Chapter Text
When Jayce first migrated with his mother to Piltover, the Undercity was basically just a footnote. It was acknowledged that it existed and then promptly ignored for many years of his life. After all, Jayce lived and studied in Piltover. What did the Undercity matter?
In hindsight, it was a narrow and short-sighted way to see things, to treat Piltover’s sister city as little more than an afterthought. But Piltover never made it easy to form an honest opinion of the Undercity. Whenever it was mentioned at all, the talk was always dismissive, its people reduced to cautionary tales, its streets painted as dangerous, dirty, and irrelevant. The Undercity was the boogeyman—the thing parents invoked to scare their children into behaving.
Only when Jayce got older, when his experiments grew more ambitious, when he had funding from the Kirammans—did the Undercity suddenly become of interest. It offered what Piltover forbade: materials laced with arcane potential, and knowledge steeped in the kind of magic no scholar aboveground dared speak of.
Still, it wasn’t as though Jayce made much of an effort back then to truly understand how the Undercity and its denizens worked. Sure, he went there, paid what he now knows were outrageous prices, and got back out—but its culture, its problems, its people, they remained a mystery to him.
Looking back, it would have been smart to learn as much as he could. Really immerse himself—learn from the source, so to speak. It might’ve spared him at least some of the pain in those early days of his exile. Fewer bruises, fewer cuts. Maybe even a broken bone or two avoided. If only he’d known who to steer clear of, where to disappear when the wrong eyes were watching, how to speak without immediately outing himself as a ‘Piltie.’ He’d been far too soft for a world built on survival and far too trusting for people who had every reason not to trust him.
He hadn’t known then just how quickly everything would change—that Piltover would turn its back on him for good, and that the Undercity, once a shadow beneath his feet, would become the only place left to call home. Not by choice, but by exile.
***
When Jayce was first exiled, he doesn’t think the Council expected him to go to the Undercity. They probably assumed he’d hop on a ship to Ionia, Ixtal, or maybe even Bilgewater. His sentence was final—even his mother’s pleading hadn’t swayed them.
Still, they’d given him a bit of leeway. He was given 24 hours to pack his things and leave the city. Whichever direction he chose, the Council didn’t care. They had even allowed him a final conversation with Heimerdinger—his mentor, after all. He had hugged his mother goodbye, trying to stay composed, and then made his way to the old yordle’s study, expecting little more than a quiet farewell.
Heimerdinger expressed regret over how the council meeting had gone, but in the end, he stood by their decision. It was a painful moment—until Heimerdinger turned his back. That’s when Jayce had seen it: his notebook, half-hidden in an open cabinet. Research he thought had already been locked away to be destroyed.
The decision happened before he could think. One moment he was standing there, the next he was swinging a heavy book from the shelf. When he came to his senses, Heimerdinger was collapsed on the floor.
Nausea hit him like a wave, paralyzing him—until panic took over.
He had grabbed everything he could—notes, blueprints, arcane components—stuffed it all into his bag with shaking hands. He hadn’t known at the time where to go. He just knew he had to run. And when the Enforcers came looking, there was only one place Jayce could think of they wouldn’t immediately follow. The Undercity.
In the days that followed, Jayce felt sick with guilt. Not a day passed without the image of Heimerdinger’s crumpled form flashing in his mind. It had been an impulse—born from anger, fear, and the crushing injustice of it all.
But alongside the shame, there was something else. A sliver of pride. Because deep down, Jayce knew his exile wasn’t about broken rules or damaged buildings. No one had been hurt. The Council hadn’t exiled him for what he’d done—they exiled him for what he represented. A threat. Someone with too much ambition they couldn’t control. They needed an example. Another boogeyman. A cautionary tale for others who might try to follow in his footsteps.
But Jayce at the very least wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of breaking him. Let them twist his story, let them tell it in frightened whispers at bedtime. He would keep going. Keep building. Keep chasing what they were too afraid to understand. Even if it meant facing the unknown, all alone, in the dark corners of the Undercity.
Because if Jayce didn’t have his dream of magic—then what was the point of the mage saving him all those years ago?
