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Jayce
“We finish this together,” Jayce says, wrapping his hand around Viktor’s. The crystal glows between their overlapping fingers. They are everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing. In this moment, there is only them. Viktor’s gaze—honeyed and golden once again, no longer cold and arcane—meets Jayce’s.
And then, together, they are unmade.
Jayce gasps, his grip slipping from his hammer. He falls to the side, grunting at the impact as his shoulder hits the hard surface of the dome. He is painfully aware of his body, can feel every hair and every pore after being in that—other space. A space beyond bodies and physicality.
He groans as he forces himself to sit up, squinting against the brightness of sunlight. He didn’t expect to be here. He didn’t expect to be at all after what happened with Viktor—
Viktor! He scrambles desperately to his feet, looking around wildly for Viktor. No, he can’t have left him there, in that other place, not after he told him that they would do this together—
His left leg buckles under him as he stands, the brace not enough to support his weakened leg after kneeling in front of his hammer for who knows how long. He wheezes as the pain of his knee hitting the ground knocks the wind out of him.
“Jayce?” says a voice that instantly soothes his panic. “Are you okay?”
He looks over his shoulder and there is Viktor, standing up from where it looks like he’d been thrown to the ground. He is naked but for the scraps of a dark blue blanket wound around his shoulders. Jayce recognizes it as the cowl that Viktor (not Viktor, not really, the Thing that Viktor had become) had been wearing. He also realizes with a note of surprise that it’s the same blanket, the one he wrapped around Viktor’s cold, metallic body that day in the lab, when Viktor returned to life only to leave Jayce behind.
“Viktor,” Jayce breathes, like a promise, like a prayer. He reaches for Viktor, and Viktor reaches for him, looking just as stunned as Jayce feels.
Viktor’s body is not flesh and blood. The mask of the Thing that had tried to kill Jayce is gone, crumbled away, but the body of purplish metallic sinew remains. The sparking, shimmering light of the arcane that had danced across and under the purple surface is gone—something has been stripped away. But the body that was birthed from the hexcore cocoon remains. Jayce doesn’t know that means.
But he knows that when Viktor says, “Jayce, your leg…” his voice does not reverberate with an otherworldly echo. He sounds like Viktor—just Viktor. Jayce’s partner.
“It’s okay,” Jayce says. He wraps his fingers around the hand that Viktor offers him, and as their skin touches, an electric tingle goes down Jayce’s arm. For a moment he expects them to be back in that other place, blinding blue light and the glow of countless souls surrounding them, but no—they’re still here, in the bright midday sunlight, on the shattered dome above Piltover. They are real.
Viktor helps Jayce haul himself to his feet, and the irony of the role reversal is not lost on Jayce as he fights to straighten out his leg and keep his footing on the curved dome. Viktor’s eyes are locked on the stiff brace that reaches from Jayce’s ankle to his upper thigh. Of course, Viktor would have seen it before—but he wasn’t really Viktor then, not completely. Jayce doesn’t think that that version of Viktor was paying attention to things as mundane and human as injured legs.
“What happened?” Viktor asks.
Jayce laughs, an almost panicked sound that bubbles up from inside his chest and spills past his lips. “To my leg? To us? To the world?”
Viktor tears his eyes away from the brace to meet Jayce’s eyes. “Yes. All of those.”
Jayce laughs again. “I barely know. Here.” He shrugs off his coat and wraps it around Viktor. It’s much too big for him, but if he buttons it up, it gives him at least a bit of modesty. The metallic purple body does not seem to have much that needs covering up, but still. He wants to give Viktor some dignity, at least.
Viktor hugs the coat around himself almost absently, still studying Jayce.
“I didn’t think I would survive this,” Viktor says, finally. “I’m glad you did, though.”
And this, finally, breaks the dam. Jayce pulls Viktor to himself firmly, hugging him to his chest so tightly he almost expects them to fuse into one being. And—after a second that seems almost eternal—he feels Viktor hug him back, just as fiercely. This is what he wanted but never got, that day in the lab. Viktor returning the hug, fingers digging into Jayce’s shoulders hard enough to bruise, his face pressed against Jayce’s shoulder as he whispers, “Jayce. Thank you. I’m sorry, thank you, Jayce. Thank you.”
