Archive of Our Own

CASSIUS: Brutus, I do observe you now of late.
I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have.
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand
Over your friend that loves you.

The air is thick in the Undercity, and suffocating.

That is the first thing that Jayce notices when he exits the failsafe chamber—the climate immediately changes from frigid to humid.

Not nearly as toxic as the air in that gods-forsaken timeline, he’s sure, but more than close enough to remind him, to choke him with the smog from his memory of the ravine, the smoke from his fires filling the windless chasm, the acrid taste and subsequent sickness of the Hexcore-diseased lizard meat that he was forced to subsist on.

His breath no longer hurts his raw lungs, no longer clouds in front of him, all moisture and heat in the clinical arid cold. Now, his breath stalls and shudders, smooth in his throat, but bringing with it pain of a different kind as he hauls the anomaly-altered Mercury Hammer through the narrow, arched fissures that connect the Hexgate’s failsafe with the rest of the underground.

Salo’s blood cools as it soaks through the fibers of his worn shirt, and his tattered, once-white coat now bears the mark of his mission as it was given him by the mage at the end of the world. The mage that was Viktor—is Viktor—who saved his life, delivering him and his mother from the icy clutches of the Freljord when he was a child.

His addled mind still refuses to wrap fully around that scientific improbability, but in the past few months alone he has seen much and lived through stranger.

Necromancy. Time travel. Quantum instability. His time in the ravine, subsisting on nothing, surviving through sheer spite and willpower, has changed his heart and his mind. Perhaps irrevocably.

It doesn’t make it any easier.

He can’t force the image of Salo’s broken body from his mind any more than he can banish the iron tang of Salo’s blood from his nose or the sickening crunch of the former councilor’s bones from his ears. And he can never expunge that murder from his growing tally. Hopefully, it will end with Viktor. Three lives for the continuation of the world.

It’s more than a fair trade. Penance for his hand in what Viktor will do—has already seemingly begun to do—if Jayce doesn’t stop him. And once Viktor lies dead, cataclysm averted, Jayce will return home to Piltover and nurse his wounds, and bear the weight of his penance, and grieve.

Because his denial of grief is the very thing that got them into this whole convoluted tangle of aberrant timelines and corruption. His desperate longing to keep Viktor alive when they were so close to the breakthrough that would save him. Jayce’s inability to let go when he never told Viktor all the ways he mattered. That choiceless hope that drove him to break his promise. That pinpoint decision, made of desperation, that created these exact conditions, that now requires Viktor’s life as retribution; the final piece of a reverse-engineered puzzle, the final barrier holding the circuit incomplete.

And maybe he will see Mel again, and his mother, and Caitlyn, and they will help him through it.

Three lives for the world.

His partner, for the world.

He has to hope.

Jayce can’t quite tell if it’s the hammer, split open like a bloated corpse and smattered with prismatic evidence of the Arcane, that pulls him toward his quarry, or something within his chest, planted by the mage—or something deeper, older—that tangles his fate with Viktor’s, inextricably. He doesn’t even have to spare thought to the path that carries him closer, he just walks, and feels the call echoing stronger through the cavity of his body.

Arcane energy glows from within the hammer’s head, illuminating the stone walls from below in dim white-silver-blue. His footsteps cast long shadows, stretching up into the higher reaches of the fissure. The soles of his shoes crunch over loose rubble. The Mercury Hammer hums.

Whatever has happened to Viktor—whatever perverse magic shimmers within his new, metallic body—that allowed him to share a mind with Salo, to peer into the Arcane and sense it within Jayce, does not bode well. If he’d been told years ago that Hextech would have wrought this, he would have laughed. Viktor would have, too, and chastised the thought. Now, he doesn’t know what to believe and what to dismiss. Magical augmentation, possession, mind-reading—these are the tricks of fairy-tale demons. Not the life-changing progress that Hextech was meant for.

Besides, he’s seen how this ends. The mage himself admitted, in their brief conversation, that he had seen it play out numerous times, and it always ended poorly. And that Jayce, for some esoteric reason, was the only one who could stop it.

He doesn’t know what he’ll find when he’s face to face with Viktor. But he knows he will never be ready.

Mid-step, Jayce freezes. The dull glow from the hammer catches the stone at an odd angle, and he swears he sees a glint of something in the wall. Something… blue? Flash-images of the hex crystals flood his mind, and Jayce feels his body and mind begin to separate in that nauseating after-image duplication, that rending oscillation between timelines, between worlds, that wracked his body when the anomaly transported him to and from this dimension.

He flinches, and then it’s over. But it leaves him feeling hollow and disoriented. It’s impossible for shards of the hex crystals to be embedded in these walls.

Without thinking, he raises the hammer to inspect the wall, scratching at the surface with one dirt-coated fingernail. He feels nothing out of the ordinary. And the glint is gone.

Unless…

Jayce squints, tilting his head in one direction and then the other. Moves the light closer. It’s impossible, but… he was wrong. There is something there, beneath the surface of the stone, shining through like the limestone has turned to clouded glass.

Jayce makes a mental note that he needs to banish the word “impossible” from his vocabulary.

As he peers through the stone, a deeper image starts to form within, like a crystal menagerie; sharp, slanted planes of sapphire make up the shapes of people, frozen in terror, bitten and scarred and mineral. He recognizes it instantly. He is not like to ever forget the odd, dilapidated mannequins with their creaking joints as their faces and hands reached for him, causing him to fall into the ravine, to drop the Mercury Hammer square onto his tibia, crushing it to gravel. He’d hit his head on the ground, hard, when he landed, knocking him out cold and giving him a concussion and a pounding headache that lasted what may as well have been his entire stay in that timeline. He probably still has it.

“I know,” he grumbles, to no one in particular.

The image shifts, showing him a great, swirling temporal storm surrounding the Hexgate, and he sees himself fighting his way through it, buffeted by wind and debris, clutching the rough surfaces for love of a life that was once dear to him. It shows him the mage, gaze wistfully downcast at the rune-eaten statue that was once his counterpart in that timeline. And, before Jayce can react, the mage’s eyes flick up to regard him, as if he can see through the stone.

Jayce steps backward, and suddenly the wall is again just a wall, the stone no longer translucent and dimensional. He puts his hand to the spot, half-expecting some reaction to the warmth of his palm or the wisps of the Arcane that Viktor was able to sense in him, but there is nothing. He breathes deep and keeps walking.

His whole body aches, not least of all his malreformed leg bound up in a makeshift brace, but he rails against his mind, pushing down his pain until he can continue to ignore it. Every step jolts his muscle against the spurs of bone that no doubt shred it as he moves and puts his weight on it, but he did not have the luxury of a gentle convalescence and he cannot stop until his mission is fulfilled.

One foot lands in front of the other, and he trudges onward. Just follow the thread.

It isn’t long before he sees that glint again, and this time he follows it readily, gazing into its depths with some desperate curiosity.

He sees mountains of bodies, war-torn and bloody, but still human, crimson banners flying above them, and a deep, opaque fog. Atop the largest mountain of flesh, Jayce sees himself, held mid-air by the throat, in the hands of some grotesque creature, the likes of which he has never seen before. What holds him is a marred and aberrant version of Viktor’s Hex-Claw prototype from a lifetime ago.

In the fog, a standing army watches, stock-still, eyes and hands glowing sickly green. It is then that Jayce realizes the thing that holds him aloft has Viktor’s face, split gruesomely down the middle, eyes gently closed as if in slumber. It has no true mouth but still it tears hungrily at his body, long metal fingers digging easily into his skin, scraping against bone, separating tendon from muscle—a surgery, or an autopsy. It pays no heed as blood pours from him, drenching the faces of Caitlin, Vi, Mel, Ekko; as his chest is reduced to mangled pulp. The army stares on. The creature, when he looks back, is straightened and alert, looking directly at him, amber eyes vibrant in the dark.

He scrambles back from that sinister gaze, pressing his back flat against the opposite wall, breathing hard and heavy, nearly dropping the hammer in the process. He has no worldly idea what that thing was, but he hopes, maybe foolishly, that that’s not what Viktor has become. If the Hexcore could grow and learn, then who’s to say it couldn’t evolve of its own volition?

His chest heaves, and he feels another wave of temporal instability wrack him, groaning in pain as he doubles over, and his hand flies to his chest, uncertain that he isn’t as marred and bloody as he saw himself become reflected in the crystal. Panic floods through him, feeling the cool, sticky dampness there, until he remembers. It’s Salo’s blood. Not his.

That, decidedly, does not make it better.

Jayce takes a few deliberate breaths, and pries himself off the wall, setting his jaw and returning to the path.

Now that he’s given credence to the thought, Jayce fears the worst. If Viktor could project his consciousness, speak and perceive through Salo’s senses, surely he knows what Jayce has done. Surely, he knows he is coming for him, next. Surely, he will be ready, and angry, and with power like that Jayce can’t even imagine what else he’s capable of. And Salo can’t be the only one. Maybe the army he saw was Viktor’s.

Jayce doesn’t know what he’ll do if he has to fight his way to Viktor. Die, probably.

He keeps his head down, to banish the possibility of seeing any more visions. He doesn’t know why they’re being shown to him like this—to what end. To prepare him? To strike fear into his heart? Fear, he already has, in great measure. He doesn’t need help in that particular department.

His little effort is in vain, he discovers, when the glow from the hammer begins to illuminate the stone beneath his feet like glacial ice, like the fortified glass floor of the failsafe chamber, and he can suddenly see far below himself, a body, felled in a barren clearing. Its hand is outstretched, fallen that way, it seems, and its breast is blown open, ribs clawing at nothing.

Jayce drops down, the metal components of his makeshift brace clinking awkwardly against the stone floor. He lets the Mercury Hammer rest on its head, illuminating the strange chamber, and cups his hands around his eyes to get a better look.

From this distance, it’s hard to tell, but the wrung feeling in his chest, the prickling in his fingers, the unsteady drumming of his heart, all tell him that this is Viktor. The body he emerged from the Hexcore’s gel matrix with, rusted to the ground of whatever structure he lies in the center of, flesh half-melted, eyes vacant and dead. The same fusion that his alternate self had undergone through the anomaly seems to have taken him.

Jayce’s heart is in his throat.

Viktor’s heart is gone. Eaten. Fruit for flies.

This version of Viktor does not look at him. He lies dormant, a forgotten relic of whatever Jayce will find when he reaches him.

He stays crouched like that, trying to make out Viktor’s features, reconstruct them in his mind: bones and flesh, pale skin and golden eyes. Even after eight years, it is a fool’s errand. He is nothing but a grave.

Jayce’s eyes close, faced with something unimaginable—his mission, carried out, completed. His promise kept. He cannot look.

He wonders if he’ll have to close his eyes when he does it, unable to watch the crater form in Viktor’s body, to become the author of exactly what he sees here. He wonders if there will be any remains at all, or if Viktor will vanish, swallowed by the anomaly, disintegrated into nothing but Arcane energy.

His fists close against the glass-stone floor, and he grits his teeth. He will not look away. He owes Viktor that much, at least.

As he opens his eyes, though, the stone has shifted back to stone, no cavern or chamber echoing below it. No grave to weep at. A deep breath does not calm him. Nothing can, he feels.

With nothing more to see, Jayce gets to his feet, using the handle of the hammer as a support as he drags his weight up from kneeling, pain shooting through his left shin, radiating out all the way from his foot to his knee. He knows how it was for Viktor, now. At least, he’s gotten a taste of what it was like. Viktor has had to live with it much longer than he has, and Jayce knows he would disdain the comparison. He can picture Viktor’s delicate lips curved into that half-irritated frown he remembers from their days in the lab, when Jayce would disprove one of his hypotheses or needle him about his habits just to annoy him.

That playfulness feels lifetimes gone, drained from him without any warning that he would need to miss it eventually. Somehow, their routine, stretched out over years, felt so constant and sure that to imagine life without it feels like throwing away a full chamber of his heart. When he was swept up in the council, he could hardly see beyond the politics, the web, the forced smiles and handshakes, the glasses of sparkling wine. That whole year feels like a dizzying blur. The only thing that stands out is Mel.

Guilt twists in his gut, at that. He has faint wisps of memories of Viktor’s illness worsening until that night Jayce waited in a chair next to his hospital bed until he woke up, weak and resigned, asking how much time he had left. And still, the only thing that catches his eye is gold—Viktor’s eyes dulled against the remarkable metallic patterns inlaid in Mel’s skin.

Jayce pants, ribs expanding and contracting laboriously, more winded by the exertion than he expected.

He marches onward toward his purpose.

BRUTUS: That you do love me, I am nothing jealous.
What you would work me to, I have some aim.
How I have thought of this, and of these times,
I shall recount hereafter. For this present,
I would not, so with love I might entreat you,
Be any further moved.

Jayce lifts his head, surveying the environment as the dark, narrow fissure of sheer stone widens and lightens, and the hammer hums louder, brighter, and whatever force is in him tugs more insistently.

It isn’t long before he crests the top of a slope between two walls and is immediately thrust into a massive underground chamber, looking down on a circular village of sorts, bustling with people, nestled in a ring around a shallow hill crowned with another large, round structure—an intricate replica of the top of the Hexgate. The settlement is all light, clean huts adorned with bright stained glass, glowing from within. The air immediately lightens, and no longer tastes of smog and acrid chemicals.

This is what Viktor has created.

Salo wasn’t kidding when he spoke of Viktor’s healing capabilities. It is incredible to witness, and he hasn’t even breached the outermost ring of tenements yet.

He sees bits of Viktor in the construction of the homes—the gently curved walls, stretched canvas awnings, the organic shapes, spiraling fractals, and shandy, rough-hewn aesthetic. As he skulks between the low, humble buildings, he shakes himself, catching little cut flowers like the ones that sprung from his alternate-timeline corpse beneath the sole of his boot. He is not here to admire what Viktor has built. He is here to destroy it.

He swallows hard, setting his brow and his jaw, drawing his shoulders back. His hand tightens around the hammer’s grip. He dons a grim expression, stonelike.

He does not expect to be intercepted, despite the foreknowledge that Viktor could have had an army, and the fact that he noticed their movement from the ledge.

They seem peaceful. Collaborative. Warm.

Another vertiginous shift wrenches his neck, seizing all his muscles like his center of gravity has increased exponentially, as if Jayce himself is a red supergiant about to implode. He stumbles forward, panting, clutching at his head, eyes blinded to his surroundings as they blur and melt around him. With a jolt, he is back in that forsaken wasteland, surrounded by the living statues, and they’re all hands, reaching, clambering toward him, unblinking, unfeeling, for possession of his humanity.

He feels the aftershocks of a hard oscillation, and a foreign object lands on his shoulder before he can see again. He throws himself violently away from the touch, and raises his weapon, a two-hand heft to put the split-open hammer head directly up against whatever—whoever—touched him.

When his vision merges from two blurry, unstable images back into one, he sees the face of a man who is terrified, unarmed, harmless.

Other people in the vicinity (all unarmed, he notes) have noticed the commotion, and turn to look at him, each watching carefully as Jayce snarls his breaths through clenched teeth, feet firmly planted, hammer charged and poised, stance low and menacing.

He slowly comes to the conclusion that these people will not hurt him. They will not even attempt to.

As the breath drags in and out of his throat, as he looks around at all the faces, each unique in appearance but dressed in the same wrapped off-white fabric and with the same gentle alarm in their placid expressions, he is able to drive the tension from his shoulders, and lowers the hammer.

All the faces soften at once, looking at him with more sympathy than alarm.

He is afraid.

They were afraid, once, too.

The smallest of his little audience—a child, no more than twelve, steps forward. She holds her hand out to him, and he just stares blankly at the same pair of unnatural eyes he saw in Salo, the same placidity and calm.

With a mechanical clunk, the hammer snaps back to its closed shape, and Jayce drops its points into the rammed earth beneath his feet. He doesn’t know why he does it, but gods help him, he takes the girl’s hand. And she smiles.

Together, they weave between the tenements, emerging out into a main causeway where manifold people in the same natural-fiber wraps, all with strange metallic markings on their foreheads and white streaks through their hair, mingle and work. Some sit in front of open-faced tents with baskets of strange fruit, some weave fibers, sitting cross-legged in a circle. There are smiths and tanners, cooks and launderers. People of all aspects and persuasions, all at ease, all moving with grace and leisure.

His mind feels like a spherical glass tank, the violence of his purpose in this place clawing and pounding at the walls as if the denizens will see clear through him and apprehend him at any moment. Inside, he houses a tempest. Outside, the village hums its gentle idyll, and no one looks twice at the ragged, blood-soaked man as he is led toward the center.

The girl gives him a reassuring smile as they proceed toward the Hexgate-shaped structure, and only then does Jayce realize how odd it is that no one has spoken to him. Not even her, who by all accounts, should fear him—or at least ask him his name.

But then, if Viktor was able to speak through his retinue, it makes sense that he can speak to them as well. Did he tell them that Jayce was coming? Do they always let strange, dangerous vagabonds into the center of their town? Are their smiles just for show?

When they reach the nestled sphere, the girl stops. She tucks a mess of curly hair behind her ear, peers up at him with her huge, Arcane-altered eyes, and lets go of his hand. Icy claws of uncertainty tear at his heart, and twist his guts into knots. The stages of Piltover were nothing compared to this. She gestures for him to go ahead.

He stares at her for a breathless moment, then looks back at the structure, steeling himself for what he must do for the world. An act of love through violence—a sacrifice as much as it is a slaughter.

The inside of the pod emits a dim glow, and for a reason he cannot name, Jayce shields his eyes as he presses his boot over the threshold.

His shoulders rock with the weight of his breath, and his mouth goes dry, because there, in his wide-eyed gaze, is Viktor. He floats, impossibly, held in place at the back of the chamber by thick filaments of white light. If Jayce stares too long, the colors begin to separate out from one another, and make his vision blur. He remembers the metallic, stormy violet of Viktor’s new flesh, but it still stuns him, nearly as bare as the last time they saw one another, hair grown down to his shoulders, draped from the waist down in Jayce’s navy blue blanket—the one he’d thrown over Viktor’s half-foreign frame when he emerged from the living aerogel-like substance the Hexcore constructed around him like a cocoon.

This structure, too, is reminiscent of a cocoon, with its flowing channels and large fractal pores, he absentmindedly notices, beneath the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. Lightning jumps in his veins and his lips part, and he is utterly frozen before the living machine that was once his dead best friend.

And then, Viktor’s eyes open.

Jayce grips the handle of the altered hammer, hard, and digs his heels into the ruined soles of his boots. Irises that were once honey-gold now glint cold platinum. And, he is certain it must be his imagination, but he is equally as certain that the corners of Viktor’s mouth raise ever so slightly—that he is smiling in the face of death, because it is Jayce who brings it.

A bolt strikes Jayce’s skull, and his consciousness splits. He is at once dozens of versions of himself, feeling their movements and his own in fragmented, slowed arcs. Some are rushing forward, some lift the hammer to fulfill his mission. Some are crying. All of them are screaming. Echoes of every other timeline converge here.

The mage had told him as much—told him that there were others, that he had seen and lost many versions of Jayce and Viktor. Left those timelines to fester and end. Told Jayce that he must be stronger than them. That he must be the one who stops the revolving, who breaks the world free.

And he wants to.

By all the gods, by everything good and sacred, he wants to obey, to keep his promise, but his hand hesitates on the trigger, and his resolve falters, and he collapses in on himself as a supernova.

The violence of the scream ripped from his throat hardly registers as pain when his whole body is pain, but the shattered spot in his tibia radiates in white-hot waves as he drops to his knees, sobs of agony felt acutely in every inch of his tired form. His spine, curved forward in delirious surrender, is a single smear of bone, aching all the way to the fluid and marrow. It is probably for the best that his insides went numb to the poison of his only food source long ago.

Jayce is not strong.

And, as his body is folded in defeat and misery, as he fails, he understands—he never was.

Viktor was his strength. His truth, his better half. His light. If he was ever brave or fearless, it was Viktor that made him that way.

Nothing he did, or tried, or made, even worked until Viktor saved him from that ledge. No amount of begging or explaining ever made anyone believe him, until the enigmatic man from the Undercity appeared, and understood him implicitly.

And he wasted those years, taking that strength for granted, not even realizing that he was bleeding Viktor dry.

His muscles seize at some strange sensation, and he is all of a sudden back in the lab, their lab, their together-home, the backdrop of their shared decade, and his head is in Viktor’s lap, cradled so achingly gently by a lithe, slender hand carding through his hair, utterly engulfed by the specific blend of ink and chalk and graphite, of the oils in their skin mixing with iron and copper, and axle grease, and the plain unscented soap at the lab sink whittled down to a sliver by their frequent handwashing.

Viktor mutters to himself as he scratches calculations and considerations into thick notebook paper, balanced on the arm of the couch. The memory brings him peace, but entwining with that peace is a choking vine of loss and grief. This is not real. He tips his head back to get a look at Viktor’s face; just a glimpse of the man who had become synonymous with home, and those tranquilizing amber eyes, but Viktor stills, and peers down at him. And his eyes are still silver, and Jayce realizes with a start that this… never happened.

Viktor’s fluffy, unruly locks give way to long, loose waves, and the soft warmth of his skin morphs into Arcane-marked pallor, and Jayce remembers where he is. His face is cold and wet, his eyes and throat sting, overflowing with churning, broken utterances of I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and the hands that hold his face are tepid, velvet-soft metal instead of supple flesh.

There is a measure of sorrow in those unnaturally shifting liquid-platinum eyes when Viktor hushes him, then a surge of pain swells in his head, like to split his skull clean open if not for Viktor holding it together. He screws his eyes shut and strangles the growls and groans that replace his breath in the undertaking of such an affliction.

“Jayce,” Viktor breathes. “My Jayce.” It’s the voice he remembers, and it isn’t, and everything about Viktor is that: the same but different, no longer his, if it ever was to begin with, guilt and disgust chasing one another around in his gut as he remembers that this version of Viktor is his doing. “I’d hoped you would come.”

He cannot stop the sobs that wrack his body any more than he can stop the burning of the runestone, fused into the sinews of his wrist, or the dizzying feeling of being flayed from the inside out.

But he feels Viktor’s lukewarm thumbs swipe at the tears that drip down the sides of his face, and though his head is still splitting, he has to say something.

“‘m s-sorry—I co—” he starts, but his voice fails where it begins, and he cannot catch his breath. “c—hah—couldn’t do it.” He does not know who he is apologizing to: Viktor—this Viktor—or the mage. It’s all the same, he supposes. He has many things to atone for. “Couldn’t… hurt you.”

