will play literally no role in the upcoming soul-bare trainwreck his half-hysterical brain has set itself on course for, but that’s neither here nor there.
Viktor arrives at the workshop by midday. Jayce nobly avoids pacing a new groove into the workshop floor before then.
There must be something in the air– or, more likely, in the sleepless pallor of Jayce’s skin and the dark bruises beneath his eyes– because Viktor makes it all of three steps inside before he pauses. Gives Jayce a long, careful once-over.
“Am I interrupting?”
The heart attack that Jayce appears to be having at his ripe old age of twenty-four? Perhaps.
“No,” he grounds out. Viktor doesn’t look particularly convinced by the word, brows furrowing deeply, and for all the hours he spent rehearsing this proposal Jayce isn't particularly sure he’s going to be able to pull off convincing after all.
Words aren’t going to cut it. Jayce isn’t a diplomat, he certainly is no figurehead; he stares at Viktor and Viktor glances right back at him, and every explanation he can think of dies on his tongue. The words taste like ash, like dust. Debris and iron.
So.
“You know those equations we were working on a few weeks back?” he asks, entirely rhetorical. Viktor’s eyes light up, and he nods.
“Your mystery equations, yes. How could I forget? I was wondering when you had intended to bring me in on this– rather rude, don’t you think, to leave me to ponder it on my own?”
Jayce doesn’t allow himself to trip over his words and fuck this up. It’s too important. Instead, he presses his primary research journal– his years of thinking and theorising and learning– into Viktor’s open waiting palms.
And he waits.
Viktor remains quiet for what feels like an eternity. It could be ten minutes or five hours, for all Jayce knows. His world has narrowed down to his dream and the man holding the proof of it in his hands, and maybe his heart rests between those fingers too.
Eventually, Viktor turns to speak. His mouth opens briefly, then closes when no sound is forthcoming. Jayce tries and fails to keep his breathing steady; his leg bounces with his nerves, an incessant tap-tap-tapping in the quiet of the workshop, and it doesn’t even earn him the usual reprimand.
“This is…?”
The breath Jayce pulls through his gritted teeth feels too thin to carry his voice. It will be enough.
“This is…” my dream, my ambition, everything I think I’ve ever wanted. “This is that private project I’m working on. Have been working on, for years now.” Jayce swallows thickly. “A way for science to harness magic."
He’s expecting a lot of possible outcomes, really.
It isn’t the first time he’s shared this pipe dream of his, but it is the first time that he’s spoken of it with another scientist, another adult; a peer, and a friend. He’s expecting rejection, maybe, anticipation weaving itself into tightly wound muscle. Disbelief, certainly.
Viktor defies his expectations like it’s his personal ambition to leave Jayce floundering.
“And you believe– you truly believe– that this could work?” he asks. His wide eyes flick back to Jayce’s half-finished circuit board, to the pages upon pages of notes on alloys that they have spent the past few days compiling, and the rush of understanding that lights his expression strangles any fear that might have taken root behind Jayce’s ribs “That with this crystal, this theoretical framework– one could harness the arcane?”
Curiosity is becoming on Viktor. Jayce knows this. It slams his thoughts to a stop with each recollection, regardless. It’s as though, to him, Jayce’s audacity to dream of harnessing the Arcane is some wondrous, tangible reality rather than a dream he’s been keeping carefully hidden for years.
For a split second, he pictures Viktor, and the way his features would be brightened by brilliant blue. The way it would catch against the amber of his eyes.
“I think it can,” Jayce breathes. “I think– I think this could change the world. Viktor, the lives this could save… I can’t put it into words. I can’t. But, Viktor, believe me: you have no idea how beautiful it is.”
“Jayce,” Viktor says, very insistently. His eyes are wide. He doesn’t look away. “I believe you.”
The bottom of Jayce’s world falls out, and much like when he was saved by the mage– he’s free-falling without gravity.
Viktor takes to the premise of Jayce’s work like he was born to understand it– as if it doesn’t stand in stunning opposition to just about just about every universally accepted tenet of science. And also the laws of physics.
He’s a little envious, actually. Of the way Viktor can take a long, studious look back at what he knows– the world that he understands and accepts because of some centuries of peer-reviewed research– and then towards the unknowns of Jayce’s work and go fuck it, why not? It’s a rare, dangerous flexibility.
It feels too good to be true, and Jayce drifts in a daze as the current summation of his life’s work is rifled through with gleeful abandon. Doubt simmers beneath his skin, a too-warm and horrible thing that Viktor has never given Jayce any reason to harbor and festers nonetheless. Too good to be true.
Viktor knows, but he doesn’t know.
He understands, theoretically, that the crystals are volatile– that beneath a deceptively fragile outer shell lies a volatile crystalline matrix– but he doesn’t understand that the internal density of the crystals is immense enough that the energy output from even a minor incident can shatter a building like bone.
He doesn’t understand how the arcane lingers in the skin.
“The circuit board has been the biggest problem so far. Every metal and alloy I’ve tried so far has melted, destabilised, exploded– or all of the above.” Jayce spares a glance at Viktor. He’s squinting at the latest prototype of the circuit board; probably pulling it apart in his mind’s eye, dissecting its construction and the aberrations of the runic script.
His thoughts won’t stop spinning and when Jayce is barely grounded in the present, Viktor still listens with rapt focus to his words. It’s heady, intoxicating. It sits next to Jayce’s fear and the old ache in his leg until he’s dizzy with the weight of them.
“ And you have tried…?” Viktor prompts.
“Silver, copper. Iron. Lead, once. That one exploded.” Jayce grimaces. “The copper iteration was highly conductive, but the transistor ended up melting. I’d try gold if it weren’t so damn expensive, but– I get the feeling it would just melt, too. Too much resistance, not durable enough to withstand the heat.”
Viktor nods. Absorbs the information thrown his way eagerly. He doesn’t know about the snarl of scar tissue seared across the expanse of Jayce’s shin. He doesn’t know that, while it doesn’t glow hextech blue, its color is stark and wholly unnatural against the tan backdrop of his skin.
An imprint, Jayce thinks, of an ambition left unchecked. Were the wound not so morbid, it would be beautiful. Had it not burst into existence in the aftermath of an explosion shattering two of his bones like glass, he would have more charitable thoughts about the artistry of the scar: otherworldly and grotesque.
Viktor understands the danger, but he doesn’t understand. Not yet.
Eventually, Jayce will have to find the words to explain it. The grief and the desperation and the feeling of his bones splintering into bruise-tender flesh after the crystal destabilised and brought half the workshop down around him.
Eventually. For now, he breathes in deep and slow, and he drags his focus back into the present– the lamplight and the scattered paper and the gentle sibilance of Viktor’s mutterings. His fingers trail along the copper framework, nails testing the grooves he finds there.
He spends a long time staring blankly at his ceiling that night, chasing thoughts that refuse to settle in his orbit.
Patronage at the workshop has been slow and steady, reassuring in its consistency. The stranger that Jayce had barely registered as a nuisance a few weeks ago is now his partner, and Viktor only batted an eye at the contents of Jayce’s research when he’d needed to blink after long minutes without.
His life has been upended and then flipped back over, and he’s gained perspective from a full three-hundred-and-sixty degree rotation, and he’s still reeling from it now. Tomorrow is the completion of one full axial rotation of Runeterra, and it brings with it a multitude of possibilities that Jayce has never been nervous about before, but is now.
Jayce bared his dream– and on some metaphysical level, himself– to Viktor and Viktor embraced both like it had been second nature. Viktor had implied that his dream had occupied his mind so much he’d taken those thoughts home with him.
Jayce is still reeling. He isn’t sure that’s going to stop any time soon.
The heavy thud of heavy metal against wood snaps Jayce from his reverie with a sharp breath and a curse. He hadn’t even heard the door open.
When he looks up, it’s to the sight of Viktor wearing an expression halfway between self-satisfied and proud, the smile curling at his lips too sharp to be entirely innocent. His hair curls around his ear. It must be more humid than usual outside.
Viktor makes an impatient gesture towards the desk– to what Jayce now recognizes as a set of tools, all shiny metal and polished to a gleam. Jayce blinks.
“For you,” Viktor says, and because Jayce is still groggy, a mile out from understanding, and now flustered on top of it all, he adds: “For alloying.”
He blinks again, baffled. Then a third time, just to earn himself the gentle curve of Viktor’s wry smile.
Right.
Of the list of suitably conductive metals that had reacted with the crystal, the copper transistor had ended up melting, and the silver had rapidly destabilised. Jayce isn’t crazy enough to dream of getting enough gold to waste on a prototype, so that one will remain a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. To get a hold of any kind of refractory metal as conductive as it is stable would mean waving goodbye to coin better spent elsewhere.
Viktor taps down twice on the desk, lips pursed and impatience lighting his frame as he waits for Jayce’s brain to rejoin the conversation. So Jayce stares at the tools for a good minute, two wrenches and chisel and a set of pliers so shiny there’s only one possible place they could have come from, then takes another four to allow his wandering thoughts catch up, and–
Oh.
Oh. “Nickel?” he says, a little faintly. Viktor pushes the tools closer to him with a nod, an indication to pick up and inspect, and when Jayce does the smile he earns is all teeth.
“The chisels are tungsten-rich alloys.”
Tungsten. Jayce could swoon. Might, actually. A strangled laugh escapes him as he turns the wrench over in his palm, testing its weight, wondering just how thick the plating of nickel over its surface is.
“Viktor, this is– how expensive?” he asks, then stills when his earlier thoughts make a reappearance. Instead of meeting his gaze Viktor is now intently combing through his journal in a gesture that could almost be sheepish. “Viktor, please tell me you didn’t steal these from the Academy.”
He gets a dainty shrug in reply. Jayce’s heart doesn’t exactly stop, but it does do this complicated flip in his chest that doesn’t do his concerns of a Viktor-related heart attack any favors.
“Eh, the Academy provides its students with the tools they need for their studies. They are being used in my studies.” Another shrug. “Therefore, it is not stealing. This is, ah– borrowing, at worst.”
Borrowing with no intent of return, he feebly thinks, and the words stay right where they are in his chest. They’re good, weighty tools. Solid. Melting them down will be a nightmare and separating them will be worse, but from their ruins they can create something new. Something better.
“I didn't mean to overstep,” Viktor says cautiously– no, awkwardly. It’s only then that Jayce remembers himself, that he’s been staring at the tool in his hand blankly for some minutes now, and that Viktor had said my studies without thinking about the weight of those words.
The implications remain dizzying. Jayce wonders if he’s going crazy– wonders, idly, if it’s normal that he wants to rush over to Viktor and hug him and then throw these tools straight into the blaze of the foundry.
“It’s– you’ve done half the math here, of course this is your research too.” The words spill out in a daze, and Jayce can’t tear his eyes from the tools, the flustered-looking man in front of him. His journal, complete with two sets of handwriting and a dream that no longer exists in a vacuum. “Gods, Viktor– this is– you…”
A hysterical little laugh bubbles its way out of him. He probably looks vaguely deranged, shaking to pieces over two wrenches and a set of chisels. Jayce couldn’t care less about that.
He wonders if Viktor understands the magnitude of the gesture, or the significance of his presence. Because this wildcard dream of Jayce’s has been out of reach for so, so long, and now? It isn’t. It’s within grasping distance now, a step closer with every day that passes, and Viktor keeps spurring him onward.
He’s not going to cry. Really.
“Are you–”
“No,” Jayce lies. And because Viktor is an asshole but he isn’t a dick, he doesn’t say a word when Jayce swipes at his eyes. He laughs instead, and Jayce wants to hear it again and again and again.
Fuck.
“Thank you,” Jayce breathes. “I’ll fire up the forge in the morning, melt these down.” He laughs. “Maybe the next prototype won’t explode?”
He can imagine it: the workshop lit up in beautiful blue, the rush of success in their veins. He hasn’t seen what an unrestrained, unabashed smile looks like on Viktor. He’d like to. Jayce thumbs at the cool, smooth metal of the gift Viktor has given him, and something in him sweetly aches.
“Did you know,” Viktor says one night, annoyance and confusion wrapped up cosily in the thickened lilt of his accent, “that there is not a single book in the Academy that discusses the arcane in more detail than a passing reference?”
Jayce sets down his soldering pen with a frown and a considering hum, because no, he had not known. Though, he can’t say truthfully that the information comes as a surprise. Piltover is many things. Accepting of any significant deviation from the status quo does not make the list. He leans away from the desk, then winces at the faint twinge that runs through his leg at the disturbance.
