viktor creating the hexcore, but it’s not to save his own life like in the show. here, he’s doing it in an attempt to save jayce’s life. he’s not just creating a hextech that can evolve and adapt. he’s trying to create a new artificial heart for jayce. one that will be able to replace his dying one and keep jayce alive.
the heart is often considered to be the “core” of the body. so the hexcore is literally intended to be a new artificial core for jayce’s body.
“Was this all there was to your theory? That it wasn’t an attack?” Viktor asks as he continues to carefully document the scrunched pile of metal plates. As he does, he finds it making more and more sense, despite being an exploded piece of equipment. He can make educated guesses as to which plates were the bicep, the tricep, the brachiallis. The golden lines follow the planes of silvery plates like the framing of stained glass windows — delicate and precise. Each once precisely shaped. Even some of the fingers have retained their intricacy in the mangled wreck. Detailed metal work once loved dearly by its creator with filigree gaps and expert soldering.
Definitely not something intended to be a weapon. Or a deception. It was clearly loved by its maker.
Viktor writes this down, too.
it was my pleasure to work with @snoelledarts on Boy From the Bridge our 2025 @jayvikbigbang bb fic (by snoelled) and art (by me) that asks the very important question: what if zaunite jayce was still a massive dork? (;
The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same
Vaunite Viktor and Runaway Jayce AU
Just an idea, but this just sprung on me and I had a big lightbulb moment.
Jayce goes to the undercity to buy parts for his less than legal experiments from Ekko’s shop. Like he had been doing for a while. And that’s how he knows Viktor, who is mentoring Ekko, and also works under Silco and is a former student of Singed. Since he decided to continue to work with Singed as a child, he never left to join the college in Piltover. Viktor did his best to keep Jayce at a distance at first, despising the Pilties, but Jayce was extremely persistent in befriending Viktor, the enchanting, mysterious, incredibly intelligent Zaunite scientist and engineer. And Viktor could only resist Jayce’s advances for so long before this incredibly sweet and surprisingly smart big oaf of a man began to grow on him. So they become somewhat well acquainted friends over time.
Marcus, after a particularly frustrating meeting with Silco, has some of his officers tail Viktor, Silco’s assistant, to try and dig up some more information and dirt on what Silco’s secret plans are. But Viktor is smart, and slippery, but not at all fast. He manages to lose the Piltover cops tailing him, but what he doesn’t know is that after they leave, they discover Jayce, obviously a Piltie, sneaking into the undercity and follow him to Ekko’s shop where Viktor is now waiting to meet up with him. No one but Vander sees the police there watching them.
Skip ahead to the Incident™️where Jayce’s apartment gets blown up. It’s less of an accident this time, and the kids don’t have anything to do with it. This time it’s the corrupt Piltover police force. Later that week, when Jayce is out with Caitlyn, the Piltover police illegally raid and search his apartment, and make it look like a break in. They try to find any connection he might have to Silco and the Undercity, but all they find are his weird experiments. So they grab anything fishy- and valuable looking, and make to leave. But one of the cops drops a crystal and it explodes as they run out the door. Jayce is a block away when he and Caitlyn hear the explosion, and discover his place in ruins and a lot of his stuff missing. But thankfully he had his research notebook on hand so it wasn’t taken.
The police of course claim that the break in was the work of Zaunite children, and avoid being held responsible. Using the excuse to patrol Zaun and harass anyone who they might think is suspicious for other reasons. But unlike before, the university doesn’t feel the need to search his apartment for anything left, as the police already claimed that anything dangerous looking had already been stolen. (They did their own ‘investigation’ to cover their tracks.) Jayce is brought before the counsel like before, and stripped of his status at the university, support, and funding, and ordered to give up on all his research. He goes home defeated.
The scene in his destroyed apartment still happens, he almost jumps. But he has another idea instead. He grabs anything left related to his research, writes his mother a misleading note claiming he’s leaving Piltover for good, and escapes into the night. And heads straight for Zaun. (In a disguise that covers his face this time, as Viktor had been recently pestering him about doing so anyway for safety.) Jayce finds the Last Drop, as Ekko’s shop is closed late at night, and asks around for anyone who might know Viktor. The whole bar immediately gets suspicious of him, and it’s Sevika at the bar who decides to take him. She thinks he’s a Piltover spy, and leads him away from the bar with the intention to beat him up and rob him. And maybe bring him to Silco to see if they should kill him. But it’s Viktor who comes across them on a late night walk, and takes notice of the suspiciously familiar lumbering shape being led down a dark alleyway by his coworker that draws him to the scene. Sevika shoves Jayce into a wall and pulls off his face covering, Jayce throwing up his arms in defense asking her to wait, when the familiar voice speaks up. “….Jayce?” He would know that voice anywhere. “What are you doing here?” Viktor asks him, and Sevika backs off but is incredibly suspicious as to why Viktor is so familiar with a possible Piltie spy.
Jayce all but melts at the sight of Viktor and rushes up to him to embrace him in a hug, one that Viktor is very surprised and uncomfortable by. But he can tell Jayce is very rattled. Jayce is able to tell him a little bit about what happened in the alley, all in earshot of Sevika, but he’s able to get across that no one will be looking for him, especially not in Zaun, (he thinks) and that’s all Viktor needs to hear before he realizes that Jayce has abandoned Piltover to continue his research and needs a place to stay. After a lot of inner turmoil, knowing he’s probably going to regret it, he brings Jayce back home with him to his private lab and his little apartment.