“There is no need for apologies,” Viktor murmurs, and warmth begins to radiate from his palms, and he bends forward until his face is just inches from Jayce’s ear. “You are here with me now.”

Viktor’s breath ghosts across his skin, and for whatever reason, he didn’t think to consider whether Viktor even had traditional lungs anymore until that heady breeze tickled the side of his neck.

His eyes nearly roll back. This is closer than he’s been to anyone in gods-only-know how long, and it’s Viktor, and though the scent of him now is mostly alien, intoxicating ozone, there are some notes of familiarity in his hair, draped around Jayce’s face like a curtain, shielding him from the white-light glow. Trace remnants of his brilliant partner, mixed into this hybrid body, playing at a hidden fantasy that never saw the light of day as long as Jayce had any ability to deny it.

Here, he does not. His gut clenches and his breath stutters. He is cracked wide open in Viktor’s arms, and there has never been any other choice, any alternate path—it was always going to be this.

“I killed Salo,” Jayce half-sobs, his voice like gravel in his throat.

Viktor pauses at that.

“Yes,” he says simply, after a moment of contemplation. His lips brush Jayce’s jaw, just the barest amount. “You did.”

Jayce’s stomach churns. Salo’s blood, tacky from drying, sticks his shirt to his chest.

“It is… not ideal,” Viktor continues. His words come thoughtful but hollow, dismissing the greatest sin that can be committed by the living as if it were a mere inconvenience. Jayce wishes he could see Viktor’s face. “His contributions will be missed.”

“I—I had to—he was—and you…” he babbles, near to hyperventilating, forcing out his words before they can dissolve in the sand of his mind, “I couldn’t bear—” inhale “—losing you.”

He curses under his breath as hot, stinging tears begin to well anew in his eyes. The salt water trails cool into the layer of grit that mars his complexion.

“You have me,” Viktor whispers. He mouths at the line of Jayce’s jaw. Somewhere, alarms are firing off like warning shots. He cannot hear them, and thus he cannot heed them. “I am… eager to see what we will accomplish together, as partners once more.”

“Viktor…” The concept of having Viktor is grotesque only in ways that he cannot recall; they were inseparable once, and in a way, belonged to one another, if not with one another, but this…

“I used to dream about things like this,” Viktor remarks, placid as a frozen pond. He inhales through his mouth, then drags his tongue—his still-human tongue—down Jayce’s cheek, gathering salt tears and dried blood and dirt alike, as some apocryphal sacrament.

Jayce’s heart hammers in his chest. If he had known…

Well, if he had known, this would not be his first time beneath Viktor’s soft, adamant mouth, with no means of hiding the way his body has reacted.

His mind cannot comprehend it. Seven years they spent sharing glances and touches, at one another’s fingertips and yet somehow forbidden. Why was it forbidden? He hardly remembers now, as he lifts his hand to hold Viktor’s hair back behind his ear, and Viktor is doing what can only be described as kissing him, sucking the skin of Jayce’s throat into his mouth just briefly before moving on to the next spot.

The synapses fire, but short. Jayce’s breaths come in open-mouthed pants, and he gives up trying to steal a glance at Viktor, letting his eyes fall shut to take in the sensation more purely.

If this is what failure feels like, Jayce has never known success.

And furthermore, he does not care to.

Viktor stretches further down, skimming one palm down the length of Jayce’s neck, over his collarbone, beneath the stretched, bloodied, sweat-and-dirt-stained neckline of his shirt. His mouth follows behind his hand, grazing Jayce’s unkempt chest with his teeth like he means to eat him.

A choked sound is all he can muster as, for a flash of a second, he is held again in the creature’s claw, digging thirstily at his flesh. Viktor’s hand advances down the center of his body, leading with his middle finger through the valley of his sternum, all the way to his navel.

Head spinning with the vertigo from that switch, Jayce reels as Viktor’s fingertips brush the waistband of his pants, dipping below just shallowly while he sucks a bruise into the exposed span of Jayce’s chest.

A faint whine rides the tail end of his breath when Viktor pulls away, rescinding both his mouth and his hands. Jayce’s grip in Viktor’s hair tightens, not willing to abandon their current course.

“Patience, Jayce.” This new version of the man he’s pined after for nearly ten years gently lowers Jayce’s head to the ground from his resting place on Viktor’s thighs, and places his hand atop Jayce’s, bidding him let go with a light squeeze.

Jayce does as he’s bid, but follows Viktor’s movement with his eyes as he stands, draped folds of the blanket spilling from where they’re secured around his waist, exposing the crimson lining like blood made fabric.

Viktor moves with every ounce of the grace he’s always possessed, but with an ease and painlessness that Jayce knows Viktor had only ever coveted before. He watches the fluid, natural movement of each woven strand of muscle-turned-metal, barely able to keep his head lifted, and is given to notice that not only has Viktor’s motion improved, but so has his physique; where before the man he spent his days with was frail and dying now stands a still-lean frame, but lithe and toned rather than sickly gaunt.

The seamless knitting of flesh and metal, so efficient in its augmentation, is, to Jayce, breathtaking, and awe-inspiring; their greatest goal made manifest.

“You’re…” Jayce ventures, and Viktor turns his head, gazing down at him, cocking his head in silent curiosity. His hands delve beneath the fallen layer of his vestments, and begin working at whatever holds them in place. He does not take his eyes off Jayce.

Jayce drops his head to the floor, depleted and dizzy, and closes his eyes as another splitting pain takes him. The pressure spreads from a band in the middle of his skull to his sinuses and cheekbones, working its way into his jaw. Behind his eyelids, he sees his own corpse, just a husk of his body, a half-eaten statue, and the mage that watches over him in that lush paradise of eternal death. He sees the mage’s eyes, pale like Viktor’s are now, and swirled with watercolor hues. He looks like he has everything to lose.

“I’m…” Viktor leads, dropping something to the floor with a soft clatter.

Jayce cracks his eyes open toward the sound, locating a tangle of off-white cloth belts, laced through rings and plates that look oddly like gilded lotus root. His gaze travels upward with just enough time to catch the blanket peeling away from Viktor’s body, revealing the rest of a sight that Jayce last saw in their lab, months ago. His right leg fused with the brace Jayce helped design for him, gold accents poking out among the violet just like the ones on his chest, and the radiant purple glow that brightens and dims at the core of him like breath, like blood.

Viktor’s eyes open, and Jayce swears he sees a flash of amber in his blink.

“Beautiful,” Jayce breathes, and Viktor’s lips part just so, and there is his partner. “Everything.”

Viktor makes a small hum in the back of his throat, then steps toward Jayce, and as a result Jayce’s eye is drawn toward the structure that mimics his pelvis—broad and deeply indented where it connects to his leg. Despite the blasé manner with which Viktor just disrobed, it still feels indecent to look, but he’s unable to stop himself before his eyes flick inward toward the space between Viktor’s legs.

He squints, exhaling heavily when the pain in his head abates, frowning as he tries to work out the answer to a question that feels leagues past bizarre to ask when his dick is half-hard in his pants.

Viktor hardly gives him time to ponder the marked absence of a certain structure he’s definitely seen through the barrier of Viktor’s undergarments before he’s kneeling down next to Jayce, placing a hand squarely in the center of his chest, and swinging a leg over his hips to straddle him.

“This form is well-adapted,” Viktor says, in a tone that sounds like acquiescence. “And versatile,” he adds, his voice now darker, more resonant, sinking forward until his left elbow rests beside Jayce’s head.

Jayce’s heart trips over itself, breathing in the air from Viktor’s exhale as he leans in. A wave of nausea rips through him. This is, perhaps, the closest they have ever been.

Certainly, it’s the most bodily contact they’ve shared at one time, but it’s nowhere near enough. He attempts to urge Viktor on with just his eyes. All his silent pleading earns him is a smirk.

Viktor settles his weight onto his right elbow, tracing Jayce’s brow and orbit with two fingers. His expression is aloof, but curious, like he’s observing the third round of an experiment. But his eyes are wildly intense, focused solely on Jayce as those two fingers follow the tracks of his tears down the side of his nose, to the corner of his mouth, and across the torn, chapped skin of his bottom lip.

Jayce parts his lips to let Viktor probe as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, straining against the seam of his trousers with what it does to him to feel Viktor’s fingers glide up the length of his tongue, the taste suffusing through his mouth; a bitter tang like effervescent copper.

He squirms a little when Viktor pushes in deeper, nearly gagging at the unfamiliar feeling of metal on the back of his tongue. Fortunately, training himself to keep down the lizards has all but broken his gag reflex. He pants around the deep intrusion, feeling saliva pool next to his molars. He continues to watch Viktor watching him, until those watercolor eyes flick up to meet Jayce’s, and they just gaze at one another. Flashes of gold, fuchsia, seafoam, violet, cycle and shift as if calculating in real-time.

And then he withdraws his fingers a little, hooking them into the curve of Jayce’s lower jaw, into the space beneath his tongue, and he leans down slowly, hovering inches from Jayce’s face, breathing into his mouth.

It snaps whatever thread of restraint he still possessed.

Jayce silently apologizes to the mage, weaves a hand into Viktor’s hair, and surrenders to Viktor’s innate gravity, pulling him down until their lips meet.

With Viktor’s fingers still in his mouth, it’s awkward and clumsy, but hot, and thrilling, and a breathy moan forces its way out of his throat, and Viktor responds in kind, with a deep, rumbling hum that nearly echoes in the circular chamber.

It’s hunger and sparks and velocity, and Jayce is utterly helpless to it, pinned beneath Viktor’s body, jaw straining as he kisses Viktor with the same fervor he used to climb up out of the fissure, to fight his way to the top of the Hexgate.

Viktor pulls away, scanning Jayce’s face like he’s searching for something, breaths coming slow and heavy. He spreads his fingers apart, touching teeth and tongue both, working his fingertips to the back of Jayce’s molars. Jayce chokes on the groan that pressure pulls from him and bucks his hips involuntarily, and Viktor subsequently removes his fingers from Jayce’s mouth completely, earning another whine.

“Incredible,” he marvels, and descends on Jayce once more.

This time, with no obstruction, their teeth clash heedlessly, desperation passing between them with crushing gravity.

He delves as far into Viktor’s mouth as Viktor’s fingers did in his, mapping each ridge of his molars by sensation alone. Incandescent want licks up the center of his body like flame, heat flaring between his ribs, spurring him on. Though before, Viktor was bold and domineering, now he yields, letting Jayce lead.

That is, until Viktor raises his hand to Jayce’s temple, cradling his skull, and that same warmth from before starts to spread from his fingertips, and Jayce is back in the ravine, starving and sobbing and losing his last thread of sanity, and he can’t breathe, and the weight on top of him increases, crushing him into the ground, and he thrashes under the gravity and throws Viktor off of him, scrambling to his knees and clutching his chest as he wheezes.

He lifts his head to see Viktor sprawled out on the ground a ways off, panting as if with exertion, but lacking any irritation or anger.

“I don’t… understand,” Jayce forces out, dropping his head. Guilt claws its way up his throat once more. “I did this to you. You left me. I thought—”

Viktor rights himself, folding his legs beneath him in a way he never could have without significant pain before. “You need not think on that any longer.” He places his hands in his lap, holding one in the other, thumbs pressed together so they form a closed circle. He speaks slowly. “I was… lost, for a time. Confused.” He shakes his head, taking a deep breath. “Resentful. But I understand now. My transformation was necessary. To serve this world. To heal those most abandoned by society. Improving life, augmenting physiology—this is what we set out to do.”

“But—” Jayce huffs, trying to corral his racing thoughts. “Why this?” He gestures to himself, feeling ridiculous for the arousal that still throbs in his gut. “Why now?”

Viktor’s eyes rake over him. He looks lost in reverie for a moment, eyes downcast. “It would be a shame to waste the second chance we were given,” he says, lifting his gaze to Jayce’s, placing his words so incredibly gingerly. “Don’t you think?”

Jayce blinks. Shakes his head. He doesn’t know what that could possibly mean, unless…

His thinks he can feel his intestines writhing. He would probably be sick if it weren’t for the lack of anything substantial in his stomach.

Every time Jayce thinks there is nothing left in him to break, he is proven wrong. He could become a million disparate pieces and they would still find ways to crack in half.

“You said you used to…” Jayce searches for the wording, as if it matters. The gushing heart of their relationship twitches and burns in the open air. “To dream about…”

In the ravine, between the delirium and the nausea and the self-pity, he’d also experienced a number of uncomfortable revelations about the things he’d wanted and the things he’d had in his previous life. Things he’d squandered. Others he’d unduly prioritized. And though he never dared even prod the word after how he’d acted in the week leading up to Viktor’s death, it was an indisputable fact that Jayce loved him, in whatever form and understanding he’d been able to grasp before everything he’d built—his love, his entire life—was ripped unceremoniously from his grasp.

And now he’s here. Confronting the idea that Viktor felt the same way, that he’d probably categorized every shared touch by intensity, length, and intent in that same analytical brain that carried his Hextech dream from theory to reality in a single night.

It’s almost as if Viktor heard his thoughts. “Back then, the things that seemed the most important would only have been complicated by an attempt to alter the course of our affection for one another.” He casts a sweeping glance around the spherical chamber, and the purple lights shining out from his core seem to glow a little brighter. “Much has changed. The Arcane saw fit to change you, too. To bring you back to me.”

Jayce just stares, searching Viktor’s expression for something that would dispel the treacherous notion that they had spent the several years of their partnership dogged by the phantasm of romance, both too stubborn and focused on their work to entertain the shift.

He finds none. Just a mask of curious equanimity, eyes dark with longing.

“Viktor…”

He has no idea what his face is doing. Something tells him, though, that he looks lost. Stunned with grief. The same way he felt when he found out Viktor was in the hospital. When the finest doctors in Piltover told Jayce he didn’t have much time left.

Viktor stands, crossing the space between them with short, swaying strides.

He holds Jayce’s face in his hands, staring down at him for a few contemplative seconds before he bends at the waist and kisses him again, this time gentle, slow—hardly a trace of the frenetic burn from before—with the devotion of an untouched love.

The too-familiar sting of welling tears threatens the corner of his eyes as he melts into Viktor’s touch, and he reaches for him, hands sliding up the backs of Viktor’s legs. The texture of the woven replacement skin is still jarring, impossibly supple for what sounds and tastes like metal.

His extremities are somewhat cool to the touch, but as Jayce’s hands reach his thighs, his hips, the temperature rises. He’s warm here. Not warm like living flesh, but warm like a gently-humming machine.

Jayce’s fingers find those deep grooves at his hip creases and slip in, ghosting over the hot violet light. The surface is like sea glass, warmer still the closer Jayce gets to the center of his body, and Viktor reacts, the slow motion of his lips halted for a moment as his breath catches and he sighs into Jayce’s mouth.

Renewed arousal floods Jayce’s body. His dick twitches in response, and he wants more of that, and he’s never been more sure of anything in his life.

He traces down the inner curve of the crease, chasing that sigh and any other noise Viktor will make. He obliges with a sounded exhale, something akin to a moan, when Jayce’s fingertips reach the termination of that groove.

Viktor straightens up, keeping his hands draped over Jayce’s shoulders, and gazes at him through half-lidded eyes. Jayce, for his part, now free to inspect and explore the fascinating body before him, jerks Viktor toward him with his left hand while his right glides into the space between his thighs.

If Viktor was still fully human, Jayce would be cupping his dick with the palm of his hand. Instead, his fingers find a slick opening more familiar in practice to him than the alternative.

“You stopped,” Viktor observes, an inquisitive lilt to the statement.

“I’m, uh—” he starts, but instead of continuing, moves his finger a little, parting the strangely malleable metal, noting a simultaneous gasp from both of them as he sinks in to the first knuckle.

Viktor rolls his head back, and Jayce takes that as a sign to keep going. He pushes in further, feeling up the walls of the cavity for more of the woven texture that adorns his skin or some sort of inner mechanism, taking note of the conformity to his expectation as he locates the accretion of two filaments—one subducting the other, if he had to guess. The consistency of the fluid is somewhere between typical plasma transudate and mineral oil, warmed by the Arcane hum at the core of him. It drips down Jayce’s hand and runs down his forearm.

“I thought you might prefer me like this,” Viktor mumbles, head still tilted back in pleasure.

Jayce pauses. A comment like that should have bite to it. Passive-aggression. Resentment. But it doesn’t. And anyway, he’s too turned on to have that conversation with any measure of delicacy. He draws his finger back to the surface, and adds another as he probes for the full dimensions of the artificial canal.

The next sound Jayce receives is one that he’s only ever heard when Viktor was in pain. There’s a desperation to it; a strangled quality, as if he didn’t mean to let it out. Exactly the way he made it when he overextended his hip in the lab, or stepped too heavily on his right leg.

It’s intoxicating.

He moves his hand a little faster, more confident in the smooth motion now that he knows he’s not going to disrupt any fragile machinery.

“I would want you no matter what,” he promises, tugging Viktor closer still, until he meets the buzzing metal with his lips, simultaneously working Viktor open through the strange warmth and yield of his cunt and dragging his tongue along the comparatively cool convergences of muscle-fibers-turned metal.

Viktor moves one of his hands from the top of Jayce’s head to his shoulder, gripping tight as he bows forward. The other hand tangles into Jayce’s greasy, overgrown hair and pulls just as tight while he pants and moans, making a halfhearted effort to meet Jayce’s fingers with the motion of his hips.

Jayce’s hand at Viktor’s waist glides down the low plane of his ass, pulling Viktor’s leg so his thighs part further, and he ignores the searing pain in his braced leg to duck into the newly-made space to satisfy his scientific curiosity.

A molten-amethyst glow radiates from his core, brighter here, limning the dripping fluid xenon-purple, and Jayce can’t help but plunge in to taste him.

As soon as he presses his tongue flat to Viktor’s entrance, just above where his fingers pump in and out, he’s flooded with that same bitter-copper taste, only amplified in all aspects, tingling like he’s just licked a live wire, and Viktor clenches around him, silent convulsions tearing at the roots of Jayce’s hair, digging into the muscle at his shoulder like he’s trying to get his fingers around the bone.

Jayce slows his movement, switching to long, languid strokes as Viktor’s death grip gradually loosens. His sleeve is soaked from whatever composition of fluid the Hexcore created for this purpose, and off that thought, Jayce realizes how remarkably odd it is that Viktor’s capacity for sexual pleasure was preserved in this form; that if his earlier comment is to be believed, he can seemingly change aspects of his body at will.

That line of thinking washes away as suddenly as it appears, though, because he feels Viktor’s weight descending, and pulls his fingers out to catch him by the hip and attempt to help guide him to the ground.

It sort of works. Viktor doesn’t land nearly so hard as he might have, but Jayce still winces at the sharp sound of his knees hitting the ground.

He sits back on his legs, slightly hunched, and breathing so heavily that Jayce can almost see the wasting man he used to be in the confines of this living machine. He stares at Jayce with a blissed fuchsia glaze to his eyes, until his gaze drops to the damp, raised spot near the placket of Jayce’s trousers.

“You have missed me, haven’t you,” Viktor remarks feebly. It isn’t a question.

Before Jayce can even nod, Viktor’s hands are working the button-placket open, and he’s about to protest, to tell Viktor they can take it slow, until he feels a soft metallic hand close around his cock, and any hope of stringing words together leaves him completely.

A noise that surprises even him works its way free of his throat, and he stares at Viktor’s downcast eyes as he strokes him slow and soft, running his palm over the head as he changes his grip.

It’s all he can do not to come apart right there in Viktor’s hand.

But he summons whatever strength he still has, and grabs Viktor by the wrist to stop him. He doesn’t have any idea how to ask his unwillingly-resurrected ex-partner of nearly eight years to let him fuck him, but Viktor seems to understand.

“You would rather be inside me,” he guesses.

After everything that’s taken place on this floor, somehow, that is what makes Jayce flush hot from his ears to his shoulders. It’s a sordid mix of desire and shame that he’s felt too many times in his life, and it only makes him want it more.

Viktor watches him for a moment, likely seeing the two emotions swim around one another in his slack expression. “I want that, too.”

He crawls forward, placing his hand in the center of Jayce’s chest, and pushes him back, finally, blessedly, getting him off his knees.

And he’s once again on his back on the floor of this sanctum, with his trousers undone, and Viktor climbing on top of him. Disbelief rings in his skull. How many times has he pictured this? It’s nothing like the flashes of daydreams he used to pretend he didn’t have when their fingers would brush during a tool handoff. It’s dizzying, and filthy, and painful—the dull rebound ache from staying in the same ill-advised position for too long radiates out from below his knee in both directions, eliciting a groan—but it’s them, at the end of the world, crossing the line that separates death from life, ardor from affection, magic from science.

Viktor wastes no time. It’s one of the things Jayce has always loved about him. In the few seconds it takes Jayce to reorient himself, Viktor is already positioning himself above Jayce’s cock, sticky humidity between his thighs.

“Wait—” Jayce tries, but the thought, like all others in this moment, dies on his tongue as he feels Viktor sink down onto him, enveloping him completely in that hot, helical-textured oil slick with one fell motion.

It drives the breath from him.

The muscles in his lower belly jump in something that’s somewhere between a flinch and a shudder, and he nearly chokes on the pure sensation of it, strangling the startled moan that springs from him in response.

Jayce’s hands find Viktor’s waist as if by instinct. He grips with what he’s sure would be bruising force if what he held was flesh, holding tight to the dregs of his sanity in holding Viktor.

Part of him feels that he should be admonishing himself for this—for giving in to baser desires, for letting himself feel this way about—do this to—the man he betrayed in resurrection. His best friend, his partner, who was supposed to die.

And again, as Viktor lifts his weight and slides back down his length, shifting his hips to seat Jayce further, his doubts are washed away, replaced by white-hot sparks behind his eyes, by feverish want suffusing through his core. It’s more than he could have ever known to ask for, connecting with Viktor in a way that spans the chasm that has always lurked between mental and physical.

Viktor covers Jayce’s hands with his own, threading his fingers between Jayce’s. He guides Jayce’s right hand up the center of his body, coming to rest where the golden bolts from Viktor’s brace have fused to him. He stares, entranced, down at Jayce while he rolls his hips, a stark mirror of the hunger Jayce feels.

The weight of Jayce’s breath once again rocks his entire body, each exhale accompanied by a small, unbidden sound. His hips jerk upward to meet Viktor, and his palms roam over tepid metal in violet and gold, dragging and catching on each golden element, reveling in Viktor’s short, quiet moans and the way his eyes nearly close with the intensity.

