#jayvikgoodbye

Jayce

The crash echoed through the high rafters of the Academy like a thunderclap. Jayce didn't think; he ran. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic rhythm of dread that grew louder with every step toward the laboratory.

"Viktor!" he bellowed, throwing his weight against the doors.

The sight that met him stopped the breath in his throat. The lab was a wreck of shattered glass and swirling violet mist, and there, sprawled on the cold stone floor, was Viktor. Jayce rushed to his side, his hands hovering, terrified to touch him.

Slowly, Viktor began to stir.

Jayce watched, paralyzed, as his partner rose. He wasn't the frail man who had collapsed in the hallway. He was something... transcendent. Viktor stood tall, his body a breathtaking mesh of flesh and shimmering hex-metal that hummed with a resonance Jayce could feel in his own teeth. Only Viktor’s face remained untouched—pale, sharp, and hauntingly beautiful amidst the machinery.

Jayce’s hammer clattered to the floor, forgotten. He didn't recoil in horror. Instead, his eyes filled with a pained, soul-deep tenderness. Viktor looked like a god carved from the stars, but he also looked terribly, devastatingly exposed.

Without a word, Jayce stripped off his own heavy cloak. He stepped into the shimmering aura of the Hexcore and draped the fabric carefully over Viktor’s shoulders, his hands lingering on the cold metal of Viktor's new form.

"You must be cold," Jayce whispered, his voice trembling with a thousand things he couldn't put into words.

Viktor looked down at the heavy fabric, then back at Jayce. His eyes were no longer amber; they were violet voids, swirling with a depth that made Jayce feel infinitesimal.

"Cold?" Viktor echoed. The voice was a haunting melodic resonance, layered like a chorus. "No. I feel many things, Jayce. But cold is no longer one of them."

Viktor tightened the cloak around himself, the weight of Jayce’s scent and warmth acting as a final anchor to the man he had once been. A look of profound, tragic clarity washed over his features.

"I cannot stay here," Viktor said softly. "The vision is too large for these walls. It belongs to the people we forgot."

Jayce felt the world slipping through his fingers. "Viktor, please—"

Viktor stepped toward him, closing the distance. He hesitated for a heartbeat, the machine in him warring with the man Jayce had loved, before he reached out. He pulled Jayce into a deep, heavy kiss. It was a goodbye—a desperate, bruising contact that tasted of salt, copper, and the lingering heat of a dying star.

When Viktor finally pulled away, Jayce was breathless, his knees weak. He watched, devastated, as Viktor turned toward the shattered doors.

"Viktor, wait!" Jayce shouted, his voice breaking, echoing off the cold stone. "Our dream—the Hextech Dream—we were going to do it together!"

He reached out a hand, but Viktor didn't look back. The cloak Jayce had given him trailed behind like a shroud as he stepped out into the night.

"Viktor!"

Jayce was left alone in the wreckage of their life’s work, the sound of his own heart breaking the only thing left in the silence.

Viktor

The air of the Undercity felt different now. It didn't burn his lungs; it sang to him. As Viktor descended into the Lanes, the neon glow of shimmer dens and the heavy scent of industrial rot pulled at his core. But as he moved deeper, the song began to sour into a dirge.

The state of the Lanes was worse than the jagged memories of his youth. As a boy, there had been a rough-edged dignity here—a community of laborers forged in soot. Now, it was a graveyard for the living. The fog was thick with the sickly-sweet tang of Shimmer, a scent that cloyed at his new, heightened senses. He saw people slumped in doorways, their skin translucent and mapped with bulging, pulsating purple veins that looked like angry parasites beneath the surface.

Hollow-eyed shadows stared at him as he passed, their gazes devoid of curiosity, filled only with a haunting vacancy. Most devastating were the children. He saw a young girl, her arm unnaturally elongated and weeping a violet ichor, gripping the leg of a man whose jaw had been partially consumed by the drug's mutagenic rot. The child didn't cry; she simply clung to the only thing she had left, her small face a mask of premature exhaustion.

It shifted something profound inside of him—a tectonic movement of his soul. The "Great Beyond" was not a place in the stars; it was the dignity these people had been robbed of.

They need your help.

Viktor froze. The voice was soft, a vibration in his mind that smelled like old books and lavender. "Sky?" he breathed.

Tears—real, hot, human tears—blurred his violet vision. She appeared before him in the hazy light of an alleyway, a shimmering, ethereal ghost of the girl he had lost. She didn't speak again; she only turned and drifted deeper into the slums. Viktor followed, his cane clicking on the damp stone, his heart thudding with a renewed purpose.