***
When Jayce first settled into the Undercity, he hadn’t yet known that it was made up of three levels: the Promenade, which sat closest to Piltover; the Entresol, the middle tier; and the Sumps, the lowest and deepest level. At the time, Jayce figured he should go as deep as possible—to make it harder for the Enforcers to find him, if they came looking.
But he’d been naive to think it would be that simple. The deeper he went, the harder it became to breathe and the less sunlight reached the ground. The air was thick and cloying. He’d seen a few people walking around without respirators, but they were rare—and clearly used to it. Jayce, on the other hand, had lungs spoiled by Piltover’s crisp, unpolluted air.
So finding a respirator—or anything that could help him breathe—quickly became his top priority as he ventured deeper into the fissures of the Undercity. While exploring, and doing his best to avoid other people, he stumbled across an area that clearly served as a dumping ground. Piltover’s factories—maybe even some in the Undercity itself—were pumping their waste directly into the lower levels. Dirty water rushed through wide pipes, carrying factory runoff and trash into the depths, where the current swept it all downstream and deposited it in massive heaps of twisted metal and broken machinery.
Jayce spent hours picking through the heaps.
The trash was a graveyard of discarded machines—twisted pistons, rusted valves, broken pressure gauges, and scorched lengths of wiring. Piltover’s scraps, dumped without a second thought. But to Jayce, they were something more: raw materials. Broken pieces, yes—but not useless.
His hands were black with grease and grime, his boots sinking ankle-deep into oily runoff. Still, he pressed on. He recognized the make of certain parts—components he'd seen used in filtration systems, industrial fans, and ventilation shafts. His mind turned, faster than his hands could keep up. If he could rewire this, seal that, strip the plating from this pressure tank…
By nightfall, he’d hauled enough pieces to a dry corner of the tunnel wall to begin working.
The tunnel he’d found—abandoned and half-collapsed—looked like it had once served as part of a mining operation. It sloped steeply downward, tucked away just out of view from the main current of waste. The perfect hiding spot. Cramped, a little damp and bitterly cold. But it was shelter.
Jayce cleared a small space and got to work, hands moving on instinct. He cleaned each part with water, checking for stress fractures, leaks and corrosion.
By the time his makeshift respirator came together, Jayce was exhausted. It wasn’t elegant—just a sealed mask cobbled from old fan parts, with a jury-rigged filter cartridge he'd packed with layered cloth and scavenged carbon powder—but it worked. When he slipped it over his face and pulled a cautious breath, the air was no longer poison. It was still foul, but it was breathable.
That was enough.
He leaned back against the tunnel wall, respirator hissing faintly, and allowed himself a moment to breathe—for real this time. Alone in the dark, surrounded by refuse and rot, Jayce took a deep breath.
He would survive another day.
***
Over time, Jayce learned how to survive in the Undercity.
It was knowledge paid for in bruises, cuts, and the occasional broken bone—but he adapted. The rules of Piltover didn’t apply here. Down here, you learned fast, or you didn’t last long.
In the beginning, he scraped by on odd jobs—patching up busted ventilation fans, jury-rigging broken machinery, hauling heavy crates when brute strength was all that was needed. His background in engineering, and the strength he’d built working his father’s forge, made him useful. Not trustworthy, not yet—but useful was enough to earn a few cogs or a hot meal.
It also taught him how to blend in. How to roughen the edges of his speech, flatten the crisp enunciation he'd once taken pride in. How to say less, listen more, and never sound like he came from Piltover—because sounding like a ‘Piltie’ was the fastest way to get overcharged, shunned, or stabbed.
Every night, no matter how filthy or sore he was, Jayce always returned to his tunnel. At first, it had just been a hiding spot—dark, mostly dry, and out of the way. But over time, it became something else. He scavenged insulation, patched leaks, and bartered for parts. Piece by piece, he built a crude filtration system to clear the worst of the toxic air in the tunnel. It didn’t smell like roses, but it no longer burned his lungs. It also helped that it allowed him to sleep without the respirator.
Eventually, he even built a forge a little deeper into the mining tunnel—small, smoky, and made from salvaged heat coils and scrap metal, but functional. It reminded him of his father’s small workshop back in Ixtal. Of simpler days. Days when metal bent to his will, and problems had clean solutions.
***
One of the first problems Jayce tried to solve—after breathing—was access to water.
