Chapter Text
In a breathless, cosmic whirl, they are rearranged.
It is a gift and a curse. The Arcane inhales them, deeply, and then sighs them out from the impassive cold of its lungs. Recycles them, siphons the borrowed energy and steel of Viktor’s form back into itself, and deposits them both back into mortal forms somewhere that is neither here nor there, somewhere quiet and quaint and ambivalent to their arrival.
Whether they are remade in Viktor’s vision, or the Arcane’s, Jayce is not fully certain. Perhaps it is a bit of both — the memory of men intertwined into the fabric of the world’s magic, how Jayce remembers Viktor, how Viktor remembers Jayce. Before and after, blended into imperfect flesh.
Jayce’s leg still aches, here. Viktor’s, too. The blacksmith watches, hawkishly, for signs of progression in the illness that once sapped his partner’s strength. It does not come. His relief could move mountains; perhaps somewhere, it does. He weeps with it into thin shoulders, one day; Viktor stares into the dark over the broad planes of Jayce’s scarred back.
It is easy, at first.
In the aftermath of it all, they crash together, meteoric — a decade of dry-kindling yearning that bursts into an all-consuming wildfire, sparked by the flint and steel of a cosmic confession.
A blazing whorl of steel and stardust, the gravitational pull of two doomed souls gifted second-life.
They sculpt out the shape of this new thing between them with teeth of desire; an imprecise tool guided by wandering mouths and ravenous fangs, carving away the carefully-constructed distance between them in colossal slabs, apathetic at first to where they fall.
In the shadow of an opaque hourglass, they make an enemy of time. They steal back moments by the grain, breath held for fate’s reaping return. They hoard hours into days, days into weeks, until the only shadow that remains is one of their own making, cast by a dune of months worn by, strewn with the debris of their collision.
The atrophy of Viktor's muscles does not worsen — but neither does it reverse.
Jayce reforges the frames of their braces, the metal of Viktor’s cane. He leaves the finer mechanics to the man himself; jokes that they can click their knees together when they hobble side by side as old men.
Viktor swats him for it with a crooked smile, but the distant wistfulness in softly-creased eyes tells Jayce that Viktor was not remade in his own vision at all.
A remorse, sickly and blue, haunts him for it: that when the Arcane unfathomably peered through them, it saw him through Jayce, the way Viktor had been when he fell in love with him. Saw him through late nights in the lab, through eyes swollen by stolen naps and missing sleep: risen onto the balls of his feet, his weight thrown haphazardly onto his cane, hand casting excitedly upward as he reaches to scratch a revision into one of Jayce’s notes. Saw him as one of the weary frames splayed against chair backs and hunched over stools, trickling words into a backdrop of conversation made easy by the delirium of the rising sun.
Saw him as, day by day, his weight canted more deeply and more often onto his aid. As Viktor waved him off whenever he tried to ask about it.
Foolish man he’d been, Jayce had believed him when Viktor said that it was nothing. That it was fine.
Over the years, he’s learned his lesson: that Viktor never admits to being tired, to being sick, to being in pain. Truly, when it comes to himself, he doesn’t admit to much at all.
In the lab, Viktor often ribbed him for not listening, but Jayce learned early on that with Viktor, listening tells him very little about what Jayce wants to truly hear. As expressive and playfully opinionated as Viktor is — especially about their research, about what Jayce should do and how he should do it — he yields up very little about himself by speaking. Maybe it’s the years of holding himself tall and biting his tongue topside; for that, Jayce can’t particularly blame him.
Thankfully, Jayce has become very good at watching.
It is watching that earns him glimpses of the true man beneath. Ripples on the water, subtle and fleeting.
For exhaustion, he watches for unsuppressed pain fighting its way to the surface. A wince here, a stiff pause and exhale there. In the beginning, he’d thought that Viktor devoted every ounce of his energy into his work. It’d been one of the things that Jayce had fallen for, the way the man threw himself so wholly into every task. But he’d been mistaken. It hadn’t been everything: Viktor didn’t have the luxury of offering everything, only what was left over after managing the pain, after maintaining the mask. And when he burned through those reserves, it showed through in thin fingers kneading the soreness around his brace underneath the table, where he doesn’t expect Jayce to be paying attention.
And even burnt from it all, he’d been brilliant. Is, still. Radiant.
Fear and uncertainty — as rare as they are in the ever-confident man — speak as twin serpents through Viktor’s eyes, golden and wide and flashing everywhere in the room where Jayce doesn’t reside. When he’s scared, Viktor turns away. Jayce’s palm always chases the space between sharp shoulder blades in those moments, trailing down to warm the small of his back. And he knows when it’s bad when Viktor shrugs him off. But Jayce doesn’t protest; he leaves him be.
Stress, insofar that it differs from the rest, hums in habit. A drained glass of something sweet next to him; the rhythmic tap of his fingers on the tabletop, a metronome calibrated to the staccato beat of his thoughts; the heavier-than-usual scratch of his pencil in his notes, scraping indents into the page beneath the weight of his worries; fingers turning something endlessly around, some scrap of their work, and always something cold, as if the chill can chase away the pressure closing in.
The years they’ve spent as partners tune him closely to the signs of the man beneath the mask. For all of the man’s evolution, Jayce sees those signs there still, even after his humanity comes and goes and comes again.
And here in their stolen life after death, in the afterglow of Jayce’s heart laid bare in the cosmos, he identifies another tell. One oft-present, once thought to be the sign of Viktor’s anger, now illuminated into a more clear light to be—
Viktor’s desire is a growl, something low and hungry that sparks across his brow, furrowed in a focused stare. The set of his jaw, the grit of his teeth, the bruising dig of his fingers and nails into Jayce’s skin— it is not what he expects, the first time he feels it, but now, he’s not sure if he can live without it. Viktor’s touch carves through him like a blade, a force of want that rends him to the bone. Heats him like steel, then molds him in his grasp. Viktor becomes the architect of his flesh in that same inevitable way he became the architect of their fates, entwined inseparably.
Jayce doesn’t mind. Far from it. He’s grown tired of the mantle of suave pioneer, the figurehead — the role that had him coaxing coin from pockets that far outweighed his own in the beginning, all to further their research. Precious moments lost to composing himself in the mirror, flicking his tongue along the gap between his teeth, playing up his natural inclination to fold his hands demurely behind his back to groom egos for the sake of their work.
Pointless, in the end, these things that took him away from where he should have been all along.
Viktor’s soft grip in his hair guides him to kneel; Jayce warms the inside of Viktor’s thigh with the press of a cheek and the banner of his breath. He places a slow, hungry kiss there, where the peach fuzz thins bare after the chafe of the brace. Jayce loses himself in that view of him, framed in the cold blue of moonlight. A chilling halo — familiar and ethereal — set behind fierce golden eyes.
To kneel at Viktor’s feet is to kneel at an altar; Jayce presses every kiss to his skin like a prayer.
To have him like this — it undoes him. Shreds him into something fibrous and frayed, shakes him apart at the edges. And to have Viktor reach for him, to have Viktor want him, is everything and more. Something he thought lost to him forever, after the cold empty of the lab and the conviction that once carried him away.
And so, perhaps Jayce should have known better, than to think it was something that would remain.
It is this time — the third time — that Jayce notices it.
When the press of Jayce’s eyes becomes too earnest, Viktor averts his own. When the draw of Jayce’s mouth becomes something slow and worshipful, Viktor guides him quietly elsewhere. As if Jayce’s devotion burns, and the only way to find relief is to hold him at arm’s length, for a moment.
Jayce doesn’t overthink it — not at the time. That is part of the appeal, he knows, in the relief they seek this way. That here is the only place Jayce’s mind goes quiet: Viktor’s pulse between his fingers, slick and vital; in the warmth of him where they are joined, soft and alive. Viktor’s mouth at his throat, a circuit of need completed; the long line of Viktor’s body above him, taking his pleasure to guide Jayce to his own.
Viktor finds solace in the control. Jayce finds relief in the loss of it.
And so things go.
In the weeks after, Jayce watches. He has always been good at watching.
The signs are there; he catalogs them with a detached sense of interest, a morbid fascination, a permeating calm as if he isn’t witnessing the beginning of the end. And he knows it is that — the end — because the path they walk is one they’ve traveled before, laid out before them in the bright detail of his recollection, vivid like every memory is when Viktor is at its center.
It begins as it always has: with the strange sensation of being held close, and yet somehow still at arm’s length.
Avoidant eyes and even more avoidant answers; Jayce’s comforting hand cast gently off of Viktor’s shoulder.
