Chapter Text
Big thank you to corviddenart on tumblr for this beautiful cover art:
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After the Hexcore is destroyed, they float.
Viktor spends some indeterminate time assuming that he and Jayce are dead, and that what they’re experiencing – in the loosest possible sense – is some sort of afterlife. Except Jayce is with him, and there’s no pain, so he’d be inclined to call it heaven.
There are impressions of what might have once been his physical senses, his emotions, his memories, his thoughts… it’s hard to distinguish between any of it. The clearest part of it all is Jayce. If Viktor can see, he’s seeing Jayce’s face, his smile and his gentle eyes. If Viktor can hear, it’s a vague echo of Jayce’s voice murmuring around him. If Viktor can touch or taste or smell, it’s by surging closer to Jayce, wrapping around him, merging warmly with him. They’re not occupying a place, as such, but there’s a background awareness that they’re surrounded by… others. Other souls, maybe, or other lives they might have lived.
Mostly, they’re just overwhelmingly together, and it’s a relief.
In the way of a dream – and it might well be a dream, some sort of trick of the dying mind to defy time and cheat death, which would arguably be an afterlife in itself – it’s hard to tell if or how much time is passing, but it seems like at some point something changes.
Viktor wouldn’t be able to accurately describe it if asked, but part of it is that things start to sharpen, become more defined. The formless, flickering shape of Jayce turns into an actual image, still soft-edged and shifting but much closer to a physical form. His expression is wondering and curious, so Viktor must be undergoing the same transformation. They both reach for each other, both say each other’s names, and when they touch it feels denser somehow, more solid. Their voices, too, are clearer and sharper.
“What’s happening?” Jayce asks, or maybe it’s Viktor. It’s hard to tell. Viktor becomes aware of a pulling within him, a growing awareness and alertness, more and more insistent-
I FOUND YOU, he thinks, except he doesn’t. It’s not his thought. It feels like his thought, though, which is very confusing. I CAN GIVE YOU ANOTHER CHANCE AT LIFE. JAYCE, TOO. DO YOU WANT THAT?
Viktor tries to concentrate, because it’s important, probably. Whatever ‘it’ is. Whether it’s his own thought or not, there’s a question being posed. Viktor has always been someone who tries to find answers to questions, hasn’t he? So, if the question is whether he wants another go at living life with Jayce Talis… well, isn’t that what he wanted, before he died, for years on end?
“Yes,” he says out loud, or in a way that feels as intentional as speaking out loud might. He feels a ripple of… something. Then-
“Ah!”
He spasms and jolts against the hard surface he’s lying on, gasping for breath, heart thumping in his ears. His eyes flutter automatically and he squeezes them shut with a small sound, already overwhelmed with sudden sensation and emotion and life; he doesn’t need to add light and vision to the mix.
Carefully, Viktor tries to catalogue and assess what’s going on, but even having a set train of thought to follow feels strange in itself. It’s all so sharp and immediate and urgent compared to where he just was with Jayce…
Jayce. Jayce.
Viktor draws in a quick breath, almost choking on it, and opens his eyes.
It takes a few seconds for his vision to adjust and for him to process what he’s seeing, but the word ceiling comes into his mind with only a little concentration. It’s simple and wooden; the underside of a roof, really. So, he’s in some kind of hut or rudimentary cabin. Viktor takes another fortifying breath and tries moving his body, relieved when his fingers twitch and muscles tense. There’s pain, though, a familiar weary ache down one side of him…but it’s muted, compared to his memories of how he used to be, in those last couple of years when things got really bad. His breathing is surprisingly easy and clear, too.
Slowly, marvelling at the sensation of floorboards under his fingers and clothes against his skin, Viktor rolls to his side and pushes himself to sit up, leaning on one hand. He takes in the fact that he’s definitely in a hut, sparsely furnished, the air a little warm, sunlight coming in through two small windows… but then his vision snags on a shape to his left, and he turns and sees Jayce lying on a bedroll along one wall. He doesn’t even realise he’s moving until he almost falls flat on his face, tripping over the long and ragged cloak he’s wearing. He makes it to Jayce’s side, though, and somewhere in the back of his awareness he notes to himself that he can put weight on both legs as he crawls. His right leg definitely feels odd, but it doesn’t buckle under him or flare up in agony.
He sets this revelation aside, though, as he peers down at Jayce’s unconscious face. It’s Jayce as he was when Viktor last saw his physical form: messy and greasy hair long enough to get in his eyes and scatter around his head, a short but thick beard, tough and partly armoured clothing with the marks of battle on it. There is one new but still horribly familiar detail: the faint, shimmering shape of fingerprints, high on his brow. Viktor swallows down the guilt and fear that floods him as he reaches out and lays two fingers against where a pulse should be-
Viktor exhales with relief when he feels a slow but strong heartbeat under his fingertips. He carefully lays his head on Jayce’s chest to be sure, relaxing further as it rises and falls infinitesimally with his breathing.
“Jayce,” he murmurs, giving his shoulder a squeeze. No response. Viktor swallows, unsure what to do, still trying to process just… being conscious.