“Shh,” Jayce says, tangling his fingers in Viktor’s hair, his soft hair, longer and streaked with grey but still Viktor. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”
They hold each other for a moment that stretches into infinity. They hold each other for no time at all. Time still feels syrupy and elastic, infinite and finite all at once.
And then suddenly that feeling snaps, like a bubble has been popped, and a voice over Jayce’s shoulder says, “Um. Is it... is it over?”
Jayce unwinds himself from Viktor—but keeps a hand on Viktor’s shoulder, unwilling to stop touching him, as though he might float away without Jayce to hold him down—and turns to see Ekko, not far from him, blinking in wide-eyed uncertainty.
“I… I think so,” Jayce says.
“Good,” Ekko says. “Because it doesn’t really seem like these guys want to fight anymore?”
He waves his arm to indicate the field of beings that surround them. And Jayce watches as these beings—these people—begin to stagger to their feet, watches as plates of white and gold metal slough off of their bodies, revealing the flesh beneath. They blink with awe and confusion as their bodies are remade, turned back in time by a power that Jayce still does not understand. Their faces no longer glimmer with opalescent fingerprints—that magic is gone from this world. But they still bear the mark of Viktor’s touch, their bodies etched with deep grooves of pink scar tissue instead of metallic shimmer.
They are also all very naked, which is such an absurd problem to have in this moment that it shakes Jayce out of his awe and surprise.
“I guess we have to get down from here somehow,” Jayce says, glancing around at the cracked and crumbling edges of the dome. “And get everyone some clothes?”
“Hm, yes,” Viktor says, his hand still on Jayce’s arm, just as unwilling to let go. “That would be a start.”
Mel
Mel watches as her mother’s guards—her guards now, always loyal to the rightful heir to the Noxian throne—carry her mother’s body away. There is movement all around her, soldiers and undercity fighters carrying their wounded, shouting for aid, clearing away rubble. Caitlyn has been whisked away by medics, thick gauze pressed to the mess of her left eye. Somewhere, distantly, Mel can hear a voice she recognizes as Vi—her sobs and screams echo through cavernous halls.
Mel wishes she could sob and scream like that. She wants to fall to her knees and break down, tear at her hair and at her skin, at the shining arcane metal that is embedded in her skin, her birthright.
But Mel has never been good at breaking down. She has spent too long perfecting her mask—she doesn’t know how to pull it away now.
So she stands in the center of it all, like a rock being buffeted by the ocean's waves, and she hopes that eventually the push of the crowd will erode her away to nothingness.
“Mel?”
She turns, and sees a face that—somewhere deep in her gut—she had been certain that she would never see again. Jayce looks dirty and haggard and exhausted, but he is there, alive, standing only a hundred paces from her.
“Jayce,” she says, and part of her mask finally slips. She runs to him, throws herself at him, feels him stumble against her weight. He doesn’t fall, though, and he doesn’t let her go. His arms are strong, wrapped tight around her shoulders, and she lets herself sob into his broad chest. She has never needed to be held more than she needs it now.
“Mel,” he murmurs against the top of her head, his hand rubbing soothing circles between her shoulder blades. “Your mother… I saw them carrying her away. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She cries harder. She screams into his sternum, grabs fistfuls of his shirt. He doesn’t let her go.
They must stand there for an eternity. She feels weak and wrung out by the time she pulls away from him. He looks exhausted. There is a heavy stoop to his shoulders, his left hip cocked awkwardly. Still, he holds her arms, keeping her grounded and afloat.
“I’m so glad that you’re alive,” he says, his golden gaze searching her face, as if trying to memorize its contours.
“Me, too,” she says, her voice thick from crying. “I can’t believe… how did you… What happened to Viktor?”
She almost doesn’t want to ask, but she has to know. She expects him to break, expects to see devastation on his face. She’s prepared to hold him, now, as he grieves.
But instead, he looks away, over his shoulder. Mel follows his gaze.
In her desperate run into Jayce’s arms, she didn’t notice the person hovering a few steps behind him. Now, she doesn’t know how she could have possibly missed him. Hugging Jayce’s oversized coat around his shoulders, looking just as haggard and tired as Jayce… is Viktor.