“Viktor,” he finally pleads, when the distance becomes too much to bear. A million words froth in the empty cavern of his chest, and for every one that fights its way out, even more somehow goes unsaid. “Please. You have to tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” Viktor once said, folding a red stain away into a handkerchief.
“Nothing,” Viktor once said, in a room darkened by a machine-oxygen hum, when Jayce begged to know what he could do to help.
“It is nothing,” Viktor says, opening a chasm of cold space on the sheets between them as he turns away onto his side. And though Jayce is no longer naive enough to believe him, nothing he tries keeps Viktor from pulling further away.
It has always been this way. And so Jayce cedes a reluctant victory to fate when no arrangement of choices fit together any better than the last. When nothing he does takes them off this path, the one where the light of his dreams illuminates his fingertips — so bright and warm that he can almost feel it — before burning up in the atmosphere, just out of reach.
The only difference now is the wound.
There’s a wound that Viktor left, the first time he walked away. To have him again now is to close it with a knife: a back-barbed blade that fits neatly into Jayce’s chest, snug there against his heart, where it offers a smirking facsimile of wholeness. A fickle reprieve from the aching-gnawing part of him that has never really learned to let go.
Even the mere semblance of distance tugs at the blade. It’s a matter of self-preservation, he tells himself, to cling closer. Out of fear that there will be nothing left the next and final time that Viktor pulls away.
At the same time, Jayce isn’t sure he can blame him.
Maybe it’s that Jayce came back wrong: that he cannot sleep without thrashing, that he flinches away from the shadows of a fire cast just so, that his brain cannot tell the difference between ravine rock and their hovel’s safe stone beneath his knees. That sometimes he sees double, straddled somewhere between wakeful nightmares and slumbering delirium, like he left behind a part of him there that still sees and feels, a ghostly eye and a phantom limb of cold-alone suffering.
Seemingly forever ago, during the lab-years, there were times Viktor would disappear for days upon end — no notice, no warning. After the first few explosions of panic, Jayce rationalized it as something like maintenance for Viktor; upkeep on that beautiful brain of his, a way to turn over the hourglass of his sanity, his patience. And maybe to get a break from Jayce, because Jayce has always been told that he’s a little too much for people.
Viktor doesn’t leave, now. But he doesn’t stay, either — there are days when he goes somewhere inward that Jayce can’t follow. It is like that for Jayce, sometimes, too.
But he wonders if Viktor doesn’t leave because he doesn’t want to, or if it’s because he knows: that left alone, the silence becomes too loud, and Jayce will start clawing at his own skin; that the last time he hit a dead end he saw no way to dream himself out of, he stepped up to a ledge; that if Viktor goes too still in his sleep and Jayce finds him like that, by the time Jayce’s shaking breaths wake him, it’s too late to pull him out of the spiral.
And Jayce racks his brain wondering if Viktor holds him at arm’s length because it’s the only distance he can manage without losing him completely.
Jayce tries. He really does.
He simply wishes that Viktor had accepted his care when he’d had something still left to give him; something more than a shackle forged in the memory of broken promises, sanded smooth by unfulfilled dreams.
There are good days, and there are bad days.
On good days, Viktor brims with life and laughter. Soft looks and his chilly nose buried in the warm crook of Jayce’s neck. Thumbing excitedly through a ream of schematics as his hand flies, his gestures urgently punctuating his point as if he can beckon Jayce’s understanding closer. They chat for hours and it’s there again, that electricity he’s felt bubbling between them since that first night, hunched over Jayce’s research on creating magic.
And then— then, there’s the husk Viktor leaves behind, sometimes, when his mind goes elsewhere.
It’s familiar, in a way. Something he’d seen in their lab days, but only caught fleeting glimpses of before Viktor threw himself into the rhythm of their work. And without it… He loves Viktor, every part of him, but those are the days where Jayce can’t seem to reach him.
It starts with a cold bed in the early morn. Viktor, roused by the pain or the nightmares, gets up and doesn’t return.
Jayce doesn’t realize he’s gone until he wakes, and by then, it's often too late.
He tries, anyway.
“Viktor?” he murmurs as he emerges from their room, rubbing the sleep from his eyes to bring their humble domicile into focus: stressed stone tile and a faded red rug beneath a sturdy loveseat, offered warmth and reading light by the masoned fireplace before it; a workbench in one corner and a kitchenette in the other. An eclectic blend of metal tools and wood-fueled appliances, caught somewhere between the more modern comforts of Piltover's lower houses and the more rural inclinations of the outskirts which cultivated their food.
It's workable — cozy and down-to-earth in a comforting sort of way — even if they haven't quite been able to chase away the off-putting blend of mildew and mothballs that desecrated their nostrils when they'd arrived. Viktor's working on it, though Jayce hasn't decided what's worse: the smell that's been claiming squatting rights since long before they moved in, or the sharp tang of mint and eucalyptus and anise from the topical analgesics Viktor mixes for his back and joints. But time and fondness have brought him around to it; anything that smells like Viktor smells like home to him, eventually.
But that feeling of home seems more distant, today. The fire flickers down low, seeding a foreboding gloom into the outskirts of the room, casting Viktor's face in shifting shadow where he rests on the couch.
Jayce wobbles toward him, pins and needles winding up his left leg like barbed wire. He shoves it beneath his notice.
Viktor stares quietly into the flames.
Jayce coaxes his leg to cooperation, relieving his weight onto the back of the chair. “Vik?” Gently, he reaches out to brush Viktor’s shoulder, careful and yielding.
Viktor startles anyway. “Hm?”
“Rough morning?”
“One could say that.” His voice is cool, impersonal. His slender fingers idly circle the top of his brace.
Jayce is prepared for it, but the chill in Viktor’s tone scrapes at him, a brisk wind over the hardening edges of a healing wound. The sharp edges of a once-warm spark gone cold. The rising goosebumps left in its wake is a premonition, a calm before a storm.
“Are you in pain?” Jayce asks, softly. So, so softly.
Viktor purses his lips. After a moment, he answers: “Yes.”
Guilt, empathy — both twist and tangle in his chest in equal measure. “Here,” Jayce murmurs, coming around to the front, kneeling and reaching out to where Viktor’s touch absently traces the metal. “Let me see.”
Viktor recoils, looks away. “It is fine, Jayce.”
Jayce pauses. He’s used to it, to how this goes. It should be fine, they can try again tomorrow — but the frustration catches in the bottom of his throat and he can’t swallow around it. “I— I can’t just sit by knowing that you’re in pain.”
A sharp scoff scrapes from above. “You have, and you can.”
It is a brand that burns cold, leaving something gnarled and ugly seared in his conscience. When? he wants to ask, but the words get caught in the raised knot of a wound and die in his throat. His pulse thunders in his ears, pounding the question in deeper: When? When? When? As if the answer will come to him on the rhythm of his vitals, the drumbeat of his bleeding heart.
Viktor finally seems to notice him, then. Sees the hurt blooming in his eyes and the way his hand trembles between them. There’s a flicker of— of something, something naked and vulnerable and hesitant on Viktor’s expression, and then it’s gone.
Quietly, he takes Jayce’s broad wrist in his grasp, pulls it back to his brace.
“The pain that troubles me — it is not the one that you think.” The metal is cool to the touch, reflecting the flame’s light but not its warmth.
Jayce holds his breath around the stinging wound in his lungs.
“When I dreamed of the future,” Viktor says, “it was never a painless one.” He guides Jayce’s touch to the back, to the uppermost buckle at the underside of his thigh. Jayce loosens it as he listens, silent. “That I tasted it was a miracle in its own. An impossibility made reality— by you.” The final words tremble, bittersweet.
Jayce searches Viktor’s features, but those hollow eyes have already retreated to their home in the fire. There are no answers there, only the groan of the wind and the musk of woodsmoke.
“And so, it is not that pain, no. To return to less of it is a blessing of its own.” A pause, and then Viktor lowers his eyes down to the space above his lap, watching the shadows dance on his flesh as he turns his hand over in the firelight. A shiver runs down Jayce’s spine; some part of him, forever touched by the Arcane, responds as if he can still see magic arcing along twilight skin. “It is more than I deserve.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Viktor simply shakes his head. Even still, he reaches down to cradle the coarse hair lining Jayce’s jaw, thumb trailing over the ember-pocked smithing scars cast across his cheek.
The gentleness eases something in Jayce; he welcomes it with a soft sigh. He guards Viktor’s hand from the cool air with the encompassing warmth of his own. “I mean it,” he murmurs, almost petulant in his insistence.