He climbs to his feet, able to stand at his full height, steady on both feet, instead of hunched and uneven. He looks around the space. It’s just the sleeping roll on the wooden floor, Jayce’s battered and corrupted hammer propped nearby, a tray with a jug and a parcel of what he hopes is food, a little stove set up in one corner, and a set of shelves with an assortment of items piled up on them. Viktor glances at the door, wondering if he should explore where they actually are, but he’s loath to stray from Jayce’s side until he wakes. He looks back at the shelves; as if by divine providence, his eyes catch on a set of battered old notebooks, bound together with a braided cord.
Information. One can never have too much information about a situation.
Heart hammering, he picks up the bundle and brings it to where Jayce lies unconscious, sitting close beside him. Carefully, he unties the cord. A quick glance through shows there’s one per year. The first one is titled ‘Hextech research records’.
It’s Viktor’s handwriting.
His own spiky scrawl, in his own home language. But… Viktor has never seen these notebooks before. He had a similar research journal, several of them over the years, but…
“A different me,” Viktor whispers, stunned. He doesn’t know what to make of it. It’s all incredibly confusing, and he’s still discombobulated from suddenly having a physical form again. He doesn’t have the mental energy to puzzle it all out. Instead, he simply flips to the first page of entries. He’s unsurprised to see that the majority of them are just a few disjointed lines, littered and surrounded by rough sketches and half-finished equations.
Taking a deep breath, he begins to read.
Finally found someone working on something worthwhile: Jayce Talis. Wants to research together!! Dubious – typical pretty and privileged Piltie, seems naïve – but he’s brilliant and his work is like nothing I’ve seen. ‘Hextech’ – using runes and volatile crystals to harness magic. We got it to work! Medarda is on our side – also dubious – hoping to bring Heimerdinger around.
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Few days in, so far so good. Stabilisation looking promising although still chasing better consistency in resonance. Absorption?? Need to look into materials options. Jayce thinks it’s more structural – can tell he’s been raised in smithing. Might be right though…
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Jayce was right. Smug! Coming up on two weeks which is when I was hoping to see results on the pressurised crystal fragment. Fingers crossed no explosions.
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Heimerdinger definitely more interested than lets on. Council sticking noses in, especially Medarda, although thankfully they leave us to it in the lab. Jayce not as bothered by it. Hope he’s right and they back off.
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Don’t trust Medarda but have to admit she got us a good deal on new contracts. Her and Jayce a sure thing – best looking couple in Piltover for sure. Funny to watch him stutter and blush around her. Glad I’m immune to her charms – not immune to her money unfortunately – funding is funding! Retrying pressurisation experiment using the following specs…
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Can’t believe it’s only been a month. Making good progress, can feel we’re close on cracking the rune sequence below. Jayce dragged me out last night for drinks to celebrate signing contracts… surprisingly fun although he’s a lot when drunk. Keep waiting for him to be an asshole in some way but he might be the nicest person I know. Annoying!!
Viktor touches Jayce’s name on the page, bittersweet nostalgia hitting him a punch to the gut. He turns to look down at the real Jayce’s sleeping face. So far, the life of the Viktor who wrote the journals seems essentially identical to his own, including his early doubts about Jayce and how quickly he’d grown fond of his exuberant research partner. He remembers, too, having the same thoughts about Mel Medarda. He remembers a lot, when he lets himself think back to those days, when everything was so new and hopeful and full of promise.
As he stares at Jayce, absorbed in memories, he thinks he sees a slight flicker of his dark lashes. He frowns.
“Jayce?” he whispers. Another flicker. A twitch of his head. A quiet noise. “Jayce!”
The journal hits the floor, forgotten. Viktor kneels over Jayce and squeezes his shoulder, giving a small shake.
“Wha…?” Jayce groans, head rolling towards the touch, and Viktor sags in relief. Jayce blinks and squints, wheezing slightly as he sucks in a quick breath, but then his gaze focuses on Viktor and goes wide.
“It’s you,” he croaks, then screws his face up. “Ah… dry…”
Viktor stares at him blankly before he understands- “Water! You need- hang on-”
He casts about frantically and sees the tray bearing a large covered jug and a cup, sitting neatly just a few feet away from them. That strikes him as vaguely notable, but he’s too busy to care, pouring out some water and gently lifting Jayce’s head to tip it towards his cracked lips.
Jayce drains the cup and then struggles to sit up. Viktor hastens to help him, hands under his elbows. The mottled scarring around the crystal embedded in his wrist is angry-looking. There’s a sour smell to him, as though he’s been wearing the same clothes for days and might have soiled them… but Viktor is distracted by the fact that he’s touching Jayce, alive touching him for real and he can feel it the way he used to, and the emotion rises rapidly in his throat. “Jayce, we… we…”
“Where’s Viktor?” Jayce demands, and everything slams to a halt.
Viktor blinks, pulling back his hands. Jayce is glaring at him, a pained look in his eyes. “What?”
“I mean my Viktor. I was… I was dead, wasn’t I? With him. Did you bring me here?”
“I am Viktor,” he replies, nonplussed. Jayce’s brow furrows further.
“No, my Viktor.”
