Archive of Our Own ^beta

It happened so quickly.

Viktor had been sitting in a chair behind Jayce as he persuaded the council to grant Zaun their independence. He remembered watching the hands slowly rise in agreement, the lights clicking on as Jayce turned to him, his smile blinding.

In that moment, Viktor had been so proud of him. 

In that moment, the room exploded. 

Viktor opened his eyes and found himself on the floor, sprawled out on his back. His crutch had been blown out of his hold, lost in the chaos, and when his ears stopped ringing, he could hear the sounds of destruction around him. Pieces of the building crumbled down around him, the smell of fire burned his nose, and the mournful cries of survivors reached his ears. 

Alive, he was alive, but how ? 

He coughed as the smoke burned his lungs, rolling clumsily onto his side while sucking in air. His vision was blurry, likely from a knock to the head, and his eyes immediately fell onto Mel, helping one of the other fallen Councilors nearby. 

To his surprise and eventual horror, Viktor realized that the person she was helping wasn't Jayce. 

Where was Jayce?

Viktor lifted his head, ignoring the sudden wave of dizziness that assaulted his senses when he did. He brought a hand to his eyes, scrubbing at them until he could see straight, and once he could, he wildly looked around the room, searching for familiar dark hair and white coat ensemble. 

It took him too long to find him, and when he finally did, he almost wished he hadn't. Jayce wasn't among the few people moving about the room, digging others out from the wreckage. 

He was one of the ones buried in the rubble. 

“Jayce…?” Viktor, without a crutch, was left to crawl his way across the floor, desperate to reach the man buried in the rubble not too far away. “ Jayce ?” 

Jayce didn't answer him, but his fingers twitched at the sound of his voice. His eyes were closed, face slack like he was asleep, and Viktor would have believed it to be so if not for the gash bleeding sluggishly on his forehead.  His body seemed to be crushed under a substantial piece of concrete, much too large for Viktor to move on his own, but it didn't stop him from grasping the piece with bloodied fingers in a fit of desperation. 

“Jayce!” 

It was a fruitless endeavor. Even in prime health, he wouldn't have been able to lift debris of this size, let alone now when his body was failing him. He'd heard of mothers summoning godlike strength to save their children in life-threatening situations; why couldn't he summon that strength now?

“Stay with me, Jayce,” he told him frantically, moving away from the debris to instead focus on the parts of Jayce he could actually touch. His fingers shook as he reached out, pressing two of them to Jayce's neck in an attempt to find a pulse, some kind of indicator that Jayce was still alive. 

The pulse was there, weak, fading, a sluggish push against his fingertips, and Viktor bowed his head as a sob tore itself from his throat. 

Alive; Jayce was alive. 

He still had time. 

“You cannot die, do you hear me?” Viktor demanded, shuffling back to the debris despite the crippling shock of pain of protest from his knee. He had to move it somehow. If he didn't move it, Jayce was going to die. “Jayce Talis, I will never forgive you if you die.”

He had no idea how long he knelt there, screaming and shoving at the debris. It felt like an eternity, but it couldn't have been long at all because nothing had changed around him when Mel finally came to his side. 

“Viktor,” Mel murmured, voice trembling almost as much as the hand that came to rest on his shoulder. It didn't hinder his actions, however, fingers still scrambling for purchase on the rubble and hoping for it to give even just an inch. He knew what she would say, and he didn't want to hear it. “Viktor, stop–”

“ No!” Viktor snapped, though it could have been described as a snarl. If he hadn't felt his lips move, he wouldn't believe that the noise had come from him. “ Help me!”

Another shove at the rubble stirred up the dust, which aggravated his lungs the moment he breathed it in. Viktor's entire body shuddered, slumping forward for support as his body attempted to reject the foreign debris, coughing and hacking. A spatter of blood decorated the rock, his vision spotted, and Mel's voice became more frantic as she struggled to pull him from Jayce's body. 

“Viktor, please, he's gone–”

“I-I can fix him!” Viktor choked out, chest heaving as he struggled to draw breath, wiping The back of his hand across his mouth and smearing saliva and blood across his skin. “Mel, please! Not him, not like this!”

He briefly wondered what he must look like to her, half out of his mind, covered in blood and dust while clinging to the body of a man he had come to care for so much that losing him was practically a death sentence of its own. 