At first, he considered digging a well. The thought had a certain appeal: clean water, self-reliance, maybe even a bit of pride. But the deeper he examined the idea, the less feasible it became. He didn’t have the heavy machinery needed to bore through solid rock, and even if he could, attempting it in a half-collapsed mining tunnel was asking for a cave-in. He’d end up buried under his own ambition. Not to mention the water would probably end up contaminated by the surrounding waste anyway.
So he looked elsewhere.
Eventually, he found a narrow runoff near the trash heaps—a sluggish stream that carried waste water from Piltover and several nearby workshops. It wasn’t clean, far from it, but it moved. That gave him something to work with.
He scavenged old pipe sections, mesh screens, fuel cells and a cracked carbon filter cartridge. With a bit of sealing paste he'd bartered for at the market to seal the pipes together, Jayce rerouted a trickle of the runoff toward his tunnel, guiding it into a set of makeshift filters: coarse mesh to catch the larger debris, cloth layers to trap sediment, and finally, a small chamber filled with carbon powder he had extracted out of the fuel cells and the carbon filter cartridge. The result was crude and ugly looking, but it was functional.
The water still tasted metallic on his tongue—but it didn’t make him sick.
That counted as a win.
He kept telling himself he'd get back to his research once things stabilized. Once he had proper tools. Once he didn’t have to spend half the day hauling scrap, fixing rusted vents, or patching leaks in ceilings with tar-soaked cloth. His notebooks sat in the corner of the tunnel, pages curling in the damp air, the ink fading just a little more each day.
But Jayce didn’t touch them.
Not because he’d given up—but because, for now, surviving had to come first.
***
By the time Jayce turned thirty, the last traces of Piltover had been scoured off him—burned out by time and necessity. The years underground had stripped him bare, then remade him in Zaun’s image.
He’d stopped counting winters after the fourth one down here. Time moved differently in Zaun—less like a current, more like a slow chemical reaction. The kind that didn’t sting until your skin was already peeling.
Zaun. That’s what the people here called the Undercity. A name with grit on its tongue and defiance in its bones. The people were the same—Zaunites, they called themselves. Scrappy, cynical, and tougher than rivets. Jayce had learned not just the name, but the rhythm of the place. How to walk the Lanes without drawing eyes, how to speak without sounding too polished, and how to haggle without bleeding for it.
He'd become someone else down here. Someone quieter. Harder. His mop of black hair hung unruly into his eyes, and a thick beard covered what remained of the man who once stood tall in Piltover’s ivory halls. Scars laced his arms and collarbone—burns, cuts, shrapnel. Every one of them a lesson.
He wore them like armor.
Whatever Piltover had once meant to him, it was a distant echo now—buried beneath layers of survival.
These days, Jayce ran a repair shop wedged between a sleepless back-alley augment installer and a synth-meat vendor that reeked of scorched plastic and grease. The storefront was barely a facade: a flickering 'Open'-sign above a dented rolling shutter that groaned when forced open. Inside, space was tight—just a single, stained workbench that doubled as a counter, surrounded by walls lined with shelves sagging under the weight of scavenged parts, half-gutted devices, and bins of mismatched screws and wires. Every inch was claimed by something useful eventually.
The backroom was no better. A narrow cot was wedged beneath a vent that coughed like a dying engine, the floor cluttered with tools that never made it back to the bench. A rust-streaked bathroom in the back, barely functioning and the tap sputtering like it resented being touched. A single burner and cracked sink made up a kitchen in name only. Neon light from the lanes outside painted everything in queasy pink, blue and green through a small window. It wasn’t home—not really. But it was something. It was his.
People came to him when things broke—prosthetic joints, vent regulators, cracked scrubbers, sputtering fans. Jayce fixed them. Quietly. Cleanly. He never charged more than he had to, and never said more than was needed. In Zaun, that was enough. Enough to keep people coming back. Enough to keep questions about himself away.
But his real work happened elsewhere.
He still kept the old tunnel, the one near the trash heaps. Once a hiding place, it had become something more secretive over time—a private refuge where he could think, build, tinker. A hideout for the kind of work he never let anyone see. Old sketches, forbidden theories, fragments of research salvaged from a life that no longer existed. The forge he’d built from scrap still worked, and the air filter system he’d rigged up kept the worst of the smog out. It wasn’t much, but down there, at least, he could follow his passion.