“Thought the City of Progress wouldn’t indulge in something as counterproductive as censorship,” he says. The pile of rune-seared paddles on the desk threatens to teeter off the edge when he shifts in his seat. “Kind of an antiquated approach to denying the existence of something so well-documented, don’t you think?”
Viktor shrugs helplessly. He looks equal parts irritated and confused. “The Professor insists that, in light of the circumstances that directly led to Piltover’s founding, denying academic interest in the arcane will continue to preserve the degree of safety we currently enjoy.”
Safety. Jayce snorts. “Sure. Piltover keeping occult materials prohibited doesn’t mean anything down here, though. If you know where to look, you can find all kinds of alchemical manuscripts, or tomes about the occult. Hell, you can even find runestones if you get lucky.” He pushes himself upright with a soft grunt, relishing in the release of tension as he stretches his back. “Travellers who can’t afford Piltover pass through the Lanes all the time. Their knowledge does, too.”
It’s when he tries to take a step forward that the ache sears forward and threatens to buckle his leg beneath him. Jayce hisses through his teeth; leans back heavily against the desk with a sigh. A few hours at the forge followed by a few hours sitting, coupled with the relative chill of the evening looming just beyond these four walls; he’d practically invited this hurt.
Sometimes, when Jayce’s curiosity gets the better of him– which is often– he wonders about the brace wrapped securely like a vice around Viktor’s leg. He wonders about its craftsmanship, and then the man who engineered it, and then if the brace exists to support the bone or secure the joint. Both it and the cane are simple, functional things, but they’re exquisite in their design and excel in their purpose.
His hand drifts to his brace, to the rings and brackets of it. The seams where he’d soldered together the frame of it, then the hinges at the knee, and the faint vibration of a currently-inaudible creak when it bends. The padding is beginning to wear out, pressing against a residual ache in his thigh that’s undoubtedly blooming purple against his skin.
Viktor is, as always, watching him. There’s a question on his lips that he doesn’t even need to vocalize, because Jayce can hear it loud and clear. “It’s okay,” he says in reply. Shrugs. “Think I just overdid it tonight.”
There’s a long moment of quiet.
“What…” Viktor begins, then trails off. “If you do not mind my asking– what happened?”
Some large, wary thing in Jayce itches to end the conversation before it can begin. It’s nothing, or don’t worry about it, or it was a long time ago even though it wasn’t, really. Viktor wouldn’t push him on it– not much, anyway. He still turns the words over in his head, in his mouth, just to test the unease at the notion.
In the end, Jayce settles: “It’s a long story.” Not an answer, but not a refusal either. A deflection, for when the bruise is less raw.
“I am not sure if you are aware, Jayce,” Viktor says, his voice softer now, “but it is late enough that I may as well stay until morning. There is plenty of time.”
Here is the problem: Viktor wants to know. It’s scary, that. Viktor sees a brace in its eleventh iteration and perceives ingenuity in place of recklessness. Viktor sees a man walking around on bones splintered and warped when they used to be whole, and registers kinship instead of a wound that will not heal.
Worse yet: Jayce wants to tell him. It’s an old wound, the leg, nearly four-years broken and precipitated by a grief that retains the capacity to barrel him over, some days. His mom would hate to know that the shape of her absence matches the malunion of his bones.
Jayce wants to tell him. Wants to bring honesty to the wound like a knife and press it to the skin, carve around the bloodless-blue striations of the scar, open himself up until he’s flayed bare and bloody just to see if Viktor will still see a partner and not a grieving, lonely man.
Fear doesn’t explode through him; doesn’t even send his heart thundering in his chest. It burns slow and steady, a nervous flush along his cheeks that prickles at the back of his neck, and takes the air from the room to fuel itself.
Objectively, there is a non-zero chance that, once Viktor knows what happened– how it happened– his regard for Jayce may wither. He might decide he doesn’t want anything to do with hextech anymore. With him.
If he lays himself bare and his scar seems monstrous under the open light of Viktor’s judgement, Jayce doesn’t know how he’ll move forward. The blade of that possibility hangs heavy over his neck, held aloft by a thread.
But: Viktor wants to know.
“Later,” Jayce says, and his voice is hoarser than he’d hoped. Maybe.
It’s not the answer Viktor was looking for, he knows– sees it in the minute downward twitch of his lips, the furrowing of his brows– but he doesn’t press the bruise.
Jayce tells Viktor later that night: “There is another thing I can tell you. That I want to tell you.”
Viktor watches him with curious eyes. His gaze flits to the brace around Jayce’s leg, then to his own, and then reactively to Jayce’s sudden movement. Jayce reaches up and backward, fumbles blindly at the clasp resting at his nape, and pulls away the pendant from where it normally rests against his heart.
He presses it into Viktor’s outstretched hands, takes a moment to linger on the coolness of Viktor’s skin against his own, and then closes his palm around it– so he can feel the hum of its energy, Jayce tells himself.
So he can feel the warmth of it, he means. Viktor’s hands are dexterous and careful; those of an artisan.
“I haven’t always lived in Zaun,” he says stiltedly. Viktor pauses. Lean in. “My mom and I– we travelled to Piltover when I was a kid.”
In Jayce’s hands rests the prosthetic fingers he had once crafted for his mother, and he has two fleeting, shattering thoughts: the first, that they seem so delicate in his hands now. The second: that once, before the calluses and the grief and the loneliness that defined him, there had been a time where his own hands had been small enough to be safely cradled by his mom’s.
He swipes at his eyes and lays those thoughts to rest. Viktor’s expression runs through this complicated flicker of emotions– as if unable to choose which part of Jayce’s words he wants to address first. Eventually he settles on asking: “A traveller?”
Jayce snorts, and he says: “Son of a House, actually.”
Viktor lets out a startled laugh. His surprise gives way to amusement, and then to surprise once more at the sincerity he finds etched across Jayce’s being.
“A– House,” he says, quizzical. “You lived in Piltover.”
“Not for long. That isn’t the important part, though,” Jayce says, laughing at the sharp look he gets that clearly reads yes, that is important, please elaborate, and gestures towards the runestone pressed into Viktor’s palm. “My mom and I almost died on the journey to Piltover. A man saved us, a mage, and– he gave me that.”
Under the low light, the rune is only a dull imitation of the vibrant blue that it can be, under the correct conditions. Viktor brings it up to his face to inspect the cut of the crystal and etching of the runeword closely, then shoots Jayce this look, perplexed and waiting patiently for the remaining sentiment of this story to slot into place.
“That mage helped me because he could, so he did,” he says. Collapsing the crux of his ambition into a breathless sentence leaves him unbalanced, unsteady. “I want to do the same. Just– you’ve seen the ways that creativity and metal can help people; imagine all the ways we could improve lives if we put magic into their hands.”
Viktor leans forward, closer, and Jayce is going to attribute the way he follows suit to the tiredness hanging heavy in the air between them. Gentle fingers brush against the sturdy steel of the brace locked around Jayce’s thigh, and he’s no longer tired at all by the time that curious touch curls around the brackets at his knee.
Jayce aches. His heart and his head and his leg; emotion and exhaustion and a shittily-healed injury. Viktor’s hand on his leg drifts back up. Settles just above his knee, where the touch turns firm with a light squeeze. The pressure of his touch is near-insubstantial and consuming at the same time, feather-light and capable of commanding every one of Jayce’s errant thoughts into some semblance of stillness.
“Tell me more about your research,” Viktor says.
It’s an out as much as it is an olive branch. Like every other gift that Viktor has afforded to him, Jayce takes it with both hands.
The crystal produces sound as it vibrates: high-pitched, sweet, and clear as a bell.
Most importantly: it hasn’t killed them both. Yet. There’s always time.
“It’s holding,” Jayce mumbles, struck-dumb and vibrating down to the bones with an energy he doesn’t have a name for. Yet. It probably isn’t radiation poisoning. He hopes it isn’t some kind of arcane radiation poisoning. “Shit, it’s– Viktor, it’s holding. That hasn’t happened before.”
“You act surprised.”
Now, Jayce isn’t quite so talented at squeezing an entire body’s worth of bemusement into a single raised eyebrow, but guessing from the way Viktor’s expression flickers to abashed, he thinks he must have done an okay job of conveying last time I convinced the magical crystal to cooperate with my poking for this long, it exploded on me and snapped my tibia like a toothpick.
Which, now that he thinks about it… that’s a story he hasn’t shared yet.
Huh.
It probably means something, that he sometimes forgets he hasn’t known Viktor for years. That they’re kind of strangers and kind of not, and that there are still so many stories to share and secrets to indulge in.
Viktor does a full circle around the cradle, inspecting it in its entirety. He brings a hand to his chin, considering. Then turns to face Jayce, abashed and maybe a touch nervous. “Does it… switch off?”
Good question. “Uh.”
It does, in fact, switch off. The energy flowing from the crystal sputters out and dies just as soon as Jayce manages to wrench it free from its socket.
It almost destabilizes in a burst of fluorescence and electricity along the way, but that’s neither here nor there. The crystal now slumbers peacefully, pulsing a soft morning-sky blue in Viktor’s steady palm, because Jayce’s had been shaking so badly he risked dropping it.
“It’s alright,” Viktor says. Jayce would appreciate it a lot more if he weren’t flushed hot with his embarrassment.
“I know.”
Viktor sets the crystal down in the very padded box it lives in. He then takes Jayce’s trembling hand between his own. “Jayce,” Viktor says again, firmer this time. “ It’s alright.”
Maybe it’s the touch. Maybe it’s the unerring eye-contact their positioning forces Jayce into, lamplit-amber against burnished gold. It startles the first of many deep breaths out of him, and the specifics of it don’t matter.
“Okay. Okay.” The song of the crystal echoes in the runestone wrapped in twine around his neck. “It’s alright,” Jayce repeats, just to convince himself.
Eventually, he might even start to believe it.
“I’ve never been able to sustain a connection to the crystal long enough for it to stabilize itself.” Jayce tells Viktor, exhaustion lilting in each word. He laughs. Runs a hand down his weary face. “But that’s only the first step. The rune matrices are next. They might blow up?”
Viktor inclines his head but remains quiet, pouring over Jayce’s words. His consideration of Jayce’s volatile and potentially deadly research proposal takes two minutes.
“Okay,” he says. “Where do we begin?”
Okay.
What.
To an external observer, Jayce could probably be classified as patently insane. Viktor’s brand of lunacy has only managed to bring them to greater heights, with greater still on the horizon.
Provided that they don’t manage to dig one big, shared grave and bury themselves in rubble along the way.
Three weeks and five further prototypes later, a chipped-off shard from the crystal undergoes a rapid and mildly explosive destabilization. By the time Viktor makes it to the workshop, Jayce has made exactly zero headway in clearing away the scattered paper dust, mostly because he can barely catch his breath long enough to keep the ceiling and floor from swimming into one another.
Viktor stares at him. Steps inside carefully, then locks the door. “There is soot on your face.”
The laugh he barks out steals the last of his remaining oxygen, and Jayce collapses into his seat with a drawn-out groan– hisses at the phantom ache in his leg.
“The crystal destabilised.”
Viktor blinks at him owlishly. “...I believe,” he says haltingly, “I explicitly asked you to not make breakthroughs in my absence.”
“Wouldn’t really call this one a breakthrough, V.” Jayce laughs, wiping a hand down his face. It’s a broken, defeated sound, even to him. Even over the mild leftover tinnitus from the explosion. “I’m just glad it didn’t blow up this workshop, too.”
Viktor’s eyes narrow and his lips purse. He takes his seat at Jayce’s side without a word. “This has… happened before?”
He’s tentative. Testing the waters. It doesn’t suit him at all, the hesitation, and Jayce forces himself out of his slump with a groan so he can meet his eyes. The concern that greets him steals his breath away, and really, it was never in question that Jayce would tell that particular story eventually. No time like the present. If the highly explosive theoretical magic-science research didn’t scare him off, this shouldn’t.
“Once,” he says. “Years ago.” Jayce lightly taps his wrench against the metal bracketing of his brace. “It’s why I have this.”
The cycle of emotions Viktor runs through looks something like this: confusion, concern, surprise, shock– a momentary wince that isn’t momentary enough for Jayce to miss– sympathy and then finally: understanding.
Relief washes through him like a cooling balm to a burn. Viktor will understand. Of course he will. He always seems to.
“Ah.” Another pause, longer this time. Jayce returns his arm to its resting place over his eyes. “Ah. That is-?”