The crackle of the fire prickles wistfully between them. Then: “Let an old man simmer in his regrets for once, hm?”
Jayce presses a kiss into the creases of Viktor’s palm. Looks up at him beneath furrowed brows, worry still writ deeply onto his face. “Alright.” Reluctantly, he leans away from the touch to work loose the final leather belt of the brace.
His fingertips graze the steel, slow and reverent and appreciative. It is their work — imperfectly cast from what they could get their hands on here, yes, but he remembers Viktor poring over the details of it at every stage alongside him; sketching, sketching, sketching over half-erased ghosts of penciled-in visions and filing away harsh edges with a fine-grit rasp. Jayce poured his blood, sweat, and tears into its smithing, working and reworking the carbon ratio of the impure metal. In the end, he still grumbled about it not meeting his standards — he's had enough of settling for anything less than perfect for Viktor's aids — but gave in when his partner kindly reminded him: Need I remind you, Jayce, that perfection is the enemy of an aching leg.
Jayce leans in until his breath fogs the metal’s shine, and then warms it with a fond press of his mouth. Their work. Theirs.
Viktor huffs a disbelieving breath, averts his eyes — but Jayce still sees the smirk curling at the corner of his lips, a subtle twitch made fiercely visible by the raise of a mole upward.
Gods, Jayce adores him.
He applies pressure to the brace, and it takes a moment to unseat from where it’s sunk a home into Viktor’s flesh. And when it does, Jayce sees the relief ripple up Viktor’s form, palpable.
It makes Jayce’s chest ache.
“Vik,” he breathes as he sets it gently aside. He folds up the linen of Viktor's pant leg, gradually pulling back the curtain on the first splotch of darkness. It is as if the universe has bloomed across his skin, a blotchy palette of flaxen yellow and angry red and dark twilight. He avoids the bruises the best he can, focusing instead on where he can massage away the tension elsewhere.
“It’s fine—“ Viktor starts, but when Jayce begins to gently work into the muscles of his calf, he grits his teeth and bites back a shuddering breath.
Before the rune, Jayce would have worried about hurting him. But he understands vividly, now, that for the rest of their lives, they will be hard-pressed to find relief without pain.
Numbness creeps up his own leg. He ignores it in favor of tending to Viktor’s.
“You promised you’d tell me when the padding wore thin.” He tries not to scold, but concern sharpens his tone. Jayce tenderly traces the bruises with his fingertips, mentally recording the points of the brace that put the most tension on him, then returns to coaxing away the stiffness on the underside of Viktor’s thigh. There’s hesitation, and then Viktor’s hips shift their weight to the opposite side, yielding him silent and trusting access.
“In truth—“ Viktor leans back into the cushions, chin raised, discarding tense breaths toward the rafters. “—it did not seem so bad until now.”
It is another thing that Jayce wouldn’t have understood before, but understands now.
Jayce carefully navigates along the leg, charting out by Viktor’s tension where he can risk enough pain to make the relief worthwhile. There is a warmth to the motion, service and adoration and everything that seems to make his life feel worthwhile, but no heat. None that he lets reach his fingertips, at least.
He is careful, about that — to not let the desire that hums beneath his skin to the surface when Viktor simply looks his way. It’s almost unbearable how easy it is for it to flare, like coals left in the wake a wildfire, ready to recatch and devour at the even slightest breath of kindling. The last thing he wants is for Viktor to feel… obligated, somehow, to offer himself up on the pyre, the way he worries he had when they’d first arrived.
He retraces his path with his fingers, but he knows there is only so much that a topical massage can do. When the winces above him begin to outweigh the sighs, he softly kisses the inner side of Viktor's knee and tries to stand.
No longer suffocated by his weight, a white-hot flash of pain blasts up his leg, sensation returning with a crash of agonizing thunder. It tears a grunt from his lips before he can stifle it.
And— immediately, Jayce realizes his mistake. Finely-attuned to the sounds of pain, Viktor jolts up to look at him. To his credit, Jayce at least has the shame to look sheepish, even if it doesn't spare him from what is to come. A scoffing curse in Viktor's native tongue is all the warning he gets before strong fingers encase his arm and haul him unceremoniously off the floor.
“What a spectacular fool you are,” Viktor finally translates — or adds, Jayce can’t be sure — as he slides over to make room for him, lofting his tender leg during the transition. “Ever the hypocrite.”
The embarrassment will burn away Jayce’s ears at this rate — that is, if his affection and its accompanying desire doesn't consume him from the inside-out first. Jayce eases himself into the loveseat, though he’s mindful of keeping to his side of it. He won’t assume this as anything more than politeness, not on days like this.
Viktor mutters something unintelligible, then pats his lap. When Jayce doesn’t move, baffled, Viktor gestures to Jayce’s braced limb. “Give it here,” he commands impatiently. “Your turn.”
Jayce’s first instinct is to open his mouth and protest, but that look is enough to make him smartly reconsider. He hooks his hands around the knee of his numb leg and hefts it tentatively up onto the loveseat. It’s settled back down to pins and needles for now, an aching static that bursts into sharp spikes of protest beneath his touch. When he tries to keep its weight balanced on the cushions instead of on Viktor, Viktor huffs and pulls the leg onto himself by the ankle.
It only takes a few moments of soft pressure for Viktor’s palm to coax sensation back to his knee, touch gentling to near nothing as he whisks over the bone-deep ache of his once-shattered foreleg. The change is not all pleasant; with the return of feeling comes the return of pain, the consequences of his own neglect. It takes all of his focus to keep still, teeth grit and eyes clenched shut, biting back a miserable groan of pain until it slowly, slowly passes.
A shudder ripples through him as the worst of it finally eases. He opens his eyes, only to be frozen beneath Viktor's paralyzing gaze as it roams up and down the sprawling length of Jayce’s form.
"Hm." Viktor gives him a knowing look. "For all of your reluctance, you like this, do you not?"
Jayce’s ears burn. He can’t tell whether he means being cared for, or whether he’s learned the tells of his simmering desire. Whichever it is, Jayce shies away from acknowledging it, lest either imply some… some sense of owing, some suggestion that Viktor ought to sacrifice something for him that surely Jayce shouldn’t need, not when it’s his own fault, not when Jayce is the reason for— for everything, for the weapons and the Hexcore and the break in his leg and that last, long look Viktor had given him over the gaping hole in his chest—
There’s a squeeze of fingers above his knee, dragging him from the spiral of his thoughts.
“Jayce?” Viktor’s staring at him, brow furrowed and eyes focused. Like if he pays enough attention when Jayce comes back, he’ll catch a glimpse of where he’s gone. Like he’s searching for a landmark from these moments between memories, something that tells Viktor where they take him and how to guide Jayce back without leaving another piece of him behind.
Jayce lets out a shaky breath. “Sorry, um.” He drags his hand over his face, trying to ease the sting of shame that he feels when he’s caught like this, trapped in the hostile landscape of his own thoughts. “Sorry.”
“None of that, lásko,” Viktor soothes — firm but kind, spoken soft and tender in a way that doesn’t help the tightness in Jayce’s throat. “You need not apologize.” Viktor’s hand asks a question in the way it hovers over Jayce’s knee, suddenly tentative, uncertain.
Jayce’s hand guides Viktor’s palm back down onto his leg in answer. “Sorr—“ Jayce bites down on the words with a grimace. “It wasn’t— it wasn’t you.” His thumb strokes Viktor’s wrist soothingly.
Viktor doesn’t answer, just watches him, contemplating. Jayce feels restless beneath those searching eyes. But if Viktor finds what he’s looking for, he doesn’t say. Instead, after a few long moments of stillness, he resumes the slow, winding massage down Jayce’s leg.
It is quiet, for a while. Jayce takes the time to untangle the twisted knot of his thoughts, an arm cast back against his forehead as he closes his eyes.
"Well.” When Viktor finally speaks, it is with an unexpected note of levity. “If you are so keen to be on your knees," he muses, with the mischievous nonchalance of explaining a proof, ignoring the way Jayce’s eyes fly back open, "then we may very well need to consider alternative padding options for the inner cup of your brace. You should be careful of tension on the anterior; contraction of the muscle there will tighten around the bone and aggravate…"
Viktor dismantles him like a machine as he speaks, methodically flicking his fingers along the latches in swift and precise movements. He skirts a touch along the supportive steel that hefts Jayce's weight down to the boot of the brace rather than onto his ill-healed foreleg, pausing his lecture to assess it with pursed lips, moving on only after he nods in muted approval.