“Viktor?” she says softly, reaching for him, as though he might be a figment of her grieving mind.
He recoils from her for a moment, and then looks to Jayce, as if seeking his approval. Jayce nods, and Viktor steps forward. His legs, from below the hem of Jayce’s coat, are still purple and metallic. His face, though, is as human as she remembers.
“Mel… I am so sorry,” he says. His voice no longer echoes, no longer carries the robotic reverberation she remembers from the fight in the council room. “I’m sorry about your mother. About… everything. I don’t know how I can ever make things right.”
“Come here,” is all she says, and wraps her hand around his thin, metallic wrist.
His eyes widen in shock as she pull him towards them, into them, so he is pressed against her side and Jayce’s.
“You brought him back to us,” she says to Jayce, pressing her forehead against his chest again. “You did it.”
“I did,” Jayce says. He pulls Viktor more firmly against them, one arm around each of their shoulders, holding them both against his broad frame. “We did. We brought each other back. Somehow.”
“Thank you,” Mel says. “Thank you for coming back to me. I don’t think I could have survived, losing everyone.”
Viktor’s touch is tentative, but after a moment, he holds her, too. They stand, the three of them, in the buffeting waves of the crowd. They are still a rock in the ocean, but they are sturdier together. She no longer feels that she will be eroded away; she no longer wants to disappear.
The day is long, and it is not kind. There are the dead, the injured, the angry. Great swaths of Piltover have been damaged or destroyed. There are those who want to throw Viktor and the Noxian army out of the city; there are those who want them executed. Somewhere in the chaos, Ambessa’s scientist ally disappears.
Nothing is easy, but night comes all the same. Exhaustion tugs at everyone’s bones. A council guest room is secured for Jayce and Viktor to hide away in, at least until Viktor’s fate is decided by the council.
“Come rest with us,” Jayce says to Mel, but she shakes her head.
“My mother’s body has been taken back to her ship,” she says. “There are mourning rituals that have to start tonight. She was… not perfect, but she was my mother. I have to do this right.”
Jayce’s holds her face between his hands, wipes a tear away from the corner of her eye with his thumb. “Do you want us to come with you?” he asks softly.
She shakes her head between his hands. “No. For the first night… I have to do this alone.”
He sighs, a deep and tired sound, and kisses her forehead gently.
“Then come join us,” he says. “When it’s time for you to sleep.”
She pulls away enough to look at Viktor, still hovering behind Jayce like a shadow. “Is that okay?” she asks. They’ve been… close, the three of them, in the past. But the lines of their relationship have never been clear, and after the end of the end of the world doesn’t seem like the easiest time to work out those finer details.
But Viktor says, “Of course.” His smile is tired, but genuine. So she squeezes Jayce’s hands between her own, and pulls away.
“Tonight, then,” she says. “Rest well.”
And then she turns, and breathes in deeply, settling into her mask once again. Tonight, she can let it drop once more. For now, she needs to go find her mother.
Viktor
As soon as they enter the council guest room, Jayce throws himself down on the bed with a groan of bone-deep exhaustion. Viktor hesitates. Is he tired? He thinks he should be. This day has been infinitely long. He isn’t sure when he last slept—has he slept at all, since he woke up in this body? He can’t remember—his mind is muddled. There are holes in his memory, as though the hexcore that was sharing his mind and body these past months took its memories with it when it vanished.
He doesn’t like this feeling. His mind has always been his one asset, his one strength. It terrifies him to feel it incomplete.
“Viktor,” Jayce says, reaching for him. “Come. Lie down.”
So Viktor does. Of course he does. He thinks he would do anything Jayce asked of him right now.
As soon as he sinks into the thick blankets of the council guest room’s bed, an exhaustion does settle into his bones, or whatever he has now, under this purple metallic frame. It is something of a relief, to realize that he can feel tired again. A confirmation of his humanity.
He saw the reality that Jayce showed him. He saw what his hands could do, the twisted world he nearly created. It is good to know he is something more mundane again—that there is no longer the power to heal or to corrupt coursing through him.
