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Rationally, Jayce knows this is where Viktor goes when he wants a break from the lab or the bustle of Piltover. He also knows Viktor isn’t cruel, and wouldn’t summon him here just so Jayce can watch him jump. Finding Viktor seated placidly ought to be enough to expel the last of the anxiety that’s been lodged in his chest since he first read Viktor’s message.
Still, the breathless question comes out before Jayce can think better of it. “You couldn’t pick somewhere else?”
Viktor cranes his neck to peer up at Jayce from the floor. His good leg is tucked up to his chest, elbow draped across the knee, with his crutch laid out behind him. The other leg dangles over the ledge. No brace today, again. Jayce wants to ask but won’t.
“I like the view,” Viktor tells him. “It’s relaxing.”
Jayce can’t honestly say he feels the same. There are many views from great heights around Piltover. Most of them are more picturesque.
“Besides,” Viktor continues, “it’s private.”
Only because no one in Piltover but Viktor would find the mechanical rumble, the sheer drop or the glimpse down into the undercity appealing, Jayce thinks. What he says is, “The lab’s private.”
Viktor clicks his tongue. “People know to look for you there. I didn’t think we would want to be interrupted.”
“Why?” With some of his initial anxiety quelled now that he’s found Viktor alive and well enough, Jayce finds space for a new sense of dread. “Viktor, what’s going on? I don’t see you all day, I can’t get in touch with you, then I get this cryptic message—'need to talk', I mean, really?”
“I was running some personal errands.” Viktor’s typical evasiveness is laced with something that makes Jayce’s dread grow even stronger.
“I wish you’d told me, you know I—”
The rest of the reprimand Jayce has been preparing—on basic courtesy, and not disappearing without warning when you’re gravely ill in a city teetering towards civil war—stops short when Viktor coughs, a horrible wracking sound.
Jayce watches, hands twitching at his sides, useless. Seems to be his default state now. He’d hoped at least it would get easier. It hasn’t.
“Come, sit.” Still raspy from the coughing fit, Viktor pats the empty space beside him. “I’ll get”—aftershocks roll through his lungs as short, laboured wheezes—“a kink in my neck staring up at you like this.”
So Jayce sits. While he waits for Viktor to catch his breath, Jayce tries to see whatever it is Viktor sees in this place that calms him. The view never improves, but he’s soothed by the white noise of running water, the rhythm of the pistons, the late-afternoon sun warming his skin. Viktor’s bent leg sags to the side, knee coming to rest against Jayce’s thigh, and Jayce tries to soak in the companionable silence.
Then Viktor says, “I made my will today. You’re the sole beneficiary.”
The tenuous peace in Jayce’s mind fractures. All his attention snaps back to Viktor, whose eyes are trained on the far distance, his expression pinched and controlled.
“Don’t get too excited—there’s not much. A modest bit of savings. Any belongings you might find useful or sentimental.” Rehearsed words, like he’s giving a lecture. Jayce’s head spins. “And… all of my unfinished research.” For the first time, Viktor’s voice catches. “Of course most of it is Hextech, so I suppose it would be yours by rights anyway.” He lowers his eyes to the stream far below. “Making it official just seemed… prudent.”
The thought alone is nauseating; the chain reaction of mental images it conjures, even worse. An empty lab. An empty apartment. Jayce doesn’t want Viktor’s money or Viktor’s things, and the only way he’s touching Viktor’s research is if they’re working on something together, as partners, like they ought to be. Anything else is—is—
Jayce’s mouth has gone dry. He feels choked. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing. I just thought you should know.”
Jayce wishes he didn’t. His thumb rubs the crystal on his cuff, a nervous tic. He forces himself to nod. “Okay.”
“There is something else I’d like your help with, though,” Viktor adds, and he pulls a folded paper booklet from his pocket.
The request might sound casual to someone who doesn’t know Viktor well, but Jayce is an expert in the field with years’ worth of data to draw from. He hears the briefest hesitation in Viktor's speech, sees the way Viktor’s eyes dart to different spots on the horizon without ever meeting Jayce’s own. There’s a tremor in his hand as he offers the booklet to Jayce.