“Why I freaked out on you when the energy signature spiked, yeah. It’s a long story,” Jayce says in a sigh. Viktor opens his mouth, prepared to speak, so he adds: “I want to tell you.”
Viktor closes his mouth with a soft click. When he stands, it’s to gravitate towards Jayce and rest a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“You should clean yourself up. I will take care of… this.”
It must be without thinking that Viktor’s hand lifts up– that he thumbs away the soot on Jayce’s cheek. His eyes go wide, worried. Embarrassed.
Jayce leans into it. “Thanks, V.”
They sit together in silence for a small eternity after Jayce returns, two mugs of lukewarm-coffee in hand.
“After my mom died, I needed– I needed hextech to work.” Great opening, Jayce. Ten out of ten. Viktor jolts, and then very intently returns to annotating the schematics for Jayce’s leg brace. A small grace. “I needed it to be worth something. I don’t know.” He pulls in a long, shuddering breath. “Guess I wasn’t in the right headspace to be working with volatiles.”
There’s silence. The sound of a pen on paper. The faint rasp of his heavy, regular breaths against the slower backdrop of Viktor’s. Then: a hum. A tapping against metal.
“I do not believe you would have been in a headspace to tolerate being stagnant, either,” Viktor says evenly.
This could be a normal conversation, in tone if not subject. Jayce appreciates it more than he’s able to convey through words, which is why he’s allowing Viktor to make suggestions for improvement upon his original design.
“No.” Jayce laughs wetly. “I just– I couldn’t save her. It was the fissure gases, in the end. Hextech is so much more than just a magic battery. But– still. You’ve seen the readings. The power these crystals can put out would easily be enough to facilitate better ventilation down here. Better purification facilities.”
If I could have gotten it to work, maybe mom would still be alive, he doesn’t say.
He doesn’t dare to mention the nights he spent wandering the Lanes until sunrise. The risks. The testing without safety procedures. How his body had been so weighted with exhaustion that there had been no plausible chance for him to react in time to a catastrophic destabilization of the crystal.
What Viktor doesn’t say in response to him is: you couldn’t have known, or of course you struggled to comprehend highly advanced theoretical physics enough to break ground in a new field of science in time to save your mother.
Instead, he says simply, “You were a child,” a fact that wants to become absolution, and that’s that.
Jayce breathes out steadily and blinks away his tears.
He doesn’t tell Viktor about the nights spent on overlooks, at the heights of Zaun that are still the bowels of Piltover. Staring at the bridge to the city that unknowingly sent his mom to her grave, then down at the water. Staring at the drop, and contemplating ways to get some rest. Viktor doesn’t push him for answers, either.
He thinks Viktor might somehow already know, anyway. All of Jayce’s other aches find mirrors in him, after all. They must be made for this, to neatly slot together for progress over function.
In due time, Jayce tells himself. Soon. They’re taking it slow.
What, he thinks, are we taking slow?
“I did not,” Viktor bracingly tells him one night, “always live in Piltover.” He holds his head between his hands, world-weary and achingly frustrated, and Jayce wants to be the one to hold him until he feels better. Is that weird?
It’s almost an exchange of information. A trade-off, nearly, for Jayce’s vulnerability. But if Viktor wants to tell him– and he’s under no delusions that he could force this information from him– Jayce will listen.
He’d dropped into his seat like a rock, resignation a heavy burden. His cane rests, momentarily out of mind, on the ground at his side. Viktor makes no move to pick it up. He instead hunches over, pressing his thumbs insistently into the brace around his leg until it gives a muffled click and– presumably; Jayce needs to ask for the schematics Viktor is using– settles into realignment.
The relief that crosses Viktor’s expression is familiar. The tension doesn’t leave him.
“The distinction means little to those who have never stepped foot in the Lanes.”
Jayce processes the words with a slow nod and not a word. It makes sense. Maybe. The wariness written across every inch of his frame. The expectation of judgement, of dismissal. The discerning eyes and the refusal to be overlooked. He has hundreds of questions, and now isn’t the time. Not yet. Eventually, though.
They work in silence, together.
My parents were artisans, Viktor will eventually entrust to him. There was an opportunity to leave. They took it.
The gaps in his words are confessions.
It was easy, in the end, for House Talis to fall into obscurity. Lacking a patriarch and direction, with an heir too young to take up the mantle and a matriarch unprepared to handle such a burden, it had barely taken half a year.
Jayce finds he can’t imagine how difficult Piltover must have made it for Viktor to rise.
They would have been idiots to turn you down, he will say, entirely truthfully. Viktor will glance at him. Smile wryly.
They do not know what they let go of in you.
The words are a deflection. Regardless, they will stay with him for a long, long time.
Prototypes nine and ten are stable. Stable, as in: they don’t explode.
They don’t do much more than that, either. Viktor prods at prototype-ten a few more times with a frown, and pushes Jayce’s goggles up his forehead– Jayce is exceedingly normal about this, and has equally very normal thoughts about Viktor wearing his lab safety equipment– when they neither light up nor spark violently.
Back to the drawing board.
“I still cannot believe you belonged to a House.” Viktor says wonderingly, a few hours later. The bags under his eyes are deep enough that he looks as though he’s been punched. Jayce would laugh, if his own weren’t worse. “Though, I believe I could picture it with some effort.”
Jayce definitely doesn’t pout, because he is a mature and respectable threat to the scientific status quo. He frowns. “Hey.”
“With a lot of effort,” Viktor amends, teasing and hopelessly fond. Jayce laughs, then knocks their good legs together. “Your trade?” he asks.
Jayce doesn’t even look up. He just nudges his hammer across the desk and into Viktor’s waiting hands. “Toolmakers. House Talis.” Then, just for the thrill of it: “At your service.”
A minute passes. Then two. Then three. Jayce allows himself to indulge in the small victory of getting one over on his partner, preening quietly. He opens his mouth to rub it in, intent on basking in the joy of finally stunning Viktor silent.
And because Viktor never lets him have anything nice, the next thing out of his mouth is: “Jayce Talis.” Each syllable is shaped with sharp intent. Precise, as though Viktor is savoring the full weight of Jayce’s name on his tongue. “As in, derived from talisman? I dare say it may have been fate that brought you to the arcane.”
Jayce’s brain blanks. Completely empty. Every thought has run for the hills, then ducked for cover just to be extra safe. He’s so fucked.
“You are going to catch flies,” Viktor says, amused.
Jayce wants to kiss that smug look off his stupid pretty face.
They arrive at the wise– incredibly wise!– decision to throw in the towel for the night after a second transistor overloads and melts into slurry on Jayce’s workbench.
Which, yeah. It’s as wise an idea as it is necessary. Frustrated tears burn at the edges of Jayce’s vision and his leg aches something fierce– a loud, vocal protest against hours of hauling components and hammering metal into complacence and maybe putting on more of a show than he ordinarily would because there is a witness in his workshop, and by the time he collapses into his chair, spent, Jayce has a handful of regrets.
“It isn’t working,” Jayce mutters, wholly miserable. Kneading at his brow hasn’t put a dent in his brewing headache, but it helps hide the wet sheen of his eyes. Good enough. “Why isn’t it working?”
He hears, more than sees, Viktor moving towards him. The familiar tapping of his cane, the rhythm of his gait. His hand is a warm and comforting weight where it comes to rest against Jayce’s back, and suddenly he can’t find his words– can’t squeeze them out past the sudden tightness of his throat.
“Come,” he says. Jayce blinks, but allows himself to be pulled upright and away from the cooling remains of their most recent circuit board. “I believe a change of scenery may help.”
Viktor is pulling him towards the door, insistently. Jayce blinks again, willing away the remaining dampness clinging to his eyelashes, and plants himself to the ground. He looks back at the miserable prototypical failure, then forward, to his partner and the door.
He sighs. It isn’t even a difficult decision.
“Where are we going?” Jayce asks. Then, “And aren’t you supposed to be heading back up topside soon, anyway?”
Viktor won’t dignify the latter part of his question with a response, Jayce knows. His relationship with Piltover is terse at the best of times. There’s a story there, some key information that will prove vital to deciphering the puzzle that is Viktor, and Jayce can’t wait to uncover it. But that’s a mission for another night. The first part of Jayce’s question is answered by a raised eyebrow and a broad, sweeping gesture to the lanes around them– an entreaty, of sorts. Look, use that brain of yours.
Jayce knows this path. It’s navigational instinct that comes free with any property situated close to the Lanes, and while Emberflit may be higher up in Entresol it’s not so far away that Jayce hasn’t ever followed this beaten path before.
Viktor is dragging him to The Last Drop. Why is beyond him.
“You need to relax,” Viktor accuses. Which. Yeah. True. Also entirely hypocritical, but that’s obvious like saying the sky is choked grey by Zaun’s smog, or Jayce is head over heels for the guy. What else is new. “And I am in dire need of new blackmail material.”
Jayce almost trips over his own feet. As it is, he staggers, lurching into the other man with a surprised grunt, and his leg lets him know very loudly that he is a fool who needs to learn to stop being stunned stupid by every second sentence that comes out of Viktor’s mouth. There are hands at his shoulders and amber eyes meeting his own, and the smile on his face rises unbidden.
“I am physically incapable of comprehending how you manage to socially navigate Piltover,” Jayce says, aghast. Viktor’s responding smile is self-satisfied and smug.
“You appear equally incapable of navigating in a straight line, and you have yet to touch a drop of alcohol.”
The crowds grow denser. The bustle, louder. A few months and a lifetime ago, the only thoughts Jayce carried around in regards to the man he’s now pressed bodily against had been wow, what an asshole, I sure hope he comes back tomorrow and other approximate derivatives.
“You’re terrible,” he sighs. The Last Drop looms directly in front of them, lit up warm and welcoming. A wry smile tugs at Jayce’s lips unbidden, and something hopelessly fond crawls its way inside his chest. “Fine. But only a few drinks, okay? I want to start work on the next prototype in the morning, and I’m not operating the forge hungover.” Then, like an afterthought: “Not again.”
Viktor whirls around so quickly Jayce is surprised he doesn’t get whiplash. His hand, insistent and seeking, finds its way to Jayce’s bicep where it tightens like a fucking vice just to pull them closer together.
“You, Jayce Talis, will be telling me that story.”
Jayce is so, so fucked.
Fact: while Jayce has the constitution– the size, mass and metabolism– to theoretically handle his alcohol, he does not drink often. He is not a social drinker because he is not social and money spent on alcohol is better spent elsewhere.
His tolerance for it is, frankly, shit. Abysmal. Hysterical. The sort of thing that would get him laughed at by his friends if he had friends to laugh at him.
A new fact, and one that Jayce will be penning down in his Viktor-specific journal at his earliest convenience: Viktor has the tolerance, but not the constitution.
As it turns out, neither of them can handle their liquor.
The average forge can reach an approximate high of 1,370 degrees before the risk of structural compromise to the surrounding environment becomes too great to ignore. Jayce’s forge can reach a high of 1,250 degrees before it burns down the rest of the workshop.
The Last Drop has somehow managed to steal and withstand all 14.3 million degrees from the fucking sun, and Jayce is going to die here.
He barely even hears Viktor speaking over the chaos and rabble of the tavern– over the raucous cheering of one group to the far left of their booth, tucked away into a corner and just-about out of sight– but he sure is saying something , because his mouth is moving and Jayce is staring at his lips as they form each delicate consonant. In the way that work partners so often do.
Viktor stares at him. Waiting for a response, he dimly recognizes.
“I don’t know how I got anything done before you,” Jayce says, definitely not answering the original question at all. It’s a truth though, an adoration that sinks down to his bones. Even the broken ones. Especially the broken ones. Viktor’s expression does this funny little thing in response: his eyebrows pinch together, like he’s confused, but his lips can’t seem to decide if he wants to sigh or smile.
Jayce’s vision wobbles. Swims. He doesn’t remember alcohol hitting him upside the head quite so firmly the last time he got drunk, but he also can’t remember the last time he got drunk. He runs a hand through his hair– why is it so warm– and takes a fleeting moment to admire how heavy his own limbs have become, and Viktor is watching him again.
The air is heavy with humidity and laughter. Beneath the buzz of the alcohol is a vague discomfort, a sense of being flushed too warm, but then Viktor laughs as he recounts some terrible joke he overheard topside and the discomfort fades into the background. In spite of the noise, their booth is a pocket of space that exists just for them. Whatever Viktor is looking for in him, Jayce hopes he finds it.