Mel's eyes flickered between Viktor and Jayce, lingering on the man beneath the rubble for a moment longer. Her expression was schooled, giving no indication of what thoughts were racing through her head, but Viktor could see the flicker of anguish in her eyes. She didn’t want to lose him either. “We need assistance here!” She called over her shoulder. “Councilor Talis needs medical attention!”

The guards that had rushed in to assist quickly moved into their space, Viktor scrambling back to give them space while Mel directed them on how to proceed. 

That piece, there.

Be careful of his legs. 

He's lost so much blood . 

“Viktor,” Mel murmured, suddenly closer than he'd anticipated. Her grip on his arms was firm but gentle as she helped him to his feet. He felt like he was going to collapse, knees trembling as the guards lifted the rubble from Jayce’s form and moved it aside. “Where do you want us to take him?” 

For a long moment, Viktor didn't answer, thoughts racing as he tried to find some kind of solution. They didn't have the time it would take to cart Jayce to the Undercity to see Singed, not with his injuries as severe as they were, and no person in Piltover dabbled in whatever madness Singed drew up in his labs. 

He looked down at his hand, the one corrupted by the Hexcore, the one that pushed newfound strength through his body, and his eyes widened in realization. 

The Hexcore.

Jayce had yet to destroy it. He'd planned to do it after the meeting. 

It was still in the lab. 

If it could fix him…

“Viktor?”

What if it could save Jayce?

“The lab,” Viktor said decisively. “Take him to the lab.”

A few drops of blood, that was all it took last time.

It just needed some of Jayce's.  

“ You are not allowed to die like this .”

The Hexcore shrieked with want. 

Jayce screamed in agony.

“I won't allow it. I forbid it.”

It was over as quickly as it'd begun. 

“Please…Please, save him.”

Jayce lay in a cocoon formed by Hexcore, healing. 

Alive, breathing. 

Viktor finally allowed himself to weep.

He'd done it.

Weeks passed with no change. 

Viktor spent every moment of it in the lab, waiting for any sign that Jayce would awaken, but of course, there was nothing.

Not an eye flutter or a finger twitch. 

Jayce simply slept while Viktor steadily came apart at the seams. Mel was his primary source of contact with the outside world, visiting every few days when she managed to slip away to check in on their progress or lack thereof. She would bring him food that he barely touched, offered updates on the state of the city as well as the manhunt for the woman who had caused the explosion, and sometimes just sat in silence while Viktor watched the Pod Jayce so peacefully slept in.

“How is he today?”

“He is breathing. Otherwise, there has been no change.”

“Viktor, you should go home, get some rest.”

“I want to be here when he wakes. He should not be alone.”

“He wouldn't want you to waste away here–”

“If it were you or I in that pod, Jayce would not abandon us. He would not simply ‘go home’ and I will not either.”

He didn't need to ask to know that Mel thought he'd lost his mind despite how she herself probably clung to the hope that his science of madness could save Jayce's life. In fact, he really didn't care what Mel thought, not when she kept trying to remove him from Jayce's side. 

He would sleep there, usually slumped over his desk, halfway through writing another theory. He'd walk laps around the room to stretch his legs, talk to Jayce as if he would eventually talk back, and only leave the room to shower or change clothes if Mel were there to sit with Jayce in his place. 

She was right, he knew that. Jayce wouldn't like that he was wasting away because of him, and if, no, when, he woke, worrying him would be the last thing he wanted to do.

It was nearly a month following the attack on the council chamber,  late at night, the sun long since set, when the voice he'd been waiting for finally reached his ears.  

“...Viktor?” 

Viktor was startled awake at his desk, jerking upward when his sleep-deprived mind registered that the sound of his name hadn't been in his head but had actually come from behind him instead. He spun around in the chair clumsily, eyes wide as he came face to face with…

“Jayce?” 

The figure looked like Jayce but also did not. While Jayce's face remained unchanged aside from a few weeks of unshaved facial hair and unkempt hair, the rest of his body looked nearly identical to the Hexcore-marked portions of Viktor's own body. He looked tired, drained even, wobbling unsteadily as he walked further into the room, and Viktor fumbled to grab his crutch, nearly launching himself to his feet in an attempt to meet him. 

“Y-You're alive!” Viktor exclaimed, stumbling forward. He was sure he would have fallen if Jayce's hands hadn't risen to steady him. Even now, his hands were gentle, but his eyes were somewhere else, somewhere far away that Viktor couldn't reach. 

He was also, for lack of a better term, naked. 

Viktor began to fumble with the blanket he’d wrapped around his shoulders, desperate to remove it and instead wrap it around Jayce's shoulders, shelter him from the biting cold of a drafty lab, and at least give him some modesty.