Viktor’s nervous. Jayce’s own anxiety ratchets higher in response, a dependent variable.
Then he looks at what he was handed and his stomach bottoms out.
“Holy shit, Viktor, are you serious?”
“Deathly,” Viktor jokes, to alleviate some tension.
All it really does is nudge Jayce over the threshold into anger. “No way. We’re not having this conversation.”
“Jayce—”
“I’m not planning your funeral.”
“Someone has to.” Viktor isn’t even looking to see the way Jayce glares at him. “Either we do it together now, or we wait, and you can do it… later. On your own.”
The paper bends in Jayce’s grip. Relaxing his hand takes considerable effort. “This is ridiculous,” he says, “you’re not going to—”
Viktor looks at him, finally. Arches an eyebrow and waits for him to finish.
Jayce picks a different approach. “There’s still time for us to figure something out. The Hexcore—”
“The Hexcore?” Viktor repeats, as cold as Jayce has ever heard him. “The Hexcore you promised to destroy, and yet, whenever I ask, you’re ‘working out the logistics’?”
Desperation sweeps any guilt neatly under the rug. “Fine, so we try something else. And if that doesn’t work, we find something new. That’s what we do. That’s what we should be talking about, not”—Jayce shakes the booklet in his hand for emphasis—“this. We can’t just give up.” Try as he might, he can’t keep the pleading note from creeping into his voice. “We can still save you.”
Much worse than Viktor’s look of hard anger is watching it soften into pity. It doesn’t suit him. “Perhaps,” Viktor agrees quietly, much like Jayce’s mother sometimes humoured his childhood fantasies just to avoid fights. “Still… should time run out… I want to leave you prepared.”
Prepared, sure. Like earth-shattering grief is an exam he can ace with a two-hour cram session. Jayce exhales derisively through his nose.
“Jayce,” says Viktor, “please.”
Jayce relents. He turns his scowl to the view of the Undercity and nods.
“Thank you.” When Jayce says nothing else, Viktor continues, “I’d planned to do this on my own today. But I realized I didn’t know what you’d want.”
“What I’d want?” Jayce could laugh. He’s never wanted anything less.
“Yes. Funerals aren’t really for the dead, they’re for the living. To find closure, to remember, to say goodbye.” Viktor speaks as gently as he can and it still lands like a suckerpunch. “Mine will be for you.”
It’s as if there’s a rubber band in Jayce’s chest wrapping tighter and tighter with each passing moment. He can’t think. He tries to take a deep breath, but his lungs won’t cooperate. Distantly, he wonders if that’s how Viktor feels all the time.
“Don’t say that,” Jayce manages, halting and frustrated. “That’s not… it’s not like I’d be…” Even finishing the thought feels like sacrilege.
As always, Viktor understands anyway. “The only one there? No, I don’t think so.” He lifts his chin in mock confidence, adopting the tone of light disdain he usually reserves for discussing the council or the upper echelons of Piltover high society. “Old friends who’ve not spoken to me in years will be unearthed by a misplaced sense of duty. The Academy will send a small delegation, for appearances. Others will come to support you: your mother, Miss Kiramman, Councilor Medarda…” For a second, his lip curls like he’s tasted something sour—and then it’s gone, a pebble sinking beneath the still surface of a pond. “But I’m not worried about any of them.”
Instinctively, Jayce wants to protest, but the argument dies on his tongue. No one’s seen Sky since that missile hit the council chamber. He doubts something as trifling as a human lifespan would be enough for Heimerdinger to break his self-imposed exile, and selfishly Jayce is glad, because he doesn’t trust how he’d react to that reunion. The exceptions prove the rule.
When Caitlyn got caught in the Progress Day attack, Jayce’s get-well-soon bouquet wound up on the floor with two dozen others of its kind, gifts from a vast network of well-connected well-wishers. In the wee hours of the next morning, Jayce shook in the emergency room as he explained to hospital staff that no, the patient had no family to notify.
Guilt climbs into bed with Jayce’s anger. Would Viktor ask this of him if there were anyone else to turn to?
