Chapter Text
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
- Stanley Kunitz, “The Layers”
Jayce wakes alone in a blind panic, pulled out of sleep not by Viktor’s pain or his distress, but by the lack of it.
When his hand shoots out across the rumpled sheets of their bed to try and anchor and reassure himself, his questing fingers find nothing but cold sheets and the displaced fortification of Viktor’s pillows. It sends Jayce bolting upright in their bed, disheveled and disoriented, drowning in an old grief and a renewed fear.
Jayce can’t have nightmares now—not with his subconscious immediately drawn to Viktor’s—but that means all of his fears bubble over in those moments between sleep and waking, when past and present blur in his mind. When Viktor is shattered in his arms, or broken open at his feet, or haunting his hallucinations, or grieving eternally in a wasteland, or clawing at his throat.
But no, it’s not before. Not in this lifetime. Not in this reality where they got things right.
On the other side of the bond between their souls, he feels… not ‘nothing,’ as he’d feared. Rather it’s as if Viktor has constructed a wall brick by brick, an Jayce can feel it there and can feel intention behind it. He stares blankly at Viktor’s abandoned side of the bed for a long moment before dropping back down onto his pillow and dragging his hands down his face.
Viktor is alive. Jayce is alive. They aren’t enemies. They haven’t had a fight. Viktor didn’t walk out on him. The world isn’t ending. Jayce is just as in love as he ever has been, and he knows that Viktor loves him too.
This distance is entirely due to Viktor caring too much and showing it in the wrong ways. Again.
It’s been three months since Jayce watched as his husband was delicately flayed open to show fragile flesh and brittle bone, knowing that Viktor was unconscious but still eavesdropping on his every worried thought. It’s been three months of Viktor sequestering himself with the excuse of taking a sabbatical during the semester break of their university, all the while hiding from the society that he helped to build.
It’s a ruse that this time Jayce isn’t on the wrong side of.
In their last life, Viktor had been nearly twenty-nine and at a Zaun augmentation parlor alone when he’d had his spine reconstructed with bolts and screws and metal plates by strangers. Instead of risking anyone topside perceiving him as ‘another diseased trencher,’ he dumped months worth of his Academy salary into six weeks of room, board, and assistance in a seedy recovery room. He treated the need for surgery as if it was a personal failing of his own, so conscious of how he was pitied or scorned for being a trencher and so determined to overcome the judgment of his supposed peers.
He had even trained Jayce into thinking ‘Viktor just disappears sometimes,’ as if it made any sense how a man so driven and so obsessive could simply walk away for a few weeks because he was ‘clearing his head.’ He always came back with an entire bevy of brilliant ideas, clear direction, and answers to problems that had plagued them, so Jayce took his excuses at face value. After all, what would Viktor have to hide from him? They shared everything.
In their first life, Viktor had only been back three days after his rushed recovery from this particular surgery, the stabilized crystals glowing in front of them, when Jayce clapped him on the back in jubilant shared excitement and felt the bolts on his spine at the same time he heard Viktor bite off a cry of pain and stagger away from his touch.
That was the day he learned just how tightly Viktor could hold on to a secret.
But that was a lifetime ago.
In this life, Viktor is thirty-three, married, and sharing a home, half a soul, and all of his emotions with Jayce. This time, there was no obfuscating what Viktor was going through as he was stretched out on their bed recovering, skin blanched pale by pain and emotions a maelstrom too jumbled for Jayce to parse out even with a constant open line between their minds.
This time, Jayce got to watch as thinking became all that Viktor could do for a time. It’s so obvious in retrospect how he had so many epiphanies while he was ‘on sabbatical.’
So it’s frustrating that Jayce is waking from some of the best sleep he’s had in months, because if he says as much, or even admits it to himself, he’ll only validate Viktor’s repeated attempts to shut him out ‘for his own good.’
Because Viktor always circles back to guilt and self-loathing. Never self-pity. Just the deep, abiding sense that he’s somehow in the wrong for hurting Jayce because he’s in pain. And now he’s apparently determined to push himself so that he can continue to atone for his failures, and to shield from Jayce exactly what that crusade costs him. And he’s doing it three months to the day after the surgery, as if that recovery time wasn’t just the earliest date of an estimated span.
His husband can be painfully literal, but only when he wants to be.