The grip on his hands tightens, and Viktor pries his hands away, grinding down hard as he lets himself fall forward until the backs of Jayce’s hands hit the ground, and a seamy whine that surprises both of them shocks its way out of his throat.

Viktor looks transfixed by it, fuchsia and amber dancing in his eyes, now hovering just a bit above him. Jayce can imagine a dusty flush high in his cheeks, the likes of which he’s seen only a precious few times.

And then Viktor moves, building a brutal pace. Fluid drenches the places where their bodies connect. Jayce’s mouth hangs open, no longer equipped to control the sounds that spill from him. His vision starts to swim, and all he can see is Viktor, who is pinning his wrists and quite literally riding him into the ground.

Every meager thrust he can manage gives Jayce a full-body chill, a wave of molten stone turning over in his stomach—over, over, over—burning everything in its wake and settling deep in his gut. He is made of calescent need, and his mind stumbles over half-formed thoughts of disgust-guilt-greed, as much as his heart screams of devotion, longing, and love.

He doesn’t know when Viktor let go of his wrist, but his fingertips now rest, warm and commanding, on the side of Jayce’s face, spanning the hollow beneath the corner of his jaw to the edge of his eyebrow, and his cheekbone to his ear, and that molten pleasure rolls over itself one final time, and Viktor is kissing him, shoving his tongue into Jayce’s mouth. And his eyes unfocus on the edge of brilliant light and heat, and euphoria subsumes him as he comes, and his vision goes white.

PORTIA: And upon my knees
I charm you, by my once commended beauty,
By all your vows of love, and that great vow
Which did incorporate and make us one,
That you unfold to me, your self, your half,
Why you are heavy

His body sways heavily in the dark, rocked as if by ocean waves.

The last time he felt the swell of the tides, he was on a return voyage from Shurima, bearing forth the hex crystals in their base form. If he puts his mind to it, he can still feel the arid heat of the desert sun, reflecting off each individual grain of sand to magnify its violence. He recalls the drought of his mouth, the rasp of breath in his dry throat, the sound of his lungs like sand itself.

Now, he thinks he catches glimpses of leaves, and stone, and unbleached linen, and the motion continues to lull him, keeping his eyelids gravid and unyielding.

That is, until a hand, so unlike anything he’s felt before, brushes the damp hair away from his forehead, and the weight lifts, and he is able to see again.

The first thing he notices is that he did not imagine his surroundings. This place is real. He walked here. Prior happenings come flooding back—the mage at the Hexgate, Salo, Viktor.

Viktor.

A dusky violet hand rests beside his face, wrapped around someone’s arm.

The swaying—the weight of his body—

Jayce realizes, with a healthy measure of disbelief, that he is being carried. With one arm supporting his neck and the other beneath his knees, a woman, seemingly, bigger than Jayce by a decent measure, holds him aloft as she trudges forward. Her hair, a wave of auburn, spills down her shoulder and brushes the side of his face. He doesn’t know where they’re going.

Viktor’s face bobs into his peripheral, peering inquisitively at him. For some reason, Jayce doesn’t feel affronted in the same way he might’ve before everything that’s happened. It’s actually sort of nice. Any embarrassment that rises in him is quickly diffused by Viktor’s reassuring touch, stroking his cheek with a finger.

“How did I—” he asks, not quite sure how to qualify what’s happening to him.

Viktor draws in a deep breath. He’s silent for a few moments, and Jayce catches his eyes scanning the middle distance. “I encountered something… strange… in your mind, Jayce.”

His breath catches in his throat. His chest tightens. “In my mind?”

Viktor seems unfazed. “A barrier, of sorts. Blocking something—some traumatic memory, perhaps.”

All he can do is breathe. There’s no way Viktor can’t hear the tremble, sense the uneasiness in him.

His eyes glance toward Jayce. “When Salo met you in the failsafe chamber—I saw it then, too.” He looks sad. “Something truly harrowing must have happened to you.”

Jayce crushes his molars together, thinking back on the mage and his warnings. The fact that he’s already betrayed him. What it was like in the ravine, and that it was a version of Viktor who left him there to fend for himself.

The fact that now he has a fibula half made up of shards. He will never walk unhindered again. He will never be without pain.

“You’re angry.”

Jayce’s eyes widen. He turns as much as he can toward Viktor. Everything about him is an occult mystery now. It wouldn’t surprise Jayce if he could also sense emotions.

An amused half-smile lifts the corner of Viktor’s lip. “I felt it,” he explains, making smooth, repetitive strokes with his finger. “In the vibrations of your body. The way the muscles in your jaw contracted.”

He relaxes a little. “Yeah.”

Viktor hums. It resonates in that mechanical way, like an echo that follows him around. “I understand. Anger is… a useful tool, in the right application. If we had no use for it, we would not have it.” He scoffs quietly, and at Jayce’s confusion, he answers, “It is amusing, though; the concept of a vestigial emotion.”

There was something about Viktor’s unusually flat affect that had been bothering him, and it wasn’t until he brought up anger that Jayce really started to put it together. Why wasn’t Viktor angry?

The way he’d left the lab after waking up is half a maddened, sleep-deprived blur to Jayce, but he remembers Viktor’s reticence. The way his hands and eyes passed somberly over the blueprints that turned their Hextech into weapons. And by the time he told Viktor about his plans to resign from the Council, it was already too late.

Jayce knows he fucked up. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for his selfishness; his disrespect of Viktor’s autonomy, disguised as care. So he’s angry with himself, too.

But Viktor’s mannerisms, although not too terribly different from the way he behaved just before he left, are now strangely placid, calculating grace. It’s as if all has been forgiven without so much as an apology.

As they continue forward, and Jayce wakes up a little more, he becomes more aware of his body—the shape of him in this woman’s arms, the dangle of his limbs, the utter weight of him, which she doesn’t seem to mind. He raises his head and takes a quick glance at the state of things, flushing with shame as he recalls the intimacy he and Viktor shared, extrapolating his apparent syncope, and the fact that Viktor seems to have done up the front of his trousers—still undeniably damp—in preparation for whatever this is.

In examining his own position, he catches sight of a veritable crowd following behind them. His gaze sweeps over a procession of figures all clad in the same natural fabric as the people he vaguely recalls from his entry to this place. Some of them hold baskets of what appear to be circular bars of soap with herbal and floral inclusions, some carry armfuls of fruit or flowers, some, lengths of cloth and iridescent glass ampullae.

Furthermore, he sees a red-haired man, separate from the crowd, walking beside Viktor, carrying folded fabric the same color, weight, and texture as everyone else’s.

Ah. He knows what this is.

He glances back at Viktor, who has draped Jayce’s old blanket over his shoulders as a cloak of some sort, achingly reminiscent of the way it hung off him that day in the lab. He’s effortlessly beautiful—always has been, Jayce thinks—watching him as he marches alongside them with his cane-turned staff in his other hand.

By comparison, Jayce feels like a feral thing, bestial in ways he cannot prove he isn’t. He’s suddenly, painfully aware of the thick layer of grime that coats his body, the way his clothes are tattered and bloody and stained, the grit of mud and weeks of reptilian viscera under his fingernails. His hair is oil-drenched, scalp scabbed from his incessant scratching at it. Human or no, he’s retroactively astonished that Viktor was willing to get anywhere near him, let alone take any part of him inside his body.

The grimace he makes at that thought brings some spots of stiffness on the side of his face to his notice, parts that are not moving like the rest of his skin, but rather like scar tissue. He brings a hand to his cheek, running his fingertips over the artificially smooth ovular shapes with curved, raised ridges, that have somehow fused with his skin.

“Viktor…” Jayce prompts, anxiety rising in his chest.

Viktor turns to him as called, and looks at Jayce’s hand on his cheek for a moment before a soft smile overtakes his features. It looks like the sun after rain.

“My mark,” he responds, gazing at Jayce with such lovesick pride that it makes his chest ache.

He frowns, and feels around with his fingertips until they match with each individual spot, and he realizes with fuzzy memory that this is the aftermath of whatever Viktor tried to do when he held Jayce’s face in his palm, that this is the shape of Viktor’s hand, forever imprinted in Jayce’s skin. His mark.

Looking around, he notices that others have them, too. But theirs are all in different configurations at the forehead, and white streaks their hair where the fingerprint touches it.

There isn’t much time to wonder, though, as they reach their destination: a steaming pool of water, surrounded by dense foliage in bench planters. The smell is sulfurous, the air thick with humidity, and as they get closer, the woman carrying him lowers him gently to his feet.

No longer in her arms, Jayce finally gets a look at her face. She has angular features and striking green eyes, which are replicated by tattoos in an array on her forehead. Jayce has never understood the appeal.

“Thank you for your assistance, Selori,” Viktor says as he passes his staff off to the red-haired man.

She dips her head. “Of course, my Herald.”

Jayce’s brow furrows when he hears that. “Herald?”

Viktor’s gaze sweeps over the congregated, Selori now among their ranks. “The people of this place are remarkably obliging.” He takes a deep breath. “They call me Herald for the service I provide them. For the return of their hope.”

Jayce follows Viktor’s line of sight and sees what he’s talking about—many of them have prosthetic limbs made of the same artificial porcelain-like material. Some have broad scars filled in or false eyes made from it. This is what Viktor meant when he said he wanted to show Jayce what he’d accomplished: he finally found a way to put their dream into practice.

His heart squeezes as he looks back to Viktor. For the first time since Viktor’s resurrection, he smiles. Lets out a breathy laugh of disbelief. Hope and admiration come flooding back, as long-strangers to him. He understands now, firsthand, why they call him Herald.

And the Herald’s attention turns to him.

He touches Jayce with astounding fondness, hand gliding up his arm to his shoulder, from his shoulder to his neck, and finally coming to rest on the fingerprints he left there. Jayce feels a jolt at the connection, and his hand flies up to grasp Viktor’s wrist.

“Easy, Jayce,” he murmurs. “I won’t hurt you.”

Jayce tries to relax, but the hammering in his chest makes it hard. Without warning, Viktor slides his hands into the front of Jayce’s coat and slips it off his shoulders, letting it fall to the ground.

He keeps his eyes fixed reverently on Jayce, brushing his hand up below the hem of Jayce’s shirt. For a moment, his hand just lingers there, flat palm pressed reassuringly to his waist. But it’s over near as soon as it starts, and Viktor grips the hem in both hands, beginning to lift it.

Jayce draws in a startled breath. Despite understanding what’s about to happen, it feels indecent, wrong, to be undressed by his partner in front of a crowd. There must be somewhere near seventy or eighty people gathered here, all staring expectantly at him.

Viktor looks out with him, hands still beneath his shirt. “They don’t mind,” he assures, his voice a low hum.

Jayce breathes deep, closes his eyes, and nods, allowing Viktor to peel the shirt off over his head. That, too, he discards.

He runs his hand over Jayce’s bared skin, just exploring, taking in the sight and feel of him. His fingers stray too near Jayce’s waistband, and a sharp prick of arousal runs through him, which he tamps down as quickly as possible. Not here, not in front of all of them. Viktor’s eyes betray him some small amusement.

He guides Jayce to sit on one of the benches, and kneels down in front of him, fingers glowing soft white as he meticulously disassembles the brace Jayce made for his leg with the pieces of the old Mercury Hammer. The brace was a stopgap, fashioned from necessity and desperation, never meant for long-term use, much less easy removal. He’s already worn it well past its capacity.

But Viktor works with care, and magic, and makes short work of it, and once it’s a pile of scrap again, Jayce feels stripped, unbalanced, despite the fact that he’s still seated.

Viktor moves on to his shoes next, the leather soft and tattered, worn nearly all the way through. They come off without issue, and so do his threadbare socks, but the skin on Jayce’s feet is wrinkled and swollen and painful, moreso without the confines of the leather than with it.

He tries to ignore the proximity and recent memory as Viktor expertly unbuttons his trousers again, this time sliding them, along with his underwear, off his hips and down his legs. They, too, make it to the pile.

And just like that, he’s completely bare before half the village.

In some ways, this is what being Piltover’s Man of Progress was like.

Viktor inspects his leg where the Arcane infested his flesh and knit him back together, smoothing over the marked skin in gentle motions. And then he stands.

“Huck, if you would,” he requests, and the red-haired man, Huck, walks over and hands the staff to Jayce. His eyes flick over to check Huck’s for any sign of judgement, but he finds none. Just… pity, maybe? But mostly, conviction and compassion.

So he takes Viktor’s offered hand, and plants the staff—now completely unrecognizable as the cane he once built for Viktor as a replacement for the one they broke the night they cracked Hextech—as firmly as he can, and struggles a bit to stand, letting out a small, pained noise through gritted teeth.

He walks with Viktor to the edge of the pool, slow and unsteady, and sets the staff down at the side. Viktor wades in first, taking both Jayce’s hands, leading him as they descend to a depth that’s waist-high to him and nearly chest-high to Viktor. The water is warm, almost hot, and he realizes as a helpless moan drifts free from his mouth that this is the warmest he’s been in what must have been months. It instantly soothes his protesting muscles. It makes him want to cry.

People from the crowd begin to straggle toward them until they’ve formed a line. They come to the side of the pool, set down their supplies and gifts, then find a place in the artificial grove to stand and watch.

Viktor never takes his eyes off Jayce.

His hands follow his gaze, alighting on Jayce’s waist. There’s an intensity in his touch—a charge, a pull, a desire. Jayce draws in a soft breath, feeling that will settle on him like a stone into a riverbed.

Gravity.

Like always.

Even when he strays to the side of the pool to retrieve a painted ceramic amphora, his attention does not deviate long. He drags the vessel along the water’s surface as he wades back toward Jayce, filling it.

And when he’s back in front of Jayce, he uses both hands to gently upend the amphora, pouring the water over Jayce’s right shoulder and down his chest. He repeats this two more times, over Jayce’s left shoulder next, and finally gets up on tiptoes, raising the vessel to Jayce’s head.

Jayce bows forward and Viktor pours. The water flows over his scalp and down his neck, dripping from the tips of his hair when he straightens again.

For the most part, the dirt and blood still cling to him. But he can feel some of it melting off.

Viktor then presses the amphora into Jayce’s hands, and reaches up to touch his face. For the past few minutes, he’s stood a respectable distance away, but now he moves closer, nearly holding the amphora between their bodies.

His touch is light, as it has been, but his thumbs press into Jayce’s cheeks, rubbing some of the dirt away. A soft, peaceful expression governs his face.

“There you are,” he murmurs, and raises his hands further, pressing closer, tucking Jayce’s hair behind his ears.

In doing so, he brushes one of the fingerprints again, and Jayce flinches a little as the current runs through him.

“Come, Jayce.”

He brings Jayce to the side of the pool, near the baskets, and hoists himself up onto the ledge, rifling through the contents of one. Sitting there, with his feet dipped into the water, Viktor now has a height advantage over Jayce. He retrieves a bar of soap and a cloth from the spread, and takes the amphora back from Jayce.

“Sit,” he instructs as he fills the vessel once more.

And Jayce sits, finding a natural ledge at Viktor’s feet.

Viktor starts with his hair, wetting the soap and then lathering it between his hands. He starts at the root, combing his fingers through, gently massaging his scalp. It smells like lavender and honey. He instantly relaxes into the rhythmic movement, leaning his head back against Viktor’s knee. It’s calming, hypnotic. Transports his consciousness back to when he was a child, when his mamá would force him into the bath and wash his hair because he had too much energy to be trusted to do it himself.

And then Viktor pauses, cups his hand over Jayce’s forehead, and rinses the soap out. It feels better already.

He opens his eyes, blinking up at Viktor, who sets the amphora to the side while he traces the planes of Jayce’s face in contemplative quiet. His eyes are pure, warm gold.

“Turn toward me,” he commands gently.

Jayce turns.

Viktor washes his face with the same meticulous care, broad strokes and gentle pressure until he gets to the creases of Jayce’s nose, for which he folds the cloth and presses the point in, and the rough thatch of his beard, which he cleans in a similar fashion to Jayce’s hair.

Once his beard has been rinsed, Viktor sets the cloth, now stained with a dilute red, on his knee and furrows his brow, holding Jayce’s chin in one hand while he thumbs over Jayce’s bottom lip, frowning. His eyes move left, and his touch follows, drawing a line across his cheek.

He shakes his head. “How did this happen?”

Jayce averts his gaze, looking to the ground instead of Viktor.

He doesn’t know how to explain.

“I… went somewhere,” he says, sighing, “through the Hexgate. You saw me come back, I think.”

Viktor nods.

“It was Piltover, but wrong. Everything was destroyed.” His mind churns, trying to figure out the simplest, vaguest way to explain. To not have to mention the mage. “I was trapped there. For, uh…” He takes a moment, takes a breath. “For a while.”

Viktor’s fingers still beneath his chin. He’s thinking.

“How did you get back?”

And there it is, the question Jayce was dreading. Viktor is too smart not to ask it.

“I went back to the Hexgate.” Not a lie. “There was… a concentration of Arcane energy there. Another Mercury Hammer. It looked like it had been there for centuries.” Also not a lie. “When I touched it, there was a bright blue light, and I came back.” He sighs. “I don’t know why.”

That’s a lie. But only partially.

Viktor hums, again producing that deep resonant sound. He’s silent for a moment.

“The Arcane moves in patterns. Once you learn to interpret those patterns, you notice them in everything. It possesses a will. A will that I observe. Translate. Enact.” He strokes Jayce’s jaw while he speaks. “It chooses its players. I would venture that you and I are specially suited.”

Hextech, manipulation of the Arcane. Jayce huffs a laugh. He’s not wrong.

When Jayce looks up again, he sees the bodies that surround them, shifting and swaying. He’d almost forgotten they were there.

“Do you do this with everyone?” he asks. It was supposed to be just a question, but even Jayce hears the preliminary envy in it.

Viktor lets out a breathy chuckle. Shakes his head.

“Only you.”

Something about those two words pin him to the spot, take his breath away.

The world shrinks to just him and Viktor. He wraps his hand half around Viktor’s thigh, and squeezes lightly. He exhales an anxiety he didn’t even know was in his body.

And they continue.

Viktor washes his back, his chest, his arms and underarms, slow and methodical, as if they’ve got all the time in the world.

Maybe they do. Jayce has no idea if living metal ages.

And then Viktor slips back into the water and whispers for him to lean over the edge of the pool. Jayce obliges, but he’s sure his cheeks darken as Viktor positions himself behind him and reaches under the water to clean between his legs, clinical so as not to provoke. But Jayce would be lying if he tried to pretend his heart rate didn’t increase a little.

After, Viktor asks Jayce to sit up on the edge, as he did. He stays in the water and sets to work washing Jayce’s legs and feet.

There’s a heaviness to the air around them that’s become palpable. In it, Jayce feels like an attraction at Progress Day. It’s all the eyes. He feels their intent, their longing, as intimately as if it were his own as they gaze in at him from all sides.

“Do they always watch you like this?” Jayce asks, half a joke.

Viktor pauses. His eyes dart up, past Jayce, taking in the air of the crowd.

“No,” he says, ease in his still-neutral, focused expression.

Jayce casts his gaze around, as if he can read what Viktor seems to have put together if he just tries.

He can’t. “Then why…”

Viktor returns to his task. He massages soap over Jayce’s heel, between his toes. “They envy you.”

And as soon as Viktor says it, he understands. Only you. The feeling amplifies. He can feel its velocity—all vectors turned toward him as if he’s the most massive object in relative space.

“It’s, uh… a little much,” he confesses, and watches Viktor’s brow furrow.

Viktor briefly touches his knee, then ascends from the pool, meeting Huck. He reaches out and touches Huck’s shoulder, and he stares at him for a moment, then nods.

At once, the crowd begins to retreat. They cast strangely sympathetic glances at him, and their envy disperses as they do. Huck is the only one who stays, but even he gives them some space, going as far as the entryway to the little oasis, standing there with his back turned to them.

“There.”

A bit of guilt lingers in his chest, but it does feel like a weight has been lifted from him.

When Viktor returns to him, he kneels down beside Jayce, water running off his body, holding one of the glass ampullae. He pours a bit of what looks like oil into his palms and rubs his hands together.

Something spice-forward and resinous diffuses from the oil that reminds him of his time in Shurima. Viktor holds out a hand and Jayce gives his hand in return.

Viktor bends and kisses Jayce’s palm, then begins to massage the oil into his hand. He works his way up Jayce’s arm, thumbs digging pleasantly into his sore muscles. Jayce breathes deep and slow while Viktor works, repeating the process with his other arm, his shoulders, scalp, chest, legs, feet: right and then left as if it’s a practiced ritual.

When Viktor reaches his left shin, he pays extra attention to the Arcane-sealed wound. Jayce sucks in a breath through his teeth as the dull pain radiates from it like a tender bruise. Viktor’s eyes flick up to meet his, but drop immediately back down as he continues, going over and over and over it. It’s a habit he’s always had—compulsive repetition when he’s trying to figure out how to make something work the way he wants it to.

“This is my doing,” Viktor concludes.

Jayce’s heart immediately jumps to his throat.

“Wh—” his eyebrows knit together, and his shoulders drop back. “What do you mean?”

Viktor looks up, his face a mask of contemplative remorse. “You’ve suffered so much. If you were here with me from the beginning, this would not have happened.”

Jayce glances off, half-relieved, half-chagrined. “Viktor…” he sighs, trying not to sound too admonishing.

“You’ve seen what I have done for the people here,” he reasons. White light begins to travel down his arm, to warm the palm that covers over Jayce’s scar. “Allow me to heal you.”

It triggers something in him.

“No—”

“No?”

He flinches away violently, kicking to get his leg free from Viktor’s hand. It sends tendrils of pain shooting through his leg to move the injury like that, but he can’t stop himself. His head feels like it’s splitting again. He sees the mage, and the blighted creatures that watched his every move. The pain of climbing up from the fissure floods back to him. He grits his teeth and groans through waves of agony, both from the phantom memory and in the ripping headache he’s experiencing again from his temporal divergence.

He’d thought it was over.

Clearly, it is not.

“Jayce.” Viktor crouches next to him, brushing the wet hair out of his eyes. He looks somewhere between perplexed and concerned. “Come back to me.”

Jayce breathes through the pain and terror, focusing on Viktor, here with him now, his partner, his love.

And eventually, the torture subsides.

Viktor is sat beside him now, holding his hand. He doesn’t remember when that happened.

“Sorry,” he breathes, mostly out of habit. He’s still shaken, but there’s an onus of further explanation that rests with him now. “I don’t know why I—I didn’t… hurt you, did I?”

