Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jayce’s head jerked up instinctively at the familiar sound of Viktor’s cane, heralding his return to their lab. He hastily stowed his tools and approached the door - Viktor always made a face when he opened the door for him, but Jayce couldn’t help himself this time. Viktor’s stomach bug had kept him out of the lab for five days, longer separated than they’d been in years. Perhaps it was a little pathetic of him, being unable to wait the extra 15 seconds, but he’d stopped worrying about that with his partner a long time ago.

He swung open the door, beaming at the sight of his partner’s steady approach. Viktor had on a carefully neutral expression (typical when he wasn’t feeling well), but still rolled his eyes at the display. “Jayce, I must reiterate, watching me walk down the hallway is a terrible waste of your time.”

Jayce inwardly disagreed, especially when he could hear the underlying fondness in Viktor’s voice. “And working while you’re sick is a terrible waste of your health, but here we are,” he countered. He knew from experience that Viktor never stayed home as long as he should, but his face wasn’t gray and sweaty like the last time they’d spoken, which was the best he could hope for. On the other hand, the pinched expression he saw there instead was getting a little worrying. “I’ve got some soup my Mom made in the ice box, she said it should be easier for you to keep down.”

Viktor sighed, waving Jayce off as he passed by. When he finally took a seat in his usual chair, Jayce noticed that he was oddly stiff, back ramrod-straight, and a sense of dread began to set in. “I spoke to the doctor,” Viktor said, facing away. His voice sounded carefully casual. “He said I’m almost four months pregnant. Relatedly, I have roughly five months to live.”

Unable to immediately process the words, Jayce coughed out a noise that was almost a laugh. “Wait. Wait, no, Viktor that’s not funny. That’s really, really not funny.”

Viktor picked up the schematic Jayce had been reading from. “It’s not supposed to be,” he replied with careful nonchalance.

Sweat was collecting on Jayce’s palms. “You don’t look pregnant,” he argued, childishly wanting to disprove Viktor’s claim.

“It’s still early on, the doctor said I should expect to show within the month.” Irritation was beginning to creep into Viktor’s tone. “It’s true that I haven’t been eating enough, and will need to do a bit of catch-up now. Yes, actually, could you get me that soup after all?”

Any moment now, Jayce would hopefully wake up from this dream. “How can it be considered early if you’re already dying? Four months, Viktor — don’t people normally notice this kind of thing earlier?”

Viktor sighed. “Unfortunately my body is not normal. Headaches, nausea, bloating, and importantly, missed periods, those are all normal for me.” A grimace. “I always thought my body was incapable of supporting a pregnancy, so that wasn’t my first thought. Not even my fifth thought. Now can I please have the soup?”

“Viktor—abortion?! There are clinics that will do same-day abortions, I will walk you to the nearest one, we can stop at the bakery on the way back, get some of those cinnamon buns you like. I don’t know how people feel about them in the Undercity but—this problem, we can solve this right now, get a good night’s sleep, and move on with our fucking lives in the morning. You are under no obligation to do…this. Not for my sake, not for its sake, not for anyone’s. Please. Let’s just go.” He reached to grab the paper from Viktor’s hands, only for Viktor to brandish his cane, blocking Jayce's path.

“I am not suffering from some moral delusion,” Viktor growled, continuing to ward Jayce off with the cane. “People of the Undercity are not so sentimental or backwards as to turn their nose up at abortion. This—this is me making the practical choice.” He ignored Jayce’s scoff. “When I went to my appointment, I had a frank conversation with my doctor, and he explained that the damage has already been done to my body. My lungs were already in poor shape, but the stress of the pregnancy has degraded them enough that I’m doomed no matter how I proceed. I could abort now, and live another few years in steady decline, rotting in bed; or, I can carry to term and end on…a high note, let’s call it. I’ve had the past few days to weigh my options. I’ll pass on a handful of miserable, bedridden years in exchange for giving someone else a go at life.”

Each word felt like the scrape of a rusty spoon inside Jayce’s guts. He’d never stopped to imagine life without Viktor. He couldn’t. He couldn’t imagine life without Viktor in twenty years, never mind in a few years, never mind in a few months. At age 24, after his trial, he had pictured his future and decided he would rather die. That same night, Viktor had helped him to consider a new future, and from that day on, Jayce and Viktor became JayceandViktor. There was a hot feeling welling up inside him, like volcanic ash spewing forth, like his heart was choking on smoke. It wasn’t as if he had never worried about Viktor’s health before (he really, really had), but an impending deadline on their life together was something he had never dared to imagine. It was like feeling the rumble of the volcano beneath his feet—a disaster too all-consuming to grasp, even as he saw the signs.

The silence grew heavy in the lab. “I’ll get the damn soup myself,” Viktor finally muttered, looking away from Jayce’s shell-shocked expression. The hiss of pain he let out as he stood from his chair turned Jayce’s stomach and broke his reverie.

Pain. Viktor was the one in pain. Viktor was the one being weighed down by their indiscretion. Jayce couldn’t be erupting, didn’t deserve to have a meltdown when Viktor was the one dying. “No,” he said, a little louder than he had intended, loud enough to stop Viktor in his tracks. “No, sit back down. I’ll get the soup, you sit tight and eat it, and I’m going to go talk to your idiot doctor about how we’re going to fix this.” Jayce clasped a hand on Viktor’s shoulder, gently nudging him back towards the desk. “If we can launch a ship from here to Bilgewater in minutes, we can get you through this in one piece. I don’t care what bullshit he said, but this isn’t happening.” He set the bowl in front of Viktor with a resounding clank. “We are standing in Piltover Academy, one of the greatest bastions of knowledge in Runeterra, and we are some of the greatest minds in our generation. We are not going to be defeated by a basic biological process.”

There was something dark in Viktor’s expression—he very rarely tolerated Jayce bossing him around. His mouth curled angrily, nostrils flaring with outrage. However, he didn’t argue back like Jayce expected—instead he tore a scrap of paper from one of their notebooks, scrawling a quick message before handing it to his partner. “Go then. Give this to Dr. Emmich, and he’ll explain the situation. Come back when you’ve come to terms with this.” Viktor resumed reading the schematics from earlier. “I’d like to get a prototype of this done before I’m dead, so try to get over yourself sooner rather than later.”

The note was violently shoved into Jayce’s pocket as he stormed out of the lab.

Chapter Text

The air in the doctor’s office was thick with tension.

“Nothing?” Jayce asked, incredulously. “There’s nothing you can do for Viktor?”

Dr. Emmich gave Viktor’s note a dirty look, presumably for the crime of bringing 250 pounds of seething Man of Progress into his office. “That’s not what I said Mr. Talis—I said there’s nothing we can do that we are not already doing. He’s on a regime of dietary supplements, painkillers, we’ve given him a new inhaler—“

“And none of that is going to stop him from dying before the end of the year,” Jayce sneered. “Which means, in practice, you’re doing nothing.” Over and over, the physician told him how comfortable they were making Viktor, how much effort they were putting into making sure the baby came out healthy. There was no mention of trying to make sure Viktor came out in one piece, and the man didn’t look nearly sorry enough for Jayce’s standards.

“We laid out Viktor’s options for him, gave him time to think about what he wanted, and he came back and told us that his priorities are delivering a healthy child and being able to keep working for as long as he can, in that order; everything we prescribed and are doing for him is in service of those goals.”

Jayce rolled his eyes. “Do you think the fact that you told him his only options end in him dying horribly may have influenced your decision?”

“I will not apologize for being honest with my patient,” Dr. Emmich argued, bristling. “And I promise you I am using everything we have at our disposal to help your…partner.”

Jayce didn’t miss the weight given to that last word. It was doubtful that Viktor had come out and named him as the other half of this equation, but the math was pretty simple. His and Viktor’s habit of spending days on end in their lab alone had been the subject of crass jokes before, and Jayce storming into the clinic would have only confirmed any suspicions Dr. Emmich had.

(Around ten months ago, after they had started getting intimate, Viktor had put a stop to Jayce’s normal public displays of affection. “You’re not a subtle man, Jayce. And we really don’t need that kind of rumor right now. I don’t want to see a headline tomorrow about how the creator of the Hexgates keeps his undercity tramp at his lab.”

“Hands to myself outside the lab, got it,” Jayce had replied dutifully.

But you’re the creator of the Hexgates too, Jayce didn’t say. But what about when you’re tired and need some help getting home? Jayce didn’t ask. Maybe if we just announced that we’re dating, Jayce didn’t suggest.)

Dr. Emmich was giving him a judgmental glare. Jayce glared right back.

“I’d like a second opinion.”

The manila folder that contained Viktor’s medical records was visibly struggling with its task. The nearly inch-thick collection of various papers was constantly on the verge of slipping free, warping the folder’s crease. Jayce had made an earnest effort to read through it, but, to his chagrin, it didn’t make a lick of sense. Each page was dense with acronyms he didn’t understand, terms he didn’t recognize, and numbers he had no context for. Worse still, the amount of red ink and boldly underlined results hinted at a conclusion he didn’t like.

The guilty look on the second doctor’s face hinted towards the same conclusion.

When Jayce came to her office and gave a summary of the situation (friend is sick and pregnant, looking for treatment, we need a specialist, here’s the signature) she was far more interested in hearing him out than Dr. Emmich had been, even if she frowned at “he” and “pregnant” being in the same sentence. That would probably keep happening, Jayce realized with a grimace. Still, she told him, she prided herself on prenatal care, and would be happy to take on his friend’s case.

Her initial enthusiasm quickly faded as she began to flip through Viktor’s medical records, brow furrowing deeper and deeper at each new test result, glancing up warily at Jayce. “…you didn’t say he was from the Undercity.”

“He’s lived in Piltover for years, I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

She shook her head. “His conditions are ones that are associated with living in the Undercity, and I’m, ah, not qualified to treat them.” Her smile was slightly apologetic. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, you’ll have to go somewhere else.”

“Do you know of anyone who is qualified to help him?”

Her smile grew more strained. “Not that I’m aware of, no.”

“Isn’t this a common condition?” Jayce asked incredulously. He couldn’t help the disdain starting to creep into his voice. “There are hundreds of babies born in Piltover every year, and thousands of people with lung problems. I don’t understand.”

The obstetrician sighed. “Well, for one thing, I think you’re underestimating how often people die giving birth under normal circumstances. And, well, there just…hasn’t been much impetus to look into conditions we don’t see in this part of the city.”

I’ll give you a fucking impetus , a childish part of Jayce’s mind retorted. “Thank you for your time,” he mumbled instead as he left the office.

The third doctor said she didn’t treat people from the Undercity at all.

The fourth doctor recommended a balanced diet and rigorous exercise.

The fifth doctor said Viktor was lucky to have conceived in the first place, and should be grateful for this opportunity.

The sixth and seventh doctors said that they didn't take irresponsible patients.

By the time Jayce arrived at the eighth doctor’s office, he was out of patience.

Jayce Talis, the Man of Progress, was not an intimidating guy despite his size. This was on purpose.

As a teenager, he had what his mother politely called “an awkward phase”, and what his aunt less politely called “an ugly duckling phase”. Sudden growth spurts left his bones aching; acne erupted, stubble emerged, and his hair grew limp and greasy from constant tugging. People stopped finding his fixation on magic cute. Enforcers gave him leery glances. Adolescent Jayce was off-putting and absolutely miserable about it.

The change started when his mother gave him a buzz cut to stop him from tugging his hair. It was a stress response that was getting out of control—his scalp was constantly sore and Ximena was worried about how often she had to clean up the greasy hair he was yanking out. At first, Jayce had hated his new haircut, loathing how it showed off his big ears and fat face. But then, one of his teachers complimented on his “smart” new look, and he noticed people's attitudes starting to change.

First he began to wash his face scrupulously to reduce his acne, which then made it easier to shave. Then he started asking his mother to help him pick out new outfits, retiring some of his older, more comfortable clothing for fresh, respectable clothing. He even taught himself to walk more softly. When his mother stroked his cheek and told him he looked more like his father every day, Jayce took that as a sign he was on the right track. His aunt purchased him a nose-hair trimmer, although it wasn’t something he replaced after it was lost in the burglary.

In just a few months, Jayce had transformed himself from presumed delinquent into a promising young man; he doubted he would've gotten the Kiramman's sponsorship otherwise.

However, all the good grooming in the world didn’t make a lick of difference when Jayce slammed both his fists onto the desk of the eighth doctor’s office he had visited that day, looming furiously over the man. “This is pathetic!” he seethed. “Over half a dozen of the most respected clinics in the city and not one of you is even willing to entertain the idea that Viktor could live. I don’t understand how any of you sleep at night!”

“I—I…we don’t…” The man was leaning back as far as he could manage in his chair, nearly cowering.

“One of the most brilliant men in the city, who has done so much more for us than you could possibly imagine, is dying of something we’ve known about for years, and all you can people can offer me is fucking excuses!”

“He’s not—I don’t—you’re the damn miracle worker, not me!” the doctor replied shrilly, drawing on his last ounce of courage. “I cannot possibly fix the damage that the cesspool he grew up in has done! Your whore already knows it, now pl—”

He was cut off mid-sentence as Jayce reached out, yanking the man forward by the collar. Jayce couldn’t hear anything further he had to say over the sound of his own heart pounding in his ears. He could only breathe heavily for a few moments, before finally swallowing his anger down. “You know, you have a point.” Jayce made an expression that might’ve passed as a smile, in a different context. “I am the miracle worker here.”

He shoved the other man back into his chair, and started collecting Viktor’s medical records off the floor, where they’d fallen during the argument.

If he couldn’t find the medical help Viktor needed, Jayce would just have to create it.

Chapter Text

72 hours after he last spoke to his partner, Viktor realized that his parting words may have been ill-chosen. Come back when you’ve come to terms with this. Jayce’s propensity for literalism could be frustrating or charming, depending on the context, but right now it was borderline intolerable. He had hit a roadblock on his current project, and without Jayce to bounce ideas off of, he was starting to lose steam. There were a few other projects on the back-burner that he could switch to, but if he only lasted a few days working on each of those as well, he’d be stuck spending the last few months of his life twiddling his thumbs. He felt a migraine coming on at the mere idea.

And, perhaps, even if he technically requested it, Viktor felt a little disgruntled that he’d announced his pregnancy to his sexual partner only for him to disappear completely. Perhaps it was due to being mildly upset about this that he accidentally sawed straight through a stack of paperwork instead of some piping.

Sky, who he’d forgotten was still in the room, cleared her throat. “Is…is everything alright with you and Jayce, Viktor?” Normally, she avoided personal subjects with the co-founders of HexTech, but the disappearance of one of her bosses and the visible seething of the other had pushed her to speak up. Their fights were few and far between; even then, neither was willing to actually be mean to the other, instead redirecting any anger. (Case in point: Viktor’s now shredded paperwork.) Admittedly, this fight was far more serious than any other fight they’d had, but even so—Viktor would sooner bite his tongue off than speak ill of Jayce to other people.

He waved his hand vaguely. “Nothing to worry about. We had, eh, a disagreement about project scheduling, and he’s run off to look into something new. Against my advice, of course, but I’m not in charge of Jayce Talis.”  All of that was technically true. Sky didn’t deserve to be lied to, but Viktor hadn’t gotten this far in life without learning how to ration the truth. He took a sip of his vile prescription nutritional drink with a grimace.

“I see you’re trying a new drink,” she observed diplomatically.

“Yes, well, my physician says that I should try for a more balanced diet, now that I'm past 30,” he replied, shrugging. “Turns out coffee and sweets aren’t enough to sustain a growing young scientist, who knew?”

She cracked a smile. “Well, I’m really glad to hear you’re taking better care of your health; we want you around for a good, long time.” He deliberately did not react to that statement. “Oh, by the way, there was an envelope addressed to you in our mailbox. Kinda heavy!”

Normally all correspondence they received was addressed to Jayce, or just “Hextech” if the writer remembered that there was more than one person in their lab. Yet, sure enough, the envelope read “ VIKTOR ” in firm, elegant lettering. Sky was right, it was heavy—and he could feel something small moving inside when he shook it. Very strange. He opened the envelope with the saw he’d been using, and took the contents out—a business card, a small note, and…an emerald. An emerald the size of his thumb print.

For a few moments, all he could do was stare blankly at it. Viktor had never been bribed like this—certainly a few students at the academy thought that the dean’s trencher assistant would be an easy target, but he had thoroughly enjoyed disappointing them. Besides, those had been bottles of mediocre wine and party invitations, not something worth more than his fucking house. Viktor picked it up gingerly, and lifted his goggles for an unfiltered look. While he was no jeweler, it certainly wasn’t a piece of glass. A glance over his shoulder let him know that Sky was busy with her own paperwork, politely not watching Viktor open his mail.

He picked up the business card, which was for the abortion clinic Jayce had begged him to visit just a few days ago, and the note, which simply read, “For help staying on track.” If Jayce were anyone else, Viktor might suspect that he was in on this. It had been mere days since their argument, and here was a jaw-dropping bribe suggesting he follow Jayce’s plan instead. But Viktor did trust his lab partner, and knew that he would never resort to such measures. ( Damn these hormones , Viktor thought, I’m getting misty-eyed about the fact that he has almost no guile .) More importantly though, that meant that someone else was privy to his medical information—someone powerful enough to stuff a small fortune in an envelope like it was nothing.

Shit.

He recognized the power play for what it was. Someone was offering him an obscenely large carrot, which meant that there was probably an equally large stick if he didn’t fall in line. Unfortunately for them, Viktor wasn’t going to bend to bribes or threats. Not about this.

“Happy birthday, Ms. Young,” he said, getting up from his seat.

“Thank you Viktor, but it’s not actually my—holy shit,” she squeaked as he casually plunked a gem worth more than what she would earn during her lifetime onto her paperwork.

“Happy early birthday, then,” he amended. “By the way, could you get a message to Ms. Kiramman? Tell her I’d like to meet her for lunch.”

Viktor took pride in how little he resented Caitlyn Kiramman. Her family was one of Hextech’s biggest sponsors. She was intelligent and made genuine attempts to be courteous with Viktor. Before Viktor met his partner, she was, depressingly, Jayce’s only real friend, and their relationship didn’t change once Jayce became one of Piltover’s hottest commodities. It would be really, really convenient if he didn’t resent her at all. The problem was simply that when Viktor tried to imagine being born with everything one could ever want and choosing to become an enforcer, he felt like screaming.

Although, in her defense, she was a damn good detective, which was what brought him to her today.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Ms. Kiramman.” Viktor nibbled on his salmon. It was fortunate that the worst of his morning sickness had subsided—it would be a shame to throw up the expensive lunch Caitlyn had bought him.

“Of course, Viktor.” She set her tea cup down with a clack , eying Viktor uneasily. “I apologize for being brusque, but is Jayce in trouble?”

“I’m hardly one to criticize for bluntness, Ms. Kiramman,” Viktor replied with a shrug. “But I have to know, how did you come to that conclusion?”

Her face settled into a pensive furrow. “You never ask to meet me, much less alone, much less in private, so that’s cause for alarm. I overheard more than one of my coworkers mention that Jayce has been spotted in several spots around the city with no clear purpose, looking troubled and holding a large stack of paperwork. I know that mother pays for two separate aides to manage errands, so whatever it is he’s doing, he has to do it himself. When Sky stopped by to relay your request, I asked how he was doing, and she told me she had no idea because she hasn’t seen Jayce in days. She also appeared to be on the verge of a meltdown, but it’s possible that’s unrelated, I don't know her very well. Moreover, you’ve touched the envelope in your pocket several times, so one of you got a message that’s weighing on you. Finally, giving a damn about Jayce Talis as a person is a very rare trait, one of the few things we have in common.”

Yes, Viktor had come to the right person with this. “Well, when you put it like that, it sounds so obvious, Ms. Kiramman. Jayce is not in trouble yet —but I would like your help in keeping it that way.” He pulled the envelope out of his pocket. “Do you recognize the handwriting? It definitely came from someone associated with Piltover’s upper echelons, I can tell you that much.”

Caitlyn took the envelope delicately, flipped it over, and frowned. “I’m sorry Viktor, but I don’t think I can recognize the handwriting off of one word by itself. Did they write anything else?” He handed over the note that had been inside with a grimace. Viktor had been hoping to avoid letting her read that, but he needed answers. She raised an eyebrow at the message. Viktor raised an eyebrow back. “I have a few guesses, although I suspect Jayce could tell better than I. He hasn’t seen this, then?”

Viktor shook his head. “Him recognizing the handwriting is exactly what I’m afraid of.  Tell me your guesses.”

Despite her visible irritation with Viktor’s caginess, she nodded. “Off the top of my head, my first guesses would be Count Mei, Camille Ferros—”

“Ferros!” Viktor interrupted, snapping his fingers. “Of course, gems! They own all of the mines for miles!”

Caitlyn looked down at the enveloped and traced the creases towards the bottom. “A gem? That’s what was inside the envelope? It must’ve been—Viktor, that’s a very sizable bribe. What’s this all about? What does Clan Ferros want with you, specifically?”

“Nothing that I’m going to give them. Thank you Caitlyn, you’ve been very helpful.”

“You’re not going to tell me what they asked.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to tell me what Jayce is doing, either.”

“No.”

Her nostrils flared. “I could just ask him myself, you know.”

He gripped his cane tightly. “I know you can. But I’m asking you—don’t tell him about the letter. I do not want Jayce picking a fight with Camille Ferros. It won’t end well. Again, thank you for your help, but we both know it’s better if I handle this by myself.”

She fell silent as he left the room, though he could feel her eyes on his back.

First order of business: figuring out how the hell he was going to handle this by himself.

Chapter Text

Jayce approached saving Viktor’s life the way he approached every other problem: scrupulous note-taking. And this situation was going to require multiple notebooks, for sure. The first was his pre-existing notebook about Viktor’s health—that one had been started when he started helping Viktor with mobility devices. After the night they cracked both Hextech and Viktor’s cane, making a replacement was just a matter of measurements. Unfortunately, every year since had seen Viktor’s condition worsen and require more elaborate devices to keep him upright. The deterioration of Viktor’s spine, hips, and leg were recorded throughout its pages, as well as everything they’d done to combat it. Wearily, Jayce realized that it was going to take a while to transfer all the information from Viktor’s medical records to his notebook. It stung, reading the test results and seeing how much Viktor had kept from him, and for how long. He didn't know what some of the terms meant, and wasn’t sure where to start.

The second notebook was where he planned to record his notes on pregnancy. If Viktor wanted this baby to be born, Jayce would make sure it was the healthiest damn infant Piltover General had ever seen. At first he had planned for those notes to be in the Viktor notebook, but just looking at the table of contents of some of those textbooks convinced him otherwise. The number of ways a pregnancy could go wrong gave him vertigo. Worse still, one of the recent journals’ articles about mortality rates showed a staggering difference when socio-economic differences were taken into account.

The third notebook was dedicated to so-called “Sump Lung”, as well as any other health conditions endemic to the Undercity. Viktor’s lungs seemed to be the biggest threat to his health; his skeletal issues might end with him in a wheelchair, but they wouldn’t be what killed him—his lungs crumpling like wet paper bags and causing multiple organ failures would. Every doctor he’d visited told him that it was common where Viktor grew up, but not much else. The library had yet to yield anything helpful about the condition, and several of the medical journals made reference to some study that had been done years ago without any indication of its results or where to find them. Moreover, if Piltover’s medical system had a hole this big in their knowledge of such a common disease, what else had they missed about Viktor’s condition?

He’d checked out six textbooks, eight medical journal publications, and five other non-fiction books to start—trying to invent technology so far outside of his usual purview was going to require an extensive research review. Jayce was sorely out of practice with pursuing a research topic this broad, and could only hope that the librarian could mind her own business about this. He grimaced. The private library room he was holed up in would keep him out of sight of random passersby, at the very least. Importantly, this room also had its own coffee maker, which he was definitely going to need.

Two cups of coffee in, he could now understand a good portion of Viktor’s medical records. Trying to read messily written paperwork filled with terms he didn’t recognize was giving him a headache; the best method he could come up with was trying to figure out the first letter of each term so he could check the medical textbook’s index for something that looked similar. However, even when he found a match, reading the definition for the term required reading the definition for several other terms. Immunoglobulin A led to the definition for immunoglobulin led to the definition of antibody led to the section on how the immune system worked led to lymph nodes and so on and so on. The more he knew about the terms, the more Viktor’s test results worried him. He’d had to take a deep breath when he found a record from the year they met predicting that Viktor had ten years to live at best; his partner had gotten more than halfway through his remaining lifespan without bothering to tell Jayce that their time together was so limited.

It fucking hurt, but it wouldn't matter soon. Jayce was going to fix it.

Underlying issue: Viktor’s lungs are failing

• Lack of oxygen is causing bone degradation, muscle degradation, possibly digestive issues?
• Running theory: his lungs are being replaced by scar tissue due to toxin exposure during childhood
  • Reverse scarring process?
    • Never heard of this being done even through magic - probably a dead end
  • Replace lungs?
    • Organ transplants - still risky, where would I get lungs?
    • Synthetic lungs??
      • How would they function? What would they be made of?

Perhaps it was his bias as an engineer, but prosthetic lungs were what felt the most promising. Jayce had heard rumors of experimental organ prostheses being done for Piltover’s wealthiest citizens, but if that was the case, it was a closely guarded secret. None of the medical journals had even hinted at the possibility, just the recent strides made in organ transplants. Even with those improvements, the success rate was still very low and added only a few more years at best—not good enough. And then there was the other logistical issue.

Viktor won’t agree to anything that would risk fetus - limits options

• There are many ways for pregnancies to go wrong - just about any sort of procedure presents a risk
  • Not well understood why in all cases? Serious lack of research here
  • I don’t understand how our species has survived this long
• Viktor is past first trimester, which means spontaneous miscarriage is less likely
  • The longer Viktor is pregnant, the worse his health will get, but baby needs to finish developing to not die
    • Is it possible for baby to finish developing w/out Viktor? Like eggs?
      • Could I convince Viktor to agree to this???

Maybe he was getting ahead of himself. Plans for how to resolve the problem were important, but first he needed a lot more information than he currently had. The data in Viktor’s medical files felt like only being able to see the shadows of what he was looking for. There was no way to know what Viktor’s lungs looked like without highly invasive surgery; his doctor could only guess by monitoring his decline.

How to observe something (Viktor’s lungs) without opening its container (Viktor)

• Sound? Listen to them?
  • That’s what stethoscopes are for—insufficient
• Touch? Try to feel it?
  • Ribs are in the way
    • Can’t get ribs out of the way without surgery, defeats the purpose
• Smell?
  • Probably not
• Taste?
  • Definitely not!!

Jayce grimaced, suddenly plagued by the image of licking Viktor’s lungs. He was happy to lick most of Viktor, but definitely not any of his guts. Eugh. Jayce anxiously scratched the back of his neck. It was too early for him to be hitting roadblocks when he was facing the most important deadline of his life. 

He tried to relax by doing something he was good at: thinking about Viktor. There was Viktor’s adorably asymmetrical nose, his fluffy hair, his golden eyes, his sexy beauty marks that contrasted incredibly against his pale, almost see-through skin—wait.

Viktor was very skinny and very pale. Jayce had teased him about it one day when he noticed that the light from the crystals shone through his hand when he picked one up with his bare hands; the teasing had put him in a bad mood, however, so Jayce dropped it. (He felt a pang of guilt for teasing Viktor about what, in retrospect, was definitely a sign of his failing health.) Importantly, he had been able to very faintly see Viktor’s bones through his lit skin. Maybe shadows were what he needed after all. He cracked open his journal for runes and began to sketch.          

