Chapter Text
When Jayce wakes with a gasp, he’s in blackness like the bottom of a well.
For a moment, he’s in the pit again. A moment when the smoke from what meager fire he could conjure is choking his lungs, the faces of everyone he has ever disappointed flashing in the embers. Pain and darkness, his only companions.
The night sky above him is blanketed with a cosmos of unfamiliar stars.
His first thought is, Viktor.
As he catches his breath, he realizes the air is clean and crisp, unsullied by the taint of metal. There’s grass under his hands, under his head. Signs of life.
And he knows he’s not in the pit any longer.
His heart is still racing like it was with Viktor’s forehead pressed against his, the arcane tearing the fabric of both of them apart. It was only seconds ago, and it was a lifetime.
Somehow, he’s returned to his physical body again — of that much, he’s certain. On the astral plane with Viktor, he felt weightless. A blank slate wiped clean in Viktor’s light, no aches and soreness he’d come to associate with being alive.
And his body is happy to remind him he still is. The joints in his leg grind painfully as he staggers to standing.
He’s in a wide, open field he doesn’t recognize, possibly a farm. Nowhere near Piltover, then. And nowhere near the Hexgate.
It’s the middle of the night with moonlight as his only navigator. There’s a dark shape some distance away he thinks might be a barn, ink blots that could be trees.
There are lights in the distance. The only mark of civilization he can find on a never-ending horizon.
The swirling detritus of his thoughts narrows into one pinprick of light.
Find Viktor.
He starts walking.
It takes him most of three days and three nights to reach Piltover.
He steals a cloak and a change of clothes from an unsuspecting farmer, fast asleep in his cottage. When his leg gives out on him on the road, he offers to trade his boots with a passing merchant for a ride in the back of her carriage. She declines the boots but offers him the ride anyway.
“What’s that on your forehead, boy?” she asks in a thick accent he’s too tired to place.
He doesn’t know what she’s talking about, so he doesn’t answer. She doesn’t ask again.
The rune in his wrist is gone. But the anomaly’s rot is scarred on his skin, the rune imprinted in the center of his palm. Burned like a brand into his flesh.
During what little sleep he can get, he dreams. He’s a child on the snowy mountainside again, on a journey he doesn’t fully understand yet. He only knows he’s so cold his veins feel frozen, like he’ll never feel warmth again. And when his mother collapses and he calls out for help, and the mage — Viktor — appears in the blizzard before him, for a moment Jayce believes he’s an angel.
When Viktor drops the rune into his hand, it’s not blue, but glowing and golden. Even through his glove, Jayce can feel it burn hot against his skin.
He startles awake. The rune on his palm tingles like it’s just been touched.
When he arrives in Piltover in the pale hours of morning, the city is different from the one he left behind.
For one, the Hexgate that should dominate Piltover’s skyline is gone. It’s possible the Council had it destroyed after the battle. But Jayce can’t make sense of that. They had never willingly given up an asset that could line their pockets, including Jayce himself. He doesn’t believe they’d start now.
The streets look younger, clamoring with life, more like the city of his youth than of his adulthood. Less drawn, hollow faces. More people ambling the polished tile streets rather than hurrying along with their heads down.
As Jayce searches for familiar faces on the crowded avenues, hood over his head so he isn’t recognized, he sees no black clothes of mourning. No evidence of reconstruction after the war.
He can’t shake the feeling that this doesn’t look like a city grieving.
Somehow, this is the hardest to accept. Jayce’s world has been torn out from under him, and yet life, unassailable, marches on.
It’s a beautiful day. The sun is high in the clear, blue sky.
The instinct simmering in his gut says something is terribly wrong.
He has to find Viktor.
For the long, dull stretch of his carriage journey, he turned it over and over in his mind: where to even start. Who might know where Viktor is. If he survived the battle. If Viktor is even —
Jayce’s chest seizes. Don’t think about it. He can’t afford to fall apart now.
When the arcane spat Viktor out of the astral plane — Jayce refuses to consider the alternative, that he’s gone somewhere Jayce can’t reach — he could have ended up anywhere. He could be on another continent.
Or he might already be in Piltover. What would happen, if Viktor was seen on the streets and recognized? Would he be seized by enforcers, brought to the Council to be tried and punished? Would they sentence him to Stillwater, or worse?
Would Mel let that happen? Would some last lingering loyalty to Jayce stay her hand?
He knows, deep down, the decision she would make.
Is Viktor out there somewhere, cold and alone? Is he frightened? Is he wondering where Jayce is right now, the same way Jayce is thinking about him?
Don’t think about it. He needs to focus on finding him first.
Jayce doesn’t make the conscious decision. But his feet lead him to the iron gates of the Kiramman estate anyway.
His leg screams at him, his brace biting into his knee, as he climbs the marble steps to their ornately-carved front doors.
Cait answers the door.
Something in him loosens with relief. He almost pulls her into a hug. He withholds only because he’s been without a bath for gods know how long.
Cait has no such reaction. Her face blanches white with shock, before she visibly smothers it into blankness.
“I’m sorry,” she says, carefully modulated and polite. “You look just like someone I once knew. Can I help you?”
“Cait.” His voice is hoarse with underuse. Jayce almost laughs, but he can’t quite get there yet. “I know I have more facial hair than I used to, but it’s still me.”
“Jayce?”
Cait stumbles back from the doorway.
“You’re not real.” She leans heavily on the wall, like her legs are going weak. “You’re not real, get the fuck away from me.”
“Cait?” Jayce says, alarmed now. “It’s me. I’m real, I promise you.”
“Help!” Cait shouts over her shoulder, into the house. “Help me!”
He reaches out to her and she scrambles backwards, like she can’t get away from him fast enough. He hates whatever he did to make her look the way she is now, possessed by some unknown terror. Like she’s seen a ghost.
Shaking, with tears in her eyes, she looks so much like the little girl Jayce grew up with.
She looks — young. Too young. Younger than the Caitlyn he knows. Shorter, rounder cheeks, the same steely blue eyes, but none of the pointed grace the adult Caitlyn carries herself with. This Caitlyn can’t be older than eighteen, maybe nineteen.
“Please go away,” she begs. She’s almost crumpled to the floor now, shielding her face. “Please, please, please go away.”
Dread drops in him like a stone. That same dizzying, surreal feeling of wrongness again, like he’s going to be sick.