Viktor squeezes his hand. “No. You needn’t worry about that.” He pauses, running his thumb over the runestone embedded in Jayce’s wrist. “I would not force you to accept my gift, Jayce. I wanted only to end your suffering. To give you what I have given to so many others. But I can see there is some aversion. It’s alright.”

Jayce lies back, staring up, as far as he can see.

Then he curls onto his side and buries his face in Viktor’s midsection.

They sit there for what feels like hours, Viktor’s hand in Jayce’s hair, rubbing gentle circles into his scalp. Jayce nearly drifts off in Viktor’s lap again.

“Jayce,” Viktor finally prompts. “It would be best if we made our return. I have something to show you.”

He drags his body up, far more exhausted than he’s allowed himself to realize up until this point. Viktor helps him stand, and Huck returns to the pool, retrieving the pile of clothing he carried earlier. Together, they dress Jayce in the wrapped cloth of the village, and Huck helps Viktor dress afterward. It seems the blanket isn’t just a drape, but also functions as a robe of sorts, expertly wrapped, held in place by the belts he saw drop to the floor earlier.

On the walk back to the village, Viktor lends Jayce his staff. Every step is another jolt of pain, but he pushes forward dutifully, and as they make their way through the dusty paths, people begin to whisper to one another. They all seem to know something he doesn’t.

Huck trails behind them until they reach a dwelling on the edge of the hub. It’s similar to all the others—smooth, organic curves of stretched canvas over odd, round metal frames, but this one has even more of that stained glass he briefly saw earlier, and as far as he can tell, it’s the closest structure to the sanctum aside from the massive bell.

Viktor pulls one of the deep blue curtains to the side and ushers Jayce in.

It’s a modest, one-room thing, boasting a bed, a table with chairs, a chest, and some shelves as its only furniture. They, too, are rough-hewn, with organic shapes and twists. The floor is lined with woven rush mats, and a blob of diffused, colored light rests in the middle of the floor, cast by the circular stained-glass skylight in the center of the frame.

From the corner of his eye, he can see Viktor watching him take it in. “This is ours.”

Ours.

“It’s small, but—”

“It’s perfect,” he interjects, more than aware of Viktor’s tendency to downplay his accomplishments. Viktor blinks, but doesn’t argue, looking fondly around the room.

Now, emboldened by the heavy curtain that separates them from the crowd of people who watched Viktor bathe him, Jayce threads his arms around Viktor’s waist and pulls him close, pressing their bodies together. He could swear he hears Viktor laugh—a soft, delicate sound like a wisp of smoke from an extinguished candle.

He can’t help himself. He stares wistfully at Viktor’s eyes—warm, deep, true amber—and then at his lips, heart aching momentarily for the sound, the lab, the past. But equally grateful for the eruption that burned it away. “Can I…”

“Kiss me?”

Viktor’s amusement persists in that question, soft and familiar, and it melts Jayce’s heart; a promise of the gentleness they used to share, reprised.

And Jayce does.

He anchors his palm below Viktor’s jaw, tilting his face upward, guiding their lips to meet. The contact is as tender as his laugh, petal-soft as they kiss, as easy and unhurried as breathing.

CASSIUS: My heart is thirsty for that noble pledge—
Fill, Lucius, till the wine o’erswell the cup;
I cannot drink too much of Brutus’ love.

The line stretches as far as he can see, all the way to the gate of the commune.

People shuffle forward, faces hidden or downcast, peering around one another to get a glimpse of the storied healer bringing peace to the hopeless.

Jayce sits on a fountain’s edge behind Viktor, watching around the folds of his robe as he summons forth the Arcane to re-set bones, replace limbs, excise tumors, and knit flesh back together.

Despite the fact that he’s been watching Viktor do this for days, the miracle is still fascinating to witness. It starts as a magnetic pull, he’s noticed; that violet glow surging down Viktor’s arm and into his fingers, almost like he can’t resist the force of the attraction. Then his eyes are overtaken by the white light, and it coalesces and travels down his arm in a helix, bathing the recipient in blinding brilliance. And when the incandescence dims, they’re transformed. Jayce wonders if it will ever lose its novelty.

But it takes a toll on Viktor.

Even if he and Huck had tried to keep it secret from Jayce, he would have known. Twenty small miracles, ten large, fifteen or so if they’re evenly balanced—it varies from day to day, but the effect is the same. Viktor’s light diminishes slowly, veins of violet growing thready and sparse. His breaths come heavier. His eyelids fall.

He tries to power through it every time.

Eventually, either he or Huck will apologize to the gathered that they’ll need to continue waiting or come back tomorrow, and will retire to the spherical copy of the top of the Hexgate wherein Viktor meditates to reconnect with the Arcane, as he was when Jayce arrived.

The line is silent today, as always, except to react to the transformations Viktor performs.

A man steps up—tall, but bent awkwardly at the spine. He holds a staff not so unlike Viktor’s, and struggles to his knees, helped by Huck, who hovers around Viktor as a constant attendant.

In the days they spent alone together after Jayce’s arrival, Huck came to check on or speak with Viktor more times than Jayce cared to count. It was always a timid sort of interruption, and Viktor would rise from their bed or their table to step outside for a few moments before reappearing in their home, completely unchanged. When asked, Viktor said only that Huck was “eagerly persistent” and “wanted to make sure he was alright.”

At some point, he explained to Jayce that Huck was the first that he healed, right here in the Sump, after some sort of altercation that he wouldn’t elaborate on. Jayce didn’t pry.

When they emerged together after days of voluntary sequestration, Jayce found it in himself to accept that Huck would be his shadow as long as he was by Viktor’s side.

The man holds tight to his staff with both hands, bowing his head so that his stringy, mud-covered hair falls around his face.

Viktor reaches out, led by that drawing charge to set his splayed fingertips on the man’s hairline. He closes his eyes in concentration, focusing the energy, the light.

It pours from him, reaching its glaring crest, illuminating the man’s bone structures from the inside out. Little gasps leach from the queue as if they haven’t seen it a handful of times already, but Jayce can’t blame them.

The man’s breath shakes in disbelief, and at this, Jayce softens. It’s always worth sitting these long sessions with Viktor, because the hesitant wonder and palpable relief on peoples’ faces after receiving Viktor’s gift, as he called it, is greater in tangible good than everything they dreamed of doing with Hextech from its very inception.

He stands to his full height, towering over Viktor, without any assistance. What happens next is usually some variation of breathless thanks to Viktor, telling him that they never thought they would feel this way again, that they had lost the ability to hope until now.

This man doesn’t do any of that.

He stares down at Viktor for a while, mouth agape in silent awe.

Then, he turns, and looks over Viktor’s shoulder, directly at Jayce.

His expression, at first, is unreadable. He just stares down the wide bridge of his nose, as if time has stopped around them. It melts into a strangely familial warmth—the look of a long-lost uncle unexpectedly recognizing his sister’s eyes in his nephew—then declines further into pity. A wistful sort, as if he has some benevolence to bestow, if only Jayce would let him.

Jayce opens his mouth to speak, to ask if they knew each other somehow, once—and immediately, tears well in the man’s eyes, and he thanks Viktor profusely before being taken into the village by another member.

His skin crawls with the unease it inspires.

“Viktor,” Jayce prods, unable to reckon with why no one else seemed to find what just happened strange.

Viktor looks over his shoulder, but only briefly, eyes shifting in that computational silver-blue-green, until the next aspirant approaches and draws his attention away.

He looks toward Huck, hoping against his better judgement to find anything to go off of, but he’s as inscrutable as the man who just walked away. Of course he is.

The next few come and go without incident, though he can tell Viktor is beginning to tire by the way he holds onto his staff a little tighter, starts to lean more heavily against it as if his own body weight is dragging him down.

Jayce gets to his feet, gritting his teeth at the pain. Assisted by Viktor’s ability to transmute metal, they were able to rework his makeshift brace into something more sustainable, but there are still plenty of modifications to be made. He walks up to Viktor, tugging the wrapped cloth beneath his brace back up his thigh as he goes, ready to pull Viktor away from the work with a sympathetic hand on the small of his back.

Viktor turns slowly, eyes already half-closed, and that’s it, he’s hit his limit—but the girl is already standing in front of them, staring down at the ground.

She cannot be more than sixteen years old. And for all intents and purposes, she looks fine. Aside from the orchid veins that surround her eyes, that turn her irises that same luminous pink.

Viktor leans some of his weight to Jayce, in a way that appears to make those assembled nervous. He studies the girl, tilting his head toward Jayce’s shoulder.

“What ails you?” he asks.

The girl won’t look at him.

“My mind,” she says, tone rough and flat. “Make it stop. Please.”

At that, Viktor frowns. He reaches out his hand to her forehead, fingertips connecting weakly with her skin. His eyes close fully, and he relaxes into Jayce’s side, probably more than he should. What Jayce is doing is already unprecedented. No one touches Viktor while he works. Not even Huck.

The purple light diffuses from his hand into her head, and he opens his eyes again with a small noise of empathy.

“I recognize your pain,” he mumbles. “It was mine, once. Long ago.” He draws in a tired breath. “I will do what I can to help you. But it will not be simple.”

The girl looks up then, first at Viktor, then at Jayce, supporting his partner’s weight. It’s gone on too long, he knows.

She doesn’t appear to be judging him, though. Her brows are knit, corners of her mouth pulled down. She looks almost… scared. As if there’s something about Jayce that’s wrong. Uncanny.

“And it will not be today,” Huck interrupts, steering the girl toward one of the waiting faithful, giving his usual spiel asking everyone to remain nearby for the time being, while the Herald rests.

Together, they walk Viktor back to the sanctum. Huck keeps a respectful distance as they ascend the hill, while Jayce holds Viktor by the waist.

When they reach the sanctum, Huck hovers in the doorway. In the center of the chamber, Viktor sleepily holds Jayce’s face in his hands.

“Thank you, Jayce,” Viktor murmurs, leaning up to kiss him slow and deep, in his state of fatigue.

Huck makes a half-startled noise, and out of the corner of his eye, Jayce catches him averting his gaze.

There is absolutely no way he didn’t know.

When they part, Jayce helps Viktor to sit down on the ground, and he grabs Jayce’s hand as he’s pulling away.

“I’ll find you when I am no longer indisposed,” he promises, giving Jayce’s hand a light squeeze.

Jayce nods, and lets go of Viktor’s hand as the tendrils of white light find his body. He doesn’t stay to watch the levitation, just crowds Huck out of the chamber, to the other man’s discontent.

Outside, he stares at Huck in silence for a few seconds.

“Do you ever get tired of it?” he asks, unsure if it’s irritation or uncertainty that pollutes his tone.

Huck doesn’t ask for clarification.

“Of course not. The Herald saved me.” He sounds so secure in his convictions. “From Shimmer. From myself.” He huffs a laugh, almost of disbelief. “My debt to him will never be paid.”

Jayce takes that in. He has to admit, it’s off-putting. Hearing people refer to his partner, the man he knows more intimately than himself, as if he’s a living god.

He doesn’t have a response.

While Viktor rests, Jayce goes walking.

He finds himself on the main thoroughfare of the commune, searching a sea of smiling faces as nonchalantly as possible for the girl from earlier.

Viktor’s community has taken to calling him Anointed, or The Herald’s Anointed if they’re not speaking directly to him, so it’s difficult to blend in. He almost feels like the face of Progress again. Everyone seems to know him here, too.

When he finally catches sight of her, she is sat on the ground in front of one of the tenements, sketching some esoteric symbol in vine charcoal on a leaf of parchment.

“You draw?” he asks, feeling suddenly both self-conscious about seeking out a teenage girl who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him, and also nostalgia for his Academy days, when he would stare across the room at Viktor while he worked and capture his likeness in his notebook.

She startles at the sound of his voice, looking up with that same expression she wore earlier, only worse—though the glow in them has dispelled somewhat, the look in her eyes is akin to revulsion. And strangely, it comforts him, to see something unrestrained in this muted world, something visceral instead of tranquil.

“What do you want?” she shoots back, still in that affronted deadpan.

Her hair is loose over her shoulders, silky black, and pin-straight. It reminds him of Cait’s.

He shakes himself, realizing that he’s been staring for just a touch too long.

“Earlier,” he starts, “when Viktor was—”

She gives him an odd look. “Viktor?”

Jayce huffs. “The… Herald. After he spoke to you, you looked at me.”

“You were standing right next to him,” she states, tone dismissing and acerbic, as if that’s answer enough. “I didn’t know I needed permission to look at someone. I’ll be sure to ask next time.”

And with that, she goes back to her sketching. It’s not just any symbol, those are runes.

“I think you know that’s not what I meant.”

Instead of answering, she just gathers up her array of materials and stands, making to walk away.

“You’re the only person here who’s looked at me like that.”

She rolls her eyes, but does, in fact, stop. “Like what?”

In attempting to put it into words, he comes up at a loss. “Like… something other than pity—or that weird, detached… tranquility thing.”

Her frown softens. “Fine. I’m from the Undercity, but I used to live in Piltover. You’re Jayce Talis. I saw your face on every balloon, mug, billboard, banner… fucking everywhere.”

He blinks. Takes an intentional breath. The shock stalls his brain. “You… hate me?”

Discomfort edges its way into her expression, but she sticks to her guns. “I mean, yeah. A little.” She looks away, shaking her head in exasperation. “I don’t worship you like some people do.”

“No—” he starts, a little more forcefully than he might have liked. “No, that’s a…” he grimaces, running his hand over his forehead, feeling the marked absurdity of the situation. “…good thing.”

She stares at him for a long moment. “Okay...” A sigh pushes air through her nose, and her jaw flexes. Just like Cait. “I was high on Shimmer, when I came here. And I recognized you. Your voice. But when I looked at you, I couldn’t really… get a clear picture. It was… weird.”

Jayce listens, concern mounting as she speaks. Whether for himself or her, he can’t tell. “Weird how?”

“Like… warped. Like the air around a fire. But… colored? Everything was moving.”

His heart pounds. “And it wasn’t like that when you looked at anyone else.”

“No.”

He takes that in, as best he can. If this girl can see something like that…

“But—when you moved, I saw these… afterimages. Almost like time was stopping every few seconds, but you kept moving through it.” Her eyes flick back toward him, peering up like she expects him to chastise her. Her voice is scarce more than a whisper. “I don’t know why.”

But he’s frozen to the spot.

They just stare at one another in stunned silence.

Dry air whistles downward past Jayce’s ears.

It’s sharp—too fast for him to breathe, whipping his hair into his eyes.

A hand is clamped around his throat, its fingers digging into the flesh beneath his jaw. His legs kick ineffectually beneath him, catching nothing but open air.

His eyes are half-open. He can’t make out any shapes, but he catches glimpses of blue lights, smearing into streaks as the air splits jagged around him.

This is not fucking good.

He claws one-handed at the pressure circling his throat, gripping whatever is in his other hand tight, fighting to pry his eyelids open to face his aggressor. Where was he before this? The Hexgate failsafe chamber?

His mind is displaced—hazy—like he’s not supposed to be here. Wherever here is. Panic scrambles up his throat as he struggles to take anything resembling a full breath.

He groans at the strain, the ache in his jaw, the fact that he’s apparently lost consciousness at some point. There was an argument, he thinks. But he can’t, for the literal life of him, remember.

The hand won’t loosen no matter what he does. So, instead, he tries to get an arm between them, fumbling for any purchase, any leverage he can get.

His fingertips glance off something made of cold metal, only… soft? Its texture is alien. Otherworldly.

Viktor?

Smudges of dusky purple come into view, along with yellow pinpricks of light, as he finally wrenches his eyes open. This split face, this mask—he’s seen it before. Hovering above a mountain of corpses. Ravenous.

This is Viktor, he remembers, transformed and monstrous, and one of them is going to die here.

Jayce lets out a strangled yell, writhing and kicking fruitlessly against Viktor’s strength. They’re skyrocketing through the body of the Hexgate, and it isn’t long before they emerge into the dome, and Viktor is aiming the claw at him, and Jayce wrenches his head to the side, only narrowly avoiding vaporization.

It’s hot and blazing and deafening, missing his ear by mere centimeters, but Viktor doesn’t change his trajectory. And in the space of three heartbeats, something detonates, throwing him from Viktor’s grasp to the Hexgate’s hard metal roof.

“Jayce?”

His body aches from the impact, heart tripping over itself with the dregs of adrenaline.

That voice. It isn’t—

He hisses in pain as he lifts himself from the ground, grasping blindly for the handle of a Mercury Hammer that isn’t there.

And as he gasps for air on the floor, it slowly comes back to him. He’s draped in soft cloth, not clad in armor. He left the Hexgate failsafe almost two weeks ago, by his best estimation. And Viktor is Viktor, he observes, to his great relief. No more monstrous than he’s ever been; no more than Jayce made him.

Viktor sits up in their bed, edging over to the side Jayce must have fallen from.

He regards Jayce with scrutiny, lowering himself at the very edge of the mattress, fuchsia clouds in his pale irises doling out heartache. “What happened to you?”

Somehow, Jayce can tell he’s not just asking about how he ended up on the floor.

He takes a deep breath, gaze drifting from Viktor’s. “Just, uh… another nightmare.”

Viktor reaches out to him, cradling Jayce’s jaw in his palm, fingertips brushing into his hair. He coaxes Jayce’s face back toward him.

“It troubles me to see you like this, heartstring.”

He nuzzles into Viktor’s hand, sighing. He has no idea what to say or do with the burdensome secret that Viktor is the villain of his unconscious mind. It feels like cognitive dissonance.

His thoughts return to the mage. His failed mission. The things he saw in the stone. His stomach turns. His brain is too active not to connect the dots.

“Let me help,” Viktor beseeches.

Jayce grinds his molars together, dropping his gaze to the floor. Silence hangs like a pendulum between them.

Viktor is the first to push on it.

“Jayce.”

His mind sputters like a stalled engine and his head throbs. He keeps his silence. He’s going to have to come up with an explanation sooner or later, he can’t just keep avoiding the subject. They’re partners. And that word, though it’s always held some charged undercurrent, means more now than it ever had the capacity to before. He owes Viktor that much.

But before he can think of anything, Viktor tugs Jayce toward him, lips meeting his with a striking tenderness.

The alarm in his body dissolves slowly, osmotic through the permeable barrier of their mouths.

Viktor pulls back by a breath, creating less than a coin’s width of air between them. He rests his forehead and the bridge of his nose against Jayce’s. His lips graze Jayce’s as he speaks.

“Please.”

Viktor’s plea rends his heart. A voice in his head tells him that if he truly trusted Viktor, he would acquiesce. He can’t tell if it’s reason or repentance.

The temporal instability he suffered when he first arrived has calmed significantly, but he still feels that riving feeling in his skull from time to time, the burning of the runestone in his wrist. Still sees flashes of the corrupted timeline when he rounds a corner too quickly. And the dreams. He hasn’t gotten a full night of restful sleep in days.

He often finds Viktor awake, staring down at him with a dissatisfied little frown, his cool metal hand resting lightly on Jayce’s forehead.

It’s a recursive system, self-sustaining by the way Jayce’s distress feeds Viktor’s pensiveness, which feeds Jayce’s distress.

It’s a mess.

And maybe Viktor can help him without changing him, the way the others seem to have been changed. Without finding out about the version of himself who’s a mage in a perpetually-doomed alternate universe, who asked Jayce to kill him.

The pendulum swings neatly between them.

Jayce leans away, enough to look Viktor in the eyes. As if he could deny him anything.

“Okay,” he breathes. “Just… promise me you’ll leave my leg.”

Viktor frowns, but nods his assent.

Viktor leads him by the hand to the glass greenhouse dome in the center of the commune.

Moonlight has to travel far to reach down here, but it does, just barely touching the tops of the tenements, diffused ambient silver glinting off the colored panels.

This space is its own perfect oasis in the middle of the arcadian idyll that Viktor has cultivated. It bursts with greenery, interspersed with leaves and flowers in vibrant orange and cerulean, edged with fuchsia and violet, gravid with berries and lined in stone.

By its nature, it should make Jayce feel at ease.

It doesn’t.

Viktor closes the door behind them, then walks to Jayce, threading his arm into the bend of Jayce’s elbow. He holds Jayce’s arm with both hands, pressing his cheek to Jayce’s shoulder for a few breaths.

“You’re anxious,” he murmurs.

Jayce sighs. “The—”

“—vibrations,” they say together.

“Yes.” Viktor nods against his skin. “The resonance of energy in your body. Your heartbeat. The way you draw your breaths.”

If it wasn’t so disquieting for Viktor to be able to deduce his emotional state without so much as a word, it would be an endless fascination, Jayce is sure. Frankly, it’s remarkable that his connection with the Arcane through the Hexcore grants him this extrasensory perception. It also happens to be vexing.

Viktor tugs him toward the central planter, dimly outlined by the light coming through the large fractal-patterned windows that cover the dome.

There are two small, round cushions set out, painted with symbols and runes.

“I guess I just… don’t know what to expect,” Jayce admits.

Viktor pulls him down onto one cushion, and sits opposite, facing him. “You’ve experienced it before,” Viktor says. “Twice. On the floor of my sanctum. I understand it was presumptuous, but I was moved to it by the magnitude of your return to me.”

Jayce remembers that day through a veil of kaleidoscope colors and violent displacement, but the visceral ardor of their long-awaited collision tethers him to it. He recalls that he did not retain consciousness either time.

“And this is safe?” he asks, his apprehension getting the better of him.

Viktor tilts his head. “Of course.”

Jayce chews on his lip. They’re already here.

“But I would like to bind your hands, as a precautionary measure. To ensure your bodily soundness.” Viktor begins extricating himself from his belts. “Lilit has been prone to physical outbursts during our sessions together. Her mind is not difficult to access, but she is deeply troubled.” Loosed from his body, he holds the belts in his lap, and looks up, at Jayce. Pure silver in his eyes, from what Jayce can tell. His voice is low, soft, reasoning. “I have no way of knowing what I will find.”

He just blinks. There is danger in this. Viktor seems to believe that even Jayce doesn’t know the reason for his mental obscurity, and it would be smart to keep it that way.

He just has to trust that the barrier will hold. Or that, if it doesn’t, Viktor will understand why Jayce made the decision he did.

“Yeah, no, that, um.” He swallows. “That makes sense.”

There’s a long pause as Viktor takes that in, regarding Jayce with an unreadable expression. He stares, blinking and breathing, and Jayce is once again reminded that he isn’t the best liar. Especially when it comes to Viktor.

“Do you trust me?” he finally asks, light, gentle, patient.

Jayce’s heart drops.

Why is he afraid? This is Viktor.

He nods—just the subtlest of movements; wholly helpless. Of course he does.