Jayce can only watch, the air in his lungs replaced with a swell of breathless adoration. And, of course, something else: a burning, longing ache, the kind of distant desire that hollows out the roots of his teeth. The kind of cavity that, left untended, will make itself very, very known in other and much more embarrassingly visible ways.
But Jayce can’t focus on anything else. There’s this look that Viktor gets when he’s focused: something that’s all pursed lips and knit-together brows and narrowed eyes. Almost like a pout, but pulled back tight against his features, as if he can guard it by holding it closer to himself. And it’s so heart-achingly familiar, so painfully rare in these past few weeks with the quiet tension between them that he’s almost forgotten how wholly he’d fallen in love with it, so long ago.
Viktor’s lips are moving again, but Jayce doesn’t hear the words anymore, not until his partner looks up and squints at him. “Jayce?” There’s a hint of accusation in his tone — were you even listening? — and Jayce knows it so well that it pulls a smile from him. He reaches over to gently rest his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. Viktor goes still, pausing a breath away from removing Jayce's brace fully.
“I meant it, you know,” Jayce murmurs. “When I said that I hope we get to grow old together. Braces and all.” His thumb traces circles across the ridge of Viktor’s clavicle, slow and thoughtful.
Viktor blinks at him, and the crinkles around his eyes soften.
“I know,” he says, finally. “Some days, I think… that is what scares me the most.”
Jayce folds forward to rest his forehead on Viktor’s shoulder. It’s uncomfortable, but he bears it, willing to endure it for this. He buries his nose into the pleats of wrinkled cloth and breathes in the scent of him.
Jayce stirs, softly, in the comfort of their bed; adrift in the blurry realm between worlds, half-woken by some fear without a face, some noise without a name. Restfulness is simply another thing taken from him — stolen by a figure in fog, by shifting shadows, by skeletal steel. Sluggishly, he reaches to the other side of the bed, a self-soothing motion.
Relief, when his fingers feel Viktor in the dark.
He traces the shape of him, man mapped by memory, touch featherlight as not to wake him. And normally, that would be enough. It would be enough to pull that golden silk string of warmth along his fingertips back into the frayed tapestry of his heart and slip back to sleep.
Only this time, the thread is cold. Cold like a corpse, like silk needle-knit into spear.
Viktor?
Maybe he says it, maybe he doesn’t. His partner doesn’t stir.
Jayce blinks away sleep and finds him again with his palm. The shape beside him lies still.
He does say it, this time — again and again, as he pulls the body close, a rising chant that chases away the dim; the pallor of Viktor’s face turns blue in the moonlight, bone shining beneath his skin. Listless eyes, gone matte and gray, open toward the ceiling.
As he watches, they burn.
An iris caves inward, collapses in on its own husk, flaking like ash, brittle like charcoal. There is flame, but no warmth as it consumes the gaunt hollows of his face — only twin voids below his brows, yawning portals into the abyss.
Then, a chasm cleaves down the center of Viktor’s skull.
It wells with molten flow, like iron cast into a crucible. And all at once, it carbonizes, blooms into frigid steel. Before Jayce can even breathe, it bleeds frost; ice races down his form and bridges to him through that singular point of contact, locks his limbs and drains them of color.
Jayce realizes, then, that he never really escaped it. It has been with him all along — a blizzard entombed in his bones, and out it pours. It crashes over the side of the ravine to drown him. An avalanche. A reckoning. Penance.
Jayce opens his mouth, and shadows take the place of sound.
“Jayce!“
He’s being touched. No, pushed. Shaken? A voice. Viktor’s calling his name. He startles awake.
His heart races. He clutches at his chest, desperate for air. He shakes with it, every muscle an overdrawn bowstring. His gaze lashes across the room, scanning for whatever has set him on edge, whatever it is he has to protect them from—
Jayce’s leg sears.
He finally manages to make out Viktor in the dark beside him — still, upright, almost statuesque in the way his hand is frozen between them. Viktor must have pulled it back when Jayce jolted upright, and he realizes with a start that oh, it's him, Jayce is what's wrong.
“Vik?” he queries, breathless and reeling and choked with guilt. Agony radiates from his leg; his composure breaks beneath a hiss as he reaches down to massage the spiderwebbed starburst of scars, if only to try to redirect the ache, somehow.
“You were dreaming,” Viktor says, matter-of-fact, though not unkindly. His hand slowly returns to steady Jayce's shoulder. “A nightmare.” Golden eyes, wide as they pierce the dim, trace their way down Jayce's arm to where he cradles his shin. Viktor leans into the darkness for a moment, then returns holding something from his side of the bed.
“Here,” he says, and though Jayce can’t see it, he doesn’t need to — it assaults his nose soon enough, sharp and aseptic and familiar. The balm, the one Viktor mixes for where his brace chafes. Before Jayce can protest using something for Viktor’s pain on his own, Viktor peels away his armor of tangled blankets and smooths the cool ointment onto the lattice of scars stretched across Jayce’s shin.
At his touch, Jayce melts back into the warmth of the bed with a shudder. It’s chilly in their room without the blankets and the mixture is cold, but the flush that blooms beneath Viktor’s touch threatens to heat him plenty. His heart's still racing from the dream, but now it beats with a confused sort of skip, tripping over the fear in its embarrassing rush toward a different kind of excitement. Jayce is very, very thankful for the gloom.
Viktor doesn't take long — he barely has time to feel bashful about it before Viktor’s tugging the blankets back over them both, swift and controlled in a way that's nearly clinical, professional. “You should keep the lotion on it," he instructs. “The scars tighten, otherwise.” His arm reaches down and across Jayce to tuck in the blanket’s far edge underneath his thighs, then his hips, then his shoulders. Viktor runs a series of pats up his body, as if he’s taking inventory of all of the treasured parts of him. Jayce holds painfully still until Viktor’s roaming hand finally comes to rest on his cheek. And it’s so— Jayce stares at him in the dark like a deer in headlights, feeling—
A lot. Feeling a lot. Too much. Like his adoration is going to swallow him whole. Like it’s going to drown him and he's going to let it, again and again. “Thank you,” he manages. His voice comes out rough.
A thumb traces his beard in silent acknowledgment.
Jayce’s eyes water. It’s that damned smell — the mint in it, surely. He reaches for Viktor in the dark, gently mapping him with his fingertips so he can lean in and press his lips to his forehead.
In the quiet, he hears Viktor hold his breath, feels him go still beneath him.
For a moment, Jayce fears that he’s overstepped. He can count on his hand the times they’ve touched in the past few weeks — he’s been careful, so careful, to let Viktor come back to him on his own terms. Giving him space to work through whatever it is that’s pulled them apart.
To show, no matter how much it aches for Jayce to step away after being so close, that it can be just this for them. It can go back to just this. Just friends, just partners, carving out something new at the end of the world.
To show that Jayce can be enough, while not being too much.
Or so he hopes — somehow, Jayce always ends up being too much.
But after a moment, Viktor relaxes into Jayce’s touch. When Jayce rolls back over, he can almost still feel Viktor’s eyes on him in the dark.
There are good days, and there are bad days — for Jayce, too.
The morning after the nightmare is cold and overcast, and when he shudders awake, the softness and warmth of the mattress beneath him is the only thing that grounds him to here instead of there. He reaches over and Viktor isn’t there, but there’s a trickle of something delicious in the air — cooking breakfast, so for him, it’s a good day.
He reaches for Viktor’s pillow and clutches it to his chest, buries his face there. It’s impossible to face Viktor like this, with the gloom coalesced so thickly about him; a cloak in the form of an infectious cloud, one that he’s afraid of shedding onto his partner, terrified of losing one of the good days with him.
And so he lays in the timeless cocoon of blankets and builds up his resolve, brick by brick, toward getting up. It’s a good day, he reminds himself. There’ll be food and laughter and smiles to fight the urge to kiss. It should be easy to face the chill of the room and step back into the warmth of Viktor’s light. But the thought of the cold on his skin makes him sink deeper into the comfort of their bed.
It’s the worst thing he can do, frankly. It gives him time to think, too much time, and his mind wanders back to yesterday. I can’t just sit by knowing that you’re in pain. He latches onto that quiet thread of tension between them, his first glimpse at the unease that revealed itself in the blade of Viktor’s words as he shot back: You have, and you can.
When? How? Jayce’s mind circles the blood in the water, hungry, picking at the edges of the scabbing wound. When? How? Testing the hurt of it until it’s raw and aching, until he’s poring over every moment, every regret, searching for where he went wrong. When? How?