Making himself presentable, Jayce spares a moment to grab Viktor’s pain medicine and then sets to work hunting his husband down. His original respirator mask is missing, but not the more stylized full-face mask that became emblematic of him in the undercity, or the heavy coat and tailored clothes that he was gifted when they decided to make a revolutionary folk hero out of a skinny scientist. By leaving those behind, it’s clear Viktor is trying to remain inconspicuous: he could be anywhere.
Jayce isn’t supposed to be alone in his head. Not anymore. With Viktor blocking him out, he’s adrift. They’ve spent even more time in one another’s minds now than they spent in each other’s company in their last life.
This is going to mess with Jayce’s head if it drags on too long. The constant thread of Viktor’s emotions at the corner of his mind is just a part of him now.
Viktor’s not upstairs in their workshop, or at his office at their university, or in the library where he teaches Zaun’s children. That means the next logical place to check will be their home away from home.
“Haven’t seen him,” Vander confirms with a frown when Jayce shows up at The Last Drop well before opening hours. Eggs sizzle in a cast iron pan and coffee drips through a filter into a waiting pot, the sounds and smells of a better morning than Jayce is having. “The kids took off early, fair bet they attached themselves to him. Didn’t think he was supposed to be out and about yet?”
Of course Viktor went right to their two youngest children, because he knows that ‘the twins’ have been worried about him for months. His ever-present guilt would have extended to worrying over Isha and Naph, but he didn’t want them to see him laid up as he was. Where in their last life the people of Piltover paid so little regard to Viktor that no one noticed his pain, in this life he has their patched together little Zaunite family who are deeply invested in his wellbeing.
“He’s hiding. You know how he is.” Jayce shrugs, and the frustration must bleed through into his voice more than he intended because the next overly-invested person in Viktor’s life catches it as he completes his sauntering descent from the upstairs living quarters.
“Trouble in paradise?” There’s something bitingly accusatory to Silco’s words, something untrusting to how he angles his head to keep Jayce in view of his one still-seeing eye as he descends the staircase in his best pretentious ‘politician’ attire, armored in finery so that he can insult Piltover to their faces in whatever meetings he has planned for the day. As he takes his seat at the bar, Vander winces at the acerbic edge in Silco’s voice and sets a coffee down in front of his husband.
“I usually find that if someone is hiding from another, it’s because they don’t wish to be found.”
His eye may be glass now instead of burning ember, but ‘the Eye of Zaun’ is as sharp as he ever was. Even with Jayce and Viktor being inseparable (and quite literal) soulmates, Silco remains hypervigilant. There’s no question which side he would be on if there was a conflict between Jayce and Viktor.
The fact that Viktor periodically makes wry unexplained references to Jayce repeatedly killing him certainly doesn’t help assuage Silco’s lingering paranoia.
He may not always act it, but Silco is intensely protective of his family. Viktor is his and Silco treats him as some strange blend of infuriating younger brother or brilliant eldest son. So because Powder asked him, and because he knew the efforts were on Viktor’s behalf, Silco let himself become the test subject for their early attempts at regenerative therapies. Viktor recoiled from the idea of being subject of human trials, whereas Silco reasoned he’d already offered himself up as a lab rat for Shimmer and was suffering the effects of losing access to it. He let his unofficial brother-in-law and adoptive daughter experiment on his eye and cheekbone and orbital socket and sinuses and toxin-damaged flesh. Though Silco’s eye was beyond saving, the experiments succeeded in helping Silco to an extent—and more importantly for all involved, their efforts slowed the progression of Viktor’s disease.
Despite serving himself up for testing, Silco still doesn’t fully trust that their ‘token Piltie’ won’t hurt Viktor some day. He is genuinely incapable of discounting that possibility.
The source of Silco’s hang-ups is currently serving him breakfast and trying not to look distraught about his husband so obviously projecting his own trauma on others. So out of respect for Vander and for the strange but sincere friendship that Viktor and Silco have built, Jayce shoves aside his kneejerk offense at being suspected and takes it as the twisted sort of loyalty that Silco means it as.
“He’s three months to the day out of the surgery and thinks he’s been a ‘burden’ long enough. I just want to make sure he’s not pushing himself.”
Silco tsks judgmentally, and just like that the focus is off of his misplaced worries about Jayce and on to a long-standing complaint about Viktor.