No one knew about the tunnel. Not even the people who trusted him to fix their limbs and patch their air.
Jayce liked it that way. Or at least, he told himself he did.
Because behind the unshaved jaw and eyes that tried to never meet anyone else’s for long, Jayce was lonely. Bone-deep lonely.
He spoke only when he had to. Kept his past sealed tighter than a vacuum pipe. Magic was still there of course—in his notes, in sketches he redrew and reworked each night before sleep—but it was something private now. Something sacred.
He couldn’t share it.
Couldn’t risk it.
Not again.
***
Jayce didn’t expect anything to change that day. He’d gone scavenging like usual, looking for scrap parts to replace a broken capacitor module—when he saw someone already knee-deep in the garbage.
A boy.
Small, looking to be thirteen, maybe fifteen at most. Malnourished, with messy brown hair that clung to his forehead in clumps, matted with sweat and dirt. He walked with a heavy limp, leaning hard on a cane that looked like it had been scavenged too. His clothes were two sizes too big and patched in more places than not.
But what caught Jayce off guard were his eyes.
Golden. Unnaturally bright. Sharp as a cut gem and full of thought. Eyes that studied everything like it had a hidden layer waiting to be taken apart and understood.
A single mole sat beneath one eye and another near the corner of his mouth—small, unassuming marks that somehow made him look even more otherworldly. He was the most beautiful being Jayce had ever seen.
Ethereal.
Angelic.
Jayce didn’t realize he was staring until the boy looked up at him with a glare that was far too old for his young face.
“You’re standing on the good copper,” the boy said flatly.
Jayce blinked and took a step back. “Sorry.”
The boy crouched again, picking through a wire cluster with slow, practiced fingers. His cane sank slightly into the muck beside him.
Jayce watched in silence for a moment, uncertain why he hadn’t just walked on. Something about the kid… it twisted something in his chest he hadn’t felt in a long time. A tug. Familiar. A kind of protectiveness he’d buried years ago.
It reminded him of someone—her, of all people. Caitlyn. Fourteen when the Council cast him out, but already sharper than most adults he knew. Quick-witted, stubborn, endlessly curious. She used to trail him around his apartment, all gangly limbs and pointed questions, eyes wide with wonder. He’d called her Sprout—half-mocking, half-affectionate—but in truth, she’d been his only real friend towards the end. The one person who looked at him and saw more than just a dreamer.
He hadn’t let himself think of her in years.
Was she an Enforcer now, just like she always wanted? He could picture it clearly too—Caitlyn in the uniform, rifle slung over her back, walking the gilded streets of Piltover with that same determined fire in her step. Maybe she still thought of him. Maybe not.
He wondered what they’d told her. Whether she’d heard the horror stories—the ones that painted him as a dangerous radical, a traitor who’d struck down his own mentor and vanished into the smoke of the Undercity.
Had she believed them? Had she tried not to?
Had she mourned him?
Jayce swallowed hard, gaze drifting back to the boy. No. He couldn’t let himself go there. Not when the past already followed him like a shadow he couldn’t shake.
The kid was still picking through the scrap heap, moving slow, methodical, clever. Jayce recognized the look—the sharp calculation of someone who’d had to grow up too fast. Zaun didn’t breed soft children, especially not the ones left to fend for themselves. And this one, with his limp and thin frame, looked like he’d had more than his share of hard lessons.
Jayce didn’t approach any closer. He just watched, then turned and walked away.
That became the pattern.
He started seeing the boy regularly—always in the same area, always scavenging, never stealing from others, but never letting anyone close. Jayce didn’t speak to him. Not at first. Just left useful scrap behind in places he’d seen the boy dig through—old fuses, polished lenses, stripped wiring. Small things. Safe things.
The kid never acknowledged it, but the pieces vanished all the same.
Weeks passed like that. Silent exchanges. Careful distance. Jayce kept his hands busy in the shop, kept his tunnel secret, and kept his words to himself. But the kid lingered in his mind more often than he liked to admit. There was something in those golden eyes—sharp, searching. When they had looked at each other, it had been as if a connection had been made. An unbreakable bond, binding the two of them together.