The first thing that comes to him is that night, when Viktor had collapsed. He’d been with Mel. A wishful pang echoes as he thinks of her, something soft and affectionate. A quiet kind of mourning. But Viktor— he hadn’t known, not at the time. Hell, it’d been a miracle that Jayce had found him when he did; he’d had an idea in the night and it’d animated him. He’d popped by the lab like he would at any hour and then Viktor had been there on the floor and he’d thought— He’d thought—
A swallow forces down the thought. If he goes there, to those feelings, he won’t be able to crawl out of them. No, it had to be something else. He picks urgently through the shifting sea of his memory, hoping that something obvious will light the way to the shore, and that then the hurt will make sense and he can fix it. Jayce can fix it, if he just knows. But the waves bear him against the rocks, again and again, until there’s nothing more to pore over.
He doesn’t know. But he has to. He has to.
Because knowing is the first step to fixing it.
This passion, this thing that drives Jayce — that pushes him to love unrepentant, to hold tight to what he has — set root and bloomed in the cracks carved by loss. When he was young, there was little to do with the empty spaces where grief made its home but to prod his tongue where he could feel the ache; where he watched his mother linger over old tools and the empty chair at the dinner table, where shoes too big for Jayce to fill sat untouched in the entryway. But as he grew older, as he tried his best to step into them anyway, he learned that while he could not fix the hole left in their lives, he could fill it — with love, with hope, with other things that he could fix.
He fixed his father’s watch, returned it ticking to his mother’s bedside table. He built a shadowbox of memories: of his father’s wallet and keys and comb, of his lapel-pin hand-forged into the shape of his house’s sigil, of these little things that his mother could not bear to look at but also could not bear to throw away. He breathed life back into the workshop, lit the forge and worked the bellows, pored quietly over his father’s old blueprints. Papered over the gaps in his legacy with Jayce’s own.
Every smile a victory, every victory a sense of purpose. He could not fix all of the things that made his mother linger on that grief, but he could fix some of them. If it was within his power, Jayce picked up his hammer — every broken thing a nail.
And then, there was magic. Another tool nocked in his belt, another way to fix what was broken. To save as he’d been saved.
To know a question was to take the first step to finding an answer; to hear a call was the first step to offer a response. Where he was needed, he went. Filled in the gaps around him with the one thing he could control: himself. And so when their research needed funding, he stepped forward. When progress needed a face, he wore its mask. When the city looked to him for protection, he poured a weapon into its mold. When the path to peace lay writ on the parchment between his fingertips, he pushed it into the spotlight.
When his best friend stopped breathing, he broke a promise.
He fixed it.
Jayce doesn’t notice that the scent of food has come and gone until he sees the first touch of light through the windows, the clouds clearing in the late morning. And only then does he finally have the willpower to drag himself from bed. He reaches for his warmest clothes and slippers, eager to chase away the goosebumps on his skin and the feeling of the stone beneath him. His leg is a bit numb this morning; he should put on his brace, but he’s afraid of spending any more time here. The ointment helped, he ventures. He should be fine.
When he makes his way out of the bedroom, Viktor is on the couch, reading. But when Viktor looks up, he discards his book and shoves the armrest of his crutch hastily beneath his arm, urgently storming the kitchenette in the corner.
“Breakfast,” Viktor announces hurriedly, glancing over his shoulder with a smirk. “I kept it warm for you, sleepyhead.”
He’s bright, energetic. The most vibrant Jayce has seen him in a long, long time. It should light up Jayce’s world. Instead, a stab of guilt slides between his lungs. “Sorry,” Jayce mumbles, going for sheepish but landing dejected. Viktor’s face falls for a moment, into that puzzled furrow of dark brows. It’s quickly replaced with a sympathetic upturn of his lips, but the damage is done — Jayce has already mucked things up. He knows it.
Viktor glances toward where the fresh afternoon light has started to trickle in, raising his free hand to rub his fingers together in the empty air, testing it. “Ah,” he says. Jayce sees the gears turning, the pieces clicking together, and he wants to disappear all of the sudden. “So it is the cold. That makes sense. If I keep the door open in the night, perhaps the warmth of the fire will be enough to counteract the heat loss from the window, or—“
Jayce’s mind races. The closed door suppresses the flash of the firelight, the long shadows of the furniture cast sharply on the walls. Jayce is afraid that if he wakes in the night and sees it reaching up and up and up—
“That’s alright,” Jayce manages around the sandpaper in his throat.
No, it’s fine as it is, and Viktor need not accommodate for him.
He steps forward and past Viktor to take his plate from the counter, carefully making his way to the small round table they share. He takes the seat facing away from him, hoping to stifle the anguish that has suddenly coiled its way up his spine before Viktor sits down.
He hears the familiar approach of Viktor’s crutch. It echoes in his skull, and the way it slows hesitantly as it nears him makes Jayce sick inside.
“You are doing that thing, Jayce.” The suddenness of Viktor’s voice makes him jump.
“Uh.” He stops pushing his breakfast around his plate. “Which thing?”
“You have a habit,” Viktor muses. “You think yourself into a knot, of sorts.” Viktor enters his peripheral, and Jayce doesn’t meet the eyes he knows are on him. “Ehh, no. Into the shape of a Klein bottle, more like. You wring yourself inside out.” But Viktor shuffles to ease himself into the seat across the small table, where Jayce can’t ignore him, finally drawing his gaze as the man continues. “No amount of pouring will fill whatever is missing.”
Jayce gives a soft huff of incredulity. He wipes a stray spot of food from his beard, then deflects with: “Do you want me to point out all the flaws in that comparison?”
“No, I want you to stop wasting water.” Viktor smirks, sticking with his analogy — probably because he knows it will irritate him. “The bottle aside, then — out with it.”
Jayce’s dread mounts beneath Viktor’s piercing amber stare. There’s a glimmer in those eyes, that spark of light, now-rare and precious, that he’s always treasured in him: passion, intrigue, curiosity; the look of an engineer who has just discovered a mechanical puzzle begging to be solved. For all of his perceptiveness, Viktor doesn’t seem to realize that he picks at the seams of something more dire than a soothing solution to his night terrors.
Those are fine, as far as Jayce is concerned. Compared to surviving in fissure, remembering it is easy. No, what eats at him are those words. You have, and you can.
It stings like sacrilege, to do it on one of Viktor’s good days. Where if he closes his eyes and bundles up and ignores the bitter hurt in his heart, he can taste what he’s lost on his tongue and set things right, to the way they should have been since the beginning. Just them, no one else. Partners.
But if he doesn't ask now, it’ll eat its way out of Jayce on a bad day for them both. He's already terrified of it on a good day; Jayce wears his heart on his sleeve and Viktor isn't one to hold his punches. It will end in bruises no matter what. Jayce steels himself to be the one to bear them.
So he takes a deep breath. Meets Viktor's eyes. And starts to lay it out.
“Yesterday, you said it wasn’t the physical pain that troubled you.”
Viktor realizes his mistake immediately. Tension ripples in from his shoulders. He sits up more straight. “That… it is best if we do not talk about that.”
It’s too late for that, now. Viktor’s avoidance had been enough to deter him when he was fresh-faced and still trying to shape his smile to mask his tooth gap from the Council — when this unspoken thing huddled new and uncertain and hopeful between them — but Jayce knows better, now, than to let Viktor dodge around it and leave this wound in them both to continue to fester.
“You said I… sat by. When? I have to know, Vik. There has to be something I can do to fix it.”
Viktor’s fingers close around the metal core of his crutch, bone-white at the knuckles. He twists slowly onto its support, chooses to face Jayce with his shoulder rather than with his deepening frown. A storm brews, isolated to the confine's of Viktor’s thoughts, but they both can feel the electricity.
Anger, in Viktor, speaks through the walls he raises, and Jayce sees the shadow they cast grow with each passing moment. Jayce’s weariness threatens to give way to frustration— no, desperation. He'd rather Viktor shred him to ribbons with honesty than to shut him out away from its blades. Please, he wants to beg. Please, let me in.
Jayce isn’t sure that he can survive another “Nothing.”
The moments drag on and he hopes and prays to any Runeterran spirit that will hear him and—
“Knowing will not fix it.”
It's the click of a lock on a slammed door. The slide of a chain in its track. But Jayce refuses to be left out in the cold again. He licks his lips, tries once more.
“Then let me know so I can prevent it. If I hurt you, Viktor, I don’t want to do it again.”
“It is not just me that you hurt." There's no hesitation, this time. "Do you care about the others, too?”