Viktor holds out his hands, flat palms facing upward. Hesitantly, Jayce mirrors the gesture, placing his hands in Viktor’s.

He makes quick work of securing the belts around Jayce’s wrists, not so tight that it’s uncomfortable, but enough resistance that if he were to flail or spasm, Viktor would have an extra moment to react. The hanging decorations clunk against each other softly as Jayce tests the binding.

“Breathe with me,” Viktor instructs, modeling the long inhale, pause, long exhale, and Jayce follows, settling his hands in his lap, keeping his eyes locked with Viktor’s.

They breathe in tandem a few more times, staring at one another like the connection is magnetic, completely involuntary.

“Good.” Viktor moves to get up, and Jayce’s panic returns.

“Where are you—”

“Jayce,” he chides, soft as a leaf dropping onto the surface of a pond. He skims his fingertips over Jayce’s shoulder as he moves behind him, settling on the edge of the planter so that his knees bracket Jayce’s arms.

He breathes in again, and out again, in an attempt to relax. He rests his head against Viktor’s inner thigh, breathing deep for any trace of his mother’s house still held in the fibers of the blanket.

Viktor’s thumbs anchor gingerly at the base of his skull, pinkie fingers resting just at the tail of his eyebrows. The rest fall into even gradations through his hair, snapping to place as if it were intelligent design—intended to happen.

“You’ll feel some warmth,” Viktor whispers, and he does—he immediately recognizes the feeling, like warm water suffusing through his brain.

He closes his eyes. Long inhale. Pause. His breath shakes on the exhale.

On his next inhale, air rushes into his mouth. His muscles tense all at once and then relax, and he dissolves into Viktor’s hands.

Jayce opens his eyes to a vast white void. The brilliance of it burns. He squints, shielding his eyes with his arm.

He can no longer feel Viktor’s fingertips holding his head. But when he moves his arm away from his eyes, he gasps. There Viktor stands, his whole body obscured by swirling pastel incandescence.

His face is untouched, unmarred by the Arcane. The mole under his eye is just there. He looks like himself.

The way he did before he died.

Short brown hair curled out at the ends, warmth to his complexion, eyes of molten gold.

“Viktor—”

He’s transfixed. His own limbs feel staticky and weightless, and he realizes that they both bear this treatment of color and light. His hand goes immediately to the side of his face, where he can feel his beard, and his hair still as long as it was when he closed his eyes. Why is Viktor different?

“You’re not sleeping,” Viktor notes, raising his eyebrows, half-surprised, half-pleased.

Jayce surges forward, moving through the dense space as if wading through water. His hands land in Viktor’s hair, and he can almost feel it returning to him: the lab, their early Hextech years. All the galas and fundraisers he dragged Viktor along to despite his protestations. A breathy laugh forces its way up his throat. He could cry.

Without even thinking, he throws his arms around Viktor, and pulls him close. He squeezes his eyes shut and buries his face in Viktor’s neck.

This time, Viktor hugs him back readily. He strokes Jayce’s hair, holding him tight against his warm-light body.

And then his hand stills, and Jayce can feel his movement as he looks around them.

“Jayce…” he whispers. “This is beautiful.”

Jayce reluctantly lifts his face. What he sees takes his breath away.

Resplendent in its vernal serenity, mantled with softly-swaying pink and orange wildflowers, great masses of fog roving through the valley under a vast blue sky—they are standing in the meadow the mage brought him and his mother to when he was a kid. When he saved their lives.

It’s as dreamy and tranquilizing as he remembers it, as if the relief of that moment is seeping through his nerves, even now. “You can see why I was so adamant about harnessing magic,” he says, taking a few steps into the grass.

Viktor is staring at the sky. “Yes.” His brow is furrowed. “I feel it. This place is at the center of you. Your most formative memory.”

It’s fitting, then, that Viktor is a part of it.

A translucent butterfly dips down, darting between them. It’s the same one; the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes that day, cheek starting to numb from the snow. It flaps its gold-accented wings, lifting and then letting itself fall, drawing sweeping circles through the air.

Until it disappears.

And quite a ways off, eye led by the butterfly, next to a grouping of trees, he could swear he sees a figure. Dressed in white.

“Who is that?”

Jayce turns and sees Viktor, still as crystal, eyes fixed on that same distant point.

He says the first thing that comes to mind—the truth.

“That’s the mage who saved us.”

The truth, abridged.

Viktor shakes his head and starts in the mage’s direction. “How is he here?”

Apparently, that explanation wasn’t enough. He follows after Viktor, knowing that if he argues, he’ll look guilty of something. “Isn’t this my memory?”

“Not exactly.”

Viktor pushes forward like a man possessed, with a sudden righteous indignation. Jayce can hardly keep up.

“But I thought—”

They both freeze, reeling back as the whole landscape changes in front of them.

They are now floating in astral darkness, watching as a scene plays out in front of them.

Heimerdinger’s lab, the night they cracked Hextech. Floating in a wash of cyan antigravity. Viktor’s unguarded grin. The look in his eyes.

It changes. The Distinguished Innovator’s competition. The breathless anxiety. The way Viktor paled before he threw up into the nearest open vessel, which happened to be an Enforcer’s helmet. Their drunken giggles on the way back to campus.

A particularly late night in the lab, when Viktor had fallen asleep on his notes. His arms, folded awkwardly around his body. The rise and fall of Jayce’s chest as he watched Viktor sleep. The tender longing in his gaze.

Sprinting through the street, carrying Viktor’s bloodied corpse in his arms. Terrified. Desperate. His body reacting to the Hexcore. Nauseating stillness.

Jayce glances sidelong at Viktor to gauge his reaction. He is just watching in awe.

But there’s someone behind him, now. Jayce has to do a double-take to determine that they’re not standing in one of his memories right now.

“Sky?”

That startles Viktor from his reverie. He looks over his shoulder, then turns to Jayce, smiling wistfully. “I forgot to tell you.”

He gapes at her form, bright swirling colors from the neck down, just like them. “You said she was killed by the Hexcore.”

The memory shifts into the day Viktor woke up in this version of his body. The sounds modulate and echo.

“It killed Sky, Jayce.”

He heaves a sigh, infiltrated by the emotions of that day—shock, relief, disappointment, fear.

“She had such dreams.”

Guilt.

“As did we, once.”

The memory quiets. “It was her voice that woke me from the coma,” Viktor explains. “Her footsteps that led me here. Her research that allowed this place to flourish and thrive.”

Jayce hasn’t taken his eyes off her.

There’s a sad smile in her eyes. “It’s good to see you again, Jayce.”

Icy claws of dread tear at the inside of his chest. He understands now why Lilit reacted to him the way she did. There is something aberrant about this apparition of Sky. It’s her, but slightly… off.

He steps back, almost involuntarily. “Viktor—”

Vertigo nearly takes him down before he can even figure out what he was about to say. His vision blurs, smearing the watercolor cosmos into bleak greys and greens.

He is no longer watching the memories—now, he is in them. He drags the Mercury Hammer through the razed streets of Piltover, hundreds of years in the future, lifeless but for the anomaly-bitten figures and those eerily-articulated humanoid drones.

A second consciousness presses up against the boundaries of his own. It feels like Viktor. Jayce grimaces, mentally caught between the inherent vulgarity of having someone else in his mind, and the seamy intimacy of it.

He keeps walking. He isn’t sure if he has a choice.

Panic flushes down his spine as the creatures reach and swipe for him, as he picks up speed, as he nears the edge of the fissure. His pulse pounds in his ears.

Viktor moves against him, and Jayce can’t tell if it’s meant to be concern or comfort. It… does not feel like either of those things.

He can somehow feel Viktor looking at him from inside his mind, which provides him the perfect distraction to lose his footing and his hold on the hammer. He can’t breathe. Viktor shifts again. Can he feel Jayce’s terror? The hammer catches and tips end over end just as his body does, ultimately swinging down onto his leg and breaking through the bone so entirely that it surfaces, tearing through his skin.

And then comes the fall.

And the darkness.

Air floods Jayce’s lungs as his eyes snap open. His head is spinning from adrenaline.

It takes him a moment to reorient himself in space, but it’s dark, and his hands are bound, and he’s sitting upright. And there are hands holding his head, and panting coming from behind him, a duology with his own labored breaths.

The greenhouse.

Viktor.

Viktor’s hands slip from Jayce’s head to his shoulders and he slumps forward, breathing heavily into Jayce’s hair. The cool rush of his breath against Jayce’s scalp is decidedly not helping him quell the humiliating tide of arousal rising in his body.

“I had no idea,” Viktor mumbles. He wraps his arms loosely around Jayce’s neck.

His chest is tight and his shoulders tremble with the remembrance.

“I believe whatever was impersonating the mage from your memory to be the source of the disturbances in your mind,” he continues. His hands are lukewarm on Jayce’s bare shoulders. There’s a long pause as Viktor falls silent, catching his breath and thinking. And then, “How did you survive?”

The sensations are a lot. Jayce squirms a little, almost mindlessly trying to free himself from the inputs. “I… scraped together a fire. Reset the bone. Caught lizards for food.” The short answer is, he doesn’t know. Viktor is right. It doesn’t make sense.

He wonders how much he owes to the Arcane, and how much he owes to the mage.

“I need more information,” Viktor says, straightening up.

He’s getting too close. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

He’s determined. For Jayce, this means disaster. “We need to try again.”

Viktor doesn’t leave any space for protest, though Jayce tries to force something out. He lays a hand on the side of Jayce’s neck, middle two fingers digging into the flesh on either side of his collarbone, and the other connects to his forehead from above.

He hardly has time to feel the balm of Viktor’s magic before he opens his eyes again in the umbra of the ravine. That same burgeoning feeling fills his head—almost like a headache, but not so much pain. More of a brimming, itching thing, that any friction whatsoever redoubles.

Lying on his stomach, he casts his gaze into the fire, meek and red and licking shadows up the chasm walls. In it, he finds Mel. Hears wordless echoes of her voice like they’re surrounding him. The flames flare, and then the figure reconstitutes into Viktor, silent but for the crack of the fire.

Jayce watches from his own eyes, feeling a distant alarm that isn’t his own as he reaches into the blaze, spurred by a hopeless yen, only to yank his hand back with a hiss when he feels the bite of the flame.

This, he remembers, was the depth of his misery.

He rolls over onto his back, groaning as an unwonted desperation rolls through him: the intemperate yearning of a doomed man.

It was also the height of his delusion.

“Fuck,” he sobs, covering his face with his hands. His right palm stings. It’s something, in a pit of nothing, which only amplifies his confusion.

From within his head, Viktor gasps almost imperceptibly. Jayce burns with shame as his memory-self clamps a hand over his eyes, abhorred by the jut in his trousers even as he reaches toward it. There’s a resignation to it that he experiences all over again—the revulsion to his own touch and regardless, surrender to it.

He can feel Viktor staring.

And under the heat of that stare, the unmistakable burn of hunger.

Jayce stumbles backward, shattering the confines of the memory. He whines into the dampened vastness of the dreamscape as Viktor’s will tightens around him, holding him there. But Jayce thrashes harder, ruining himself on the fluid traction between their minds. He is violently thrust back into his corporeal body, and he catches the sensation as Viktor’s consciousness slips out from beside his, holding his breath to stifle a moan.

Viktor’s fatigue is plain in the weakness of his hands, in the way his body sways.

“Your impulses are distracting, Jayce,” Viktor chastises. But there’s no virulence to the words, just a tired fondness.

Jayce shifts his hands in his lap, mortified to find that he’s hard from whatever just happened between them, that there’s now a damp spot in the front of his trousers from their exchange.

Viktor removes his fingers from Jayce’s forehead, instead bracing his weight on Jayce’s shoulder. “You didn’t want me to see you pleasuring yourself?”

The question is reasonable enough. Maybe Viktor didn’t—

“Or did you not want me to know that you were aroused by it?”

The muscles in his abdomen tense. His ears and shoulders heat considerably, the silky cascade of Viktor’s condescension sending a shower of sparks down his spine.

“I didn’t think it was relevant,” Jayce mutters, still catching his breath.

Viktor leans forward, glancing down toward Jayce’s hands before kissing his shoulder open-mouthed, grazing Jayce’s skin with his teeth. “No?”

Jayce’s breath shakes as he exhales, and he inhales through his teeth. “Didn’t want to distract you,” he responds, almost petulant as he lobs the word back at Viktor.

Viktor shifts and slides down into the scant space between him and the planter, pressing the front of his body firmly against Jayce’s back. “I fear you’ve succeeded in that already,” he breathes, grabbing a handful of Jayce’s pectoral muscle. His right hand skims Jayce’s waist, dipping into the open space amidst all the belts and draped cloth that barely cover his body for all their efforts.

A stuttered moan drifts from Jayce’s throat as Viktor pinches his nipple between the knuckles of his fingers, and kneads the muscle with gentle pressure. At his waist, Viktor’s fingertips delve beneath the fabric of Jayce’s trousers, causing the muscle to clench.

“You shouldn’t be ashamed of it,” Viktor nearly purrs, cheek pressed to Jayce’s shoulder. “You are… breathtaking.”

Jayce’s hands curl into fists, digging his blunt fingernails into his palms. Another panted moan drags itself free as the pads of Viktor’s fingers make contact with his dick, sending a familiar jolt coursing through him.

“It wasn’t just the memory,” Jayce forces out. “It was you. The pressure of having you in my head. Every time you moved…” His breaths come labored, protracted. He can’t finish the sentence. Wouldn’t know how if he wanted to.

Viktor’s hands halt their motion. “You were aroused… because I was inside your mind.”

He closes his eyes, sighs, and nods. “Yeah. I was.” He pauses. Considers. “Am.”

A long, covetous exhale blows warm across his shoulder blade. He wants nothing more than to see Viktor’s face—see that stunned, enthralled look he’s sure is there. He glances over his shoulder, but to no avail.

“And outside your mind?”

With his hands bound, there’s nothing he can do but take what Viktor gives him: light, lingering strokes with just his fingertips, teasing little shudders and frustrated sounds from him like it’s the most entertaining occupation he’s had since the councilor impressions they used to do when they were drunk.

His head is still buzzing like radio static, sensory inputs scrambled across his senses. “V… oh, fuck…”

He tests the binding again, prying his wrists apart just a little. It holds fast. That knowledge sends a wave of heat that he can’t account for prickling through his skin.

Viktor reacts at the same time Jayce does, shifting his hips closer to the small of Jayce’s back from his splayed, kneeling position, shivering when his cock makes contact with Jayce’s body.

“Jayce—” he moans, burying his face in the center of Jayce’s spine and inhaling like he’s trying to take in as much of Jayce as he can. To that end, he takes Jayce’s length fully into his hand, tightening his grip, but keeping his strokes agonizingly slow.

Jayce nearly breaks at the sound of his name dripping from Viktor’s tongue like that. He hardly has the wherewithal to process it in the literal seconds between that and Viktor’s hand finally closing around him, but it does something to him, accelerating the frequency chiming under his skin. The increased pressure is bracing, and though every atom of his body that’s in contact with Viktor’s is ringing with a sensitivity he’s never felt before, he can’t help but buck his hips into Viktor’s grasp, sending waves of tingling overwhelm shimmering through his nerves.

Viktor’s mouth falls open against Jayce’s skin. “Do that again,” he breathes.

Jayce makes a small sound without so much as a fraction of a thought and obliges, driving his hips forward, fucking into Viktor’s hand with as much restraint as he can manage, folding in on himself to couch the sensation.

Viktor moves with him, chest rising and falling in a stark rhythm as he grinds into the small of Jayce’s back. “Good, Jayce—that feels…” For the first time since Jayce reentered this timeline, Viktor seems to be lost for words. He drops his left hand from Jayce’s pectoral, cupping the bottom of Jayce’s rib cage instead. “Immense.”

Viktor rises to his knees, shucking the blanket away from his form in earnest, following the curve of Jayce’s body with his own. He descends on Jayce’s neck, kissing him, dragging his bottom lip as he pulls away. “Your obedience is prepossessing. As are all your qualities.” He pauses, hand stilling on Jayce’s dick. “My marvelous, beautiful, willful Jayce. So good for me.”

Viktor’s voice is low and smoldering in that anomalous mechanical hum, and he punctuates each adjective with a quick, fluid pull. The praise goes straight to Jayce’s dick, adding fuel to the fire already demolishing his neurons.

He can only whimper in response, brows drawn tight together and jaw clenched to keep from unraveling.

This, like all other systems they find themselves cogs in, seems to be recursive, self-replicating, expanding exponentially, blooming into something fervid and intoxicating as it cycles between them.

And just when Jayce is certain he can’t take any more without tipping off the edge of it, Viktor stops.

All his abdominal muscles pull taut at once as Viktor withdraws his hands from Jayce’s clothes, placing one lax, innocent kiss on the corner of his jaw.

His vision swims in the dark, and he moves to chase Viktor’s hands with his own, but he’s quickly reminded of the belts that restrain him. The movement is ineffectual at anything other than jostling his straining dick, and he keens at the friction, grating and very nearly painful.

Viktor is still breathing heavily as he gets to his feet and steps in front of Jayce, crouching in front of him. There is that dazed would-be flush decorating his features, his eyes hooded blazing fuchsia in the low glow from his body’s natural light.

Of course, Jayce’s attention strays to Viktor’s cock. The texture is again as the swirling makeup of his metal skin, filaments braided so that more of that violet-light undercurrent is visible—a consideration for tactile sensation otherwise dampened by the metal. He’s familiarized himself with the workings.

He tries to stay as still as possible, tied hands twitching in his lap, because he’s certain any movement will burn.

He wants to ask why they stopped, wants to know what he’s supposed to do, to beg Viktor to continue, but the thoughts are bubbles that drift and pop instead of signalling his mouth to move.

“Viktor…” is all he accomplishes.

“I know,” he soothes, reaching out to brush a few strands of hair behind Jayce’s ear. “I feel it just as you do.”

When his fingers brush the marks he left the first time they did this, Jayce sees flashes of an image that he can only assume Viktor is intentionally sharing; feels its intent as the insistent pull of gravity.

His brain sparks like a blown fuse. Just the thought is dizzying—Viktor inside him, this time pervading his body rather than his mind.

Jayce studies Viktor’s eyes. He still looks tired, but he’s got that austere intensity in his gaze that always heralded a breakthrough in their research. Jayce just nods helplessly, fighting to keep his wits about him, shaking from the sudden loss of stimulation.

“Wait here,” Viktor instructs. “I will return in a moment.”

Left alone, Jayce gives himself a mental once-over. His whole body is heavy, lingering static from the absence of Viktor. There’s an ache to it, and an exhaustion from trying to hold his own against Viktor both mentally and physically. He’s the hardest he’s ever been in his life, his cock flushed and throbbing and drooling precome into the light fabric of his trousers.

If anyone could see him right now, Piltover’s golden boy reduced to a trembling mess—

His ears heat with that thought, the flush creeping into his cheeks. He cuts his mind off. They can’t see him. They won’t. There’s no reason to think about it.

The only person who will see him like this is Viktor.

Somehow, that doesn’t help as much as he wishes it did.

He rests his hands as far from his dick as he comfortably can. Though his body is wired, begging for release, what Viktor showed him a moment ago makes him breathless with need. He won’t let his endurance fail him before they make it there.

It’s for that reason that Jayce lets his eyes close, depriving himself of the instinctual need to process his surroundings. He needs to calm down if he’s going to tolerate Viktor’s touch in any capacity. At present, even the force of his breathing offers some unwelcome stimulation.

His mind strays counterproductively back toward that idea, that whisper of a feeling that’s wholly captivated him, idling in his veins. It’s a strange thing to want something so foreign to him in matters of the body that he’s hardly considered it before—but hasn’t he? In the ravine, it was just Viktor, the thought of him as he used to be, the memory reel of every rare time he’d initiated touch without utility, the fantasy that he might touch Jayce in the same way Jayce was touching himself.

But further back, in their initial partnership, there were times when Viktor’s tone was the perfect mix of sharp and smoky, and he looked at Jayce with that piercing gaze, and for a split second Jayce imagined himself beneath Viktor, on his knees or on his back, under the heat of that gaze, but chased it from his mind because it was wrong to think of him like that when Viktor trusted him so much.

So much for all of that.

At the sound of the door opening, Jayce cracks his eyes open, and watches Viktor stalk back toward him with an ampulla of pearlescent glass that he recognizes from the bath. He’s still uncovered, still resplendent in his elegance, still visibly as hard as Jayce feels, and walking like it doesn’t bother him whatsoever. And Jayce realizes with a prick of bewilderment that wherever Viktor went, he went like that.

Viktor kneels in front of Jayce, setting the ampulla down beside them. “You reached for me. In the fire.”

Jayce can sense the question in it, but doesn’t know what that question is. “I was delusional. Hallucinating.”

He studies Jayce’s expression, inscrutable. “But you still reached for me.”

Jayce hesitates a moment, then nods.

The corner of Viktor’s mouth quirks upward in something resembling a smirk.

“The breadth of your devotion inspires.” Viktor hooks a finger into one layer of the belts he used as a binding, and lifts Jayce’s hands in front of him. “It was that devotion that made me what I am. That gave me the means of bringing our vision to fruition.” He catches Jayce’s hands in one of his own, dwarfed in size and capacity by even one of Jayce’s. It sends a shiver through him. “And it was that same nature that kept you alive. The reason we’re together again, now.”

Jayce considers that assertion. Not guilt, not grief, but devotion. And he finds it true enough to suffice when he’s got use of less than half his brain. The words infiltrate deep, oozing warmth between his ribs. For a second, he feels again like that twenty-four-year-old boy defending Viktor’s right to his own personhood. So dazzled and empowered by the brilliant man who brought him back from the brink that, in a way, he did devote his life to him. To them.

Viktor leans down and kisses Jayce’s palm, and he almost yanks his hands back, instinctually resisting the light suction of Viktor’s lips as the significant threat to his restraint that it is.

Viktor’s eyes flick upward, meeting Jayce’s. Sensing impetus isn’t something Viktor has admitted to, but Jayce isn’t sure anything would be too wild to be beyond his belief anymore.

“You were my reason for everything,” Jayce confesses, his voice rough. As soon as he’s said it, it strikes him that he never told Viktor that everything he did was for him. Leveraging his position as a Councilor, brokering peace with Silco, voting Heimerdinger out to prevent him from getting rid of the Hexcore. All of Hextech, for that matter. All of that was touched by Viktor’s hand. “Everything.”

Letting go of that secrecy to rectify the lapse in communication between them is a catharsis in itself—a balm for the way the last week of their lives together spun out.

