There’s something really interesting about Jayce’s word choice here: “While your best friend bleeds out in your arms”
“Bleeding out” implies that Viktor was still alive to bleed out
However we as an audience know/can infer that Jayce knows deep down that’s not true
As others have pointed out:
1) His clothes are more torn while he carries him than in the council room which would imply that Jayce throughly check for signs of life, that cpr was done, etc
2) Jayce carried him for five blocks - where there would have been no signs of life
3) He brought him to the lab not the hospital - he knew there was nothing the hospital could do
4) Viktor’s spine is severed - he had to have felt that something not right was going on there, holding him in his arms for FIVE blocks
5) He later tells Viktor “my partner died in this room”
To me Jayce saying “bleeds out in your arms” means that he may have convinced himself, deluded himself into believing that Viktor hadn’t actually died, that he was dying and that he had saved Viktor from dying
I don’t think until after meeting Mage Viktor, did he really allow himself to acknowledge that he brought Viktor back from the dead
I think you can see it in the way he reacts to being back in that room, before Mel walks in, before the not-Viktor-Viktor joins them
He appears resigned to me, like he’s been forced to come to terms with the fact that Viktor actually did die that night
I personally think it explains a lot of his behavior after - how he can’t believe Viktor leaving him, him thinking Viktor was coming back when it was Heimerdinger & Ekko, etc
I think most, if not all, of us can agree that being brought back from the dead is different than being saved from death, Viktor wasn’t saved because Jayce preformed CPR, he basically preformed necromancy on him but while Viktor knew that - Jayce had (seemingly) convinced himself that it wasn’t like that or at least not as extreme as that
Which honestly kinda makes me wanna cry 😭
