Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

∆

They wake up in the lab.

They wake up in the lab — on the floor, stone tiles cold under Viktor’s hands. It hits his nose first, sawdust and cutting fluid and the strange, vegetal hit of a cup of coffee starting to go mouldy. The place Viktor knows better than he knows anything else, even after he has known everything. 

The one he was sure he was never going to see again.

Through the windows, closed and soot-stained, the first pale light of dawn is just starting to make itself known. 

Beside him, Jayce moves, shadowed and angular and so impossibly young. “How— ” Jayce starts, hand reaching out to grab the edge of the nearest desk.  

Some part of Viktor still understands time, its endless weave. “It’s a gift,” he says. “From the— ”

“From you,” Jayce finishes for him. 

Viktor swallows his tongue, all the words that start and end with: That wasn’t me. You know what I was. 

Jayce won’t understand what it means to look into that sort of mirror. Even if Viktor knew how, and had the right metaphors to explain it, it isn’t enough. Piltovian is a stupid language with too many spaces for maybe and what if. Could, would, should. 

“We’re back,” Jayce is still saying, dulled behind the ringing in Viktor’s ears. “Before it all went wrong. Vik, this is incredible. Do you get what this means?” 

It hits him slowly, bile rising in his stomach, what exactly it is Jayce is referring to. What it means for Viktor to be breathing. Inside his palms, he can still feel the stars ache. 

When he goes to stand his leg goes out from under him, muscles behaving the exact way they always have. It’s only Viktor who has changed. How fast the mind adapts. He catches himself on the edge of a chair, elbows braced as the only thing keeping him from hitting the floor. 

He can hear Jayce start to move behind him. 

“Do not— ” he hisses, curling his shoulders in on himself.  “Don’t you dare.”

The pins in his spine move against vertebrae as he finally pulls himself up to sit. Against the far wall, smudging letters on the blackboard, Viktor can make out the shape of his cane, burnished brass handle catching in the light. It is still a cane, then. Not a crutch yet. This is where they are. 

“When?” he asks, not looking. 

Jayce shuffles some papers on one of the tables, screws scattering. It’s quiet for a moment, long enough for Viktor to start to believe maybe something else is different here. Some other distortion in the universe. 

“We haven’t figured out the crystals yet,” he says eventually. “Gates are still in prototype, looks like you’re still trying to find the stabilization resonance for anything over a ton.” 

Viktor huffs breath through his nose. “Stupid. It took me almost a year to figure out that we got lucky using the same frequency for all the small payloads. It’s an energy balance. Of course it’s a function of distance and mass.” 

That means it’s early, means this lab is all there is of it, small enough that a single fire will have the whole thing up in smoke without Viktor needing to worry about any extra pieces left behind. 

“We could do it right this time, Vik,” Jayce says. 

It’s like they’re speaking different languages. Viktor makes sure it’s Piltovian that comes out of his mouth when he says, “We have to destroy it. All of it. It cannot be allowed to exist, Jayce. I will not let it happen again.”

“We have time now, Viktor,” Jayce says. “The ten years that Heimerdinger was talking about. So the hexcore was a bad idea— ”

Viktor flinches, closing his eyes, and does not interrupt him.

“— but we know that now. You gave us a blank slate. We can fix it. Do it right” 

There’s that look in his eyes, the familiar one. Like Jayce’s mind remembers but his body has forgotten, unable to give up this singular lifelong dream. His fingers are rubbing against the rune on his bracelet. He probably doesn’t even notice he’s doing it. 

“Do you really believe that?” Viktor asks. “Do you think there’s a way to harness it in a way that doesn’t end in destruction?”

Jayce looks away from him, towards the scrawled equations on the blackboard furthest from them. The piles of chalk dust on the floor. Viktor’s cane.

He doesn’t answer. Viktor does not say: You were there for the explanation. You heard it just as well as I did. The endless cycles. The same endings. Jayce, how do you possibly think—

Jayce knows. They both know.

“Mel— ” he starts, before he cuts himself off, laughing low. “That’s not going to be an option this time, I guess. If we’re going to put down the hextech research, we’re going to have to find our own capital.”

One of the first things on the very long list of things Viktor will never be able to offer him. “She may still be persuaded,” he says. “Her interest in you goes beyond investment. If we are where we think we are— there will be opportunities to pick up where you left off.”

The wooden seat of the stool digs into the back of his thighs as Jayce finally looks backwards over his shoulder. Viktor isn’t brave enough to ask him if he meant it, any of what he’d said. Instead, all Viktor does is take him in, the width of his shoulders, the soft curve of his jaw. They are back to where things make sense. Viktor is the only one out of the pair of them whose body remembers what it is to be hungry.

“Viktor, I know you heard me,” Jayce says, and then he’s moving, crossing the room in a handful of strides to stand directly in front of where Viktor is sitting. He opens his mouth like he wants to say more, explain himself again, but then he simply reaches out and puts careful fingers on Viktor’s jaw. “Can I— please?” he asks.

Viktor has never allowed himself to hope for this. Never dreamed. Even now, knowing what he knows, he can barely bring himself to believe it. The answer he gives Jayce is a nod, more of a twitch of his chin, but it’s enough. 

Jayce kisses him like a man starved. Like he has always wanted to do this. The palm of his hand is callused, a machinist’s hand, and it drags against Viktor’s skin, down his face and onto the back of his neck. Bones still tingling with eternity, Viktor holds himself back from reaching out, half-convinced this is a thing that will only be safe going one way. Viktor knows himself, and the careful wrought-glass bars around his heart. Metal gets stronger as it is worked, pushed and pulled into new shapes. Glass will hold until it can bear no more, and then it will shatter.

Another hand comes around his waist, pulling him closer. Lips against lips, it is the first splintering shard. Breathing heavy, they separate only long enough for Viktor to look into his face. What he sees there is overwhelming, a kind of terrifying devotion, and Viktor feels himself start to think about what it will mean for him, for the both of them, if it is true.

Someone knocks on the door and they wrench apart, the moment breaking, one of Jayce’s hands steadying the back of the stool. “Hello?” a voice says. Both of their heads snap towards it. “I’m here for my interview. I think Viktor probably mentioned me?” 

Viktor tastes ash on his tongue as Sky pokes her head through the door, smiling. Jayce takes another step backwards. The stool wobbles on uneven legs.

His body reacts before he does, nodding and saying, “Miss Young, I apologize for the inconvenience but it will be better if you come back tomorrow. Is that acceptable?” 

She looks confused, eyes darting between them, but her smile doesn’t dim as says, “You sure? It sounded like you were pretty desperate for the help when we talked last week. But yeah, I can come back tomorrow.”

“There has been a change in direction on the research,” Viktor says, because after everything the least that he owes her is some form of the truth. “It was— unexpected. We are still determining the consequences on the path forward. I believe we will know more by tomorrow. Until then, I am sorry to have wasted your time.”

Sky nods, and pulling her stack of papers in towards her chest, says, “If you’re sure. I’m just with the rest of the grad students in the offices down the hall if you change your mind. I’m giving a seminar after lunch, but other than that that’s where you’ll find me.”

Stepping forward to shake her hand, Jayce says, “We will. Don’t wait for us today, but one of us will come and see you tomorrow, after the second class slot. Will you be free?”

She nods again and Jayce gestures her out of the room, dismissive without being rude, the councillor he will never get the chance to become, here. Viktor feels his own breath catch in the back of his throat as the door closes behind her.

“What happened to her,” Jayce finally asks and it takes long seconds for Viktor to find the words. The first and most terrible of his sins. Where he had begged Jayce to end it, because Viktor himself lacked the strength.

“The hexcore,” he starts, sighing. “I was— not well. You remember. She attempted to save me from it, so it took her instead. All that was left was ashes.”

“You loved her,” Jayce says and Viktor chokes. 

“I murdered her, Jayce. Threw her life away in a desperate bid for my own.”

“She was in love with you, then. I read her notebook. She used to doodle your names together.”

Viktor flinches. Even after everything, there are still pieces of it that he did not know. “I am aware of Miss Young’s— attraction. There was an aspect of her in the Arcane, for a time. She and I had known each other since we were children. It was discussed.”

He allows the implied ‘before you’ to hang between them. Jayce closes his eyes. “She wasn’t there,” he says.