Viktor sighs, expression melting back into that dazed look from before, devastatingly beautiful. His face is a mirror to Jayce’s own internal world. He lowers Jayce’s hands back to his lap, and leans forward, caressing Jayce’s jaw as he seeks his mouth.

Almost involuntarily, Jayce shies away from the contact. It sparks and fizzes at the surface of his skin like the effervescence from fermentation, creeping steadily toward intolerable.

Viktor tilts his head and frowns, then places his whole palm over Jayce’s jaw, swiping across Jayce’s cheek with his thumb. The touch leaves a trail of fire in its wake, but it’s not as bad as the light drag of his fingertips, distressing his nervous system with its scarceness.

Satisfied, Viktor proceeds toward Jayce’s mouth, and though Jayce braces himself for the feeling, he’s unable to prepare for the current that shoots through him as soon as Viktor’s lips touch his. The sound it drives from him can only be described as a whimper, high and helpless and keening, as all the work he did to calm himself is undone in a second.

Viktor moans against his lips, dragging himself closer so he can hook an arm around the back of Jayce’s neck. It feels almost too intimate, too good, too much—the slick glide of Viktor’s tongue against his, dipping into the ridges of his molars, mouths slotted together as if they could swallow one another. Its smolder devours him whole. More fluid seeps from his cock into the already-saturated patch of fabric that it strains against.

He doesn’t know what to do.

He whines into Viktor’s open mouth, holding his breath to stave off the inevitable. For the first time since his hands were bound, he brings them up to chest level, placing his shaky fingertips firmly on Viktor’s chest.

It takes a second for Viktor to catch on, but when he does, he breaks the connection between their mouths, lips glossy with their shared saliva.

“Please,” Jayce begs, the word strangled, tumbling out of his mouth as soon as Viktor pulls away.

Viktor’s resolve is cracking, just like his own. His teeth are clenched, fists balled in the drape of Jayce’s garments. “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Jayce knows that’s a lie. But he can’t argue. Not now. His mind feels fractured from his body, splitting, slurring his words as he compels the specificity into existence. “You can’t—hah—s-show me something like that—” he swallows the saliva accumulated in his mouth, and inhales sharply, tone darkening in a way he last used with the mage, “—and then keep it from me.”

Viktor’s gaze eclipses, turns hungry. “You’re so eager to take me,” he says, as if there’s any question.

That phrase alone, with such an unabashed demeanor as Viktor seems to have cultivated, spikes Jayce’s heart rate further. “Please,” he repeats, drawing out the word.

With an exhale, Viktor’s whole body softens. “Stand up, Jayce.”

The phrase sounds like an instruction, but Viktor helps him up, handling him gently, to the gratitude of his strung-out nerves.

Viktor doesn’t unbind his hands, but works around the restraint to untangle all of Jayce’s belts from his body. Once the belts are off, the drape loosens, and Viktor unwraps it from his shoulders, setting it aside. Viktor then backs him up onto the planter and removes his brace and trousers, working carefully at the button-placket when Jayce hisses with the overstimulation of having his hands too close.

When his cock is finally freed from the damp, woven fabric, the air burns, but nowhere near as badly as the cloth. The flush is worse than he thought—ruddy and hot all the way to the base. Viktor stares for a little too long, hand hovering dangerously, breathing slow and deliberate.

Eventually, he stands back up, picks up Jayce’s blanket, and lays it out on the ground before stacking the two cushions in the center of it.

“The cushions will support your hips,” Viktor explains. “Lie face-down,” he guides, sparing a long look at Jayce’s unbraced shin, “and be mindful of your leg.”

Jayce eases himself off of the planter and down onto the blanket, coming forward until he’s sat in front of the support. He steels himself for the pressure of his body weight pressing his cock into the compact surface of the cushions, then props himself up with Viktor’s help.

The pressure, as predicted, is white-hot and searing, somewhere between stringent pleasure and severe discomfort. Jayce’s whole body screams at him for it, and his cock throbs miserably, but he just breathes through the delirium while Viktor retrieves the ampulla and kneels behind him.

On some level, being spread out like this should be humiliating. But it’s impossible to be humiliated by it when he can practically feel the want radiating off of Viktor as he traces the curve of Jayce’s ass with a finger. He flinches in response, muscles seizing up.

“While I admire your responsiveness, I have concern for your comfort.” Viktor introduces his touch slowly, still teasing, but less so now than before. He skims over the lines of Jayce’s body, imbuing ease however he can. “Conduct yourself by my hands. Feel, instead of think. I will take care of everything.”

Maybe it’s some sleight magic, but Jayce does relax. The rhythmic movement and quiet, droning hum of Viktor’s voice lull him.

Until a thin stream of oil is poured over his tailbone, running down in both directions, and torturous anticipation drags him back to activation.

Viktor spreads the oil over Jayce’s lower back, massaging it into his skin, dipping between his legs after a few moments. Viktor’s soft metal fingertips glide over the ridges of sensitive muscle, and Jayce doesn’t try to muffle or control himself. He moans openly, laying his head down in the crook of his elbow when he determines that to be the best course of action.

The intent touch continues, increasing in pressure at his perineum, and then sliding back. Viktor is gentle and deliberate, focusing on areas where he can maximize the efficacy of his ministrations—just like with all his experiments—dipping the pad of his fingertip shallowly into Jayce’s ass with the pressure of his touch before bringing it back out again.

Viktor makes a few more passes before he makes that advancement in earnest, and Jayce reacts, almost surprised at the ease and restraint with which Viktor presses his finger in. It’s agonizingly slow, but oversweet with compassion, giving his body a chance to adjust to the unfamiliar sensation. That doesn’t stop his pulse from jumping, pounding in his throat as he makes a valiant attempt to avoid tensing.

Counterintuitively, his neglected arousal begs for Viktor to pick up his speed, consequences be damned, but Jayce knows he won’t—knows he wouldn’t hurt him. So he doesn’t expend the effort to ask. He tries to push the thought, to banish the voice in his brain that vocalizes all his cognition, and instead let his sounds of pleasure flow out as they come to him, offering them to Viktor just as he asked. A gift, he might say, or a sacrifice.

“Breathe, Jayce,” Viktor soothes, slowly, steadily driving his finger in to the base.

He pauses there for a moment, and when his hand stills, Jayce does his best to take a shaky breath. He’s letting Viktor lead him. As he always has.

Jayce redirects the desire of his muscles to contract to those in his arms instead, grabbing up fistfuls of the blanket in hopes that it will be enough to keep him pliant for Viktor.

The cushions are doing their job as well, making sure he’s not putting weight on his leg, but the impulse to dig his knee into the ground to anchor himself is so strong that he has to willfully resist. Especially as the impulse is in lieu of accidentally cycling that impetus back to the muscles of his pelvic floor.

Viktor withdraws his finger as slowly as he pushed in. A slight burn flares up upon egress, as his body’s instinct wins over to constrict, and it only prolongs Jayce’s agony. In again, out again, acquiescing to the strange feeling of living metal breaching where nothing else has, slightly cool but rapidly warming with Jayce’s heat. With repetition, the tight coil of resisting resistance mellows. Now he’s only one layer deep, soaking into the pillows.

He isn’t sure how long Viktor works at him like that, sitting patiently between his legs, muttering encouragements that Jayce hardly hears while he tries to keep himself still, but eventually Viktor pulls out entirely. The distraught moan that follows the feeling of being left empty breaks out unbidden and unseemly. Viktor lets out a quiet moan in response, and kisses Jayce’s flank, an insistence that he won’t be empty for long.

Jayce can feel his hole clenching, begging for something that an hour ago he might have denied wanting altogether. Just that thought makes the part of his brain responsible for arousal light up like the crystal mesh in the Hexgate. And the fact that it’s Viktor touching him like this… It makes him again into that tameless creature clawing at the vertical walls of his own hell.

He throws a glance over his shoulder, and catches Viktor just staring, mesmerized, at his ass. He’s holding the unstoppered ampulla again, and shakes himself when he notices Jayce looking.

Jayce is speechless twice over, a pang of breathless adoration in his chest, to understand that Viktor’s desire for him threads through every aspect of his being so readily, so inextricably, that his preoccupation has an inertia of its own; that it requires an outside force to change its momentum.

Ever the pragmatist, Viktor takes advantage of Jayce’s attention to coat two fingers in the thick oil, smearing it gingerly over and pressing those two fingers to his entrance. “You are a beautiful man,” he muses, partly in defense of himself, surely knowing that the compliment will strike through Jayce like a shock. “So impressively patient.”

Jayce whimpers at the praise and Viktor uses that to push the two fingers slow into his body, stretching him. The pain of it is considerable, but not too much to take—nothing, he thinks, would be too much to take, for Viktor—and dampened by his still-buzzing pleasure.

As Viktor prepares him, Jayce puts his head back down on his arm. He’s fighting against his own body, and the intrusion of Viktor’s fingers to avoid climax, but he can’t help but to raise his hips and shift back to meet Viktor’s fingers at the base. Patient until Viktor told him he was.

Now, his need burns through him like acid, devouring. He’s unraveling, thoughts fraying, reminiscent of his temporal oscillation, but not quite the same. Viktor proceeds with working him open for long, charged minutes, steadfast while Jayce falls apart. He adds another finger. Jayce is going to die here.

By the time Viktor finishes, Jayce’s forehead is pressed firmly to the junction of his wrists, mouth dry from panting, the fabric of the blanket wet beneath him from saliva dribbled out around moans and tears of frustration from testing himself this long. His muscles twitch, shredded to the last threadbare nerve, when Viktor’s fingers slip out of him completely. Deliriously, he almost expects relief to come from it, but all he feels is hunger and void.

Viktor spreads him open with both thumbs, and Jayce raises his head wearily. “You have endured valiantly,” he praises, smoothing his clean hand down Jayce’s side. “For a while, I thought I might lose you.”

“Anything for you,” Jayce mumbles, words half slurred together.

Viktor laughs, light and warm and breathy. “I think you are ready.”

That switches something in Jayce’s brain back on. He blinks, anticipation brought back to an active simmer in his gut. “Viktor… need you…”

Hearing that, Viktor groans, and immediately rises to his knees. “Yes, Jayce,” he agrees, his cock dragging up the back of Jayce’s thigh as he leans closer. “You will have me. I’m right here.”

It’s oddly… wet. And not in the same way Jayce is, with steady dribbles of precome leaking out every so often—did he slick himself with the oil? It’s all hazy, impossible to know, but something about the texture…

From this angle, he can’t see well enough to determine, so he presses back, blindly chasing Viktor’s dick. When he makes contact, Viktor hisses like Jayce has burned him. Thin, slippery fluid drips down his leg, and Jayce recognizes the consistency as the same fluid Viktor’s body produced to lubricate his cunt. His cock is now practically drooling with it, oozing from every seam of the organic metal, if he had to guess.

“Fuck,” he breathes.

Viktor makes a helpless noise that sends a chill down Jayce’s spine, and then he has a hand on Jayce’s hip, and he’s pressing in closer, aligning himself, and he pushes forward, sinking into Jayce’s body with minimal resistance.

It’s unlike anything Jayce has felt before.

His vision blurs and his whole body feels weak. If he wasn’t in a fully-supported position, he might have just liquefied completely.

Somehow, this is the relief he’s been searching for. All the tension melts out of him in a lazy flood. Viktor’s got him. He has nothing to worry about.

Viktor’s arousal soaks him where they touch, significantly reducing the friction as Viktor sheathes himself to the hilt, fluid running down his perineum to his balls and into the cushion.

In his state of overwhelm, Jayce’s breath shakes, small, aborted moans riding out on each exhale. What was the word Viktor used? Immense?

Yes, that’s apt: the sensation is immense, pervasive, leaching into the deepest parts of him. The act of Viktor taking him, claiming him—as if he needed to, for Jayce to be his—makes him dizzy, drunk on gratification and pleasure.

His cock throbs, pressed harder into the support with Viktor pushing down on him, and Viktor moves, and everything shifts, gliding back in withdrawal, stopping just shy of exit, and plunging back in with an obscene, wet sound.

“More, Jayce,” Viktor pants, and it hardly even registers as a request.

What else does he have to give?

Viktor gives him another long, languid stroke, reducing his mind to the singular thought of Viktor, inside him, filling him, executing a need that belongs so intrinsically to them both.

He hears Viktor hum, radiating his satisfaction in distorted tones, and he increases his pace, gripping the flesh of Jayce’s hip harder, rocking Jayce into the cushion with every thrust.

It’s too much.

“Vik,” he sobs, tears dripping unhindered from his eyes.

Technically, nothing is stopping him, but he wants to hold out for Viktor. Prove his devotion is strengthened by his desire, not secondary to it.

Viktor’s palm skims his spine, tracing his scar from Renni’s chainsaw, bending forward to kiss at it, hand stopping at his nape. The subsequent thought swims through his head half-formed: he never told Viktor about her. Or her son. “You are doing… so well,” he praises between rough breaths. “You look, ah—so beautiful like this.” He gives another languorous thrust, a heady groan dripping from him. “Glorious, Jayce.”

Jayce whines, nearly mindless under Viktor’s attention, feeling the back of his neck heat as Viktor splays his fingers, anchoring them at certain points on the back of his scalp.

There’s a momentary sensation of falling, and then the stimulating tingle of Arcane static consumes every cell in his skin. It’s so sharp it stings, wrapping back around from bracing to numbing, oscillating between the two states in rapid succession.

He’s almost loath to open his eyes, but when he does, it’s as he expected—an approximation of the cosmos stretching infinitely in all directions, a body made of light. Here, his hands are unbound.

The first thing those hands do is reach for Viktor.

Upon contact, Jayce is thrown haphazardly back into his body, only… this is Piltover. His mind is still hazy, but there’s a stale, bitter taste in his mouth and the air is so humid that he’s overheating.

Viktor is beneath him, utterly undone, splayed over a white tailcoat that Jayce distantly recognizes as the one he wore to the gala that celebrated the opening of the Hexgates. His short hair is mussed and unruly, his cravat undone, shirt and vest open and dragged out of the waist of his trousers, exposing his chest and back brace.

He’s got a lit cigarette in one hand, almost completely negating the seclusion of the alcove they’re tucked into. His mind slowly fills in the gaps: the way Viktor sidled up to him, placed a hand on his shoulder, and leaned up to his ear to murmur his intent to “get some fresh air”—usually code for smoke.

Jayce remembers surreptitiously slipping out of the party, halfheartedly chastising Viktor for the habit, and then… the details blur. Viktor holding him by the chin, amber eyes blazing, blowing smoke into his mouth. The way they collapsed into each other, tongues sliding against one another in the heat of their mouths, the frantic, juvenile search for an isolated corner and the way his hands shook as they removed their clothes to varying degrees.

Now, though Jayce can hardly recall what got him to this point, he’s straddling Viktor, riding his dick, undressed of everything but his undone shirt and gartered socks. Viktor gazes at him from below, mesmerized, eyelids falling, bringing the cigarette to his lips with one hand, the other placed firmly on Jayce’s stomach.

The smoke escapes his lips in a concentrated stream, directed at Jayce, though Viktor is lazy with it, and the brunt of it doesn’t quite reach his face. Jayce has got his fist over his mouth, stifling the sounds that might alert any stragglers outside the gala to their current engagement, but he honestly doubts it’s making any difference.

The stupor fades for a single heartbeat, just enough to sense the desirous will melting against his, that crowded feeling of Viktor’s presence in his head making its reprise. In that split second of clarity, he feels everything. The prickling sensation of the Arcane, roving over his skin in blooming, swirling patterns. Viktor’s quick, shallow thrusts into him, harrowing his nerves with rippling washes of heat and heavy, building pleasure. The convoluted eros of Viktor inhabiting him, mind, body, and soul.

And as convoluted as it is, it feels right. True. Whole. Like he could live the rest of his life sharing himself with Viktor in this way. Their cosmic entanglement has a destination, and that destination is amalgamation. Integrating with one another so wholly that they’re no longer distinct. The boundaries are already soft and feathered, a perfectly symmetrical gradient across which they can merge.

He stares down at Viktor, searching for permission to lose himself in the joint stimulation of both his physical and metaphysical body, to finally allow the pleasure to overwhelm him. And he finds it there, a fervent assent in Viktor’s fluttering golden eyes that it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t remember. And just as the last thread of his restraint snaps, he catches the silhouette of the mage in his peripheral vision. Watching them. But there’s no longer a will to repent, only a milky sense of guilt descending upon a senseless man.

His orgasm is unmaking.

All of his senses shatter at once, electrifying the very concept of his self. All the molecules of his being convulse, charging his release with a pulsating resonance that works its way through his body like a lighting strike.

It sublimates the walls of the memory, siphoning him back to his writhing flesh, to Viktor’s slow, dismounting strokes working him through the aeonian cataclysm of it all, grinding almost painfully in and out of him despite the mess of fluid drenching them both.

“Ah… Jayce,” Viktor remarks, his voice rough and tired and garbled, but still little more than a whisper. “You were… magnificent.”

His faculty of speech has long since dissolved, so his only response as Viktor bends down to kiss at the small of his back are half-delirious noises that may have, at some point, been words. The quiet moans bleed into a whimper when Viktor slips out of him.

“Oh,” he coos, half a sigh, “indelible thing.” He strokes Jayce’s skin, eliciting a weak twitch. “My beloved Jayce. I know.”

He comes around to sit in front of Jayce, gently untangling the belts from his wrists, inspecting for marks. They’re there, but nothing serious, just lightly pinkened indents. He watches, inanimate, as Viktor smooths his thumb over them, and his eyes wander further, to the fluid dripping from Viktor’s groin in semi-viscous ropes. He groans inwardly at the fuzzy thought of what a mess they made, and the effort it will take to clean it.

Viktor then moves to the side and eases Jayce off the support, gathering Jayce to him, holding him there. “You did so well,” he whispers, carding his fingers through Jayce’s hair. “So perfect for me. So good.”

Everywhere Viktor touches him burns, leaves residual sparks lingering in the aftermath.

He’s drifting, barely acknowledging it as Viktor leans over him to draw up a length of the blanket from the ground and begins to clean him off with it.

And before he can span the space between two thoughts, the soft oblivion of unconsciousness overwhelms him.

CASSIUS: Do not presume too much upon my love.
I may do that I shall be sorry for.

Viktor finds him in among the filter flowers, examining the fibrous stem of one he’s dissected to glean firsthand what he can of its mechanism.

Jayce has made a point of reading Sky’s notes—the book Viktor brought with him when he departed their lab—but at present, he’s on a personal mission to find a way to technologically replicate and amplify the effects; to make it a viable option for depollution throughout Zaun.

Viktor runs his hand along the blooms as he approaches, leaving them swaying back and forth behind him.

“V, hey,” Jayce greets.

His surroundings immediately appear warmer with Viktor there.

A blithe softness spreads across Viktor’s features. He continues sauntering toward Jayce until he’s standing above him, and takes Jayce’s face between his hands, gazing down at him.

Jayce immediately shifts his body toward Viktor, placing the bisected stem down on the tray beside him, skimming his palms up the back of Viktor’s legs.

“Jayce,” Viktor responds, his voice a dreamy smile, blinking slowly at him. “I have something I’d like to discuss with you.”

That phrasing immediately raises alarm bells in his mind, and a wave of anxiety rolls through him, but he does his best to keep from reacting. And, in a way, it is serendipitous timing.

“Of course,” he says, shaking his head a little to emphasize its effortlessness. “There was actually something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about, too.”

Viktor’s eyebrows raise. Surprise looks so abstract on him, now. “Oh?”

Jayce slides his hands further up, under Viktor’s robe, to his hips, giving him a gentle tug to sit down beside him.

Viktor flashes Jayce a begrudgingly fond, mischievous look, but sinks down beside him, leaning into his side. He turns his attention to the tray of plant parts and the various loose sheets of paper Jayce has been scrawling notes onto.

“I’ve been studying these flowers,” he starts, picking up the stem and holding it in front of them., indicating the porous, spongy material in between the fibers. “Their structures and mechanisms. And I think, with the right materials, I can reverse-engineer an air filtration system that could serve the whole of the underground.”

He glances over at Viktor, gauging his reaction. He looks pleased, but it’s always difficult to tell with the uncanny aloofness that’s commandeered his face.

“That’s brilliant, Jayce,” he says. But the smile doesn’t fully reach his eyes. “In that case, I expect you will be especially pleased to hear what I have for you.”

Jayce waits for Viktor to continue, but he doesn’t. He picks up the other half of the stem and studies it closely, holding it up to his eye and turning it over a few times.

The suspense keeps Jayce’s attention rapt, millions of possibilities running through his head. Viktor said he would be pleased about it, so it’s probably not anything negative. Unfortunately, that does not assuage his anxiety in the least. He’s never liked surprises.

But seeing Viktor interested in one of his projects again sparks something in Jayce. Some breathless longing that convinces him, just for a fleeting moment, that he’s going to get to see the Viktor that was his partner in Hextech again. The man who took his observations and hypotheses and transformed them, alchemy-like, into truths and physical things. The one who knew exactly how to bring his theories to life but wouldn’t hesitate to call him an idiot if he was being an idiot.

The guilt makes him nauseous, but he misses that Viktor.

Instead of his anticipated look through that long-forgotten window, Viktor places the stem back down on its metal tray and rises silently, holding a hand out to Jayce.

“Walk with me,” he says. Jayce can’t tell if it’s a request or a command.

Either way, he takes Viktor’s hand, using his assistance to clamber to his feet.

They walk, arm in arm, back through the swirling sprawl of golden flowers, back into the commune proper.

The population has swollen a bit since he arrived, even with Viktor’s need for rests growing more frequent. It’s nothing their infrastructure can’t handle—yet. But there’s a part of him that knows they won’t be able to expand forever. At least not without Piltover coming to call.

“You seem idle of late,” Viktor starts, as they enter the outer ring of tenements. “I have observed a restlessness in you that calls to mind waiting for the Council’s approval on our research.”

Jayce blinks, sort of stunned that Viktor would bring up the Council, or anything about that part of their lives, for that matter, of his own volition. Deeper than that, it’s a little embarrassing to be observed like that, to the point that Viktor feels the need to mention it.

Viktor is right, though. The boredom that comes from living in a tiny paradise has all but numbed his brain. Hence the project.

He huffs, acquiescing. “I guess, a little.” He cards through the last few blending days, trying to pinpoint exactly when he’d asked Viktor for Sky’s journal. It’s harder than it should be to remember. “But not anymore. I think this air filtration thing is doable. We’d just need to figure out how to build it.”

“And how to implement it,” Viktor adds.