Fated.
For what? Jayce didn’t know yet.
***
The breakthrough came quietly.
Jayce came back late one night from the Lanes, hands sore and shoulders aching, expecting to collapse onto his cot in the tunnel for a few quiet hours of tinkering and research.
Instead, he found the boy already inside.
He was crouched in the middle of the space, cane set carefully aside, poring over Jayce’s notes and half-finished constructs like he was decoding a blueprint to the universe. Grease smudged his fingers and soot streaked one gaunt cheek—just enough to half-hide the tiny mole near his eye that Jayce had memorized like a star in a familiar constellation.
Jayce froze in the doorway.
The boy looked up slowly, meeting his gaze. “You sign everything,” he said, lifting a page and pointing to the corner where the initials were scribbled in Jayce’s familiar handwriting. “‘JT.’ Every single page.”
Jayce blinked, unsure what to say.
The boy’s mouth twitched—just barely. “Bit egotistical, don’t you think?”
There was no venom in the words. Just dry humor. A gentle jab.
Jayce let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Habit,” he said gruffly. “Old one.”
The boy nodded, eyes flicking back to the notes. “Still. It’s good work. Messy… but fascinating.”
And just like that, the ice began to crack.
Jayce stepped further into the tunnel, careful not to make any sudden moves. “Didn’t think anyone else knew about this place.”
“I followed you once,” The boy said without shame, still studying the notes. “Weeks ago. You’re not as sneaky as you think.”
Jayce let out a low grunt—part laugh, part exasperation—as he set his tool bag down with a heavy clunk. “Clearly not.”
Silence settled, not awkward, but tentative—like the calm before you decide if someone’s worth trusting.
“I don’t even know your name,” Jayce said, easing onto an overturned crate. “It only seems fair you share it if you’re going to keep breaking into my lab.”
The boy turned slightly, just enough to meet his eyes. “It’s Viktor.”
Jayce nodded slowly. “Jayce. Jayce Talis.”
There was a flicker of something in Viktor’s expression—surprise, maybe, or just curiosity. In Zaun, people rarely gave last names. Most didn’t have them. A full name was something you left behind in Piltover.
Viktor tilted his head. “Fancy.”
Jayce shrugged. “Leftover from a life that doesn’t exist anymore.” He hesitated, then added, “But… figured you’d earned it.”
That gave Viktor pause. The boy looked down, fingers brushing the edge of a nearby schematic. The air between them changed—less guarded.
“So,” Viktor said. “What happens now?”
Jayce looked around the tunnel. “You keep breaking in, I start leaving the door open. We call it progress.”
Viktor blinked. “You call that progress?”
Jayce smirked. “Zaun’s version.”
***
And that was that. After that night, Jayce started seeing Viktor more often. He still ran into him in the trash heaps now and then, still left him little gifts of useful scrap—but more and more, he began to find traces of him in the tunnel lab. Evidence that Viktor had let himself in while Jayce was away at the shop: a note scratched in the margin of a schematic, a capacitor repositioned, a tool missing only to reappear the next day, cleaned—but bearing new scratches.
So Jayce adapted. Expanded his little gift-giving ritual to the lab, too.
He began tailoring the tools he left behind—clearly made for smaller hands than his own. A miniature spanner, the handle wrapped in soft cloth for better grip. A pair of goggles with an adjustable band, left neatly on the worktable—just snug enough that Jayce could picture them resting above those sharp, golden eyes.
And it seemed he wasn’t the only one making an effort.
Sometimes, Jayce noticed little things had changed when he returned to the lab. The wobbly leg on the second workbench had been reinforced with a bit of welded scrap, neat and precise. The filter on the air vent had been replaced, the new mesh finer than what Jayce could usually scrounge up—cleaner, not as worn or frayed. Once, he found a set of replacement heating coils sitting on his desk, just the right size for the makeshift forge.
Viktor never mentioned any of it when he spied him making his rounds through the scrap heaps. But Jayce noticed. And the quiet weight of it—the effort, the care—settled in his chest like something warm. Like a conversation spoken in the language of metal and grease and shared space.
***
One day, a switch seemed to have flipped.