Three pots of coffee later, someone entered the room. Once his eyes remembered how to focus, Jayce saw that it was Caitlyn, and she looked…upset. “Hey Sprout,” he slurred. “Uh, did you need something?”

“Do I need something?” she asked incredulously. Caitlyn gestured at his discarded coffee pots and his ever-growing pile of reading materials. “I think you need something—a sanity check.”

“You know, people used to tell my mother that all the time.” Jayce chuckled at his own joke. Caitlyn did not.

“How long have you been in here, Jayce? No one has seen you for days; I only found you by process of elimination. Your mother didn’t even know.”

He rested his chin on his hands as he pondered the question, only to encounter something unexpected. “Uh, long enough for my beard to grow out a little. Oops.” Now that he had noticed it, the beard felt unbearably itchy. Abruptly, Caitlyn yanked on his hand, inspecting his fingers.

“Jayce, why do you have blood underneath your fingernails?”

Oops again . “Must’ve itched my neck too much, thought I was just sweaty. Man, I haven’t done that in years.” The last time had been when he and Viktor had presented the first Hexgate prototypes to the Council—Viktor had helped him apply a bandage and adjust his jacket to cover it up, scolding him the whole time. He remembered that more fondly than he probably should.

“Jayce. Jayce . Focus. What the hell have you been working on in here? I want answers.”

“Don’t worry about it, Cait. I’ve got this under control, just go home and let me work,” he said, trying to subtly close his journals.

“You know, Viktor said something similar. I didn’t believe him either, and I’m going to find out.”

Jayce cradled his notes to his chest, hunched over them protectively. Unfortunately, there was more evidence to investigate than just his journals. Caitlyn’s eyes widened as she read the cover of the book closest to her: Introductory Obstetrics . She picked it up and read the title of the book underneath: Diseases of the Undercity: An Overview . She read a third title, then a fourth, then a couple of the academic journals, while Jayce watched in defeat. After a few moments of deafening silence, she spoke. “Jayce. Did you get Viktor pregnant?”

“Hate it when you do detective shit.”

“What the fuck , Jayce.”

His forehead hit the table with a dull thud , as he slumped over in a vain attempt to make his head stop spinning. At that point, he half-hoped to just escape the situation by passing out, but that was only delaying the inevitable. He turned his head to the side, still not looking at Caitlyn, but not speaking directly into the table. “Yeah. Viktor’s pregnant. He’s sick enough that it would kill him, but he’s decided to have the baby anyway. I’m trying to figure out a way to stop him from dying, and he's mad at me about it.” 

She gasped. “That’s not fair.”

“Diseases never are, sprout.”

“No, I meant—that’s not fair of him.”

At that, Jayce sat up. He felt a spark of rage, that she would make Viktor out to be the bad guy in this situation. Viktor was dying—he didn’t need judgment, he needed Jayce’s help. “You don’t know—don’t say that. Not about Viktor.”

The clench of her jaw betrayed how badly she wanted to argue. Instead, she sighed, loudly. “I’m going to walk you home. You need to sleep and have a proper meal.”

“No, no. I have a meeting. Council. Day after tomorrow.”

Caitlyn gave his shirt a firm tug away from the chair. “Come on. Now . You can barely string a sentence together. If you want to give a presentation, you need to sleep and clean yourself up. All the data in the world won’t mean a thing if they don't understand what you're saying.” Jayce grumbled, reluctantly looping his arm through hers as she led them out of the library. “Also? Medicine isn’t my area of expertise, not by a long shot, but I think you’re going to need help with this one. Because it’s not your area of expertise either, and you can’t invent a damn thing if you’re trying to cram eight years’ worth of study into four months.” She caught the pout on his face. “I know you don’t like working with people who aren’t Viktor, but you have got to set your hang ups aside.”

He grunted. “Yeah. Okay.” He could tolerate working with someone who wasn’t Viktor, if the alternative was no Viktor ever again.

“Oh, and Jayce? Have you heard anything from Camille Ferros recently?” she asked, her tone suddenly much more casual.

“No. Why? I don’t like her.” He hadn’t meant to say that last part out loud. Oops again, again .

Caitlyn was silent for a long time. Either that, or Jayce was tired enough to have lost his sense of time. “…No reason. Get some sleep, Jayce.”

Chapter Text

Viktor didn’t like looking at their budget records—it was one of the few hypocrisies he consciously allowed himself. Jayce had happily volunteered to take charge of the books, citing his previous experience helping balance the Talis Forge’s books. Normally Viktor was loathe to skip out on any part of their process, but the fact of the matter was that reading them made him sick to his damn stomach. He felt nauseated every time he read the list of sponsors and donors, and the enormous numbers next to each one. Even the smallest contributions were more than his parents had made in their lifetimes, and most of the families had gotten rich by wringing the Undercity dry. Each one of those donations could change someone’s life forever, and here the book listed dozens that had been sunk into Hextech.

It wasn’t as if they were spending extravagantly on themselves; the amount Viktor took home was not much more than what Heimerdinger had paid him for being a glorified gofer. Hextech’s development was simply that expensive, and Viktor truly believed the work they were doing would one day be meaningful for everyone, not just their sponsors. He had to, for the past few years to make sense, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like a traitor every time he looked at their budget. It didn’t stop the impulse to go to the bank, withdraw all their donations, hobble to the Undercity and start throwing huge handfuls of money into its depths, watching it fall all the way down into the Sumps where he’d been born, where his parents were buried. He wanted to hear the outraged shrieks of the Piltovan elite while their money trickled down into the depths where they wouldn’t dare follow.

So no, he didn’t look at their budget if he could help it, but this was a special occasion.

Viktor flipped through the section that sorted donations by donor to locate Clan Ferros’ relatively small subsection. It was paltry compared to even some of the lesser houses of Piltover; per Councilor Medarda’s suggestion, all donors who met a (very affordable) yearly threshold were allowed unlimited use of the Hexgates with no extra fee, and Clan Ferros was paying the minimum. In fact, by his estimate, the bribe he had received was worth more than all of their official donations combined. Jayce had confessed relief, once, that they weren’t big donors, since the more money someone spent on Hextech, the more Jayce had to talk to them. Viktor had agreed readily, but it had been naive to assume Clan Ferros wasn’t keeping an eye on them anyway. Camille Ferros having access to his medical information was frightening, but not actually surprising.

However, that still didn’t tell Viktor why she gave a damn about him being pregnant. He briefly considered that she was trying to prevent him from sullying House Talis—but no, despite Camille’s legendary hatred for the Undercity and Jayce’s best attempts to promote his family’s legacy, there was no way she cared enough about such a minor house. If it was just the existence of a bastard child, Camille would’ve solved it in a much simpler, more brutal way. The Principal Intelligencer of Clan Ferros was not known for mercy.

One of the most jarring things about moving to Piltover was Camille Ferros walking around in broad daylight. Usually when you meet the bogeyman, it has the decency to appear at night, when no one else is around. Every child in the Undercity had been raised with warnings about how hands that strayed too far were liable to be cut off by the Gray Lady. You could hide from an enforcer or pay off a Chembaron, but if she wanted you dead, there was no bargain to be struck with her, no plea that would move her stone heart. Some of his peers had teased Viktor as a child, telling him that he would be too slow to catch her when she came.

Fortunately, stray children were beneath her notice. The Gray Lady only came in person when trenchers started getting ideas about money or autonomy. Strike leaders with their throats sliced in their own homes were more her style. Viktor still struggled with the urge to curl up and hide whenever he saw her, but until yesterday could reassure himself that she didn't care about him. Viktor had always strove to be respectable to Piltovans despite his origins; failing that, to be unobjectionable; failing that, to be unnoticed. Evidently, it hadn’t worked, and now he was on Camille Ferros’ shitlist for reasons he didn’t fully understand.

It was a fucking nightmare. He made a choice for himself for the first time since breaking into Heimerdinger’s office, and this was his punishment, evidently.

“…Viktor?”

He glanced over his shoulder to see that their laboratory assistant had arrived, looking rather harried. “Viktor, am I fired?” she asked in an unsteady voice.

He blinked. “Eh…no?”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, okay, I’m glad, because I really like this job and it’s an honor to work with you, but when you gave me that jewel, I thought you were trying to tell me I was fired—that it was my severance package, or something.” She took the offending gem out of her pocket. “Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with this.”

Viktor felt a pang of guilt. He hadn’t stopped to think that Ms. Young didn’t want the jewel anymore than he did, and that dumping it on her with no explanation was more than a little inconsiderate. “My apologies, Ms. Young, it was an unwanted gift that I thought you might appreciate more than I. I didn’t think it through, forgive me. If you’re certain you don’t want it, I can take care of it, as I believe I need to speak with this gift-giver anyway.”

Smiling in relief, she handed the jewel back to him. “It’s no problem, Viktor. Honestly, I was making a big deal out of nothing anyway. I know you haven’t been feeling well these past few months, I shouldn’t be surprised if you’re still a little out of it.” She giggled. “But gosh, I was worrying about what I was going to tell my parents!”

Viktor pushed the jewel under some paperwork, where neither of them would have to look at it. “Oh? Are you close with your parents?”

Sky nodded. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without them; their support was what kept me going at the academy when things got tough. I still go to see them a few times a month,” she replied, smiling.

“Jayce is the same way with his mother, I know. A real mama’s boy, as they say, but he’s not ashamed of it,” Viktor said, fondly. His partner's capacity for love and sincerity never failed to amaze him. "He keeps asking me to visit her, and I'm not sure how to tell him that it's not a good idea."

"Not a good idea? Why?"

Viktor grimaced. "I don't think she, eh, holds me in high esteem. Not that that matters to me, but I think Jayce would be hurt."

Perhaps Mrs. Talis would’ve had a different impression of Viktor had she known that he was the reason she still had a son at all, but Jayce had never told her that part of the story. It wasn’t as if Viktor liked dwelling on it either; when he had talked Jayce off the ledge, it was just him reaching out to a promising stranger, not to mention basic decency. Looking back, it was terrifying to consider that if he had arrived just a few seconds later, he would’ve never met the most important person in his life. His world would be a much poorer place without Jayce Talis.

Sky seemed to sense that his silence was turning broody. “What about your parents, Viktor?”

Unfortunately, she had not picked a cheery subject. “I, too, owe them everything, but I cannot visit them anymore. They passed many years ago, now.” He picked up a stack of papers; looking Sky in the eye was suddenly difficult. Despite that, she pushed on.

“What were they like?”

Viktor shrugged, scrunching his nose. “Honestly? I don’t fully remember. My memories of them are all good, but unfortunately few. They worked long, long hours—making enough money to care for a sickly child was a struggle. I suspect that working 80 hours a week or more to support me contributed to their early deaths.”

“Viktor...that’s terrible. You don’t know that that’s true, you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

He struggled not to flinch away when she rested her hand on his shoulder. “It’s alright, Ms. Young. At the risk of being grim, it is, in a sense, natural. Octopi, some spiders, plenty of other animals—they all die after reproduction. Many parents make similar choices in dire circumstances. I mourn them, but all I can do is work hard to leave behind a legacy they would be proud of, to make a mark on the world. More than anything, I want to honor the sacrifices they made for me, one way or another.” He felt the urge to touch his midsection, where their grandchild was nestled. Viktor hadn’t intended to follow in their footsteps, but it was better than nothing. Maybe his own child could live up to the dreams Viktor’s parents had had for him.

Wasn’t that the point of children?

Chapter Text

Jayce’s presentation was going to be absolutely perfect. He had compiled the most comprehensive research from the most prestigious journals and written them out in the most concise, striking language and put on his most dashing coat and given himself the cleanest shave and put on his most winning smile and if this didn’t work he was going to kill himself. Scratch that last part, he reminded himself. You’re not supposed to think that anymore .

“Jayce,” Caitlyn murmured, elbowing him. “I can hear you grinding your teeth from here. It’s honestly really gross. Stop it.”

That was probably why his jaw hurt. He instead sandwiched his tongue between his teeth, hoping wouldn’t bite through it by mistake. Caitlyn put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got this, just stop overthinking it. It’s a serious issue and you can prove it.”

Jayce nodded numbly. Caitlyn had agreed to read over his report while he slept to check for sleep deprivation-induced errors. In the morning, she’d handed it back to him with a few corrections and a grim expression. Intellectually, they both knew that life in the Undercity was much harder, but the raw data of the number of people who bled out or died of infection was hard to look at. Some masochistic part of Jayce’s mind could only picture a dozen dozen Viktors drained of life and a dozen dozen babies screaming for a parent that would never comfort them. It wasn’t Viktor that had inspired his dreams of improving life for everyone in Piltover, but it was the threat of losing Viktor that pushed him to do something about it. It was a selfish motivation, but someone had to be selfish on Viktor’s behalf.

Too soon, they found themselves in front of the Council room doors. Caitlyn gave him one last comforting pat and the most reassuring smile she could manage. “I need to get back to work. It’ll be fine, I’m sure I’ll be hearing all about the ‘next chapter of Hextech’ from my mother tonight.” She set off at a jog; Jayce felt the childish impulse to ask her to stay.

When he finally worked up the nerve to walk into the Council chambers, the expressions that greeted him ranged from somewhat bemused to openly bored. Undeterred, Jayce began passing out his reports; once there was a crisp stack of papers in front of every seat, he began his carefully practiced speech.

“Councilors—first of all, I must express my gratitude for agreeing to meet me on such short notice. I know you all have very busy schedules, and I am humbled that you would make time for me. You all have been entrusted with making sure Piltover upholds its title as the City of Progress, so I know your time is extremely valuable.

It is regarding that progress that I come to you today. As the co-founder of Hextech, I have spent the last five years working to propel our city into the future. It is my duty to our city, and one that I take great pride in. But progress is about more than what we are doing now; it’s also about paving the way for our successors to accomplish great things.

It has come to my attention that many of our citizens are in dire need of improved health care. I have spent the last few days collecting data about such issues, focusing on children’s health. We can invent the most astounding machines in the world, but if we leave our children to wither away, we won’t have anyone to entrust with our city’s future. Some parts of the city have maternal mortality rates as high as 65 in every 10,000 births, and nearly 1 in 5 children have developed a lifelong medical condition. In some parts of the world, these tragedies can be prevented through the use of magic. Now that we have magic under our control, I think it’s high time that we find out what Hextech can do for the health of our citizens. I have already sketched out some possible designs, and with your permission, I think I can start on—”

“Which parts?” Salo said, interrupting.

“I’m…I’m sorry? Could you clarify, Councilor?”

Salo rolled his eyes. “You said “some parts of the city”. Which parts?”

“Well, um…” Jayce scanned the room, glancing at each Councilor’s expression. Many of them looked suspicious; there was a tension in the air. “The worst statistics come from neighborhoods located in the Undercity.”

At the mention of the Undercity, the suspicion on several faces transitioned into outright disdain. Gripping his copy of the report tightly, Jayce realized that he had made a major mistake. Even his most reliable allies on the Council—Heimerdinger, Mel, and Cassandra—looked deeply uncomfortable. The rest were exchanging long-suffering expressions.

Hoskel scoffed. “Of course they’re sick. It’s filthy down there, and they’re constantly finding new ways to poison their bodies.”

“But they’re your citizens. Our citizens!”

“Our citizens, maybe, but not our children. If they choose to live in the muck, it’s not our responsibility to foot the bill when they get a cold.”

Jayce could feel himself floundering. His palm-sweat was beginning to soak the report he clung to, and his vision began to blur. This was too important. He had to make them understand.

“But many of them are children! Newborns even! We shouldn’t—we can’t make them suffer for situations they were born into. They need help,” he protested, voice wavering.

Cassandra pulled a face, sighing. “I have already spent a considerable amount of time and money providing the Undercity with clean air. The Grey was the source of a number of diseases, and I don’t appreciate the insinuation that I haven’t already done important work for our less fortunate citizens.”

“I never meant to imply—” Jayce sucked in an anxious breath. “I know you’ve done so much for the public good, Councilor Kiramman, I only meant that there are still many affected by the way things were before that are still suffering, things like Sump Lung that can triple the rate of infant mortality. As a mother, surely you…” he trailed off at the pinched expression of offense. Evidently, she didn’t appreciate the reference to her personal life.

Bolbok was the next to cut in. “At our last meeting, we established what the next plans for Hextech were going to be—improving the capacity of the Hexgate and finding a way to stabilize your crystals. You cannot expect us to overlook our previous agreement in order to pursue this new project.”

“I understand my responsibilities, and I take them very seriously, but the Hexgate improvements are meant to improve our mercantile capacity, while there are dozens of children dying every week right now !”

“Are we to understand, then, that we have to follow your priorities instead of the ones we already agreed upon, despite the fact that we’re paying for all of this?” Shoola asked.

To his horror, Jayce could feel tears beginning to well up in his eyes. He looked to Mel for help, but was only met with a pained look, the closest to flustered that he’d ever seen on her face. “I just mean, that if your house was on fire, if it was—these are children we’re talking about!”

When the room went silent, Jayce realized he had raised his voice much louder than he meant to. The last time he had shouted in the Council room was during his trial, he remembered, distantly.

It was Salo who broke the silence, and Jayce’s faith in his city’s government. “Don’t be absurd—that would only encourage them to have more children. The overpopulation issue is bad enough in the Undercity as it is without us enabling it. I don’t know where you’ve been going at night, but I can assure you, they’re having no trouble reproducing without our help.”

Hot. Jayce’s face felt hot . His hands, his chest, his face—all of it suddenly felt like it was burning. As if he was in a sauna, the air suddenly felt thick, too hot to breathe comfortably. His stomach churned, and he wasn't sure if it was because he wanted to vomit or scream. Through the pounding of his heartbeat, he vaguely registered that some of the other Councilors were arguing with each other, but that seemed irrelevant compared to the sensation overtaking him. Unconsciously, he took a step towards Salo—it was when he could suddenly picture driving a hammer straight through his skull that Jayce realized he genuinely wanted the man dead. Homicidal rage was a novel feeling for Jayce. He didn’t like it. He took another step.

The flash of golden jewelry in the corner of his eye broke the near-trance he had entered. “ Jayce ,” Mel said, somehow cutting through the uproar without having to raise her voice. He turned to face her, slightly dazed. The other voices died down, and she continued, gently. “We sincerely apologize for Salo’s statement. I think, perhaps, that he let his personal distaste for children color his words.” Salo rolled his eyes, looking entirely unapologetic. Mel did not acknowledge him. “I know your heart is in the right place, as it always is, but you’ve sprung this on us rather suddenly. We’ve hardly had time to read what you’ve given us, never mind weigh our options. I think looking into Hextech’s possible medical applications is a remarkable idea that could be a new point of pride for Piltover, and provide new possibilities for trade. I’d love to discuss this with you after the meeting, if you have time.”

Jayce could only nod mutely. If he opened his mouth now, there was a good chance he’d burst into tears.

Heimerdinger, who had been looking direly uncomfortable until this point, nodded enthusiastically. “Well said, Councilor Medarda. I can hardly imagine the miracles you boys will be cooking up for our citizens. However , like many of your propositions, I must once again remind you that none of these will be safe for public use until you’ve found a way to stabilize your crystals. Goodness knows what would happen if Hextech, in its current, unstable state, was distributed in our hospitals. No, no, it scarcely bears thinking about. Councilor Bolbok is correct, you need to finish your current projects first before we can consider where to start on all this.”

When Jayce left the Council chambers, he was struck with the nauseating feeling that the city outside those doors wasn’t the same as it had been that morning.

Thud .

Mel had made it sound so simple.

Thud .

But he had seen the looks on the other Councilors’ faces.

Thud .

He could’ve pissed on the floor and they would’ve looked less disgusted at that than what he had proposed.

Thud .

What other projects would they shut down that he’d been planning for years?

Thud .

“Jayce. Please stop hitting your head against the wall.”

…Thud .

“ Jayce .”

He rotated his head to face Mel, mussing his hair against the bricks. He stared blankly at her, hoping she would start this conversation, because he sure as hell didn’t know where to begin. He was in luck.

“Before we discuss your proposal, there’s something I should get out of the way—a significant portion of the Council now thinks you’ve impregnated at least one Undercity brothel worker. No, don't look at me like that, I know you haven’t, you haven’t been to the Undercity in years. But my word won’t stop that rumor from spreading.”

It took a minute for Jayce to process the double whammy of information. “Why do you know where I go? And more importantly, why the hell would they think that?”

Mel sighed. “It’s part of my job to know what people are doing in this city. And as to why they think that? Part of it is that you have abruptly come to the Council to talk about pregnancy in the Undercity, and part of it is, well, projection.”

Jayce mouthed the word ‘projection’ in silent disgust. “I’ve never heard about that happening before, that’s awful. But then… why would they shoot me down? Don’t they have a reason to care, too?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, during which Mel could only grimace. “You really do have a good heart. And I’m not just saying that.” The implication made Jayce feel sick to his stomach. “I just thought you needed to know what’s going to start happening from here on out. But that’s not what I came here to discuss with you. I did look over your report Jayce, and some of your preliminary concepts are ingenious. The leaps and bounds we could make in medicine could be staggering; making Piltover a destination for medical tourism would add an entirely new stream of revenue.”

“Mel, I don’t care about the revenue. I—People need this now! There are people who are on track to die right this second and every day I’m not working on something to fix that is a day I’m letting them down.”

Mel cocked her head. “Jayce. There’s something you’re not telling me.” It wasn’t a question.

He knew better than to hope she hadn’t caught his slip-up. Half of him wanted to spill everything and beg for her help, but the other half hesitated. Maybe it was the fear of her judgment, or the fear of Viktor’s judgment, or maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t look the answer. Jayce wasn’t sure of his sponsors’ values anymore, and how much they aligned with his own. “Why didn’t you say anything at first?” he asked instead. “You always support me, why not this time?”

“As I said Jayce, you sprung this on us without warning. If I want to make sure the Council will back your proposals, I need time to prepare them. You didn’t let me help you with this, so I couldn’t. Damage control was the best I could provide for you.”

Jayce groaned. “Yeah, well, maybe you shouldn’t have to prepare the Council to actually help people. Maybe they should agree to do good things because they’re good. And maybe you shouldn’t have just let me make an idiot of myself by trying to ask them to give a single shit— Sorry.” His mouth had gotten ahead of his mind—he’d never spoken to Mel like that before, and he found his eyes guiltily trained on the floor instead of her eyes. “I know you did your best.” A painful silence stretched between them.

“It seems you’re not going to tell me what’s wrong, but you’re not going to let this go, are you, Jayce?”

“No.”

“Well, I suppose that your convictions are what got us where we are today. I will neither help you nor hinder you in this matter, not openly, but if it’s that serious, then I recommend you visit Professor Lenus. She’s a member of the biology department who’s known for her remarkable research into medical technology.”

Jayce met her gaze. He couldn’t identify the emotion in her gaze; she wasn’t happy, but she didn’t seem angry, either. “Thank you, Mel.”

“I don’t need to tell you that you are putting your goodwill with the Council at serious risk if you pursue this, so instead I will wish you luck. I imagine you’ll need it.”

Jayce hit his head against the wall one last time, for good measure.

Chapter Text

First his cane. Then, shakily, his right foot. Finally, pushing on his cane to give himself some momentum that his right leg wouldn’t collapse, his left foot. One stair down, a dizzying number to go to get to Camille Ferros’s office. It would’ve been easier if there was a railing so he could push with both hands and leave his bad leg out of the equation nearly altogether, but these stairs seemed designed to be as inhospitable as possible without resorting to actual traps. Perhaps Viktor should be keeping a look out for them, just in case.

Cane. Right foot. Left foot. He wondered what happened when someone who was actually welcome tried to climb these stairs. What would they do if someone’s opulently rich grandmother wanted an audience? Have man-servants carry her over the treacherous architecture?

Cane. Right foot. Left foot. Perhaps no one was welcome here. It wasn’t as if Ms. Ferros was known for being a gracious hostess, after all.

Cane. Right foot. Left foot. Hopefully Viktor wouldn’t tumble down the stairs. Dying or miscarrying by falling down an expensive flight of stairs would be an anticlimactic way for this whole saga to end, not to mention embarrassing.

Cane. Right foot. Left foot. Unfortunately for Ms. Ferros, Viktor had a talent for ignoring implied boundaries. It made him the man he was.

After a few hundred grueling repetitions of cane-right foot-left foot , Viktor found himself in a waiting room. It contained one secretary, sat in front of a modestly-sized yet ornate desk, a fine Shuriman rug, several astonishingly dull paintings, a door labeled “CAMILLE FERROS” behind the desk, and absolutely no seating beyond the secretary’s plush leather chair. At this point, Viktor was forced to conclude that either this space never had any actual visitors, or that they had removed all the furniture when they saw him on the stairs. He wouldn’t put it past her—in fact, by his estimation, that office would provide an excellent view of the stairs he just climbed. He tried not to shudder at the thought of her watching his struggle. But, sadistic voyeurism or not, he was not going to back down.

He stood in front of the secretary’s desk. The secretary did not look up from the paperwork he was scribbling on. So that’s how we’re doing it , Viktor thought. “I received a very generous donation from Ms. Ferros the other day. I was hoping to thank her in person, on behalf of Hextech,” he said, slightly louder than necessary.

The secretary met his eyes for a moment, giving Viktor a dirty look before they fell back to his paperwork. “Do you have an appointment?” he asked.

Viktor rolled his eyes. From his pocket, he produced the envelope, placing it on the desk, followed by the donated jewel. “I was under the impression that Ms. Ferros was interested in seeing me sometime soon. Could I prevail upon you to, eh, double check?”

The secretary glared at the stone, seemingly offended to be confronted by something equal to his net worth. “Fine. I’ll tell her that you’re here, Mr….?” he trailed off, raising an eyebrow at Viktor. Perversely, Viktor was beginning to feel almost flattered that they were going through so much trouble to annoy him. He took pride in irritating Piltover’s elite when he could get away with it, and sometimes even when he couldn’t. The secretary continued waiting for a response, eyebrow climbing ever higher.

"Viktor."

"Last name?"

“Unnecessary. As you can see,” Viktor responded, holding up the envelope that simply read VIKTOR, “Ms. Ferros did not require a last name when she sent me her generous donation.”

The secretary squinted at him for a moment, then leaned back in his chair to knock on the office door behind him. “Ms. Ferros? There’s a Mr. Viktor “Unnecessary” here to see you,” he called. He was smirking as he said it. Clearly suffering from the delusion that he’s clever , Viktor thought. That type of humor had gotten old within his first month at the academy; it was frankly disappointing that no one had any new material. There was a muffled acknowledgment through the door, and the secretary finally gestured for Viktor to proceed.

Camille Ferros’s office was both exactly and nothing like Viktor expected it to be. The room was much larger than it had any right to be, but not quite the same expansiveness that Councilor Medarda or Councilor Kiramman’s offices boasted. The color palette was monochrome—white, grays, blacks, with touches of Ferros blue and Piltover gold threaded throughout. The windows—which did indeed overlook those obnoxious stairs—were frosted with clan Ferros’s diamond-patterned insignia, in a way that made looking in difficult but looking out more than manageable. There was a single, tiny tree in the corner, trimmed in the Ionian style, and a tea cart stocked with all the essentials. Her desk appeared to be ebony with a marble finish and gold trim. In the middle of it all, the woman herself sat primly in an imposing black chair that didn’t actually look comfortable. The small chair across the desk from her looked even less comfortable. Viktor took a seat, trying to disguise his relief.

The only way the office differed from his expectations, really, was the absence of bloody trophies taken off of poor miners.

Ms. Ferros, much like her secretary, did not greet Viktor. Rather, she took a long sip of tea, watching him without so much as blinking. Viktor had always been prey rather than predator in Piltover, but in that moment he had never felt so much like a mouse, staring into the eyes of a falcon. “I have come to discuss your donation, Ms. Ferros.”