“Ah, you would have found your way eventually.” Viktor inclines his head; raises his glass as if in toast. He then adds, sweetly, “Perhaps within a few decades.”
Jayce is a furnace, red-hot, fuelled by his racing heart. His face must be on fire. He knocks his own glass against Viktor’s with the finesse of a man that can barely see straight. “ Ha-ha. You’re hilarious.”
For a long, pleasant moment, neither of them speak. Viktor nurses his drink steadily, and Jayce clutches at his empty glass like it can cool off his overheating hands.
Then they entirely counteract their earlier wisdom of taking time away from work by buying more drinks.
As the night wears on, the Last Drop only grows livelier. Despite the chaos of intermittent bar fights and, at one point, painfully tone-deaf singing, Jayce’s mind remains locked in orbit around Viktor.
He isn’t out of place here in the slightest. Not only in the tavern, but in Jayce’s life– the sentimental musings of a man who’s had one too many. But the thought sticks in his spinning mind and demands that he pay closer attention.
If his thoughts are prone to remaining in orbit around Viktor, their bodies are a different matter entirely. The booth they occupy is small, but they’ve been drifting closer and closer together like any space between them is an affront; like twin stars locked in orbital decay. Jayce wonders what the collision will look like.
His head is spinning.
“You just– you fit here,” he says. Slurs. Maybe he’s ranting. The naked amusement he’s earning himself only fuels the flames. “It’s been a while since everything made sense.”
There’s a soft laugh from Viktor– then the weight of his hand on Jayce’s arm. Lower, to his wrist, where his fingers curl. Maybe he isn’t the only one playing fast and loose with restraint. Maybe Viktor is also throwing caution to the wind tonight. Maybe he’s tipsier than he lets on through appearances alone. The specifics of it all aren’t more important than the way the Last Drop brightens him in amber and gold: stunning like sunrise, sunset, smiling.
“I fear your sense may have abandoned you, Jayce,” Viktor says, lilting forward to press a hand to his chest. “You, my partner, are drunk.”
He leans into the touch and Viktor leans into him in turn. “Nope. Just happy.” Jayce shakes his head, just to prove it, and frowns when his empty mug sways right back at him. “Maybe a little tipsy.”
“You have lived in Zaun for this long, and remain a lightweight?”
Jayce wants to keep looking at him. They’re pressed together in their cramped little booth that isn’t cramped in any way other than by choice, thigh-to-thigh and so close that they may as well be fighting to sink into each other.
When Viktor’s molten gaze settles on him– trailing over his eyes, then his cheekbones, then lower, lower, lower still, to his lips– Jayce relishes in the burn. He leans in closer, heart pounding with enough force that, distantly, he thinks he might actually pass out. And then Viktor presses closer to him, so close that they breathe the same air, and Jayce can see the steady rise and fall of his chest.
For a moment and eternity, neither of them move.
Viktor’s thumb traces the path of his cheekbones, then the tip of his overheating ear. Then he’s trailing further backwards still, through the strands of hair framing his face– coming to rest, gently, at the nape of his neck.
Jayce doesn’t have the wherewithal to resist when he’s pulled forward. Even if he did, he wouldn’t.
It’s gentle, the press of their foreheads together. Viktor’s eyelashes are a dark fan against his cheeks.
“You’re drunk,” Viktor whispers. He isn’t wrong. It doesn’t change how desperately Jayce wants this– the proximity, the promise, the potential. He wants this moment, wants to become it, and if he had to pick any of the moments that they’ve shared so far to live in forever– it would be this.
It would be this.
Jayce brings them together again intently, forehead to forehead and heart to heart, and his eyes flutter closed.
His mouth is drier than Viktor’s Shuriman-desert sense of humor when he comes back around, and his head hurts like some asshole has taken a hammer to the inside of his skull in a failing attempt to figure out the finer details of percussion.
“Oh. Oh, fuck,” he says– wheezes, really, and pushes himself upright blearily. Even the sound of his own sleep-hoarse voice is too much to bear. There’s a glass of water on his bedside table that Jayce drains in seconds, and it barely puts a dent in the headache. Hangover.
He’s also not wearing a shirt. It doesn’t appear to have even made it into his bedroom. Instead there’s a blanket now haphazardly pooled in his lap, soft and worn-blue.
Jayce thinks, half-hysterical, at least I’m still wearing my pants, and tries to not think too hard about it.
He fails at this like he made a vow to eat his own words. Thoughts. Whatever.
The memories of the night before exist in fragments. The vice of Viktor’s hand settled at his waist. The soft brush of his hair against Jayce’s arm slung over his shoulders. The way that Jayce’s focus had narrowed and narrowed and narrowed further until the only thing left on his mind had been each and every point of contact between their bodies.
Their foreheads pressed together, tender and intimate and mutual and fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck.
His face is on fire. The alcohol is long out of his system and Jayce’s face is on fucking fire. A long, anguished groan shrivels up and dies in his throat.
They’d been two idiots nonverbally confessing to something, tucked away in a corner of the universe belonging just to them– then two idiots limping and laughing their way back through the Lanes. It’s a miracle we didn’t get held at knifepoint and mugged.
He’s never going drinking with Viktor again. He barely even remembers how the hell they got back.
The glass of water at his bedside. Jayce remembers that. The soft clinking of ceramic on metal. Condensation sweating down the glass. He also remembers the plush comfort of his decidedly not plush and barely comfortable mattress beneath his heavy body, and the long, breathy groan that had slipped from him.
Viktor had been watching. He’d been flushed. Because of the alcohol? Because of Jayce?
He runs a hand down his face, and feels the echoes of another hand running through his hair– ghosting over his stubble. Curious. Intimate.
Jayce is going to die of embarrassment if he doesn’t die of yearning first. But first: he’s going to go back to sleep.
A fragment from a dream-that-is-not-a-dream: the ghost of something, some whisper he can’t remember, passing over the shell of his ear. Curling around that sound. Fingers around his fingers, dexterous and warm.
A touch to his forehead.
Then, nothing.
Notes:
it'd be a huge help to RT here!
1. science based on science until it isn’t. quick, spot the scientist!
2. fun fact for this chapter in specific: got drunk to gather empirical (symptomatic!) evidence to use as reference while writing lightweight jayce. doing so was expensive, but well worth stumbling through explaining statistics to oomf
3. remember to drink water at regular intervals if you're gonna get wasted
4. have i ever mentioned my undying love for nonsexual intimacy? and the zaunite forehead bump as a gesture of affection? woah.
Chapter Text
They don’t talk about it.
But whatever wall they knocked down stays down, and when they next meet, Viktor sits closer to him than ever.
Memory has always been a strength of Jayce’s. His work is testament to this– he hasn’t found shit in all of his research this far to detail the runic script necessary to invoke the arcane; he’s working based on what he witnessed first-hand in all the glorious visibility of a fucking blizzard.
The point of this is: Jayce spent much of that evening studying Viktor. He almost certainly made for an abysmal drunk conversationalist. He’s running out of space in his studying-my-work-partner-in-a-totally-normal-way journal and will need to buy another sooner rather than later, but here’s another very scientific fact for it:
Viktor is beautiful. Objectively.
He was stunning under the low golden light of the tavern. He was beautiful when draped in the thick shadows of Zaun’s nightlife on the journey to the Last Drop, and ethereal when sparks of neon and color would catch against his skin. Inviting. Untouchable. When they were forehead-to-forehead, Jayce had the perfect view of the mole beneath his eye.
Jayce is used to working with forces of nature that can ruin him should he overstep. He’s practically the leading figure in the field of scientific reckless abandon.
He wouldn’t mind if Viktor were to join that list.
Having practically confessed his undying affection for the guy while drunk in the Lanes’ finest tavern, the minor, monumental step forward in their working relationship that is inviting Viktor into his shoebox apartment should not make him as nervous as it does.
Nervous is an understatement. Jayce may yet die of a heart attack.
Viktor isn’t even shy about taking in the entirety of Jayce’s possessions. He’s rooting through the bookshelves to find all the dusty, age-worn scrolls and tomes and books that Jayce owns within the first five minutes, a curiosity bordering greed evident in each decisive action.
He wants to ask, how long have you been thinking about coming home with me?
He also thinks he might combust regardless of how Viktor answers, so Jayce wisely keeps those words safe in his heart for now. A new entry on the long list of things he admires about Viktor: his ability to adapt to new situations. Jayce pulls in a deep breath, sets his shoulders, and makes himself comfortable in his own home.
“Defining the runic script is– it’s been a lot of guesswork, really,” he says after Viktor reaches his notebooks on the topic. Jayce shrugs at the questioning side-glance thrown his way. “There’s no other way to figure out what they do without putting them to practice. Some of them have clear, distinct effects. Take acceleration. It’s all about speed, but its practical application would probably be in the transportation of goods."
The runes aren’t anything new to Jayce. He’s been dreaming of them for the past fourteen years. They are, however, to Viktor. He absorbs every word with rapt focus.
“And the rune around your neck?” he asks.
Jayce unclasps the twine at his neck and lets the pendant drop again into Viktor’s waiting hands. “It represents foundations. It’s a stabilising agent, subtler than some of the others. I’m hoping it can reduce volatility and enhance the viability of other runic matrices.”
Spread across the worn pages of Jayce’s journal are runes– or, at least, drawings of them. Warmth fizzles in his chest at the way Viktor’s fingers trail over the loops and arches of them. “Where did you find these?”
“The mage,” Jayce answers. At the blank look thrown his way, he elaborates: “It made for one hell of a light show, and my memory is pretty good.”
That isn’t even accounting for the way that traumatic memories accumulate in the brain like sediment and rewire behavior and personality around themselves.
Viktor is staring at him now. “You recalled these runes from your one encounter with a mage that occurred well over a decade ago,” he says, his voice tinged with disbelief like Jayce is the weird one here.
“Well, yeah. Defining them was the hard part.”
“You are insane.”
Pot, kettle.
Runes belong in groups clustered along metaphorical branches that belong to a metaphorical tree. The tree in this metaphor is anchored by its roots into the ground– the arcane– through which power flows.
Precision. Domination. Resolve. Inspiration. Sorcery. Groups that are referred to recurrently in the manuscripts Jayce has gathered over the years. Each rune they work with belongs to one of those groups.
Beyond that, they know precious little. The number of runes they have tentative definitions for is far exceeded by the number that remain mysterious in form and function. Pioneering a new field of research has less of an existential terror to it when there’s a second set of eyes making sure your equations won’t blow you both up.
“There’s a doorway analogy I like, too,” Jayce says, innocent and innocuous, just to watch Viktor’s expression twist into a scowl.
Because Jayce actually cares about his formal education– and mostly because he’s been too busy with the workshop and hextech and his catastrophic looming emotional revelations about Viktor to have made many classes as of late– he makes a concerted effort to actually attend some of the upcoming lectures at the college.
This has nothing to do with Viktor being unable to visit as often while he’s busy with his own academy work.
Zaun’s College of Techmaturgy is barely recognized as an academic institution in the eyes of Piltover. It receives precious little support, thrives in spite of the lack of formal financing, and currently offers only a handful of courses. This will likely change in the coming years. Advance. Progress. In the meantime, the classes are few and densely packed.
Beyond the realm of pioneering a new field of science, Jayce is– technically– a mechanical and electrical engineer. So: a formal qualification would be pretty useful to have. He could pass through half of the classes offered in his sleep. The other half are divine torture via the pathway of boredom.
There’s this itch that lives under Jayce’s skin, relentless and ever-present, some kind of parasitic static that grows in size with stagnation. He’s barely even aware of the drumming of his fingers against the paper of his journal– the narrow-eyed glares and annoyed murmurs around him at the tapping of his pen. His new default state of being consists of his mind being elsewhere and his thoughts spin spin spinning without ground, locked in an endless orbital loop.
He could and wants and needs to be– elsewhere, creating. Prototyping. Learning through practice, rather than theory. He needs to be developing and changing and iterating and evolving, pushing a frontier that nobody else is brave– or insane– enough to shove.
The next page of his journal holds a rough sketch of the next possible prototype. A mindless sketch, rough and scrawled, with few changes made from the last iteration in the hopes of carrying over its stability. The annotations around it are an easy back-and-forth between its two authors.
Jayce thinks idly that Viktor would hate these classes, cramped and full of whispers.
He also thinks that between the spirit of frenzied collaboration and the desperate hunger for improvement– the refusal to be satisfied with good when the promise of great beckons from just out of reach– Viktor would probably love the college itself.