Jayce pinches the bridge of his nose. “You shouldn’t be worrying about me.”
“Sorry. Too late.” Viktor’s smile is devastatingly gentle. The rubber band in Jayce’s chest twists ever tighter. “I’m paying for it, by the way,” Viktor continues, with all the gravity he might use to buy them both lunch from the slightly nicer cafe a block from the lab. “That’s in the will too.”
Jayce laughs humourlessly. “I wasn’t thinking about the cost.”
“You might want to think about it a little. Some of these options can get quite expensive.”
The scowl Jayce shoots at Viktor goes ignored. “You really want me…” He skims the brochure the way he tests water temperature from a tap, relying on speed to avoid injury. It doesn’t work; he’s getting burned anyway. “...picking the colour of your coffin?”
“Not a coffin, no, I’m not going to be buried, my body will be donated to—”
“Viktor,” he snaps, and Viktor goes quiet. “I’m serious. If this is about making sure I’m ‘prepared’, we’re wasting our time. There’s no option in this booklet that would make me feel better.”
“I know,” Viktor says simply. “The goal is to pick ones that will not make you feel worse. For instance…” He reaches over, turns to the next page in the brochure. “Do you think you’d like to give a eulogy?”
Yes, Jayce means to say. He owes Viktor that much. No one knows Viktor better than Jayce, so no one else could know the full scope of what the world will have lost—the genius and the passion, but also the humour, the kindness, the fearlessness and razor wit and iron will. What’s the point of years of toasts and speeches and addresses to the council if Jayce can’t do this?
But then he pictures himself at a podium and a vice clamps around his throat, squeezing until it’s all he can do to keep his breaths steady. He’s always had Viktor watching from the wings, or smiling in the front row, or waiting back at the lab with a cold pot of coffee and yesterday’s leftovers.
There must have been speeches at his father’s funeral. All Jayce remembers is the sound of his mother crying next to him.
Jayce stares at the crystal on his cuff as he shakes his head.
“It’s all right, that’s why I asked,” says Viktor. No judgment, no disappointment. Like he already knew Jayce wouldn’t even be able to give him this. Shame churns Jayce’s stomach. “I don’t want you to feel obligated.”
Jayce inhales through his nose, manages to count to six before he exhales again. When he’s confident his voice won’t crack, he turns to Viktor and asks, “What do you want?”
“Me?” Viktor bats his hand as if swatting a fly. “Nothing extravagant. A thirty-foot statue in the Academy District. A national day of mourning. I want you to wear black for two years.”
Jayce musters every ounce of patience he has to not roll his eyes. “Come on, V. No bullshit.”
Viktor shrugs. “The funeral doesn’t concern me. I won’t be there. Besides, nothing I want is offered in that pamphlet.”
“Which is?”
Viktor hesitates. A whole war plays out in the movements of his eyes, a battle against a deep instinct towards self-reliance.
“What everyone wants, I suppose,” he says eventually. “To be remembered. For it to have mattered that I lived at all. To think that when the sum of my life is tallied up, I did more good than harm.” His gloved hand flexes in his lap, stretching full before closing into a fist. From underneath the leather, the outer edge of a dark purple bruise creeps up his arm. “With everything that’s happened…” His voice cracks. “I don’t know if I have enough time to balance the scales again.”
“The explosion wasn’t your fault.” Jayce has told himself the same thing a thousand times; spoken aloud to Viktor, the words gain unprecedented conviction. “We were robbed.”
The reassurance doesn’t work. Viktor’s composure splinters, his face contorting. For a wild second Jayce fears Viktor is about to cry, and knows that if he starts, Jayce will join him, a tearful sort of autocatalysis.
Instead, Viktor coughs, hard enough to send him fumbling in his pocket for his handkerchief.
Jayce would have preferred crying.
The spell subsides, and the handkerchief gets tucked away again, new splotches of red blooming across the fabric. Viktor closes his eyes and sits back on the heels of his hands, the late-day sun painting stark shadows in the hollows of his cheekbones. The mask is back in place, pieces superglued back together. If not for the muscle twitching in his jaw or the grim twist to his lips, he might look relaxed, but Jayce has seen barely-concealed fear too many times in the mirror not to recognize it.