“Here, take this; you must be freezing–”

“No,” Jayce replied quietly, lifting his hands to maneuver the blanket around Viktor's shoulders once again. He was still far away, but his eyes were beginning to clear the longer he stared at Viktor's face, studying his own hands as if they weren't his own. “You're cold. You should wear it.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“I'm fine,” Jayce studied his hand with something akin to fascination, twisting and turning it in different ways as it caught the light. “I…don't seem to be able to feel much of anything, actually.”

Any happiness Viktor had felt at the realization Jayce was alive had begun to dwindle. Something was wrong, heartbreakingly wrong. Had he even brought back Jayce, or was this just a simple shell of what he used to be? 

“Jayce, I–”

“I don't understand,” Jayce said slowly, confusion flickering across his features. “I was dead. I felt the ceiling crush me. I shouldn't…be here. What happened?” 

A part of him wondered if he should even bother to explain. Should he tell Jayce that in a fit of hysteria, he'd fused him with the Hexcore to save his life? How would he take such news? 

“You were dying,” Viktor admitted, feeling a sharp stinging behind his eyes. “You were dying, and I…I had to do something .”

“Viktor,” Jayce said softly, so softly, like he always sounded when he said his name. Would that change when Viktor told him the truth? “What did you do?”

Viktor swallowed the lump in his throat, urging himself to stand a bit taller by straightening his shoulders. He was not wrong; saving Jayce wasn't wrong. “The Hexcore was showing a probability of improving human life when fused directly with a living source,” he said. “So I utilized it to save your life.”

Jayce's expression remained more or less emotionless, which took the air from Viktor's fragile lungs. Jayce had always been emotional and easy to read; where was he now?

“Why?” 

Viktor scoffed in disbelief. Why, he asked, why would Viktor do something so utterly insane as to fuse a foreign entity with a human being instead of just letting him die? 

“I am selfish,” Viktor admitted with a halfhearted shrug, avoiding his eyes. “I saw you lying there, half-crushed, barely a pulse, and I lost myself. Perhaps the world was ready to lose you, but I was not.”

They stood there in the silence that followed, neither of them moving nor making the move to go first. Viktor began to wonder if, in his selfish act to keep Jayce with him, he just ended up losing him in a different way.

Jayce eventually took the first step towards him, much steadier than he had been moments before. His hands reached out, touched, and then carefully guided Viktor closer to himself, cradling Viktor's head against the curve of his shoulder. 

Jayce's skin was cooler now, not as hot as he had once been, and his skin had taken on a stiffer feel to it, more metallic, yet it was still Jayce. Viktor's eyes burned as he allowed them to slip closed, relishing in the embrace that was familiar and unfamiliar all at once as his own arms came up to circle around Jayce's back, fingers curling in and holding tight to the muscles in his back. 

“You saved my life,” Jayce murmured into his ear, his own fingers massaging the back of Viktor's scalp where he'd hit his head in the explosion a month prior. The hand at his back rested low at the base of his brace, keeping him steady. “Thank you.”

“You would have done the same if our situations had been reversed,” Viktor murmured back, tucking his face into the curve of Jayce's neck and taking a deep breath. Even though it'd been weeks, he still smelled like Jayce, smelled like home.

“I would have.”

The longer Viktor remained in Jayce's embrace, the warmer his skin became, and the warmth was so soothing, so familiar, that Viktor could feel his body start to shut down, exhausted from the weeks-long endeavor and the illness crippling his lungs. He coughed, attempting to chase away the sudden tightness in his chest, but it only triggered a heavier attack that caused his knees to buckle and Jayce's arms to tighten around him, keeping him from collapsing entirely. 

“Easy, easy,” Jayce soothed as Viktor clung to him, desperately sucking air into his lungs. “Breathe. Nice and slow.”

It took some time. It usually did these days. The fact Viktor had managed to cling to life out of pure spite for the sake of seeing Jayce live and breathe again had been nothing short of a medical miracle, but he was still too stubborn to die. 

Jayce eased him back, hands steadying his shoulders, and modeled the breathing he wanted Viktor to do. If he hadn't been wheezing, he would remind Jayce that he knew how to breathe and that he was not a child. Jayce squeezed his shoulders, continuing to model, and his eyes seemed to glow, or maybe that was the lack of oxygen to his brain causing him to hallucinate.