“I see. Viktor is being needlessly self-flagellating again.” Silco takes a long sip of his coffee, and Jayce knows to wait now. He could take off searching the rest of the undercity, but something tells him that he won’t need to. Nothing happens in Zaun without Silco somehow knowing it. The de-facto leader of their little city-state sends him on his way with a dismissive flick of his hand. “They’re in the gardens. Powder accompanied them because she worries for him too.”
And Silco naturally knows everywhere his Powder goes. Parents aren’t supposed to have favorite children, but Silco didn’t get that message. At least he gave up acting like Vander’s brood didn’t adopt him the moment they discovered that he and Vander had been in love for decades before the death of Powder and Vi’s mother divided them.
As Jayce leaves, he does so with a few admonishments from Silco to Viktor and a flask from Vander. As the door to The Last Drop swings closed behind him, he sees Vander take a seat at the bar and gently tug Silco in by the shoulder to press a kiss against his scarred temple, their fingers lacing together on the polished wood counter. It feels intrusive, like he glimpsed a moment he shouldn’t be privy to. A moment he shouldn’t recognize so well.
But he does.
Because if Viktor is at the gardens, then Silco isn’t the only one consciously or unconsciously struggling with the past today.
***
Technically the gardens are Claggor’s project in this lifetime, but Viktor has undeniably passed his predilection for obsession on to the next generation of undercity scientists. Now their students and graduates keep the experiment going to push the boundaries of what they can grow in blighted soil and darkness. It’s a tribute to Zaun, proof of how with enough determination life can spring even from the most hostile conditions with no magic required at all. Further in the valley, Jayce can spot Claggor hauling fertilizer as Mylo chatters aimlessly at him, gesturing with a trowel next to a stacked configuration of aging beams spotted with mushrooms. A knot of Viktor’s morning reading group are chasing each other between garden beds of root vegetables, shrieking in laughter.
It makes Jayce flinch, and for just one moment in his mind it sounds like an unearthly chorus of soulless wailing.
Jayce doesn’t hold classes here. He doesn’t visit the struggling vegetable patch, or collect soil samples, or work on the water catchment system that feeds into a patched up water tower.
Their people look at this place and see a possibility for the future.
For him, this little pocket of the undercity will always be the scene of his biggest regret.
But their past isn’t something that Viktor has ever shied away from. His nightmares don’t just live in that transient moment between sleep and wakefulness, he sees them crystal clear and viscerally real even during the day. The hallucinations come to him as superimposed images of mannequins and hollow shells, remembered violence and present remorse, as the screaming of magic denied its outlet. Viktor chases those memories and forces himself to confront them.
There are more good days than bad, now. But some things, some days, some places set those memories off more than others.
This fissure was the epicenter of a series of decisions that shattered the both of them.
It’s different here at the very heart of what would have been Viktor’s doomed commune in another life. There’s no row of homes and stalls, no eerily peaceful inhabitants. Just students and young scientists and their own children. Ekko shows a group of children how the rain collection and gray water systems feed into filters. Powder lines Isha up on an old doorway into a shack beneath the water tower, laughing as she marks Isha’s height in purple among fading pink and blue lines. Violet sits just beyond them, uncharacteristically soft as she watches her younger sisters.
They’re all doing an admirable job of pretending they’re not keeping an eye on Viktor the entire time, but when Ekko catches sight of Jayce he greets him with a silent up-nod and a significant look in Viktor’s direction. He and Powder are obviously keeping the kids distracted so that Viktor can have a moment.
It isn’t a coincidence that he finds Viktor surrounded by yellow flowers, sprawled exactly where Jayce left his destroyed half-human body. But it’s not surprising, either. Viktor is exactly the type to pick at a metaphorical scab to keep the wound bleeding.
There’s a rock at at the scene of Jayce’s crime, as if it’s an unmarked headstone for Viktor’s second death. Heel braced on it to elevate his leg, Viktor is stiffly seated with his shoulders against the wooden leg of the water tower. It’s a far cry from when Jayce saw him here the first time, a would-be savior suspended above the ground communing with the arcane and wholly unprepared for betrayal.
His eyes are closed medatatively, but Jayce knows that it’s because he’s shoring up that wall between them. Jayce never learned that trick, any more than Viktor learned how to hone in on Jayce’s location when the link between their souls is open. Then again, Jayce doesn’t try to shut Viktor out, and Viktor never has to go looking for Jayce.
Maybe that means Jayce is clingy. He’s been called worse, so he doesn’t care. But it does mean that once again Viktor doesn’t expect Jayce until it’s too late to escape him.