Submerged by the crest of another wave of uselessness, Jayce clings to the first solid truth he can find in its depths. “Viktor, I’d be dead without you.”
Viktor’s eyebrows quirk up. His lips part in surprise, or maybe the beginning of a protest.
Jayce doesn’t give him the chance. “I know you wanna change the world, and I’m just one person, and maybe that doesn’t feel like enough, but if you’re worried about being forgotten, or… or not having mattered…” The premise is so ridiculous Jayce struggles to disprove it. “All the best parts of my life happened because of you. With you. I couldn’t forget you if I tried. I don’t even know who I’ll be, if… when you’re…”
Jayce finally does what he’s been avoiding since that horrible night at the hospital: imagine life in some bleak, Viktor-less world. He squints down at the papers in his hand as if they might reveal the future, like those optical illusion postcards Caitlyn has, a secret image hidden in the pattern if you tilt your head just right.
He can’t see anything. Viktor is too fundamental now, rooted into every part of Jayce’s being. Removing him breaks the whole equation. Insufficient data.
Reality slams into Jayce hard enough to knock the wind out of him. The backs of his eyes burn, making the ink swim around on the page until he can’t corral the shapes into words. The constricting force in his chest peaks. If not for the roar of blood rushing in his ears he’d be certain his heart’s been juiced to pulp.
“Sorry,” he chokes out, bent forward, pinching the bridge of his nose. There’s a lump in his throat he can’t swallow down, growing bigger and bigger, a storm surge rising over a flood wall. “I’m sorry, I…”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have sprung this on you.” Viktor tugs the booklet out of Jayce’s trembling grip, tosses it somewhere behind; it clatters on the floor. “I wanted… it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t fair.”
None of it is. Not fair they need to have this conversation at all, or that after a day alone, writing his will and thinking about his funeral and staring down the barrel of his own mortality, Viktor’s biggest worry was how it all might affect Jayce.
Viktor, who asks for help so rarely and now needs things Jayce can’t give him—
Viktor, Jayce’s favourite person on the planet, the closest friend he’s ever had, his partner—
Viktor, who is dying.
Pressure builds behind Jayce’s squeezed-shut eyes and his clenched jaw aches, but the sudden, surprising weight of Viktor’s hand on his shoulder quiets the cacophony in his brain.
“I’m sorry,” Viktor says, thumb tracing gentle lines up and down Jayce’s arm.
The rubber band in Jayce’s chest finally snaps.
He muffles the first sob against his closed fist, but then Viktor tugs his shoulder and he melts, twisting to bury the next sob in the crook of Viktor’s neck, and the one after that, until he’s weeping in Viktor’s arms.
He knows he shouldn’t. It doesn’t feel right, piling his own grief onto Viktor’s weary shoulders. His mother, or Caitlyn, or even Mel—they’d be far enough from the epicenter to avoid any hurt themselves.
But he just wants Viktor. He always only wants Viktor.
Viktor doesn’t shush him, or tell him it’s okay, or say any other empty platitude people turn to in well-meaning desperation. He waits patiently, arms wrapped around Jayce’s shoulders, one hand cradling the back of Jayce’s head. Like he knows what Jayce needs when even Jayce doesn’t.
With effort and time, Jayce wrangles back some of his composure. He loosens his fingers from the fists they’ve made around Viktor’s vest to rest flat palms against Viktor’s back instead. He times his own breathing to Viktor’s rattling lungs.
“You know, lately I have been trying to think of death more objectively,” Viktor says, once Jayce has quieted. “Death is as much a part of evolution as life. Progress necessitates leaving the old behind to make way for the new. I tell myself that when they carve me up, maybe the Academy will discover something that leads to a cure for the next patient. That perhaps in death I can help achieve things I couldn’t in life.”
How very Viktor. Jayce feels a rush of affection, soured by the thought of some student slicing Viktor open with clinical curiosity. There are limits to Jayce’s scientific altruism.