He shouldn’t be here. He’s made a terrible mistake.
Jayce needs to fix this. He steps inside and approaches her slowly, like a spooked animal. He holds his hands up to show her that they’re empty.
“Wait, listen. I can explain, you have to underst—”
There’s a sharp blow to the back of his head, searing pain as his vision goes black. Then nothing.
Jayce comes to with a throbbing in his head. It’s the second time in a week he’s woken up not knowing where he is. He hopes it’s the last.
When his vision clears, he lifts his aching head to see Cassandra Kiramman, sitting straight-backed on a settee in front of him, holding a rifle with practiced ease, and very much alive.
Jayce gapes at her, speechless.
“Welcome back,” she says coldly.
Jayce swallows, throat going rough. The last time he saw Cassandra was when her body was laying in the rubble after the council attack.
His stomach turns over. This doesn’t make any sense.
“Cassandra. It’s… a surprise to see you.”
“That’s Councilwoman Kiramman, to you.”
Jayce has a scientist’s mind. It works rationally and efficiently, sifting through evidence and sorting them into theories with neat boxes and labels.
But right now, it’s chaos. Did he somehow end up in the past? Even just a few months ago, he would have dismissed that as impossible.
Nothing feels impossible anymore.
“You shouldn’t be alive.”
Caitlyn’s voice rings out from somewhere behind him. Her voice doesn’t echo, but it’s a near thing — they’re in the cavernous living room of the Kiramman estate, all gold gilt furnishings and the stuffy trappings of aristocracy. When Jayce tries to move, he finds that he’s tied to his chair.
“Respectfully.” He dips his chin at Cassandra. “I could say the same thing about you.”
Cait comes into view on his right, aiming a small pistol at his face. There is something to be said about Kiramman women and their guns.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cait narrows her eyes. “Are you threatening my mother?”
Jayce has the belated idea that maybe he should be more careful choosing his words with a gun to his head.
“Are you seriously asking me that?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“I didn’t come here to hurt either of you. I never would, as long as I live.”
Her face doesn’t change. But the smallest tremor in Cait’s hand holding the pistol.
She drops her arm and holsters the pistol at her side. Jayce knew (hoped) she would never actually shoot him, but he still breathes a little easier.
“Mother. Leave us.”
“Absolutely not,” Cassandra bursts. “I am not leaving you alone with him.”
“Mother.” Jayce can tell she isn’t asking. “I need to do this. Alone.”
Cassandra is silent for a beat, something unspoken passing between mother and daughter. She sighs and finally stands, leveling a frigid look at Jayce he doesn’t understand before turning back to Cait.
“I will be just outside.” She leans the rifle, butt-end down, against the settee. Jayce realizes with a twinge in his skull that she knocked him out with it. “And do not, under any circumstances, untie him.”
Cassandra makes to leave, but stops at Jayce’s side and grips his shoulder. She bends to speak into his ear, low enough that only he can hear.
“You were like a son to me once. And to Caitlyn, like a brother. When you…” There’s a moment when her icy mask cracks. Deep sorrow takes its place. “I do not know how you are alive today. But trust me when I tell you, you will never hurt her the way you did, ever again. I will not allow it.”
She straightens and smoothes a nonexistent wrinkle in his jacket, aloof again as if nothing happened. “Do we understand each other?”
Without waiting for an answer, Councilwoman Kiramman sweeps out of the room.
Jayce waits until the door shuts behind her. “I’ve faced some formidable people in my life, Cait, but your mother might beat them all.”
Cait doesn’t reply. She sits down in front of him on the settee her mother vacated, and buries her face in her hands.
This Caitlyn is… different. Jayce can see that now. There’s a sadness in her that wasn’t there in his Caitlyn — not at this age, at least.
“Can you tell me what’s going on? Why am I tied up like a criminal?” Jayce struggles against the ropes binding him even though it’s useless. “Cait. Will you please talk to me?”
“I saw your dead body.” She sounds hollow, scraped clean of emotion. “Like the thing that used to be you, and wasn’t anymore. Like an empty shell.”
Unbidden, a memory ambushes him: sprinting through the halls of the University, Viktor’s broken body heavy in his arms. Cradling him to his chest.
The pain in his head crescendos, stabbing behind his right eye. He grits his teeth. Don’t think about it.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you died,” Cait spits. When she finally snaps her head up to look at him, he almost recoils. “I mean that three years ago, you died, and we put your body in the ground and yet here you stand.”
Three years ago?
That’s not right — that can’t be.
If Caitlyn thought Jayce died in the astral plane with Viktor, that would be several years in the future, not the past. There would be no body to bury. Caitlyn would be older. And Cassandra would be dead.
But Jayce has a scientist’s mind. He calculates outcomes, putting the pieces together, even as the horror slams into him with a sickening lurch. He refused to consider it even with the evidence staring him right in the face. No Hexgate. Piltover, different. Caitlyn, young. Cassandra, alive.
Jayce, a dead man walking.
This isn’t the past. This isn’t his universe at all.
He’s in a different one.
“No,” Jayce breathes. His heart throbs in his ears. “This is wrong.”
“How did you do it, then? Defy your own death? Were you never really dead at all?”
“Cait.”
“I mourned you. We had a funeral for you! You left me!” Cait’s voice cracks. She sounds muffled like she’s underwater.
“Caitlyn, please,” Jayce gasps, and there’s no air to breathe.
Jayce’s vision tunnels, going black at the edges. He’s in the pit again, knowing that nobody will ever find his body, knowing that he’s a failure and he’s going to die and why can’t he just die, why won’t his heart stop beating, beating, beating, keeping him hopelessly, fruitlessly alive—
Then the tightness in his chest loosens.
Hands on his face, the back of his neck. Forcing him to bend at the waist and put his head between his legs. Caitlyn’s voice saying,“—have to breathe, listen to me. In through your nose, out through your mouth—”
He does what she says, and he slowly comes back to himself, slumped in his chair staring at the stitched threads in the carpet. And Jayce realizes Caitlyn cut him free from the ropes binding him.
It takes everything he has to lift his head and face her.
Cait’s eyes are huge and wet. And Jayce loathes himself, the alternate version of him that put her through this much pain. Hates himself now for doing the same exact thing.
“What happened to you, Jayce?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Cait narrows her eyes, proud and defiant, looking so much like the Caitlyn he’s always known — there she is. There’s his sister.