There is still a hollow feeling in his chest, though. Right over his heart, right where Jayce shot him, not so long ago. He presses a fist to his sternum. Why is he still here? Why has he been allowed to live, after everything he’s done, after everything he could have done?
He knows that Jayce has forgiven him. He can’t imagine forgiving himself.
So he doesn’t try. Not now—maybe someday.
Instead, he turns to Jayce, rolls onto his side to face him. Jayce is rubbing at the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, face pinched with what looks like pain.
“Jayce,” Viktor says, all thoughts of his own forgiveness and salvation instantly slipping from his mind as he focuses on his partner. “Are you hurt?” He places a hand on Jayce’s chest, feels the steady beating of his heart.
Jayce opens his eyes and tilts his head to meet Viktor’s gaze.
“No,” Jayce says, and gives Viktor a tired smile.
There are still fingerprints gouged into Jayce’s forehead like a crown, fresh pink scars instead of a metallic shine. Viktor’s fingerprints. Viktor almost wants to reach out and touch them, but he doesn’t want to hurt Jayce if the marks are still tender.
“Just exhausted,” Jayce says, and yawns. Then he winces, and reaches down to rub at his left thigh. “And this. Swinging my hammer around has definitely been putting way too much weight on this leg, but… Maybe I can put the hammer down now. For a while, at least.”
Viktor sits up. He reaches for Jayce’s leg brace, then hesitates, his hand hovering near Jayce’s knee.
“Jayce,” he says. Bile rises in the back of his throat. He desperately searches through his fragmented memories, but comes up blank. “…Did I do this?”
Jayce pushes himself up onto his elbows and reaches for Viktor’s arm. He holds him, a hand on his forearm, running his thumb along Viktor’s ridged metallic skin. “No,” Jayce says. “You didn’t. It was just dumb luck. When I was in… that future place. I fell. Just tripped and fell into this cave. And my hammer…” Jayce winces, goes a little green around the edges as though he’s reliving the moment. “My own hammer crushed my leg. It was nobody’s fault.”
Viktor must not look comforted by that, because Jayce continues, “But, hey, the only reason I was able to climb out of that cave was because I remembered how we’d built your leg brace, and I was able to replicate it. Well, mostly. I only had pieces from my hammer to work with, and no tools, so it was shoddy work, but it was good enough. Good enough for me to stand and climb out of there. So you helped, in a way.”
“Do not give me credit I haven’t earned,” Viktor says, looking away.
Jayce reaches for his chin, tilts his head back to face him again. “I thought about you all the time I was trapped down there,” Jayce says, his voice soft. “You and Mel. I wouldn’t have had the strength to crawl out of there if I didn’t know that I was doing it to get back to the two of you. Maybe that was selfish—I should have been strong enough to do it for Piltover and Zaun. For the world. But what gave me strength was thinking about you.”
Viktor closes his eyes against the brilliant shine of Jayce’s gaze on him. “I see why the council has always favoured you,” Viktor says. “You know just how to win someone over.”
“I’m not trying to win you over, Viktor,” Jayce says, a real hint of frustration in his voice. “I’m telling you the truth.”
Viktor opens his eyes again. “I know,” he says. “That is why it works so well.”
He leans in, lets himself feel comforted, feel loved, at least for now. He presses his forehead against Jayce’s, breathes in the smell of him, sweaty and dirty from the day but still undeniably Jayce. He holds the back of Jayce’s head, a part of him missing the shorter, clean-shaved nape that Jayce used to have. So much has changed.
He pulls away enough to gently touch the top of Jayce’s brace. “You should take this off,” he says. “Before we sleep. Believe me, you will regret it tomorrow if you fall asleep with it on.”
Jayce snorts. “How many times did I tell you to take yours off when you spent the night in the lab? And how many times did you listen to me?”
Viktor gives him a wry smile. “Well, hopefully you will listen better than I did.”
Jayce hums in agreement, but doesn’t reach for the brace. Instead, he watches in quiet contemplation as Viktor feels around the edges of the brace, reaching for buckles and clasps. The design really is similar to the brace that Viktor once wore—he finds the clasps easily, with practiced hands.