“Not at the end of it, no,” Viktor answers, and leaves it at that. Pulling his arms around himself, he takes in the room again. The papers, the dust, the glowing blue crystals scattered on the tables, as if a single wrong move wasn’t going to set their energy to explode. Careless. Desperate. Looking at it now, Viktor understands how inevitable it all must have been. Of course it ended how it did.

Jayce comes back up behind him and puts a broad hand on his back, above where the brace drops off to skin. He doesn’t say anything, just stands there as they both stare at their life’s work, the thing that destroyed them. Viktor feels his body lean into him, grateful for even this tiny piece of stability.

“Let’s go home,” Jayce says. “My place is bigger than yours. We can deal with this tomorrow, after some sleep. Nobody is going to make any breakthroughs on our research if we’re not here.”

He says it like it’s unquestionable that they will go together, like to Jayce maybe it is. This concept of home as if Viktor has any idea what that means. Has ever had any idea what that means.

The hand disappears from his spine and for a moment, Viktor aches for it, until Jayce steps back towards him and hands him his cane. Taking it in his fist, Viktor stands, unsteady. Another thing he will have to get used to. Beside him, Jayce wavers like he wants to reach out, but holds himself back. Taking his first step forward, Viktor finds his feet, and takes another.

“Tomorrow,” he says, watching Jayce out of the corner of his eye. Jayce nods, and matches his pace beside him. Together, they step into the academy halls, all old stone and scuffed corners, and then into the open air.

∆

The apartment is cramped, but clean. Jayce is right that it’s larger than the studio apartment that Viktor had called his own during these years, barely a step up from a dorm room. They shuffle into it in silence, and Viktor only pauses for a moment at the threshold to the bedroom. From inside, Jayce throws soft clothes at him, all several sizes too large. “You can shower, if you want,” he says, turning his back so he can change himself. “I’m going to add that to the list of problems for tomorrow.”

Arms full of clothes that smell not anything like Viktor and everything like safe, he stands there. Flopping back onto the bed, Jayce pulls up the covers and looks at him, like he expects Viktor to just go along with whatever it is that he’s doing here. Like he has ever dared to be that brave. “Jayce— ” he starts, cutting himself off.

“Come to bed,” Jayce says, like that’s a normal thing to say. Nausea tumbles through him, the vertigo of towering over, the suffocation of knowing. Maybe that’s Jayce’s point. What do these little human embarrassments matter, now, after everything?

They must matter at least a little bit, to some part of Viktor’s head, because he takes the clothes with him into the bathroom, dodges the shower stall and the sink with his elbows, and finds the space to change. The braces unlatch with a chafing relief, falling to the floor in a tangle of metal and leather. Viktor will pick them up in the morning. Nudging them with the end of his cane, they slide under the sink and out of being an immediate tripping hazard. It will have to be good enough.

He feels naked as he steps back into the bedroom, stripped raw in the cocoon of Jayce’s clothes. The blankets are still peeled back, waiting for him. When he steps towards the open space, Jayce smiles up at him, soft and already dozing, and it feels impossible that he can’t hear the rabbiting terror of Viktor’s pulse, jumping under his skin. Sliding in beside him, Viktor barely has the opportunity to draw into himself, protect his sharp corners, when one of Jayce’s arms comes around him and pulls him close.

“In every timeline,” Jayce whispers into his hair and there isn’t a single thing that Viktor can say to that, not really.

Through the mostly-closed blinds, the light turns golden, falling over both of their faces as if the sinking sun itself is trying to welcome them home. 

∆

In the morning, everything is quiet, and Viktor is alone. The sheets beside him have gone cold, but, breathing out, he doesn’t find himself worried. It is as it will be. If always, forever, every universe, really only means one night, then one night it will be. It is the best that Viktor has ever slept, the long night tightening the muscles in his thighs and setting his hip to ache. It was worth it.

Grimacing, he starts to move.

The apartment is warmer than any apartment Viktor has ever had, radiator rattling away under the window, just barely laced with frost. It had been cold the night before, walking back from the lab, but only now does Viktor realize that it must be winter, here in this strange second chance that they’ve been granted. There are a pair of slippers lined up neatly against his side of the bed, and Viktor shakes his head even as he slides his feet into them. He does not have a side of the bed, not here.

He expects the rest of the apartment to be empty as he makes his way into the hallway and eventually to the living space. Instead, Jayce is hunched over something on a long desk against one of the walls, a handheld butane torch lit on the bench beside him. When Viktor makes out what it is that he has splayed in front of him, not even the radiators are enough to cut through the chill.

“What are you doing?” Viktor hears himself hiss, fingers aching around his cane. Jayce jumps, spinning around to face him, an expression that isn’t quite guilt stretching at his features.

“I thought you were asleep,” he says.

Over his shoulder, Viktor can see the gears and buckles and small pieces of metal even more clearly. The leg brace, more a part of his body than his own flesh and cartilage, splayed out like a patient on an operating table, not quite human enough to bleed. “What are you doing,” he repeats, making sure he does not waver or stumble as he takes two long steps forward, until he is able to grab the edge of the table for balance instead.

Jayce’s hands are trembling when he points to the joint, the main one, at the knee, that he has taken to pieces on the table. “Anti-backlash gear,” he says, as if that explains anything. “To stabilize the hinge. Prevent over-rotation and lock-up. It was one of the first things I realized could be improved when— ”

“Jayce.” Viktor says, interrupting him. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing it,” he answers, looking wide-eyed up at where Viktor is staring down at him, like maybe he is starting to grasp the edges of what it is he has done. Neither of them has ever been very good at keeping their emotions off their faces.

Viktor doesn’t know how to tell him that deciding to slice directly into Viktor’s skin, tie his tendons together in a new pattern, split him gory down the middle and rearrange his ribs was a better choice than this. The obvious proof of Viktor’s weakness. The single point of his own failing body. Yes, there are improvements to be made. Of course there are. There always will be. But to have it laid out and tinkered with without his knowledge, by someone who thinks they understand—

“Do not,” he finally says, still staring at the pieces.

He can’t tell Jayce to leave, but he can flick off the flame on the torch, pick the old gears from the new with long, careful fingers. Jayce moves to the side to let him work and not a single word passes between them as Viktor reassembles all of the pieces into the exact shape they had been before. Familiar as anything. Completely his design.

“I am going to go tell Miss Young that her services will no longer be required,” Viktor says, finally throwing it over his arm and turning towards the bathroom. “Take inventory of the lab.”

Jayce just nods at him, still backed into a corner and shoulders curled.

Inside the bathroom, Viktor puts back on the clothes he had been wearing the day before, snapping up the buckles and ties of the brace overtop of them. Strapped to his chest, the holes in the leather fit neatly over the pins in his spine. This, at least, has not been tampered with. Finally dressed, he looks himself in the face in the mirror and tries not to note the absence of dark circles under his eyes, the warm flush of his cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he hears Jayce say as he steps out the front door. Viktor doesn’t say anything back to him, can’t find the words, and instead just follows the worn paths to the university, like none of it really did ever happen, and nothing has changed.

Sky takes it well, confused and sweet, and has him repeat the excuses in both languages, just so she can, to hear her say it, trust that you’re not pulling some topsider bullshit on me, Viktor. He owes her at least that much. By the end of it, she nods and tells him he knows where to find her if he ever changes his mind and he has the grace not to tell her that he won’t.

He stares into the lab for hours, unmoving, silent, and makes no move to gather any of it into piles, to sort what must be destroyed from what might be able to be used again. Even the fact he’s considering saving some of it is telling. Even as the light starts to fade, it is exactly as it was. His first day of opportunity to stop it from happening again, and Viktor has done nothing. A new list of sins.

Still, in the evening, his feet take him to Jayce’s door and when it opens he knows the relief across Jayce’s face is mirrored on his own. This is how it is going to be, then. In the warmth of the radiators, next to Jayce’s skin, he says, “Don’t do it again,” and then, after a minute, “We will destroy it tomorrow.”

And Jayce doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. They are both familiar with patterns. 

∆

They start spending all of their time in the lab, working around the research they refuse to touch, throwing out increasingly outlandish ideas until they run out of even those.

“The flowers,” Jayce says at one point, staring over Viktor’s shoulder. “In one of the universes. Where I was— ” he cuts himself off, shaking his head. “It showed me a universe where there was no hextech, but they had these flowers. For clearing the air. You know them. You had them at your— ”

“They fed on the arcane,” Viktor finishes for him. “As I knew them. If there is another way to keep them healthy in the fissures without it, I do not know it. They need light.”