“Try me.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” He strains to pull himself into sitting up. “I need to find Viktor. I need to know if he ended up here with me.” I hope. “Do you know where he is? It’s really important to me. He is important.”
Cait narrows her eyes. “Who the hell is Viktor?”
Jayce gives her the abbreviated version.
He refuses at first. There’s no use recounting his long list of failures. But Cait is too damn persistent. And he could never really say no to her anyway.
Retelling the events that led him here is swallowing a knife in reverse; the words cut his tongue on their way out. It’s an out-of-body experience saying it all out loud, like something that belongs in the fantasy books he loved as a kid. He doesn’t blame her for gaping at him in disbelief.
Cait has no idea who Viktor is — or Vi, or Jinx, or Silco, or most of the central players he mentions. And why would she? Her path hasn’t crossed theirs yet. If it ever will at all.
He’s fine until he gets to the point in the timeline when Viktor — the council room. The explosion. Jayce can see the skepticism on Cait’s face as he tells his story. But when he stumbles over his words, she reaches out and grips his hand, anchoring him.
He leaves out most of what happened at the end between him and Viktor, locked together in the cosmic grip of the arcane. It feels too… intimate. Something to stay only between the two of them. Too raw to talk about even with Cait.
He says only that he was able to pierce through the hexcore’s influence to reach Viktor, and together, they ended it. He thought they were dying. Instead, he woke up here.
“That,” Cait says, “is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”
“How can you even prove this? How do I know you haven’t completely lost your mind?”
Jayce holds out his arm. The skin on his wrist is healed but still has the hexcorized patterns, the scar tissue webbed and unnatural, like iridescent lace. The rune is etched into his palm like a crucifixion mark.
“You said you saw my body,” Jayce says. “And I saw your mother’s.” Viktor, heavy in his arms. “Do you have any other explanation for how I’m here right now?”
“And that’s—” She gestures at his wrist. “The same thing that’s on your forehead?”
“What’s on my forehead?”
Already, Cait isn’t listening. She’s jumped up and pacing, lost in thought.
“So, for the sake of the argument, which, by the way, I still don’t believe you — you’re not my Jayce, then.” She can’t hide her disappointment. “You’re… some other Jayce, from another universe. You’re not really him.”
She was always so good at this, Jayce thinks. Detective Cait. If she had been in his shoes, she would have figured all of this out in minutes.
“It’s me. I might not be your Jayce, but I’m still me. Just… a me that has been through a very different set of circumstances.”
“A different set of circumstances,” Cait echoes, hollow.
“Cait.” In a deep, cowardly place inside of him, Jayce thinks he already knows the answer. “How did I die?”
There’s a long beat of silence as she stares out of the high windows that overlook the courtyard outside.
Jayce remembers when they were children, when Cassandra would send Jayce home despite Cait’s cajoling to let him play longer. How Jayce would hide until dark, and Cait would sneak out to talk to him through the bars of the front gates.
He wonders if Cait is remembering the same thing. If she even has those same memories at all.
She sighs, tilting her head back to the ceiling. “I need a drink.”
She goes to the bar cart in the corner of the room, behind him. He hears her uncork a bottle.
“Do you drink, Other Jayce?”
“Are you even old enough to drink?” Jayce asks wearily.
“My Jayce liked to drink now and again. That’s how he died.” She speaks in monotone, cold and detached. “There was a robbery at his place, an explosion. A child was killed. He was expelled from the University and exiled. Drank himself half to death and jumped out of the wall of his ruined apartment to finish the job.”
Jayce turns around slowly to look at her.
She pours out a bottle of something dark and amber into two glasses. He can only stare numbly at her back.
Acid coats her words. “The University reported it as an accident, of course. Didn’t want to tarnish their squeaky clean reputation.”
She leans heavily with both hands on the bar cart, hanging her head.
“But I knew the truth. I knew how upset you were afterwards, how unstable. But you were always this — this immovable force to me, in my mind, you know? I never stopped to consider for a second that you could feel that hopeless, that alone. That you were only human, too.” Her voice hitches. “I should have been there for you. I should have known. I could have — I could have—”
Before he can think about it, Jayce is up, across the room, and pulling Cait into a hug, holding her tight. He can feel it rack her whole body as she sobs.
“Listen to me. It wasn’t your fault,” he says fiercely. “Don’t do this. I know what it’s like to lose someone. I know what kind of hole it leaves in you. Don’t fill that void with guilt and regret. It’ll poison you. If your Jayce loved you as much as I do, he would never have blamed you for this.”
She slips out of his arms and sinks to the floor.
He doesn’t help her up. Clumsily, he gets down on the floor next to her and puts his arm around her.
He lets her cry as long as she needs to.
They’re there for a long time, Jayce’s arm around her shoulders.
When Cait’s sobs have eventually subsided and they’ve been quiet for a while, Cait fixes him with a watery look.
“You don’t smell like him.”
Jayce isn’t sure what to make of that. “What do I smell like?”
“Like you need a bath.”
Jayce snorts without humor. Cait almost smiles, fleeting, there and gone again.
“You can stay the night. Or as long as you need. I’ll have one of the guest rooms made up for you.”
“Won’t your mother have something to say about that?”
“Somehow, I think she’ll survive.”
“I should probably go see my mother,” Jayce says. “She’ll want to know her son is alive, I think.”
“Jayce, your mother. She…” Cait looks stricken. She can’t meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Jayce can only nod and rub his temples. It’s not really his mom, he reminds himself. His mom is back home in his universe, safe and sound. Probably mourning him, the son she thinks is dead.
“Cait.”
“Yes?”
“I think I’ll have that drink now.”
The Kirammans guest suite is almost as big as his entire childhood home.
He showers for the first time in far too long in the adjoining guest bathroom. After walking for days and sleeping on the wooden floor of a cart, feeling hot water on his sore muscles is damn near orgasmic.
Washing off the dirt from travelling is a timely affair. It takes multiple rounds of scrubbing himself raw until the water finally runs clear.
The shower made him clean, but it couldn’t work miracles. His face is frightful in the gold-trimmed mirror above the sink. It’s the first good look at it he’s had in weeks. The dark shadows under his eyes look like twin bruises. He has new lines where he didn’t before, gray hair at his temples that he’s sure will only multiply.
He barely recognizes himself.
No wonder Cait reacted the way she did, he thinks, pushing the wet hair off his forehead.