That night, Jayce shows Viktor all of his research with incredible passion and fervor, and it surprises Viktor how much he finds himself believing in Jayce’s research. There begins their official partnership to share their Hextech dream, not with Piltover, but for Zaun, and the rest of the world.
The Piltover police, with no targets on which children to blame for their break in, and not wanting to piss off Vander, grab a random kid off the streets that was picking a fight with them to arrest, not realizing that the kid worked for Silco. But the kid had Shimmer on him, and injected himself with it to fight them off in desperation. He manages to kill a few cops, but is ultimately gunned down. Silco is beyond pissed off. Marcus is forced to bury the whole incident just to appease Silco, but ultimately their whole bargain is all but thrown in the trash, and Piltover is still enraged that some of their officers were killed in the Undercity. Relations between Piltover and Zaun become increasingly more unsteady, and violent as a result. But meanwhile, Viktor and Jayce are holed up in their own little world working together to develop Hextech. Silco is not exactly thrilled to lose his assistant. But Silco manages to bribe enough people in Piltover to leave the undercity alone in the meantime. Jayce and Viktor quickly realized that they still desperately needed funding for their research, and ended up presenting their work to a sceptical, but soon baffled Silco only weeks after they began working together. Silco sees the potential for the Hextech to benefit the Undercity in many different ways, so he uses the money he makes from his enormous sales in Shimmer to fund their research. No less than a month later, he rescues Powder from the aftermath of a brutal police attack that burned the Last Drop to the ground, killing Vander, Milo, and Claggor. But Vi escaped only to blame Powder for leading the violent officers back home with her after one of her toy bomb traps failed to activate. Vi was still arrested unjustly, and Silco took in Powder.
Years pass, and things eventually calm down again. Without Mel around to seduce and influence Jayce, he realizes his feelings for Viktor much sooner. But he’s still too scared to confess to him as Viktor becomes more and more busy being radicalized by Silco to fight for the Undercity. It’s Viktor who ends up having to step up and take a position of political power, not Jayce. Viktor and Jayce did not have access to any of Piltover’s extensive funding and resources like before, so their research was slower going at the beginning despite Silco’s funding and resources. But surprisingly, with Jinx’s help after years of her endless curiosity and tutelage from a big brotherly Jayve and regretfully resigned Viktor, they refine the crystals to a more safe form. Soon enough, they are able to produce versions of the HexClaw and the HexGloves, which they made for assisting work in the mines and in construction. But without Heimerdinger’s warnings like before, they are able to have Silco fund their mass production to be used all over the Undercity. But it doesn’t take long for the people of Zaun to figure out they can also use the tech for their own self defense against Piltover, and it begins to cause problems again between the two cities. Viktor ends up having to fill in for Silco more and more as a representative for his Shimmer operations and as a political representative for Zaun in talks with Piltover, leaving Jayce alone often in the lab to work alone. So Jayce is not there when Viktor collapses for the first time from the illness he’s been hiding from them.
That night, Jinx and Silco bring in an unconscious Viktor to their lab. It’s not the first time Jayce has helped a rogue Zaunite with first aid, and they even developed a few useful medical devices, but this was different. This was Viktor, and as far as he could tell with his limited medical knowledge, his condition was bad. Very bad. So Jayce throws himself into working on creating new medical inventions, things he tries to use to treat Viktor, to cure him. But the tension between Zaun and Piltover is boiling over again, and Silco needs weapons to help the citizens of Zaun to fight off Piltover’s oppression. Jinx ends up using their refined crystals to manufacture bombs and weapons, against the strict wishes of Jayce and Viktor never to do so. But it goes unnoticed by Jayce as he gets more and more desperate as Viktor’s illness worsens without real medical attention. He is tempted by Singed into resorting to treating him with small doses of Shimmer like Silco uses on his eye.
Now with Viktor having minorly stabilized, and the usage of an artificial lung that Jayce designed, they work together on the evolving HexCore. Eventually, they accidentally trigger the HexCore mutation, with Huck there bringing them food like usual on orders from Silco, Huck gets sucked up to feed the HexCore as it feeds power to Viktor to transform him as Jayce tries to control it. Viktor doesn’t turn into Machine Harold thanks to Jayce having a better grasp of the HexCore, but most of his body is still transformed to merge with all his metal braces that Jayce made for him, and the artificial lung support and Shimmer that was keeping him alive.
Viktor, empowered by his new strength and powers in his new form, decides to go join Silco in his war against Piltover. But Jayce stops him, and finally confesses his feelings to Viktor, and pleads with him to stay with him. Viktor, still having his emotions, is swayed. Because he knows it too, deep in his bones, all these years they've spent together, he loves Jayce too. He returns his feelings. They kiss, and even sleep together that night. But when Jayce wakes up in the morning, Viktor is gone.
I haven't worked out all the alternate universe differences in this AU revolving around Jinx, Caitlyn, and Vi, so for now assume most of their storyline outside of what happens with Jayce and Viktor stays mostly the same.
Someone shoot me. Why can I never write like 1 paragraph for an idea and just leave it alone. Once again running with this until it looks like another rough fanfic instead of a little AU idea. Hope you like it. :]