Jayce heaves a disheartened sigh. In his enthusiasm, he’s gotten ahead of himself. Old habits die hard. Or, at least, they’re hard to kill. “Right.”

A troubling discomfort settles over him as he realizes that he was planning as though he still had the power and funding of the Council behind him. As if they would lift a finger to help Zaun. Especially after what Jayce did, cutting that deal with Silco, and then the attack on the Council chamber…

His logic tries to reason with him for a second—Cassandra Kiramman was the one who spearheaded the effort to rid the Undercity of the Grey. But among the last words her daughter said to him were “I just understand, now, how easy it is to hate them.”

And there’s Mel—but she would only agree to an endeavor like this if it would advantage her.

No, he’s learned his lesson about putting his trust in people.

They’ll have to build it themselves.

“But if you could build this,” he gestures to the shaped-metal structures, “with such a small community, and with your new abilities, we could build these stations. Figure out how and where to place them. I’d just have to nail down the design.”

As if he’s been reading Jayce’s mind, Viktor stops, and it becomes apparent that he was leading him to the forge, strangely empty of its usual occupants.

“The timing is fortuitous.” Viktor squeezes his arm lightly, reminding him of every time he wished they could have done this at parties and donor events. “This new project will require prototyping.”

He nods fervently. His chest feels full of helium as his mind races toward the conclusion that he hopes Viktor is coming to. The two of them, working together again, hypothesizing, engineering, prototyping. Something Jayce almost didn’t realize was central to his happiness until he lost it.

“I had hoped you would take up the forge.”

Disappointment crashes over him in a dizzying wave, the lightness in his chest turning manic. His thoughts are wrestling each other, much like they did moments ago with his reasoning about Piltover, but this time they’re trying to convince him that isn’t it, that Viktor is eventually going to get to the part where he joins Jayce in a reiteration of what they used to have, but his heart, deflating, knows the truth.

He should have known. Shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up. Viktor is too busy healing people, and managing the commune. He would never have the time for something like that.

He tries to swallow his dismay. It bleeds out of him in a shaky exhale anyway. He’s never been good at hiding his emotions.

“Oh.” The sound falls between them like a pebble dropping into a well.

Viktor peers up at him, his expression a full even keel, as always; broken only by the smallest lift of an eyebrow.

“For…”

“The good of the commune,” Viktor answers, soft but sure. “Your own pursuits, when there’s time.”

His mouth feels dry. The aberrance of being misunderstood, or at the very least, misrepresented, by Viktor, of all people, incites a vicious war beneath his skin.

On the one hand, he understands Viktor’s reasoning. He has a useful skill in smithing; it’s only fair that he contribute materially to the community. But on the other hand, it feels reductive. Distressing, that Viktor, who knows him better than anyone else, would value his physical ability over his mind.

Viktor moves infinitesimally in his peripheral. He’s been silent for too long, he knows.

“For our dream,” Viktor continues, pressing a medallion-sized gear into the palm of Jayce’s hand. He’s immediately reminded of the cog he pushed toward Viktor through the center of the antigravity field created by the hex crystal on the night they met. “Our promise to the world.”

So he’s been smithing.

Spending long hours at the forge after his duty to the commune is fulfilled and everyone else has turned in for the evening, working through the design, refining it for future production.

The last couple of weeks he’s spent developing a method of producing a high-efficacy material for the filters—a contained centrifugal force apparatus of micro-perforated steel to extrude molten glass at a high speed, resulting in a thick wool of fine glass fibers.

This week, he’s constructing a prototype of the filter station itself, cylindrical in reference to the stems, and fitted with multiple fiberglass filters. The next step will be finding an effective way to power the things once they’re installed around Zaun. At the moment, he’s considering an extension network branching out from the Hexgate, borrowing the power generated by the gemstone mesh.

In reality, diverting that power will be difficult without access to the materials and construction capabilities he enjoyed as Piltover’s golden boy, but that’s a problem for further down the line.

Viktor always comes to collect him soon after they’ve lost the light, to bring him to their bed.

This night is no different.

He’s just finishing the third iteration of his filter frame when he catches sight of Viktor, cutting through the last of the twilight with his dim violet glow.

“It’s dusk, Jayce,” he says, in that mild, buzzing tone, by way of announcing himself.

It isn’t admonishing, just his way of voicing his end of the silent agreement they’ve fallen into since they stopped spending their days together.

“I know, just…” he sighs, hardly taking his attention away from the filter frame as he prepares to fill it with the fiberglass. “Hang tight, it’ll only be a few more minutes.”

Viktor scoffs. He’s used to this.

Jayce opens the frame and then opens the outer container of his extruder, wearing thick leather gloves and making use of forceps to safely transfer and compact the material into the frame.

“When we install these, we’ll have to find a way to either divert power to them, or equip them with their own renewable power sources. I was thinking about it, and the Hexgate—”

Viktor cuts him off. “The Hexgate?”

“Yeah, I thought—”

“No.” Viktor waves his hand dismissively. “Something else will have to do.”

Jayce fastens the frame shut and faces Viktor fully. He can’t keep the affronted indignation from showing plain on his face. “You haven’t even heard what I was going to suggest.”

Something strange happens in Viktor’s expression. Something that Jayce can’t classify. But a calculated irritation layers over top of it almost immediately.

“Are you the leader of this commune, Jayce?” His tone is as even and calm as ever, with only a whisper of a bite, like he’s asserting his inherent authority over a student.

Jayce flinches physically from the words, stunned silent by the sharpness and flippancy.

“I—no, but—” He flounders for a response, eyes narrowing and brows drawing together. “We’re partners.”

“Precisely.” Viktor frowns, rounding the workbench to approach him. “Which is why I expect you to trust that my disfavor of this approach is for good reason.” He stops in front of Jayce, fingering the anomaly-corrupted gear that Jayce has made into a regularly-worn ornament on his belts.

His frustration seethes, with Viktor penetrating so far into his personal space that they may as well be tied together.

“Look,” he hisses, the muscles in his jaw flexing with the effort of keeping his voice low, “I’m sorry if you don’t think I’m doing enough for the commune, Viktor, but I’ve been here every day since you asked, making frames, and tools, and fasteners, and contributing in ways that are—” He stops before he can say a waste of my fucking time, and after a pause, he instead chooses “—tedious. So if that’s what’s going on, I don’t understand why.”

In the past, while developing Hextech, they’d fought over whose turn it was to use the “good” tools, and pencils, and whose method was more efficient, or more likely to work, or more likely to work well, but Viktor has never, not once in their near eight years of partnership, held himself higher than Jayce in rank or stature. Until now.

Viktor reaches up toward his face, and he pulls back reflexively, fixing his gaze on the ground as they sit in the discomfort of it.

“Are you discontent here?”

Viktor’s voice is quiet, but lacks the softness he would have expected from a question like that.

Jayce’s eyes flick back toward him, suddenly fearing what his answer to that might be.

He’s seen the change, creeping into their daily interactions in tiny ways that only flagged as abnormal after their night together in the greenhouse. The sharp edge of sternness in Viktor’s tone that before was reserved for rejecting the demands of authority, but now weighs his requests as commands. The possessiveness in Viktor’s touch that Jayce has, until recently, dismissed as welcome intimacy. The weird obsession with humility and service that pervades the air and population of the commune, as a smokescreen for whatever’s actually going on in his mind.

And that might be the worst part of it all—he never has any idea what Viktor is thinking anymore. He doesn’t tell him, and Jayce can’t read him the way he used to be able to.

Jayce’s jaw works as he thinks, and he closes his eyes, sighing. Apparently, they’re doing this. “My skills are being underutilized. I mean—casting nuts and bolts? Really? Anyone can do that.”

“They are necessary building components,” Viktor answers smoothly. “You know that as our capacity wanes, expansion is unavoidable. Are you above the work?”

Even after weeks of mindless bliss, Jayce is amazed to find that he’d nearly forgotten how infuriatingly deft Viktor is in arguments, how easily he twists meanings to his advantage. Jayce may be an adept flatterer, but especially graceful in debates, he is not.

His irritation flares. “I’m above this.” He gestures between them. “Whatever this is.”

“And what is it?” Viktor asks. His façade has cracked, settled firmly into irritation. “By your estimation.”

“This—” Jayce huffs, pausing for only half a heartbeat before his indignation slams into him, pushing him off the cliff before he can prepare a rope. “This… superiority thing you’ve got going on here. The condescending attitude. The acting like you’re better than me.” Gravity increases as he falls. “If this is about the weapons, fine, I get it. I fucked up, and I can’t take that back. But this isn’t anything like that.”

“The people of this commune look to me for guidance,” Viktor responds tersely.

That’s not a direct response to anything he said.

Rage pushes him blindly forward.

Through the haze of delirium that blankets that experience, Jayce recalls, in the greenhouse, Viktor tracing and kissing the scar across his back, and guilt registers distantly in his gut, apprehension at what he’s about to do—and potentially learn—buzzing under the surface of his anger.

He scoffs bitterly, exhaling his nerves. “I never told you, but before the attack on the Council, I went down into the Undercity. Raided a Shimmer factory with someone who claimed to know their way around. And my recklessness caused the death of a child.”

His heart races, pounding in his throat at that revelation. He’s terrified, but not for the same reason he was when it happened.

Viktor looks taken aback for just a fraction of a second before his expression reconstitutes into ambiguity. It only frustrates Jayce more.

“That’s why I have the scar on my back,” he continues, nearly snarling his tirade. “Why I was wrapped in bandages when you woke up. His mother tried to kill me at the Councilors’ memorial.”

The weight of his confession hangs between them, silent but for Jayce’s breaths and the hum of the furnace.

Viktor blinks. His irises breathe platinum-teal as he studies Jayce.

And then, his features soften.

“That’s in the past.”

He reaches toward Jayce again, but without even a whisper of a coherent thought, Jayce takes a half step backward. Somehow, Viktor has managed to respond in the worst way imaginable.

He feels nauseous. Dizzy, as if the whole world is tilting beneath his feet. In the back of his mind, he’d dared to hope that Viktor would react with disgust, betrayal, dismay—anything to reflect what Viktor might have felt or said if he’d had the time—or, maybe more importantly, the courage—to face Viktor about it when it happened. To collapse at his feet in shame and tell him you were right, Hextech was never meant to be used for weapons.

Instead, he’s met with sickening grace.

“Jayce,” Viktor murmurs. “You are not the man you were.” He lets Viktor get closer to him this time, worn down enough by the recurrence of his guilt to let Viktor’s comforting hands find their way to his neck. “It may be regrettable, but we all have our parts to play. Roles that are crucial in the process of evolution. You mustn’t let it daunt you.”

Jayce winds the wire of those words around the spool of his mind. What results from it does not reassure him as much as he’d like it to.

He leans into Viktor’s touch anyway, flinching inwardly at the conflict coiling in his head.

“Viktor,” he returns, silent thunder in his chest. “Am I an investment to you?”

The question is raw, gravel and smoke, a rumbling whisper that barely carves a space for itself in the humid air. His unresolved insecurities about every relationship in his life; the way no one ever valued him unless they could get something out of it.

“No,” Viktor entreats, brushing his thumb across Jayce’s throat. “Of course not.”

Once the prototype is in full working condition, Jayce loads it onto a handcart and wheels it down the main walkway until he reaches the glass and ceramic workshops.

He’s been working pretty closely with the folks in the glassmaking trade to produce his microfiber glass wool, so it’s a happy coincidence that Lilit has been working with them, too.

She’s in the middle of hand-painting different stains onto the surface of round, organically-rippled glass panes, getting them ready for the kiln.

“Hey,” Jayce calls, advancing into the open-air workroom.

Lilit looks up at him, but doesn’t respond to his greeting. Her hands stall at their task, though, as she stares at the miniature filtration tower.

“Is that it?” she asks, putting down her brush, and rising from her seat to come closer.

Jayce beams. “This is it.”

Lilit circles the cart, inspecting the device. Interest is how she shows enthusiasm, Jayce has learned. Despite her permanent deadpan and habitual glare, she does care about things.

“And it works?”

Jayce huffs a laugh. “I wouldn’t have brought it all the way over here if it didn’t.”

She turns her glare on him in return. Now, he can discern the jocosity in it. “All the way,” she mocks. “Your forge is less than a minute from here.”

“Ha ha,” he shoots back.

That actually gets a quiet, amused laugh from her. He’ll call that a victory.

“Care for a demonstration?”

She cocks her head. “Show me what you got.”

His smile widens. It’s been a long time since anyone has shown earnest interest in his endeavors, let alone matched his energy about them. It’s nice.

He takes a wide ceramic bowl full of wood shavings and paper trimmings off of the cart, and uses a pair of tongs to pull one of the coals out of the furnace. With a glance back at Lilit, he drops the coal into the paper, and smoke begins to rise from it, haze quickly accumulating beneath the awning.

Lilit flashes him a skeptical frown, until he rushes back to his machine, flipping a switch to activate the electrolysis battery within.

It hums to life, stuttering to its start as the electrolyte exchanges charged ions between the two electrodes. The mechanism kicks on, pulling air into the cylinder, and cycling it out, clean, once it’s gone through multiple layers of filtration. It works almost too well, filtering so efficiently that it almost keeps the smoke from diffusing into the air in the first place. Almost.

He looks back at Lilit, whose signature scowl has allayed significantly. Her eyebrows are raised as she watches the filter work, seemingly unable to take her eyes off it.

“This is going to be major for the fissures,” she finally says, barely turning toward Jayce even as she addresses him.

He folds his arms across his chest, shaking his head. “Right?” He watches the machine, looking for any points of weakness, listening for signs of distress. “I just wish Viktor felt that way.”

“What do you mean?” She does turn her head, then. “It clearly works.”

He meets her gaze. Considers for a moment whether he’s actually going to have this conversation with a teenage girl, effectively roping her in, at least on some level. Unfortunately for her, she’s one of the only people in the commune he can have an earnest conversation with in the first place.

“It’s the power supply,” he finally sighs. “What I have here will power a machine of this size for a while, but it won’t work at the scale I need for the actual filter towers.”

She raises her eyebrows, stifling a derisive chuckle. “What, Piltover’s Man of Progress can’t figure out an alternative power supply?”

“Hey,” he warns playfully. “It’s not that I can’t. It’s just that…” He chews on his lip, trying to figure out how to phrase it. “Viktor won’t approve it.”

Lilit’s eyes narrow as she stares at him sidelong, the corner of her mouth pulling into a plainly disdainful frown. “Won’t approve it,” she repeats in a deadpan.

“Yeah.” Jayce grasps at the air for... something, then gives up and runs a frustrated hand through his hair. “I came up with the idea that it would be efficient if we could divert some of the generated power from the Hexgates and reroute it through the ground using rune extension patterns to hit each of the towers.” He walks back toward the cart, grabbing a cup of water that he’d brought for the demonstration. He pours the liquid slowly, drowning the embers in the bowl with it.

“It already generates a surplus, so Piltover would never notice. And Zaun could have clean air in a matter of months. It’s an obvious choice. The risks are negligible. And I thought—” The sentiment sticks in his chest. “I thought he’d be happy that I was building off of Sky’s work. When we were partners back in Piltover, improving conditions for the people of the Undercity was something we always talked about. Him more than me.” He places the cup down on the table. “Now, it seems like all he cares about is this little pocket.”

Lilit gives him a long, hard stare. It looks like she’s trying to decide something. Finally, when she speaks, she rolls her eyes and sighs lightly. “He’s doing a lot.” Said like a resignation. A consideration she didn’t want to make. “Keeping this place going isn’t easy.”

Jayce sets his jaw. Chews on that.

She’s right.

“How have your sessions been going?” he asks, scratching absentmindedly at the stiff web of anomaly-matter in his left wrist, following that thread. Maybe there’s something there that will point him toward an explanation.

Her eyes wander away from him. “They’ve been fine.”

“Any progress?”

Her whole demeanor has changed, flipped over into true aversion. “Nothing important.”

He takes a breath, easing his expression to balance her reticence. “Come on, there has to be something worth talking about.”

“There’s not,” she says, flat and sharp. “Why do you care? It’s not like you’re my dad.”

Jayce backpedals, mortified that he’d somehow managed to strike that nerve.“No, I—I know. I didn’t mean it like that.”

She scoffs incredulously. “Then what did you mean?”

Jayce opens his mouth to explain, but the explanation doesn’t come. “I… guess I don’t know. Sorry. This thing with Viktor, about the filters, it… must be getting to me.”

Lilit shakes her head, going back to her workstation. “It sounds like you just need to trust that he has a good reason for it.”

He blinks, mouth agape, his brain trying to catch up with his ears. “How did you—”

“Can you leave?” Her words are blunt, and terse. “I want to be alone.”

Jayce stays anchored to the spot, replaying his argument with Viktor from a few days ago in his head. He makes a sound in the back of his throat like he’s about to protest, but summarily remembers that she’s a fifteen-year-old girl, and keeps his mouth shut. “Yeah, uh… sorry,” he mumbles. “I’ll. Uh. Go.”

He steps back toward the filter tower prototype on the cart, and switches it off.

Jayce is reasonably certain he’s struck his thousandth bolt.

The work is tedious, as he’d said, but at least it’s fast. His father didn’t teach him nothing, after all.

The midday humidity combined with the heat of the active forge plasters his clothes to his skin with sweat. He pushes stray, damp strands of hair out of his face as he removes the fastener from its header and sets it aside to cool.

“How many more?” he jokes, pulling the cloth from his belt and swiping at his forehead with it.

Souzadh works with him during the day. He used to own a forge somewhere in Shurima, Jayce has learned, so his skill is more than welcome here. He’s taken little interest in Jayce’s filtration project, but is always willing to offer advice when Jayce asks.

Through working together, Jayce has also learned that Souzadh lost the use of his right hand in an ill-advised attempt to catch a falling anvil that had been improperly secured to its pedestal, and as such, that hand has now been fully replaced by the golden and porcelain-colored material that makes up all the integrated prosthetics in the commune. Viktor’s fingerprints from the healing rest mostly within his hairline, threading streaks of white through his tied-back locs.

Souzadh punches the second hole through the piece of curved frame he’s currently holding, then dips that end into the trough of water, producing an angry hiss and a good deal of steam.

“I’ll trade you,” he responds, setting the frame component on the flat surface of his anvil. “You’ve been making bolts since we got here this morning.”

Jayce shrugs. Work is work. And he’s been making them for a week, not just the day. It doesn’t really matter to him. The frames require more artistry—more bending and shaping than the smaller pieces of hardware—but making bolts is repetitive in a way that produces more immediate results and numbs his brain into perceiving less of the time.

They wordlessly pick up their hammers and trade stations. Once one of them has suggested it, they always do, if only for the sake of a little variety within the routine. They’re about the same height, so trading hasn’t been an issue. Outside, people pass by, some glancing in, while others are completely oblivious to the repetitive clang of the hammers.

So he takes the metal strut from the coals, and busies himself with bending in the intricate curves, drawing out some length when he needs it, squaring off the corners as well as he can, and punching holes for joins before quenching and setting them aside for tempering.

A few sections of frame deep, Jayce looks up from his work to see Viktor hovering in the threshold of the forge tent, flanked by two commune members Jayce has only ever seen in passing before. He immediately feels cornered, and looks to Souzadh for support.

Souzadh straightens up at his workstation, meeting Jayce’s eyes before directing a curious glance toward Viktor.

“Jayce,” he says in his mechanical melody, smiling that hollow facsimile of smile.

“Viktor,” Jayce responds, his voice softer than he means it to be.

Viktor crosses the threshold, standing across Jayce’s anvil from him. “I was wondering if you wouldn’t take on a… special project for me.”

Jayce’s chest squeezes at that wording. He’s stopped getting his hopes up. Now, he feels only a distant sense of panic at what Viktor might be asking of him.

His eyes track down from Viktor’s to the smooth steel cylinders held in the hands of the other disciples—four in total, one handle held in each hand.

Instead of panic, his face twists in betrayal. “The power cells from the Hexgate,” he mutters, shaking his head. “You said—”

“I know what I said,” Viktor admits easily. “And there was a reason for it. But upon further reflection, I have changed my mind about utilizing the Hexgates’ power.” He takes the hot end of the metal frame in his hand, and the violet current under his metal skin glows brighter for it. “It’s an efficient source that we do not have to expend the energy to create. That is invaluable for a community of our size and means. And, if we siphon only from the excess, Piltover will have no quarrel with us.”

Jayce eyes Viktor suspiciously, squinting as if that will help him read into Viktor’s intentions. He said nearly those exact words to Lilit himself, only a few days ago.

Souzadh is strangely quiet. He’s stopped his work to attend this conversation, but isn’t reacting or contributing in the way Jayce would expect someone to when their savior is having a public dispute with his partner right in front of them.

“You want me to put the power cells in the filter towers?” he asks, narrowing his eyes.

Viktor moves the frame to the designated cooling area, and as he sets it down, Jayce catches the slightest bit of movement in the steel, almost as if it were reaching toward Viktor magnetically, returning to a dormant state after his hand has moved too far away.

“You could,” Viktor answers, “but they would deplete quickly without a strong connection. We would have to keep cycling them out.”

He doesn’t like where this is going.

There’s a fluidity in Viktor’s stillness; a poise that Jayce has never noticed before—at least not in this capacity. It reminds him, oddly, of Salo, before the blast paralyzed his legs.

“That’s why I was going to suggest runic repeater circuits carrying the Arcane energy through the ground,” Jayce retorts. “Which you would know, if you had listened to me.”

“Yes,” Viktor responds, casting a disinterested glance around the tent. “I suppose I would.”

Jayce feels the hot flush of rancor rise in his body. “So, what, then?”

“I would like you to do a bit of reverse engineering, Jayce. Isolate the power source from these cells. Build it into something better. Stronger.”

“And how do you suggest I do that?” he asks, his tone hollow and dire, fixing his stony gaze to Viktor.

Viktor inhales deeply, hovering his hand over the finished pieces of frame. Tiny, inert sparks sputter aberrant white from his fingers, wrapping around them as they fizzle out ineffectually. He doesn’t meet Jayce’s eye. “With the right rune matrix apparatus, the source within the cell could draw upon latent Arcane energy in the environment, recycle that energy, and sustain itself.”

The floor feels like it’s dropped out from under him completely. The runestone in his wrist burns. He stares, speechless, for long seconds, mouth hanging open. His whole body is numb as he puts the unimaginable together.

The words tumble from his mouth like heavy stones, stolid and untenable.

“You want me to create another Hexcore.”

Viktor turns toward him, then, catching his gaze, staring at him in grave silence.