“I… I am,” is all he can think to say, but even as he speaks he’s running his fingers over his own face, uncertain. It feels familiar, except… facial hair? Viktor has never had much more than patchy stubble. He could barely grow even that for most of his twenties, and then he was just used to shaving regularly so he kept it up. But he’s seen a version of himself with facial hair…
“It’s him,” Viktor murmurs in amazement, looking down at himself, belatedly recognising the tattered white cloak he’s draped in. “It’s the other me you saw in that vison you showed me. I’m in his body…”
Jayce is staring at him in confusion, but Viktor is having an epiphany. He turns to look at the journals he found. The life that belonged to another him.
“Of course,” he breathes, head spinning. “They are his. His life. And he… I…”
He raises his hands and gazes at them, feeling the familiar vertigo of inhabiting a new form. He’s wearing fingerless gloves, and what he thought was grubbiness on his fingers… upon closer inspection, he sees that they’re tattoos. So faded and blurred they’re barely visible, but he can make out lines and runes against his skin. He pulls off the gloves, seeing the faint lines tracing all the way back to his wrists…
His wide sleeves slip back as he examines said wrists. He pauses as he sees the faint mottling on his skin, like faded bruising. Purple and gold.
“Jayce,” he says softly, heart hammering, “what colour are my eyes?”
Jayce stares at him, swallowing before he replies quietly: “Hexcore-coloured. But… you… you are my Viktor? Then how…”
Viktor doesn’t respond; he’s busy standing and shrugging off the cloak that’s half-grey with dirt and wear, yanking the shirt underneath over his head. He goes still, looking down at himself. He’s not a wasted skeleton like he became in his original body, but instead closer to how he was in his early adulthood: skinny, but still with some lean strength, ribs and hipbones only faintly visible rather than sticking out. It’s baffling, because this version of himself seems older than Viktor was when he destroyed the Hexcore, not younger.
These observations pale, though, compared to the dark, gold-laced purple scarring down his sternum, spreading out unevenly across his chest. The skin around the scar seems to fade and disappear, the purple flesh appearing as bare metallic muscle knitted together, shimmering gold veins running through the whole thing and pulsing with his heartbeat.
“God, Viktor,” Jayce breathes, eyes huge. He moves as though to stand up too, but Viktor is sitting back down and tugging off his boots and socks, sucking in a breath as he sees how his right foot is distinctly more mottled than his left, which is almost completely normal-coloured. He tugs up the trousers on the more discoloured leg; the closer he gets to his knee, the darker and more solidly purple his leg gets, the more warped the musculature, the more gold is threaded through. Viktor touches it, and finds it numb.
“It’s like when you fused me with the Hexcore,” Viktor murmurs, “except… localised. Like the Hexcore is only affecting certain parts of me, instead of all of me. But… how? How did he manage to control it like this? And how are we here, wherever here is?”
Jayce suddenly gasps, eyes bright and excited the way they get when he’s figured something out. It’s how Viktor pictures him, usually: radiant with discovery. “The rune! Viktor, the rune on this crystal he gave me – you gave me – it’s an acceleration rune. The same one that makes the Hexgates work!”
He clasps his wrist, where the crystal is buried in his flesh. Viktor frowns. “But… we destroyed it, did we not?”
“We destroyed the Hexcore, using the crystal, but… couldn’t that have activated the magic? Possibly triggered some kind of transportation…?”
“Wait, wait…” Viktor breathes, as his mind sorts memory from dream. He meets Jayce’s eyes, his own widening. “I heard a voice. My voice, I think. Just before I woke up here, I heard it say ‘I found you’, and then… something about giving us another chance. At life.”
Jayce sucks in a breath. “It has to have been him. The other you, the one who gave me the crystal as a child.”
Viktor stares at him, head spinning, before inhaling sharply and shaking his head. “Whatever the explanation… right now, we need to figure out where we are, and you need to wash and check for injuries.”
Jayce hesitates, but then he glances down at himself and wrinkles his nose. He nods, starting to struggle to his feet; Viktor hastens to stand and help. He casts his gaze around the sparse space, looking for something to help with cleanliness-
“A-ha!” He goes to the shelves, grabbing a small basket holding a bar of soap, a sponge, a toothbrush and toothpaste, and a comb. He crosses to the door, taking a steadying breath before cracking it open, unsure what he’ll see outside.
“Oh,” he breathes, pushing the door wide. It’s beautiful; some kind of mountain meadow, rolling downhill towards a lake, long grass dotted with wildflowers. It’s completely deserted. “Well… we definitely have somewhere to bathe properly, but it might be a little cold.”
“Where are we?”
Viktor glances back, seeing Jayce limping slightly but able to walk, knee brace creaking. “I don’t know. Mountains, somewhere. There is no one around.”
He steps aside as Jayce reaches the door. There’s a tall wooden staff leaning next to it; he recalls his other self holding it. It makes sense that he would still use a walking aid. He can put weight on his right leg, walk without limping, but the strain it puts on that side of his body is persistent. He suspects Jayce’s need is greater, though, so Viktor hands him the staff.
Together, slowly, they make their way down the slope.