It is sharp and accusatory and it punches a hole through his patience; a flare of heat bursts unbidden up through Jayce’s lungs, like hot air from the bellows. “Sure, I guess!” His fork hits the plate with a sharp clatter. “I can’t read your mind, Viktor. You have to tell me. I can come up with all the ways I’ve hurt you — and everyone else in my life, while we’re at it! — all day, but unless you tell me, I can’t know what’s important to you. What makes you—“ He hesitates, chewing on the inside of his lip. He knows that once he says it, there’s no way to go back.
But if he has to provoke him to find an opening, then so be it. “—like this.”
Viktor’s bristle is immediate, as he knew it would be. “Like what?” Each word punctuates itself with a dagger’s edge.
“Cold!” Jayce shouts, arms bursting wide. “Like—“ And suddenly the anger is gone, burnt up in one blazing eruption, his fist curling back to his chest, his body going slack with quiet defeat. He leans back in his chair as he searches for the words, his hands and his eyes falling to his lap. “Like… you hate me.”
Viktor's eyes dissect the room, cutting from one point to another with the sort of precision that carves up everything in it — except for Jayce.
A deep silence stretches between them, and every moment is a word of its own answer. It would hurt less if Viktor jumped out of his seat to say yes, I do. It would hurt more if it took him this long to lie and simply say no.
“Sometimes,” Viktor finally says, “I worry that I do.”
The honesty of it, almost vulnerable, locks Jayce in place, prevents that admittance from ruining him. Afraid that even the twitch of a muscle will shatter this delicate thing hanging between them, will close the door that has finally eased open for him.
“Okay,” is all he manages, at first. Hollowly, he wonders what else there even is to say. A different man would balk at what seems to be the beginning of the end — no matter which path he chooses now, he’s afraid those words will chase him down it until the end of time. But Jayce hasn’t made it this far by running from his problems; as always, he meets them with the layers of his chest peeled back to bare his beating heart. I promised you. “Okay, so, please, just… talk to me, then.”
Golden eyes flick to him, then back away. Viktor hauls himself to his feet. Tucks the crutch beneath his arm and wanders over to their workbench against the window. His fingertips brush thoughtfully along the dark shadows scratched into its metal top. Across the handle of a rasp, then over a bolt prototype — the first and defective cast of a mold that paved the way for its successors: the five rivets capping the rods that line Viktor’s spine, reforged to replace the ones reclaimed by the Arcane.
Unconsciously, Jayce counts them by their jutting silhouettes, visible through the back of Viktor’s sweater. By the time Jayce finishes, Viktor is leaning against the side of the workbench to face him, turning the bolt over in his hands.
Jayce opts to watch the metal roll between Viktor’s fingers, rather than anywhere else. It’s easier to bear the silence, that way.
Finally, Viktor's words wind a solemn path across the space between them. “I saw their minds, Jayce.”
Familiar and eerie, the phrase drapes a curtain of stars around Jayce’s memories. Golden spires ascending to the sky — beautiful and ethereal, connections haunted by the knowledge of a terrible emptiness and a bitter end.
Jayce takes a moment, searching for the words, breathless. Jayce tries to be… empathetic; he wants to be kind, in some way. Doesn’t want to hurt him again. Doesn’t want to send him turning away. “The ones you… saved?” Even still, he regrets the euphemism as soon as it leaves his lips.
It earns him a hard, searching look. Then: “All of them.” Viktor’s thumb traces the rivet’s uneven metal threads. “The ones I saved, the ones I hurt.” A correction. “The ones we hurt.” An accusation.
Red hair, the glow of shimmer dull on hollow eyes. The cold rage of a mother, taking her pound of flesh.
A shattered skyline, a ruined hexgate. The huddled silhouettes of two lovers, outlined in their final moments.
He reaches for some unknown other, something illuminating that his conscience will stumble over that fills in the gaps. But he finds nothing.
When it’s confusion that takes root on Jayce’s features, and not epiphany, Viktor sighs.
“You are a smart man, Jayce.” He twists the bolt between his fingers. “But you cannot see beyond the reach of the tool in your hand.” The afternoon holds its breath around him. Viktor raises his head. “That… task force of yours. When the ones they savaged came to me for help, I saw it through their eyes. I felt the Grey in their lungs as if it were my own, again.” His hand tightens around his crutch. “Our Hextech dream, turned against the very ones we swore to help.”
Indignation, shame; they rear their heads in equal measure within. Jayce braces his arm on the knee of his good leg, cradling his forehead in his palm. “We had to do something,” he murmurs, throat tight. “And it was either us, or Ambessa. You saw her, Viktor. She would have razed the Lanes without a second thought.”
“With what?” Viktor asks, a roughness edging the quiet hiss. “Fire and steel have yet to create a rubble that the undercity cannot rise from.” He raps the end of his crutch on the hard floor. “You would have known this, had you bothered to care. Had you simply—“
“It wasn’t simple!” Jayce cuts back. “Nothing was simple. Nothing has been simple since— since the Council, since the attack, since you—!" Since you died. Since you left. "Hell, Vik, I wasn’t going to— to make weapons again, until the memorial!“ Beside Viktor’s arcane tomb, he and Mel had both rejected the very idea. He’d said no. Until… "Gods, Viktor, a memorial! And for Mrs. Kira—" He sucks in the name, swallows the habit in his heart that tastes like cold summer lemonade and spiced winter tea. "—for Councillor Kiramman, no less! Caitlyn was grieving, it was hard enough already, and then they—"
“They were Ambessa’s mercenaries,” Viktor informs. And this is news to Jayce, something he barely has time to process before— “Mercenaries provoked by your own escapade into the undercity, no less.” Viktor clenches the rivet between his fingers. “To see a product of my own work turned against a child, Jayce… You tainted our legacy with weapons of war. Neither of us can take that back.”
Jayce knows.
He’s known all along, learned it from every time that he’s fucked something up, every time he’s made a mistake. Every time he’s tried to help someone he cares about, he’s found a way to make a mess of it. Someone always gets hurt. Jayce feels like he’s tried it all; action and inaction, justice and mercy, kindness and cruelty. He’s tried and he’s tried and no matter how right it always feels to try to fix it in the moment, time always illuminates his inadequacies in the harsh, unflattering spotlight of retrospect.
And even then, little of it makes sense. He’d saved his partner and he’d killed his partner; had he been told which of those had apparently been a mistake to Viktor, he’d have never believed it.
But Viktor thinks it all so simple, all so easy. If he had simply done this, simply done that— Things he’s not sure Jayce has ever said back to him in his life. Because nearly everything that Viktor’s done, Jayce has… has understood, in some way.
Jayce thinks about the heavy drape of responsibility around his own shoulders, that of securing their futures: to wear the face of Hextech; to be raised up as their golden boy, the you can do it, too of a minor house and a late blacksmith’s son. He understands why Viktor didn’t want to shoulder that burden with him. Couldn’t. Jayce thinks about the salt of scrutiny it’d grind into Viktor’s wounds; the judgment and pressure it’d put on him as his illness tore him apart.
It tugs at him, still. But every time the hurt and the anger rises and Jayce wonders: why wasn’t my partner there? Weren’t we supposed to do this together?, the grief and regret in the back of his mind jumps at the opportunity to remind him: He was dying. Beneath Jayce’s nose, Viktor had been dying, and waving off every ounce of concern Jayce had ever brought to him about it.
And so he's never given voice to that frustration, that question of why they were decisions he had to make alone in the first place.
And so he forgives Viktor for it, without ever being asked.
And so it hurts, more than anything in the world, that it seems like Viktor can’t be bothered to understand a damn thing about anything Jayce has done.
He bites down his first response, and then the second. When Jayce finally sighs, it’s a tense, frustrated thing.
“I know.” Jayce shakes his head. “I was naive, and someone else paid the price for it. A kid. I can never undo that.” His fingers curl into his chest, wishing he could pull out the regret that he's sick with there and bare it for Viktor to see. "Everything was going to shit, and I could feel it all slipping through my fingers. I had to do something, anything to try to fix it. To hold on to everyone I cared for before they got hurt again.”
Viktor’s nose wrinkles. A quiet, disapproving scowl, hurt writ across his features.
“And that—“ Viktor looks away, solemn. “—is why I left.” Metal rings on metal as he casts the bolt back onto the workbench, straightens abruptly on his aid. “It was not my job to be your moral compass, Jayce. I tried, and you never listened. Not about the weapons. And not about—“ His free hand ghosts over the rods in his sternum, and Jayce knows that if the Arcane had spit them out differently, it’s there that he'd find the scars from: “—the Hexcore.”
Jayce doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t even need to think about it. “It saved you," he says, natural as breathing. "Without it, I— I would have lost you.”