Her eyebrow arched, yet she did not speak until her teacup was back in its saucer. “I take it, then, that you have not followed my suggestion. Do I need to add new incentives?”

“Hopefully that is not necessary,” Viktor replied stiffly. “I believe we can agree to some different terms. You see, I am familiar with your, eh, work, Ms. Ferros. If you were truly determined that I should not have this child, you could have used a more direct method, say, push me down the stairs, slip something in my drink, you get the idea.”

“I don’t normally take requests, but if that’s something you’re interested in…” she offered.

“No, thank you. What I mean to say is that you could have taken more extreme measures, but you don't seem to want me dead, so there must be something else you want from me. If you could just tell me what it is, that would make things easier on us both, yes?”

She cocked her head, visibly irritated by Viktor’s attempt to take control of the conversation. It really underscored the falcon comparison in Viktor’s mind. Without looking, she plucked another cup and saucer from her supply, and began pouring. “Well, if we’re going to talk business, why don’t I pour you a cup of tea?”

Viktor grimaced, leaning back in a futile attempt to distance himself from the offending brew. “I think I will have to pass, Ms. Ferros.”

“Nonsense. You’ve been drinking gallons of that foul-sounding nutritional slop, you must be in dire need of something nice. Besides, tea is excellent for soothing all sorts of maladies—nausea, heartburn, inflammation, cramps, congestion, that “unusual” smell. It’s just what you need. And no, it’s not poisoned. As you said yourself, if I was planning to do so it would have already happened.”

Viktor’s patience was waning. He reached out to push the teacup back towards her. “Yes, yes, you read my medical reports, I already knew that. But we’re here to talk about what you need, not what—” he said, before cutting himself off with a hiss of pain when— 

CRACK

Camille broke his pinky finger. She struck with the speed of a cobra, nimbly grabbing the finger and fracturing it with just a firm pinch. Reflexively, Viktor cradled it to his chest. It was far from the worst pain he’d ever experienced, but it was still terrifying.

She pushed the teacup back towards him. “I must admit, I’m impressed by your pain tolerance, even if I find your manners lacking, boy. Mind them, or I won’t mind mine.” Viktor picked up the teacup with his uninjured hand. The sweat on his palm felt tacky against the porcelain. “Better. Now, the thing you must remember about a new technology is that it goes through a sort of life cycle. First, it is discovered, and investors jump on board. After a few years, the first results start to emerge. They’re few in number but large in scale, usually some sort of civic project. Your Hexgate, for example. With any luck, the investors see a handsome return on their investment, and they were very lucky this time. However, these projects are limited in scope, and their profits plateau sooner rather than later. The next stage is the invention of products meant for the public. This is where the real profit rolls in, as the number of products and buyers start to increase exponentially. However, if there aren’t enough materials for mass production, this stage cannot happen. The profits will stagnate, and the technology fades into the background. Fortunately for all of us, clan Ferros has foreseen this problem for Hextech, and we have already begun stockpiling the materials necessary to make your inventions available to every household in Piltover. Namely: a limitless supply of hex crystals. Once the technology has progressed, we shall be Hextech’s most important supplier of material goods. Unfortunately, if the genius behind Hextech were to grind to a halt now, clan Ferros would be sitting on a mountain of rocks with a very limited demand.” She narrowed her eyes. “I won’t allow your melodramatics to ruin our hard work.”

 “…unlimited hex crystals,” Viktor repeated in disbelief. She was right that the crystals were the limiting factor in their work. Even putting their volatility aside, they were expensive to acquire in the first place. The only known mines were in Shurima, and mining them was inherently very dangerous. The invention of the Hexgates had cut down on the cost of transportation, but the scarcity and required skill meant that the price was still astronomical. When Jayce had initially visited the area, the batch he took home was a much more manageable price, since they were still considered nothing more than novelties. Ever since Piltover had started putting in bulk orders the price had skyrocketed, and there was no telling when those mines would run out. He and Jayce had looked into artificial gems, but Viktor’s lungs ached just remembering the clouds of poisonous gas those experiments yielded. “How?”

“That would be telling.” She took a sip of tea.

“Yes, yes of course it would.” He resisted the urge to sneer, fearing for his other fingers. “Fine. Assuming that this ‘mountain’ of hex crystals is real, I fail to see what great threat I am posing to your schemes. It may take a few years longer, but Jayce will reach that stage of development with or without me. My time has always been limited, as I’m sure you’ve known for many years.”

She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “Oh please . It’s no secret that your partner is a terminal romantic. He won’t be able to cope with his secret lover dying in childbirth. This melodrama is better-suited to breaking his heart than anything I could’ve come up with. Moreover, if you manage to get the thing out alive, he’ll be far too distracted by fatherhood to get anything done. This will set Hextech back by a decade or more, assuming he recovers at all.”

Viktor sat in stunned silence for several long moments. When he came in search of answers, he wasn’t expecting Camille Ferros of all people to have cast him in some romantic tragedy she was imagining. “Ms. Ferros, with all due respect, you’ve seriously misunderstood the situation. Jayce is not in love with me, and I was not planning for him to take in the child. We are two young men with certain needs, nothing more. He is a dear friend, and this will be hard on him, yes, but it is inconceivable to me that he would throw away his lifelong dream in favor of being a single father in mourning. The child will be raised by a nice family, the work on Hextech will continue, and Jayce will get together with Councilor Medarda—whenever she finally decides to make a move. You’re making a fuss over nothing.”

“With all due respect, you have a poor track record regarding what is ‘conceivable’. I’m not sure whether you’re lying badly or deluded by your own self-pity, but Mr. Talis has spent the past week terrorizing every doctor in Piltover, tormenting the academy’s librarians, and making a fool of himself in front of the Council. That is not nothing. He is sabotaging Hextech’s future as we speak.”

The teacup in Viktor’s hand trembled, sloshing hot water onto his fingers as he felt his understanding of the world begin to crumble. There was no world where Jayce wasn’t working on Hextech. There was no world where Viktor had doomed their dream, their legacy. He felt a giddy nausea at the impossible idea—that Jayce loved him more than his childhood dream, Piltover’s future, and his career combined. “Jayce will never give up on Hextech. It’s everything to him,” he insisted.

“I might have believed you if I hadn’t known his father,” Ms. Ferros replied airily. “Percy Talis was a bright young man who elevated his family to recognized house status with one clever invention. It was a quaint little thing that could take the place of a dozen tools all by itself. It made him a tidy sum. If he had married someone from a house of equal status, one with some money, he could have built a few factories, hired a hundred men, invented another quaint thing or two and lived a very comfortable life. Instead, what Percy Talis did was marry a foreign woman with nothing to her name and spend the rest of his short life doing manual labor until he died in an accident in his own tiny workshop. He was a man of little consequence, other than what his son has gone on to do. Jayce Talis is a man of great consequence and Piltover still requires his genius. Right now, he is on the path to follow in his father’s footsteps, and throw his life away for someone beneath him. I do not underestimate the power of love to destroy a promising career, and neither should you.”

It was true that Jayce revered his late father. Jayce rarely brought up Hextech’s potential without comparing it to his father’s work. Viktor had refrained from pointing out that Hextech’s effect on Piltover had already blown his father’s work out of the water. It would’ve been sacrilege; even worse, it would’ve upset Jayce. Viktor still refused to believe that Jayce could ever give up on Hextech, but he couldn’t fault her reasoning. “Ms. Ferros, I am still going to be dead within a few years, regardless. I don’t know what you want me to do about this.”

She leaned forward. “I want you to terminate, immediately. Then, I want you to corral Mr. Talis back into the lab, and focus your joint efforts on making Hextech ready for the mass market as soon as possible. Unless you think you can accomplish that by yourself within the next few months, I will take any action necessary to incentivize the two of you.”

Viktor gambled. “I can.”

“You can what?”

“I can design a Hextech product that will be ready for mass production within two months. Something that every household in Piltover will want.”

“And what would that be?” she asked skeptically.

“An autonomous cleaning device that could replace brooms and mops. Everyone with five cogs to their name will jump on the opportunity to never have to sweep again.”

The silence was deafening. They stared at each other as the most dangerous woman in Piltover weighed her options.

“Alright,” she conceded at last. “I agree to your terms. You may get started immediately. Keep the jewel, you may use it to fund this project since it is a private commission. If you fail me, I will rip your fetus out, then kill you, then make sure your body is never found. Please see my manservant on your way out, he will splint your finger. And feel free to use the elevator, it’s just down the hall. Goodbye.”

She poured herself a fresh cup of tea. Viktor felt more hateful, more infuriated, more terrified than he ever had in his entire life. He glanced down at his middle. You will live to see that old woman dead. Enjoy it for me.

Chapter Text

Walking back into the lab for the first time in a week was bittersweet for Jayce.

The lab was their sanctuary; sometimes it was subjected to invasions by investors, councilors, and their ilk, but the majority of the time it was his respite, where he worked on his life’s passion with his favorite person in the world. The feeling of relief when he walked in reminded him of being a kid, holing up in his bedroom after an agonizing day of school. It was a place he could control, where there was no one he had to put on an act for.

The problem was that he couldn’t even try to leave his worries at the door this time, not when most of them were centered around the man waiting for him. He’d never felt dread walking into his own lab before. Jayce wondered if Viktor had felt this sort of dread when he’d returned to their lab a week ago, to let Jayce know he was dying.

Viktor looked up from his blueprints as Jayce stepped in.

“Jayce. You’re back,” he said. His face looked even paler than it had last week, his cheeks even more gaunt; Jayce hoped it was his overactive imagination. His guarded expression stung—Jayce couldn’t stand Viktor being upset with him. If it wasn’t Viktor himself on the line, Jayce would’ve crumpled then and there, begging for forgiveness.

“Hey, V.” His voice was barely more than a whisper, yet still felt too loud in the silence. He approached Viktor tentatively, like a feral cat that might startle at any moment.

It earned him a glare. “Stop that,” Viktor hissed. “Don’t slink around your own lab looking guilty. I take it you haven’t given up on your fool’s errand, then?”

“Of course I haven’t, Viktor! Your life is far more important than anything we’ve got going on in this lab. I mean, look, you’re working on—” Jayce frowned, looking down at Viktor’s project. It was a blueprint for something he’d never seen before; the schematic couldn’t be more than a few hours old, given that Viktor was still penciling in the details and measurements. The device appeared to be hexagonal, slightly less than a foot in diameter, an inch thick, with some sort of wheels on the bottom. “What the hell are you working on?”

“Perhaps if you’d been in the lab recently you would know.”

“You’re the one who told me to leave,” Jayce replied sourly.

Viktor glared back. “I told you to come back when you were ready to work. My apologies for assuming it would take less than a week.”

“I am ready to work,” Jayce said. “Just not on some bullshit. Really now, what is that?”

“It’s a commission. From Clan Ferros.”

Jayce scoffed. “Who are you and what have you done with Viktor? You hate commissions, and you really hate Clan Ferros. Don’t get me wrong, I do too, but are you seriously telling me that you want to spend the last little bit of your life making some garbage for them instead of even trying to save your own life? That’s crazy, Viktor.”

Viktor’s hand clenched around his pen, white-knuckled. “You’ve always asked me to help you out with our sponsors, and now seemed like a great time to do so, given that you’ve apparently pissed off several of our most prominent ones.”

Jayce quashed the childish urge to point out that Viktor was deliberately misinterpreting his words. For years, he’d tried to goad Viktor into attending galas and parties with him—hours and hours of schmoozing with strangers in some stranger’s house always left him in some foul kind of mood that only the lab and Viktor could wash away. “I didn’t set out to piss them off, I just thought—I spent days compiling evidence about the healthcare crisis in the Undercity, because it’s not just you Viktor, it’s so many people, and I thought I could convince them that this was urgent, but…Viktor, some of them want people to keep dying. It’s awful, I couldn’t stand there and listen to that.” He looked at Viktor pleadingly, begging him to understand what they were facing.

Viktor didn’t even look up. “I could’ve told you that,” he mumbled into his blueprint.

“Could have told me what?”

“I could have told you that people are dying in the Undercity and that the Council doesn’t care!” he spat.

Jayce blinked in disbelief. “Then… why didn’t you?”

“You didn’t exactly ask me before you gave that presentation, which made it difficult to warn you.” Viktor rolled his eyes, finally putting down the pen. “I can’t advise you on things I don’t know about.”

“No, Viktor. I mean why didn’t you tell me about any of these problems before now? We’ve known each other for years, and you never thought to mention any of this? Why did I have to spend days in the library, to humiliate myself in front of the Council, to find out what you apparently could have told me any time?”

“I did not become your partner in order to educate you about how the world works, Jayce,” he replied with a sneer.

“No, Viktor, you didn’t. You became my partner because we wanted to make this city better together, and I really don’t know how you expected us to do that when you won’t tell me how broken this city actually is. I mean, if the Council looks down their nose at basic healthcare, then how do we know that they’re not going to do the same thing when we present all of our other ideas? The mining gauntlets, the cleaning equipment, the safety gear we have planned, are we going to bring those before the Council and be told to trash them too? Did you think that none of this would seem relevant to me?!” He thumped the desk with his fist on the last word.

The rage in Viktor’s eyes was like nothing he’d ever seen from his partner and it made him feel like the scum of the earth. Viktor was one of the pillars of Jayce’s life, and his happiness meant everything. Having to choose between Viktor’s respect and well-being wasn’t something he’d ever anticipated. Viktor’s next words were pure acid. “My apologies for not discussing politics in the lab. I’ve been told it’s bad manners up here.”

The discussion was collapsing; Viktor was terrifyingly focused on using any weapon he had at his disposal, no matter how unfair.

“Please, Viktor,” Jayce said, trying to soften his voice. “At least look at what I’ve got so far, there’s so much I have to share with you, please give this a chance. I don’t want to do this without you. I’m begging you, Viktor.” He opened the case he’d brought with him, rifling through his notes and drafts for something that could fix this. Viktor finally, finally , turned to face him, allowing a little bit of curiosity to creep into his expression when Jayce noticed the splint on his pinky finger. “Shit Viktor, what happened to your hand?”

Viktor flinched back. “I…I smacked it against some equipment. It was a only a minor fracture.”

The hundreds of pages Jayce had read about pregnancy health risks began to swarm in his head. “Viktor, pregnancy can cause clumsiness, you’ve got to be more careful around the equipment. God, should you be handling the equipment? We can take on some more staff if that would—”

The precarious truce vanished in a mere moment.

“We will do no such thing,” Viktor snarled. “I know what I can and cannot handle. If you cannot trust me to know my own body, this will not work.” He stood abruptly. “I cannot work with someone who isn’t showing me such a basic level of trust.”

“I have always trusted you, Viktor. I respect you more than anyone else in my life, and I have always trusted you with Hextech, with our future, and yes, your own health. But I’m finding it hard to do that when trusting you to know when something is wrong is what got us here in the first place. It took you four months to notice you were pregnant and now you’re on death’s door. All I can think about is how this wouldn’t be happening if I had put my foot down when you started throwing up.” Jayce blinked away tears. “And…I’m starting to get the impression that you don’t trust me, either.”

An oppressive silence filled the lab. “We’re back where we started, then,” Viktor said coolly. “I have work to do, Jayce. Do what you see fit, since my opinion on the rest of my life matters to you so little.”

Jayce couldn’t leave the lab fast enough. He swung the lab doors open, nearly smacking into a shell-shocked Sky. He lasted about two minutes before he had to stop, bite down on his hand as hard as he could, and scream.

The biology department was new territory to Jayce. Enemy territory , part of him thought. Coming from a long line of blacksmiths, he'd been born into the study of the inorganic; metal and stone were his comfort zone. The intro biology class he took as a requirement during his first year at the academy cemented in his mind that it was a terrifying field of study. He had only heard rumors of the horror known as “organic chemistry” and feared anyone that took that class and went back for more.

Standing outside of the laboratory of the department’s most notorious member felt like sneaking into a foreign country. The disbelieving stares from passerby didn’t help. He knocked on the door, gripping his briefcase tightly. After a minute of strange shuffling noises and the odd grunt, the door finally opened to reveal a thoroughly disgruntled looking woman. She was short—the top of her head didn’t reach his collarbone. Her dark hair was arranged into something that might have once been a bun, and her even darker eyes sported dark circles that rivaled Viktor’s. She would almost be intimidating if it weren’t for her size and delicate sprinkling of freckles. “Professor Lenus?” he asked, cautiously.

“Allegedly. Come in, Mel told me to expect you.” Tentatively, Jayce followed her in.

The first thing he noticed was that her lab was bigger than theirs. When he felt a stab of jealousy, Jayce realized he should’ve looked into getting a bigger one like Viktor suggested once, instead of sticking to what he had grown comfortable with. The second thing he noticed was the gallery of…samples. Some of them looked familiar—was that a liver?—but others were total mysteries. He wrinkled his nose.

“Nice…collection?” he said, trying for diplomacy.

Professor Lenus snorted. “More like a hit list. They’re samples of organs affected by disease. I like being able to see my enemy, it’s a good motivator.”

Looking closer, Jayce could see that many of the organs had something visibly wrong with them; there were discolored patches, visible rotting, and scarring throughout. He averted his eyes before the nausea could set in. “Any Sump Lung samples?” he asked.

“Nope,” she replied, popping the ‘p’. “Not really in demand.”

Jayce sighed. “Yeah, so I’ve heard. But I’m demanding it. Now. And I’m willing to do anything it takes. All of my resources, including my time, are at your disposal.” He put his briefcase down on her desk, letting it make a loud thump . “This is what I’ve come up with so far.”

Professor Lenus sat down and opened the briefcase. She immediately began flipping through his notes and preliminary designs, sorting them into two piles. “Won’t work. Won’t work. Interesting. Won’t work. Been done before. Won’t work. Interesting. Won’t work. Might work. Won’t work.”

Jayce grimaced at how many had gone into the reject pile. It was what he expected, but still made his heart sink. “You must have an interesting bedside manner,” he said.

“I don’t have a bedside manner because I don’t have patients,” she corrected. “I work on finding treatments for disease, not administering them. Most of the people I work on are cadavers.”

“I’m starting to think I’m in the wrong laboratory.” He laughed nervously, scratching the back of his neck.

“No Mr. Talis, you are not. Mel sent you here for a reason: I’m very good at what I do, and I get results fast.” Professor Lenus squinted at some of the diagrams. “And I want you to tell me the honest truth about what you’re doing here, because a lot of these designs are for maternal health care, not lung diseases. I can’t do anything for you if you don’t let me know what you want.” She looked up. “And this will stay between us. I’m not going to sell you out to the press.”

Jayce took a deep breath and hoped she was telling the truth. “I know someone who is 17 weeks pregnant and has an advanced case of Sump Lung. I need you to ensure that both he and the baby survive. Anything that endangers the baby will be considered unacceptable.” A pause. “And no, he doesn’t work in a brothel.”

Lenus looked up. “He?”

“He ,” Jayce repeated emphatically.

She held her hands up in surrender. “Just checking.” After a tense minute of flipping through the smaller pile of papers, she spoke. “I cannot give you any guarantees. This will involve breaking more than a few laws, and you won’t make any money off of this. You could lose a lot of respect if the press finds out. Do you understand?”

“Yes. I don’t give a damn. Not if you tell me there’s a chance.”

“There is a chance,” she affirmed. She held out her hand, and Jayce shook it. “I look forward to a fruitful partnership with you, golden boy.”

Chapter Text

It would’ve been easy for Viktor to spend the rest of the day in a depressed slump, given that he had just driven Jayce away (again). He was seriously considering treating himself to at least a few hours of abject self-pity; unfortunately, mere moments after Jayce stormed out (again), Sky walked in, looking dazed.

“Good morning, Ms. Young.” His voice crackled from unshed tears. “Eh, how much of that did you overhear?”

She let out a shaky sigh. “Uh, let’s see. You’re pregnant. And dying. And you don’t want Jayce to help, so he’s going somewhere else. Oh my god, so that’s why you’ve been so weird recently.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s a good summary of the situation. I would appreciate you not spreading this information, please.”

“Viktor…” she grimaced. “Of course I won’t, I would never betray your trust like that. But at some point it’s going to come out, you know? People are going to start speculating about what Jayce is doing. Heck, once you start showing, anyone who sees you is going to start having questions.”

He was beginning to wish that he’d upgraded from recluse to hermit as soon as he found out about the pregnancy. Perhaps it had been naive to think that he would be able to get a few months of work in before the end. He’d never been able to get away with anything in Piltover, not unless some magnanimous member of the city’s elite decided to humor him. Heimerdinger had saved him from expulsion, Councilor Medarda had saved Hextech, but unless Bolbok or someone had some abrupt moral epiphany, Viktor was just going to have to fix this by himself .

There was an icy fury gripping his heart that said they should be the ones drowning in their own beds, not him. Viktor had to remind himself not to focus on unachievable goals.

Then he noticed Sky inching back towards the door. “Ms. Young?” he called, slightly alarmed. Viktor realized, with a jolt of guilt, that he had forgotten to factor her help, or lack thereof, into this equation. Was she still comfortable working with him? “Ms. Young, I apologize that you found out this way, this situation is entirely inappropriate, that I’ve put you in an awkward position, as your employer. I—I hope you do not think less of me despite my behavior.”

She froze in place, her face the image of shock. “Viktor, of course I don’t think less of you, and I think of you as my friend , not my employer. But…” she trailed off, biting her lip. “But I want to go help Jayce. If there’s any way to help you then I want to take it. I promise I’m not bragging, but I have a lot more experience with biology than Jayce does, and I think I could really contribute. Please understand, I love working with you more than anything, but I can’t sit back and do nothing while you’re dying.”

Viktor’s gaze slipped away from her heartbroken expression. He hadn’t felt this ashamed in years. Part of him wanted to let her go to Jayce, since he clearly didn’t deserve her help. But she was still standing there, despite him, and seeing this through was more important than his shame. “Ms. Young—Sky. I’m sorry. I lied to Jayce. This isn’t just a commission, and I need your help.”

She visibly perked up at the use of her first name, which made Viktor feel guilty all over again, and moved away from the door, back towards the desk. She glanced at his blueprints. “Viktor? What’s going on?”

“If this commission doesn’t get finished, I’m in serious trouble. All of us could be.” He glared at the blueprints. “Clan Ferros has somehow managed to get their hands on a large number of crystals. They want something suited for public production that will use them, and don’t they trust Jayce to do it after I’m gone. Camille Ferros herself let me know that, eh, they don’t approve of me going on paternity leave, so to speak.”

Sensing the gravity of the situation, she leaned in and whispered. “What are they going to do if you don’t finish it? Did they say?”

Viktor wasn’t sure whether to pity or envy Sky, that she was so less jaded than most born in the Undercity. She had explained once that her parents were both originally from the topside, but that debt had forced them to move across the bridge. They didn’t know to warn their daughter about a woman who would slice off a sump rat’s fingers without flinching. He wasn’t sure how to put this delicately.

“Well, she said something about, eh, disemboweling.”

Sky’s hand flew to her mouth in shock. “And she was serious?”

“Deadly serious.”

“Viktor. Please don’t make puns at a time like this.”

“Apologies.”

She glanced nervously at the door. “And you don’t want to tell Jayce about this?”

Viktor shook his head. “No, no, definitely not. If Jayce finds out, I have no doubt he’ll march right up to her and tell Camille Ferros exactly what he thinks of her behavior. If Jayce’s attempts to save my life fail, then he will be crushed, but that will be the end of that. If he makes an enemy of Clan Ferros, that will haunt him for the rest of his life. I can’t let that happen. Please, I know I have no right to ask this of you Sky, and I cannot guarantee that you won’t be put in danger as well, but given that my health is going to get worse soon and I have to—”

“Viktor,” she cut in. “Of course I’m going to help you. I’m on your side until the end, whether that’s in four months or four decades. I’m hoping for the latter, though.” She gave her most reassuring smile.

“Sky…” Viktor said, trailing off. The residual shame was still choking him. “I don’t know how I can hope to repay you.”

“I want dibs on choosing the middle name.”

He smiled back. “You have yourself a deal.”

The blackboard was awash with runes. The device’s base design sat in the middle, dozens of equations surrounding it, and then corrections surrounding those, and then more corrections surrounding those. By tomorrow, they would have to start erasing the original equations to make room for the third round of corrections.

Such was the nature of invention.

The Hexbroom’s basic premise was simple: a device that could clean dirt and debris off the floor with little to no effort on the owner’s part. But there was more than one way to dust a floor, and each method had its own problems. If the Hexbroom pushed dust out of the way, much like a real broom, it would be the most simple mechanism; on the other hand, it would still require the owner to get rid of the dust, and directing the flow could prove problematic. After all, simply blowing on the floor would spread the dust everywhere—counterproductive, to say the least. Alternatively, the Hexbroom could be built to destroy dust, perhaps with some sort of laser. That option appealed to Viktor the most, but as Sky pointed out, the risk of setting the owner’s carpet on fire would be a truly unfortunate outcome. Finally, there was the possibility of an inverse broom—something that sucked the dust up instead of pushing it away. The main concerns with suction were the possibilities of the Hexbroom jamming itself or trying to suck the carpet off the floor.

In short, the Hexbroom sounded simple until you asked a single question.

Viktor sighed. “We need to choose which mechanism to pursue. We can’t be exploring three different routes at once, not with our time limit. If we don’t choose our mechanism, we won’t even know what we will need to build the Hexbroom.”

“On the other hand, if we choose one, get to the testing stage and can’t make it work, we’ll be back to square one,” Sky argued. “It’ll be helpful to keep our options open if we need to backtrack. Also, are you sure about the name Hexbroom, Viktor?”

“Yes, well we—is something wrong with the name Hexbroom?” he asked, quizzically.

Sky pursed her lips. “There’s nothing wrong with it, per se, but we’ve already got the Hexgates, and I know you’ve been working on a Hexclaw, so I’m starting to sense a pattern? Plus, it doesn’t really look like a broom.”

“The Hexgate doesn’t really look like a gate either, and I like having a pattern to the names. I’m no good at naming things, so it makes it easier for me. And everyone will know who built it.” He yawned. “Jayce is better at the impressive sounding names, but this isn’t his project, so I get to name it. And I’m calling it the Hexbroom.”

“What’s up with the names Jayce gives, things, anyway?”

“He told me he takes them from old Targonian legends,” Viktor replied with a fond smile. “Apparently the Talis family originally came from Mount Targon, and no doubt you’ve noticed how keen Jayce is to honor his family. I think the names are, eh, on the long side, but I can’t deny that they’re striking.”

“So are you going to let Jayce pick the baby’s name? The first name I mean, since I already called the middle name.”

It had been foolish of Viktor to think that they could get through the day without any hard questions. He tried for vagueness. “I think whoever raises the child should get to choose their name. They’re going to be the one using it the most.”

There was a pause. “Viktor, maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it kind of sounds like you don’t think it’ll be Jayce? That Jayce won’t be raising his own child?”

“He made it clear that he doesn’t…approve of this, eh, decision, so he shouldn’t feel obligated to take responsibility for it,” Viktor replied, defensively. Perhaps there was some part of Viktor that enjoyed the idea: Jayce holding their child, having some piece of Viktor around for the rest of his life. Taking selfish solace in the fact that Jayce would never forget him. He still knew it was a terrible idea.

Sky stared at him like he’d grown a second head.

“Viktor,” she hissed. “ Viktor. Look me in the eyes and tell me you genuinely believe Jayce would give up his own child. Your child. Have you guys not talked about this at all? Is this some mid-pregnancy psychotic episode?”