“Please, a moment longer and I will join you. I just need to…” Jayce finds that he doesn’t want to hear whatever excuse Viktor cooked up for their kids. His husband is too light, too easy to lift and move. Viktor goes entirely stiff in his arms and reflexively reaches for his crutch as others might a weapon, and then his higher reasoning kicks in and he relaxes abruptly. It’s enough to let Jayce squeeze in between him and the wooden column, settling Viktor onto his lap and curling his arms around his husband from behind. Now everything is right, two halves of the same soul joined back together. Even as his concentration shatters and his plan fails, Viktor can’t help melting back into Jayce as something seems to unwind between them, a joint sigh of relief.
There’s a faint mechanical note to his voice with the respirator mask, and Jayce tries not to flinch.
“…Ah. Hello, my love.”
Viktor cropped his hair short again before the surgery to make it easier to take care of with limited mobility. Jayce mourns the length, but understood that it was important to Viktor that he be self-sufficient. It’s grown out some in the months since then, beginning to curl beneath his ears again as it used to in the days of invention and innovation. The unruly tufts tickle Jayce’s nose as he tucks his head down against the top of Viktor’s head.
He doesn’t think he could fight the memories as well if Viktor sat here in this place where Jayce murdered him, long haired and thirty-three and beautiful, as he’d appeared so long ago and yet so close to this very day.
“You weren’t in bed.”
The yellow flowers fill the air with the scent of nectar and soil, and it’s so absurd to Jayce that florals are intrinsically hooked into his worst memories. So many of the most traumatizing moments of his life ended in otherworldly gardens. Since he was a boy, Viktor has offered him flowers and butterflies and lush landscapes in the most scarring of ways.
He chases the comforting familiarity of Viktor, instead—the faint astringent scent of his sweat from pushing himself past his limits, the salt warmth of his skin as Jayce presses a kiss to the mole on the curve of Viktor’s neck. Out of respect for their audience, he keeps it just at that.
Viktor keeps his metal palm planted on the ground as if he’ll spook Jayce if he touches him with it here, and reaches back with his still human hand instead to cup the back of his neck gently.
“I’ve been in bed long enough. And you weren’t supposed to find me here.”
Viktor stole one of Jayce’s shirts for this outing, oversized on him to disguise how drawn he’s become despite Jayce’s constant care. Like the blanket he wore here in their last life, it’s as if he’s brought Jayce’s comfort with him. Jayce slips his fingertips under it, palm curling against Viktor’s side to feel warm flesh past the leather of Viktor’s brace, reassuring when in another life Viktor’s skin would be replaced by unnaturally cold metal.
“It’s think it’s pretty safe to assume I’d find you anywhere, V.”
Jayce has trekked through apocalyptic wastelands, uprooted his life topside, pursued Viktor into his dreams, and followed him from one timeline to another. He’d have walked Zaun end to end and level to level if that’s what it took. Thankfully, he didn’t have to this time.
The dig of bolts against Jayce’s chest as he clings to his husband isn't a step closer to his nightmares, it’s proof that this time he can help. The design, the materials, all of it came from Jayce, like the more supportive crutch and the less bulky braces. He can’t perform the surgeries, but there are myriad ways he can help now that he understands the battle that Viktor was fighting before he ends up at death’s door.
He can’t do that if Viktor starts shutting him out again.
Viktor sighs, using his mechanical hand to unclasp the mask from around the bottom half of his face, setting it aside without ever letting metal brush against Jayce. Viktor tries so hard to be considerate, and somehow manages to do it in all the wrong ways. They've both got a history of that, though.
So Jayce captures Viktor’s hand in his own: while he knows Viktor can’t feel it, the gesture is all the more important because of that. Now they’re just a tangle of limbs, Jayce bracing Viktor’s leg along his own, both of their arms wrapped tight, Viktor enfolded in Jayce and Jayce curled down around him, carefully positioned to not strain Viktor’s still-healing form.
It leaves them coiled together facing the same way, eyes fixed on the rock at their feet.
The only way to break through an uncomfortable moment is to face it head-on. “…You couldn’t have at least put a bench here?”
“Eh. I put the bench where I murdered Vander. You see, I go there to brood and I come here to think. These are very different things.” The problem with trying to use gallows humor against Viktor is that he’s worse at it. Grim comebacks seem innate to being Zaunite so he had a head start. But now that Viktor has spent this second lifetime in the company of children and teens he’s picked up their own lingo as he did Jayce’s, and mixed it in as well. “If you brood here while I am thinking, it will ‘throw off the vibe,’ don’t you think?”