Jayce wasn’t sure what changed—nothing new had been said, no new lines drawn—but suddenly, Viktor was there more often. Not just in the traces he left behind, but physically there, as if he'd decided, quietly and without announcement, that the lab wasn’t just a borrowed space. It was his, too.
Jayce came in late that first evening, hands stiff and aching from a day of hard labor, expecting silence—and instead found the soft glow of lamplight already spilling across the workbenches. Viktor, seated at the far end of the table, his cane leaned neatly against the wall. No greeting, no explanation. Just there, soldering something with a steady hand and that familiar furrow between his brows. The goggles Jayce had left him drawn protective over his eyes.
Jayce didn’t ask questions. He just set down his bag, rolled up his sleeves, and got to work.
They didn’t talk much that first evening. Just exchanged the occasional dry remark, a passing comment about a faulty wire or the odd smell coming off one of Viktor’s half-melted circuits.
Jayce joked once that Viktor was trying to poison him with solder fumes. Viktor, without missing a beat, replied, “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
Jayce had laughed. A real one. Caught off guard.
The next night, Viktor was there again.
And the next.
***
Over time, the silences softened. The jokes grew easier. Viktor started speaking more—never much, but enough that Jayce learned things. Little details, scattered in passing between long stretches of work. He treasured each one.
“My father was a machinist,” Viktor said one night, without lifting his eyes from the copper spool he was unwinding. “He taught me how to fix things before I could read.” He paused. “It didn't matter much in the end. Both him and my mother were gone by the time I was ten.”
Jayce hesitated. “You had no one else?”
Viktor shrugged. “I figured it out.”
Jayce didn’t press for more information. Just nodded and offered him a half-broken stabilizer core from his pile, like an apology he didn’t know how to say out loud.
In time, Jayce found himself offering pieces of his life, too—not all at once, but in scattered fragments, the kind you only share when someone’s earned them.
That he’d grown up in Piltover. That his mother had loved to cook—had always been someone with too much heart and too many recipes, the kind of woman who could’ve fed an army if they’d let her. Instead, she’d just had Jayce. And he’d grown up basking in the warmth of all that love, like it had been made just for him.
He told Viktor, quietly, that he hadn’t spoken to her since his exile. That sometimes he worried she believed he’d left her behind on purpose.
“I sometimes think about sending her a letter,” he admitted once. “But I don’t know what I’d say. Sorry your son’s a failure and a fugitive?”
Viktor didn’t laugh. Didn’t offer false comfort. Just said, “She probably already knows you’re not either of those things.”
The words hit Jayce low in the gut—a flood of feeling, warm and too much, threatening to pull him under.
***
That night, lying on the cot in the back of his shop, Jayce stared at the ceiling, thinking about what Viktor had said—about losing his parents, about being ten and suddenly alone.
Viktor had claimed he was fine. And maybe he was. He was sharp, resourceful in that unmistakable Zaunite way. Jayce didn’t doubt it.
But it still left a deep, aching weight on his chest.
No child should have to grow up that fast.
Not that many children in the Lanes had carefree childhoods. But Viktor—with his limp, his cane, and no family—seemed doubly cheated by the world somehow.
After that, Jayce found himself doting more than before. Quietly, carefully—as much as Viktor would allow. Desperate to give Viktor a little bit of his childhood back. He brought sweets and day-old pastries, bartered from the baker in exchange for fixing a broken oven. He shared his notebooks on magic. And when Viktor offered insights, Jayce praised him sincerely.
Because Viktor was brilliant.
Sharper than anyone Jayce had met in years—maybe ever. His thoughts were incisive, his curiosity boundless, and his way of seeing things cracked open problems Jayce had puzzled over for years at that point. Together, they made progress. Real progress. Viktor didn’t just help with the research—he pushed it forward in ways Jayce hadn’t imagined.
Sharing his magical theories felt intimate. Sacred. Like peeling back his ribs and exposing something raw and beating inside him. His research had always been a part of himself. Giving it to Viktor felt like giving away a piece of his soul.
And Viktor treated it with reverence. Not as something fragile, but as something worth protecting. Something he saw value in. He handled it with care, with curiosity, with warmth.
And in those moments—just for a while—Jayce felt seen.