Over the steady pounding of steel against steel and the roaring forge flames, Jayce doesn’t hear the workshop door groaning open and clicking shut. He doesn’t hear any footsteps, or the tapping of a cane, because he is a busy man who is focusing on his work– and enjoying the relief from the night’s chill provided by the heat of the forge against his skin.
He does, however, hear Viktor’s amused “Am I interrupting?” in a lull between swings.
Jayce swears, loudly, and does his best to leap out of his fucking skin. And because Viktor is an evil, evil man whose primary purpose in life is to watch Jayce suffer, he nearly bends double with his laughter while Jayce can do little more than watch helplessly as he tries to catch his breath.
Even with the forge at his back, the heat does little to make him feel less naked.
“My God,” Jayce wheezes out, “what the hell is your problem?”
Viktor looks him over.
Viktor looks him over again, satisfied. “You tell me.”
Jayce would be less flustered if he were to actually catch fire, because Viktor’s eyes don’t leave his chest until he limps over to his chair, where his shirt lays discarded, and pulls it back on.
The eleventh prototype fizzles out into nothing, the arcane power of the crystal haemorrhaging into the air and dissipating before it ever reaches the runes they’ve spent painful hours engraving into metal. They watch it sputter to life with wide eyes, and sigh at the same time when it putters out of existence.
The twelfth explodes. Naturally. Viktor takes the cuts and bruises well.
Jayce decidedly does not, because he sees the blue flicker in intensity and then he’s elsewhere, in his old workshop, staring at a sparking rig in the split second before the shockwave of pressurised air sends him into the wall and the ceiling into his leg.
He freaks the fuck out. Sue him. He only needs to have blown himself up once to know he would prefer to not experience it again– and that he’d rather Viktor never experiences it at all.
“And you’re sure you’re not feeling any lightheadedness?” Jayce hears himself say distantly, as though underwater. This time, the muffling isn’t a byproduct of tinnitus but rather his own too-rapid breathing. The gashes at Viktor’s forearms aren’t overly deep, but pink seeps through them sluggishly even as Jayce wraps gauze around them. His throat tightens.
Viktor rolls his eyes, but remains patient and willing beneath his tentative touches. Leans into them, even. “Yes, Jayce. As I have already told you, repeatedly.”
The occasional, errant spark of blue drifts through the air. The crystal is blown, and Jayce is going to have to repurpose the shards left of it into runestones. Not entirely a waste of time, but he would have preferred, on the whole, for it not to have exploded.
“I think we need to increase the oscillations.” Viktor says. Jayce’s soul turns in its two week notice and vacates the property.
“You– what? Viktor, that rig was the most stable prototype we’ve made yet and it still wasn’t strong enough.” He swallows thickly through his rising hysteria, and his next words crack beneath the strain. “And you’re telling me that instead of dampening the oscillations, you want to–”
“Increase them. Yes.” And before he can complain or form a coherent protest, before he can vocalize the terror living behind his ribcage, Viktor silences him by snatching his hand into his own. “Jayce, this rig was the most stable prototype so far because we built it to withstand higher power levels. It was the equipment that failed under the strain, not the equations.”
“Trust me,” Viktor asks. Jayce can only shake around the laugh that escapes him; can only muster up a mild, baffled terror at the fact that mortal fear be damned, he’s going to go along with this.
He doesn’t vocalize the terror nestled sweetly in his throat. Doesn’t voice the promise that wants to scrape its way out: if this gets us killed, I’m going to haunt you.
Even still, the honey-warm flecks in Viktor’s eyes and the gentle brush of his thumb against the curve of Jayce’s wrist are all the reply that he needs.
Of course; I’d expect nothing less.
He forges the equipment for the next device to be more durable– to withstand, against his better judgement, increased oscillations around the crystal– and is rewarded in the form of Viktor’s touch lingering on his arm when they next harness the crystal’s energy.
When the oscillation frequency is increased by one-fifth, a burst of light greets them. It leaves just as quickly. When increased by a quarter, a spiderwebbing pulse of light is their prize. The rigging holds stable, and when Jayce leans forward to test its absorption, the flicker of energy reaches out to curl around his fingertip.
It’s a split-second of potential. It’s electric and warm. It pulses like the ache wrapped around his mangled leg, and leaves his skin buzzing. It pushes aside the fear in him to make room for awe, for a childish curiosity he hasn’t been able to wholly embrace in well over a decade, and Jayce is breathless with it.
When he turns to look at Viktor, Viktor is already watching him– some indescribable, bruise-tender feeling written into every inch of him, from the sweeping curve of his smile to the lingering phantom of his hand at Jayce’s bicep.
The crystal yawns itself to sleep. They both stand and stare at the rigging for several long minutes before turning, dazed, to their notebooks.
That first success doesn’t immediately give way to a path paved for progress. They’re both scientists; they run several more experiments before daring to tentatively confirm that, yes, Viktor’s idea to increase the power entering an already-volatile system has in fact unveiled a principle that they can exploit future experiments to prime the crystal to respond to their prodding.
It still sets Jayce’s teeth on edge. Has his stomach doing swoops even as his heart races.
Their progress slows down after that initial breakthrough. The rigging stubbornly refuses to hold up to further increased oscillations, no matter how firmly Jayce attempts to weigh it down, because the rotatory motion continually brings the cage closer and closer to the edge of the workbench and Jayce isn’t about to allow himself or Viktor to physically hold it down. Too dangerous, he thinks. Even for us.
Jayce has two options: use vises to clamp down the base to the workbench and hope the pressure doesn’t damage the circuitry, or remodel the workshop to create a working environment that doesn’t allow for the currently-high risk of the crystal and its cradle dropping off the bench and onto the ground.
They haven’t blown up the entire workshop yet. Jayce would very much like to keep it this way.
It doesn’t help that Viktor is busy these days, occupied with his personal studies up topside more often than not. Which– Jayce doesn’t mind that. His partner has a life outside of the workshop and hextech and Jayce, even if he doesn’t talk much about it. What little Jayce knows of Viktor’s life in Piltover has been carried by strained, clipped syllables: words about the Academy, and about sponsors, and about how he desperately hopes for his work to retain its efficacy and benefit those who most sorely need safer fuel cells for their augmentations.
Viktor doesn’t talk much about his life in the upper city, hasn’t offered up any information beyond the few stilted pieces he’s already entrusted to Jayce’s steady hands. Jayce doesn’t mind that. He’s hardly any better for it.
What Jayce does mind is the silence. Months ago, the quiet had been soothing. A break from monotonous repairs and stilted conversations. These days, it’s anathema to him, and the creak of the workshop’s door swinging open after hours is synonymous with relief.
The shadows under Viktor’s eyes have evolved into bruises, deep purple against the pallor of his skin. In his concern, Jayce has half a mind to offer up his bed for Viktor’s use– the other half of his mind too busy being on fire to protest the thought– but it’s his certainty that the offer will be waived off that stays his hand.
“Busy day?” Jayce offers up, rhetorical, because he knows damn well that it has been. Viktor near-collapses into his seat at the workbench in response and yeah, that’s an exhaustion Jayce feels as keenly as his own.
“Progress Day preparations,” he sighs. “Much to do, such little time. You know how it is.”
Jayce blinks foggily, because no, he really doesn’t. Progress Day is a Piltover thing. The news will reach the Undercity, but the inventions sure as hell won’t. The latter half of that sentence, though– that, he can sympathize with.
He makes a broad, sweeping gesture to the back of the workshop and the cradle that sleeps there. “No progress here, either. If we’re dialling the oscillations up again, I’ll need to remodel the workshop to accommodate for the shifting. The cradle’s gonna fall off the bench and blow us both up at this rate.”
At the very least, it would make for an interesting break in the repetition of staggering blindly into dead ends. A weary noise pries itself through between his gritted teeth, and Jayce kneads at his temple as if it can banish the near-perpetual headache that sits there as of late. People who have been blown up by the raw, unfiltered energy of the arcane typically don’t have to worry themselves sleepless over cracking open a new branch of science.
Viktor looks up sharply. Jayce waves him off. They’re both tired and rapidly slipping towards the end of their respective ropes. The feeling of being trapped, backed into a corner– the raw, animal certainty tucked behind his ribs that time is slowly but surely running out– is nothing new. There are grains of sand slipping through their cupped fingers and down, down, down into the maw of an abyss below.
What awaits them at the end of this road, Jayce doesn’t know and couldn’t possibly begin to imagine. A few years ago, he might have unshakably believed the future to promise success in his endeavors– an optimism split seventy-thirty between delusion and hope. He would like to believe that, since then, he’s gained in caution and reason.
Even if his partner intermittently insists on encouraging Jayce to indulge in his madness in the name of scientific progress.
“You should come to the Progress Day showcase,” Viktor says. If his voice were steadier, it could have passed for nonchalant. It’s not, though, so it doesn’t. Jayce cocks his head to the side to get a better angle on the pinkening of his cheeks. “Perhaps it will act as a source of inspiration.”
Viktor doesn’t say I think you’re going stir-crazy, and I would like for the change in scenery, but Jayce hears it loud and clear regardless. He leans away from the desk– winces, for a second, at the rising tide of discomfort in his leg– then grins wryly.
“You want to drag me up topside?” he says, dubious.
Jayce isn’t sure how to feel about Piltover. Not really. The City of Progress is a beacon and a monolith, and at the end of the day, the shadow it casts will always fall dark on its Undercity. Any want for independence will be met with the business end of a rifle. Wariness erodes into bitterness erodes into a dirt-covered childhood grief in the shape of a casket.
His work takes him up and across that bridge, sometimes. Augmentation and prosthetics are nowhere near as common as they are in Zaun– because the work doesn’t have a tendency to mutilate when the reflection of daylight against gilded pavings give enough light to see by– but they’re not mythologic, and Jayce is good at what he does. Topsiders pay handsomely for discretion, and repairs are always in need.
“We could both use a break.” Factually true. They’ll both go insane at this rate. Viktor makes this soft, considering noise under his breath, then adds, “And I believe that you would not be as out of place in Piltover as you think you would be.”
The words don’t register immediately. When they do, all Jayce is able to do is blink– let his mouth fall open, then force it closed as his eyes narrow. Something close to indignation is a warming flare beneath his skin. What the hell is that supposed to mean?
There’s a knowing glint to Viktor’s gaze. Sharp, steady. It could be kindness or kinship or knowing– a recognition of the tiny piece of Jayce that once belonged to a family of topside toolmakers, or a recognition of the way that past seams into his present. Regardless of what it is, Jayce is flayed and bare beneath the blade of it.
So, here’s the deal. Before Jayce’s father had the bright idea to go and die on them and leave House Talis to sink in his absence, there had been a year or so where everything had been fine. Good, even. He’d been enrolled in a school not too far away from his home. He’d been bored out of his mind in the classes. He didn’t have many friends, because they were operating on different wavelengths and Jayce could barely get through five minutes before going on a theoretical tangent about magic.
Things had been good. The memories are faint, sandwiched between the crushing fear of the blizzard that came before and the shadow of grief that arrived much too soon, and also because he’d barely been older than ten, but he does faintly recall having lived in Piltover.
Further back, in the recesses of his memory: he’d once attended a Progress Day parade. He’d been insistent about attending for months. Excited. Desperate to see the pinnacle of that year’s research and development. His mother had been the one to accompany him to the parade, his small hand held safely in her own as they weaved through the crowds.
The festivities had been grand and beautiful. Each invention had represented possibility. Progress. The future sprawled out before him, and the infinite paths he could choose from.
Jayce is older now. Smarter. Possibly wiser, but when considering the way that he spends most of his free time trying to solve a riddle with a tendency towards violently destabilising, that may be an overly generous descriptor.
The celebrations up topside seem unnecessarily gaudy now, rife with trinkets and excess. A grand celebration of exorbitant wealth and possibilities that belong to the people lucky enough to afford them.
(Maybe Jayce is a little bitter.)
Against white stone and gilded banners and lit up beneath the midday sun, Piltover is blinding in her opulence. Of course, that’s just about all that the city has to offer.
The sea air greets him at the bridge– that marvel of engineering, singing in the headwind– clear and light and heavy-handed on the saltwater tang. It’s already an improvement from the stifling atmosphere of the workshop, staring out over the railings and upon twin expanses of endless blue.