A sympathetic twinge travels up Viktor’s right leg as he works his way down the brace, half sense memory and half real pain. There is still metal, rods and gears, embedded in Viktor’s skin from when his leg and back brace fused into this new, strange body. It should be unbearably painful, he thinks, but even with the spark of the arcane gone from within him, this body doesn’t feel the way his body used to. The hexcore changed him, and even now that it has left him, he is still what it made him.
He should be dead. He was dead, on the floor of the council room. He can hear Jayce’s biting words in the back of his mind. My partner died in this room. Those words were not wrong. Viktor died. What he is now is something else—he hopes that there is enough of himself left in this moth-eaten mind.
“There,” Viktor says, when the last clasp is undone. He careful removes the brace and sets it on the floor beside them.
Jayce flexes his knee and ankle tentatively, and winces.
“Will it heal?” Viktor asks. His fingers itch to rest on Jayce’s knee, to let the power of the arcane flow from his fingertips into Jayce’s joints like a soft balm, to heal everything that hurts him. He can’t, of course. That power is gone, and he saw what the arcane truly did to those he tried to help. He would never turn Jayce into his puppet.
Still, he aches to relieve Jayce’s pain.
The expression on Jayce’s face is not hopeful. “Heal more than it already has? No, probably not. The break was bad and… I should have tried to set it sooner, but, uh… I wasn’t entirely in my right mind. The doctors at the academy clinic said they might be able to rebreak and reset the bone, which would help to straighten it out a bit, but they didn't seem very hopeful about the damage to the joints and ligaments.”
Viktor huffs and lets his forehead fall against Jayce’s chest. What a cruel twist of the universe, to fix Viktor’s leg only to shatter Jayce’s. He listens to Jayce’s steady, even breaths for a moment, trying to convince himself that Jayce won’t inherit the infection in his lungs, too.
Jayce reaches up and holds the back of Viktor’s head, running his fingers through Viktor’s hair. “It’s okay. It could be worse. I can walk with the brace, and it doesn’t really hurt unless I overdo it. I’m fine, Viktor. I would have shattered both my legs if it meant making my way back to you.”
“Don’t say that,” Viktor says into Jayce’s chest. “Don’t hurt yourself for me.”
“It’s what people do for love,” Jayce says.
Love. The word warms the hollow place in Viktor’s chest. He knows he loves Jayce—he knows Jayce loves him. They flirted around the edges of that knowledge for years, working together in their lab. Touches that lingered. Late nights with a bottle of expensive liquor brought over by Mel, the three of them sitting too close together to be proper, sharing long looks and soft words.
As Viktor’s illness grew worse, as Viktor’s conviction that he didn’t want Jayce to know about his illness grew deeper, Viktor pulled away from Jayce, from what might have been between them. And Mel moved in, filled more of the space that Viktor left behind, and Viktor remembers feeling—both jealous and relieved. Relieved that Jayce would still have someone, once Viktor was gone.
But now Viktor is not gone. And neither is Mel, of course. And Viktor doesn’t know where that leaves them.
“What about Mel?” Viktor asks, running a hand along Jayce’s side, hoping Jayce has followed his train of thought.
“What about Mel?” Jayce repeats, his fingers still combing through Viktor’s hair. “Can’t I love you both? I always have.”
It sounds so simple, coming from Jayce. From another, Viktor might not believe it could be so easy. Viktor still believes that humanity is rife with conflict and jealousy. He knows emotions cloud judgement and reason.
But Jayce was right when he said that people deserved to choose—there is beauty in choice, in trying.
“Is that okay?” Jayce asks, softly, because Viktor hasn’t said anything yet.
“Mm,” Viktor says. “If I have to share you, Medarda is not the worst person to share with.”
Jayce laughs, and Viktor feels the rumble of it in Jayce’s chest, his forehead still pressed against him. “Medarda. Don’t pretend the two of you weren’t friends as well.”
Viktor cracks a smile, though Jayce can’t see it from how they’re still intertwined. Of course Jayce is right—Viktor and Mel got to know each other over the years of hextech’s development as well. Jayce was her golden boy, but there was no golden boy of hextech without his partner, and Mel had said as much to Viktor more than once.
“She was worried about you, too, you know. When we were waiting for you to wake up. After the attack on the council room.”