“Those don’t exist. At least, I don’t think they do?” Sky’s expression was still thoroughly unimpressed. “I know that Jayce has an, eh, overactive sense of responsibility, but I think it would not be very sensible for him to start raising an infant at this point in his career, never mind a bastard child by his crippled, Undercity lab partner. And by not very sensible, I mean that it could have catastrophic consequences for him and our work.”

“Viktor, Jayce isn’t a very sensible guy, but more importantly than that, he’s not a heartless one either. You know that,” she pleaded. “You have to know that Jayce would never give up his own baby.”

Viktor swallowed down a snarl, bristling at the condescension. “He will if he doesn’t want to throw away our life’s work. And I must politely remind you, Ms. Young, that we are on a deadline and need to focus on finishing this project and not my personal life, thank you.”

She was looking at him with pity. It made Viktor sick. “Okay, Viktor,” she murmured. “Okay. We can do that.” There was pity in her voice, too.

“…I will talk to Jayce on my own time,” he conceded. “I think we should call it a night. It’s been a long day.”

Sky didn’t call him on the deflection, but the pity didn’t leave her eyes as they locked up.

Chapter Text

31 years ago.

A child is born to Eli and Zuzana, once from a tiny village many miles away, now of one of the Undercity’s many immigrant enclaves. The baby’s leg is at an odd angle, reminiscent of Zuzana’s father. The new parents fear for their tiny, sickly child, and name him “Gabriela” to give him strength.

30 years ago .

A child is born to Percy and Ximena Talis. He is big and strong—a little too big, perhaps, given the amount of blood soaking the hospital bed. There will not be another child, they decide. Ximena had grown up with five siblings, and Percy with two, and they’d planned to split the difference with four or five children, but plans change. They name the baby Jayce, after Percy’s late uncle, a skilled blacksmith and pillar of his community.

24 years ago .

Zuzana and Eli present their son with a cane, handcrafted by a neighbor. “Gabriela,” his mother says, “say thank you to Franz for the cane.” He mumbles into his mother’s skirt. “Don’t thank me, thank Franz,” his mother insists.

“It’s normal for girls to be shy at that age,” Franz replies with a smile. The boy feels a pang of discomfort for reasons he doesn’t understand yet. “Come, sweetheart, could you try walking with it? I need to make sure it’s the right height. No, bend your elbow, that’s it—”

The cane does help, but the next day at school, his classmates yank it away, demanding to see. Several of them giggle about how he looks like an old man. The boy comes home that night and tells his parents that he feels better now and doesn’t need a cane after all, he’ll be normal from now on. When their faces fall, he realizes that was the wrong thing to say. The next day at school, he makes sure to clutch his cane as tightly as he can.

23 years ago.

The doctor tells Jayce how lucky they were to find help when they did. Very lucky indeed, he tells them as he examines Ximena’s purple-black fingers. Very very lucky. Jayce nods along, rubbing the stone the mage gave him. Percy’s hand is glued to his son’s shoulder, gripping him tightly. It’s uncomfortable, but his dad’s making a weird expression, so Jayce just keeps playing with his rock. The doctor stares down at his mother’s hand, and tells them he’ll be back in two hours to monitor the situation. Jayce isn’t sure what the ‘situation’ is, but grown-ups get mad when he asks too many questions. He just saw his father cry for the first time, so he decides it can wait.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone up ahead,” his father says, holding onto Jayce’s shoulder and his mother’s uninjured hand. “I’m so sorry.”

Jayce frowns. “But you asked Mama and she said it was okay, so you can’t be in trouble. And the mage came and got us so we’re fine now.”

His father doesn’t look any happier, and his mother reminds him not to talk about the mage that helped them in public. They’re all fine thanks to the mage, and the mage was so cool, and Jayce wants to tell everyone but his mom keeps saying no.

Five hours later, Jayce learns the word ‘amputate’ and that his mother isn’t fine after all.

Three weeks later, Jayce wakes up screaming from a dream about snow drifts deep as a lake and realizes that he’s not fine either. That night, he sleeps between his parents, gripping his rock as tightly as he can; when he wakes up in the morning and can’t find it, he screams his parents awake again. Percy Talis gives his son a leather bracelet to make sure he never loses it again.

22 years ago .

The boy sits next to the river, fiddling with some cogs. A week ago, his class read a book about a woman who falls in love with a dockworker. The main character falls in love with this man because he’s tall, kind, and has beautiful dark hair. The boy notices that Aton, who sits two desks in front of him, is tall, and doesn’t bully him, and has soft-looking dark hair, and the boy gets his first-ever crush.

The heroine likes to leave letters tied to the ropes mooring her lover’s boat, but they don’t have boats, so he left a letter on Aton’s desk instead. The boy tries to make his own little boat in the meantime: practice for when he will build one big enough to carry him and his future love around the world.

He hears footsteps and looks up to see Aton, standing over him with a smile, holding the letter. The boy feels a tiny leaf of hope uncurl in his chest, until he notices two more boys behind Aton, which didn’t make sense, because when you ask someone out you don’t bring your friends with you. Icy fear grips his heart.

“Hey Gabby, do you have a crush on Aton?” one of them asks.

The boy tries to think of an answer that will make them leave but he can’t. He struggles to his feet and looks for an escape in vain. The only direction away from them means going up a hill. Aton’s grin is turning into a snicker as he unfolds the letter and begins to read. “Dear Aton, I think you’re very handsome. I think one day we could—”

The boy claps his hands over his ears so hard they ring. He’s suffocating with embarrassment and wants to leave, but then one of Aton’s friends starts yanking first at his hand and then at his hair. “We’re talking to you, freak!”

There are hands in his hair and voices shouting, and he’s dropped his cane, and the harder he tries to pull away the harder they pull him back, until with one great yank he’s sent toppling into the river. He surfaces, briefly, scrabbling for a hold and ending up with one of the other children’s ankles in a death grip. The boy can hear them shrieking with laughter as the ankle wriggles in his grasp, kicking at his face until he lets go. The river isn’t strong enough to sweep him away, but the soggy weight of his long hair and clothes are too much. He’s sinking down, clawing at the surface, murky light trickling through his tiny fingers, grabbing at nothing.

And then a huge hand plunges in and pulls him out by the wrist. He’s draped over some soft dirt and given a firm few pats on the back. “Gotta be careful, missy,” his savior says while the boy hacks up water. “What happened?”

He wants to explain that it wasn’t his fault, that he needs his cane, that he doesn’t know where his toy is, that he thought Aton was different, but all that comes out is weak sobs and more vomit. When he’s finally out of fluid to vomit up, he wheezes instead and begins to shiver. He stares up at his savior, an absolutely enormous man, sooty-faced and fresh from the mines.

“Do you have somewhere to go?” his savior asks. The boy nods. “Can you get there by yourself?” The boy shakes his head, gesturing to his bad leg. His savior sighs and shucks off his blue vest. It’s tiny on the miner, only reaching his waist, but huge wrapped around a child. His savior carries him home, cocooned in the leather. The boy passes out in the huge arms, but someone must have given the man directions because when he wakes he’s being transferred to his father’s embrace, and from his father’s embrace into his bed, and judging by the rumbling voice he hears in the next room over his savior stays a while longer. (He never sees the man again, but the sensation of his entire forearm being held in a single hand is one he will never forget).

In the morning he tells his parents that he tripped and fell into the river. His father worries if his lungs have been hurt, given how delicate they were to begin with. His cane is ‘inexplicably’ found in some bushes, broken, but Franz agrees to carve him a new one. His long hair is gnarled and knotted and sticky with something from the river, so his mother cuts almost all of it off, apologizing the whole time. Within three days, things are almost back to normal, but he keeps staring at the mirror.

“I think I’d like to be a boy from now on,” he announces one morning. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his parents exchange confused looks.

His father clears his throat. “Is this because of what happened with, eh, the river?” His parents don’t believe his story about tripping, but haven’t called him on it directly.

“No, it’s not that. It’s just—when the man pulled me out of the river, he called me ‘missy’, but now my hair is so short, I was wondering if he would think I was a boy instead and I realized that I wanted that. Can I be a boy instead?”

Viktor returns to school a few days later, brandishing a new cane and a new name, nursing a safe crush on a man four times his size whose name he’ll likely never know.

21 years ago .

Jayce doesn’t cry when he finds out he’s told there was an accident at the forge.

Jayce doesn’t cry when he’s told his father has passed on.

Jayce doesn’t cry when he sees his mother break down sobbing.

Jayce screams when he sees his father in a casket, gray and still. He screams himself hoarse despite his mother begging him to stop and his uncle telling him to be a big boy. He screams and screams and screams at the very nice funeral they’re holding because his father was the head of a house. He screams and yanks his hair as hard as he can and hot tears soak his nice shirt and he keeps screaming until his mother gently leads him out of the funeral parlor.

Later he will regret how much of the funeral he missed, how he embarrassed his family, and how it caused his mother and uncle to fight afterwards. When he’s alone, he rocks back and forth, whispering apologies to his bracelet.

20 years ago.

Once again, Viktor sits by the river with a boat. This river is more of a stream, much shallower this time, and the other children are at a safe distance. He stops—freezes—when he hears someone approaching from above, but it’s just the girl who asks to borrow his books sometimes, and she leaves after a moment anyway. No danger. He winds his boat and lets it loose in the water.

The boat works better than he’d hoped, but his leg can’t match his creation, leaving him crumpled in the dirt. His heart sinks when he sees it disappear into one of the caves—they had been declared strictly off-limits for children after one of his peers slipped and fell on the damp rocks.

That boy wasn’t found for six days.

Despite that, Viktor’s not letting his achievement slip away from him, and carefully climbs through a hole in the rocks. He’s determined to retrieve his creation, and braces himself against the slippery rocks, avoiding a fall. Instead, he’s taken aback by the sight of a spindly stranger picking his boat up. He bites back a gasp. When an enormous, pallid creature emerges from behind a rock, he does gasp. It’s easily three times his size, and when it screams in his direction Viktor worries that, unlike the previous boy to die here, his body will never be found. Not when it’s in some monster’s gullet.

“Don’t be afraid,” the man says, without turning around. “You built this?” There’s an encouraging note in the stranger’s voice, and Viktor’s curiosity overcomes his instinct to flee. He nods. “Why don’t you play with the others?” the man asks, idly spinning the tiny turbines.

A few unsteady steps towards the man is all he needs to explain. It’s usually the only explanation Viktor needs.

The man does not flinch or look embarrassed. He doesn’t so much as acknowledge Viktor’s leg. “Loneliness is often the byproduct of a gifted mind.”

(It’s meant to be reassuring, a compliment even, and the man seems to be speaking from experience. It’s a kind gesture, but not what he needs to hear. No one ever tells Viktor that his loneliness will end. No one ever asked him if he wanted a gifted mind, if loneliness was its cost. It’s infuriating, but his fury is frail and useless. The upshot of loneliness, he supposes, is that the great emptiness he feels is deep enough to drown all his tiny furies in.)

But it turns out the man has something better to offer than bittersweet reassurances. He introduces Viktor to Rio, who’s actually very sweet, if a bit slimy. He lets Viktor join his quest to save the creature, and gives Viktor something incredible: a sense of purpose. Rio is his first friend, and the doctor is his second, and helping Rio soothes something inside of him. Maybe Viktor will never connect with his peers, but the idea of helping them, of helping everyone—help is a connection, too. How can he truly be alone if his actions can make people happier, can change their lives? Where some people have a few intimate connections, he can have distant yet profound effects on thousands. It evens out, mathematically. His parents have always told him that helping to repair the world is the greatest thing someone can accomplish with their life, but he finally feels it, on a deeper level.

He learns many things over the next few months—chemistry, physics, how a waverider shows affection, trigonometry, biology, the feeling of overcoming a real intellectual challenge, a little bit of history, and, last but not least, what it looks like when a brilliant mind has no moral boundaries.

19 years ago.

Rozette Holloran is the most beautiful girl that Jayce has ever seen. Being seated behind her in class feels like being struck by lightning, but in a good way. A life-altering moment, impossibly rare. He gets to stare at her auburn ringlets all day, and, if he cranes his neck, watch her draw. She draws cats and flowers and trees and jewels and all sorts of things, swirling and looping in the margins of her classwork. Jayce likes drawing too, and has liked it even more since he noticed Rozette. His margins are increasingly filled with girls and their ringlets.

Eventually a teacher catches him staring over Rozette’s shoulder, and everyone’s getting ready to accuse him of cheating, but when he bashfully admits to admiring Rozette’s art she’s thrilled. She begins to show him her art more often, beaming when he praises its beauty. She giggles when she spots her portrait in his notes. She squeals with delight when he gifts her a rock from his collection, although she’s not interested in his explanation of its properties. He asks if this means they’re boyfriend and girlfriend now, and Rozette says sure.

He tries really, really, really hard to be a good boyfriend. Like any task Jayce sets his mind to, he does thorough research—his mother, his neighbors, the romance books—and puts his research into practice. He gives her his snacks, brings her his flowers, and compliments her pictures. He’s also careful to do whatever she asks, like not talking to her friends, and letting her cheat off his tests, and not talking about boring things. It’s tiring work for an eleven year old, but it doesn’t seem to be working. His heart feels warm when she smiles at him, like hours of sunshine concentrated into one moment, but the heat becomes suffocating instead as she watches her attention drift and her frustrated expressions. There must be something he’s doing wrong, but he can’t intuit what it is. It’s only after reading a few more novellas that he gets an idea.

On the second-most humiliating day of Jayce’s life, he puts his nicest clothes on before he goes to school. Rozette is standing among her other friends. Before her, he drops to one knee, and takes her hand in both of his. “Rozette, I love you more than anything in this world. Will you marry me? Um, when we’re older I mean.” She isn’t saying anything, and Jayce doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say either, so he tries to kiss her hand. It’s an unpracticed gesture with an unwilling participant, and involves more spit than he intended.

The kiss is what pushes Rozette from shocked to disgusted. With a disgusted shriek she yanks her hand away, and kicks at Jayce’s shin while he looks on. It hurts enough that Jayce yelps, and now some of her friends are shrieking too, and others are howling in laughter, and Rozette is wiping her hand off against a wall, throwing him murderous glances every few seconds. Jayce’s ears are ringing and he still doesn’t understand what went wrong so he runs until he finds bushes to hide in.

After a while, he still doesn’t understand what went wrong, but he’s going to be late for class so he leaves his hiding spot and sprints, avoiding eye contact. Jayce takes his seat, which is unfortunate given that Rozette is in her seat one foot in front of him. She keeps throwing poisonous glances over her shoulder, and he sees his peers whisper and giggle at the display.

Three days later, the giggles stop following him around, and Rozette isn’t looking at him at all, and it almost seems like things are settling down.

The day after, Rozette’s older brother, flanked by several older boys, corner Jayce outside of school. “Are you the kid who’s been creeping on my sister?” he asks.

“I don’t understand,” Jayce answers honestly. A fist flies out and connects with his face, knocking him over. Instinct kicks in and Jayce tries to scramble away, but two more hands reach out and pin him to the ground. Something hard and heavy is on his back; out of the corner of his eye, he can see Rozette’s brother kneeling on him.

“What do you want with my sister?” the older boy demands, pressing his knee into Jayce’s spine.

“She’s my girlfriend,” Jayce explains miserably. “I wanted to do something nice for her.” He attempts to squirm away but there’s too much weight.

“She’s not your girlfriend, retard. Keep your hands off my sister!” There’s a hand on Jayce’s head, suddenly, crushing his face against the pavement, but the pavement is burning hot from hours of afternoon sun, and Jayce screams. His face is scalding by the time someone comes to break it up.

A few tense hours later, Jayce, his mother, both of the Holloran siblings and their father are packed into the headmaster’s office. The conversation is difficult for him to follow, especially with a wet towel pressed to his tender face, but words like “assault” and “impropriety” are being thrown around.

“Rozette is my girlfriend,” he protests. “I love her more than anything!”

But Rozette isn’t looking at him, and the headmaster looks frustrated. “That’s not what Rozette or any of her friends said.”

“Perhaps his mother has been teaching him foreign customs,” Mr. Holloran sneers. His mother visibly cringes and Jayce realizes that he’s humiliated his family again.

It’s only because of his mother pleading that Jayce is still emotionally disturbed by his father’s sudden death and promises to talk sense into him that the headmaster decides to drop the matter, with the caveat that Jayce is forbidden to speak to Rozette or her friends.

When they finally get home, Ximena holds her only son in her lap, gently stroking his hair while he sobs. The texture of her skirt and the hot saltiness of his tears sting his raw skin, and his uncle told him he’s too old for this sort of tantrum, but trying to convince himself not to cry only makes him cry harder.

“I—I—I—I love her, mom. I don’t understand.” The words are difficult to push through his sobbing.

“Oh,” she murmurs. “My sweet boy. I know you do. You have…such big feelings. You have a grand heart, and you always dedicate your whole self, and many people aren’t going to understand it. I should have…” she trails off. Jayce sobs harder.

In the dark, he sits and imagines spells he could cast from his heart—spells loud enough to make the city shake, bright enough to light up the night, hot enough to boil lakes.

18 years ago

Viktor doesn’t stand up quickly enough for the enforcer’s liking, and his cough apparently sounds sarcastic. When his nose heals, it’s slightly crooked.

16 years ago.

Uncle Ody lectures Jayce on the importance of paying attention in the forge for two hours. Jayce supposes he might deserve it, given that he walked into a hook this time. There’s a nick in his eyebrow and an incredible amount of blood on his shirt; Uncle Ody cannot stress enough that it was nearly his eye. “When you’re in the forge, you should be thinking about the forge and nothing else!” he admonishes.

“What do you mean? How am I supposed to think about one thing the entire time?” Jayce asks. There’s too much room in his mind for the forge to fill; he can’t stop other thoughts from rushing in to fill the empty space.

“Your mother definitely dropped you on your head,” is all Uncle Ody says.

15 years ago.

Somewhere along the way, Viktor changed from weird kid to striking young man in the eyes of others. He rebuffs the first half dozen boys that try to cozy up to him, still convinced there’s some cruel trap they’re trying to spring, but eventually his raging hormones win out against his fear. It’s in a storage room, and they only use their hands, and the other boy isn’t very good at it, but the gasps Viktor earns give him a heady, novel rush of power.

Jayce has a new haircut, a new wardrobe, the best grades in his class and real hope of making it at the academy. If only his family stopped treating that as some sort of betrayal. If only his mother didn’t glance nervously at his bracelet and ask if he was sure about this. If only the photograph of him and his father and the first hammer they made together didn’t feel like an unfulfilled promise.

14 years ago.

The flu that Viktor’s mother hasn’t been able to shake is making it harder for her to work. Fortunately, she might be getting a break soon if the strike everyone’s been talking about happens, she tells Viktor. She stops talking about the strike when old Franz  is found dead in his home, his throat slit with mathematical precision. (Viktor clutches his cane, the sixth one of its kind, all made by Franz). Six more people are found the same way. People whisper about clan Ferros and new nations.

Jayce’s second (first?) girlfriend invites him over, and makes sure to specify that her parents won’t be home. She laughs when he asks for clarification about whether she means that in a sexy way or not, which worries him, but the slow kiss he gets is a good enough answer. Even though he did his research (but did not ask his mother, this time), he’s still terrified when he gets there. She’s nervous too, which makes it better and worse, but he feels more relieved than anything else that he’s able to get her off and that he doesn’t come in his pants. It’s not like fireworks or anything else he’s heard sex compared to, but he does feel overly aware of his fingers and mouth for the next several days. She still dumps Jayce for being “too much” a month later. He fantasizes about killing himself and leaving a note asking her if he’s more to her tastes dead for several hours until the shame kicks in and then he cries and cries, scratching himself raw.

13 years ago.

The two weeks between the academy entrance exam and the results are like a dream, like the fraught sleep before an important day when nervous excitement pervades the subconscious. The exam was technically open to anyone, but the preparatory materials were only provided to topside schools. Used editions of study guides from previous years could be (illicitly) purchased with relative ease, yet without a tutor that could help applicants study, learn the best methods, and what subjects were likely to matter that year, they were as good as an unmarked treasure map. In short, most of the Undercity’s children just didn’t bother.

Viktor is not most children by any measure, and he’d had the incredible fortune of being born to parents who not only could but would support him in this.

He drops out of school several months in advance so that he can focus on this—even if he doesn’t make it in, he’s already learned everything he needs from the local school. It costs more than is strictly advisable, but his father finds copies of the last five editions of the Academy’s study guide, and Viktor begins the arduous task of reading every single one, cover-to-cover. There’s a growing stack of newspapers as well, so that Viktor’s prepared for any questions about current events . Neighbors sometimes stop by to donate anything they have that seems relevant, although the most helpful contribution is a mysterious slip of paper shoved under the door with very thorough instructions on taking the Academy exam, tips and tricks, and likely topics for this year’s essay portion. His skin crawls when he recognizes the handwriting, but it’s undeniably helpful.

One of his books is lost when he makes the mistake of reading it in public, and a former classmate deliberately spills some dark, greasy soup on it. Viktor was fortunately most of the way done with that one, but keeps his study materials at home from then on. It’s not lost on him that some of his peers are jealous or view this as a betrayal. He worries that the latter group is right, sometimes; with the mumbles about Zaun getting louder, it feels like a traitorous time to leave.

His parents do their best to reassure him. “You will change the world one day, my treasure,” his mother reassures him. “But it will be with your mind, not your body. It’s not what you were made for, and there’s no shame in that. I’m sorry they don’t understand, but I promise the work you will do will be so important.”

His father chimes in: “Besides, we have already worked so hard on this. Many of our friends too; you can’t throw away all that hard work because of a few small-minded men.” His mother tuts at that, starting an argument about the other men in the neighborhood and the size of their minds that stretches out until his mother breaks down coughing.

Viktor understands the important part—he’s standing on a ladder built by dozens and dozens of people; trying to climb back down now, when he’s so close to the top, would be a criminal act of disrespect. And so it’s respect that guides his feet when he takes the exam, respect keeping his eyes forward despite the gawking, and respect keeping his mouth closed when whispers burn his ears. The disrespect topside shows for him doesn’t give him room to disrespect his family.

Part of what makes the two weeks after the exam so odd is the certainty that he has either aced the test or bombed it. As he told his parents when he made it home, the ease with which he tore through it could only be explained by having studied perfectly or having studied so poorly that he entered a fugue state. His parents laugh. He hadn’t meant it as a joke.

The dream comes to a surreal end when his father arrives home the day of the test results with nothing but a uniform and a strained smile. “My boy,” he says, beaming with pride. “You will be starting at the Academy at the end of the month.” His mother is trying to smile.

“Can I see the test results?” Viktor asks.

His father shakes his head. “I must have forgotten them,” he replies, voice cold with irony. His mother is no longer trying to smile.

“Tati, please,” Viktor begs. “Tell me what happened. I need to know.”

They had lied to his face, but Eli had seen the test results. They told him that his son must have forgotten to show up, or forgotten to turn it in, because they had no record of any applicant with that name. And yet, on the far wall, he could see the test results, listed in order of score, with one “VIKTOR” in third place out of 1298 test takers. Viktor had earned his place, so he would show up in his uniform and learn. “It will save us money on the fees,” his father adds with a chuckle.

He mourns that neither of his parents seems the least bit surprised. He doesn’t ask how long they’ve had the counterfeit uniform waiting. More importantly, he’s terrified to go back to that place. “I can’t. They won’t let me.”

His mother cups her hand to his cheek, like she used to when he was half her size. “Our lives have been hard, Viktor. Coming to Zaun was hard. Working in the mines has been hard. Getting you here was hard. But it will be worth it. You’re going to change the world, my Viktor. Don’t ask for permission.”

12 years ago.

If Jayce Talis can secure a sponsor, he can take the entrance exam. That was the deal he struck with the rest of his family. His mother is heartbroken that he’s not following in his father’s footsteps, his Aunt Helen is worried about who will take over the forge, and his Uncle Ody thinks he has delusions of grandeur . Although, given how much his uncle complains about Jayce’s work ethic in the forge, he should be jumping for joy.

Except, he might have done something a little stupid, or perhaps a few stupid things. First of all, the invention he wants to present is just a blueprint. Second of all, he only signed up for one sponsorship audition. Third of all—he overslept.

He can explain the first two easily. His idea for a new type of kiln that could combine extreme high temperatures with a rotating vessel could revolutionize the way cement, lime, and titanium dioxide were manufactured, allowing for the processes to be done continuously and in quantities previously thought impossible. The math was sound, and hopefully they would see that, but he didn’t have the materials to construct a working model. And then, signing up for the Kirammans’ audition was the obvious way forward. It had been a while since that family had sponsored anyone, but they had the resources for the kinds of projects Jayce had in mind, both in terms of scope and risk. The fact that his father had done more than one commission for them way back when would probably help his case too. It was the oversleeping part that he had absolutely no excuse for, but all three factors meant that he was sitting outside the closed Kiramman tent with nothing but a few pieces of paper and the beginning of a panic attack. Maybe someone had invented a new type of gun he could shoot himself with?

“Are you okay?” a tiny voice asks. Someone is standing in front of him, small and blue. Jayce wipes his eyes and the blurry image resolves into a worried-looking girl, holding a pastry the size of her head.

“Yes,” he replies automatically. She stares. “Well, no. I’m not okay at all.”

She sits down next to him and tears off a piece of her absurdly large pastry. It feels a little undignified for Jayce to accept, but his dignity is already at a new low; conciliatory treats from small children was just a drop in the bucket. He decides this probably means she wants to hear more.

“I’ve just ruined the rest of my life by oversleeping. I was up too late last night double checking the math on my blueprints, and then I thought I spilled some tea on my outfit for today, and I didn’t, it was fine, but that wrinkled it up so I ironed it again, and then I looked over my speech notes again, but I said things in the wrong order so I spent another two hours rereading them, and…long story short, I didn’t get to sleep until 5 am so I overslept and missed my nine am meeting with the Kirammans to audition for a sponsorship.”

“And how does that ruin your life?” she asks.

“I know it sounds stupid, but I need to go to the Academy. It’s where I’m meant to be, I’m sure of it, but my family thinks I should just stick with toolmaking and money’s been a little bit tight with the decline in construction projects, so I need a sponsorship or they won’t let me take the admission test, but I’m an idiot with a huge ego and this was the only thing I signed up for, so unless they miraculously let me try again next year, I’m never going to go to the Academy, and I’ll never create any of the things I’ve been dreaming of for the past decade.”

The little girl frowns, and it’s honestly pretty adorable—a tiny girl in her finest Progress Day-appropriate dress, holding an astronomically huge pastry (with a few bites taken out), hair in pigtails, eyes deadly serious. It makes Jayce want to shoot his brains out a little less.

“That’s not fair,” she says. “All of these people are here just because they want a political connection, none of them actually need the money. And their inventions are all silly—I saw a new kind of pen, something that beeps when metal is nearby, and—and something called a bicycle. They don’t need those—there were riots in the Undercity just a few weeks ago, people need serious things.”

Jayce runs his hand through his hair, the urge to tug on it haunting him. “And how do you know mine’s not silly?”

She shakes her head, which makes her pigtails wobble back and forth adorably. “I know it’s not because you have blueprints and it looks big. It must be serious. Tell me?”

And so he does tell the girl. He tells her about how house Talis helped to build Piltover, how his father’s tools have helped make building easier for everyone, but that the recent war in Ionia has caused problems with the supply chain for some materials (she helpfully tells him she already knows this, since she’s a very well-informed little girl). The supply issues have brought construction problems to a halt, which is terrible for the city’s economy and has brought the infrastructure projects to a halt. They could switch to using more concrete to make up for it, but the amount of concrete needed would take long enough to make that it might be better to wait for the war to end. But with his new design, his rotary kiln, so named for the way it rotates, they could be increasing the amount of concrete made by—

His explanation is cut off by the sound of an explosion. Reflexively, he covers the girl’s body with his own and clenches, anticipating heat or shrapnel.