“So it’s worth researching?”

Viktor makes a non-committal sound. There are options, false light, false soil, the kind of problems that have plagued the undercity and the fissures beyond them since before the first steam engines started to run. These sorts of opportunities had driven him, once. When he’d still been content knowing that small changes were all he was going to be able to make. Swallowing, he does not stare at where the crystals are gathering dust, notes in his handwriting scattered on the table in front of them, ready to be picked up.

Being in this room is unbearable, most days. It doesn’t stop the both of them from coming back.

This is all Viktor is going to be able to take today. He seems to be reaching that limit earlier every day, surrounded by all of these reminders of what he had dared to attempt. Dipping his head in Jayce’s direction, he doesn’t say goodbye as he shrugs his coat over his shoulders and steps into the midafternoon air, crusted with frost.

Snow squeaks under his shoes as he walks, and walks, to the edge of the city where the walls are high and the sewers start to drip. He didn’t intend to come here, but it feels inevitable, like everything else seems to, right now. Endless cycles. At the edge of it, he leans against the wall and stares down at the drop, thinking.

“What are you doing?” comes a voice from behind him and it isn’t a surprise that he’s been followed. He had only hoped for a few more hours alone. The air bites a sharp chill into his lungs as he breathes in, a reminder of life.

“Thinking,” Viktor answers. Even through the ice the water continues to flow over the side of the structure, down into the stream and eventually to the river and the fissures below. Everyday things get quieter between them. Not comfortable, but distant. Like without this thing tying them together, they have nothing. Maybe it is Viktor that is nothing. A professor’s assistant. Greedy, arrogant—

“What happened to the man I knew?” Jayce whispers. 

Viktor doesn’t turn towards him. No point in it. He knows the shapes Jayce’s face is making. 

“He had something that he wanted, Jayce,” Viktor says instead. “Something strong enough to keep him standing.” 

A long spear of ice fractures from the end of the pipe, splintering and falling into the water below, too far for Viktor to know if it shatters or simply slips under the surface, unnoticed. “We both know how that ended.” 

Jayce’s spine has no metal in it and that means Viktor can’t hear it as he shifts, more a change in the air than anything. “Is this how it’s going to be then?” he asks. “Are you just going to give up? What about the undercity? Everything you ever worked for? All those people — don’t they matter?” 

“You asked me what I wanted,” he says, and leaves it at that. Jayce will understand. He will not agree, will try and fight it, but he will understand.

Jayce does not reach out to touch him, concerned for his balance on the slippery stone, or too far given up to care, as he says, “Are you coming home?”

Viktor nods, and means it. For tonight, at least. Jayce sighs.

“Don’t do anything stupid Vik, please. I know you’re having trouble adjusting— ”

Viktor snorts, and says nothing.

“— but we’ll get used to it. Figure it out. There are so many things we could— ”

There’s the word again, always the same. Stupid, polite, topsider planning for the future like even here, discussing this, Jayce isn’t able to make a definitive statement. Like maybe he doesn’t believe it either.

“I am not interested in hearing it, Jayce,” he says, finally interrupting. “Tomorrow I will see if there are any specimens of the flower in the botany labs. If there are not, I will find a supplier. From the undercity, if that is what is necessary.”

Jayce breathes in loud enough to be heard even over the sound of the water and the shifting ice, almost a gasp like he is the one coming up for air. Viktor still does not look at him, and instead continues, saying, “We will need to clean the lab. We need the space. There will be no commercial interest in clean air for the fissures, not like there was with the hexgates. We will have to make do.”

“Yeah,” Jayce says, and Viktor hopes it will be the end of it. It will not be magic. Pulling Jayce’s dream down to reality, crushing it small and making it wither, is the only thing he has to offer here. “That sounds great, Vik, really. Cleaning up sounds like a good idea. We can put the stuff in storage, whatever, we’ll find the space. Make it work. I bet we could set up a greenhouse or some kind of terrarium under the windows, so that even with the draft it won’t be— ”

They no longer talk of destroying it, like they both realize it’s beyond their power. They have been here before.

“Leave,” he says, and Jayce does, stuttering his rambling to an end with a kind of desperate faith that Viktor will never understand. Viktor said he was coming home, so Jayce believes he will, unshakable. Both of them have stared into this same dark, understood the same things about breaking ice, and Viktor is certain that if their roles had been reversed, now, tonight, well— Viktor has done worse things than wait in the shadows out of sight. He knows how to be quiet. Confidence is another matter. 

Standing as still as he can, and making no noise, Viktor listens to him leave, exactly as he was asked to do. 

∆

There are nights he can’t contain it— all of the memories of the spiraling angles of infinity. Nights where he wakes gasping with his hands clawed into the bedsheets and can’t remember where he is. Where he blinks his eyes open and doesn’t understand he is a man, now. Only. 

Jayce will call these episodes nightmares because to Jayce that is what they are. 

Except Viktor, sometimes— 

Well. 

He learns to go without sleep.

∆

“I saw my mom today,” Jayce says, out of the blue one afternoon, like that’s any way to start a conversation.

Viktor hums at him in response, not looking up from where he’s calibrating their only array of humidity sensors. They have to be fully dried every hundred hours of use, or they cease to function. Baked for an hour at two hundred degrees. Viktor is contemplating reinventing them in a way that makes sense. Who designs a moisture sensor that can’t survive being exposed to water? He makes a note about it in the margins of his notebook— offhand scrap.

“She asked about you,” Jayce continues, when it’s obvious Viktor isn’t going to say anything back. “I told her that we’re— you know— ”

Finally looking at him, Viktor raises an eyebrow and says, “Fucking?”

Sputtering, cheeks going red, Jayce says, “Sleeping together. Well. Living together, really. I figured she can extrapolate the rest of it if she wants. I mentioned how we moved all your stuff over a few weeks ago and she, uh— ”

Dealing with topsiders is sometimes like dealing with children. Viktor prefers to be direct. “She doesn’t approve?”

“No, that’s not it at all— She wouldn’t— No, she wants to meet you. I mean, to hear her say it I’ve been talking about you forever so I guess she just— ”

There are a thousand Ximena Talises in a thousand fractured universes who have had to bury their sons, all because Viktor had the arrogance to introduce himself as someone willing to change the world. Viktor has never once looked her in the face to apologize for it. Beg at her feet. “I don’t think that is a good idea, Jayce.”

“Why not?” he asks. “She’ll love you, promise. I mean, you saved her life. She doesn’t know that, but still— ”

Joints locking tight, Viktor says, “You can’t tell her any of it. Please.”

“She noticed I was different,” Jayce says. “I didn’t tell her, but she knows something happened. Viktor, I don’t know how to lie to her. I don’t want to learn.”

“And you think introducing me is the solution?”

The air hangs silent between them, thick with the scent of plants and the promise of life, not anything like burning metal and cutting oil. Lost pieces of gravel crunch under the soles of Jayce’s shoes as he grinds them into the floor. “It might be good for us to tell someone,” Jayce whispers, eventually. “Viktor, after everything we saw— ”

He says ‘saw’ like they were observers. As if Jayce has taken a chisel and a hammer and split his own mind in two: before, and after. A bad dream. Something that can be stepped past, or over. And he thinks, in this new world, Viktor is someone who will be welcomed into his family.

“Not yet,” Viktor says. “Jayce, at best I am what— your undercity charity case? A failed academic? And at worst— ”

He sighs, leaning into the desk and rubbing his eyes into the heels of his hands. “I can’t, Jayce,” he says. “Not now. Tell her I am sorry.”

“I’ll tell her you’re busy. Give you some more time to think about it. Vik, I think it would be good for you. For us.”

Viktor doesn’t laugh at the concept of being busy, but he wants to. Everything that Viktor has is inside this room. Only a few meters square, longer than it is wide, short enough that he can get across it in a handful of uneven, three-legged steps. The piles of partially boxed up never-to-be-finished research, the terrarium and its struggling flowers, and—

Jayce puts a hand on his shoulder. Inside his chest, Viktor has only splintering glass to offer him. Leaning to rest the side of his head on Jayce’s knuckles, there is no more need for words. 