He hugs Viktor tighter. “Does it help? Thinking that way?”
Viktor is quiet for a long moment as he weighs comfort against honesty.
“No,” he eventually admits, sounding so small Jayce regrets asking. “Even if that were true… selfishly, I would rather live.”
“That’s not selfish, that’s human.” It’s about the only thing Jayce has said all day that he doesn’t second-guess. “And I meant what I said earlier. I’m not giving up. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve done the impossible.”
Viktor’s hum of affirmation slides into another coughing fit. Jayce tries to pull back and give him space, but Viktor’s grip turns desperate, holding Jayce close even as he twists sideways to cough into his glove. As he winces through the laboured breaths that follow, Jayce is struck by the possibility that this isn’t only Viktor’s way of comforting him. Maybe Viktor enjoys the closeness too.
It perplexes Jayce as much as it soothes him. Of the two of them, Viktor’s never been the touchy one. Never reached for Jayce first, never initiated. Never stretched the bounds of necessity: the brush of a hand to pass a shared tool, a grip on the arm for balance on the stairs, a nudge beneath the table at a rare fundraiser. All these years, Jayce assumed that Viktor merely tolerated physical contact for Jayce’s sake, the polite courtesy one expects from a disinterested cat.
Maybe he had it all wrong. Maybe Viktor’s been holding back.
Why would Viktor be holding back?
Asking would take more courage than Jayce can spare right now. He turns to duty instead. “Leave that pamphlet with me. I’ll take a look tonight.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
Viktor sighs, the hot exhale tickling the side of Jayce’s face. “Jayce.”
“Okay, no I don’t. At all. But…” Jayce pauses. “You shouldn’t have to do all this by yourself.”
Viktor shrugs. “I do a lot of things by myself. I’ve always had to.” He taps the back of Jayce’s head. “Though I was much better at it before I met you.”
“Yeah.” Jayce recalls years spent alone in his room and later the Academy, working in secret on things nobody believed possible. Sometimes, knowing Viktor feels a bit like that—with Jayce wondering again why no one else sees the magic that he does. “Likewise.”
Viktor’s fingers creep up the back of Jayce’s head to reach the longer hair on top, twisting strands the same way he plays with his own when he’s lost in thought. Jayce will spend the next week dwelling on that—what Viktor means by it, why the sensation of Viktor’s fingers in his hair sends pleasant shockwaves down his spine—but for now he closes his eyes, lets himself be lulled by it.
He could spend the rest of the afternoon like this, hiding from reality in Viktor’s collar.
“You’ll be all right, Jayce,” says Viktor, after a long moment. “You’ve got so much left ahead of you. So much more to do.” The fingers in Jayce’s hair still. “You have to finish our work.”
Jayce shifts on Viktor’s shoulder to watch the clouds turn pink. “Don’t think I could do that without you.”
Viktor scoffs. “Of course you could. Hextech was your dream long before it was mine.”
“Never worked until I met you,” Jayce counters. Then, “I need you.”
A choked noise escapes Viktor, the strange midpoint between a laugh and a sob. He buries his nose in Jayce’s hair, taking deep, shaky breaths. His fingers seize, gripping so tight they tug on Jayce’s scalp—
Then he lets go.
“You don’t,” says Viktor, sounding certain despite the unshed tears in his voice. He rests his cheek against the top of Jayce’s head. “Jayce… what I said, about not being forgotten… I didn’t mean that I want to haunt you.”
Sorry, too late, Jayce wants to say. They crossed that event horizon years ago. But that’s not the reassurance Viktor needs, so Jayce compromises with, “I know.”
Viktor says nothing more, the distant rush of the water below filling the silence instead. When his hand drifts down Jayce’s neck, thumb dipping beneath the collar, Jayce shivers, and when Viktor's shoulders hitch and he sniffs, Jayce wraps an arm around his waist and squeezes.
As he watches the sun dip down to meet the horizon, Jayce tries to memorize the feeling of Viktor’s hand on his skin, the rise and fall of Viktor’s chest with every breath.