That’s when he sees them.
Four metallic fingerprints. Silvery and iridescent, the same as the scars on his wrist and palm. Ringing his forehead, crown-like, just below his hairline.
Viktor marked him permanently.
His hands shake as he grips the sink to steady himself.
Maybe this is a form of divine punishment, Jayce thinks bitterly. His penance for his sins, to be reminded of Viktor every time he glimpses his own reflection, when for all he knows Viktor may have gone somewhere Jayce can’t follow.
Even if he never sees Viktor again, Jayce will wear this remnant of his touch, anointed as his disciple, for the rest of his life. A cruel echo of what he’s lost.
He doesn’t look in the mirror again.
The guest bedroom four-poster bed is so soft and enormous, it feels like it’s swallowing him whole. He tosses and turns for an hour before giving up and dragging the sheets and pillows onto the floor.
After months in the pit, he still isn’t used to sleeping on something that isn’t the ground.
In his dream, he’s a child again, playing with Cait in the Kirammans’ flower garden.
He doesn’t remember this. But it feels as vivid and tangible as a memory. He can smell the freshly-cut grass, count every individual thorn on every rosebush.
Cait is chasing him. Jayce is older, taller. He can easily outrun her. He lets her catch him every time.
He’s been in Piltover for a few years now. Jayce has never had a friend before.
Cait catches him yet again. As a trophy, he braids her a flower crown with blooms that she picks. Jayce tucks a purple hyacinth behind her ear, and when Cait grins, there’s a low grumble of thunder in the distance.
The horizon is turning a bruised, angry violet. It’s time to come inside before the rain starts.
It’s only after he’s been awake for some time, watching the dawn whiten the sky through the window, trying and failing for the strength to get up, that he remembers the Kirammans don’t have a garden.
“Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
He feels like a teenager caught sneaking out. To be fair, he kind of was. “I need to find Mel.”
“Councilwoman Medarda?” Cait says, incredulous. “To do what?”
Jayce was hoping to steal out the door before sunrise, before Cait could stop him. He crept down the stairs quietly as he could, only to find Cait in the foyer already wide awake and suited in her enforcer gear, ready to go to work, staring at him like he’s lost his mind.
“You call her Mel? You’re on first-name terms with the most powerful woman in Piltover?”
Jayce had — maybe glossed over the specifics of his relationship with Mel, a bit.
The thought of sharing details of his sex life with Cait is about as appealing as being in the pit again.
Jayce only nods grimly. “She might know where Viktor is.”
“But she doesn’t know you, in our world.”
“She doesn’t need to know me. I just have to talk to her.”
“And how, exactly? Burst into her private chambers unannounced? Demand an audience?”
Before Jayce can protest, Cait forces him bodily through the foyer archway into the living room. She pushes him into a chair.
“Need I remind you, you shouldn’t be alive. You should be lying low, unless you want to cause widespread panic that the dead can come back.”
“Fine. I’ll go to Heimerdinger, then. I’m sure with his lifespan, he barely remembers one dead student.”
“After you…” She trails off. “Heimerdinger disappeared. Nobody has seen him in years.”
Another dead end. Jayce fights the urge to break something. “Then I’ll go to the University. Maybe they have records. Files on their past students.”
“Yes, I’m sure they’ll let a random homeless man have access to those.” Jayce opens his mouth to argue. Cait talks over him. “What part of ‘you’re supposed to be dead’ do you not understand? What if you’re recognized?”
Jayce scrubs a hand through his hair in frustration. “I’ll wear a hood.”
“Oh, sure. Not suspicious at all. The guards will have you thrown out on the street. Or worse, arrested.”
“Lucky I have an enforcer to bail me out, then.”
“I’m a junior officer. What am I supposed to tell them? ‘Don’t worry about him, he wasn’t thinking straight. It’s a side effect of the resurrection and all.’”
“I can’t do this, Cait! I can’t sit here knowing Viktor could be out there somewhere while I’m sitting on my ass here. I’ll climb the gates, I’ll break the windows, I’ll tear this fucking city apart to find him if I have to!”
Jayce realizes he’s on his feet, looming over Cait, his blood rushing in his ears. She studies him, her face unreadable.
His anger ebbs as soon as it came. Cait doesn’t deserve it.
He sags, taking a step back. “I’m sorry.”
Cait considers him for a long moment.
“I’ll go to the University and ask around,” she says finally. “They won’t turn away an enforcer.”
“Thank you,” Jayce says, shamefaced.
“What’s his last name?”
“He doesn’t.” The words catch in Jayce’s throat. “He doesn’t have one.”
“…All right, then. What does he look like?”
“Ah. He’s… he would be about 27, around now. Brown hair. Brown eyes, but they’re more like amber. Shorter and smaller than me, to about my chin. He uses a cane. He has a mole under his eye on the right, one above his mouth.”
Describing him makes Jayce’s heart unspool like loose thread. He catches Cait’s expression and his face heats, inexplicably. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
Cait makes to leave but pauses in the archway, turning back.
“Have you considered that Viktor in this universe might not be your Viktor?”
Jayce has. He’s been trying not to think about it.
“I’m willing to take that chance.”
It would be enough just to see Viktor again, one last time, he tells himself. He almost believes it.
“I’m trusting you to stay here and not try anything stupid while I’m gone.” She grabs her uniform’s hat on her way out. “You’re officially on house arrest.”
“Since when?” he calls after her retreating back.
“Since now!” The door slams behind her.
Jayce waits about ten minutes, just in case she comes back, before he makes a break for it.
A hand on his shoulder stops him at the door.
“Cait said you’re not allowed to leave.” It’s Tobias, Cait’s father, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, son. It’s for your safety.”
Jayce briefly considers shrugging him off and leaving anyway. Tobias couldn’t physically stop him, if he wanted to.
Then behind Tobias, he sees Cassandra. She doesn’t have her rifle anymore, but the look in her eyes is more threatening than any gun could be.
Jayce grumbles a curse and stomps his way back upstairs.
Jayce can only wander aimlessly through the many rooms of the Kiramman estate for so long. He can’t stand doing nothing, not knowing whether Viktor is out there. If he’s searching fruitlessly for Jayce, too.
He avoids Caitlyn’s parents, or maybe they’re avoiding him. It’s not hard to do in a mansion this size. The day is mild and sunny, so he forces his reckless energy to move into taking a walk on the grounds.