∆

When he coughs, for the first time, Jayce isn’t in the room to see it. Even Viktor doesn’t think anything of it. The lab is dusty, especially now that they’re working more with soil chemistry than steel. They’re having minimal success with the flowers, recipes for fertilizers well-trodden paths by the chem-barons, artificial lights constantly tinkered with by desperate hands in the darkest pits of the fissures. Viktor isn’t sure if this is something he wants enough to make real progress in. That is the aspect of it he and Jayce do not discuss— the things that had driven them to true heights. Terror. Childhood faith. Glory.

When it happens again, Viktor recognizes the rattle and Jayce does not. It isn’t surprising. Jayce had not recognized it for the first several years. Topsiders come down with colds. As Viktor wheezes breath into the collar of his shirt, Jayce asks him a stupid question.

“Are you okay?”

All Viktor can manage to do is look at him, spine contorted in the only direction able to take pressure off his ribs. Curled in on himself, he feels like a child, standing at the edge of his father’s funeral, realizing some people don’t get happy endings. A different kind of displacement in time.

Viktor knows his face has always been easy to read. Jayce stops pacing. Goes pale. Breathes a single syllable, “No.”

Taking in his expression, a desolation that once cleaved worlds, Viktor feels the last pieces of the breaking-glass cage around his heart finally give way. It overwhelms him, strangles the little breath left in his chest, and all he can manage to do to answer him is whisper the words: “I’m sorry.”

Like he’s the one who can do anything to make this right.

“No,” Jayce repeats, and then again. “Not here. Not now. Not after— ”

He moves with a speed that reminds Viktor of war. Both his hands come onto Viktor’s biceps, pulling him straight. When Viktor wheezes at the motion, he drops his grip away like something on fire. Stepping back, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides, Jayce stares.

“How,” he says.

Viktor manages a laugh, a half-breath cough that catches in his throat. “I grew up in the fissures, Jayce. It was only a matter of time.”

“No. I mean how here. How now. How after— ”

“It is the same as it was. Why expect this to be different?”

“He forged universes, Viktor,” Jayce almost snarls. “Don’t tell me this was out of his power. You and I both know it’s not true.” 

Viktor blinks at him, slow, and says, “But it was. He did not have the ability to heal without leaving corruption. The options were for us to start again, the way it was always going to be, or to leave me in a half-state. Jayce, you and I both know how that ends.” 

In every universe. In every timeline. It was not going to be allowed to take root here. 

“There could have been a way,” Jayce says. 

Viktor does not shrug at him. The spasm passes and he breathes in deep, heady florals on his tongue. There are more of the flowers now, a dozen of them fighting for light under the window. A sensor reads lower pollution values near their stems than at the door to the lab, but not by a significant margin. Viktor is going to have to take them down into the undercity to really find out if they work. Maybe enough of them will make a difference. Buy him another few weeks.

“Let’s open the gates,” Jayce says from behind him. “Vik, we both know the gates weren’t the problem. It would give us the money to do more. Figure out how to make it safe.” 

“Absolutely not,” Viktor says, jerking to face him.

On the far side of the room, half-hidden behind a closet next to the door, the brass box holding what’s left of their crystals catches in the light. Like some kind of omen. They both stare at it.

“What are your options?” Jayce asks, hushed.

“There are no options. It is what it is. All of the resources we had before— ”

“Did they make a difference? Any of it? Did you ask anyone at the Academy for help?”

Doctors at the hospital, frowning at his accent. Nurses who didn’t understand how to treat the chafing blisters from his braces. Researchers who stared at the pins in his spine in open mouthed horror, quickly morphing into morbid fascination.

“Nothing that was a cure,” Viktor answers. “Painkillers. Muscle relaxants. Physical therapy.”

“And without it?”

Viktor understands what it means to live a life in pain. Has always understood, since the very first day staring into the research he wasn’t going to be able to destroy. “I will manage,” he says, and prays this is the end of it.

“What will it do to you?” Jayce says, stepping back in front of him, towering. “Viktor, what does that mean?”

When Viktor doesn’t answer him, doesn’t know how, Jayce huffs a harsh breath through his nose and says, “Absolutely not. Viktor, I mean it, we both know that the gates weren’t the problem. I’m not going to watch you torture yourself because you think that’s what you have to do. If we don’t have a— ” He closes his eyes and swallows visibly. “— If we’re going to need time, then we’re going to need money. We both know what went wrong last time. If we keep it simple, stick to the mechanics— ”

In another universe, Viktor had begged Jayce to destroy the hexcore. He has learnt that lesson. He will not beg again.

“No,” Viktor repeats. “Jayce, I will not— ”

Stepping back, Jayce looks down at him and says, “Then I’ll do it without you. I could, you know. I’m not going to watch you die. Not again.”

When Viktor doesn’t answer him, too frozen to form words, Jayce continues, “No weapons. No hexcore. Nothing complicated. Just shipping logistics, maybe mining equipment. Vik, I mean it— ”

“No,” is all he can bear to breathe.

“Please,” Jayce whispers, and steps forward to pull him close. Arms surrounding Viktor’s frame, no longer the anger of before, he chants it. “Please. Viktor, I can’t— ”

Face pressed into his neck, Viktor whispers, “I love you,” and tries not to make it sound like a goodbye. It is early. The timeline is measured in years, if nothing is worse.

When Jayce answers with: “How long?”, Viktor has no reply. In his arms, even if it is only minutes remaining, it is more than he had the first time. He will make it be enough.

One final act of creation.

∆

In the end it takes them less than six months. A single demonstration across a table sets Mel Medarda’s eyes alight and that guarantees it. When the work crews hammer in the final piece of brass, it is exactly as it was. A perfect replica of Viktor’s own memories, drawn in their hand.

At the demonstration, the first ship blinks out of existence. The second. Then the reverse, a freighter in Noxian colours that immediately turns towards the port. Far below the balcony, the crowd cheers at the display, waving flags with Jayce’s face on them, topside gold and white. 

Stomach turning in on itself, Viktor looks away. 

Jayce, still staring over the railing and into the crowd, is smiling. 

∆

“You’re growing your hair out,” Jayce says, laughing as he comes back from another Council meeting, guest of honour. Shipping, and politics, and the things that are happening again. 

Viktor has just been too empty to get it cut, too exhausted to do it himself. Too busy staring into the future where he doesn’t exist. Where nothing he is matters. At least that is what he tells himself. He shrugs, winding a finger through where the ends curl over his shoulder. 

“It looks good,” Jayce continues. “Suits you. You know, I always thought— ” 

“You are growing out your beard,” Viktor says, turning to look directly at him. Jayce’s hand comes up to his own face, a look of surprise passing across it as he meets his jaw. 

Blinking, he says, “Yeah. Guess I am.” 

They are both scrabbling for ways to make the terror they remember real. Visual reminders. Physical distinctions from the students they were and the minds they are now. Neither of them know how old the other is. Viktor can barely count the number of times he has died. 

“We can’t go back,” Viktor says eventually, and knows Jayce understands. 

Coming up beside him, Jayce stands close enough to touch. Together, they are reflected in the light of the abandoned terrarium, where inside a single yellow flower still grows. Distorted in the glass, it is like nothing has changed. 

∆

It takes less than a year for them to catch up to where they were, progress that Heimerdinger calls ‘miraculous’. The only thing neither of them mention is the hexcore, patterns of runes kept carefully away from their counterparts, as if not speaking of it is the same thing as not knowing it’s possible to create. They hire Sky and she gives Viktor a knowing look when he hands over the employment contract. She does not say I told you so, which means she’s a better person than Viktor has been, in her shoes.

Jayce starts to talk about fixing things, investing in medical research, solutions for the mining colonies, which he refuses to call fissures, out of some unknown sense of propriety. All of the rules that build his foreign, polite society.

Instead, after weeks of copying, Viktor looks at the drawings for the claw, for the mining gauntlets, and comes to another, bigger realization. They have been so stupid. Small-minded. “She was right,” he mumbles under his breath. 

“What was that?” Jayce asks, turning. 

“Do you know how long I was at the Academy before we met, Jayce?” he asks. “As Heimerdinger’s assistant. Before.” 

“Dunno— Six years? Seven? That’s standard for students before they start teaching, right?” 

“Seven.” 

Jayce comes over beside him. “What about it?” 