She led him to a wide, open space beneath a crumbling bridge, a makeshift camp filled with the dying and the addicted. Sky gestured behind him.

Viktor turned. Three men approached him, their eyes bloodshot with shimmer, rusted knives drawn. He felt no fear. He saw only their affliction—the jagged, purple veins and the heedless suffering in their gazes.

"Heedless suffering," Viktor whispered.

On autopilot, he reached out his hand. His power surged—not as a weapon, but as a warmth, inviting and pure. He closed his eyes, and suddenly, he wasn't looking at a thieving addict. He was inside the soul of a man named Huck. He saw Huck’s life: a daughter's laugh, a job at the forge, and the slow, agonizing descent into the bottle of shimmer.

Viktor focused, his new mind calculating the biological correction. He reached into Huck's very DNA, pulling the shimmer from his blood like thread from a loom.

The connection snapped.

Viktor opened his eyes. Huck stood before him, the purple haze gone from his eyes. His skin was no longer grey; it was decorated with beautiful, shimmering silver patterns where the Hexcore had knit him back together.

Huck gasped, looking at his clean hands, and then he fell to his knees, sobbing with the weight of his restored humanity. The other addicts, seeing the miracle, dropped their knives. One by one, they knelt, bowing their heads in reverence before the man who radiated the light of a new god.

Viktor’s knees buckled. The effort had taken its toll, the magic draining his remaining physical reserves. He leaned heavily on his shattered cane, watching in confusion and awe as more and more people emerged from the shadows, hope—real, terrifying hope—burning in their eyes.

In the center of the crowd, he saw her. Sky stood amongst the broken and the healed, her eyes full of tears. She gave him a single, proud nod.

He had done it. He had kept his promise. He would heal the Lanes, one soul at a time. The Glorious Evolution wasn't a war; it was a cure.

Months had passed since Viktor had descended into the deep. The commune he had built was a sanctuary of humming machinery and hushed voices, a place where the healed—those etched in silver—lived in a peace that the rest of the world could not comprehend. At its center sat Viktor, the Herald, draped in the heavy cloak Jayce had given him so long ago.

He sat in total stillness, his eyes closed. To an observer, he was a statue of metal and glass. But within, he was traveling.

Viktor plunged into his own subconscious, his consciousness drifting through the vast, violet nebula of the Hexcore that now served as his heart. This was the Great Beyond he had always theorized about—a sea of pure information and raw energy.

And somewhere within this infinite expanse, a ghost lived.

“Viktor…”

His metallic core spiked. He began to run—or the psychic equivalent of it—chasing the familiar vibration. He had done this hundreds of times before, reaching out into the dark only to find shadows and echoes of his own guilt. But tonight, the frequency was different. It was steady.

He saw it: a faint, shimmering thread of lavender-colored light snaking through the violet clouds. It was the essence of Sky, the part of her that had been woven into the core during that final, violent accident.

He reached out, his movements agonizingly careful. In the past, his desperation had been too sharp, snapping the connection before it could form. This time, he held his breath, grounding himself in the logic and the love he had cultivated in the Lanes. He caught the thread. He didn't pull; he followed.

The voice grew louder, no longer a whisper but a clear, melodic song.

The nebula parted, and there she was.

She stood in a pocket of golden light, looking exactly as she had in the lab—her dark curls, her glasses perched on her nose, her eyes wide and full of an intelligence that rivaled his own. But there was a radiance to her now, an angelic glow that transcended the physical. She wasn't just a memory; she was a presence.

"Sky," he breathed, the word vibrating through the entire dimension.

She smiled, and the warmth of it felt more real than the cold steel of his external body. Viktor moved toward her, and for the first time in his life—old or new—he felt no resistance. He stepped into her space, and she met him halfway.

They embraced. In this realm of the mind, there was no metal, no crystal, no braces or canes. He was simply Viktor, and she was Sky. His beautiful Sky. He pulled her close, his face buried in the crook of her neck, smelling the phantom scent of lavender and parchment.

When he tilted her head back to kiss her, it wasn't a parting of salt and copper. It was a homecoming. It was the resolution of every equation, the healing of every wound.

The chaos of the world—the looming threat of Silco, the heartbreak of Jayce, the suffering of the Lanes—faded into a distant, inconsequential hum. Within the heart of the machine, he had found the one thing logic could never provide. He had found peace.