Work Text:
The subway car rumbles as a man sits inside, alone. He balances a journal on his knee, gripping the page he is working on tighter as a particular jostle almost makes him lose his place. The train is coming to a stop, but the man has no intention of getting off here, so he doesn’t look up.
But something catches his eye. The small billboard over the sliding doors flickers sharply, going from its usual dull red to a startling shade of purple.
It makes him look as though he is staring at the other man when he walks in.
Noticing his crutch, on impulse, the man stands up. He grips his journal awkwardly, paper digging into his fingertips. The other man raises a brow, but smiles anyhow.
“I think I will manage,” the man says, his accent thickly Russian, and gestures to the dozen empty seats all around them.
The first man flushes, swiftly taking his seat again.
To his surprise, despite the litany of places to choose from, the Russian man sits next to him.
“What are you working on?”
……….
There is a tower, built so high up that at its peak, the air is thin. Only the most resilient of creatures can survive at such an altitude, and yet creatures who have never been the resilient sort built the tower that tall anyhow.
They are gone now. All that remains is an untouched monument, oxidizing in the sun. Not just the tower, but the two bodies resting at its peak, unreachable and unknown.
A raven, a smaller creature, summits the impossible tower with ancient ease. It lands on the first body, once made of flesh and presently bone. It pecks idly into the skull's eye socket, finding nothing. Nothing lives this high, but the raven does not know enough about the complexities of the world to not at least examine it, give it a try.
The raven flitters in the air briefly, hopping the short distance from the remnants of bone to the remnants of steel. Its beak barely fits between the sharp slits of the face plate, but it explores anyhow, coming up empty once again.
Chittering, the bird takes flight, leaving behind this relic of mankind without so much as a second thought. It does not need to marvel at the achievement. To the raven, it is nothing but a place. It leaves behind the body of bone and the body of steel.
Hands clasped for all eternity.
……….
Two sisters lie in an open field, the night sky open and wide above them. This far from the city, just as the older sister promised, the sky's alight with stars. Laying in the grass, their bodies are stretched out in opposite directions, but their heads are close together. In a field of green, their hair, spread out, looks like patches of flowers. Pink and blue.
“Oh, see–” The older sister points to the sky, and the younger sister’s eyes follow her. “That one looks like a butterfly.”
The younger sister makes a noncommittal noise, and the older sister glances towards her, laughing a bit.
“What, you don’t see it?”
“Nah.”
“Okay, Pow-Pow, what does it look like to you?”
Powder stares at the sky again, concentrating.
“It looks like two people. Holding each other. That’s their arms, see? Their heads are just close together.”
Her sister stares back, squinting, and Powder can see the gears turning. Eventually, she just chuckles again.
“Okay, I’m gonna have to take your word on that one. I don’t have an artistic eye .”
Powder lightly slaps her arm, the two laughing together before settling down in the field again.
“Okay, what about that one, that one looks like–”
……….
“ –I’m interrupting something.”
Jayce froze, suddenly jerking backwards. He had been a hair’s breadth away from stepping through the hole that had been blown in his apartment, letting himself fall through the night sky and taking the shame of what he had done to himself, to those kids, to his family, with him.
But the voice had stopped him. A voice that Jayce recognized despite having heard it for the first time earlier today.
“The hell’s your problem?” Jayce snapped, whirling around to face Heimerdinger’s assistant. He was standing as frigidly as he had been that morning, presiding over the Enforcer’s investigation into his apartment. Of course, he’d only been permitted to enter after they’d removed–
“What’s that? Another list with my name on it?”
“Actually… Yes. But only because you signed your notes. Every page, I might add.”
Jayce cringed. How egotistical had he been? How driven by the possibility of creation and the notoriety that came with it? He had believed, in some secret part of his mind, that one day when his ideas took off, and he became famous, those signatures would be valuable. People would divide his notes up piecemeal, each wanting a record of what he had done… and they would all have his signature to prove it.
But what did they have now? The only thing his name was synonymous with was death.
“I was intrigued by what I read,” the man continued. “If you had argued this, in front of the Council–”
“Why?” Jayce snapped. “Why would I? I was supposed to be exiled today. Should have been. I killed a little girl.”
It didn’t matter that she’d broken into his apartment. Truly, it didn’t. He’d seen the other kids, in threadbare clothes with callouses on their hands. Undercity children, looking for a way to provide for their lives back home. Jayce had propped himself up like a shiny jewel in a glass case – he’d left dangerous objects lying around, he’d gone behind the Academy’s back – and those children paid the price for trying to pilfer it. He deserved to be robbed. Frankly, losing some trinkets, some books, some clothes, would have been worth it. Because that girl would have gone home alive to sell it. Would have used that money to provide for the children sobbing over her even as the enforcers took her body away.
“Is that what this is about?” The man seemed to pierce right to the core of him. “You think if you kill yourself tonight, that will fix this? No, Jayce. Your dying does not bring her back. Not even in the world of your notes, your Hextech. ”
Jayce’s hands shook.
“I have seen firsthand the lives that magic can save. That’s what I wanted to bring into the world. But instead, I took someone out of it. I uprooted a family. I destroyed my mother’s reputation, the Talis legacy–”
The man snapped Jayce’s journal shut.
“I do not believe that. If you truly believe you can help people…is her loss not all the more reason to try? It does not have to be this way. Not through science. But you must still believe there is something you can do. And if you do not? Then you must find it. You must live. ”
Jayce took one step away from the ledge, then two. Closer to the stranger, he finally realized what else he was holding in his hand… His bracelet. The small crystal still inlaid in it, glinting in the evening light.