Nothing happens, other than a man holding a smoking box running out of the tent as fast as he can. “I think you can get off of me, now,” the girl says helpfully. Jayce does so.

Next, Cassandra and Tobias Kiramman exit their tent, looking pissed as hell. A stunned enforcer starts running in the vague direction the failed inventor went. “I suppose that’s one candidate down,” the Councilwoman remarks dryly. “How long until the next one?”

Her husband checks his pocketwatch. “Looks like an hour?”

Jayce’s confidant springs into action. “Mom! Dad! I found the man who was supposed to be here earlier! He’s very smart and he protected me from the explosion, please you have to see him. Please please please!”

When Cassandra Kiramman looks at him with genuine interest, Jayce realizes he is experiencing the second miracle of his life.

Chapter Text

“I think this is ready—or as ready as it will ever be without another five years of trials. Go fetch your boyfriend,” Dr. Lenos ordered. She gave the booth a good smack for emphasis.

It wasn’t the point, but Jayce couldn’t help himself.

“He’s not my boyfriend, actually.” Already he could imagine Viktor coming in, hearing Dr. Lenos call him that, getting angry with Jayce for misleading her about their relationship and who knows what else.

“Fine. Fetch your man. I don’t care what you call him, we need him in this box ASAP.”

During their two weeks of work together, Jayce had done everything possible to avoid discussing Viktor directly. Saying his name out loud meant Jayce ran the risk of spiraling into a guilt-yearning-depression-anger-self loathing episode, because any sentence that started with ‘Viktor’ could end with things like ‘dying’, or ‘hates me’, or ‘isn’t talking to me’. Instead, he and his current lab partner worked on medical breakthroughs that could be for anybody and discussed a completely hypothetical patient who was nearly five months pregnant, had congenital mobility issues, and also happened to have late-stage Sump Lung. It was all very hypothetical and made possible by the fact that Dr. Lenos didn’t give a rat’s ass about Jayce’s personal life nor his neuroses, but now Jayce’s personal life needed to make an appointment with her.

“No I mean, that we’re…” he made a gesture with his hands, gently clasping them together. “We’re not like…that.” He couldn’t help the despondency in his voice when he said it.

“Well, you could’ve fooled me. And I’m not saying that because you stuck your dick in him. I’m saying that because you know the guy’s medical history like the back of your hand. You’ve clearly got a big brain but a good third of it is dedicated to this guy.”

“Yeah yeah, I’m an obsessive creep, I know. Just, please, don’t bring it up with Viktor. Getting him to cooperate will be hard enough as it is.”

She groaned, sounding almost disgusted. “I meant that he’s lucky. You know I’ve worked with people on their deathbeds, and their spouse of fifty years couldn’t name a single medication they were on? You’re trying to revolutionize medicine for a guy that’s stringing you along. There’s something very wrong with at least one of you.”

“Don’t talk about Viktor that way,” Jayce snapped. “You don’t know the first thing about him. He’s an incredible man.” He had no idea why Mel put up with this woman.

Dr. Lenos only rolled her eyes. “No, I only know his entire medical history. Now go get him while I think about how grateful I am that I’ve never been in a relationship.”

Jayce, strictly speaking, did not go fetch Viktor. He sent a message to Sky asking her to convince Viktor to come by, waited for her confirmation, and then sat awkwardly in the common area outside that wing of the academy. It was pure cowardice—he was scared to wait with Dr. Lenos, who doubtless would have more biting criticism of his and Viktor’s relationship, and he was scared to risk going to Viktor and being told to fuck off in person. Sky’s response had promised that they would be there within two hours, so there Jayce sat, staring blankly at their latest schematic and trying to remind himself to breathe.

One hour and thirty eight minutes later, he finally heard the click-clack of Viktor approaching. Guiltily, he realized that he was starting to dread it.

Sky entered first, holding the door open for Viktor. Jayce noticed he had switched from his cane to the crutch they kept for bad days, and was leaning more heavily on it than Jayce had ever seen before. It was nauseating to see how much he had deteriorated in just two weeks. Reflexively, he calculated what percentage of his remaining lifespan two weeks represented in the worst case scenario, and immediately tried to forget the number he came up with.

Instead, he leapt to his feet, standing arrow-straight. His fingers twitched, buzzing with the need to be on Viktor (his shoulders his waist his back his face his—), but Jayce didn’t know the status of his ‘touching Viktor’ privileges, and clasped them behind his back to be safe.

Viktor’s eyes crawled over him, dark with exhaustion. Jayce probably wasn’t any better off in that regard, at least.

“Am I getting a presentation then, Mr. Talis?” he asked dryly. His free hand (pinky finger still splinted) flexed by his side.

Jayce took inventory and realized that he was absolutely standing in the same pose he assumed when they were presenting their latest work to the Council—specifically the one he assumed when anxious. He coughed awkwardly. “I suppose you are, actually. Thanks for coming, I, uh—right this way.”

He led Sky and Viktor to the laboratory.

Dr. Lenos was sitting at her desk, scribbling wildly on some piece of paper. She briefly glanced at their guests; Sky awkwardly raised her hand in greeting but received no response. “That’s Dr. Lenos. Mel recommended her to me. She’s got a lot of experience with medical technology and has been a big help,” Jayce explained. “Um. Okay! I’ve got a couple things to show you. Some of them are more complete than others, but any one of them could revolutionize entire branches of our health care system once ready.”

Viktor’s face scrunched up in discomfort. “Jayce, I was joking about the presentation thing. I’m not an investor, you don’t have to sell me on these.”

Don’t I? Jayce thought. It was clear that Viktor resented what he was doing. The more Jayce thought on it, the less surprised (but more heartbroken) he felt. Viktor never went easy on himself, rarely accepted help, and openly resented his health issues for getting in the way of his work. Most favors that Jayce was allowed to do for him had to be framed as ‘efficient’ in some way. And while Viktor loved his creature comforts as much as anyone else, he had a worrying habit of denying himself when things went wrong. When they were behind schedule, he would staunchly refuse anything Jayce brought him. Pastries, sandwiches, even his beloved sweetmilk would sit untouched until they were caught up again.

We are trying to improve lives , he would sternly remind Jayce, but Viktor couldn’t answer what that had to do with him having a little treat. It was his mother who had explained it to him, when he brought her the chocolates Viktor refused. Jayce had been agonizing over what he had done to offend Viktor, that his partner wouldn’t accept anything from him. She told him that some people felt the need to punish themselves when they didn’t meet their own standards, and that they would deny themselves happiness or even hurt themselves for their perceived failure. She looked pointedly at Jayce, who didn’t care for the implication.

If Jayce wanted to be sure that Viktor wouldn’t try and refuse this as well, he did need to sell it to him, but as something more important. Viktor couldn’t possibly object if Jayce was improving the lives of the entire city, like they’d always promised. He just had to make Viktor see that.

Sky interjected. “Is that…a photo booth?” She was pointing at the large, curtained structure in the corner.

“You could be wronger,” Dr. Lenos mumbled, speaking for the first time since they’d arrived.

“It’s actually a good deal more complicated than that, but I’m saving it for last. The first thing I’d like to show you is actually…this!” He tugged a piece of canvas off of a glass box containing his first exhibit. Jayce had perfected the art of dramatic unveiling in his adolescence, back when he still wanted to be a stage magician, and he could never resist the dramatic flourish.  

Sky and Viktor both looked taken aback by the odd-looking invention, but Jayce couldn’t really blame them. Partway through its development, Jayce was overtaken by giggles when he realized it looked like the world’s strangest model train. Admittedly, he had been awake for 32 hours straight when he decided that their invention was the height of comedy. The front of the ‘train’ was a box topped with a disk that had 20 divots framing its rim. That box was connected through a series of tubes, large and small, to a series of three more boxes, all covered in further disks, pumps, and buttons. Finally, those led into the ‘caboose’ of the device—a huge box that displayed graph paper to the viewer. Several canisters sat under the device, hooked up to ports along the sides. 

“Ta-da!” Jayce said. His voice sounded a touch manic, even to his own ears.

“Huh,” said Sky.

That was a good enough cue for Jayce to start explaining. “This is an automatic blood multi-analyzer. Better name pending. So basically one of the big problems for blood testing is how long it takes—if you want to do more than one test, you have to separate out different samples, add reagents and diluents to each one, run them through the dialyzer and heating bath and photometer and dump them out and load them back up again and then write down the results. It’s a dozen damn tests, one after the other. I don’t even understand how those chemicals work. But! I do understand how to make things go from point A to point B really, really well. So what I’ve done is I’ve got this setup that runs them through the entire process, and it automatically separates each sample using air bubbles, so they can all be run sequentially without having to clean it out and reload it each time. You load up the blood samples and you just,” he tapped each of the ingoing tubes, “one-two-three-four. I’ve even set it up so that it graphs each sample all by itself. We tried it out and this device can process 50 samples per hour .” He gave the case a proud smack—perhaps too proud of a smack, judging by the way his audience of two flinched at the noise.

Sky looked frazzled. “Could you slow down a little? It’s a little hard to tell what you’re saying when you speak that fast.”

“Sorry. Sure. Anyways, next up…these are only models so far, but I’m hopeful about them.” Jayce pulled out two objects from a cabinet under the table. The first one was a crib, roughly the size of Jayce’s fist, covered by a glass dome with two holes, and containing a tiny sphere of blue glass inserted into one end. It was entirely unnecessary, but Jayce had lined the inside of it with cloth and put the tiniest baby figurine he could find inside of it. And if he had gotten attached to the tiny baby figurine, that was nobody’s business. He held it up proudly.

Viktor’s brow furrowed in concentration; this had his attention. Jayce could recognize the tell-tale glimmer of curiosity in his eyes. “Is it…to prevent infection?” he asked.

“Yes! Yes, among other things!” Jayce beamed at his partner, and Viktor ceded a tiny, crooked smile in return. “That’s just the start—if we power it with a gemstone, it can also keep the inside warm and slightly reduce gravity. Add in some oxygen-rich air and a little bit of water to keep it moist, and you’ve got yourself a human incubator! Like they never left the womb!” Sky cringed a little. “Um, I’m not going to make that the tagline or anything. The tagline isn’t important. What’s important is that it could do incredible things for infants with health issues. If they’re sick, underweight, premature, need treatment, then the incubator provides a sterile environment for them to grow and recover. More than one in ten babies are born prematurely in Piltover, and that rate is higher in the Undercity. The earlier they’re born, the higher their risk of, um, not surviving. And things like,” he swallowed, “things like illness, stress, being underweight can make premature birth more likely. Not to mention any pre-existing health complications.”

Jayce held the tiny model out. Viktor had to lean hard on his crutch and hold his splinted finger out of the way, but he took it, cradling it in both hands. His expression softened for the first time since he arrived, almost wistful. “Smart. A backup in the, eh, admittedly not unlikely event that I can’t carry to term, yes?”

Or if we come up with something that can save you and need the fetus out to implement it.

“Mhm,” Jayce said instead. He doubted Viktor would be as keen if he admitted it was a hypothetical, untested device in case they wanted to take the baby out and perform some even more hypothetical treatment on Viktor’s lungs. Yes Viktor, I was thinking we could take it out of the oven early in case I want to try rearranging your rib cage. There wasn’t a good way to pitch it, not without evidence that it could work.

“Moving on. This,” Jayce said, picking up the other model, “is a sort of artificial breathing chamber.

All at once, Viktor’s expression shuttered. “It looks like a coffin.” 

“Aha, no, it’s meant to keep you—keep the patient alive . See, it works through using bellows to control the air pressure to force air in and out of the patient’s lungs, if their lungs are damaged, and—”

“No, Jayce. I thought I made my opinions clear on being kept alive as some rotting pile of flesh clear to you. I refuse to be stuck in some tube just so I agonizingly disintegrate slower.” His lips were curling into a snarl; Viktor leaned back, shying away from the model as if it were venomous.

Jayce’s heart sank. He’d been proud of this one, taking inspiration from the way the bellows of his forge kept a fire breathing, how flames and people were the same in that regard. “It wouldn’t be forever,” he protested weakly.

“I cannot condone this and I certainly won’t permit you to subject me to it,” Viktor spat.

Alarmed, Jayce realized that Viktor was turning for the door. This couldn’t be going worse. Even when the Council had sneered at his proposal just a few weeks ago, none of them had stormed out in a rage. Sky was looking back and forth between them anxiously. Impulsively, Jayce reached out to snag Viktor’s sleeve. He stiffened in Jayce’s grasp.

“Viktor, please. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but at least let me show you the last project? It’s ready to go now.” He swallowed. “It’ll let you see the, um, the baby. That’s why I wanted you to come in today, please Viktor?”

Viktor stared at him with an inscrutable expression for several painful seconds. “Are you sure that it’s safe?” he asked.

Jayce nodded vigorously. “We’ve tested it on five different rat litters and they all came out fine!” Viktor didn’t look entirely reassured.

Dr. Lenos piped up for a second time. “If a little magic light is enough to cause complications then you’re already fucked.”

Jayce had never stopped to consider the effects working in their laboratory might have on a pregnancy, and judging by his gob-smacked expression, neither had Viktor.

It took ten minutes to set up the light chamber, the grand finale to this shitshow of an afternoon. As he explained to Viktor, it was like a camera that could see through the body. A few years into their research, he and Viktor had discovered that some types of film were affected by the light the crystals gave off; when they were in use, the discharge would leave bright streaks of white on the imprints. They sometimes used it in the lab to monitor the strength of a device’s output or to check if something was fully sealed.

The first version was able to show the location of bones and major organs within the subject’s body. Running a few pregnant rats and one poro through confirmed that fetuses were visible, but only as tiny, faint skeletons with murky outlines. Not good enough for Jayce. The next breakthrough had come when he had the idea to inscribe runes into a lens that filtered the light. Depending on the rune, it would provide a clearer image of different parts of the body. Inserting a growth rune lens caused fetuses to appear in fantastic detail, whereas inserting a decay rune lens highlighted ongoing health problems in their subjects.

They had decided to use both to examine Viktor.

Loading up the film and inserting the appropriate lens was quick and easy, and the device was activated by the tug of a lever. What ended up taking the most time was getting Viktor undressed—everything on his person, including his braces, could interfere with the image. There was nothing to be done about the various bolts and screws in his bones, but the rest had to come off. Viktor was not excited to hear that. Jayce could hear him inside the booth, cursing under his breath as he fumbled with the various buttons.

There was a sigh. “Jayce, could you come help me with this?”

“Really?” He’d been certain that Viktor would be too upset to accept Jayce’s help. Perhaps he wasn’t as angry as he seemed—or perhaps Viktor was genuinely struggling to get it all off.

“It’s nothing you haven’t done before, now come here.”

Jayce tried not to seem too eager when he joined Viktor in the booth. It had actually been over two months since they last had sex. Viktor had always been nauseous, or had a headache, or been just too sore when Jayce tried to initiate. Jayce would have worried that Viktor was tired of him were it not for how angry Viktor seemed with himself for not feeling up to it. As a compromise, he had used some of his favorite toys on himself while Viktor watched. It was easy to identify those issues as early pregnancy symptoms, in hindsight.

It had been eons (just under two months) since he’d touched Viktor in a way that could be described as intimate, and around two weeks since he last touched Viktor at all . He tried not to be too obvious about breathing deeply through his nose, or trailing his fingers along Viktor’s exposed skin whenever possible. His hand trailed especially slowly over Viktor’s hip; when Viktor reached down, Jayce realized he’d been caught, but instead of removing his hand, Viktor held it against him. He took that as a sign that he could give up on being subtle with his affection, and pressed his face against Viktor’s middle, only to be met with an unexpected firmness.

Jayce sat back on his heels and craned his head; sure enough, the pregnancy was finally beginning to show. A little curve, dramatically nestled between the juts of Viktor’s hipbones and ribcage. He wasn’t as emaciated as Jayce feared he might be, but the swell of his middle looked unsettling in context. There were other changes too—he could see that where Viktor’s chest once tucked neatly into the top of his back brace, there was enough fat for it to spill over the top.

Jayce didn’t realize how long he’d spent openly gawking at his partner until Viktor’s expression grew irate. “Yes, I am pregnant, as you seem to have forgotten. Now are you going to help me out of this or not?”

Properly chastised, Jayce resumed peeling off Viktor’s layers. When he got around to the back brace, Viktor let out an audible sigh of relief. “We’re going to need to adjust your back brace, sooner rather than later,” Jayce said, concerned.

Viktor nodded. “I have realized this. It would be one thing if it was just my damn chest, but this brace was not built to accommodate a second person, no matter how small. I was thinking of replacing the front half with a few adjustable straps—two or three belts to keep it in place.”

“That could work, but would reduce the amount of support you’re getting, which you’re going to need more of going forward, not less .”

“It’s not, eh, a long term solution, but it doesn’t have to be,” Viktor said.

Jayce ignored the most likely implication. “Right, we can go back to this version after this. But you’ll still be struggling to walk once it’s been adjusted.”He only got a shrug in response.

Viktor’s brace was anchored to his underwear, so that had to come off as well. Jayce, heroically, did not look at his not-boyfriend’s crotch. Not for more than a few moments, anyway. Once Viktor was stripped down to nothing but his socks, Jayce gave him a loose, thin tunic. It allowed for some modesty without interfering with the test. Jayce had also screwed a few support structures into the back wall of the booth for Viktor to lean against for support, given the challenge of standing upright and still without either his cane or brace to help him. Finally, he held out a pair of shaded goggles. “It’s going to be a really bright flash, closing your eyes won’t be enough to block the light out,” he explained.

With Viktor finally in position, Jayce left the booth and closed the curtain behind him. “Okay Viktor, there’s going to be a loud popping noise and a bright flash, but we need you to stay as still as you can. Are you ready?”

There was a pause. “Crank it!” Viktor called back.

Despite himself, Jayce smiled as he pulled the lever. Sky startled violently at how loud the resulting sound was.

The image needed half an hour to develop. Conveniently, nearly half of that time would be taken up by getting Viktor back into all of his various clothes and braces. There was a strange look on Viktor’s face, as they waited for it to develop.

Dr. Lenos came by with a needle, to Viktor’s irritation. “I’m leaking blood from my nose and mouth all the time, do you really need more of it?”

Jayce answered. “No, she said we can’t use blood samples with saliva or mucus in them, they need to come straight from the vein.”

“What?” asked Sky.

“What?” Jayce responded, realizing that they didn’t need to know about his very hypothetical plans on how to get a sample of Viktor’s blood without him knowing, just in case.

If Viktor found that at all suspicious, he didn’t say so. Instead, he continued to stare at the developing image. The outline of his body was coming into focus; Viktor’s gaze was fixed on the tiny smear in the midsection.

“Jayce, are you planning—” he cut himself off. His voice had taken on an overly careful tone; it was the unsettling tone Viktor used when his question had a correct answer that Jayce needed to arrive at without any hints. “Jayce, have you given any thought about where the baby is going to live?”

His brain went into overdrive, developing a pros and cons list for both his and Viktor’s apartments. Viktor’s was slightly bigger, but Jayce’s was closer to work, and his mother’s house was about equidistant from both. Jayce’s apartment had more reliable hot water, but Viktor’s had a bathtub. Jayce had the larger kitchen. Viktor had the larger bedroom. Viktor lived on the ground floor. Jayce lived in a quieter neighborhood. He frantically rotated and compared the two layouts in his mind until coming to one, indisputable conclusion—

“Shit. Viktor, I think we need to buy a house.” It was like a light bulb going off. Neither apartment had room for a nursery.

Viktor’s stricken expression let him know that that was the wrong answer. “Jayce, that’s not what I meant. I meant who will the child live with, if all of this doesn’t work?”

Jayce didn’t like where this was going. What had he done wrong? “Viktor, I’m going to support both of you no matter what, I’m sorry for not saying that earlier. I promise, I will do anything you need.”

Viktor was shaking his head. He looked even more upset. Jayce didn’t understand. “Jayce, I’m not sure that that’s…a good idea. This is a difficult thing you’re offering to do. I was thinking, perhaps, we could find a different family that would be better suited for this.” Viktor wasn’t making eye contact anymore.

He’d never been shot before, but Jayce thought it must feel similar to hearing that. Realizing that Viktor didn’t trust Jayce with his child ( their child) made him nauseous. The mere possibility had somehow escaped him for the past few weeks. He felt a little stupid, now that he actually thought about it; it was one thing to work on projects with someone, to mess around with someone, but it was an entirely separate matter to trust them with your kid. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he understood Viktor’s concerns. They had only met when Jayce was nearly exiled from the city, only started working together when Viktor interrupted his suicide. As partners, Viktor had front row seats to all of his failing, his neuroses, and personal flaws. They weren’t even in an actual relationship. Jayce was just a heartsick moron, just like always.

“Okay,” he heard himself say distantly. Something in him crumbled.

It was another ten minutes before the image finished. Jayce didn’t say a word the entire time. Fortunately, the image came out perfectly. Sky and Viktor looked appropriately impressed, and Jayce was trying to school his expression into a smile.

Admittedly, Jayce wasn’t sure what a picture of a fetus was supposed to look like, but he didn’t see anything unusual. Tiny hands, tiny feet, a huge head, all curled up. Something in his chest burned as he stared. The longer he stared at the tiny, tiny fingers, the more he felt the irrational urge to reach out and grab them. Hands are for holding, some deep-seated instinct told him. Where am I going to put you? Will you look like Viktor? Do you like me? I think I like you. Why does my chest feel so hot? You look like a peanut. I’m so sorry, peanut.

He heard Viktor make a strange vocalization, like a sob, but he had never heard Viktor sob before. He didn’t check.

Less than an inch above the fetus, Jayce could see the terrifying state of his partner’s lungs. The scarring screamed out at him—a bright, dense, abstract pattern stretching across Viktor’s ribcage. Like cobwebbed cobwebs constricting his ribs, almost bright enough to obscure the rods in his back. It bunched up at the bottom, compressing itself to make way for the new life underneath. A funeral shroud hanging over a tiny, tiny crib.

Dr. Lenos sounded nearly polite when she spoke. “The bad news is that your lungs are as bad as we feared, and they’re only going to get worse. The good news is that the fetus is actually larger than average for this stage and has no obvious health issues so far. It’s doing fine, despite the circumstances. Of course, I can’t swear to any of this, because this is a brand new form of testing, but I’ll be examining it further over the next few days and keep you updated.”

“Thank you.” Viktor’s voice crackled with emotion. “I should get back to the lab now,” he said, without moving. He was too entranced by the image to leave, staring for several long moments before Sky gave his arm a gentle tug. She shot Jayce an apologetic look as they left.

For two hours, Jayce silently sat in the middle of the laboratory, silently examining his work. Then—

“Can you give Viktor my lungs?” he asked, hoarsely.

“I don’t do surgeries.”

“Could a surgeon give Viktor my lungs?” he amended.

Dr. Lenos sighed. “Probably not. And they’d never agree to it, even if it was possible.”

“I want to die.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that.” She sounded almost pitying. “Look. I’m sorry you want to die, and that your not-boyfriend is treating you like shit. I can’t do anything about that. And I’m sorry that he’s dying, but I think we can do something about that. Think of it this way: in just a few months, this will be over one way or another, and then you can have the biggest meltdown this city has ever seen. I don’t give out compliments easily, but you’ve accomplished an astonishing amount in two weeks. It’s too early to give up. Save it for later.”

Save it for later . He could do that. He wasn’t a tiny child screaming at his father’s coffin anymore. He knew how to save it for later. “Yeah, okay. Okay. What’s next, then?”

“Next, we need to start building functional prototypes and move to human trials.”

Jayce frowned. “I thought you said we couldn’t do human trials without a ton of paperwork?”

“I said that the academy doesn’t allow for human trials without a ton of paperwork. That just means that we can’t run trials up here,” she corrected. “The red tape around clinical trials changed after some dipshit used them to do some heinous things under the radar a few decades back. No, if we want to do human trials before your partner is six feet under, we need to go to the Undercity.”

Chapter Text

Viktor peered into the dark abyss of his newest creation; said abyss was barely bigger than one of Jayce’s fingers, but dark and empty nonetheless. He sighed in disappointment. “I don’t see anything that would be causing a blockage, Sky.”

Sky groaned. “Alright, I guess we’ll just have to check the runes again. But Viktor, I really don’t think you should have your face that close to the prototype. We’ve only just put it together.”

Viktor grumbled. “You’ll have to forgive me; given our deadline and the stakes we are dealing with, I’m anxious to see this done sooner rather than later. Heimerdinger’s not here, we don’t have to spend—ack—” Viktor had flicked the device resentfully and promptly regretted it, as the device finally came to life and promptly sucked a thick lock of his hair into its opening. “ Shit !”

Sky leapt to her feet, scrambling for the power button. It quickly sputtered to a stop, but, despite some insistent tugging, it refused to let go of Viktor’s hair. She threaded her fingers through his hair, looking for some sort of tangle to undo, but to no avail. Viktor winced at the siege on his scalp.

“Sky, I think you’d better fetch some scissors. My hair and the prototype are in quite the passionate embrace.”

She pursed her lips. “Are you sure Viktor? You have such nice hair, it would be a shame to just chop a bunch off like this.”

He shrugged, despite his awkward angle. “I’ve been meaning to get a haircut anyway, it’s been growing like a weed recently.” He raised his eyebrows, pensive. “Maybe that awful nutritional sludge has been working, my hair feels better too.”

“Oh, you didn’t know? That’s just a normal side effect of pregnancy, I’m surprised your doctor didn’t tell you. Your hair gets all shiny and grows faster. I kind of noticed it right before you told me the news, it looked almost metallic. That’s what makes chopping it off such a shame…” she sighed. “But it’s your hair, and it’s stuck. I’ll go get the scissors.”

Mindlessly, Viktor began stroking the hair not stuck in the device. It did feel quite thick and soft. He’d noticed Jayce had been petting it even more than usual, but chalked that up to how pathetic Viktor must have seemed when he was puking and sulking all over the lab. Loathe as he was to admit it, Jayce had done the right thing, badgering him into a check-up. “Dr. Emmich didn’t bring that up, no. Most of what we discussed was do’s and don’t’s of pregnancy and my medication changes. He felt the need to reiterate that I shouldn’t try shimmer while pregnant,” he told Sky.

“Doctor Emmich, more like Doctor…rude word that rhymes with itch. Stop laughing, you know I don’t like to swear!” Viktor snorted as subtly as he could, which was still more than loud enough for Sky to hear. She scrunched her face at him in response. “Although, I guess everyone I know who’s been pregnant talked about what they learned from their mother, or their aunt, or their sister, or their friends, not what their doctor said. I don’t know if they’re required to talk to you about that stuff. I know your mom isn’t here anymore, but are you sure there’s no one else you can ask? Maybe Jayce’s mom…?”

Viktor cringed. “Eh, maybe not her. That would require a very awkward conversation.” Sky cringed right back.

“Oh my god, have you not told her yet? Shouldn’t you do that, like, as soon as possible? You’re already showing, Viktor!”

“Yes, yes, I’m very stupid and hormonal, now could you please free me from this contraption?”

Sky shrank back a little at his words, shame-faced, and began to cut Viktor’s hair free from the prototype. She cut directly next to its mouth in an attempt to spare as much of Viktor’s hair as possible: the result was a stripe of short hair running diagonally across the side of his head. Viktor was going to need a bold new haircut to hide it. Despite a firm tug, his removed hair stayed trapped in the prototype’s mouth. The wavy locks exploded outwards, flopping over the sides.