“Then so be it!” Viktor’s frustration leaps between them. It is startling — the most that Jayce has ever heard Viktor raise his voice in all of the years that Jayce has known him — and even still, he doesn't shout. Viktor has never needed to. “What was it all for, if my work brought only pain, in the end?” His despair fills the room to the brim. “If I had known that my life prolonged would bring only suffering, I would not have fought so hard to save it.” Viktor's body seems to catch on the grief as he staggers to stillness between them.
The anguish in Jayce’s chest compels him to protest. Don’t say that, he thinks, you can’t mean that. It suffocates in the base of his throat.
Since Jayce was a boy, he dreamed of magic. This thing that saved him when nothing else could. It haunted his every decision, his every ambition, his every desire. But when his dreams of magic withered in the purgatory of the rune, dreams of his partner flourished in the space left behind, crowding out all else. What they have now is a wish come true to Jayce, difficult days and all; precious time he thought he’d never have again. He wouldn’t trade it for the world.
With a soft exhale, he realizes it, then: that maybe it’s not the same for Viktor.
He expects the thought to echo — sharp and painful — in the hollowed-out cavern of his heart. But it’s strangely muted, like a distant memory of someone else, one where he's on the outside looking in. For now, at least. Jayce knows that it will sink in later, and maybe then it will truly break him to know: that Viktor cannot be happy here, not in the same way that Jayce is.
In retrospect, now, it seems obvious, in that way that many things do. Viktor had been clear from the start; his ambitions did not start nor end at being only an assistant, and Jayce assumes the same could be said for being his partner. As much as Jayce had birthed Hextech, Viktor had raised it, sustained it. Viktor’s days were numbered, and yet, for nearly a decade, he’d chosen to spend nearly every one of them in the lab. With Jayce. With their dream. Their beautiful, bloodied dream.
Silence settles between them, still and breathless.
Jayce steps tentatively forward. Whether it is to comfort Viktor or to comfort himself he isn't sure, but Viktor pins him in place with his eyes for a long moment. Then, Viktor shakes his head.
“I saw glimpses of it. Of the end.” Viktor hangs his weight onto the padding of his crutch, his voice quiet again. “I took comfort in knowing that even with my life’s work in the Hexcore destroyed, we could secure some measure of independence for Zaun.” A bitter melancholy weaves into his words, disappointment writ clear into furrowed brows. “Zaun, and the destruction of the Hexcore. And you— you could do neither, in the end.”
Jayce doesn’t need to be reminded. He’s thought about it every single day. But when confronted with the thought of making any other choice, his answer is always the same. “Neither of them were worth it, without you.”
“That was not your decision to make!” comes the hiss, bursting with heat, all steam from a boiler.
“I couldn’t fix it without you!” Jayce’s throat burns raw. “Every time that I’ve tried to make things right without you, I’ve just— I’ve just fucked it up more, somehow!” Over and over. “I knew that if there was any way for me to make things right, it was with my partner.”
It seems to take the breath out of Viktor, for a moment. Those eyes go searching again, in all the spaces Jayce isn't, mouth hung softly open in disbelief. But it's short-lived; the hard lines return as if they'd never softened at all.
"Perhaps you were right, then, hm?” Viktor turns away, drifting back toward the workbench. “Your partner died in that room. And he is not here, either.”
The wound those words inflict wells first with pain, then with fury. Something righteous, something caustic. It froths as it pours from him. “Yeah, you know, I think I agree with you, for once.” Because, actually, now that he thinks about it, there is something he doesn’t understand, can’t even begin to fathom, and if they’re blowing it all up anyway, he might as well know. “You and that ego of yours, so damn righteous about everything I’ve done wrong, but what about what you did, Viktor?” Jayce takes a step after him. “Sure, I saved you with the Hexcore. I took that choice from you. But you’re the one who decided to kill those people. Not me. And mine? At least I can say that mine were accidents. But you—”
“Don’t.” Viktor’s voice is as sharp as it is hushed. But Jayce won’t be cowed.
“You sold them salvation just to turn them into monsters. And I don’t know why you did it. Fuck, Vik, I—”
The memory swells warmly in his chest; that first time he'd seen it, the bright and beautiful sprawl of the commune, humming with potential there beneath the earth. He'd felt proud. So, so proud. And that made what Jayce came there to do agonizing, splintering his soul into two as he watched the light fade from Viktor’s eyes. But he'd promised, he'd promised. The room blurs.
“I saw what you’d built, and if I hadn’t known what… what it led to, if I hadn’t promised you—” Impressions, soft and fleeting, sense-memory pressed indelibly on his soul; the memories of a life there with Viktor flicker across his own. The cloying humidity of the greenhouse, his skin tacky with the sweetness of a forbidden fruit. Another lifetime, another end. "I thought... I thought you were saving them, at first."
"I did, too." Viktor's admittance is soft, spoken away into the workbench. But Jayce hears it and the stinging in his eyes becomes almost unbearable; he wipes it away with his sleeve, holds his breath as Viktor continues. "They needed not suffer any longer, not as I had. Not from the rot in their lungs from the Grey, nor the fever of shimmer bursting their skin, nor the dues they paid with their bodies in the mines." He pauses. "I took their pain, in… all of its forms." He lingers on the words, thoughtful, formed into a shape curled around something Jayce is missing but doesn't have the presence now to decode, because he has to know—
“But you didn’t just take their pain. You took them, Viktor. They were your… your puppets. When you went, they went too. That’s no way to live."
“What, Jayce?” Viktor casts a bitter glance over his shoulder. “Is a life hinged on something outside of your control not one you consider worth living?” He props his weight against the workbench’s surface, briskly setting aside his crutch. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect a topsider to understand.”
A chip of recognition digs, barb-like, beneath Jayce’s skin. His lips purse, taut. “One boot for another, then,” he muses, grim. “And in the end, it crushed them all the same.”
“Yes.” Viktor finally turns back to face him. He expects cold anger; instead, a deep sadness hollows out the man's eyes. “And I live with that every day, the same as you.” He retrieves the bolt from where he'd cast it down, almost apologetic in the way he smooths his fingers along the warped crown. “Their pain, their hopes, their fear. I knew it all.” He sags into his sorrow. “And each day, I lose more of them to time. To mortal memory.”
The tension holds taut in Jayce’s form — for one breath, and then another. And finally, it eases.
It makes sense, now. All of their hopes and dreams, guarded in a crumbling tower of human memory, one that Viktor can only watch as it falls. It dawns on Jayce that even if they were to put pen to paper this very moment, they would lose twice as many for each one writ. The deep darkness of those bad days, the heaviness in Viktor’s shoulders, saddled beneath the collective grief of a people.
Where Jayce struggles with the ache of emptiness inside of him, that part left behind in the ravine — Viktor instead inhabits a vessel overfull.
Jayce crosses the distance between them, purposeful despite the ache of his leg. Viktor's eyes trace the marks in the floor; it is only when Jayce’s palm rests warmly on his shoulder that Viktor finally looks up at him.
“You are not their sole keeper, you know,” Jayce murmurs, inclining his head. “There are others, those left behind, who carry on their memories.”
Shock, then a weak protest. “You— you do not know that.” Viktor’s eyes go wide, unguarded.
Jayce’s hand shifts, sliding up to curl his fingers around the other man’s nape in a gentle grip.
“No, but you do.” Barely a whisper. “This— I get it now. This thing you’re afraid of. This doesn’t have to be your legacy.” Jayce’s thumb soothes a path beneath the hollow of his ear. “We’re scientists, V. Partners. Failure is… it's just a part of the process, yeah?”
To the souls that were lost, it is an empty comfort, if not an outright insult. But it’s not them that Jayce is trying to console. As much as his heart hurts for them, they aren’t his world. Not like Viktor is.
Viktor reaches up to him; his touch ghosts, tentative and uncertain, across the spiderweb scars on Jayce's wrist, pained. Roughness mars his voice, reduces it to a wayward scrape of metal.
“Even now,” he whispers, “the way you look at me; it is the same as them. They trusted me, and I hurt them.” He glances. “I hurt you.” In his other hand, the cold steel of the bolt bites into his palm. “And I will hurt you. Again and again. As long as their memories are here; as long as my memories are here, Jayce.”
A thousand lifetimes of pain and loathing, all condensed into the one man that Jayce has fallen hopelessly in love with, over and over. Jayce cannot blame him; not for that.
He lets out a held breath. And though it pains him— “Then… you don’t have to stay, Viktor.” The words tremble, weak with dread. “Go. I won’t stop you.” His chest aches, as present in his body as the sear in his leg. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s the only way we stop hurting one another. And— and everyone else.”