Viktor, thankfully, doesn’t leave him waiting for too long. Jayce spots him through even the winding crowds of bodies– hears his displeasure and the metronomic rhythm of his gait like he’s attuned to it specifically– and pushes himself upright from his perch on the railing.
This, he’s realizing, makes for the first time he’s seen Viktor in full Academy regalia: all pristine white and perfect geometric lines, finely pressed. The beauty of it wouldn’t hold up for a minute over the bridge, but that’s neither here nor there. Viktor seems well aware of this fact.
He’s also not particularly shy about the once-over he gives Jayce. If he’s inspecting the clothes– old, not even his own, and he’s damn lucky that they just about fit– he lingers for far longer than could be considered professional, and then for even longer after that.
“Stop that,” Jayce chides. The clothes are not flattering enough to warrant that kind of attention. Piltover-white, sure, but the shoulders of the suit miss the crests that had once lived there.
It’s kind of a mind-fuck. Yesterday, he was busy working himself insane over dangerously theoretical science. Now he’s standing on the bridge connecting two cities, overlooking the vastness of the ocean as it sprawls across the horizon, wearing his dead father’s old, stiff, entirely uncomfortable Piltovan clothes that he only owns because of his dead mother’s sentimentality.
A reminder, he’s sure, of when House Talis enjoyed the luxuries afforded to even minor houses. He’ll examine that complicated snarl of feelings never, thank you very much.
“You look…”
“You can say outdated,” Jayce replies wryly. “Piltovan high-fashion doesn’t have a long shelf-life past Promenade. You look great.”
They aren’t quite hand-in-hand when they cross the bridge, Jayce knows this because he would very much prefer that they were, but with the bustle of the crowds it’s a pretty close thing.
So.
Progress Day. The annual celebration of Piltover, self-proclaimed City of Progress, and her founding. A grand day, rich in festivities and what have you, to demonstrate just how far technological and scientific projects can advance with enough money at the helm.
There’s a shit ton of staircases required to navigate Upper Piltover– the sector of the city Jayce avoids like the plague. Just– rows upon rows of them. Endless. Real progressive. Piltover’s streets aren’t wide enough for the crowds invited by the festivities, and while it’s shelter from being singled out or seen as very clearly not belonging, it offers nothing else.
And the stairs just keep coming. Piltover fucking sucks.
“My God,” Jayce hisses through clenched teeth as yet another staircase looms ahead– the last, hopefully, before they reach the Academy Square. His leg aches . Zaun is all sheer cliff-faces and slopes and mechanical ingenuity to avoid how fucking inaccessible endless staircases are. “How the hell do you do this every day?”
Viktor’s grimace is wry. Tired. “Necessity,” he says, with the intrinsic awareness that they’re going to be feeling the staircases for some days after the fact.
The Academy Square is where all the scientific and technological wonders– supposedly– are gaudily displayed. Emphasis on gaudily. Everything is gilded. Everything. Mostly in minor forms, such as gold crest decals on banners or the catch of sunlight on warm-toned metal, but it’s inescapable in its abundance and in the unignorable declaration of wealth in excess.
Kiramman, he knows, because those cross-keys are stamped above the ventilation shafts to remind the denizens of Zaun just whose generosity funds their breathable, mostly non-carcinogenic air. Ferros. Arvino. Medarda. Giopara. Different colors, united by gold.
It’s suffocating– kind of embarrassing, really– how they drape the tents in their names and the gilded banners of their Houses. Each one of them chafes.
The one other person in this city who understands why is at his side. Viktor, he knows, won’t judge him for his envy.
But. Piltover mercantile bodies put aside, they’re here for inspiration above all else. They’re here, suffering Piltover at her most obnoxious, to claw inspiration out from where it hides in the crowds, from where it’s tucked away in stalls and, most eminently– from the displayed highlights of this year’s innovative progress. Scoping out the hypothetical competition, so to speak.
The competition includes, as follows: a mechanical grooming kit. A chef’s range– fuelled by natural gas! Improved sound quality on a phonograph. There’s a motor that they walk past just in time to watch it rev to life– a powerful engine, certainly, based upon how violently it rattles the bare-bones demonstrative framework of the carriage surrounding it– and it sputters to death just as quickly with a puff of charming black smoke.
The pinnacle of this year’s functional technological advancements in Piltover are a natural gas range and a phonograph that sounds better. Incredible. Truly.
Jayce whispers beneath his breath, “These are the highlights?”
And Viktor just. Snorts. It’s an undignified noise, and he immediately hides it behind his palm and a fake cough, but there’s no way Jayce was ever going to miss such an obvious, unfiltered expression of amusement. Not when they’re practically glued together at the hips.
The look on his face must be particularly dumb– or blindsided– because he can see a grin behind that hand. Score.
“Viktor,” Jayce adds on, stiffly. “If I’ve ever implied that your peers are of even remotely comparable intelligence to you– sorry.”
Maybe it’s the words. Maybe it’s the fact that Jayce is rigid with barely-contained laughter because holy shit, this is the best Piltover has to offer? As soon as hextech stops threatening to blow them both sky-high every time they work a new prototype, it’ll blow this out of the water effortlessly.
Maybe it’s the dizziness of the midday sun as it beats down overhead and catches on painfully obnoxious gilded banner decals, but Viktor chokes on a scandalized gasp, hissing Jayce! through gritted teeth.
He does a spectacularly bad job of feigning shock. He’s an open book, his feelings plastered all over him like a signature. The wide-eyed-innocent look he’s trying to play up is undercut entirely by the teeth in his smile.
To Jayce’s endlessly baffled amusement, it just… doesn’t get any better. The food, though? The food outshines the inventions by a considerable margin.
Take that, Piltover.
The sun is sinking steadily by the time they return to the bridge– mostly because they take the scenic route overseeing the coast. Over the sea, the sun bleeds a warm-toned multitude. Bright, vibrant red. Flecks of amber. Glints of gold, but not at all garish in hue as it had been on the banners.
It’s quiet. Pleasant.
“We needed this,” Jayce mumbles. Viktor sighs, the sound soft and relaxed, and nods. He doesn’t think he’s missed out on all that much over all these years. But.
“When you’re the highlight of Progress Day, just let me know, okay?” he says. Viktor turns to him, brow pinched in consternation and protest prepared, so Jayce tacks on: “I’ll suffer Piltover for it.” For you.
Viktor goes quiet, satiated. It’s only after they part ways for the night and the warmth at his side dissipates that Jayce realizes how closely pressed they’d been.
The loose-limbed relaxation from the Progress Day festivities doesn’t last long.
Jayce returns to the workshop and the amalgamation of tension and frustration settles over his shoulders as though he’d never taken a step back at all, stifling like a blanket in the heat and just as unwelcome. The stress, he muses idly, has evolved into a tangible presence. Seared itself into reality like the magic they hope to harness.
Prototypes fourteen through seventeen all arrive at the same rasping, pathetic demise, spewing out sparks of blue before fading to black entirely. And with each iteration, that steel-wire of tension in him grows more taut– threatens to snap entirely when he leans down to add increasingly less detail to the notes in his journal.
He carves a new sequence of runes. They test the new variation in the runic script for any visible change or effect. The attempt meets no visible success. He carves a new sequence of runes. Etch, notch, repeat.
Viktor incrementally boosts the power to the eighteenth iteration after seventeen putters to death with a sad rattle, his steady hand wrapped white-knuckle firm around the control dial. There’s a tremor to him as he works; even in the low-light, Jayce can see the way adrenaline jitters through the both of them. He won’t say a word of it.
Eighteen through twenty-three are volatile and loud and bright.
They set Jayce’s teeth on edge and leave Viktor antsy, casting glances to the front of the workshop for silhouettes or shadows after bursts of fluorescent light from the crystal leave them blinking blue out of their eyes.
Jayce can’t blame him. He’s no better for it. The thing about Viktor is that he understands Jayce without words. The same, of course, is true in reverse. Viktor casts a careful glance out to watch their backs and Jayce understands the need because that fear is his own. It’s Viktor’s, too, some vestigial Undercity impulse that must have refused to leave him, even after so many years away.
Enforcers can and have and will interfere with simpler matters with lesser provocation. The threat of them is a powder keg, waiting for a spark to send it all tumbling down. Jayce would rather not give them reason to think him or his workshop or his companion or his precocious little light show as suspicious enough to warrant investigation, but when the ground trembles underfoot and the resonance of the crystal amplifies-
–chimes–
–resonates–
–that dread of his returns in full force. Panic is heady enough without the threat of ruination; his chest is too tight and his fingers are too cold-numb without adding in the wooziness of too-shallow, too-quick breathing.
Viktor doesn’t soothe him with stress-clipped syllables and blunt platitudes because he can’t. The fear is justified. To pretend otherwise would be to deny a very possible reality.
Anticipation and lengthy exposure to the high-energy wavelengths emitted by the crystal leave Jayce’s skin crawling. He cranks the dial further still with each question of science, each audacious thought that has pulled both him and Viktor to this precipice, and listens with a jackrabbiting heart as the device rattles louder and louder.
A handful of new entries to the list of things that Jayce is: Tired. Terrified. Trusting.
Alive, for now.
Research question: how long does it take for prolonged sleep deprivation to cause degradation in perceptual processing?
Empirical evidence would suggest: not all that long, actually. Underneath a blinding capacity for compassion and hatred and ingenuity and stupidity, humans are spectacularly prone to coming undone at the slightest provocation.
Back to the point, though. The experimental process goes something like this: Jayce is idling at his desk, blinking dust out of his eyes. Jayce, for the life of him, cannot get the words he penned down a few days prior to make any kind of meaningful sense. Jayce sees, in his peripheral vision, a room-brightening spark of blinding blue. Concentric rings, geometric patterns. Runes, dancing where they hang steady-hand etched into the air.
He jolts upright with a gasp, clawing at the desk to keep himself from toppling out of his seat.
Across the room, Viktor twitches violently. “Jayce?”
“Did– you saw that, right?” he starts. Even to his own ears, he sounds breathless, and when he goes to describe the vision-image-dream, the words escape him with a rasp.
Already, the picture eludes him. Vision, hallucination– is there a meaningful difference? The distinction is as follows: the ability to bring what is imagined into reality. The runes he knows he’d seen flit out of reach, name and function both, but they can be real if you’re a mage or they crack hextech, so Jayce isn’t insane.
Jayce is, however, some-going-on-many hours without sleep.
Viktor watches him– has moved closer to him– with some catastrophic mixture of concern and sympathetic amusement on his face. Jayce wants to walk over and be closer and maybe knock their foreheads together lightly for good measure, but he isn’t about to chance himself on staying upright when the ceiling is swooping for his legs.
“I think,” Viktor says slowly, “you may need to sleep.” And then, offhandedly: “The beard suits you, by the way.”
Beard. Beard?
Jayce reaches up, fingers tired and fumbling and shaky, to his own face. Pats his cheeks dumbly. There is, in fact, a beard. Last he recalls, there had not been a beard.
The hair is coarser. Thick. He’s barely been paying attention to his reflection in the morning, too eager to get back to work, so he probably looks like shit. Even if Viktor says it suits him. Viktor is too nice for his own good, even if he is simultaneously an asshole.
No wonder Jayce has been so overheated. His face has a blanket now.
“Jayce,” Viktor says through a poorly-stifled laugh. “Go to sleep.”
He keeps the beard.
Prototype twenty sees the oscillations scaled up a third. Twenty-one sees an increase of half from baseline. The low, steady song of the crystal evolves to a resonant chorus, a sporing of fluorescence; bright blue firelights spark from the device to drift across the workshop. They fizzle out on impact, shattering into dust.
It’s working and it isn’t. Increasing power into the system sustains the channel. The crystals respond but the runes don’t convey meaningful input, they don’t cast the request carried by the runic script across the gateway.
The arcane, Jayce hypothesizes, is an energy field. A wavelength of sorts. It always exists. The potential to tap into it always exists. Mages are naturally able to do so, but the process should theoretically be replicable with the right power source and the right medium to communicate through.
In the workshop, that field of energy is thinner than ever. Recursive impulses hang heavy in the air. Raw potential tastes of ozone and static.
On one hand: the barrier is now so thin that the right stimulus could shatter it.
On the other: the barrier is now so thin that the wrong stimulus might shatter them.
Jayce dreams of colors.
The soft scattering of oxygen-orbital blue over the sky of Progress Day Piltover. The deep, drowning navy of the sea surrounding the twin cities.
Flecks of gold catching on the tide. The setting sun as it bleeds deep, deep red over the waves.