Viktor does this on purpose because he knows his offbeat commentary leads Jayce off track. It’s also a very blunt reminder that they both have their ghosts here and that it’s never his own death that haunts Viktor.
The fact that Viktor is sitting here and still so flippant about his own murder is enough to crack through Jayce’s despondency. “While you were ‘thinking,’ did it occur to you that coming here to block me out might—”
“Appear insensitive?” Viktor interrupts Jayce with a wry tip of his head, letting him look at Jayce out of the corner of his eye as he tips sideways enough to rest his head back against Jayce’s broad shoulder. A dark brow arches, and there’s something in his eyes that Jayce would better be able to name if he had the empathic cues to back it. “Jayce. You are fundamentally misunderstanding my actions, and it’s not a conversation that either of us wish to have—”
“Pretty sure we do need to have that talk, Viktor. Because we don’t have a good track record with misunderstandings—”
“—have here.” Viktor’s tone has taken a waspish edge, because they might both be a little hypocritical about interruptions. But for a moment, there’s a crease between his brows as he searches Jayce’s face (amber eyes, not shifting opalite) and he frowns slightly (in frustration, not confusion and betrayal). “If you insist, then I’ll explain. I ask you to listen to me, and to think about what I say while we see to our children. We can argue when we get home, if you still believe it necessary.”
It’s not a demand, no matter how it may sound in that moment to Jayce. It’s a deliberate compromise—a cornerstone of a relationship between two fatally hardheaded people who are intelligent enough and stubborn enough that they can rationalize their side of every potential conflict between them. Viktor is going to give his unfiltered thoughts for Jayce to chew on, and then they will reconvene after they leave a place that is screwing with Jayce’s head (and should be screwing with Viktor’s head, too).
Jayce gives a terse nod of agreement to the terms, and Viktor closes his eyes and leans his body back into Jayce’s. Shutting him out while still holding him close, again.
“Has it never occurred to you that there may be times that I need a break from your emotions?” It’s a bucket of cold water, and Viktor’s fingers tighten around Jayce’s in sympathy—white knuckled and anchoring with his human hand, but so very delicately in the metal hand that could crush Jayce’s bones. “You do not realize how much time you spend grieving me. You see the entirely predictable, anticipated progression of my condition, you see me living beyond my years and watch me age, and you grieve me.”
Jayce has picked Viktor up from a bloody floor and feared the worst—more than once. From the floor of their lab where he’d stayed sprawled for hours in a pool of his own blood, and then Jayce was told that he had only months left to save his partner. Crushed from the rubble of an explosion, and Jayce’s decision to revive him was a reckless unwillingness to let go. From the battered floorboards of their home, screaming with the voice of the arcane and demanding Jayce crank the dial to torture him more. He’s seen Viktor on the edge of suicide—more than once. Whether he was standing on a ledge or woven into the fabric of space and time, Jayce dragged Viktor away from that precipice each time.
And he killed Viktor. Right here on this patch of earth.
And Viktor wants him to… what, bottle that up? He doesn’t do that the way Viktor can.
“I love you more than reason should allow, Jayce Talis. But I cannot live in constant mourning of what was and what will be; nor should you.” The look on Viktor’s face is infuriatingly familiar now as he watches Jayce from within his arms: the doomed patience of someone awaiting the inevitable.
And with that bombshell dropped into their lives, he’s the one to declare the conversation over for now. Dropping his hands, Viktor reaches for his crutch and braces himself against Jayce’s knee on the other side, hoisting himself back to his feet. It’s instinctive that Jayce helps him up, hands on both of his husband’s hips to brace him until his feet are back under him.
“Viktor...” Jayce stops Viktor before he can pull away entirely, scrambling to his feet to rest a hand on his husband's shoulder. Viktor's face is guarded as if he's expecting the worst as he turns to face Jayce. He looks drawn from losing weight he couldn’t afford to, despite Jayce plying his mother for every family recipe he could get. And more pressingly, there’s a crease of pain between heavy brows.
Viktor’s hand covers Jayce’s mouth gently for the moment, another old habit that followed them to a second life.
“Think on it first. Please.”
It’s the ‘please’ that gets Jayce, a rasped, earnest whisper.