“No.” He shakes his head, voice rasping smoke, like the scorched debris he pulled Viktor’s body from. “I won’t do it.”

Viktor’s expression changes, only infinitesimally, but enough that Jayce’s breath catches in his throat as he watches it. His eyes go cold, melting into halcyon enmity, fiercely icy, all previous warmth gone, irises cycling through all their living hues in a slow kaleidoscopic fade.

“You would sabotage our dream?”

Jayce’s heart rate spikes as he studies Viktor, stood in front of him so sharp and sure, features drawn in vitriolic antipathy.

He glances over at Souzadh again. He hasn’t moved.

“This isn’t our dream, Viktor.”

The two outside the forge shift slightly, the movement catching Jayce’s eye. They’re staring intently toward Jayce, but Viktor glances over at them, and they stay put.

“If you want it,” Jayce challenges, “why don’t you make it yourself?” But a thought seizes him. Viktor wouldn’t be asking him if he had a choice. “You can’t, can you?”

“My ability to heal is finite,” he answers, slowly turning back to Jayce. “I know you have noticed.”

Jayce can’t argue with that. Of course he’s noticed. Everyone has. The queues grow longer—the wait to be healed by the Herald has increased by a magnitude of days since Jayce first arrived.

“I only want to continue helping those in need,” Viktor continues, reaching toward Jayce’s hand. “This is what will make that possible.”

Jayce grips his hammer tighter, jerking his hand out of Viktor’s reach. “And what happens when that one depletes?” Viktor flexes his fingers, then curls them into a fist, turning his hand over as he draws it back toward himself. “The cycle doesn’t end.”

“That is precisely the goal,” Viktor responds, gazing at his palm as he folds down each of his fingers individually. “A system that harnesses the self-replicating property of the Arcane. That feeds on the energy created by its chaos.” His eyes flick upward to meet Jayce’s. “You would be instrumental in the inception of the final, Glorious Evolution.”

Jayce’s mind spins. He flips through proverbial pages in his mind, frantic, for any mentions of this glorious evolution. He can’t remember any, but whatever it is, based on the state of the people in the commune, it can’t be good. “This isn’t the way. I’m sorry, but my answer is no.”

“No,” Viktor repeats, turning the word over in his mouth like it’s foreign to him. At this point, it may well be. He drags his fingertips over the smooth surface of the anvil. “When you were born, Jayce, was your mother afraid?”

He has no idea how he’s supposed to answer that.

Thankfully, it appears to be a rhetorical question. “You are blinded by fear. I understand. It’s natural for short-lived species like humanity to resist adaptation because it feels like danger. But that fear heralds rebirth. Transformation. Liberation from the body’s weaknesses.”

Jayce sets his jaw, molars slotting together. His head is starting to ache like it did when he first returned from the mage’s timeline, the runestone itching violently in the skin of his wrist. The rift between them has only grown since he failed to keep his promise. They will never be the same as they were.

“You’ve changed,” Jayce levies, mostly just to see how he’ll respond.

“All things change,” Viktor replies flippantly, not missing a single beat. “Change is a natural consequence of life. I wasn’t aware I was meant to be an exception.”

“Viktor,” Jayce whispers. “This isn’t you.” The optimist in him wants so desperately to believe that Viktor can still be reasoned with. But the truth is, he doesn’t know how deep this ideology is rooted, or how long he’s been forming it. “I don’t know where, or when, but you’ve crossed a line.”

“Need I remind you, you were the one who changed me.” Viktor steps closer to Jayce, backing him toward the forge. “This whole chain of events started with you.”

It strikes Jayce that Viktor doesn’t know how true that is.

In any other situation, “you were the one who changed me” might have been a profession of love, but here, it rings hollow and accusatory, twisting uncomfortably in his gut.

Jayce shakes his head, making an attempt to stand his ground. The heat of the forge seethes like breath at his back. “You had set that in motion yourself. You built the Hexcore. You used it to change yourself long before I had anything to do with it.” He recalls the feeling of Viktor’s dead weight in his arms, much too light. The angry red symbols breaking apart his pallid skin. “You think I didn’t see the runes carved into your body? Your hand? Your leg?”

Viktor’s eyes flash amber, with a desolate bitterness that, frankly, stuns him. “I knew you would never understand.” His expression evens immediately, saddened, fatigued; the same as it was when he emerged from stasis, alive, but forever altered. “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

Jayce feels the burden of those words, like a lance through his chest, though the sting is absent. The hurt that Viktor endured alone, because Jayce was too preoccupied with fixing to meet him there, to sit in it with him. This is the anger he’s been missing—the resentment he knew was buried in there somewhere, ripening and rotting deep below that perfect surface. The fact that he so neatly contained it mere seconds after it broke open is not a promising sign.

Apologies spring, half-formed, into his mind, working his throat around silent words, but it’s too late for that now.

A lifetime too late.

“Consider what I am asking of you.” Viktor steps forward again, and there’s nowhere to go. Jayce is pinned between Viktor and the forge, flanked by Souzadh and his anvil. “The result.” He lays his palms flat on Jayce’s chest, scrunching his brow when Jayce flinches. But he continues unfazed. “An end to pain. Infinity, stretched out before us. We can be one, Jayce,” he beseeches. “Together in eternity.”

The feeling of Viktor so close has him lightheaded, has all his thoughts disorganized, his senses addled.

But he shakes himself, grunting through a laborious breath.

“In the lab, with Mel, you said, ‘there is always a choice.’” He glances down at Viktor, draped over him like a siren, and then to the other three who stand idly in the domain of their argument. “What do you call this?”

“They have chosen ascension,” Viktor hisses. His eyes plead with Jayce to understand.

That dissonance tastes bitter; met with desperate adjuration that Jayce cannot even begin to reconcile with everything Viktor’s said.

“Souzadh,” Viktor prompts, peering around Jayce’s shoulder.

Souzadh tilts his head, ready with his response as if he was waiting for it. “Yes, Herald?”

“Are you satisfied in this commune?” he asks. “Are you comfortable? Fulfilled?”

“I am,” Souzadh affirms. “Before I had this, I had nothing. I was wasting my life, or what I had left of it. All I wanted was to see my Fiyahit again. I didn’t care what happened to me.” He addresses Jayce directly, a mix of sorrow and veneration in his unnaturally pale eyes, rimmed blue from Arcane influence. “I owe my life to the Herald. The use of my hand. My purpose. He gave these things back to me.”

Jayce’s disquietude only grows as he listens to Souzadh speak. It’s his voice, but the cadence is… off.

Viktor looks up at him, blinking slowly, imploring: See? Everything is fine.

He studies Viktor’s eyes, still blooming in every color. The heat from the forge is beginning to burn. Nothing is fine.

“Don’t you see what you’re doing to these people?”

“I am serving them. Bettering them. Improving their lives. You are the one who cannot see, Jayce. I know their minds.” He’s practically begging, but his affect still hovers in that cryptic, unearthly dispassion. “Please. We’ve been through this once already. You have the opportunity to alter the outcome.” He frowns, takes a deep breath, and shudders slightly as he extricates himself from Jayce. “Consider it. For me.”

That night, sleep evades him.

The corrupted Mercury Hammer, the only other thing as out of place in this commune as he is, sits against the wall of their room, staring Jayce down.

Viktor is asleep—or, as asleep as he can be—with his arms wrapped around Jayce from behind, his face buried in Jayce’s nape.

Viktor once described his “sleep” in this state as being like a deep meditation, where his mind is mostly dormant, but his senses are still tuned to his surroundings, so Jayce has spent a good deal of his nights the past few weeks lying awake in Viktor’s arms, nursing a festering dread in the pit of his stomach.

His doubts arose slowly, almost undetectable at first, more just vague feelings than anything concrete. Little things about Viktor’s behavior that didn’t quite fit, but that Jayce dismissed as unforeseen consequences of undeath, of the Hexcore knitting him back together, darning his mind and body with off-color wool.

And because of that, Jayce was willing to overlook those incongruences. He’d made it through hell, fought his way back to Viktor, and arrived barbarous and broken, heavy with ignominy, and Viktor had welcomed him with a more tender affection than that which had fallen by the wayside in their previous partnership.

In hindsight, he understands why things happened the way they did, but that does not assuage the sting of guilt that tells Jayce that all of this is his fault. For leaving Viktor alone, for refusing to let him go. For failing to save him, despite it all.

He misses Viktor.

The Viktor who made bad jokes and ate pickled vegetables out of the jar. The Viktor who could ramble for hours about the intricacies of runic patterns and their variations, and who would scowl at Jayce if he was more than ten minutes late.

And he feels guilty about that, and guilty about the guilt, and the tangle of his viscera is a suffocating mess of shame and longing for everything he took for granted.

Is this not Viktor? Is this not the Viktor he made?

The thought makes him feel fidgety, sick, and he shifts, and Viktor’s arms tighten around him just the barest amount.

In a way, what Viktor has become is their joint creation. The culmination of Hextech, dim electrical impulses circulating like blood, pulsing softly within the night-dark confines of their dwelling. And Jayce almost wishes it was something he could be proud of. Something to count among their triumphs. A way to hold dominion over death, if only to give Viktor back the time that he deserved.

Unfortunately, the known conventions of the universe were not so easily defeated. Not without dire consequences.

How did they get here?

How did two scientists with nothing but tenacity and a shared dream end up in the eye of a temporal storm—at the center of the end of the world?

Maybe Heimerdinger was right about their shortsightedness. About the corrupting power of the Arcane. And maybe Jayce was wrong to depose him.

But, selfishly, he wouldn’t change his decisions.

Misguided as they may have been, they were his cleanest path forward, his best chance at finding a way of curing Viktor’s disease. At keeping him.

He doesn’t regret it.

What he regrets is their decline. The way he’d acted those last few years of their partnership. The ways in which he’d let the stress change him, divert his efforts, drag him away from Viktor.

Every time he’d left Viktor to attend a gala or meeting or fundraiser. They were necessary to secure support and funding, sure, but still. He should have fought harder for Viktor to accompany him, or done more of that work outside of those damned parties. He should have stayed in the lab longer. He should have stayed.

It’s almost laughable, now—the readiness and ease with which he allowed himself to be seduced by this idealized version of his relationship with Viktor, to fall so hard in the breathless pursuit of something he should never have fought down while Viktor was alive.

The worst part is, he’s not sure where Viktor ended.

At first, it was just his eyes, his affect, the intonations in his voice, only slightly different, easily explained by the transition into a new body.

But it’s more than that. Despite the vertigo it triggers to think back on the last several weeks, Jayce is painfully aware of the inconsistencies he detected in Viktor: the ones he’d let slip by him, and the ones he’d willingly ignored.

It’s Souzadh, and Lilit, and Salo, and Huck, and all the other members of the commune who have been forcibly subdued by whatever miasmal connection they have with their host. The way he saw the personality bleed out of them in real time, the way their eyes glinted and then settled, and the voice they spoke with was no longer their own.

It’s the magnitude of this dark, sordid possessiveness in Viktor that Jayce has never felt from him before. Thrilling at first—the aspect of being Viktor’s setting a fire in his brain—but it devolved, making him feel more and more like an exotic animal on display. Less of a partner, more of a pet.

It’s Viktor’s detached, dazed air, his aloof dismissiveness, his total disregard for the lives that Jayce took. His Viktor would have been furious. A betrayal like that might have ended their partnership. And Jayce wouldn’t have been able to blame him. Instead, he smoothed it over, both times, as a sacrifice for some nebulous “good.”

Jayce would welcome that anger now, would praise it with all the air in his lungs, because at least it would mean that there is hope.

He should have known—should have put it together from Viktor’s reaction to Salo. Viktor would never have accepted the idea of life as a sacrifice, let alone personally espouse it.

With a creeping dread, Jayce realizes this is how Viktor must have felt during his short-lived councilorship. An ornament for his ego, the unsung defender of their ideals and research, while Jayce was summarily absorbed by the corruption in the city; playing both sides of that coin, and coming out worse on all accounts.

The arms that ensnare him are suddenly heavy, stifling—the rise and fall of Viktor’s chest at his back distressing instead of comforting. A growing nausea gnaws at his stomach: he isn’t entirely certain whether his lover was ever truly Viktor, or if it was only the Hexcore’s approximation of him. Designed and conducted to prey on Jayce’s silent desire, for the express purpose of swaying him from his mission and luring him into its service.

He can’t get Viktor’s words from the forge out of his head.

We can be one.

Together in eternity.

The final, Glorious Evolution.

Even just that word, evolution, rings on repeat in Viktor’s altered voice in the back of Jayce’s mind. With the frequency with which he mentions it, it’s bordering on obsession.

It draws a visceral reaction from him—a violent shudder that jostles Viktor from his dormancy. Cold fear laces through the marrow of Jayce’s bones, and he holds himself as still as possible as Viktor’s hand flexes over his sternum and then relaxes, tugging Jayce closer.

Jayce breathes an exhale of relief, but that does not clear his mind, nor his nerves, of the glaring discrepancy:

The Viktor he loved, the one who made Jayce promise to destroy the Hexcore at the expense of his life, would never ask this. This sinister thing wearing Viktor’s face isn’t his partner.

His stomach turns.

He holds his breath, jams his molars together, and breathes down the sob that threatens to crest his lungs.

Maybe there’s a way to save Viktor from it.

He saw Viktor in that astral in-between. He saw him.

Jayce wants so desperately—hopes beyond hope with he last shred of idealism left in him that it’s possible, that he can pull Viktor out of it. Get rid of the parasite puppeting his body, leeching off of these people who have no choice and no idea what they’re forfeiting until it’s too late.

What’s more likely, though, is that even if they once were extricable from one another, Viktor is now too deeply entangled with it to excise. A wave of horror surges through Jayce’s chest as he imagines Viktor being held prisoner in that astral realm, the Hexcore an invasive vine, strangling the final vestiges of life from his body. Forced to watch as Jayce cavorts with his captor, as he sleeps in its bed.

Or maybe his consciousness floats dormant in the vast ether; sleeping, peaceful, painless.

Even more likely yet, there is nothing left to save.

That realization, feeling the gentle breath on the back of his neck, floods him with a pulsing numbness; desolation in the center of his body. This thing will only keep festering and spreading until the casualties are too great to count. The longer he waits, the more people will die.

He feels cold, and hot, and his skin prickles uncomfortably, and this time he cannot stop the sobs that force their way up his throat. He can only stifle them, and hope that will be enough to keep his contemptible secret.

He knows.

He knows, with heart-rending clarity, that the thing with its arms around him, surrounding him, clutching him to its body is no longer Viktor.

He knows now that this is where the ruined future starts, that this commune will become ground zero for the swathes of featureless drones that plagued the decimated husk of Piltover.

He knows that there is only one way to save the world, and that is by doing something so unimaginable that he has rallied against the most formidable truth of nature to avoid it.

He knows what he has to do.

BRUTUS: With this I depart:
That, as I slew my best lover for the
Good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself
When it shall please my country to need my death.

He waits until Viktor is meditating in his sanctum some days later.

It is broad daylight—nights, Viktor spends in their shared bed.

Jayce has turned this over and over in his mind, stumbling numbly through his days, at times trying to delude himself into believing that the knowledge can be ungiven, shoved back into the box; that they can continue living like this forever.

But that’s not the truth.

Jayce barely breathes as he trudges up the hill, Mercury Hammer in hand, feeling the burning gazes of the people who catch sight of him boring a hole in his back.

He closes his eyes and his feet carry him forth, chanting a silent mantra in the dark chamber of his mind: It’s not him. That’s not Viktor.

It’s all he can do to keep himself going.

Don’t think.

The weight of responsibility bears down on the wide yoke of his shoulders, bending him, dragging him toward the ground even as he fights his way onward.

Every step is a million stilted moments, surging through the thick air as if it’s wet plaster. Every moment is a chance to turn back. To blind himself to the horror. To let the Hexcore have his consciousness and let himself dissolve into balmy abstraction, so that he will not have to do this.

He draws a shaking breath, gritting his teeth against the splitting sickness.

It has to be him.

It’s not Viktor.

He is resolved.

Though that does not make it easier.

Jayce almost expected it to feel hazy, like marching through a dream, but despite his dizziness, the world around him is clearer than it has been in months. It’s as if he’s woken up, hungover from a solution of Runeterra’s most potent intoxicants. And, in a way, he supposes he has.

He strides forward, crossing the threshold into the sanctum, and his breath catches hard in his throat as soon as he lays eyes on Viktor, suspended in the air, his expression drawn in peaceful sleep.

Jayce doesn’t have any earthly idea what he will do without Viktor—he’d hardly even let himself entertain the idea when Viktor was dying of his illness. Now, he will have to go forth with the burden of slaughter alongside his grief, heavy emptiness in all the places Viktor should be, but never again will.

That isn’t Viktor, he reminds himself, again, again, again.

Jayce’s heart drums, resonant, in his chest. He can feel it in his throat, and his stomach, pounding hard and rapid. It’s near impossible to keep himself standing, but he pushes on, regardless of the way his knees feel like loose ball bearings scattered across the ground.

It takes only a few more steps to put Jayce in the exact spot he was in the last time he attempted this, and as his toe touches down on that fateful point, something slanted shifts, rights itself, slots perfectly into its place.

His ribs feel too big for his body. All his bones are clumsy, his organs filled with mud. Everything about this feels untenable, feels wrong.

The mechanism of the hammer warbles, and at the sound, Viktor’s brows draw together, and his eyes drift slowly open.

Jayce heaves a strained sob of a breath, thanking whatever deities exist that from this distance he is unable to discern their color. He plants his bare sole on the groove-textured ground, and lifts the Mercury Hammer, the muscles in his forearms taut and aching.

The acceleration rune chimes and glows, imbued with purpose. He squeezes the gnarled, skin-warmed metal of the switch and thrusts it forward, movements mindless, mechanical, abhorrent. A burst of chimerical light momentarily blinds him, dimming all else as the hammer’s segmented maw reacts, breaking open at the head with a series of tiny mechanical clangs, catalyzing a beam as if it has a mind of its own.

Wisps of Arcane energy, shaped by the anomaly, swirl around his head, sucked in toward the gravitational core, condensing all at once and then discharging outward with another glaring flash.

Jayce squints against it, but does not—must not—look away.

No matter how his mind splits, fractured into hundreds of disparate possibilities of how this moment plays out, how he experiences them all simultaneously, swelling at the pliant edges of his being to emerge and corporealize. He hears his own screams echoing distorted around him, feels his own will falter and strengthen at once.

Wind generated by the accumulating force whips Jayce’s hair across his forehead, but his eyes remain trained on Viktor, leaking, weeping, as he aims the charged hammer, tamping down the riving pain in his stomach. Despite the tension petrifying his whole body, and the way his breaths stutter and seize around his mournful snarl, he wrenches the switch back, and shoots, terminal regret forcing its way through his veins the moment the sin is committed.

Viktor’s eyes widen. For the first time, maybe ever that he’s seen, Viktor looks terrified.

The ray of pure, condensed energy lurches toward Viktor, and Jayce watches it surge haltingly forth as if time has slowed to stretch this possibility as far as it will go. He tries to keep his gaze steady, to afford Viktor the service of witness he is owed, and to prevail over the cowardice that brought them here, but in the half-heartbeat space between firing and impact, that terror overwhelms him.

His brows scrunch together, and he flinches, turns his face away, shields himself. He cannot weather the crux of this betrayal thrice-over—cannot watch the beam connect, cannot witness what he knows will haunt his dreams until he’s dead.

Piltover, at least, will not mourn him.

The blast, when it hits, is deafening. Even from behind his eyelids, Jayce can tell that, for a breath, the chamber is awash in blazing light.

What follows is the sickening metallic crash of Viktor’s body hitting the hard stone floor, echoing throughout the whole of Runeterra.

It takes a hard battle against his disbelief and denial, but Jayce finally raises his face and opens his eyes, and the brunt of his grief collapses in on him immediately.

The roof of the sanctum is blown wide open, antigravity suspending its pieces in the air.

He chokes on his heartbeat in dragging his gaze downward, and stands, transfixed, eyes stinging, breath no more than a trembling draft. Viktor’s chest is a shattered likeness of his sanctum, but the pieces are gone, vaporized into nothing. Violet-white sparks climb the air, reaching meagerly up from that crater, releasing tiny motes of warm, shifting light. His form is cradled by the curved wall of the structure, propped up to stare heartbroken at Jayce with shimmering eyes.

Jayce has seen this before.

The walk to the commune, the crystal portals in the stone. The body in the clearing.

Viktor.

Limbs numb, Jayce stumbles forward, dropping the hammer with a piercing clang. He rushes toward Viktor without any accord, stepping half into one of the pores in the stone, causing his gait to falter, dropping him to Viktor’s side.

He hardly registers the physical pain in his scramble to gather Viktor’s broken body into his arms.

Viktor clutches at Jayce’s belts while Jayce pulls him into his lap, and his fingers close around the gear he gave Jayce only a few short weeks ago.

“Jayce, wh—” Viktor manages, features contorted in anguish, weakness arresting his faculties as his depressurized chest struggles for air. “Why?”

Jayce screws his eyes shut, burying his face in Viktor’s hair, choking on his own breath as he makes a strained attempt to avoid hyperventilating. “Because I promised you,” he whispers through gritted teeth, holding Viktor tighter, as tight as he can.

Viktor makes a small sound in his throat, and Jayce cannot tell if that means recognition.

“They—” Viktor pants, between wheezing breaths. “The people will—”

“I know,” Jayce responds, swallowing down a sob, curling himself smaller against Viktor. “I know.”

Viktor lets his head fall against Jayce’s shoulder, relaxing into him, surrendering.

“Jayce…” Viktor mumbles again, tugging the gear into his palm, running his thumb across its surface. “You,” he breathes, “were worth… everything.”

Jayce’s chest tightens, and he shakes his head, helpless, jaw clamped shut, working around the horror those words inspire. It isn’t true. His throat burns with strangled screams, all his muscles tense and unyielding as he rocks Viktor with the rhythm of his sobs.

Viktor’s hand falls heavy, fingers snarling in the cord that attaches the gear to Jayce’s belt, snapping it.

The steel of the gear rings out as it clatters to the ground, rolling off a ways before it makes its rounding descent and settles flat on the stone.

Something Viktor said drifts back to him: “It is amusing, though; the concept of a vestigial emotion.”

Love, he thinks, is vestigial to him now—here his heart lies dead in his arms.

Outside, Jayce hears the bodies drop one by one, a discordant shriek of agony raising high into the air, maybe even as high as Piltover.

All these lives, in exchange for the world.

For him to keep his promise.

For him to let Viktor go.