In front of them, all of their research, almost every single piece of it they can remember, and more, is laid out. It covers the whole table, trailing down almost to the floor. Papers and scraps and wires. 

“Jayce,” he whispers as they stare at it. “What if we had it wrong?” 

“Had what wrong?” 

“The liquid fuel, the generators, the blast furnaces, all of it. Jayce, that is what is causing the poison.” 

He looks confused. Maybe this isn’t something he was ever going to understand. “That’s why we’re building the equipment, Vik,” he says, pointing at the table. “To help them.”

Viktor does not laugh at him, at himself, but it is a near thing. “I wanted creation,” he says, tongue choking back the word ‘evolution’. “I thought that was what we needed. Something completely new. Being at the Academy made me stupid. Blind.” 

“The hexcore— ” 

Viktor can still hear it whisper, sometimes, when he has gone too long without sleep. Certain scars that not even being reborn will heal. “Not the hexcore,” he says. “But not these toys, either. What does it matter if they can work faster? They already have mining gauntlets. Why do they need to mine at all?”

“The coal— ”

This is the crux of it. Viktor says, “The coal, the iron, the carefully synthesized fuel. They need power, Jayce. Something to run the machines. We will never be able to make their equipment better for them, not from up here, at the Academy. Airsick fools, the pair of us. Thinking we knew better. Like some sort of god.”

He doesn’t realized he’s switched into another language until Jayce makes a confused sound, staring at him out of the corner of his eye. Viktor sighs. “We need to give them something to run the machines. Something safe that can’t be tampered with. Beyond that, who are we to tell them what improvements their lives need? You have never been in a chemical plant. Neither of us have ever truly been in a mine.”

Jayce puts one strong hand on his shoulder. “Do you think you can figure it out?” he asks. “Without it becoming dangerous? Vik, I don’t know— ”

“What other option do we have? They’ll figure it out from this no matter what— ” he gestures broadly at the prototypes in front of them— “This way we get ahead of it. No missing crystals. No bombs.”

The fingers on his shoulder go tight, and Jayce doesn’t say anything. He remembers things that Viktor does not, memories lost to a blur of pain and concussive noise. After a long minute, his hand drops away, and Jayce says, “If you’re sure. Viktor, I need you to be really sure.”

“I am,” is all Viktor says to answer him, and it’s enough.

Breathing out, Jayce says, “Okay. Power. Generic machine work. What do you think about— ”

He sketches a long series of formulae on the nearest blackboard, wiping away what had been there before with the end of his sleeve. It’s rudimentary, unstable, obviously not taking heat losses into account, but it’s a start. Something settles in the base of Viktor’s chest, watching Jayce work, still getting used to being listened to, even after all of their combined, written-over, years.

Staring at it, this new idea as it starts to take form, he has another thought. If power is what they can create, here, then power it will be. All he has to do is make sure the people who need it the most are the ones who actually receive it. Looking across the table and into Jayce’s face, he says, “Do not tell the council. Or Heimerdinger. Not yet. They will want it immediately, while it is too dangerous. Heimerdinger will not want it at all.” 

Jayce nods like he has made a reasonable point, and maybe he has, but what he has really done is bought himself time. A chance to even the scales.

∆

Viktor follows the branch in the river to the undercity, to the cove. The water has worn the stone away lower than he remembers. In a generation it will begin to look like a fissure. In a few millennia it will become one. This is the nature of water. 

The entrance to the cave is the same, hidden behind boulders. Viktor knows there are other labs, larger ones, built deeper. But this one is the most secret. That much he remembers. 

When Viktor steps into the first cavern, following the water, Singed appears out of the gloom to greet him. Like he had been expected, even like this, with no warning. Messages can be intercepted. 

“I wanted to see Rio,” he says. Singed nods and beckons him further into the cave. Behind the rusting iron door, the light changes. The walls have been expanded, rough cut stone extending outwards and down into the lab Viktor has spent so much time trying not to mimic. There are papers everywhere, pieces of equipment, glass canisters full of liquids set over flames. 

If the colours were different, metal instead of glass— Viktor shakes his head. He used to spend a lot of time here. That is why it is familiar. He and Jayce are doing it differently, this time. There is no hexcore. 

Rio is in the heart of it all, the light under her floating body illuminating everything, and all Viktor can think about while he looks at her is the memory of how her snout had felt under his palm, begging for more mushrooms. She isn’t moving. Not anymore. Only the wires and tubes weaving around her body drifting in the liquid. 

“Is it true?” Viktor asks. “Is she still alive?” 

Singed looks up, face distorted in the strange light. “In a sense,” he says. 

Viktor’s stomach churns as his own thoughts betray him, generating memories of the twitch-of-a-finger control over endless bodies, the limits to life. He had come to Signed once, before, with a different kind of desperation. He had thought he understood what Singed had meant about ‘legacy’. 

He understands now. 

“Is it causing you pain?” Singed asks from behind him. For a second Viktor thinks he’s asking about Rio, and then his memories catch up, filtering between things that are now, and things that were before, and things that are almost forgotten. The feeling of the bone drill. The way the restraints had held his head down, and how he had shaken, even with the shunt in the highest vertebrae blocking the pain. How long it had taken to get used to touching metal where he had expected skin. 

Looking over his shoulder at him, Viktor says, “It has made a significant improvement in my ability to walk. The pain is not worse than it was. It healed well.” 

“Do tell me if anything needs adjusting. The pins have a tendency to shift as the body changes.” 

“That won’t be necessary,” Viktor says, turning back towards Rio’s unmoving shape. He tells himself he’s not turning away from Singed. This useless memory of someone being able to heal him. 

Singed laughs. “Youth,” he says. “You think time will never find you. It will have to be replaced eventually. I will not always be here.” 

“It’s in my lungs,” is all Viktor says to answer him, breathing out. Viktor has been through too much to cry, here, now, about this. It is quiet for a minute, as Viktor stares into the bubbling liquid, until— 

“I am sorry, Viktor,” Singed says, putting a hand on his shoulder, and that’s all it takes. 

Forehead pressed to the warm glass, he sobs. He’s not sure what this grief is for. For Rio, for inevitability, for his millions of reborn swallowed-down dead, or simply for his own life. All of them, or none. It doesn’t matter. Not really. 

What matters is the way it rattles from his chest and into his curving spine, dripping from his eyes. The way it makes him choke on the little air that gets into his lungs, threatening a fit. His hand clenches and pounds against the glass. Where had he learnt this? This desire to hit something, cause damage, just in the hope it will make this stop. He has always been angry. The violence is new. 

Singed’s other hand comes up to grab his fist. “It is delicate,” he warns. “The glass.” 

He presses his open palm to it instead, shaking. It thrums under his touch like a heartbeat. 

Together, like this, it is the three of them. Almost as it was. 

“I want to talk to Silco,” Viktor finally says, however long after it takes him to catch his breath.  

Singed takes his hand off of Viktor’s shoulder and turns away. Vials clink against each other as his fingers pick through them, each indistinguishable from the next in the box. When he finds what it is he was looking for, he holds it out to Viktor, deep pink and shining. 

“It’s— cleaner,” he says. “More refined. Not for the streets. Fewer side effects. Use it sparingly.” 

Viktor takes it. Puts it in his pocket. Says, “That’s not what I asked for.” 

Singed eyes him over the boxes, all of the mismatched glassware. When he speaks again it’s in both of their first tongue, like he wants to make sure he’s being understood. “It’s a bad idea, little eel,” he says. “Silco hates the upper city. It’s gotten worse since you were last here. The only thing that interests him is violence.”

The vial is heavy against his thigh. “Why sell this then? If he needs soldiers he already has them. An army of addicts will not fight for long.” 

“He needs money,” Singed says. “War is expensive. The things he wants to build are expensive. They lost once. He has no interest in losing again.” 

For a second, Viktor can almost hear the echo of resonant distortion in his own voice as he says, “I can help him with that.” 

Singed looks at him then, scarred face giving nothing away. He opens his mouth to say something else, and then closes it. Eventually, he nods. He has always been a practical man. 

“Very well,” he says in Piltovian. “Come back in a few days. I will arrange it.” 

∆

Back in the lab, Viktor looks at the flowers, still in their glass, and thinks about how he had planned to test them down in the undercity. An easy excuse for where he’s been, even as abandoned and wilting as that piece of their research is, now.