“It seems to have grown a mustache. We’ll have to let Heimerdinger know he has competition.” Viktor snorted at his own joke. Sky responded with an amused hum. “Although this is good information, come to think of it. If it’s going to be cleaning floors, ideally it should be able to handle some hair without jamming. Perhaps not a full head of it, no, but it should be able to handle a shedding pet.”

Sky loudly cleared her throat. “Viktor, you know I don’t think you’re stupid. You’re the smartest, most driven, selfless person I’ve ever met and I’ve always admired you for it. This has been really hard on you, pregnancy is always hard, and you shouldn’t feel embarrassed to not have all the answers, I just wish you would let other people help you with this instead of trying to push people away. I promise I’m not trying to make you feel stupid, I would never want to do that—I just think you need…a little bit of outside perspective?”

Her eyes shone with admiration, like a sunrise pouring over the horizon. It paralyzed him.

“Sky, there’s no need to be—you think too highly of me. I may have said all these noble things, but…” he swallowed. “But what do I have to show for it? The Hexgates, which have done nothing for the Undercity, a couple of half-finished other projects, and of course this damned floor cleaner, intended to keep topside homes nice and neat, when for years I’ve dreamed of a clean Undercity, to stop children getting sick.” Like bile, the words welled up from deep within, bitter on his tongue. “No, Ms. Young, I’m afraid I’ve misled you. Perhaps I misled myself.”

“Viktor…” Sky frowned. “Well, whatever you say about yourself is true of me and Jayce, too. All of us have been working hard for so long, and we’ve done the best we can. It’s not your fault that your time is in danger of being cut short. And if Jayce hasn’t been telling you how incredible you are, then he doesn’t—” she said, before taking a deep breath. Whatever tangent Sky had been building up to was abruptly abandoned. “No, I know he’s trying really hard for you. I think maybe you just scare him off, sometimes.”

Viktor had been fully prepared to brush her off, but the last sentence cut through his brooding. “What, you think Jayce is scared of me , somehow?” The idea was preposterous—that Jayce, the most stubborn, earnest, passionate, driven man he knew, on track to being the most famous in Piltover to boot—could be scared of Viktor . He huffed out a half-laugh. “You’ve, eh, you’ve lost me.”

“Maybe not scared of you, per se, but scared of scaring you, I guess?” Sky shrugged. “I just mean that sometimes when I see you guys talking, if you start to look uncomfortable, Jayce gets this kind of spooked look on his face and changes the subject, and you definitely look uncomfortable when people compliment you. Like right now. You look super uncomfortable.”

As soon as she pointed it out, Viktor noticed that his face had been in a tense, furrowed position for quite a while, to the point that the muscles felt a little sore. Deliberately, he tried to relax them into something more neutral, but the embarrassment of having it called out made fixing his face difficult. “That hardly seems like the most likely explanation. Jayce’s mind runs a mile a minute, sometimes even I struggle to keep up his thought processes. He’s always thinking about a dozen things at once, I doubt that he’s suddenly intimidated by having conversations with me. We’ve known each other for six years.” 

He looked over at Sky. She was grimacing. “I’m not sure what you’re doing with your face right now. Forget I said anything. But seriously, Viktor, maybe I’m wrong about this, but you have to admit Jayce was being pretty weird when we went to visit him, right? I had trouble understanding what he was saying at some points and he looked kind of, I don’t know, strung out I guess?” She bit her lip. “Look, I don’t want to play the I-told-you-so card, but I could hear what you guys were talking about.”

Sky’s restraint was truly commendable. Nearly two entire days had passed without her pointing that out. Viktor wouldn’t have lasted thirty minutes, had it been him. He groaned. “Yes Sky, you did, in fact, tell me so about Jayce. Yes, I have in fact overestimated his practicality. He’s worked himself up into some sort of state , and thinks that he can and must solve every problem in the world, and that he can just add fatherhood to his list of responsibilities with no consequence to everything we’ve spent these years building, and that he can just brute force his way through this and that fool won’t realize what he’s done until he’s lost everything and hates me for ruining his dream—”

A noise foreign to Viktor startled him, even as it emerged from his own mouth: a harsh sob. It had been nearly a decade since Viktor had properly cried. Despite the lack of tears, it was still a shock. He hadn’t cried for his father’s death; really, Viktor had thought he simply lost the ability to do so. There were no tears, but this was the closest he’d come to crying in years. A second sob heaved out of his chest that dissolved into a stunned wheeze when Sky rushed forward to embrace him. The unexpected touch knocked him off balance, forcing him to lean into her. He was frozen in place; no one besides Jayce had hugged him in years. Viktor can smell the coconut in her hair mousse, she was so close. His heart raced, unable to decide whether he should feel relief or terror. He settled on shame. 

“I didn’t mean to say that last part. Forgive me,” he rasped into her shoulder. 

The way she rubbed her thumb into his back was nearly violent in its intensity. “Jayce would never hate you, Viktor, you know that.” He hummed noncommittally.

“He would be right to. I’m abandoning him, and only leaving behind half-finished work and unbearable responsibilities. That old hag was right.” His broken finger throbbed.

Sky shook her head. “That’s not true, Viktor. This isn’t your fault, and we’ll…we’ll make it through this.” Her voice crackled, betraying the lack of confidence in her own words. Even if she was too fond of Viktor to hold him accountable, she was frightened by the situation as well. He could feel her heart pounding where their chests touched, and the way she struggled to keep her grip on him gentle. Viktor respected both Sky and Jayce deeply—as scientists. He was far less confident in their ability to rely on each other, to weather the storm together.

But perhaps they didn’t have to?

Viktor shifted, prompting Sky to finally let him go. “Sky, I think it’s time we start accepting job applications again.”

She burst into tears.

By lunch, Sky’s sobbing had subsided to little sniffles while she ate her egg salad sandwich. Viktor tried to concentrate on how awful his nutritional sludge tasted instead. She had reluctantly agreed that they were going to need more help in the lab soon, regardless of how things turned out, and that it would be easier on everyone to start the hiring process soon. They’d decided on sending out feelers to the Academy faculty—putting out a public announcement that Hextech was hiring would be bound to inundate them with applications from social climbers who’d never touched a wrench in their lives.

As much as Piltover repeated the narrative that their city was a true meritocracy where anyone with wit and willpower could make a name for themselves, everyone of note was from one of the mercantile clans, or directly connected to one. House Talis had not been destined for greatness. Jayce’s father was the one who had elevated it to House status to begin with, the one who’d designed the crest Jayce stubbornly plastered on all of his belongings. His sponsorship by the Kirammans was an unusually lucky break, and one that he had nearly squandered. Hextech, however, had catapulted the Talis name to unthinkable heights. The crest that Percy Talis had crafted only a few decades ago hung on banners, next to those of clans Kiramman, Giopara, and Holloran. As soon as word of a position got around, every other family in the city would be cramming applications into the mail slot in hopes of achieving the same. Viktor would have added considerable prestige to his own family name, had it existed. 

Sky had assured Viktor several times that they were not replacing him, that no one in the city could ever. It was unnecessary—Viktor’s ego had its weak points, but he knew he was damn smart. Jayce was a once in a lifetime genius; Viktor may not have had quite the unbridled creativity (Hextech was not his idea, after all) but he was able to match Jayce in just about every other way. No, Viktor wasn’t hoping to find his replacement, certainly not his better. He just needed someone, maybe a few someones, who would be able to support Jayce and keep him on track. Ideally someone would be able to talk Jayce out of halting his meteoric rise by way of bastard child, but he would still need support.

There was a loud knock on the door. 

Viktor took one last heroic swig of his revolting drink before he got up to answer. It wasn’t the gentle yet insistent knock of Councilor Medarda, the almost manic one of Heimerdinger, nor the stern one of Councilor Kiramman—nor was it Jayce, who never knocked at all. Viktor had a suspicion about who had come to their lab; his suspicion was confirmed when he opened the door and spotted the clan Ferros crest on their guest’s broad chest and the disdain on his dour face. The interloper leaned to look past Viktor, into the lab behind him.

Viktor could see the moment his eyes landed on the prototype from the calculating furrow of their visitor’s brow. He found himself glad that they’d taken the time to remove all of the hair. “Can we help you?” he asked. “Our progress report on the commission isn’t due to Ms. Ferros until next week.”

“Ms. Ferros is well aware of the agreed schedule,” their visitor replied frostily. “She simply wished to inquire after your meeting with Mr. Talis and Professor Lenos. Clan Ferros is concerned that the split attention of Hextech’s creators will cause delays.”

Viktor could hear Sky behind him, shuffling in her seat. “We can assure you that there is no cause for alarm. Jayce has been looking into avenues that Hextech might take in the future, and wanted my, eh, input on some of his preliminary work. Since I am already ahead of schedule on your commission, I agreed to consult on his work.” Viktor thinned his lips into something that almost resembled a polite smile.

“ Ahead of schedule, you say.” The man’s suspicious gaze trailed from Viktor to Sky, then to the prototype. He glared at the device, as if trying to bully it into giving up its creators’ secrets. His lip curled into a sneer. “When should we expect our commission, then?”

“Well…” Viktor trailed off. He hadn’t committed to a specific date the day he spoke with Camille—the implication was that his death would suffice as a deadline. Giving a more specific schedule could have an unfortunate effect on his lifespan. “It’s hard to say.” There was no telling what she would do once his part of the deal was finished, never mind what she could be up to while they spoke. 

“If you don’t know when you’ll be done, how can you know you’re ahead of schedule?” 

He resisted the urge to worry at his lips. He needed more time and a lot more information. “Well, we’re ahead of schedule on this step of the process, but—” and suddenly he had an idea “—we won’t be able to progress much further without the crystal.”

The Ferros representative’s stern expression took on a quizzical note. “The crystal? Don’t you have those here in your lab? Did Talis take them with him?”

Viktor feigned confusion. “No, no we have our own, but Ms. Ferros told me that she would be supplying the crystals for this commission. I need the crystal so that I can calibrate the prototype. No two crystals are alike, and I’m unfamiliar with her source.” He sighed, as if in relief. “It is good that you came then, so we can sort this now. Yes, as soon as we have a sample of your crystals, we can really start refining our work. I was unaware she hadn’t told you, very odd.”

Viktor glanced behind himself to motion to the prototype, and smiled at their guest. Sky, on the other hand, was studiously staring at a piece of paper and nowhere else. 

After a moment, he nodded stiffly. “I’ll have that delivered here tomorrow, then. Clan Ferros looks forward to the results.” He tipped his hat and retreated back down the hallway. Despite the fact that his legs were beginning to tremble, Viktor did not close the door until the other man was well out of sight. Sky let out a shaky groan the moment it closed.

“Viktor, they’re watching us. They’re tracking what we do.” Her face had taken a turn for the gray.

“I know, Sky. I suspected that they would,” he reassured her, taking his seat. She did not look reassured. “The good thing is that they’re doing a bad job of it.”

She scoffed. “They know where we’ve been going and who we’ve been talking to, that seems like a pretty good job to me!”

“No, no you could find that sort of information out by paying off the janitors. That lackey believed me when I said that we’re ahead of schedule, which means that they don’t know what’s going on in here. He couldn’t even tell that something might be, eh, off .” Viktor gestured to his accidental haircut. “These are not Piltover’s best and brightest she has monitoring us.”

“Don’t act like you had that under control,” she retorted. “You were nervous. And what was asking for a crystal about? That’s just going to bring more attention to us!”

Viktor grimaced. “You have a point about that, but this is worth it. We need to find out where she got those crystals. Jayce has been to the mines we source ours from. It’s a very time-consuming process, getting them out. The ones we have now were mined years ago, and he could only afford them because no one wanted them. The crystals are going to get exponentially more expensive going forward. It’s a problem that Jayce and I have not found a safe solution for, and if we can’t solve it then the combined intellect of Clan Ferros won’t be able to either. My only conclusion is that they have discovered an unsafe solution, and we need to figure out what that is. I will not allow Hextech to be complicit in their schemes.”

“And if we can see one of their crystals, we can start to figure out what they’re up to,” Sky said.

“Exactly!”

“Viktor, this is still dangerous.”

He sighed. “I’m not denying that, Sky. But we are already in danger, and there’s nothing I can do to change that unless we rework our creation to defend us from Clan Ferros’ thugs instead of hair.” He scowled at the prototype. “Perhaps we should have gone with lasers after all. That, or a much bigger device. See what Camille thinks of a cleaning automaton twice the size of her biggest goon.”

“Sure Viktor, but let’s focus on building something that doesn’t maim us before we build something to maim others.”

“Not to maim others,” he murmured, half to himself. “To protect people. But yes, I see your point. Let’s get back to revolutionizing home cleaning.”

Chapter Text

Jayce was in serious danger of puking on the police station floor. Despite Caitlyn’s surprising career choice, he hadn’t been inside the building since the day he’d been arrested. Funny, that he had once again ended up there because of Viktor. That was their very first meeting—and it had ended with Viktor giving him a strange look of pity and amusement as the sheriff cuffed Jayce.

(Viktor had later admitted that he hadn’t actually believed anything was going to happen to Jayce—he had a name, a sponsor, and Heimerdinger’s favor. Boys like him usually walked out of the station with a slap on the wrist, but then, most boys didn’t admit to experimenting with magic. I underestimated you , he’d told Jayce with a wry grin.)

Jayce doubted that Viktor would find his current situation nearly as amusing. 

Dr. Lenos had explained it to him in rather brutal terms: the only way to get testing done for medical devices in less than 25 years was to outsource it to the Undercity. The Academy had intense stipulations regarding human experimentation of any sort, owing to Heimerdinger’s hawkish oversight. Ever since some disgraced professor had been caught using an experimental medication on late-stage cancer patients that had nothing to do with treating cancer and everything to do with pushing a body on the brink of death to its limits, all methods of expedited medical research had been cut off. The problem with an immortal dean was that any changes to the Academy’s policies were dependent on him; unfortunately, Heimerdinger was obstinate at the best of times, and had been deeply shaken by the incident in question.

Jayce was sympathetic, but it did mean that anyone who couldn’t be helped by current medical techniques was shit out of luck, no matter how promising something a decade away from approval might be for their condition. Doctors, patients, researchers alike had been begging for the professor to make any sort of concessions for years, but Heimerdinger was not a man of exceptions when it came to his principles. The nice thing about the Undercity, in such cases, was that Heimerdinger struggled to remember that it existed. 

It was a system of careful agreements and obfuscation. For example: say one of Piltover’s researchers has an idea that they want to see in hospitals before an entire generation has passed. They take this idea to one of the major industrialists of the Undercity, who uses their ample resources to run the necessary trials. The researcher comes away with the data necessary to advance their project, and in exchange the Undercity industrialist is allowed to market the product in the Undercity. The many denizens of the Undercity suffering from debilitating illnesses get a chance at recovery. As long as everyone makes good on their part of the deal, everyone benefits, Dr. Lenos had told him. It was all fine, she assured him.

Sitting in the police station, waiting for a mysterious “contact” to smuggle him into the Undercity, Jayce struggled to believe that it was actually fine. He bounced his leg violently, and tried to scratch his neck subtly. Dr. Lenos had offered to take care of the process for him, and that probably would’ve been the smart thing to do, but Jayce couldn’t abide the idea of letting the process out of his hands. He needed to make sure all of this was fine. It was going to be fine, it was going to help Viktor, and people like him, so it had to be fine. Jayce just needed to really, really make sure.

He was halfway to scratching his neck bloody again when someone finally approached him. The enforcer eyed him up warily—Jayce was aware that he wasn’t looking his Golden Boy best, and it was showing in the expressions of everyone he spoke to. Grooming had always been a war against his own body for Jayce, and he’d abandoned the front lines for several weeks. His facial hair was looking less and less like stubble, and more and more like a beard. Shit , he thought. I really should’ve shaved before this. 

The enforcer—on the older side, ruddy complexion—jerked his head towards the back room. “He’ll see you now, Talis.”

The look the sheriff gave Jayce upon entering his office was akin to someone receiving half-dead, mangy vermin from their pet cat. Jayce couldn’t say he was pleased to see the man either (Caitlyn had all sorts of complaints regarding him, even if she always took them back moments later) but Jayce was in his office, asking him a favor, and swallowed his pride. 

“Thank you for seeing me, sir,” he said, wearing the freshest smile he could muster.

The sheriff’s look of disgust solidified into a sneer. “Kiramman isn’t in today,” he said flatly. “I don’t know what tea party you need her for, but I can’t help you.”

Jayce was aware of how people viewed him. Before the Academy, he was a lowly, half-foreign meathead. When he was in the Academy, he was the Kiramman’s cocky charity case who thought he was too good for honest labor. Now he was a foppish wannabe-elite who did nothing but waste Piltover’s money on far-flung nonsense. Never mind how hard he’d fought for every step, never mind how he put more blood and sweat into each invention that the sheriff would spill in his entire career, never mind how the city had evolved at a breakneck pace in the months since the Hexgate first launched. He was always in the wrong in their eyes, and Jayce knew that one day he’d finally prove them wrong, but—

He sighed. That day didn’t need to be today. “I know Caitlyn’s not here. I chose a day she wouldn’t be here on purpose, and I would really appreciate it if you didn’t let her know about this.” Jayce fought to keep his voice at a slow and steady pace.

Marcus looked bemused, and leaned forward. “What exactly do you want then, Talis?”

Jayce tried to concentrate on the instructions Dr. Lenos had given him when they last spoke. “I need to make…a business deal in the Undercity. I’ve been told you can put me in contact with someone down there. Could you help me out?”

The sheriff’s eyebrows shot up towards his hairline. It probably wasn’t common knowledge that Jayce was dipping his toes into the medical field, especially not so soon after the completion of the Hexgates. Narrowing his eyes, Marcus gave him an appraising look. “Right then, I understand. So that’s how you manage it. Should’ve guessed. Well, if you’re ready to take the next step, then yes, I can take you where you need to go. I assume you’ve brought the necessary supplies with you?” He gestured towards the briefcase Jayce had brought with a jerk of his chin.

Jayce’s fist clenched around the handle. “Yup. Got everything I need.” All of his work from the past few weeks, blueprints and results and analysis, was tightly packed and locked into the case. There were duplicates with Dr. Lenos, but Jayce didn’t want anyone getting their hands on them before they were ready.

Marcus stood. “Alright. Once you’ve changed, we can head out. I’m not sure why you’ve got all that muscle in the first place, but we’ll have a jacket that fits.”

Increasingly, Jayce felt he was losing track of the conversation. Concentrating on what other people said was difficult when he got like this, and the weird double-talk they were using didn’t help. “What jacket? And you want to go now? I was kind of hoping I could clean up a little first.”

The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Yes, now. And you should absolutely not ‘clean up’. We’re going to put you in some spare clothes and you’re going to keep that beard, otherwise everyone from here to the fissures is going to know that the fop from the posters was skulking around the Undercity. If we’re quick, we’ll make it back here by sundown and you can take a nice bubble bath to clean off all the grime. Now hurry up.”

Marcus watched the streets hawkishly as they traversed the Undercity. He glared down everyone that so much as looked at them. Per his instructions, Jayce followed closely behind, the brim of his borrowed hat tilted as far down as possible. The people seemed to shrink away from them, either averting their gazes or curling up like dead leaves. It turned Jayce’s stomach.

“Is the Undercity not to your taste?” the sheriff asked dryly. Despite looking straight ahead, he picked up on Jayce’s unease. “Not what you were expecting, I take it.”

“It’s…different down here than I remember,” Jayce replied. “Things seem tense.”

Marcus scoffed. “When were you down here? Did you come down on a dare or something?”

“No, no there was this pawnshop I used to visit, further down.” It felt like a lifetime ago—before the explosion, before the trial, before Viktor—when Jayce was still a student nervously walking these same streets. The first time down, Jayce jogged his way around, trying to be in and out quickly before realizing it only drew more attention. It wasn’t a smooth experience by any means; he frequently got lost, could hear snickering every time he stumbled, and lost his wallet, once. He’d had to lie to Councilor Kiramman about where that money went. And yet, Jayce felt ill at ease trailing behind Marcus in a way he never did back then. “I wonder if that guy remembers me.”

Marcus’s posture suddenly tensed, and his voice took on a much uglier tone. “If it’s the one I’m thinking of, he died due to gang violence years ago. Happens all the time. The people down here will eat you up if you let your guard down.”

Perhaps Marcus knew better than he did, but when Jayce chanced a glance at a small child, frozen in fear, he felt far more like predator than prey.

Their journey took them deep into the Undercity, beneath the Promenade, beneath the Entresol, down into its heart. They were, in fact, heading in the general direction of the old pawnshop, but the closer they got, the less of it Jayce recognized. The landmarks he had used back in the day to find his way to Benzo’s were nearly all unrecognizable or missing entirely. The Uppercity had also undergone many changes, but the recent prosperity hadn’t reached down there, judging by the boarded up shops and gaunt beggars. Jayce was scared to think about what had happened to that kid who worked at the shop, assuming he hadn’t also been—

Anyways.

They came to a stop in front of a building with a giant, frankly terrifying neon green eye dominating the front. Written in the “iris” was, presumably, the establishment’s name: the Last Drop, and judging by the frothy mug at its center, they probably served alcohol. Jayce could feel the pulse of music from ten feet away.

Marcus gave one last look at their surroundings before heading in, and Jayce could only timidly trail behind. The inside of the establishment was even more chaotic than the music implied—dozens and dozens of people crammed into a too-small space, clad in a cacophony of bright, mismatched clothing and tattoos. It was dimly lit inside, but a rainbow of glowing lights were dotted throughout the room. And, of course, the music that had been palpable outside was downright deafening inside.

Jayce had never liked loud parties when he was an Academy student, and was discovering that that still held true. Hopefully he wouldn’t need to come back; trying to follow Marcus through the crush of bodies was some sort of torture he’d never dreamed of prior. Too many colognes, perfumes, leathers, cottons, metals, flashing lights, voices, baselines—

If Jayce let out a tiny whimper, then no one had to know. The music swallowed it up easily.

Fortunately, once they were roughly halfway up the stairs, the crowd came to an abrupt end. The second floor of the Last Drop felt almost like an entirely separate building; up there, the gentle, warm lighting and empty hallways allowed Jayce to get a better look at the building. The wooden floor was clean, arranged into a branching geometric pattern and overlaid with a simple rug. The walls might have been white once upon a time, but were visibly tinted by years of smoking, making the paint closer in color to its wooden trim. It would’ve almost been cozy, if not for the still-audible music, the sour-faced woman guarding a door, and the concerningly dark stain on the floor they hadn’t bothered to cover up.

The woman by the door looked deeply unimpressed by them. In fairness, she looked like a difficult woman to impress: tall and buff, with a prosthetic arm unlike any Jayce had ever seen. Prosthetics topside were much rarer to begin with—Jayce had seen more during their walk to the Last Drop than he normally saw in an entire year topside. The ones that did exist were designed for subtle aesthetics, which his mother’s prosthetics embodied perfectly. They were crafted from a silver alloy, meant to give her as much of her previous functionality as possible, while still allowing a simple pattern for aesthetics purposes: his father’s proudest works. The arm he saw now, however, loudly asserted its presence, and promised all sorts of functions beyond that of an organic arm. Jayce was downright enchanted, yearning to get a closer look, but his manners and common sense won out. He kept his distance.

Marcus removed his hat. “Is Silco in? I’ve brought him a customer,” he said, jerking a thumb at Jayce.

Silco? The industrialist? It made sense, Jayce supposed. An industrialist would have the resources for large scale medical research.

The woman by the door took a drag off of a fat cigar. “You’re in luck. Silco’s in, and I’m sure he’ll be glad to see you. Interesting customer you’ve brought today.”

It seemed she had recognized him, despite the outfit and stubble. Jayce could only hope that no one else had. She knocked on the door. Jayce couldn’t hear the reply over the music from downstairs, but she opened it. 

Silco’s office was cozy, to Jayce’s surprise. All of the Councilor’s offices he had ever been to sprawled and gleamed aggressively, firmly establishing the wealth that had gone into them with severe, white furniture and overwhelming amounts of gold. The room he had stepped into was certainly not cramped, but the sturdy wooden desk took up a significant chunk of the space, and the large, swirling window behind it didn’t provide much lighting, given the lack of sunlight.

The man sitting at the desk idly swirled a glass of spirits in his hand as he sized Jayce up. Marcus was only spared a brief glance, while Jayce found himself feeling like a specimen under a microscope. The man was smartly dressed, and his relaxed posture spoke of confidence. Jayce could almost think of him as just another business partner, were it not for his right eye. He had sustained some sort of major injury to his face, which any of Jayce’s usual business partners would have gone to great lengths to cover up, yet Silco left it in full view. Moreover, the black sclera was unlike any scarring he’d ever seen before. Jayce was unsure what kind of injury would cause something like that. The black eye stared at him. He stared back.

Jayce realized he was openly gawking at a stranger’s scarring and averted his gaze with an awkward cough.

“You must be Silco. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet me. I promise to make it worth your while.” Jayce held out his hand, hoping to smooth over his faux pas.

Silco did not take his hand. Instead, a sardonic grin unfurled across his face. “Oh, don’t worry. A visit from the Man of Progress himself alone is worth it. What can I do for you?”

Jayce’s hand retreated to his briefcase, where it began to drum an anxious rhythm. “Well, I was told that you can offer…certain business deals?”

“Oh, I certainly can,” Silco drawled. “But first, tell me: how are you finding Zaun?”

“Zaun?” Jayce parroted, confused.

Silco’s smile turned indulgent. “Oh, pardon me. Zaun is an old name for the Undercity—one I’m hoping to bring back into fashion. You see, I’m used to dealing with people’s servants; we so rarely get visits from Piltover’s high society. So, tell me, how are you enjoying your trip?”

Jayce didn’t have any pleasantries prepared for the situation, and his nerves were already frayed. The stress of the overstimulating club, the sleepless weeks of panicked research, the ongoing deceptions, and the fact that the love of his life was pregnant and dying—it was all coalescing into a great force, one that abruptly broke his verbal filter. “Well, um. Your music is really loud.”

Silco raised a single eyebrow.

“I like your office, that’s actually a beautiful lamp, really. I liked the swirls. But it’s been a little hard to concentrate on anything, with how loud the music was. Lots of loud stuff going on down here, can’t say I’m used to it. I usually spend fourteen hours a day in an underground room smaller than your bar. Ha ha. Sometimes I go to parties, but I don’t really like them much. Sorry, I’m not really high society, I just make a lot of money for Piltover so everyone pretends I am. It’s nice to be important, I guess. Or, well, it’s better than the alternative? I mean, I think I deserve it, I’ve done a lot for the city. Definitely more than someone like Hoskel. I don’t know what he does. I’m not sure I know what I do either anymore. I thought it was making the world a better place, but it doesn’t really seem better yet. It sure doesn’t seem better down here. No offense. I mean, it’s not your fault, the Council doesn’t really like people down here. Sorry. You probably knew that already. Have you guys ever thought of just, you know, doing your own thing?”

There was a deafening silence. Silco looked startled, his doorwoman suspicious, and Marcus was looking murderous. 

“Are you asking if Zaun has ever considered independence?” Silco finally asked, incredulous.

“Um,” Jayce said. “It was just a thought.”

“Just a thought,” Silco echoed, disbelieving.

Jayce was beginning to get the impression that he’d said something inappropriate. “A-anyway, let’s get back to business. I don’t want to waste any more of your time.”

“Yes, quite. Business,” Silco said, sounding dazed. He opened a drawer in the desk, and Jayce opened his briefcase. At the same time Jayce pulled out his first blueprint, Silco’s hand emerged, clutching three glowing, magenta cylinders. 