As he took it, body trembling, Jayce realized that tears had not only come to his eyes, but had started to fall. The man didn’t judge him. If anything, his face seemed to soften.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Viktor.”
Viktor guided Jayce from his apartment, and down the block, until the destruction was far enough behind them that he couldn’t look back at it anymore. He offered for Jayce to come to his apartment, to spend the night with him before his work was destroyed in the morning. Over tea, they discussed their mutual passions…and found that so much of it lied with the Undercity. With Zaun.
Jayce had destroyed a Zaunite family. But, if Viktor truly wanted to remain by his side…he could find some way to make it up to the city. No matter how long it took. He was never meant to meddle with magic, he realized. Perhaps he was meant to stay rooted on the ground. With Mankind.
……….
There’s a deer limping by the side of the road. For a moment, the man thinks of getting out of his truck and following it. Hunting season still has a few more weeks to go, and he’s got his rifle in the back. He’d be putting it out of its misery, really… It doesn't seem like the poor thing can put weight on its back leg at all.
He bends backwards to grab his gun, but before he can open the driver’s side door, he sees something. A dog, some ruddy-brown mutt, is waiting in the treeline. For a moment, the man thinks the dog has gone feral, is more wolf than dog, that it’ll go for the deer itself before he can make it there. But then he notices its tail wagging.
It breaks from the trees, coming close to the deer, the same way someone could train a dog to do for humans. It seems intent not to leave the deer, and in his surprise at the sight, the man lets the two get far enough away that they disappear into the woods.
……….
“Let us instead do this once again…as partners. ”
Viktor leaned over Jayce, holding his chin in his grip as he kept his head tilted sharply back. Jayce grunted, shifting against his hold, even as Viktor grew closer. He wanted him to know he wanted to be free. He wanted him to know he wanted to resist. He wanted–
Viktor’s expression shifted, just a bit, before Jayce could say a word. His eyes lit up with this unknowable mirth, and all at once he closed the distance between them…kissing Jayce on the head, right between his eyebrows where they were scrunched and furrowed, the muscles smoothing beneath his lips immediately.
“Cut!”
Viktor leaned back as the director called the scene early, that smile finally spreading from his eyes to his lips. Despite the intensity of the green bodysuit production had him in for the digital effects, Jayce could still appreciate the gold of his eyes.
“What was that all about, huh?” he teased, and Viktor only shrugged.
“You looked cute. The scrunch…” His finger traced over that space between his brows. “I’ll get over it. Next take, I swear.”
“I’m holding you to that, you know. I wanna get home at a reasonable hour.”
“Oh?” Viktor’s brow raised. “Have plans, do you?”
“You know we do.”
“Right, well…” Viktor leaned down again, kissing Jayce before he had to move back to his starting position for the scene to roll again. “Break a leg, darling.”
……….
He sits alone, at the end of the world. He could go anywhere, but there is nowhere he really wants to be. Here, at least, he can see him. Body frozen like a statue, the surface covered by an aggressive technicolor of fungus. Hammer still held high above his head, ready to strike down on Him.
He spins the rune he’d pulled from his bracelet idly in his hands. His eyes do not leave his form. He wishes he had just let him go through with it.
……….
Viktor is sitting atop the dryer at the laundromat. He tells Jayce it feels warm, helps his leg after the long walk from their apartment in the cold winter air, but Jayce has a suspicion he only asks him to place him up there because he likes the brief moment his arms are around his waist.
Their sheets are still spinning as Viktor thumbs through his book. He doesn’t look up when he asks–
“Do you think we’re together in every universe?”
Jayce stopped folding his sweatshirts for the moment, considering.
“Well… I don’t know about every single universe. Isn’t the theory that they branch when we make choices? So there has to be a universe out there where I didn’t choose to talk to you at that work party. Or, there’s a universe where I did, but you took one look at me and had the common sense to walk away.”
Viktor laughed, the sound bouncing off the tile walls in the empty room. The worker behind the counter looked up from her magazine for only a second before flipping the page.
“Yes, well… there is also the idea of constants, no? Universal constants. Gravity is always present, the Earth always spins around the sun–”
“And we always end up doing laundry together?”
“I do not think the laundry is the part that’s important,” Viktor stressed.
“So what is?” Jayce replied, making Viktor laugh, shake his head.
“ You are.”
“Nah, I don’t think it’s me.” Jayce stood, moving close enough to Viktor to be able to place his hands on the dryer, to feel the warmth from the machine and from the other man’s breath. “If it’s gotta be either of us, it’s you. You’re perfect, V, you’re my–”
……….
Partner.
In their final moments, somewhere between reality and the purity of the Arcane, Jayce did not leave Viktor. He had left him before, too many times…but not now. Not again.
He had held him as the rune in his arm burst with impossible light, as the colors smeared and the stars stretched and the world, whatever that word meant anymore, became all the more impossible to describe. In that last moment, Viktor had stroked his arm. And somehow, Jayce had known, as if it were his own thoughts, that it had partially been a comfort for the brief sting of pulling the rune free, and partially a comfort for whatever would come next.
They were together. Jayce understood that, now. Not just in the expanse, drawing out together and dissipating like a tangled-up shooting star – but always. Everywhere.
He hadn’t understood what that version of Viktor meant, about timelines, about Jayce being so essential to Viktor, and Viktor so essential to Jayce.
But as he became a part of it, as they both did…he understood, now.
They were a universal constant. They would always find each other, because this moment would always come to pass. The moment where they wove themselves into the universe, so tightly stitched so as to be rendered invisible.