“Where did you go?” Jayce asks him as he steps back through the door. A file sings in his fingers, smoothing out the edges of yet another piece of brass. “Is everything— ”

“For a walk,” Viktor interrupts him, and prays his eyes aren’t still rimmed in red. “Jayce, do you trust me?” 

Looking up, Jayce’s face is open and honest. The success of the gates has given him hope, Viktor knows. Furthered the split in his head between then and now. He says, “Always, Vik. No matter what. Did something happen?” 

“I think I have found something,” Viktor says. “A solution. For the undercity. Giving them the reactors will start a war, we both know that. Letting Piltover have them first is— ”

“Worse,” Jayce finishes for him. “Yeah.”

“It needs time. And— delicacy. I can’t have the council finding out before it is ready.”

Biting his lip, Jayce says, “That means you’re not going to tell me what it is, doesn’t it?”

“I am telling you that it exists,” Viktor says, and prays it will be enough. There will be time later for brute force.

“Okay,” Jayce answers, nodding. “Okay, Vik. I trust you. Promise you’ll tell me if it gets dangerous, or if you need help.”

“I promise,” Viktor tells him, and it doesn’t feel like a lie as it leaves his mouth, but it will be. Of that he is almost sure.

∆

The message from Singed comes only a few days later, a date and a time, no location. Viktor already knows where to go. Over the bridge and down the tram into the undercity, one of the highest levels, not quite clear enough for regular daylight. The sign for The Last Drop blinks electric at him as he steps through the door. Inside, nobody spares him a glance, except for those in the corners who are hungry. Predators are always hunting for fragile things. 

He gives his name to the bartender and gets a laugh in reply, until Viktor slides a small bag of money across the counter and repeats himself. Still laughing, the bartender says, “Your funeral, man,” and points him towards a side staircase, framed by thick velvet drapes. 

The steps are narrow and creak under his feet as he climbs. The further he gets, the more the sound from the bar is muffled, almost becoming aquatic, behind him. At the top, all there is is a single door, an easy enough place to find. 

Viktor knocks and, receiving no response, pushes the door open. 

“Who the fuck are you?” a girl off to the side asks him, cocking a gun at his head. His memories tell him: Lonely. Unstable. Brave. It takes all of his willpower to keep the recognition smile off of his face. Maybe this too is an opportunity. Something that can be fixed. 

“If you are going to shoot, then shoot,” he says, holding himself back from sparing a glance in her direction. “Do us both the favour.” 

She collapses into laughter. Literally collapses, onto the floor. “I like him,” she chokes out between peals. “He gets it.” 

“You know who I am,” Viktor says, addressing the back of the chair and over her continued laughing. It spins around to face him. 

Silco’s eye is grotesque and even expecting it, some animal part of Viktor flinches back. He nods and says, “I do. Topside miracle boy. Lucky enough to get out. They still talk about your exam results in the fissures. It’s good. Gives the children something to try for. What are you doing here?” 

“The children deserve better than to dream of exams,” Viktor answers and Silco laughs like he’s told a joke. 

“So what?” he says. “You come down here after a decade at the Academy and think you can do what nobody else has managed? Clear air rots your brain, boy. Our people don’t need a saviour.” 

His accent is wrong. Viktor has never heard him speak it before but Silco misses the combination of the consonants in the middle, the guttural heave of them. It’s a subtle thing, not easily noticed, except the word he’d used almost means martyr. 

Which is exactly the thing that Viktor is about to offer to be. 

“You are familiar with the hexgates?” he asks instead, leaning on his cane. He will not beg this man for the comfort of a place to sit. 

Silco leans back in his chair, tenting his fingers on the desk. Somewhere to Viktor’s right, Jinx is spinning her gun around one of her long braids, distracted. Silco says, “Jayce Talis. Low house, but clever. They’ll make him a councillor before the year is up. What about him?” 

“The hexgates are mine,” Viktor says, and some part of him means it. The nasty, buried, scrambling part. “I stabilized them. Designed the reconstruction algorithm. Before me they were a pile of sparking crystals and bad ideas. House Kiramman took my name off the plans.” 

Smirking, Silco says, “So why are you here?” 

“I can give you power,” he says. “Not political. Real. No more coal, no more fuel synthesis. Clear the air. Jayce Talis wants to build better mining equipment. With what I will offer you, there will be no need for the mines at all.” 

“The council won’t take well to you stealing their secrets.” 

Viktor laughs. “They will call it stealing, yes. But I have a feeling that will not matter to you, or to the people of the fissures. Let the council throw their tantrums. How many years have they been throwing away lives?”

“And Talis?” 

“Will work on what I direct him to work on,” Viktor says. “What did you call him? Clever? He and I are— involved. It will not be a problem.” 

He uses a fissure word to describe their relationship. Silco will understand the nuances of it, or he won’t. 

“We could build something great,” Silco says, and there’s that word again, the proof Viktor was looking for. Filtered down even here. Could . Silco was a miner, but that means he only ever worked in the fissures. He’s never lived in them. Piltovian is his mother tongue. 

Fuck the sun that shines on them. An old curse that doesn’t translate. He extends a hand over the desk, taking it off his cane, and says, “It is time that things changed.” 

The smile Silco gives him is sharp, too many teeth, and Viktor almost matches it. The things he used to be afraid of. 

When they shake, one of them loses. Only time will tell which one of them it will be. 

∆

Over dinner, days later, Jayce tells him the council and their accomplices are smuggling spirits and stretching quantities on their manifests, but he does it with a smile. 

“I think I impressed Mel— ” he says, and then cuts himself off. The smile drops. 

Into the new silence between them, Viktor says, “You can, if you want. With Councilor Medarda.” 

And this is the part of it Jayce will never understand: Viktor will do anything to make sure he is happy. Even if that means leaving. Giving him up. Crushing himself into the dirt to provide a single moment of stable floor. 

“If I want—“ Jayce echoes. His brow furrows. “What are you talking about? I already told you— ”

“That was before.” 

“Before— ” He stands, coming over to Viktor’s chair and kneeling beside him. “Viktor, do you think that I’m going to leave because you’re sick? Do you honestly believe that I could— ”

“It will be easier for you if you do not have to watch it happen,” Viktor says, the simple truth.

Jayce moves before Viktor can say anything else, pulling back his chair and slotting himself between his knees. Like this, Viktor is taller than him, but only just. Jayce makes up the difference easily, surging up to kiss him, like he thinks he can use his body to convince Viktor of the things his words cannot.

“You are the only one I want,” he pants between breaths, hot on Viktor’s face. “I’m not leaving you. Not for any man, woman, or mage in all the rest of the world. Viktor, what do I have to do to get you to believe me?”

And Viktor does not say: stay, because he already feels his heart splayed raw and bloody here, under Jayce’s hands. Instead, he takes his lips down Jayce’s throat, mouthing at the tendons, feeling their slight give under his teeth. Jayce’s back hits the table behind them, setting the abandoned dishes chiming, enough to get them both to pull back.

“Bedroom?” Jayce asks, colour blooming on his skin. Viktor nods, and so they go.

On the mattress, on their rumpled unmade sheets, Jayce undresses him like it’s worship, an offering to Janna in the wind. His hands find the brace, tight around Viktor’s chest. The buckles give first, leather sliding against leather, and then the joints, each individual key turning to unlock its piece until it falls open from the front, exposing all of his softest parts.

Hands on Viktor’s waist, Jayce asks, “Other side too?”

They don’t always, almost never, some things too vulnerable for Viktor to bear. Sliding the strap off of his own shoulder, Viktor nods, and turns.

Jayce’s hands find him again, and it is quick work. When it is done his nails clink on the pins. Tap. Tap. Tap. Up and down each vertebra where the brace has been undone. The touch resonates somewhere other than Viktor’s skin— in his bones, in his jaw, like a tuning fork set to sing.

“You’re beautiful,” Jayce murmurs, not for the first time. It might be the first time Viktor believes him, though, frequency catching in his teeth like if he opens his mouth it will be enough to break worlds. Face pressed into their pillows, he makes no sound.

Like this, they are almost as close as two people can become, pressed together. The calluses on Jayce’s hands catch on his skin and Viktor feels his own nails dig into flesh. To be known is to be devoured. Maybe that just means they’ve done this backwards— with his fingers on Jayce’s forehead they shudder together, and it is over.