Like a caught rabbit, Viktor goes still. Searching, always searching, for the lie on Jayce's lips. When he doesn't find it, he returns the rivet to its grave on the workbench. Draws the hand back to cup Jayce’s cheek in his palm.
It's cold. Jayce leans into it, anyway. He will always, always lean into that touch.
“No.” Viktor’s tone commands the world, speaking destiny into another direction. “No, we hurt the most, when we are away from one another.” His fingers card back into Jayce’s hair. “I think… that it is simply our fate, to love one another with fangs.”
Jayce shudders. He knows that he should tell Viktor that fate need not play a hand in it; not when they have choice. That it doesn’t need to be this way, all teeth and nails and raised hackles. That Viktor doesn’t have to claw for a place in a city that scarcely ever wanted nor deserved him — not any longer.
But he doesn’t feel the need to. Pain will mark their lives forever. Jayce can handle a love that’s rough around the edges, if it’s with Viktor.
But he has to know: “Do you, still?” He can only bear it if he knows. Only fix it if he knows. “Love me?”
Viktor’s hesitation doesn’t scare him, this time. It is thoughtful, purposeful. The gears turn and Jayce busies himself with soothing his anxiety so that he can let them.
“Yes.” It whisks from Viktor like the exhale of a machine, the release of a great pressure. Jayce feels it, too. “Though it is… different, now.”
Jayce tilts his head, the gesture minute. “How so?” he asks, soft.
Amber eyes study Jayce’s features. “Before, I had… more purpose, than I had time.” He combs through the dark tangle of hair at Jayce's nape. “It was a spark that could not be sustained, not without oxygen. It burned bright, but it was doomed, in a way.” He shakes his head. “And now, it is the opposite. All of this time, it feels…” His lips quirk as he searches for the words. “Undeserved. Meaningless. It is a vacuum.” His hand pulls away, drifts down to rest upon Jayce's chest. “Somehow, I must… synthesize my own air, if you will.”
He nods, quiet. The past few weeks — no, the past few years — make sense, in that context. They flare, they burn, they suffocate. Passion born again from the ashes, over and over, inevitable.
Jayce steps gently against him. Lends his warmth, the support of his body, to coax Viktor away from the cold and unforgiving metal behind him. “You don’t have to do it alone,” he murmurs.
“I know.” Viktor slowly lowers his cheek to the collar of Jayce’s shirt. “I simply must learn how.”
Jayce tugs him close, winds his broad arms around him. He presses a kiss into dark brown locks. “We’ll figure it out.” The words are warm against Viktor’s scalp. “We always do.”
His partner finally relaxes against him, trusts him with his weight in a way that Jayce decides he will spend his life trying to be worthy of.
In the wake of it all, an unsteady peace settles between them, that night.
For Jayce, it’s an exhausted one. He slumps against the cushions of the couch with a weary sigh, curling deeply into himself — he leaves the other side of the couch open, just in case Viktor changes his mind.
Viktor refuses the offered comfort of the sofa, instead preferring the rigidity of the workbench for sketching something in his notebook. As much as it piques Jayce’s curiosity, he’s loathe to irritate him by being nosy.
Jayce, a thousand miles away, opts instead to watch the flames cast snapping shadows in the fireplace.
A hollow chill carves out every warm part of him and leaves nothing behind, only a vast numbness, a calm in the absence of everything else. He expects it all to hurt more. What remains instead is more eerily and terribly familiar.
It is the inside of the lab, gray and cold and empty around the edges, the center softly illuminated by the prismatic ripples of the Arcane. Nights spent dozing, uneasy, the ache of his body gone quiet, leg jogging, the pain of rent flesh on his back living somewhere else far away.
Even now, reeling silently from the hurt, he can’t imagine having made any other choice, that night after the attack. Maybe that’s why he deserves it, deserves all of this; because even after everything, knowing what he knows, if he were to wind time back to that moment, he’d still choose — every time — to save him. Again, and again, and again.
If he had a choice in the matter, though, he’d go back further; before the Hexcore, before the gates, to that long part of a decade when it was just them. Two sleep-deprived partners tearing into problems with their teeth until late into the night, blowing breakers with miscalculations and hypotheses gone awry. Back to lingering touches and his palm on Viktor’s shoulder, back to desire postponed on the promise of having more time.
Jayce would go back then to tell him to cut the bullshit. He’d look him in the eye and tell him that he knows has has more pain and less time than he’s letting on. And they’d find a way to help him, instead of helping what Viktor planned to leave behind; he’d tell Viktor that he can focus on his legacy when they ensure he has the time to enjoy it.
Because Jayce had loved him then, the way he does now, even if he didn’t realize it. And hell, if saving him meant creating magic all over again and letting Viktor chart the course to heal his own body with it, on his terms, like he’d begun to do, then Jayce would do it. When he thinks of what they could have done instead with Hextech, had they known that its power was finite, that their demands on it were limited, better spent saving Viktor's life than padding Piltover's pockets—
Jayce lets out a breath. Glances over to see Viktor still working, wearing an ease he hasn't seen on him in a long, long time.
Maybe it’s pointless to dwell over the past when the future lies only a step away. Different than what they’d imagined, but there and boundless with potential all the same.
When they retire for the night, Jayce settles with ample room between them; a respectful distance, void of assumptions or obligation. It is a cold and quiet ravine, and yet every fiber of Jayce’s being strains to reach across it, to not leave any more precious time stranded in the rime of distance and uncertainty and inaction. His eyes adjust to the dark as they trace the shape of his nightstand in the sparse room.
Jayce doesn’t say a word, but maybe Viktor hears his quiet yearning all the same. There’s a shift behind him, and then cool fingertips brush along Jayce’s arm — experimental, a touch with a question curling around its edges.
“Jayce?”
“Hm?” The attention is the excuse he’s desperately desired to turn over. And yet, Jayce is suddenly paralyzed by the thought of facing him. The numbness in his chest gives sharply away, his courage disappearing between the fanged and yawning mouth of panic.
Viktor doesn’t respond, not immediately. The silence between them grows expectant.
Jayce counts every moment.
Then, Viktor’s palm smooths gently up to his shoulder.
“Come here, lásko,” he says, certain as anything. When Jayce doesn't move, choked with surprise and dread in equal measure, Viktor lets out a strained sound and whispers: “Come here.”
Jayce is helpless to resist him, as he always has been. Miserably, he turns over, sees that piercing amber gaze set upon him in the low light. Instinctively, he searches Viktor’s face for anything — for everything — he can recognize. Somehow, it’s all there, and more: Viktor’s lips lightly parted around a strangely uncertain breath; his widened eyes dampening the delicate wrinkles around their edges, glassy in a way Jayce has never seen before.
Viktor’s hand raises to cup Jayce’s cheek. His thumb soothes the scar that laces Jayce's brow. The air between them thickens with something wordlessly pained and tender and tense.
Jayce trembles. All at once, the ground disappears from underneath him. He sucks in a sharp breath; it lances a hole through his chest, and from that gaping wound comes the sob, choked and twisted and ugly.
Viktor pulls him into his heartbeat, coils narrow fingers into dark hair. The calming tempo he combs into the back of Jayce’s scalp does nothing to quell the thundering shudder of his cries against Viktor’s chest. Jayce curls into him, trying to disappear into the space between Viktor’s lungs, trying to escape from the sear of his guilt and the bitterness of his regret.
“I’m sorry,” Jayce gasps. “I’m so sorry.” The frantic bury of his face must be bruising, but Viktor doesn’t flinch away. “You were right. I’m so sorry.”
Viktor's low hum reverberates through them both.
“No,” Viktor murmurs. The softness of it is enough to make Jayce bite down on the burning anguish tight in his throat, if only enough to hear him. “No, not always.”
Jayce weeps. Viktor lowers his chin to the top of his head, drapes his other hand into the small of his back, cradles him in the midnight gloom. It is silent permission; Jayce unfurls just enough to throw his arms around him, desperate and frantic and unbound.
It sets in, now; the gravity of all these things that neither of them can undo or take back. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to quiet the steady chorus of Viktor’s hurt and disdain that rings in his head and hollows out his heart. Jayce loves him, he’s always loved him, and maybe Viktor loved him too, once. And this— this warmth, this comfort— Jayce wants to believe that it’s a sign of that love still there within him, unextinguished; that despite everything, it was affection and more that held them together, after all.
That will hold them together, like it always has, without the need for him to cling and carve his claws into it.
But he’s afraid to let go again, just in case it’s another right that in retrospect will be wrong. So he doesn’t. He doesn't let go.