Isha latches on as soon as Viktor is upright, and that takes him out of reach. The moment Jayce lets go, the emotions that Viktor had been walling away hit Jayce full-force.
There’s pain, of course. Jayce can’t feel it himself so much as feel that Viktor is feeling it. There’s bone-deep exhaustion. And there’s love. There’s always love.
Watching Isha sign and gesture animatedly, gently tugging a braid as he teases her in return, there’s guilt in Viktor too. Sometimes that happens around Isha, like a softer echo of what Viktor feels around Vander. Not as soul-rending, but present.
Isha died here, in this fissure, on the day that Jayce murdered the man he loved. Viktor won’t say that, and he’s made it clear that Jayce shouldn’t ask. But Jayce has made a study of context clues when it comes to Viktor and had years to figure it out.
Jayce killed her. Not directly. But whether she was one of Viktor’s devotees or there with Jinx, she died as Jayce severed Viktor’s control over Vander. Viktor carries the guilt, but Jayce is the one who killed her as he killed Viktor.
…Who is looking over Isha’s head at him knowingly. Intently. Like he’s waiting for Jayce to catch up to something that’s already clear to him.
A break from your emotions. The words reverberate in his chest long after Viktor turns away. Jayce swallows them down, forces his breathing even. If Viktor needs space, then fine. Jayce can do that. It isn’t comfortable or natural for him, but he’s pushed himself to do harder things at Viktor’s request. He can let himself be distracted, let Viktor drift out of his reach for the moment.
“Alright, you little menace. You don’t get to hang off of the prof all day, some of us have projects to show him.” Powder materializes from inside the shack with Violet at her heels. She knows about Viktor’s surgery, of course. She perched cross legged on Jayce’s desk smudged with ink and criticising his blueprints, and she had to test everything he made. If she could break something (and by the gods can the girl break things) then it wasn’t good enough to use on Viktor or Silco.
Jayce has lived in Zaun long enough to recognize when he’s being pickpocketed. Powder bumps into him on the way to Viktor, snatching the pain medicine and the flask of sweetmilk off of him, and like that their conspiracy of care lives on.
The girl collects family wherever she goes, and Viktor’s somewhere central among that hierarchy. She worries about Viktor as much as Jayce does, but she’s not broadcasting her every worry into Viktor’s head so apparently she doesn’t get the same pushback. Viktor sees Powder as his eldest daughter, because he and Violet never quite had the same connection.
It’s Jayce that Vi gravitated toward, almost despite herself. He has two honorary little sisters in this life, and he likes to think that maybe in the last life he could have as well. If he’d lived that long.
“Nope, little monkey, you stay with us.” Isha is wriggling uselessly as she’s hoisted over Vi’s shoulder, kept at bay before she can tag along wherever they go. With the leader of the Powder and Viktor fanclub secured, Vi offers an extended fist to Jayce and a raised eyebrow.
“You harassing Viktor again?”
Jayce rolls his eyes, playing his part despite the anxious disquiet that Viktor leaves him in as he’s led off by Powder. Rapping his knuckles against Vi’s own, he shrugs without offering any defense. “Someone has to. You harassing the kids?”
“Keeps them on their toes. Can’t have them getting soft like some topsider.” Vi shrugs with a grin, and it makes Isha squirm trying to escape again. Looking at her, Jayce feel ancient. There Violet is, the age she was the last time he saw her fighting for her life in their previous timeline, but somehow younger without prison tattoos or years of grief and anger. Meanwhile, Jayce is the better part of a decade older than he looks and carrying these ghosts of who everyone became. “Besides, I like to be home when Powder drops in.”
For the moment, that makes no sense to Jayce. Sure he doesn’t come down here, but that makes it sound like this fissure is ‘home.’ He was pretty sure that Violet was still living in the basement of the Last Drop keeping an eye on Naph and Isha. It’s possible he just assumed, though. There’s an amused look in her eyes as she judges him, as she apparently always will do. Then she blows out a puff of a laugh.
“Viktor said you were weird about this place, but damn.” Setting Isha back on her feet, she ruffles the girl’s hair, then avoids swatting hands by dodging and swaying as if they’re boxing, palms raised to give the girl a target to aim for. “Yeah, yeah. You’re a tiny badass. Go grab Naph so you can rub in that he’s shorter than you, I’ve got to do the house tour.”