“What’s that? It kind of looks like Shimmer,” Jayce said before he could think better of it.

Silco stared, disbelieving. Then, his eyes turned to the blueprint in Jayce’s hand, and he began to frown. Finally, he slowly turned to look at Marcus.

“Shit,” said Marcus, who was suddenly looking very pale.

For the past few hours, Jayce had felt increasingly ill at ease. From the suspicious glances he got, to the snide comments that made no sense, to the location, to the very vague wording—everything had felt slightly off. Except, Jayce had never participated in legally dubious clinical research before and brushed off the feelings of unease as a very reasonable case of nerves. 

Silco’s eyes, bulging with rage, were locked onto Marcus. “What exactly did you come down here for, Mr. Talis?”

In no particular order, a series of dots connected in Jayce’s mind. Silco, the industrialist, sold Shimmer. Marcus, the sheriff, was helping him sell Shimmer. Caitlyn’s boss was working with a drug dealer. Jayce was in the office of a drug dealer. These drug deals were happening regularly. At least some other enforcers knew about this. Silco, the industrialist, the drug dealer, had just asked him a question. “Well, sir, I was told that there were, um, places in the Undercity—in Zaun?—where I could go to consult about medical research.” 

“ Medical —ah, I see. You were looking for Renata Glasc. Due to a comical misunderstanding, our dear sheriff has brought the Man of Progress, the most famous person in all of Piltover, who has direct connections to several members of the Council, directly into my office so that I might offer him drugs by mistake. And now I need to figure out how to resolve this. How…droll.”

The tension was becoming overbearing. Marcus gave Jayce a look of absolute loathing out of the corner of his eye and began pleading with Silco. “He said he wanted a business deal, I didn’t think, there have always been rumors—look at him! He looks high, he’s been shaking and scratching his skin off all day!”

A brief glance at his fingernails affirmed Marcus’s words—Jayce had indeed scratched himself raw again, without noticing. “Huh.”

Silco’s face was turning a deep shade of red, one that very nearly matched his shirt; his lips were curling into a snarl. “ You —”

The rest of the sentence was drowned out by a terrifying noise that nearly startled Jayce out of his chair. It started out as a raspy scream, coming from above his head, that broke off into rhythmic gasps. After a few moments, Jayce realized he was listening to someone cackling. Then, a few dozen pounds of teenager plunked on the desk in front of him, and he really did fall out of his chair.

“Oh my god,” the girl giggled. “This is the funniest shit that’s happened around here in ages. You’re the best, Marcus, I really needed this. The world’s prettiest nerd comes to a drug deal by mistake because you chose the wrong Chem-baron.” She pulled a gun out of her belt with a spin, bringing it to a stop when it came around to Jayce. “Anyways, we’re gonna kill him now, right?”

That broke Marcus out of his terrified daze; he drew his own gun on the girl. “Drop it or I’ll—” His threat was cut off by Silco’s doorwoman (bodyguard?) holding a blade to the sheriff’s throat that had emerged from her arm. A drop of blood beaded up where the tip prodded. And so they were trapped in place: Piltover’s most acclaimed scientist at a teenager’s gunpoint, teenager at the sheriff’s gunpoint, sheriff at the bodyguard’s knifepoint, and the unarmed Chem-baron who somehow looked the most murderous of them all.

“Stand down, all of you,” Silco hissed. “No one dies in my office without my permission.” Marcus was the first to lower his weapon, followed by the bodyguard. The teenager pursed her lips, and gave her gun a thoughtful twirl. “Jinx, that means you too,” Silco said crossly.

“Please,” Jayce begged. “Viktor—people still need me. I can’t .”

“Well, aren’t you noble.” The girl—Jinx—blew a raspberry, but finally stowed her weapon. “I think he looks like a tattletale, but it’s your funeral.”

“Jinx, out . I can handle this.” Silco pointed to the door. Jinx obliged with a roll of her eyes, but slammed said door on the way out. 

For a few moments, Jayce could only stare up at the ceiling, heartbeat hammering in his ears. Eventually, Silco’s irate expression came into view. “You can get up now, Mr. Talis.”

Jayce stood up on shaky legs. His breath was coming out ragged; he felt in serious danger of passing out, but the woman that had held Marcus at knifepoint not two minutes prior picked up the chair and shoved Jayce onto it.

Meanwhile, Marcus’s fear was curdling into rage. “Silco, if this idiot had died, both our heads would be rolling by the end of the day. Your little psycho nearly blew out the brains that keep the whole damn economy going. She’s not some little helpless little sum-snipe anymore, she could have damned us all.”

Silco’s look was venomous. “Those are bold words coming from the man who walked Piltover’s cashcow into the wrong office. You don’t have the excuse of madness for something this moronic.”

A month ago, Jayce would’ve been chomping at the bit to report both of them. For the past several years, he’d heard horror stories of how Shimmer was destroying the Undercity from the inside-out. Some of the very few recent papers on health in the Undercity he’d managed to get his hands on showed how many lives it had ravaged in just a few years. And Marcus—Jayce had long had his suspicions about the efficacy of Piltover’s enforcers, although he’d never imagined anything this extreme. And this was Caitlyn’s boss, he remembered with horror. He knew he was getting involved in some dubious business when he came down here, but this felt like going into an old house, expecting cobwebs, only to fall through the floorboards.

The problem was—who would he report this to? If it was only a matter of admitting that he’d been intending to skirt the law, Jayce would have been willing to suck it up and take the punishment. But he couldn’t go to the enforcers with this. He didn’t want to go to the Council with this—he didn’t trust them to treat the Undercity fairly. And even if he did find someone to go to someone about this, it would be putting all his work to save Viktor at risk.

“I won’t talk,” Jayce said.

“Oh good,” Silco replied, “you’ve got more sense than our dear sheriff.”

Marcus was unconvinced. “He could just be saying that and intending to rat us out as soon as we turn our backs.”

“I won’t talk,” Jayce repeated, firmer this time. “I didn’t come down here for fun. I’ve got something more important going on.”

Marcus’s face was stuck in a fierce scowl, but Silco was far more interested in Jayce’s paperwork, nearly forgotten in the chaos.

“I see,” he drawled, tracing the handwriting. “Well, it pains me to hear that I’m not a priority for the man of progress, but I will find a way to survive. Now, unless there are any other comical misunderstandings to clear up, please leave my office.” Jayce and Marcus both stood. “Not you, Marcus. We need to talk . Sevika, could you escort Mr. Talis back to Piltover?”

Neither Marcus nor Sevika looked particularly happy about the situation, but when Jayce quickly grabbed his things and made for the door, Sevika followed and Marcus did not.

Right outside the door, not even pretending she hadn’t been listening, was Jinx. To his horror, she had a couple of Jayce’s papers (that he hadn’t noticed were missing in the first place) and waggled them triumphantly in front of his face. “Ooh, are you in trouble?” she taunted.

Fortunately, Sevika snatched them back and handed them to Jayce without looking. “You’ve caused enough trouble for today, Jinx. Don’t push your luck.”

Jayce stuffed them into his suitcase and clutched it protectively to his chest. His blueprints had seen more than enough ill treatment for the day and were going to stay where they belonged.

As they descended the stairs back to the bar, the crowd began to part to make way for Sevika. The people too dazed (high? Drunk? Both?) to notice her approach would be pulled out of the way well in advance. She commanded attention without even trying. It was a sharp contrast to Marcus’s arrival, where they both had to push their way through the dancing crowd. Without warning, she reached out, yanked an enormous brimmed hat off of one of the dancers, a poncho off of another, and handed them to Jayce. “Take off that stupid get-up and put this on instead. I don’t feel like being seen with a Piltie.”

Jayce obliged without complaint, and left the borrowed clothing in an awkward heap by the door.

After about five minutes of silently making their way back to the bridge, Jayce spoke. “That’s an impressive arm,” he said.

“Thanks. If you want one, I can help you make room for it.”

He grabbed at his arm. “I’m…fine, thank you. Just admiring the craft.”

She sneered. “Us trenchers are capable of a little ingenuity too.”

“I know that!” Jayce protested. “My partner is also…from here, and he’s the smartest man I know. Hextech wouldn’t have been possible without him.”

“I don’t see how smart he could possibly be, if he’s letting you waltz into Chem-baron’s offices.”

Jayce coughed. “Well, this didn’t exactly come up in conversation.”

“Oh, you’re just really stupid then, huh?” She punctuated her question by taking out a cigar and lighting it. Jayce didn’t have a response.

A few minutes of tense silence stretched between them as they walked. Her cigar burned down, leaving a tiny trail of ash to mark their path. “So, what do you want with Renata anyways?”

Jayce dug through his frazzled mind in search of his sales pitch. “I’m trying to address a number of health crises in this city, including prenatal health issues and diseases caused by environmental factors. Clinical trials at the Academy can take many, many years to complete, while people continue to die. I am looking for a research partner in the Undercity who can help me in a more timely manner.” Jayce was unsure he’d ever get to even meet the person he’d written that pitch for. They were apparently a Chem-baron, anyway.

Sevika looked at him quizzically. “Those aren’t Piltover health issues. Those are Zaun issues.”

“I know,” Jayce said.

“You wouldn’t make any money that way.”

“I know.”

“So, what? You’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”

“No,” Jayce replied. “I’m doing this for entirely selfish reasons. I only really want to help one person, this is just the only way I can figure out how. I didn’t even know about any of this before a few weeks ago.”

Sevika came to a stop. She heaved a deep sigh. “Renata wouldn’t have seen you today, anyway. She won’t be available for a while. If you’re serious about this, show up at 6 pm on the middle bridge in three days. I can get you a meeting with her.”

Jayce blinked. “You’d do that?”

“I want 50 cogs in exchange, but if you want to stick your neck out to save babies or whatever, then by all means. I don’t care why you’re doing this, just that you are.” She flicked her cigar to the ground. “Don’t be late.”

Jayce nodded. Not another word was spoken between them.

At 4 am, after hours of sleepless pacing, Jayce looked at the calendar on his wall. The next day (technically the current day) had “DINNER WITH MOM” written on it in pen.

“Oh yeah,” he mumbled to himself. “Oops.”

Chapter Text

“Between this and seeing my father’s decaying corpse again, I would’ve preferred the corpse,” Viktor said, staring morosely at the teal gem.

Sky choked on her own spit. “Pardon?”

“A corpse you can bury,” he continued. “And, eh, technically speaking I could bury this too. But it wouldn’t solve anything.” He glared at it. “I’m mere months from death; I thought I would go to the grave regretting that I hadn’t done enough for the Undercity. Instead, I’ll die knowing I’ve doomed it. What hope do I have of even beginning to fix this?”

She put her hand on his shoulder, and tugged gently, trying to pull his gaze away from the synthetic crystal. “Slow down and explain before you get apocalyptic. Didn’t Clan Ferros make this?”

Viktor went to card his hand through his hair, only to discover it was too short for that now. After the mishap with the prototype, Viktor had been forced to pay a visit to the barber, and so, courtesy of the latest and greatest in grooming technology, Viktor was now sporting just under an inch of hair on his head. It was disorienting, like everything in his damn life as of late. He sighed.

“This one may have been made by Clan Ferros, but it is my invention,” he clarified. “It was obvious early on that the crystals were going to be a limiting factor in our work. Between their unstable nature and the difficulty of acquisition, they are, eh, not an ideal material, to say the least. I thought I had cracked our problem when I discovered it might be possible to synthesize stable crystals from readily available materials. They were not as powerful as the natural ones, no, but if there was functionally no limit to our supply, then what did it matter? And I was right, it was possible. Only, there was nothing functional about the process itself. I had anticipated there might be some extraneous output from the reaction, but I was totally unprepared for what happened when we ran it.” Subconsciously, he balled his fits. “Producing a single crystal filled the entire lab with smoke, top to bottom. The mountain Ms. Ferros promised us could fill the entire Undercity..”

Sky winced. “Maybe… they came up with a version that doesn’t do that?”

“If Clan Ferros has such geniuses in their employ, they wouldn’t be threatening us with violence in search of household appliances,” he deadpanned.

“Maybe they figured out a way to dispose of it safely?”

“Again. No such geniuses in their employ.”

“Maybe she was bluffing and they haven’t made them yet?”

A grimace twitched across Viktor’s face. “And maybe if I ask very nicely, Councilor Hoskel will donate his fortune to the Undercity. Maybe the sun will rise tomorrow on a world that’s fair. But it’s not something I’m going to count on.”

The pity in her gaze felt like a vice. “I know Viktor, I just…don’t want you to beat yourself up over this for the rest of your, um, your pregnancy.”

“You can just say the rest of my life, Sky. I understand that you’re trying to spare my feelings, but please. No diversions, no pretty lies—the city is already drowning in them. I won’t pad my casket with self-deception.”

Her face crumpled in defeat, eying the gem with a leery expression. Viktor had promised himself to show Sky the patience she had been showing him, especially given the possible dangers involved if they fell short of Clan Ferros expectations, but his patience with the entire world was fraying. Living in Piltover for over a decade had required immense patience; he couldn’t afford to be sensitive about his health or his upbringing without putting himself in danger. He took pride in his ability to listen to the most hateful sentences ever voiced without flinching. And yet, he would have to spend the last few months of his life unspooling into hysterics, and poor Sky would be his only witness.

She would understand, of course, and wouldn’t hold it against him, and he hated that.

After several more minutes of depressing staring contests with the synthetic crystal, there was a knock on the door. “May I come in?” he heard Jayce ask. 

Viktor’s heart skipped a beat. Hastily, he stowed the stone in the cushioned case it arrived in, and hid it under his desk. Viktor made a shushing motion at Sky—Jayce would immediately understand the implications, and then Viktor’s deception would come crashing down. He grabbed the nearest schematic instead.

“Viktor? Hello?” Jayce called from behind the door; his voice had taken on a hint of trepidation. 

“Yes, Jayce, you may come in,” Viktor responded. The pounding of his heart made it difficult to speak casually. “Eh, unless you’ve come to offer me another test tube to live in. Then you may not.”

The door gently creaked open; Jayce popped his head in sheepishly. There was a trace of hurt in his expression; Viktor tried not to feel too guilty. “Actually,” Jayce said, scratching at his neck (which was looking raw again), “I was going to visit my mom for dinner tonight. I know you don’t normally go, but I’d really like you to come tonight, considering…” he gestured to Viktor’s midsection. “Considering.”

Viktor’s stomach lurched. He was beginning to wonder if Sky had some sixth sense about what he and Jayce would argue about next, or if they were just that depressingly predictable. “Jayce, I think it’s better if your mother doesn’t know about this. I don’t see the point.”

The face journey that Jayce went through was quite impressive. First, the blank confusion at the words that were failing to process; then, strained as he parsed through the implication; finally, a flicker of anger that he forced off his face with a drawn-out sigh. Perversely, Viktor found himself wishing that Jayce would just yell like he so obviously wanted to do. Watching Jayce swallow his frustration somehow made Viktor even angrier than he already was.

“Viktor,” he said, in a tone reserved for when he was genuinely trying not to goddamn lose it, “I understand that you want to keep this as private as possible. But I would like to let my mom know she’s going to be a grandmother sooner rather than later. The longer we take, the more upset she’s going to be. If she shows up for a visit a few months down the line and I’m holding a newborn, she’ll be pretty damn mad and I would not blame her.”

Viktor glared. “There’s a very simple solution to this: don’t be holding a newborn in the first place. I will set up for someone to adopt them, like I told you before, and none of this will be a concern.” There was also the fact that Mrs. Talis didn’t like Viktor, and was not going to be pleased by the news, but he’d decided to spare Jayce that knowledge a long time ago.

“I can’t believe you’re still on about that!” Jayce snapped. “No, I can actually, that’s the problem. You’re the smartest person I know and you can still be so dense sometimes—I want to be involved in this, I don’t care who knows or what they think about it, and my mother should be the first person to know.”

Viktor was getting ready to snap back about how Jayce has no idea what he’s talking about, that his reputation was everything right now for Hextech, that he’s being guided by sentimental impulse instead of reason, that just six years ago his own mother called him insane in public—

And suddenly he had a terrible idea. He sighed. “Alright Jayce, I’ll come and see your mother tonight. We’ll see what she has to say.”

Visibly, Jayce was shocked to have won the argument so quickly, but took it in stride. “Great, I’ll pick you up at 5:30 tonight. I’ll arrange for a carriage there; it’s a bit of a trek from your place to my mom’s house, and it’ll allow us a little privacy on the way there.”

There was a certain talent for redirection that Viktor had picked up over his years in Piltover. No one wanted to take orders from a trencher, regardless of the authority or expertise he held. As Heimerdinger’s assistant, trying to confront students about misbehavior could range anywhere from humiliating to downright dangerous when they decided that listening to him was beneath their dignity. Their childish power-tripping, however, meant that their guards were down. With a little careful timing, it was all too easy to dupe someone into saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Those consequences were inevitably much harsher than anything Viktor had the authority to inflict; there was a petty satisfaction to letting someone dig their own grave. 

Of course, this wasn’t the same at all. Jayce was driven by stubborn righteousness rather than disrespect, and the only danger he posed was to himself. Still, the concept was the same: if you don’t have the leverage, find someone who does. Viktor just hoped Jayce didn’t take it too hard.  

The man standing in front of Viktor was a stranger. A very, very pathetic looking stranger, at that.

His first proper bath in ages and a set of his nicer clothing couldn’t change the shock he felt, looking in the mirror. His new, close-cut hair style and splinted finger were minor details, the sort that warrant a second glance at most. It’s his face that looked alien to him—it contradicted itself. On one hand, the nutritional sludge had successfully forced a little weight onto his body, making Viktor look slightly less gaunt. The hormones he reluctantly agreed to abandon for the rest of his pregnancy (the rest of his life) had redistributed the new fat to his face. The ghost of his mother was starting to show in his features, terrifyingly. On the other hand, his failing lungs were starting to make themselves known. His skin was taking on a grey pallor, and there were tinges of blue in Viktor’s extremities. Constantly needing to wipe his mouth after coughing fits left his lips visibly chapped. His visibly failing health, too, reminded him of his mother. 

(However: the splotches of darker skin were just plain baffling—not to mention the unsightly swelling in unmentionable places. Pregnancy was an enigma.)

The outfit he’d chosen ameliorated the horror slightly by disguising the changes to the rest of his body. The black, unfashionably unfitted topcoat did a fantastic job of obscuring his figure. The fact that it was mid-autumn was a boon; if it was instead mid-summer, he would be risking heat stroke in such an outfit. It hid his swollen chest and belly to even the most keen-eyed passerby.

Unfortunately, it did nothing to solve the other problems his changing figure had caused. Viktor’s back brace could no longer safely fit, forcing him to rely solely on his implant and crutch. Between the loss of his brace, the new weight, and the strange changes to his ligaments, Viktor was barely ambulatory. Every time he walked, he found himself almost slumped over on his crutch, painfully shuffling forward. Sky did everything in her power to stop him from needing to walk, gently insisting that she fetch everything ‘so he could focus’. It wasn’t subtle, but the horrified look on her face when she watched Viktor try to walk was unbearable enough to keep him seated anyway. She had insisted on walking Viktor home, after Jayce left.

Sky had been so supportive of his choice to meet with Ximena, to finally let someone else in, which just made him feel worse about his plan for the evening. He sat on the edge of his bed, hoping for the stranger in his mirror to turn back into someone he recognized. 

Not that it would help.

A polite knock on the door pulled him out of his wallowing. “Just a moment,” he called. Getting up from a seated position took a minute now, and he didn’t want Jayce trying to get in. When Viktor moved into the apartment, he’d put his bed in the room closest to the entrance in order to minimize time elapsed between arriving home and collapsing onto his bed. He felt grateful for it now, as he hobbled towards the door.

Jayce had changed out of the clothes he’d been wearing that morning, and thankfully bathed as well. After he left that morning, a distinctly chemical smell had briefly hung in the air—somewhat familiar to Viktor, but not in a pleasant way, and definitely not the way someone should smell when visiting their mother. Especially not when they were going to give her some bad news. Instead he had on a simple button up and vest combination, something he could get away with, given how hot he ran. The vest was in house Talis colors, with a tiny version of their crest embroidered onto the breast. Unfortunately, the dark bags under his eyes and raw spots where he’d been scratching undermined the clean-cut look he was trying to achieve. Viktor could only hope that he would settle down soon.

“You look nice!” Jayce chirped. 

Viktor glared. He wasn’t in the mood for polite lies.

Jayce shrunk back a little. “Sorry, I guess we’re not—anyway, are you ready to go? I know I’m a little early, but I thought maybe we should drive a little slower than we normally do.”

Viktor hummed his assent. The past few months had involved more than enough vomiting for one lifetime, and carriages made him queasy at the best of times. He staggered towards the carriage, wobbling like someone three times his age, when he felt a solid warmth on his lower back—the familiar presence of Jayce’s steadying hand. The touch was unusually hesitant; Viktor supposed he had earned it with his recent aloof behavior. Against his better judgment, he gave into the touch, relaxing slightly into Jayce’s hand. Jayce also made sure to open the carriage door for him, and steady Viktor’s ascent into the carriage. He always treated Viktor like the refined socialite he should be dating, rather than a dying man from the Sump. It was one of the things about him that both endeared and frustrated Viktor.

And fuck, Viktor’s back really, really hurt. 

A few minutes into their ride, Viktor found the courage to let go of a little more of his hard-earned dignity. “Jayce, do you still have that, eh, chair?”

“Chair?” Jayce echoed, bewildered.

“The chair that you made for me. After my first surgery.”

“The chair that I—oh!” Realization flashed in Jayce’s eyes. “Yeah, I put it in our storage unit. If you want, I can swing by and grab it for you tomorrow?”

Viktor shook his head. “No, there’s actually something else I need from there, too, for my current project. I’ll get it myself.”

Jayce’s mouth curled into a tiny pout. Viktor did actually need to visit their storage unit—he had a sinking feeling that Clan Ferros had paid it a visit, and there was no telling what else had been tampered with. Unfortunately, Jayce seemed to be taking this personally. Admittedly, Viktor could understand; he, too, would be offended, being denied to see his hard work in action. He tried to offer a compromise.

“Perhaps you could come by later and see if it needs any tuning? It’s been down there a while, and you know the schematics best.” Viktor gave Jayce a wry smile, seeing him perk up. “And, I think you’ve earned an I-told-you-so.” That earned Viktor a flinch. The self-deprecation was meant to perk Jayce up a little, but his partner’s expression was downright wounded instead.

“Viktor, I never wanted—”

“Of course you didn’t,” Viktor interrupted, hastily. “No one wanted this. I just meant…I know I can be stubborn sometimes.”

Jayce shrugged. “And I can be pushy and overbearing. It’s fine.”

That wasn’t what Viktor had meant, but Jayce was visibly shutting down. Bringing up a years-old argument was hardly going to cheer him up. Viktor offered the only thing he could—his emaciated, clammy hand for Jayce to hold. Jayce didn’t reach out to take it, but the moment skin touched skin, Jayce’s larger hand enveloped his, viper-strike fast. There was no eye contact, just a tyrannically gentle grasp around his uninjured hand. He chanced a look at Jayce’s face—dull-eyed, listless—and did not look again until they arrived.

Ximena Talis’s home was a place that Viktor had idly imagined from time to time; he kept some half-formed notion of it in his mind for when Jayce described a childhood escapade, or relayed something his mother told him over dinner. Walking in, Viktor realized he’d subconsciously overestimated house Talis’s wealth by a good bit. In his defense, he didn’t actually have a good frame of reference for Piltover’s middle class—most of his experience consisted of bouncing between the cheapest apartments available and the elite mansions his career had taken him to. The building was two stories, and, if he had to guess, about the size of Heimerdinger’s office. (He had no idea how big Heimerdinger’s actual home was, but the yordle seemed to live out of his office-cum-lab anyway).

The most striking feature of the Talis family home was its clutter: a dozen picture frames, two bookshelves, four plants and five chairs visible from the doorway, all arranged in a way that spoke of practicality rather than organization. The mansions Viktor had visited had a range of aesthetics, some leaning minimalist, some heavily extravagant, but they were all so meticulously neatly aligned. Regardless of whether there were three chairs or thirty, they were all part of matching sets, and all arranged in neat rows. Moreover, the smell of dinner was permeating the entire house—a larger house would situate its kitchens well away from the entryway, but here it was close enough that Viktor could hear the murmur of a pot cooking. He recognized the aroma from leftovers Jayce had shared with him in the past. Unfortunately, his stomach lurched at the smell; for the past two months, any strong smell made Viktor nauseous, no matter how pleasant he usually found it. He clenched his fist around his crutch, tightly, to suppress a gag. 

It was, of course, right as his face scrunched up in badly repressed nausea that Ximena Talis came out to greet her guests. “Viktor! You made it! I’m so glad, we so rarely get to see each other, I don’t think I’ve seen you since Progress Day, and that was—goodness, that was months ago! Jayce said you might be coming, so I made chicken rice, since you like it so much.”

The first shock was her hands on his shoulders—Viktor knew that she didn’t really like him, and yet she still managed to greet him with such enthusiasm, to be just as physically affectionate as her son. The second shock was that she knew his food preferences. “I, eh, didn’t realize I’d ever mentioned my feelings on chicken rice to you.”

“Oh, no, Jayce told me,” she explained, gently leading them both towards the kitchen.

Viktor shot his partner a poisonous look. “My apologies, Mrs. Talis. When Jayce so generously share your cooking with me, I did not realize he was relaying my thoughts to you. You are a wonderful cook, of course; if I enjoyed anything less, it was a reflection of my own peculiarities.” Jayce, damn him, looked very hard like he was trying not to laugh. Viktor had done him the favor of helping finish his mountains of leftovers, yet Jayce had turned around and ratted him out to his poor mother, who didn’t like Viktor to begin with— 

“No, no. I asked Jayce what you thought, so I knew what to make more of!”

—It occurred to Viktor that he might have been deceived about Jayce’s leftovers situation. Bastard.

The dining table was moderately sized—scuffed here and there, but still sturdy—yet absolutely dominated by the pot of steaming-hot chicken rice, freshly cooked. The rice gleamed an appetizing golden color, dotted with peas, peppers, and those exquisitely salty olives that Viktor liked so much. No less than half a dozen chicken thighs, golden-brown and crispy, were nestled into the bed of rice. Fresh cilantro leaves, roughly chopped, finished off the top-most layer, and a tiny bowl of lime wedges flanked the pot, sitting at the ready. 

Viktor’s traitorous stomach amended its previous position, and decided that perhaps he was hungry, after all.

Mrs. Talis gestured towards the table; as if by some unspoken cue, Jayce leapt forward to pull a chair out for Viktor. “Would you like me to make a salad too? Can I get you something to drink?”

“Um,” Viktor said. He struggled with being the center of attention. “Just, eh, just water is fine. Please Mrs. Talis, you didn’t need to go through all this trouble on my behalf. I don’t want to impose.” Jayce immediately got up to fetch water. He seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. Bastard.

“It’s no imposition at all,” she promised. “Jayce and I both like to eat this—although his father liked it best of all. After a long day at the forge, he could just about eat half the pot by himself.” She smiled fondly, drifting into memories. It had not escaped Viktor’s notice that many of the pictures on the wall featured a man with Jayce’s thick eyebrows, long face, and strong chin. The amount of clutter in the Talis family home was nearly enough to make one forget that only one person lived there.

A glass of water was shoved into Viktor’s hand; he took a long drink, eager to avoid discussing dead family. When he turned to thank Jayce, he finally noticed his partner’s expression: a bug-eyed rictus of terror. Something must have shown on Viktor’s face, because Ximena also turned to look at Jayce—who was suddenly on the other side of the kitchen getting himself something to drink as well.