Yet, somehow…it helped. He managed to suck a breath in, then another, lungs filling, and somehow it wasn't painful. 

This time, there was no blood. 

“When was the last time you slept, Viktor?” Jayce asked, concern filtering into his tone. One hand moved from his shoulder and instead came to cup his cheek, a singular, cold thumb brushing at what was probably the dark circles underneath his eye. “You look awful.”

“I bring you back from the dead, and you cannot even have the decency to flatter me,” Viktor huffed out a laugh, tilting his head into the touch of his skin. It somehow was and wasn't Jayce; Viktor could live with that. “How cruel of you.”

“You look like you're about to keel over, and you're laughing,” Jayce said in disbelief, shaking his head. He'd tried to take care of himself to avoid this, yet he'd made Jayce worry anyway. “Here, let me help you.”

“I am not an invalid, Jayce.”

“I didn't say you were,” Jayce motioned to the large couch on the other side of the room, the one they'd moved explicitly into the lab for late nights. “Come on, lay down.”

“You have been in a coma for over a month, and you are already mother-henning me,” Viktor complained, but he didn't protest Jayce's attempt to get him to the couch. He sank onto it with a groan of relief, joints audibly cracking as he settled and laid out on the cushions. “At the very least, put some clothes on.”

Jayce took his time draping several thick blankets over Viktor's body, tucking them under his aching limbs while ignoring Viktor's half-hearted protests. A pile of pillows gradually appeared behind him, propping him up to alleviate the pressure on his lungs. 

Only then did Jayce seem satisfied, wandering off to find something to wear. 

Viktor lay on the couch, listening to the movement in the bathroom as Jayce dressed himself. The shuffle of fabric, the tip tap of metal-clad feet on the tile that became muffled when they touched the carpet once he emerged. 

Jayce pulled up a chair beside the couch and sat down, the new weight from the metallic alloy that had become a part of his skin adding an extra weight that caused the chair to creak. At first, they spoke quietly, Viktor updating Jayce about everything he had missed while he'd been asleep. 

Eventually, their talk tapered off as Viktor's eyelids grew heavier, and he began to doze. He must have fallen asleep, even for just a moment, because when Jayce finally spoke again, it startled him back into awareness.

“Maybe this was the solution,” Jayce said thoughtfully, and Viktor hummed inquisitively, somewhere between awake and asleep. “Merging with the Hexcore. We can use it in a way we never thought before.”

“Hm, perhaps,” Viktor agreed, eyes still closed. “Maybe it has given you some of its power, not only to sustain, but to do more.”

“We can help people this way,” Jayce continued, almost as if Viktor hadn't spoken at all. If Viktor opened his eyes, he was sure he'd see the light in Jayce's eyes again, which ignited when he was inspired. “Maybe I could cure your illness.”

“Do not waste such power on me,” Viktor sighed, giving a weak wave of his hand. “I am beyond saving, and I accepted that long ago.”

“ Don’t say that; don't just give up,” Jayce snapped, a tone he rarely heard, and it was so surprising to him that Viktor opened his eyes. Jayce looked angry, scowling down at his hands. “I have limitless power at my fingertips, and you're still telling me to give up so you can die.”

“Jayce,” Viktor murmured, lifting one heavy arm and reaching out towards him, fingers searching until Jayce finally took his hand, squeezing it fiercely. “Look at me?” 

Jayce turned his eyes to meet his, desperation the most apparent emotion seen on his face, but something else swirled behind his eyes: the Hexcore's magic. 

“Viktor–”

“I cannot stop you, no matter your choice,” he interjected, returning the squeeze. “But if it were to fail for any reason, I would not want you to blame yourself.”

“It won't fail. I won't fail.”

“Oh, Jayce–”

“You saved my life, Viktor,” Jayce said seriously, meeting his eyes. “Let me do the same for you.”

Viktor sighed, knowing he could never entirely deny Jayce anything, not when he looked at him like that. “Very well,” he said, knowing he was defeated. “I will not hold it against you if it is beyond your abilities.”

“It isn't,” Jayce promised, smoothing the hair back from Viktor's forehead again and again until Viktor's eyes once again closed, succumbing to exhaustion under his gentle touch. “I'll save you, I swear it, and then we'll see our dream to completion. Together.”

“Together,” Viktor agreed sleepily. “I would like that.”

Viktor slipped off to sleep not long after, sent off by the gentle motions through his hair and the warmth of the blankets. 

Jayce didn't sleep that night. 

He never let go of Viktor's hand.