Sweaty and sticky, Jayce rolls into Viktor’s side and says, smiling, “So, what was that about Mel Medarda?”

Viktor doesn’t hit him, but it feels like a near thing. Vision still just slightly blurred and staring into the ceiling, he says, “For that, you are on cleanup. I will remind you that there are still dishes on the table.”

Laughing, Jayce throws a blanket over the pair of them and makes no further move to leave. “In the morning,” he says. “Come here. I think one of the rads is on the fritz, it’s freezing in here.”

Viktor has never been so warm. Jayce pulls him tight and something settles, deep where the glass shards in his ribs are slowly becoming sand. Let the hourglass turn. Closing his eyes, sleep finds them both, and it is as restful as any Viktor has ever known. 

∆

They make Jayce a councillor. The pattern repeats. At the celebratory banquet, Viktor stands to the side of the room and cradles a thin flute of wine in his hand, staring out over every beautiful shining thing Piltover has to offer.

Nobody approaches him, and he approaches nobody. He prefers it this way. There are those among them he recognizes, not from their status, or from their obvious wealth, but from the flashes of their memories that flicker across his vision when he looks into their faces. Greedy, tiny, desperations, each of them. Throat caught somewhere between pity and disgust, it is better if Viktor does not speak.

He had hated these parties the first time, too much of an outsider to be welcome, too frail to use his body to make himself known, the way another man might. The way Jayce did. Now, they are simply exhausting. Viktor has no patience for petty politics, not with the clock ticking in the back of his head and people in the fissures choking.

But Jayce had asked him to come, a celebration of their partnership in fine clothes with fine food. Every few minutes, Jayce makes a face at him over the shoulder of whichever Piltovian monster he’s talking to, and Viktor has to hold back a grin.

As long as they do not make a habit of this, it is not so bad.

Mel Medarda visits him for a few minutes, asking his opinion on things that are actually relevant to their research. Distance limits for the hexgates. Maximum payloads. Potential interferences with the system due to obscure or mage-influenced materials. Viktor can see her head run the calculus on everything he tells her, and maybe in another universe they are friends. Maybe they still might be, here.

Not yet.

Bidding her good evening, Viktor finishes his wine and catches Jayce’s eye. Gesturing with his shoulder towards the door, he prepares himself to leave. When Jayce starts to walk towards him, Viktor shakes his head and that convinces him to stay, absorbed almost immediately back into the throngs of his admirers, and people who think they have something they can take from him. They are the ones who are most likely to interpret Jayce’s good nature as weakness.

Viktor thinks they are the ones who will be the most lucky that they are building no weapons this time.

Pausing as he shrugs on his coat, Viktor looks back out over the ballroom and breathes out. If there is to be peace, some portion of this must survive. He has never been very good at giving up concessions.

But he has tried to burn it once. It is time to try something new. Turning his head, at the edge of the horizon, Viktor can see the undercity glow. 

∆

The next morning, Viktor goes instead to answer a different invitation. Another step towards what might be a solution.

Jinx meets him at an old arcade, windows broken and sign hanging off of a single rusty nail. Grinning at him when he raises an eyebrow at her, she says, “Silco asked me to show you what we’ve already got. I show you mine and then you eventually show me yours. Lookin’ for overlap. You got much use for grenades up topside?”

Snorting, Viktor says, “No.” She laughs.

“Machine guns?”

“Unless one is an enforcer, also no.”

She makes a twisted sort of disgusted face and says, “Don’t see the point then. Oh well, come with me. Hope that cane makes you good at stairs. We’ve gotta go a long way down.”

It is a lot of stairs, but not an unmanageable amount. Viktor follows her past where the streets turn into pipes and where the pipes turn into rough-hewn caves. At one of the old Kiramman-branded hatches, rusty at the edges, Jinx looks over at him and says, “Silco thinks we can trust you, or he thinks you’re not a threat. Same thing. Don’t look like much of a fighter. Tell anyone about this place and it won’t be him you need to be scared of, got it?”

He nods, and she starts to twist open the door, far too smooth for how rusted it’s supposed to be. Following her inside, a short passageway takes them into one of the ancient ventilation ducts, almost more myth than reality. Viktor pauses for a second at the step down to the platform, suspended over the bottomless dark. “Did you build this?”

Looking back over her shoulder, Jinx laughs and says, “Found the turbine already all crooked and banged up. Built everything else around it. You can stay over there if you’re chickenshit, but it’s not gonna fall.”

Viktor is more worried about the end of his cane going through the grate. Picking his way across it, step by careful step, he does not ask her for a solution. On one of the desks, a wide array of machinery has been laid out, prepared, like they are being entered in a competition and Viktor is the judge. Each of them is rough, no finished edges or ground-down welds. Electric paint covers most of them, faces and symbols and swear words. Even at a distance, Viktor can tell it’s brilliant work. Juvenile, untrained, but brilliant. 

Bouncing on her heels, Jinx rushes forward to stand beside them and, gesturing at the table, says, “Well, whaddya think?”

“I will have to examine them before I am able to give you an opinion, Jinx,” he says, coming up to lean on the edge of the table. As he does she bounces again and disappears from sight. Before Viktor can even think to look for where she’d gone, she’s returning with a stool tucked under her arm, wide boards bolted to the feet, an easy solution for the grate.

“Use this,” she says. “Don’t want you falling off the side. Yet.”

So Viktor sits, and pulls the nearest piece of machinery towards himself. Slowly unscrewing the primary panel, he does not hold his breath. She must still notice his nerves, because she laughs, and then pokes him, and then laughs again. Glaring at her, Viktor gets to work.

“You’re, like, a fairy aren’t you?” she asks at one point. For a second Viktor doesn’t understand her, head full of glimmering white and endless endless endless , before he realizes that all she’s implying is a simple insult. Another game. 

“This is unstable,” he says instead of answering her, poking a pen into the mess of wires. “No tolerance on the input voltage. Any variance and— ”

“Duh,” she says, cutting him off. “That’s the point. Figured you’d get that.”

He glances up at her. “You are not useful without your hands,” he says. “Do not forget it. If you want something to kill you, then make sure it will. This is an injury, that’s all.” 

A twist of the pen knocks it off the table and into the endless chasm below them. It doesn’t explode, not even when Viktor hears it hit something, far enough away to echo. She laughs. “More explosives, got it!”

That wasn’t his point. It doesn’t matter. He says, spinning to face her, “Is this all you have?” 

She looks almost offended, face twisting. “What else did you want?” she asks. “A cure for fissure lung? A novel method of separating lithium from salt? A pony? I specialize in things that go Boom! So, yeah, that’s what we got.” 

He grimaces and sets himself back to examining the prototypes she has on the table. Some of them are interesting. All of them are dangerous. After a few second she says, “You said that councillor jackass was your boyfriend— ”

“Partner,” Viktor interjects, only half listening.

“That’s worse. You do understand how that’s worse, right?” she scoffs. “Piltie in your bed. You know, maybe Silco was right. He says that anyone who goes topside doesn’t come back. Like something happens to your brains— ”  

“You are from Zaun, yes?” he asks, finally looking at her. 

She nods, grinning. “Born and raised! Never left. Got my head on proper.” 

“So you have had a hard life,” he says and she nods again, smile dimming. This will not be a fair comparison to make, not to this girl or to anyone else. “Allow me to show you something.” 

∆

They take the elevator down. It shudders to a stop at the bottom, open sides showing stone on three walls and a platform through the other, a puddle of light in the dark. Stepping off the elevator and onto it, they say nothing. Ahead of them, the fissures start to branch, one after the other into the gloom. 

Some of them have lights strung onto the walls, extending out until they can no longer be seen. Others are dark. Others still are closed with thick steel doors. None of it matters, here in this place where the power is fickle and the locks can be picked. Viktor guides them forward, cane tapping in time with the sound of distant dripping water, until he eventually finds what he’s looking for. 

The branch looks exactly like any of the other branches. Dark, no lights. Jinx pulls a miner’s lamp from somewhere, one of her endless pockets, and fills the reservoir with the runoff by their feet. 

“Don’t get it on your fingers,” Viktor warns, watching her fiddle with the mechanism. She glares up at him from under her bangs and says nothing, finally working the spout into place. When she clicks a lighter in front of it, Viktor holds his breath. Fire is always risky here. The lamp lights, and nothing else. 