Were Jayce still the man he’d been before moving to Zaun, he wouldn’t have the frame of reference to look at Violet’s house and see the home she’s transforming it into, instead of the shack under a water tower that it appears to be at first sight. Jayce never thought of his upbringing as privileged until he saw the world that Viktor grew up in. He spent their first year living together slowly coaxing Viktor out of the idea that a mattress on the floor, a dining table and an ice box were ‘perfectly sufficient’ as long as there was a workshop above.
“So, it’s not much but I’ve been working on it.”
Vi’s patched couch and punching bag are proof that Vi at least doesn’t seem minimalist to the point of self-punishment. The battered iron mining gauntlets strung up in the corner give Jayce a moment’s pause, another pang from the past. Even with the small reminders, it’s easier to forget where he’s at and what it means once he’s away from the gardens—this little shack has no place in his nightmares.
“I don’t think anyone’s first place on their own is supposed to be luxurious, Vi.”
Violet snorts and meanders towards her little kitchen, grabbing water for herself. “I don’t know, your first place seemed pretty swanky when I saw it.”
“Robbed it,” Jayce corrects automatically, eyes still scanning the room. “And that was Kiramman money, not mine.”
And there it is. Evidence. Trapped between the couch and a rough-hewn side table is a strip of silk far too fine to belong in the undercity, pendant crooked on it like its owner was too eager to loosen her collar.
Jayce picks it up with just his fingertips, holding it in sight without turning around. “Though I guess you’d know more about the Kirammans than I do, these days.”
“That’s where that went.” The silk is snatched from his hand and gone before Jayce turns. Moments like this are like striking gold for a big brother. Vi may not fluster easily, but Cait certainly does. He files it away for the next time he goes topside to visit.
He’s glad, though. Orchestrating excuses to bring the daughters of the most influential families in Zaun and Piltover into contact was harder than it might seem. Probably because Violet’s whole family are violent revolutionaries in the eyes of Piltover.
And it’s that family that draws Jayce on in the tour, eyes catching a cabinet top lined with photographs, the frames carefully dusted and arranged.
An image of Violet, Powder, Mylo, and Claggor as they were when Jayce met them this time around are beside newer photos that incorporate Isha and Naph. Powder raises bunny ears behind Ekko’s head in another, the photo obviously taken without his knowledge while he was mid-word. More intriguing, though, are the older photos. It seems like there’s a flattened out crease in every one of them.
A girl who looks startlingly like Powder has her arm thrown around the shoulder of a teenaged boy who can only be Silco, before scars and war changed him. Past the stress marks and cracking of an old fold there’s a hulking young Vander who looks down at them both fondly. In another photograph, the same woman and a man with Violet’s nose and jaw hold an infant, a crease separating Vander out of the frame.
“Yeah, turns out Silco kept a whole stash of photos in his ‘I hate Vander’ pile. I gave Powder most of them. She doesn’t remember our parents as well as I do.”
No. There’s no hate in these photos. Silco may have kept the memories of his loved ones who died, but the creases wouldn’t be this pronounced and frayed if he had just left them folded with Vander off the page. And if he'd just trimmed Vander out of them and let go of that past entirely, they wouldn’t be marked at all. Instead, the creases are deep, so pronounced that they’ve torn at the edges, so worn that it’s clear Silco unfolded them regularly over the years.
It’s almost comical: they’ve known each other for years now, but it’s always been Vander that Jayce related to, not Silco. But Jayce knows what regret and yearning and love and resentment and wavering resolve look like when combined. Jayce knows how it destroys a man to kill someone you loved more than anything, in the name of a world you had wanted to change together. It seems that a twisted version of the same story may have played out in Zaun a generation before them.
He knew how much it mattered to Viktor that Vander and Silco reconciled as they became the founders of Zaun. Somehow he just figured that was for Vander’s sake and to ensure a Zaun without Shimmer.
There’s a chance Jayce had been projecting himself onto the wrong partner. But of course he wanted to see himself in the ideological protector, instead of the political genius who fell into the trap of backroom wheeling and dealing. The partner who in grief twisted their dream into weapons and war.
Violet’s been talking and Jayce knows that he’s been responding, making interested sounds to keep her going while he chased that thought to the end. He learned that in the council, though Mel repeatedly warned him off from doing it. At least here he’s pretty sure he hasn’t agreed to a trade deal that screws everyone over.
But Violet deserves his undivided attention.
So maybe he should be a bit more attentive to the present.