Viktor lifts his head from Jayce’s chest to meet his eyes. He raises an eyebrow. This, somehow, surprises him.
“She was!” Jayce insists. “I’m not the only person who cares for you, Viktor. Caitlyn asked about you as well, and my mother… You are loved, Viktor.”
Viktor swallows down too many emotions. “If you say so, Jayce,” he says, because he isn’t ready to think about every other person he may have let down. Every other person whose forgiveness he will need to seek on bended knee. It’s easier to focus on Jayce, just Jayce, for now.
He leans up, and presses his forehead against Jayce’s, a mirror of the way they’d held each other in that other place, when they had thought it was the end.
“I love you, Viktor,” Jayce says, his breath barely a whisper.
And Viktor tilts his head, just a hair’s breadth more, and presses his lips to Jayce’s.
It’s not exactly how he’d imagined the kiss, the many, many times he’d imagined kissing Jayce over the years of their partnership. The beard is new, and bristles against Viktor’s chin. He’d always imagined this happening in the lab, Jayce leaning into him, pressing him against a desk or a lab table. Instead, on this soft bed in a council guest room, Viktor leans over Jayce, hands against his chest, and it is nothing like what Viktor imagined, and it is everything that Viktor imagined.
Jayce pulls Viktor down against him, presses him down into him as though he wants them to become one being, and Viktor only holds him tighter. He pulls his mouth away from Jayce’s for just a moment, just long enough to pant against Jayce’s lips, and then he kisses him again.
The future may not be so kind to Viktor, the man who almost ended the world—but for now, for this moment, it is easy to be here, and to be loved.
Later, much later, when Jayce has fallen asleep at Viktor’s side, his back pressed against Viktor’s front, their hands tangled together at Jayce’s chest, the guest room door clicks open softly. Jayce doesn’t stir, his breaths even and deep with sleep, but Viktor’s eyes crack open, quiet but alert.
There is only faint moonlight illuminating the room from between a gap in the curtains, but it is enough for Viktor to recognize Mel. She moves softly, quietly, towards the bed. She is wrapped in nothing but a thin silk dressing gown, her hair devoid of ornaments and its usual elaborate style. She pauses when she catches Viktor’s eye.
She tilts her head in silent question. The acrid burn of jealousy claws its way up Viktor’s throat. For a moment, still half-caught in the dream of sleep, he aches for the numbness of his previous form. Human emotions are ugly, painful, cruel.
And then he feels Jayce shift slightly in his hold. He thinks of Jayce’s words, the beauty of imperfections. He tells himself that this jealousy doesn’t make him an ugly thing—it only makes him human.
So he doesn’t swallow down the jealousy—he lets it wash over him, lets himself sit in it for a moment. And suddenly, it doesn’t feel so bad, so all consuming. Can’t I love you both? I always have. Jayce will love them both whether Viktor turns Mel away or not. He can’t change Jayce’s heart—he doesn’t want to.
So he nods, just a slight shift of his head, but enough for Mel’s sharp eyes to catch the movement. She smiles, and her lips move with silent words. Thank you.
She slides into the bed on Jayce’s other side. There is plenty of room—the council guest rooms are decadently oversized. She pulls the blanket up and over her shoulder gently, careful not to disturb Jayce. She places one hand against Jayce’s chest, just shy of where Jayce and Viktor’s hands are intertwined. She looks exhausted. There is a bone-deep sadness around her eyes. Viktor thinks of her throwing herself into Jayce’s arms, sobbing and screaming into his chest. And he thinks of her seeing him, standing in Jayce’s shadow. He’d expected her to be angry with him, furious at everything he had done. He knows Ambessa would have turned against Piltover with or without him, but that doesn’t erase his involvement.
But she had turned no anger towards him. Only relief. You brought him back to us, she’d said.
He shifts his hand, fingers still wrapped around Jayce’s, until his pinky just brushes Mel’s. She looks surprised for a moment, her eyes jumping up to meet Viktor’s. He smiles, just slightly, and after a moment she smiles back. The sadness around her eyes eases somewhat, and Viktor thinks that this, maybe, is the truth of human emotion. It can be ugly, and it can be beautiful, and the pursuit of that beauty, not its destination, is what matters.