The mirror reflects the flame over the thin path in front of them, slick with algae where the pipes drip from overhead. There’s a nameplate hammered into the wall, illegible. Not that Viktor needs to read it to know where he is. Even the shapes of the stones under the soles of his shoes are familiar. 

This is not a journey he has made very often on his own two feet. Not in a long time. As a child, on his father’s shoulders, hands grasping at trailing moss. As a teenager, turning his back on his mother, an Academy acceptance letter gripped in his fist. Not since. 

He stares into it, unseeing. 

“Hey,” Jinx says from beside him, knocking her shoulder into his arm. “Need a hand?” 

In this, Viktor is not too proud to accept her help. Together, they descend into the ravine. 

∆

The first houses, built into the side of the cliff, are shuttered, their tin roofs rusted and gaping like the mouths of animals. The beam of light from Jinx’s lamp catches on them, sending reflected prisms up into the towering stone walls. Nothing moves except for the pair of them, slowly working their way downwards, shards of glass and broken tiles sliding below their feet. 

The lower they go, the thicker the air gets. Humid and stinking. Jinx coughs beside him, twice, and then, with a look of determination, breathes in. She does not cough again. 

The ache in his lungs is almost nostalgic. 

Viktor did not think to bring them masks, too proud to face anyone who may still be down here while wearing one. As they reach the bottom, houses becoming more sturdy but staying just as dark, he starts to wonder if that was a mistake. A fungus curls up the largest one, natural shapes that are almost, nauseatingly, familiar. Viktor looks away from it and does not think about whose house it had been, or how it had felt to scrub mineral deposits from the shingles. 

His feet take him past the buildings and to the water. To the machine in the water. Its low, hulking form in the centre of everything. Curling his fingers into the side of it, he starts to peel off thick sheets of rust until they break away and fall to the ground. Underneath, the shape is barely identifiable as the engine he had known so well. None of its delicate gears survive. 

Viktor closes his eyes, and lets the final flakes go. He can feel Jinx’s eyes follow him, the weight of them, as she says nothing. 

The longer he stares at his surroundings, the climbing slime and broken wires illuminated by the single thin beam of light, the more obvious it is. This is no longer a place where people live. Hasn’t been for a long time. 

Viktor never went looking. Some part of him had to have known, when the news stopped coming. Inside these houses there will only be mold. 

At the bank of the stream, just a few more steps further, he kneels, grimacing against the pain of it. He will pay for this in the morning, for the rest of the week. Maybe forever. He ignores it as he reaches into his bag to pull out the pale blue flower he had bought from a vendor on their way here, answering no questions. As he sets it in the water he says, “This is where I grew up, Jinx. Those of you from the city do not understand the fissures. You don’t have to agree with my choices, but you need to know that they are because of this.” 

The light from her lamp swings over him, throwing his shadow onto the opposite wall, inhumanly large. Haloed. 

“Peaceful resting loved in current,” she whispers, staring into the oil-slick shine on the stream’s surface, caught in the light. It takes Viktor a heartbeat to process it, first, the syllables, choked through an accent that almost never goes the other way, then the words, out of order and half remembered. 

“Until we find the other bank,” he finishes, the way he’s supposed to. It doesn’t really matter who they’re speaking for. Viktor says it for all of them, every shuttered house. 

In silence, they watch the flower until it disappears around a bend and into the dark. Neither of them cry. When it is gone, they both stand, and say nothing. He doesn’t know what he expected, bringing her down here. Not this. All Viktor feels is exhausted. She gives nothing away. 

It is not until they are back on the ledges, scrambling with her hands on his elbow up the slippery stone that either of them speak again. 

“That wasn’t right, was it?” Jinx asks, almost too quiet to hear. There are a lot of echoes in the fissures. 

Viktor pauses and shrugs. Pretending to make it normal will make it normal, this he has to believe. “Close enough. Where did you learn to speak the language? It’s rusty.” 

She starts swearing at him, rough and colourful and mostly aimed at a nonexistent bartender with a proclivity for dogs. It’s an impressive set. 

“You were taught funeral rites at a bar?” he asks, one eyebrow raised. 

It’s her turn to shrug. She says, “You pick things up.” 

There’s more she isn’t telling him, but secrets are so common here, in the wet dark. Viktor lets it go. As they continue climbing, long enough that he can no longer hear the water behind them, he says, careful with his syllables, “It is ‘rest peaceful in the current, love’ , if you were curious. The prayer.” 

He can feel her eyes on him as they continue to walk, and has the grace to not mention it when her lips start to form the shapes, soundlessly practicing the words, all the way until they can see sunlight again. 

∆

“Jayce,” he says into the streetlamp glow of their bedroom. “I need to teach you something.” 

Turning his head, Jayce looks directly at him and slurs, almost asleep, “Anything. What is it?” 

“It’s a prayer— ” Viktor starts and then stops, biting the inside of his cheek. He has already done so much crying. 

That seems to wake Jayce up. He goes up on one elbow and asks, “A prayer?” 

“For the funeral.” 

Even barely visible, Viktor can make out how Jayce’s face goes hard. The way his eyes look when he says, “Viktor, you’re not going to die.” 

Viktor is too exhausted to fight him, muscles still twitching with the effort it had taken to climb the final steps and onto the bridge into the upper city. So he says, “Indulge me then. In case I get run over by a trolley or fall out a window.” 

“Don’t joke about that,” Jayce snaps and all Viktor does is put a hand on his chest, pushing him back to laying down. 

Looking into his eyes and palm pressed firm, Viktor says, “Rest peaceful in the current, love. Until we find the other bank.” and then repeats it, slow. And again. On the fourth repetition Jayce echoes him, screwing his eyes shut. On the sixth, his pronunciation is almost passable. On the ninth, Viktor knows Jayce will not forget it, and so he stops. 

“What does it mean?” Jayce whispers, voice more a feeling in Viktor’s fingers than sound. 

So Viktor translates it, as close to cleanly as he can, and then stops himself. “No,” he says. “Love isn’t right. It’s not so— direct. It is the same prayer for one’s parents as it is for one’s spouse. The word means more— like a piece of the speaker’s heart. In the phrase it is like the speaker is saying goodbye to a part of themselves alongside the ashes in the water. Offering it to the current.”

“Ashes,” Jayce echoes, and Viktor hadn’t even thought to explain this part. 

“There are only two things that people pray for in the fissures,” Viktor says, laying back so he and Jayce are side by side and staring at the ceiling. Some conversations are easier in the dark. 

Viktor is good with numbers. Less so with words. 

Jayce makes an encouraging noise beside him and Viktor continues, saying, “Clean water and clean air. Clean air is a miracle, but people can do something about clean water. Each fissure is carved by a stream and the community builds itself around it. The purification machine will be repaired even if the people are starving. Down to the last man, woman, and child, it will run.” 

Under his nails, he can still feel flakes of rust. “When a person dies there is nowhere to bury them. Too much stone. So, the bodies are burnt. The ashes are scattered in the stream, on the far side of the water wheel. The ceremony is held on the shore. It is the best honour any of them can offer.” 

“Until we find the other bank,” Jayce says, stumbling only slightly on the syllables. 

Viktor curls into him. Says into his chest, “There is an old story, about the river of the dead. The second half asks the departed to wait patiently in the water until they and the speaker are reunited and can go to the afterlife together. That is what the prayer means.” 

He is not so brave as to ask, to beg for confirmation of what they both already know, already swore, hands clasped at the end of everything. Still, Jayce gives it to him. “In any world,” he says. “Any universe. This one or the next.” 

Under his cheek, Jayce’s heart beats slow and steady. There is only one piece of it left to tell. 

“The prayer is normally split in two, to be proper,” Viktor says. “And it is considered a sign of a good life, in the fissures, to have two people willing to mourn you at your funeral. When it was my father’s turn, my mother said the first half. It was her heart that was the most broken. And I said the second, because I was his son.” 

“Do you want to see him?” Jayce asks. It’s not the question Viktor was expecting. Not one he has an easy answer to. 

“I did not. While we were— While I was— ” he sighs. “I’m not sure I know his face anymore. With hope he has given up waiting. He and my mother both.” 

And that’s all there is to it. Not nearly desperate enough to be a confession. Just the quiet, easy, reassurance as Viktor eventually falls asleep, listening to Jayce repeat the word love, under his breath, like it’s the only part of the prayer that matters.