Hextech blue, reflected in Viktor’s eyes.
Prototype twenty-four sees an increase of one-hundred percent from baseline, and against all odds it holds steady for five entire minutes. The runic script fizzles, searing itself into the air with all the bite of raw ozone, and doesn’t dissipate. At his side, Viktor takes studious notation of each rune, their order, their duration.
The rattling of the device remains within acceptable levels, even as he calibrates the script to push their carefully constructed message into the arcane. The movements aren’t familiar, but they’re second-nature all the same– a sharp twist here, a crank in the opposite direction here. Stop. Turn. Stabilize, inquire, accelerate, channel, foundation, imbue.
The crystal groans. Shrieks, and there’s electricity in the air a split second before the air pressure in the room increases. Jayce’s blood runs cold as concentric rings of blue emerge from the chaos, then colder still as they grow wider–
–brighter–
–more tangible. More real. The geometry, he remembers well. Overlapping patterns, careful calculations. Intentful. Nothing at all like this floundering of theirs. Nothing like the violence in the spiderwebbing tendrils of light, how desperately the energy seeks to anchor itself to something grounded. The power of the crystal ebbs and flows, flickering in and out, and Jayce is cold, small, afraid.
The pressure swells. He has several thoughts in rapid succession:
The first: I’ve seen this before.
The second: I know how this ends.
The third and most damning: Viktor.
The light bursts out of the crystal, sun-bright and blinding. Jayce gets all of a second to stare at it, to feel his heart knock against every single one of his ribs as it falls into his stomach, to push himself so that Viktor won’t take the brunt of the imminent destabilization alone, and then the light converges. Jayce closes his eyes.
The ground tremors, then disappears from beneath his feet.
He doesn’t wake to bone pushing through skin, or concrete dust thickly coating him, or the taste of blood on his tongue. All in all, a marked improvement over the last time.
Distantly, he hears sound. Some soft, breathless, disbelieving thing. It takes a moment to register in his mind, fear-frozen and stiff, but it does sink in.
One word, five letters, one syllable.
Slowly, Jayce opens his eyes to blue. Soft, electric blue. He breathes out, “Holy shit,” and braces himself to wake up.
The ceiling is inching closer. Or– he’s inching closer to the ceiling. Jayce reaches out (up?), and his fingers brush against the cold hard surface, and he doesn’t wake up because this isn’t a dream. Viktor laughs– that’s what it was, that’s what I heard– louder this time. The noise cracks down the middle like fjord ice.
The cradle is floating. Their journals are floating. They are floating.
They’re floating.
“Jan’ahrem,” Viktor hushes, “incredible– ”
In a memory from well over a decade ago, he remembers this. This thrill. The awareness of being held delicately in the grasp of something so vast and powerful. So, so delicately. So intentionally. As though great care were being taken to avoid holding on too tightly and snuffing him out.
The fear in Jayce drains away like meltwater.
He’s adrift. He’s weightless. Scant meters away from him, Viktor inspects a drifting cog between his fingers and smiles so, so widely. Jayce has to hold out his arms to stop himself from smooshing face-first into the ceiling. He also has to carefully angle himself when he gently pushes away; to give himself momentum enough to move, but not too much that he’ll slam into a wall.
“I cannot believe you were right,” Jayce rasps. “I mean, I can– but fuck, really?”
There’s a hysterical edge to his voice. The slope of it hangs heavy in Viktor’s own words when he says, “I told you it would work.”
“You’re telling me,” Jayce starts, then stops. Laughs. When he moves an arm to gesture at the workshop, the sweeping motion threatens to send him spinning. “You’re telling me we could’ve cracked this sooner if we were less concerned about killing ourselves in the process?”
When Viktor laughs again, louder, it’s tinged with some impossible emotion. Not quite hysteria or glee or relief alone, but a combination of the three. His smile, wondrous and sincere and awestruck, is a toothy thing. His cheeks dimple beneath it.
Jayce loves him.
If he weren’t currently suspended in mid-air by zero-gravity, he would rush over– swoop him up into a crushing hug– do something stupid, no doubt, like kiss him like he’s currently desperate to. Instead, he reaches out for the first object that languidly crosses his path: the dial cog, the one they’ve both white-knuckled before politely requesting that it not sign off on twin death warrants.
Once it’s close enough, he pokes it. It drifts across the space between them and towards the impossibly slight gravitational pull– we’re not floating, we’re in a static orbit– of the crystal, jolting as it approaches the nexus–
–and jolting once more when it’s spit out on the other side. Wonder lights up Viktor’s eyes as he plucks it from the air; curiosity, then, when he turns it over to inspect the oxidative pattern engraved into the metal. He tilts his head back and laughs again.
Jayce feels delirious. Uncontained. Weeks and months of stress and tension were burned out from the supernova intensity of the crystal, and he’s weightless for more reasons than just the localized lack of gravity. The outermost orbital shell around the crystal thrums an ancient pulse against his skin as he floats closer to it, then past it, then towards Viktor.
It’s nothing like swimming at all, but swimming is the next closest thing to this. This utter weightlessness, the relief from the ache in his leg– but not from the way the pulse of the crystal echoes in the arcane imprint of his scar, curiously– and the way non-existent breezes move in currents against his hair.
As soon as he’s close enough to do so, Jayce offers an outstretched arm. There’s something wondrous about the spark that races across his skin when Viktor reaches back, locks his hand around Jayce’s forearm and pulls them together. An anchoring, of sorts. They’re adrift but they’re together, and the promise of gravity looms a little less.
Told you, Viktor mouths against him. Their legs keep knocking together. A natural consequence, Jayce thinks, of being anchored by the upper body while core strength keeps them upright. Of course they’re going to tangle up in each other. It was always going to happen.
Viktor shifts in his arms– or maybe he shifts in Viktor’s– and it’s enough for them to lock eyes. Jayce’s heart settles in his throat.
Across from them, the crystal gives a warbling hum and flickers. Its output is failing, Jayce numbly registers. He gets enough time to lock eyes with Viktor and think, hey, at least the crystal is spent, it probably isn’t going to shatter and vaporize us both when it hits the ground before gravity returns.
Shit.
It’s a strange feeling, the change. Jayce is weightless in one moment, struggling to make sense of where his own limbs are in the absence of a constant he’s known since birth–
–and his blood is rushing in reverse by the next, when he slams hip-first into the supremely comfortable tempered metal of his workbench.
His bad leg takes the rest of the impact that Jayce feels in his fucking teeth. It’s a damn good thing that Viktor is no stranger to the colorful language common to Zaun– because he’s utilizing as much of it as he knows, and in the newfound silence he isn’t exactly quiet about it.
“Jayce.” There are firm hands at his shoulders. “Jayce,” Viktor says, more urgently this time, at the lack of response.
“You’re okay?”
Viktor raises an eyebrow. “I did not take that impact,” he says mildly, an accusation and an admission of concern all in one. Jayce waves him off as he pulls himself back upright, hissing at the screech of his now-compromised brace protesting the extension. One of the arms must have busted. A quick glance confirms it.
The sigh he might have let out on any other night snares in his throat as he catches sight of the ruined cradle. It must’ve smashed on impact with the ground, metal brackets overheated by the circuit and then bent out of shape, but it still sparks blue.
They have the blueprints to recreate this version of the design. Because it worked.
It worked. Viktor is sitting next to him, his second perspective and second chance and his first partner.
He doesn’t think about it. He just acts. It’s easy, in the end, to turn to the side and wrap his arms around Viktor. It’s easy to laugh and laugh and laugh until the post-adrenaline tremors devolve into hysterical little half-sobs.
For a fraction of a second, Viktor is still beneath his touch.
The second passes. The world continues to spin. Jayce feels the tension slip out of Viktor’s frame as keenly as if it were his own, and then there are arms wrapping around him, too, and Jayce may as well be floating again. He may as well be floating, unfettered by gravity, swallowed whole by his adoration– or maybe strung up to dry by his admiration. The two are interchangeable, and have been for a while.
He feels like an exposed nerve, raw and visceral.
He feels warm and safe and whole.
It’s easy, like coming home, to pull back from the hug just enough so that he can cup Viktor’s face between his palms– to thumb over sharp cheekbones and lean in to brush their foreheads together. Distantly, Jayce knows he’s still breathlessly laughing. That there are tears welling up in his eyes. That they’re sharing the same air.
That Viktor is watching him, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, as he watches Viktor in kind. It’s dark, but not so much that Jayce doesn’t notice his eyes flickering from his own down to his lips, and then to the mid-distance.
They don’t speak. They probably should. Jayce continues to hold Viktor and Viktor continues to allow it, and isn’t that good enough?
Want is a livewire beneath his skin. Potential is an electrical impulse in the brain. Patience is not one of Jayce’s virtues, but fear sure as hell is.
Time becomes sluggish in the early morning hours.
For the life of him, Jayce has no idea how long they spend like this: tangled up, stupefied, unwilling to move for fear of shattering the moment.
Still. Beyond the walls of the workshop, the world has continued to spin in blissful ignorance. Eventually, Viktor jolts in his arms. Moves to pull away; to return to Piltover and his own life there, as he does every night.
Tonight is different, though.
“Stay,” Jayce says. Pleads, probably.
There are a thousand justifications for it, such as: having just defied everything known by traditional science. Having tapped into a form of energy that, until now, has belonged only to figures of myth and the mage that saved Jayce’s life years before now.
Having just come so, so close to–
Jayce settles on a feeble but undeniable truth: “It’s late.”
Viktor falters, turning a half-step to face the door with a wince in his impact-aching leg and then back again. He looks at the smashed up cradle, haunted by something wistful, and Jayce knows he’s won.
“Upstairs, yes?” he says, entirely rhetorical. Pleasantries. Jayce nods, and Viktor moves away from the door and towards the stairs.
It’s only once he disappears from sight– once Jayce hears the creaking of the stairwell with each of Viktor’s steps towards his apartment– that the reality of the evening slams into him as hard as he hit his fucking desk.
A new working hypothesis: ingenuity has a directly proportional relationship with a proclivity towards digging one’s own grave, be that literal or metaphorical.
Expected conclusion: the first recorded instance of spontaneous human combustion.
It’s a smallish bed, even when Jayce is its sole occupant. If this bothers Viktor– or, more pressingly, if the implications of it bother him– he doesn’t voice any concerns.
No. That’s wrong. Viktor’s movements have changed. A small shift, but visible should you know where to look. There’s a certain looseness in place of precision. A stop-start hesitation he does his best to stamp out.
He settles at the edge of the bed. He undoes latches and buckles. He hisses out a sigh once the brace has been pried away from his leg, then glances at Jayce; an invitation. To his own bed.
Oh, Gods. He’s going to die at the ripe old age of twenty-four. I did this to myself.
At the very least, Viktor’s clothes are his own– spares, from the singular time he got rained out on his descent to the fissures. Jayce’s heart would have given out otherwise.
It’s still a near thing.
He’s stiff when he settles down onto his shitty mattress. He’s stiff when he pulls off his own leg brace, and only partially because the bashed-in arm resists movement. He’s stiff when he lays down.
It’s quiet– save for the nightlife of Zaun outside– but he can perfectly imagine Viktor laughing at how stupidly tense he is right now.
Paradoxically, that thought is all his brain needs to get the memo, and once he admirably overcomes the hurdle of not fucking combusting, relaxing becomes simpler. A matter of proximity and presence. Two things that, with Viktor, he has plenty of experience with. This is just– an extension of working together. Totally.
In no universe does Jayce Talis sleep on the night he paves the way forward into a new field of science.
That, he can hypothesize confidently. If he knows himself with any modicum of clarity– if other hypothetical Jayces are anything like himself– the lingering memories of success and drifting and partnership should haunt the lot of them.
Too much to think about. Too much to process.
Here’s a memory that he is going to hoard until he dies; one that’s solely his: Viktor’s eyes, as they trace over his face. As they linger on his lips. In the pitch-dark of midnight, the air is fragile. A word could shatter it.
Jayce imagines, briefly, that he had kissed him. Leaned forward, felt the softness of his hair. Felt the softness of his lips. The rest of it is a sensory blank, taste and smell coming up empty beneath the overwhelm of ozone and static. Jayce’s heart is a racing thing.
His runestone rests in his hand instead of over his heart, where it normally lives, and Jayce can trace the curvature of its symbol even blind. Foundation. A stabilizing agent. Permission to create something new.
His leg aches from the impact. Jayce’s heart continues to race. Next to him, Viktor is warm.