The estate is an obnoxious display of wealth, and that principle extends past its doors, too. Their property is vast enough to have a walking path that winds through the immaculately-trimmed hedges. He chooses a direction at random and passes underneath a wrought iron trellis archway, cradled by wisteria.
Everything he sees unearths memories, a feedback loop of his own misery. This small oasis of greenery in the metal and stone of Piltover reminds him of that other world. The flowers growing on the metal husk that used to be him, another Jayce. And another Viktor, strange, unknowable, telling him he needed to do the unthinkable to save them all.
“Well, we did it,” Jayce says out loud. Like with the force of his bitterness alone, the other Viktor might hear. “We’re saved, and he isn’t here. So what did I even do it all for?”
The open blue sky offers no answers.
Once his leg is properly complaining at him, he loops around to go back inside and draws up short.
Under the kitchen window, there’s a garden.
There’s no garden on the Kirammans’ grounds in Jayce’s world. He finds it hard to imagine Cassandra pulling weeds, getting dirt under her fingernails.
But it’s there. The same rose bushes from his dream. The same delicate hyacinths, pure white to deep purple, in the full bloom of early spring. Defiant of Jayce’s understanding.
Cait finds him in the library hours later, with no news.
“Nobody at the University knew anyone by the name of Viktor who fit his description. No student file on him, either.”
She throws a thick folder down on the table between them.
“I also stopped by the station and manually searched the records of city residents. If Viktor is out there, he’s not in the system.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jayce says immediately. “I didn’t make it all this way just to give up on him this easily.” He’s prepared to take the city apart brick-by-brick if he has to.
Cait just stares at him, calculating something in her head.
It reminds him inextricably of Viktor. How he would study Jayce sometimes with his butterscotch eyes. The same way he would stare down a complex theoretical equation he was steadfastly dedicated to solving, and he wasn’t leaving the lab until he did. Being the subject of that single-minded focus was… flustering.
With Cait, it just makes him vaguely annoyed. “Something on my face, Detective?”
She arches a brow. “There is, actually, smartass. Not what I was thinking about, though. What makes you different?”
“I don’t know, Cait,” he grumbles. “Maybe it’s my sunny personality.”
“You’re misunderstanding me,” Cait says, impatient. “Where do the paths diverge?”
She doesn’t sit, and starts pacing in front of the dark wooden bookshelves instead.
“What’s different about this universe that something happened — or didn’t happen — in yours, and you’re still alive?”
Jayce’s heart squeezes so painfully, for a moment he can’t breathe. “Viktor.”
“Oh, your genocidal boyfriend has something to do with this? Why am I not surprised.”
“He’s not genocidal, and he’s not my—” He clams up at the look on Cait’s face. “He stopped me. In my timeline, the night I was expelled from the University, I was — I drank too much. And he came in, right before I was about to…”
Am I interrupting? Their first night as partners brought Jayce back from the brink in more ways than one. It was electrifying. Like finding the gear whose notches fit perfectly with his own.
Jayce never got to tell Viktor how much that night meant to him. A lifetime of yearning for someone who understood him, and then: Viktor. He was the first person to ever truly see Jayce. To see all the passionate, embarrassingly idealistic parts of him, and the thrill when Jayce found out Viktor was made of all the same.
And it only cost them both in the end.
“He saved you,” Cait finishes, softly.
“Yes,” Jayce says. “He did.”
“I didn’t realize he meant… so much to you.”
Jayce thinks hard. “So in this universe, I died that night, so it’s possible Viktor and I have never met. That must be why there’s no hextech in this world.”
Cait blinks. “Is that your magic crystal power thing you invented?”
“It’s not — never mind.”
He and Viktor likely never had that fateful first night in Heimerdinger’s office, so no Hexgate. No hextech. No anomaly.
Which means if he finds Viktor, there’s no way of getting back to their world.
Jayce banishes that thought as quickly as it came. He doesn’t need an existential crisis right now.
“Jayce.” Cait’s tone is cautious. “What if Viktor doesn’t exist in this world?”
“He does. He has to.”
Jayce can’t consider the alternative.
If Viktor in this world never met Jayce, he may have never made it to the University at all. Maybe he never donned a stolen student’s uniform to sneak into classes, determined to take whatever scraps he could from an education he couldn’t afford. A boy born in the fissures with a will to claw his way out and a dream of living in the sun.
Maybe he never left.
The realization shoots Jayce out of his seat.
“This database. Does it only include Piltover residents?”
“Of course,” she says, offhand. Then stops in her tracks, understanding what he’s implying.
“I’m going to Zaun.”
Jayce will try to find Vi, or Ekko, hell, even Jinx, if she doesn’t kill him first. Anybody he might recognize.
“You cannot be seen, Jayce.”
“Cait,” he warns. “You can tie me to a chair again, if you want to. But it’ll only be a waste of time. I’m going.”
“Fine. Then I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t need to.” Jayce is already leaving, brushing past her. “You have your job to do, your life to get back to. I can do this on my own.”
Cait grabs him by the arm, dragging him to a stop.
“You shouldn’t have to,” she says, vehement.
Then she lets him go and shrinks back, as if she’s said too much. Cait looks furtively up at him, then away.
“I can’t let you leave me again,” she says, in a small voice that sounds younger than her years.
Jayce would have thought his own heart was too battered to take any more damage. But it cracks in half anyway.
“I won’t,” he promises, touching her shoulder. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
She still can’t meet his eyes.
“I saw you, you know,” she says suddenly. “After…”
“After I died?” Jayce says, gently.
“It was like you were real. You would visit me, talk to me. At first it terrified me. Then I started talking back.”
Jayce swallows his own horror. Oh, Cait. How could I have done this to you? “So when you saw me at your front door, you thought…”
Cait nods stiffly. “My mother made me go to all kinds of doctors about it. Nobody could help. Probably because I didn’t want them to.”
Her face hardens once more. “Then they gave me new medication and the hallucinations stopped. It was never really you, of course. But it was like losing you all over again.”
“Cait.” Jayce hesitates before pulling her into his arms. “I’m so sorry.” I don’t know how to make this better.
She lets him hug her briefly, then pulls away, avoiding his eyes. “We should get moving. I don’t want to be out after dark.”
If Piltover is a different city from the one Jayce knows, Zaun is unrecognizable.
The two cities don’t end neatly at their respective limits, cordoned off at the bridge. They spill out and bleed across it, with no clear divide that Jayce can make sense of. Brightly-colored stalls line either side of the bridge, harking all manners of wares: street food, breads and pastries, fruits, vegetables, jewelry, fabrics, flowers, trinkets and baubles, even a pop-up barbershop.
The people follow suit. They stroll back and forth between the two cities without a second thought, linger at stalls to chat with the vendors.
Jayce and Cait pass a boy in a beautifully welded wheelchair, rolling after another, older girl with the same dark skin and bright purple hair. A Chirean woman flirts with an enforcer, whose uniform is Zaunite green, as she blushes and passes her coins in exchange for a pocket watch.
It all floats past him, as if borne by the river below them. The rune on his palm is starting to itch.
Cait strong-armed him into wearing a hood, and from under it, he studies each face as they weave through the crowd. Viktor might be here. Any second, he might glimpse a passing stranger, only to see familiar amber eyes staring back at him, a velvety accented voice saying, Fashionably late, are you? You always enjoyed a grand entrance, Jayce.
Cait has no such distraction. Her head is on a swivel and her hand hasn’t left the pistol on her hip once. “Are we there yet?”
Jayce realizes belatedly that they’ve long crossed the boundary and he didn’t even notice. “I think we already are.”
“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”
“Not really.”
“Wonderful. Let’s find someone who knows where Viktor is, and get home.”
At her tone of urgency, Jayce shoots her a look. “What’s the matter?”
Cait glances furtively around them. “Nothing.”
Jayce almost laughs. “You’ve never been here, have you?”
“I’ve… passed by.”
They make their way down a cobblestone street, bathed in the early evening sunset, following the flow of foot traffic. A street performer plays a violin somewhere.
The air tastes cleaner. Even the colors seem more vibrant. Building above ground rather than under will do that, Jayce supposes.
“You were once the little girl who made fun of me for making my mom check under the bed for monsters.”
“I grew up,” she says curtly. “Also, you were 13. That’s far too old for that kind of behavior.”
“They’re just people, Cait. Nothing more, nothing less. I used to think the same way as you, a long time ago. They’re no different from you besides the mark on the map they call home.”
“And of course, you have an entirely unbiased opinion on the matter.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cait levels him a don’t act dumb with me, you know better look. “Viktor, with no last name. He’s from here, isn’t he? That’s why you dropped everything to — oh.”
They turn a corner, and the crowd thins out all at once in the large, open square, and it’s there. The Last Drop.
Jayce has never seen it before. From what he remembers, Vi always made it out to be a bit of a dive bar. This is anything but, all cheerful red and copper exterior and stained glass windows. If welcoming arms were a building, it would be this one.
Jayce dimly notices that his hands are shaking. Like he’s on the edge of something enormous.
“Jayce?” Cait is already several steps ahead of him. She turns back to him, cocking her head. “Are you all right?”
His rune prickles, undeniable.
He follows that too-big feeling, that intuitive, gut-gnawing energy, follows it straight through the doors of the Last Drop, Cait tailing behind.
The bar is busy with the dinner crowd but not stifling. There’s a boulder of a man with a craggy, friendly face and gray in his beard behind the bar. Jayce realizes with a small shock this must be Vander.
And sitting at the bar, a girl about Caitlyn’s age with a mop of pink hair, sipping a drink and looking entirely bored — Vi.
She’s not quite fully formed into the Vi that Jayce knows. She’s wearing a worn leather jacket that’s comically oversized on her — maybe Vander’s in another life? Her hair is shorter and sticks out at all angles in a distinctly teenager-y way.
Jayce doesn’t expect the stab of affection he feels seeing her.
Vi looks up, does a double take when she sees Jayce staring. And gives him the middle finger.
In a world so deeply changed, it’s nice to see that Vi, at least, is a mathematical constant.
Vi eyes him as Jayce approaches the bar, Cait close behind. “What are you two Pilties doing on our side of town?”
“How do you know we’re from Piltover?” Cait asks.
“You mean, besides the everything about you?” Vi smirks. She gives Cait a once-over. “Cute get-up.”
Cait opens her mouth to retort.
But Vander materializes behind Vi from pouring another patron’s drink, like he has a sixth sense for when Vi is getting into trouble. He’s probably honed the skill well.
“That’s enough, Vi,” he admonishes. He nods at Jayce and Cait, his gaze straying momentarily to her uniform. “Evenin’, young’uns. What can I do for you?”
“We’re looking for someone,” Jayce says. “Do either of you know a Viktor?”
Vander’s entire demeanor shifts.
He stands up straighter to his full ceiling-scraping height. Vi’s head snaps around to look at him, but Vander doesn’t acknowledge her.
He sets down the glass he was wiping.
“That depends on who’s asking,” he says evenly.
There’s nothing overtly threatening in it, but it raises Jayce’s hackles anyway. He gets the sense that Vander is a man who fiercely protects his people.
They know Viktor. Jayce’s heart is pounding in his ears.
“I’m…” How in the world to describe his relationship with Viktor. “An old friend.”
“Are you asking as an enforcer,” Vander says, jerking his thumb at Cait, “or are you asking as an ‘old friend?’”
Jayce isn’t interested in playing games. This man knows who Viktor is, and he’s desperate.
“You’ve met him.” He puts both hands on the bar and leans in, enunciating every word. “Tell me where he is.”
“Careful, son.” Vander seems unfazed. “Intimidation is one method of getting what you want. You better be prepared to back it up.”
“We’re not here to cause any trouble,” Cait cuts in.
She yanks Jayce back from the bar and quells him with a look.
To Vander, she says, “I’m here off-duty.”
“Oh! What a relief,” Vi says. “For a second, I thought one of you was actually doing your job for once.”
“What’s your problem?” Cait replies hotly.
“You want a list?”
Jayce can feel a headache building behind his eyes. This is all rapidly slipping out of his control. His rune is practically burning on his palm, as if it’s responding to his mounting panic.
A side door to the right of the bar opens, and in spills a preteen girl like a hurricane with sky blue hair, talking a mile a minute.
“Vi!” she shrieks. “Our experiment worked! All we needed was to add more methane—”
“Powpow.” Vi’s scowl breaks into a smile. She slips off the barstool and throws an arm around the girl’s shoulders. She does a mock-exaggeration check of the girl’s face. “No eyebrows burned off?”
“Yeesh, relax, that was one time—”
Jayce can only gape. It’s one thing to see Cait and Vi as their younger selves. It’s a strange cognitive dissonance that Jinx — war criminal, wanted terrorist, Viktor’s murderer — was also once this girl with grease smudged on her nose, telling Vi excitedly about something to do with glitter bomb gas.
“And she only had to break half my test tubes to do it,” a familiar voice drawls.
An older man with a long, hawk-like nose and a scar over his left eye sidles up to Vander behind the bar.
“She takes after someone I know,” Vander tells him.
“Messy things, aren’t they, children?” he says, touching Vander’s arm in a way that’s undeniably more than friendly.
Jayce’s mouth goes dry. “You.”
Silco and Vander both turn to stare at him curiously.
“Sorry, have we met?” Silco asks, not sounding sorry at all.
The side door opens again. In the chaos of it all, nobody else in the room notices, but Jayce glances over, unthinking, and —
There’s a man in the doorway.
He’s dressed in Zaun tailoring, all careful geometry and sharp lines, resplendent in black and red.
His hair is longer, with the same curl at the ends where he twirls it when he’s deep in thought. There’s a new scar on his right eyebrow. Same high cheekbones and strong brow. Same mole on his cheek, and above his mouth.
Same butterscotch eyes.
He’s gaping back at Jayce, face drained of color and leaning heavily on his cane. Uncorrupted by the arcane, his body human and whole again.
He’s as beautiful as ever, as beautiful as the day Jayce first met him. As beautiful as the day he lost him.
The world falls away.
Viktor.
Jayce knows he must have moved. He doesn’t remember the specifics. He might have knocked over a table. All he knows is he’s across the room and in front of Viktor in seconds.
Jayce reaches out and grabs desperately at Viktor’s shoulders — just to touch him and to know, at least, that this isn’t a hallucination. He’s warm under Jayce’s hands. Solid. Undeniably real.
“Viktor.”
Jayce doesn’t care if he’s this world’s Viktor, or his Viktor. He crashes into him and pulls Viktor into his chest. Like if he holds Viktor tight enough, he can press all his overflowing emotions into him. Make him understand what words can’t say.
“Jayce?” Viktor says.
And, gods, his voice. Jayce thought he might never hear Viktor say his name again.
“You’re… alive?” Viktor whispers, astonished and uncertain.
Jayce knows it immediately, as certain as the ground beneath their feet. This is his Viktor.
Viktor shifts in Jayce’s arms like he wants to be freed. Jayce doesn’t want it to end, but he lets it happen. He keeps his hands on Viktor’s shoulders, though. He’s not letting go anytime soon.
Jayce opens his mouth to speak and finds that he can’t.
Viktor is looking up at Jayce, his expression gone distant. As if he’s looking through him, grappling with something beyond that Jayce isn’t privy to.
“Viktor?” Jayce says, tentative, quiet enough for only him to hear. “It’s me. It’s Jayce.”
Viktor looks — lost. A little unsteady on his feet, like his legs might give out at any moment. Jayce thinks he knows how he feels.
Vi clears her throat, shattering the moment and hauling Jayce back to reality. “Uh, Vik? You know this guy?”
Cait is appraising Viktor, brow creased in deep thought. The rest of them — Vi, Jinx, Vander, Silco — are staring at Jayce like they’re seeing him in a completely new light. Wary, maybe even a little suspicious.
“I think you have some explaining to do,” Vander rumbles. “About who you really are.”
“I would also like to know,” Silco says, arms folded, “about the nature of your relationship with my son.”
His words hit Jayce like a blow, leaving him spinning. It’s more than enough to momentarily distract him. “Sorry — your son?”
Jayce turns back to Viktor and — he’s gone. The door is hanging open, like he rushed out in a hurry.
Jayce doesn’t think, doesn’t hesitate.
He follows.
One of the more frustrating parts about Jayce’s leg is that he can’t move as fast anymore.
Luckily for him, Viktor matches his speed. He doesn’t get far before Jayce finds him.
The side door opens out onto a narrow alley between the bar and the neighboring building. It’s lined with crates and barrels, pockmarked by shallow puddles that reflect the dusk-orange sky and the glowing lamps strung from copper pipes.
Viktor is staggering down the alley away from him, shoulders weighed down. Jayce can hear his ragged breathing even from a distance.
Now that he’s found him, he’s never letting Viktor out of his sight again.
Jayce hurries to catch him before he can make it past the mouth of the alleyway.
“Viktor — hey, wait — Viktor, stop.”
Viktor’s body seems to give out on him. He falls heavily into sitting on a nearby crate. His chest heaves as he gasps for air.
When his eyes meet Jayce’s, they’re wild with panic.
This is nothing like what Jayce imagined for their reunion. This is his whole world, his best friend, his partner, alive and real and right in front of him. And he’s terrified. Because of him.
Jayce sinks to his knees on the ground between Viktor’s legs. His leg protests loudly. He doesn’t spare it a second thought.
“Viktor?” The urge to touch him is overwhelming. Jayce reaches for him on instinct. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Viktor knocks his hands away.
“Go away,” he chokes. It’s paper-thin. “Let me — let me just—”
This close, Jayce can see Viktor’s hands are shaking, breath coming fast, his eyes unfocused and glassy. Jayce knows the signs. He’s seen Viktor experience these attacks before during their hextech days. Been plagued by them himself ever since his months in the pit.
“Viktor.” Jayce reaches out and cradles Viktor’s face. His skin is clammy to the touch. “Hey. Look at me.”
Viktor finally meets his eyes. Deep honey, forever-and-ever gold. For a second, Jayce forgets his own name.
“Breathe.” Jayce grabs Viktor’s wrist with one hand, feels the fluttering of his rabbit-heart pulse against his thumb. “Listen. Breathe with me. In through your nose, out through your mouth. Like this.”
He demonstrates, setting the pace to guide him.
Viktor takes a deep, shuddering gasp, like the breathing hurts him. And follows Jayce’s lead.
Time seems to gentle and slow. Viktor’s panting gradually relaxes, until they’re breathing in the same, steady rhythm. Until Jayce is certain their heartbeats are in sync. One breath passed back and forth between four lungs.
“I’ve got you,” Jayce murmurs, rubbing circles over Viktor’s wrist with his thumb. “It’s all right. I’m right here.”