She tried to reroute the conversation, in spite of her son’s suspicious behavior. “So, Viktor, Jayce told me you weren’t feeling well. How are you doing now? Did you get the chance to try any of the soup?”

“I had a little,” he lied. “It was very good, thank you. And, eh, my health. About that.” Jayce was still standing in the kitchen, doing a bad job of looking busy while he peeked at Viktor, over his shoulder. Viktor nodded towards the table—it was as good a time as any to break the news.

Jayce finally took his seat at the table. The glass of water he had taken so long ‘preparing’ visibly shook with how hard his hands were trembling. “So, um, uh,” he started, unable to meet his mother’s increasingly concerned gaze. His painful attempt smile had returned. “So me and Viktor are having a baby?”

Mrs. Talis’s mouth parted, silent with shock.

Viktor cut in “No, Jayce, we are not having a baby. I am giving birth in a few months, which will inevitably kill me, and you are going to be reasonable about this.” 

Jayce was shaking his head before Viktor finished. “No, there’s no ‘inevitable’ about that. And even if—” his voice cracked “—even if something like that did happen, I’m not just going to dump them on the nearest doorstep, I’m not some…some kind of asshole.”

“Jayce, this has nothing to do with your moral fiber—it’s not about you. It’s simply not a good idea.” Viktor took a bracing breath, the deepest his lungs could still manage. “And I think your mother will agree with me.”

Jayce’s head whipped around to look at his mother instead. It was a low blow, Viktor knew, but he was running out of options. Even putting everything else aside—the differences in their social standings, their histories, their health, and so on—the fact of the matter was that in six months, Viktor would be dead and Jayce would be alive. He had no concrete way of stopping Jayce making the worst mistake of his life from the grave, but his mother (who didn’t like Viktor to begin with) held much more sway. Early on in their partnership, Jayce had spent a tipsy evening explaining his complicated dynamic with his mother, and how badly it hurt when she wasn’t on his side.

Really, perhaps it was better that Jayce bite the bullet sooner rather than later. His mother would never accept the child, and Jayce would need all the time he could get to come to terms with his position. He might not forgive Viktor for it, but that, too, would benefit them all in the long run.

“That’s not—Mom, you always encouraged…” Jayce’s gaze flicked back to Viktor for a moment, then back to his mother. Beads of sweat began to form on his flushed temples. “Mom, you don’t think that, right?”

“Jayce, this is a lot to take in.” She looked uncomfortable.

“I know this isn’t ideal, but…come on, Mom.” Jayce’s breath was coming unevenly, as the unease in his expression slid into outright betrayal.

Viktor tried to redirect Jayce’s attention. “You need to let go of this, Jayce.”

It didn’t work. His expression remained fixed on his mother, despairing. “Mom?” he tried again, voice watery.

“Let’s discuss this after dinner. You’ll feel better once you’ve eaten.” The answer was painfully evasive.

Jayce stood abruptly. His chair scraped loudly against the wooden flooring. “I’m not hungry anymore,” he mumbled, making for the door.

The situation was deteriorating in a way Viktor hadn’t planned for. Unsteadily, he tried to rise from his seat. “Jayce, please, where are you going?” Mrs. Talis asked. 

“For a walk!” he bellowed. Viktor froze, halfway out of his chair—he’d only ever heard Jayce raise his voices in emergencies. Silence hung heavily in its wake. “…I’ll be back later. Eat without me,” he added, quieter. The door closed behind him with enough force to clatter the house’s many photographs against its walls.

Viktor felt a hand on his shoulder, gently pushing him back down into his seat. “Sit, Viktor.” Mrs. Talis gave him a weak smile. “If he says he’ll be back, he’ll be back. In the mean time, I’d prefer not to eat all this by myself.”

In his heart, Viktor wanted to chase after Jayce.  However, his heart was outvoted by his feet, back, lungs, and stomach. He sagged into the worn dining chair and hoped that Jayce wouldn’t take too long. Mrs. Talis gave his shoulder an affirming squeeze, and gestured toward the glistening post of chicken rice. 

They both startled at the distinctive sound of a trash can being struck, followed by a muffled shout. The chicken thigh Viktor was trying to transfer to his plate slipped from the serving spoon onto the table. “Shit!” He looked guiltily at Mrs. Talis. “Sorry.”

“It’s no problem,” she replied. A new piece was swiftly placed onto his plate in its stead, followed by a generous helping of rice. It made Viktor feel like a child, but perhaps that was what he deserved for ruining their family dinner.

The chicken was moist and fragrant, and the rice pleasantly spiced. Viktor hummed in appreciation when he bit down on an olive, releasing a burst of brine. It was the most flavor to grace his mouth in weeks. “This is delicious, Mrs. Talis,” he said between hearty bites of the chicken.

She smiled. “I should hope so, with how fast you’re eating.” 

Viktor paused mid-chew. He was much hungrier than he thought. “Pardon me,” he murmured sheepishly into the half-eaten chicken.

“Oh no, I’m not trying to nag you about table manners. I’m just glad you can finally try my cooking while it’s still fresh out of the oven.” Her eyes drifted, pensive. “I just wish I could still make it the way I had it growing up, but Piltover just doesn’t have all the same spices. There was this oil we used, made it such a lovely color. I can’t remember the name…”

“That sounds nice,” he responded politely.

“Oh, it was. Your family was from outside of Piltover too, right? What do they like to cook?”

Oh god, Jayce didn’t tell her about his parents. “Whatever we could afford.”

“Oh, pardon me. Surely they can afford more now, with your current job?”

“They died before I met Jayce.”

Silence constricted the room, taut, like a bandage around a gash. Viktor always hated an awkward silence. “Listen, Mrs. Talis. I’m aware that you don’t really care for me. And I’m guessing that tonight, eh, hasn’t really changed that. I’m alright with that.”

She stared. “What…makes you say that?”

Please don’t draw this out, he pleaded silently. “The night we first met, when Jayce introduced us, you looked—” Terrified. Revolted. Angry. “—unhappy. As I said, it’s fine. You don’t have to pretend when Jayce isn’t here.”

“I…” Mrs. Talis folded her hands on the table. Viktor’s mind ran wild. I hate you. You’ve ruined my son’s social prospects. You’re corrupting him, making him an outsider like you. You served your purpose, you should have quit while you were ahead. “I owe you an apology.”

He stared.

“I was scared that night. I almost lost my son, my only family left, and he was furious with me. He just ran off, didn’t tell me where, and the next day he came back telling me how you convinced him to break into a Councilor’s office and almost blew it up. I thought for sure the Council was going to reverse their decision, that I was going to lose my boy even after what I did. I did hate you, a little bit,” she admitted quietly.

“You had every right to,” Viktor said with a shrug. There was no reason for her to know how close she came to losing her son to a ledge, and certainly no reason for Viktor to be the one who told her. “I have been hated for worse reasons.”

“No, Viktor—I need you to understand.” To his horror, she looked near tears. “It’s just…Jayce has always attracted the wrong kind of people. He’s smart, he’s strong, he’s driven, but he’s more than most people can handle. People look at someone like that and see someone easy to use, because he’s so capable and so lonely. There’s nothing I can do about it, and it shames me to say this, because I don’t always understand him either.” She sniffled, loudly. “So I was scared that you saw Jayce as someone you could use. But I was wrong, and I’m so glad that I was. You and Jayce are two of a kind. You understand him in a way that no one, not even his mother ever could, and you’ve made him really happy. He still carries so much hurt, so many expectations, but he’s confident and open and happy in a way he never was, before. You’ve done so much for my son, and I’m sorry I let you think I feel anything other than gratitude towards you.” Her eyes were wet with tears as she finished her confession.

And yet, Viktor’s mouth was dry. He’d been ready to soothe her guilty conscience, to tell her he didn’t mind her discomfort and distrust, that there was no reason for her to keep up an awkward charade of politeness. He wasn’t prepared for a sincerely offered olive branch, laden with unearned praise.

“I…” he trailed off. “That’s, eh, very kind of you, but I worry that you are mistaking the effects of success on Jayce as my doing. Anyone would feel more confident after accomplishing what he has, lab partner or no. I too, am proud of what we have accomplished together.” Mostly. Not enough. Not nearly enough given how little time I have.

Her eyebrows drew together, concerned. “Viktor, what kind of relationship do you think you have with Jayce?”

The question’s very specific phrasing felt like a trap. “We are lab partners, with a strong rapport and deep respect for one another.”

“And you’re pregnant with his child.”

Viktor felt his ears turn pink. He wasn’t enthused to be explaining his and Jayce’s friends-with-benefits situation to the latter’s mother. “Yes, well. We are also two adult men with certain needs and limited free time.” 

“I see,” she replied evenly.

Worry prickled in Viktor’s gut. “Did he…tell you something else?”

The several seconds it took her to respond made Viktor’s hands feel cold and clammy around his fork. “…No, he said the same thing,” she finally conceded. Relief washed over Viktor, but he couldn’t help but notice how sad she sounded as she said that. “I’m sorry, Viktor. I didn’t mean to pester you while you’re trying to eat. But please, consider talking about this with him.”

And so the rest of the meal passed in silence. 

As Viktor was polishing off a second helping of the rice, there was a timid knock at the door. “Jayce?” Mrs. Talis called out. For a heart-stopping moment, the fear struck Viktor that it wasn’t Jayce at the door, but an enforcer come to tell them he had managed to get in trouble within the past half hour. Fortunately, Jayce did indeed shuffle in, although Mrs. Talis’s sigh of relief made Viktor wonder if she had been thinking something similar.

Jayce, however, did not look relieved to be home. He looked gutted. There was a very mild limp to his gait as he entered the living room, making Viktor suspect he’d lost the fight with the trash can they heard earlier. He returned to his designated chair with a resigned thump. 

“Would you like to eat now, Jayce?” Mrs. Talis asked, gently. Jayce shook his head. “Alright, then I’ll put the rest of this in the ice box, and we can talk.”

“I’ll do it,” Jayce mumbled, taking the pot before she could get out of her seat. His mother cast a worried glance after him as he mechanically packed the leftovers away. He didn’t say anything when he returned to the table, just stared at his mother expectantly.

“Please,” Mrs. Talis began, “I would like for both of you to tell me what’s been going on and what you’re planning to do, without interrupting each other or arguing this time.” 

Viktor and Jayce made eye contact over the table, waiting for the other to speak. Viktor knew that if he spoke first, it would give Jayce the opportunity to counter his words, and that Jayce was likely thinking the same. Eventually, Viktor decided to let Jayce ‘win’ and speak first. After all, it didn’t matter which order they spoke in—Viktor felt confident that Mrs. Talis would agree with him, in the end.

“A little under a month ago, I found out I was pregnant, despite being told for many years that I was infertile. Due to my pre-existing health issues, I am unlikely to survive. It is too late to reverse the damage that has already been done, and I was never going to live a long life to begin with—” he saw Jayce’s nostrils flare, but his partner remained silent “—so I have decided to carry to term, and finish as much work as possible in the time I have left. I plan for the child to be adopted out to a suitable family, and I will rest easily knowing that Jayce will continue my life’s work.” Viktor tried not to look at Jayce’s stricken expression. 

Mrs. Talis nodded carefully, before turning to her son. “And you, Jayce?”

“I don’t—ever since Viktor told me he was pregnant and that it, um, was a danger to his health, I’ve been working on medical uses for Hextech. If Hextech can transport ships and fire lasers, I see no reason it can’t handle a disease. I’ve already made a lot of progress. And I want to take care of my child, no matter what happens, but—” his voice cracked. He swallowed, hard, before continuing. “But you two both think I’m crazy and can’t be trusted with a child, apparently.”

She flinched. “Jayce, sweetheart, I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“That’s not what you said at my trial,” he spat back.

“That’s not fair, I was just doing what I thought was safest for you at the time.”

He scoffed. “You didn’t trust me. And you still don’t.”

Viktor hastily cut in. “Jayce, I don’t think you’re crazy, you know I respect you more than anyone else in this city, but being sane doesn’t make you ready to be a single parent, either. We need to be reasonable, Jayce.”

“Viktor—” 

“May I speak?” Mrs. Talis cut in.

Jayce and Viktor exchanged glances—they both had bad habits of forgetting that other people existed when they were in conversation. Viktor nodded at her, sheepishly.

She stroked her prosthetics, nervously. “Did you have someone in mind to adopt the child?”

“Not yet, but…” he floundered. “But people do this all the time. It’s not as if children are being left to wander the streets up here, there’s…procedures.” 

The expression on Mrs. Talis’s face was one of profound pity: the kind reserved for someone blind to how deeply in trouble they were. It was an expression that Viktor was used to—people often assumed ignorance from him, about academia, about Piltover’s high society, even about his own health. Open smugness was a luxury he could rarely afford, but he did get a private kick out of proving those people wrong. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, Viktor didn’t actually know much about adoption in Piltover. It was just one of the city’s many functions that existed without really pertaining to him. People in Piltover took out loans, sued each other, got married, got divorced, and produced mountains of paperwork as they did so. Viktor had only a very vague idea of how it all worked, but since he had no plans to do any of those things, he hadn’t wasted any thought about it. The city’s legal systems simply existed, in the same way that his apartment’s plumbing did: neither warranted closer inspection as long as they didn’t inconvenience him.

Viktor had a sneaking suspicion that his incuriosity was going to be his downfall. 

“I don’t know how it worked where you grew up, but the system here, it’s not pleasant. Jayce’s father and I, we looked into it once, but it—” 

“You looked into adopting?” Jayce blurted out, bewildered. “You always told me you didn’t want more than one child.”

"It was a difficult thing to explain, and we didn’t want to get your hopes up. Both your father and I grew up with siblings, and we wanted that for you, too, but your birth was…difficult, so we looked into adoption instead, but it wasn’t what we expected. First they asked us all these questions, but they were about our family histories, and where I came from. They didn’t like that I wasn’t from Piltover, that we were a minor house, and told us we couldn’t look at all of the children. They wouldn’t tell us where most of the children came from, and when they did, the adoption fee was higher. For some children they would tell us that the baby came from a healthy family, and others they didn’t say anything about at all, just that they cost less. We were very sorry for some of those children, but it felt more like buying a pet and we couldn’t go through with it.”

Jayce was slack-jawed in shock. Viktor felt sick—with shame, with horror, with hatred; it was criminally naive of him to think that any child of his would end up anywhere but the clearance bin for the crime of being born to a crippled trencher. Instinctively, he wrapped his arms around his midsection. How stupid he was, thinking that perhaps infants would be safe from their disgust.

Mrs. Talis delivered her next words as gently as she could. “I know this must all be very hard on both of you, and that you have a lot going on. But I don’t know if you’re thinking enough about them in all of this. Part of having a child means considering how your actions will affect them in five, ten, twenty years, and it doesn’t seem like you have thought that through yet.”

Viktor knew he had already lost that argument, but Jayce wasn’t giving up yet. “Of course I’m thinking about that!” he replied hotly. “I’ve been working around the clock to make things better—for them, for Viktor, for everyone in this city—and to make sure they grow up with two parents. And I won’t let anything or anyone get in the way of that.”

It was Jayce’s stubborn conviction that he would make the world a better place that drew Viktor to him in the first place, the thing that had reshaped Viktor’s life. Now it felt like life’s final joke on him, for ever believing he could be involved in something great.

Mrs Talis sighed. “Oh, my darling boy, I know. I know you try so hard. But there’s so much more to it than that.” She reached out to cup her son’s cheek, thumb resting just under where tears were beginning to form. “You’re an important man now, you’ve done so much, and I’m so proud of you. But you don’t always seem to realize what that means.” Her gaze drifted away. “You have all these expectations and responsibilities that people have put on you, and when you’re raising a child, you have responsibilities to your child, too. Are you sure you can manage all of those? If you don’t spend enough time with them, it will hurt. But if you abandon your responsibilities to the city, that can hurt them too. Everyone will know them as your child, so anything you do will reflect on them. And, if things…don’t work out—” she briefly glanced at Viktor, “—are you ready to do all that alone? While you’re grieving?”

Grieving. Even though their separation over the past few weeks had allowed Viktor to ignore it, he knew that Jayce would grieve after his death. Jayce felt things deeply, and took losses hard. Of course, his partner was also a resilient man, and Viktor trusted that he would recover without issue. But, the idea that Viktor would be the subject of that grief disoriented him. It felt unnatural, that other people could be emotionally invested in him. He knew that his parents had been, but that was a biological imperative for them, and they had both been dead for years. The knowledge that he could hurt Jayce with his absence was equal parts nauseating and...

Viktor made sure that his expression was neutral when Jayce shot him a terrified look. 

“I know I haven’t been a perfect mother,” Mrs. Talis admitted. “I’ve said things that have hurt you. I’m saying things that are you hurting you right now. I had to make a lot of hard choices, since long before you were born, and they weren’t always the right ones, but I promise I’ve always thought of you when I made them.” She took her son’s hand, holding it tenderly to her chest. “And now you have to do the same.”

For a moment, Jayce was silent. His throat bobbed the way it always did when he’d been worn down to the bone. “What,” he rasped, “are we supposed to do? You don’t think they should be adopted, but you don’t think I can raise them either. Where does that leave us?”

“I have a compromise in mind. I could raise them.”

Jayce’s mouth fell open in shock.

Viktor frowned, running through what she had said so far. “Wait, how does that fix the issue with Jayce’s public reputation?”

“Well, we lie, of course.” Viktor was learning a lot about Mrs. Talis tonight. “We can tell people that they’re from my side of the family, that there was an accident and I offered to take care of the child. People will care less about a cousin from your my side of the family, and Jayce can still be involved without raising suspicion.”

“But that would mean lying to everyone, including my own kid!” Jayce protested. “Do I even have any cousins on your side of the family?”

“Yes. You did at one point, at least.”

“What does that—you’ve never mentioned any of this!” Jayce yanked his hand away; he looked close to hysterical, and Viktor couldn’t blame him. For as long as Viktor had known him, Jayce had loved to wax poetic about his father’s side of the family and their contributions to Piltover, but said almost nothing about his mother’s side. Perhaps uncharitably, Viktor assumed that her side of the family was too boring, too embarrassing, or too unpleasant for Jayce to brag about. It never occurred to him that Jayce hadn’t been told anything about his mother either.

Mrs. Talis, for her part, looked gutted. “Jayce, I…” Her hands crumpled around the space where his had been. “I’m sorry. We should have had this conversation a long time ago.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll start at the beginning. I was born in Ixtal.”

“You—I—” Jayce stuttered. An offended groan escaped his mouth; he seemed unable to verbalize his outrage. If Jayce had been shocked before, he was gobsmacked now. For that matter, Viktor was also taken aback—Ixtal was notoriously mysterious. Its section in the Academy’s library was so small, that ‘reviewing Ixtali literature’ had become a euphemism for slacking off. The Academy had sent many expeditions into the region over the decades, but those had been so disastrous that…well, Viktor guiltily hoped that Mrs. Talis had never had the opportunity to hear those jokes. 

“I know it wasn’t right to keep this from you, but I couldn’t be sure it was safe. You’ve always been true to yourself, but this isn’t the sort of truth that can be shared with just anyone. Especially after your father died, I was scared that you would tell someone and that they would use it as an excuse to take you away from me. No, Jayce, please don’t interrupt, I know you have questions but I need to say my piece.”

Jayce responded with a tiny, shaky nod of his head, lips pressed firmly together. His hands clenched around the arms of his dining chair, white-knuckled, as if he could hold his world together that way.

On the other hand, Viktor wanted so badly to bolt from the room. Jayce was on the verge of an existential meltdown, his mother was getting ready to tear open some very old wounds, and Viktor was the awful bastard who had started it. “Mrs. Talis, I’m sure you don’t want me to hear this. I’ll give you and Jayce some privacy,” he said, trying to wobble out of his chair.

For the second time that night, she refused to let him escape. “No, Viktor, you should be here for this, too. If I’m going to ask you to trust me with your child, you deserve to know the truth as well.” Resigned, Viktor accepted his fate—if hearing Mrs. Talis spill her heart was his punishment, then so be it.

She spoke quietly, haltingly, as if each word was a test of endurance. “I was born in Ixtal, in a large…city, not too far from the capital. It was such a wonderful place—it was built in the middle of a lake, there were floating gardens between the roads, and the marketplace fit tens of thousands of people. The cities in Ixtal are all interconnected; our capital sits in the middle, and cities and town are arranged in circles that get smaller towards the outside. Our city was dedicated to the third—to the study of water magic.” The pauses in her speech, Viktor realized, were due to her translating ideas on the spot. Many of his neighbors growing up, especially the older ones, had the same issue when they spoke about the old country. “Every city was dedicated to a specific type of magic, except the capital, which was dedicated to all magic. Everything we did was based around magic. We were governed by…our strongest mages, the Yun Tal. They had to pass difficult tests, but after that, their authority was absolute.”

“My father didn’t agree with that. Sometimes you remind me of him very much, Jayce.” She paused to take a deep breath. “He said that even though our family only built fishing boats, our work was important too, and magic didn’t give anyone the right to be a bully. One of the Yun Tal who governed our area could be very cruel. When I was 14…something happened. Some sort of fight. I never found out what happened, and that pains me to this day. I went to the market with my mother, and when we came home, the mage was standing in front of our house with a broken nose. He told us that my father was dead and we would all be sent into exile.”

Jayce flinched at the last word.

“We didn’t have prisons like Piltover does. Instead, there were tiny villages at the very edge of Ixtal where criminals and their families were sent to live in exile. The people of Ixtal aren’t allowed contact with outsiders—we were always taught they didn’t exist, that all of humanity lived within our borders—so living in exile meant living as far away from everyone and everything as possible. It took us weeks to walk there from our old home, and we were only allowed to bring what we could carry.”

“It was not a nice place to live. We were overseen by a…prefect, a member of the Yun Tal. People were sent there for all sorts of crimes, but she hated our family for committing a crime against the Yun Tal. It didn’t matter that my father was dead and none of us had been involved, we were all tainted by association. The only supplies that were allowed into the village from the rest of Ixtal had to go through her, and she often gave us very little, or nothing at all. There was only one woman in the entire village who was treated worse than we were, but no one knew why, just that you could be punished for even speaking to her. It’s a long story, but I ended up making friends with her anyway, and I found out that she was being punished for trading with the outside world. Usually the punishment for that was even worse, but her father was a member of the Yun Tal, so she had been shown mercy of a sort. One day, she told me she was going to leave Ixtal, and move to a city to the north.  The people she had been trading with were coming back soon, and she was going to go with them. She asked if I wanted to come too.”

“At first, the idea terrified me. If I went with her, I could never return to Ixtal ever again, could never see the rest of my family, or I would be killed. The city she described sounded awful—I couldn’t imagine a place without magic. But something changed my mind. My brother’s wife had become pregnant recently, and the prefect wouldn’t allow us to have extra food, medicine, or clothing. Our new neighbors were scared to help us, or perhaps they just didn’t care. I realized that the child might spend their entire life there, hated and punished for something that happened before they were born. They would never know anything different, and any children of mine would be the same. I agreed to leave with her.”

“In retrospect, I know that I was very lucky. Before I got here, I thought that no magic meant that everyone would be equal, but of course that wasn’t the case. If I had been anyone else when I arrived in Piltover, with no family, no money, barely speaking a word of Piltovan, then I don’t know what would have happened to me. Instead, the traders vouched for me and my friend when we got there. They worked for clan Cadwalder, so they had enough money to pay our fees. My friend married one of them, and they hired me to work at their store. I don’t know if you remember, but you’ve met them before, Jayce—the Morvellis. I owed them everything. Once I learned how to speak Piltovan, they let me work at the cash register, and that was how I met Percy.”

“Eventually, I told Percy the truth, but the Morvellis warned me to never tell anyone I was from Ixtal. Whenever people asked, I said that I was from a small village to the south. Strangers kept telling Percy he could do better. I’m lucky that he was too stubborn to listen and married me anyway. People were suspicious of me. It’s not as bad as it used to be, since I’ve been here so long, but people didn’t trust me. After you were born, they thought I would…corrupt you, somehow, especially after your father died—” she hiccuped “—so I did my best to raise you to fit in. And that meant lying to you, even if it hurt.”

“Maybe things would have been different if you weren’t an only child. Your father and I didn’t intend for you to be, but pregnancy was very hard on me, so we decided that doing it again would be too risky for me, and, well, I already explained how trying to adopt another child went.”

“I’m not telling you this to make you feel sorry for me, and I would never want you to feel guilty about it. But those are the choices I’ve made. Some of them were very difficult, and maybe some of them were wrong, but I have a healthy, successful son who’s still in my life, so I can’t really regret it. Do you understand?”

Jayce didn’t respond.

“Jayce?” 

He nodded. 

She let out a shaky sigh of relief. “And you, Viktor?”

“I, eh—” Viktor had forgotten he was part of this conversation. “Yes, I think I do.”

“You don’t need to decide right away, but I want you both to consider my offer.”

Viktor need time to consider. As it stood, Mrs. Talis’s proposal seemed like his best option, especially in light of how little he apparently knew about adoption. She had already demonstrated her ability to raise a child into an admirable adult. She lived in a stable, comfortable situation. She was even privy to half of the child’s family history. All in all, Ximena Talis was the perfect choice given the circumstances, which made Viktor’s deep feeling of guilt about the prospect absolutely nonsensical.

Jayce would definitely need time to consider her offer, alongside the earth-shattering amount of information he’d just received. He was silent the rest of the evening. The time until their scheduled carriage would arrive was instead taken up by Mrs. Talis telling Viktor everything she would remembered from own pregnancy, three decades prior.

“Let’s see—I remember…my legs kept cramping, it was a little harder to breathe than usual, everything ached—”

Viktor resisted the urge to snort. “I’ve got practice with those,” he joked.

Mrs. Talis tried to smile. “Well, on the other hand, they should start moving soon.”

“Will that hurt?”

“No, it just feels strange. Almost like being tickled from the inside.” Viktor didn’t think that sounded much better. “Oh, it looks like your carriage is here.”

Indeed, Viktor could hear hoofbeats drawing closer. Mrs. Talis held her arms open—offering a hug, Viktor realized. Despite himself, he obliged. It felt like the least he could do after coming to her house, starting a fight between her and her son, accusing her of hating him and then listening to her recount her traumas. 

Jayce approached tentatively. He still didn’t say anything, but the goodbye hug he gave his mother looked painfully tight, and lasted for several seconds. “Love you, Mama,” he whispered, almost too quietly for Viktor to hear.

Before they got in the carriage, Viktor nudged Jayce’s hand with his own. He needed to be a little brave, for his partner’s sake. “Jayce, I was thinking…would you like to spend the night at my apartment? Not for sex, just…you know.” They hadn’t spent the night together since Viktor found out about the pregnancy, given all of the arguments that had followed. But, the shaken look on Jayce’s face worried him. It was no secret that Viktor was as emotionally comforting as a cinder block; he struggled to provide soothing words or gentle encouragement the way most people wanted, but fortunately, Jayce didn’t seem to mind that about Viktor. He hated platitudes, preferring Viktor’s bluntly honest opinions. It was part of why they worked as partners. Viktor would make for a terrible shoulder to cry on, and Jayce had never asked that of him, but it felt wrong to leave Jayce alone to stew in his thoughts after the night he’d had. And, if Viktor was perfectly honest with himself, he missed Jayce’s presence as well.

The startled look Jayce gave him in response briefly made Viktor worry that he’d miscalculated—but Jayce nodded jerkily. “Yeah. Yes, I’d like that. Please.”

The carriage ride back was far more pleasant, tucked into his partner’s side.