Across from him, Viktor’s presence seeps into every part of Jayce’s life. His coffee ring on the workbench and his journal on the shelf and the spare clothes he asked Jayce to keep safe for him that he wears now, because Jayce did, and he will, and he wants.
He wants. He’s caught in a decaying orbit and he’s okay with it. Embraces it, even. Has been chasing it since that night at the Last Drop– the comfort and intimacy of sharing a breath and a mind.
Next to him, Viktor shifts. Reaches out.
Takes Jayce’s hand from where it rests over his chest, clasped firmly around his runestone.
Brings it, slow and deliberate, hand and rune, to his lips.
Jayce follows each movement helplessly, wide-eyed. Side effect of the orbital decay, that, this gravitational collapse. He shifts onto his side, heart in his throat and mind elsewhere entirely, just so they can be face to face. Viktor’s hands are cooler than his own but not quite as rough.
His lips are a little cracked, but still soft.
Jayce inhales softly. Tremulously. It’s deafening.
A word would shatter this.
Jayce wakes slowly.
Which is weird.
He wakes slowly, mind fogged over with exhaustion and anticipation, to an empty bed and wonders distantly if last night– the crushing weight of each movement, of each thought not vocalized– was just. The byproduct of some dream that he is absolutely not prepared to handle before midday.
Blearily, he pushes himself upright. The blankets at his side are askew. The apartment is deafeningly quiet. Jayce blinks, and the picture makes no more sense than it did a blink ago.
He deflates and goes right back to blissful oblivion.
Jayce wakes a second time to the smell of coffee, of all things.
Which is weird, because his press is long dead and he never did get around to stripping it for scraps. He groans and drags a hand down his face, and it doesn’t really do much to wake him up because his head is stuffed full of cotton.
Jayce pushes himself upright slowly, and Viktor says from the doorway, “Ah. You live after all.”
To that, he can only blink, because he left his brain behind in the moment that the workshop lit up in brilliant, beautiful blue. What.
He gets no time to think before a mug is pressed, not unkindly, into his waiting hands. Viktor lingers a moment longer, probably to be certain that Jayce isn’t about to drop scalding hot caffeine all down himself, before pulling away.
In all his genius, Jayce has exactly three thoughts: The coffee smells great. Viktor’s wearing his spares. Last night happened.
“You…” he starts. Stops. Closes his mouth, and grimaces at the taste of his mouth. “You look good?”
Ten out of ten, Jayce. Go back to sleep. Now. It’s not too late for this to be a dream.
In his defence: he isn’t awake yet. Not entirely. He spares a vague thought to hope that Viktor might politely avert his gaze from the tangle of blankets he’s caught in, or the drool on his cheek, or the fact that he’s prone to–
“And you are the victim of truly spectacular bedhead,” Viktor retorts, visibly amused. There’s fondness in the lilt of his accent and the laugh he’s badly suppressing. Yeah. Should’ve seen that one coming. It’s worse than ever now his hair is growing out longer.
Jayce isn’t going to respond to that, because he has nothing to say that isn’t some variation of hey, I’ve been in love with you for months, let’s do science together. Jayce is going to incinerate his taste buds on the volcanic coffee in his hands, and he’s going to wait for the caffeine to hit his system before he makes any irresponsible decisions.
“How did you sleep?” Jayce croaks. A few strands of hair fall into his eyes as he drinks long and deep of the coffee, and he doesn’t miss the way Viktor tracks the movement of him sweeping them back from start to finish. “I didn’t kick you, did I?”
The coffee is sweeter than he’d normally take it, but it sure as hell isn’t burned, so it’s a win in Jayce’s book. It was also made by Viktor. In his house.
After they shared a bed.
Three wins in Jayce’s book.
There isn’t much room in Jayce’s apartment, so it isn’t weird at all that Viktor takes his seat at the edge of the bed. He’s wearing his brace again, and he’s made himself at home. Jayce isn’t sure how to feel about that. Probably the same way he did about Viktor taking his hand, and about being adrift together, and about watching the sunset together, and about getting drunk together.
“You didn’t kick me,” Viktor says. “And I slept well enough.”
That’s a confession, but could be one of two things. The first being that the bed is shitty, small, and uncomfortable after being dropped out of the sky. Well enough isn’t good, but it is when considering the circumstances.
The second: there’d been too much to think about to sink into sleep. Too many possibilities. Too many thoughts to linger on.
Jayce thinks of his hand in Viktor’s, the impossible weight of everything going unspoken. That delicate hitch to Viktor’s shoulders after Jayce had hugged him tight, drunk on delirium and delight. Everything that, somehow, they’ve managed to avoid saying out loud.
Everything that, he thinks, they probably need to stay out loud.
“Thanks for fixing the press,” he says, then drains the rest of the coffee. It’s still far too hot.
Viktor is watching him expectantly, dextrous fingers drumming a familiar rhythm against the ceramic of his own mug. Jayce is entirely too morning-gross for the conversation they should have had months ago. He makes a rough gesture in the direction of the bathroom, cringing when his awkward shuffle to the edge of the bed places weight back on his sorer-than-usual leg.
“Give me a minute.”
The bathroom is every bit as cramped and rickety as the rest of the apartment.
Jayce gives himself five minutes to freak out before he splashes water against his face– and shit, he does get the worst fucking bedhead, that’s going to haunt him forever now– before composing himself once more.
Composure is a strong word for it. He sets his shoulders, terrified when he knows he doesn’t need to be, and forces his exhale to come out steadily.
He’s barely a minute out of the bathroom before Viktor, apparently no longer content to wait for Jayce to get his shit together, steps into his space. Because of course Viktor is a step ahead of him on this, he always seems to be, and Jayce will always watch him with awe.
Viktor’s hand is cool against his cheek. He doesn’t think twice about cupping it beneath his own, or about leaning into the touch.
“You…” Viktor begins, then trails off. It’s rare to see him wordless. Jayce offers a shaky grin and earns himself rolled eyes, and this is just it– an extension, a continuation, another step forward for them to share.
His hands roam– hover, aimless and a touch frantic– before instinct sparks, catches, and he frames Viktor’s face with them. This close, Jayce can take in his features in perfect detail; he can trace them, map them with his thumb: the arch of his cheekbone, the bow of his lips, the mole beneath his eye.
Each touch feels shattering, and when Viktor’s hand settles at his waist he feels as keenly as a brand. Jayce wonders, idly, if Viktor feels the reverence in each brush, or maybe the breathtaking affection that he still can’t fathom how it can fit within the confines of his body when it seems so able to swallow him whole.
It’s a simple matter, in the end. Jayce leans forward, and he presses their mouths together.
Despite having seen it coming, Viktor gasps into it– against him– a hushed intake of breath that Jayce feels intimately against his own skin. His lips are as gentle as they’d been against Jayce’s hand, maybe somewhat chapped and, but this is Viktor, his partner, and Jayce shudders around each imperfection he’s entrusted with.
He pulls back just long enough to breathe, and Viktor barely gives him that much space. Jayce would have it no other way. The angle is awkward, and there’s more than one brush of teeth; a clack and a wince, then a stolen breath just to laugh at themselves. Jayce is off-balance. Viktor’s breaths are warm and humid against his skin, and the noises he makes are soft and small, and his hair is kind of tickling him, and it’s perfect.
If Jayce’s coffee had been made overly sweet, Viktor’s must have been even worse. Jayce pulls away to breathe, chest heaving and face burning, and Viktor– clever, opportune Viktor– takes the chance to bring Jayce lower, to bump their foreheads together with a breathless little sound.
Then there’s a hand leaving its home at his waist to snake up his side, along his chest, settling heavy at his nape like it belongs. Viktor’s fingers curl there in the soft roots of his hair, a light and teasing tug at his skin, and he trembles beneath it– pulls Viktor closer, closer, breathless beneath the weight of want.
Viktor kisses him like he needs Jayce to breathe. Jayce– very much distractedly– thinks he might like that. Might crave it, this state of being essential, non-optional, absolutely vital to Viktor’s survival, like Viktor is to his own.
Reciprocity. Partnership. Viktor pulls, and Jayce follows, and this one isn’t a kiss, it’s a promise. Jayce breathes out, tremulous. They’re pressed together, forehead-to-forehead. Mind to mind. Not clouded by alcohol, not drunk on elation– just them.
The hand at his nape allows for no movement. It’s only fair that Jayce holds Viktor in kind.
“I needed to breathe, you ridiculous man,” Viktor rasps. His chest jumps with the words, with the laughter they contain, and he’s lit up by his joy: fond and warm and precious.
Having to breathe, Jayce thinks dizzily, is an affront.
“Can we do that again?”
The look he earns himself is devastatingly fond. Only you, Viktor says with his eyes. Or maybe that’s just an echo of some sentiment buried deep within Jayce, thawing beneath the spring sun. It’s hard to tell, and it doesn’t matter anymore when Viktor pulls him back in, because Jayce is more than content to let it happen.
Here’s a solid, concrete fact: Jayce doesn’t like the taste of sweetmilk.
And here’s another, just for the hell of it: Jayce now has very, very good motivation to get used to it.
Notes:
it'd be a huge help to RT here!
mind you this was supposed to be a one-shot. some fun and cool notes from the backrooms are as follows:
1. ‘they don’t talk about it’ notated as the story of their fucking lives in the working document
2. writing about the leg pain pals gave me my own diabolically heinous leg pain to grapple with3. piltover is an inaccessible nightmarish hellscape. checked the art book for references on the layout of the city, the streets and academy square specifically, and. there are so many fucking stairs. why are there so many fucking stairs.
4. the progress day section (written under the working banner of 'fuck piltover') is dedicated to jayce canonically being a little HATER. check the council archives. read jayce's journals. between dmitri and him taking every given opportunity to insist that the other progress day inventions are baseline mediocre and not at all as revolutionary as the hextech he can't get to work, the guy is a giant ball of pride. let him be a hater. please. it's so funny.5. please don’t poke the lab volatiles, they are not pookie
6. wide awake while sharing a bed (until passing out) based on fun and enlightening experience that fried my brain when i had to get up the next day. never have i ever... dealt with an entire night’s worth of proximity based heart palpitations. and feelings.
7. writing kissing is, somehow, harder than writing them trying to fuse every five minutes. in fact, them repeatedly trying to fuse happened quite naturally8. i love alluding. so much. allusions are my bestie. this fic is one of those timelines and possibilities btw
9. 37,000+ vows were harmed in the making of this fic
Pages Navigation
wistevili on Chapter 1 Thu 26 Jun 2025 07:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
renjaminbunny on Chapter 1 Thu 26 Jun 2025 10:45PM UTC
Comment Actions
milacane on Chapter 1 Fri 27 Jun 2025 12:22AM UTC
Comment Actions
emeryrose on Chapter 1 Fri 27 Jun 2025 05:18AM UTC
Comment Actions
flipped on Chapter 1 Sat 05 Jul 2025 08:18AM UTC
Comment Actions
tristonanan on Chapter 1 Sun 13 Jul 2025 04:59AM UTC
Comment Actions
lidiamartini on Chapter 1 Wed 23 Jul 2025 04:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
MistyMountainsCold on Chapter 1 Sun 24 Aug 2025 07:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
wistevili on Chapter 2 Thu 26 Jun 2025 07:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
renjaminbunny on Chapter 2 Thu 26 Jun 2025 11:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
milacane on Chapter 2 Fri 27 Jun 2025 01:37AM UTC
Comment Actions
emeryrose on Chapter 2 Fri 27 Jun 2025 05:41AM UTC
Comment Actions
doubleelduob on Chapter 2 Sun 29 Jun 2025 03:29AM UTC
Last Edited Sun 29 Jun 2025 03:32AM UTC
Comment Actions
Kotonni on Chapter 2 Thu 17 Jul 2025 05:36AM UTC
Comment Actions
lidiamartini on Chapter 2 Wed 23 Jul 2025 07:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
MistyMountainsCold on Chapter 2 Mon 25 Aug 2025 03:38PM UTC
Comment Actions
fs_animri on Chapter 2 Tue 09 Sep 2025 01:56PM UTC
Last Edited Tue 09 Sep 2025 02:01PM UTC
Comment Actions
wistevili on Chapter 3 Thu 26 Jun 2025 07:50PM UTC
Comment Actions
Tenevora on Chapter 3 Thu 26 Jun 2025 11:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
renjaminbunny on Chapter 3 Fri 27 Jun 2025 12:29AM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation