Ovalith

"You should come up with me. We're partners!"

...This well-meaning, painfully oblivious himbo is2g.

Don't get me wrong; it's great that Jayce wants Viktor to be included. But that scene as a whole, to me, has always been one of the most brutal when it comes to the developing disconnect between Jayce and Viktor.

It's the most unguarded with Jayce Viktor will ever be about his anxiety regarding the precarious spot he inhabits in Piltover and society as a whole, his damaged self-image... and yet there is not a shred of recognition on Jayce's face as to why Viktor would decline to make a public appearance in front of "all of them".

After all, they're partners, equals (and in Jayce's eyes, Viktor was never broken), so where's the issue?

This right here is a running theme throughout season 1 - time and time again, Jayce fully fails to assume Viktor's perspective and see what the world looks like through his eyes. Jayce knows he thinks the world of Viktor, but sadly, this blinds him to how differently they are treated, how broken Viktor views himself in anticipation of people's disdain, and above that, just how lonely Viktor feels.

How fully and truly forsaken he feels whenever Jayce fails to support him.

Jayce doesn't understand that Viktor needs him at all.

Once you recognise this, you see it in almost all of their scenes throughout acts 2 and 3. Even in some they don't share, such as, infamously, the sex scene.

(Even the one time Jayce appears somewhat close to this realisation, he says "now he needs me and there's nothing I can do" ...Jayce please. Even Mel understood that the only thing he would have had to do for Viktor was to not leave him alone, yet this pure-of-heart, dumb-of-ass boyfailure keeps wanting to do the most and thereby accomplishing the least. I love my man dearly but Christ alive...)

Thankfully though, it doesn't stay that way.

Because not only does Jayce eventually learn – in a very hands-on way – what the world looked like from Viktor's perspective by losing the function of his leg, clawing his way from the depths of the Fissures to the top of Piltover in maddening solitude (save for the gawking of unsympathetic entities). And not only does he learn that the „impossible dream“ as his mother put it, the beauty and the salvation he was chasing his entire life was Viktor all along.

He also learns that this same dream literally bent time and space solely to set Jayce on his path to Viktor. To save him from himself, to save him from loneliness –

because Viktor needs him.

"Only you can show me this" - Without you, I am lost.

And I believe the moment Jayce realised this, understood the depth and scale to which Viktor actually needed him, that's all there was. In the end, when given the choice, of course he was going to stay with Viktor over abandoning him ever again.

(Disclaimer: When I refer to Jayce as a himbo or a dumbass, I am not downplaying his intellect, only questioning why he's not using it sometimes.)

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