Jayce leans closer and their foreheads touch. His other hand drifts from Viktor’s face to the back of his neck. And something about it is cosmically profound and right. They’re two celestial bodies, always meant to end up here. Drawn into each other’s gravitational pull.
Jayce opens his eyes to Viktor inches away, vital and beautiful and here.
“Hi,” Jayce says, awestruck.
Viktor’s breath is warm on Jayce’s face. “Hello.”
Relief washes over Jayce. It should be impossible that Viktor is right in front of him, after all they’ve been through.
All the war, the senseless violence, dragging himself out of the pit with bloody palms, letting himself be broken, nearly losing himself in the breaking. All for Viktor, alive and in his arms.
All of it was worth it.
Viktor is devastating and gorgeous in the lampglow, eyes soft and so warm they’re almost orange. He hesitantly reaches out and touches Jayce’s face. Jayce sucks in a breath. Every cell in his body snaps to attention at his touch.
“Are you… real?”
Jayce smiles for the first time in recent memory. “I could ask the same thing.”
“You’re supposed to be dead," Viktor tells him.
“Funny,” Jayce says. “We have a way of doing that, don’t we? Not dying.”
Viktor’s gaze roams over Jayce, taking him in. His brow creases in confusion.
“Why are you dressed like a farmer?”
Jayce laughs. Something that’s been tightly coiled in his gut since he woke up in that field loosens.
It’s the same moment Viktor notices the fingerprints — his fingerprints — on Jayce’s forehead.
His expression hollows out. He sits back, pulling away from Jayce. Jayce’s hand falls from Viktor’s nape into his own lap.
Viktor is looking through him again, eyes on Jayce but not really seeing him. He looks like he’s caving in on himself.
“What have I done to you?” he whispers.
Jayce squares his shoulders. So it’s like that, then.
“Nothing I wouldn’t go through a million times over for you.”
It has the opposite effect of what Jayce wanted. Viktor’s eyes shutter, his face a blank void.
Viktor curls up in on himself, wrapping his arms around his knees. “Where have you been all this time?”
And Jayce — Jayce can be okay about this. Viktor isn’t shutting him out. He needs the space to process. Jayce can understand that.
He can let Viktor be whatever he needs to be, and Jayce will be there to fill in the gaps for what he can’t.
Jayce hauls himself to a stand. He gingerly sits beside Viktor.
“I ended up somewhere outside Piltover,” he says. “In a field somewhere. Probably gave some cows the shock of their life.”
“And… you walked?” Viktor sounds incredulous.
Jayce studies the ground. There’s moss growing between the cracks of the stone street beneath them. Signs of life, stubbornly persistent. Viktor’s shoulder is inches away from his and it feels like miles.
“Jayce?” Viktor prompts.
“Well, yeah, V. I had to find you. It took me a few days, but Cait helped me.”
Jayce feels more than sees Viktor stiffen beside him. “How long have you been here?”
“Not long. Less than a week. What about you?”
Viktor snaps his head up to look at him. “No.”
Jayce shifts in discomfort under Viktor’s scrutiny. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” Viktor hisses. “No. Jayce, tell me you are lying.”
“I’m not, Viktor, I’m — listen, I’m sorry. I should have found you sooner, but I didn’t think—”
“Jayce.”
Viktor is watching him, and Jayce is watching him back across the gulf between them. Dreading that whatever he’s building up to will turn his world on his axis, and feeling sick from the vertigo already.
“I have been here for three years.”
Jayce wants to sit and talk with Viktor until long after nightfall. But after the bombshell he dropped, Jayce can hardly coax more than a few words out of him.
He’s clearly drained by his episode earlier. Jayce tells him he should rest, and Viktor, surprisingly, allows it. That’s never really worked before with Viktor, in Jayce’s experience.
Jayce helps him downstairs into the bar’s basement, where there’s a spare bedroom. It’s simply furnished, warm wood and lamp light, with a bunk bed and a few threadbare couches and armchairs.
There are traces of Vi and Jinx’s childhood everywhere he looks — crayon art drawn in a child’s hand taped to the walls, a spare box of toys made from junk metal shoved in a corner.
Maybe Viktor’s childhood, too.
Jayce helps him into bed. He pulls the patchwork quilt up to Viktor’s neck. Viktor stirs from whatever far-away place where he had retreated into himself.
“Do you feel like this?” His words are a little slurred with exhaustion. “After you have these attacks?”
Jayce smoothes the corner of the blanket over Viktor’s thin shoulder. “How do you know I have them, too?”
Viktor’s presence stands larger than a mountain in Jayce’s mind, commanding and exacting and intimidating, when he wants to be. Yet he seems so small looking up at Jayce from the child-sized bed. Vulnerable in a way that disarms him.
“Because you knew exactly what to do.”
Jayce doesn’t know what to say to that. He switches off the light. He slides down to the floor next to the bed, leans his back against the mattress.
“You should get going.”
“I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Go home, Jayce.” Viktor turns over onto his side and closes his eyes. “Do not burden yourself any longer.”
“You’re never a burden to me,” Jayce says, quietly. If Viktor hears him, he doesn’t respond.
True to his word, Jayce doesn’t leave. He waits until Viktor’s breathing has evened out and he’s sure he’s fallen asleep.
Only once he’s certain does he stand, his leg brace squeaking. Viktor looks peaceful asleep. Soft and untroubled.
Jayce leans over and gently tucks a piece of Viktor’s hair behind his ear, tenderly enough not to wake him.
“When I saw you again after so long, I thought—” He swallows around the lump in his throat. “My first thought was, Everything’s going to be okay. No matter what happens. It’ll be alright, as long as I’m with you.”
His words ring hollow even to his own ears. He’s glad, at least, that Viktor isn’t awake to hear Jayce make a fool of himself. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done that over Viktor. He’s sure it won’t be the last.
Viktor doesn’t stir, but he sighs a little in his sleep. In what dim light glows through the crack under the door, he looks like a fallen angel, dark eyelashes on high sculpted cheekbones, his long hair haloed around his head.
“I missed you so much,” Jayce whispers. “I was starting to think I’d lost you forever.”
There are things easier said in the dark.
Jayce brushes the wetness from his eyes. He pulls a blanket off of the top bunk and a pillow off the couch. He curls up on the floor beside the bed. The only noise is Viktor’s breathing filling the room, heavy in the silence.
For the first time in ages, Jayce falls asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow.