Chapter Text

prologue: exit music (for a film)

TWO YEARS AFTER THE FOUNDING OF HEXTECH.

“You missed your three o’clock meeting.” Sky’s voice cut through the sound of the blowtorch, pitched to carry. When Viktor turned around, blowtorch set atop a rubber safety mat and welding mask pushed up over his hair, she was standing in the doorway to his lab, her notebook and what looked to be several sheaves of paper tucked in her arms. “I took notes, though.”

“Ah.” Viktor slid down the length of his worktable, the unoiled wheels of his stool squeaking loudly in the newfound silence. Sky met him halfway, setting everything but her personal notebook down atop the table. “Was there a—”

“Nothing that important,” Sky said, already anticipating his question. “But you really need to get better about checking your emails, Viktor.”

Viktor wrinkled his nose. “Bah. Emails. Most of those meetings could be emails.” He gestured broadly, a flippant flick of the wrist in Sky’s general direction.

“Well, when you don’t attend the meetings, I don’t think it matters that they could be emails,” Sky said quietly.

“Right,” Viktor said. He began to thumb through the papers Sky had set down on the table, all written in her careful, spindly hand. Minute after minute of the meeting he’d missed, while elbows deep in wires and steel — at least half of which had to be useless posturing and pandering. “Did anything strike you as, eh, particularly important?”

Sky leaned over. “Here,” she said, shuffling the papers around. “About an hour in, they got around to addressing um, the Zaun proposal.”

“The school funding one?” Viktor asked. “Or the internships?”

“The internships.” Sky yanked the page free, finally, setting it atop the disheveled pile of papers. “It’s not, well…”

“Ah,” Viktor muttered, fisting a hand in his hair. Approval for full class of Zaunite interns uncert, Sky had written. Partial class? DEI initiative ment. ½ board disapp. “I see.” He kept his voice level, even enough to not belie his disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” Sky said. She laced her fingers together, twisting them around one another as she peered at him over top of the frames of her glasses. “I tried to, well — I tried to say something. But I’m not…” She trailed off.

“It’s alright, Sky,” Viktor said. He sighed. “I’m sorry to have forced you to stand in for me. It’s not your job.”

She shrugged, and smiled, small and closed-lipped, at him. “It’s okay. What were you working on?”

Viktor wheeled himself back toward the mess of parts and wires he’d been buried in. He gestured to the schematics — rough and unstandardized as they were — where they were pinned to the sloped wall just above Viktor’s worktable.

“Is that…?” Sky adjusted her glasses and leaned in closer. “Oh! It’s —!” She looked down at him, eyes wide.

“If my math is correct, then yes. Hopefully, this will be the first iteration of the…well. I don’t have a name for it yet.” he said. “But, among other things, it should help make surgeries five times more precise. Or it could help with precision crafting. Even mining, if scaled up enough.” Viktor cleared his throat. “Well. If my math is correct. Which…eh,” he wibbled one hand back and forth, “it may not be, this time around.” He looked down at the disparate parts of the little machine — one of the smallest lasers Viktor had ever tried to construct — and fought off the urge to twiddle the pieces between his hands.

“As usual, you’re — it’s. It’s brilliant.” Sky paused. “But please, Viktor, check your emails next time. I can’t keep filling in for you at board meetings.”

Viktor shot her a glance. She looked deathly serious, mouth set in a thin, hard line. “Fine, fine,” he said. “Come and take a look at the calibration equations, though.”

“Jayce hasn’t taken a crack at them yet?”

“Eh,” Viktor said, a wry note creeping into his voice. “He’s too busy with those meetings I keep missing. I’ll find him later. Come here — I think there’s something off about the tertiary power lines, but I can’t tell which variable it is…”

The sensation of heat over his right shoulder was a familiar one. It had felt, at times, like Jayce had spent the better part of their collaboration thus far hovering over Viktor’s right shoulder as he peered down at the calculations and mechanisms Viktor had to offer. Sky’s presence was not an unfamiliar one — body heat was body heat, irrespective of the body — but still, Viktor thought that he could feel the minute differences between her slim figure and Jayce’s bulk.

“All the power lines look correct,” Sky said underneath her breath. Her specialty was firmly within the realm of bioengineering — a hop, skip, and a jump from Viktor’s own specialties, of which mechanical engineering and biochemistry numbered — but she’d had a head for the finer points of wire bound construction since they were children. “Do you think it’s an issue with the power source?”

“Perhaps,” Viktor said. “I think…” He swung his head around, and ignored the way it made his back and neck scream in protest. Pushing himself up off the stool was harder than he’d anticipated. The backs of his thighs were sore, tingly from being sat on for too long with too little motion, and the knee of his weak leg felt stiff and swollen, the area of the joint just a shade too warm.

Sky, wordlessly, handed Viktor his cane. She followed him to one of the myriad blackboards, huddled together in some dark corner of Viktor’s lab, watching as he pushed them together and apart, in search of whichever board he’d used two weeks ago, when he’d first begun to piece together the math.

“It’s in my area of the lab, Vik.”

“Ah. Thank you.” Jayce stood in the open doorway to the lab, buttoned up and meeting ready, if not for the fact that his tie had since been taken off and shoved, haphazardly, into his breast pocket. Jayce held a tablet in one hand, and a drink tray with two to-go cups in another, one of which Viktor could smell from halfway across the room; licorice and star anise, sweet, heavy spices, just barely cut with milk. “Is that for me?”

Jayce set the cups on Viktor’s worktable, just inches shy of where Sky had set the meeting minutes, moments earlier. “Sweetmilk, from that stand you like down High Street. The coffee’s mine, though.”

Viktor wrinkled his nose. “Black coffee,” he said.

“With one sugar,” Jayce added. “The single sugar is important.”

“Right, of course. Because that one sugar is doing so much for all…that.”

“We can’t all drink milk with a hint of coffee, Viktor,” Jayce said. “Some of us need stimulants to stay awake.” He paused, cutting in just as Viktor was about to respond. “And I’m not doing drugs.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Viktor protested. “When have I ever said that?”

Jayce rolled his eyes. “Let me get the blackboard. I think I know what’s off with the tertiary power lines — I was looking at your math before the meeting, and I think it’s got something to do with the exponents on line thirty two? The ones relating to circular power regulation.”

“No, I checked those twice,” Viktor said. He took the to-go cup of sweetmilk, and took a sip. It warmed him instantly — and made him all too aware, suddenly, of how long it had been since he’d last eaten. “You are thinking of it graphing as a wave, Jayce. But the energy outputs as measured map more accurately onto a, eh, a parabola.”

“Oh. Huh.” Jayce scratched at his chin. “What about the boundary equation?”

“The — ah. Ah! The boundary equation.” Viktor met Jayce at the blackboard. “Sky, do you think this could account for that, eh, that issue with the power source you mentioned earlier?”

Sky hummed. “I mean, if the boundary equation is off, then that means the power threshold for initialization is either too low, or too high. Which could account for the issue with the tertiary power lines — either they’re shorting out, or—”

“Or the power’s never reaching it to begin with!” Jayce shouted, an ebullient grin on his face. “Hold on, let me start on the recalculations, and Vik—”

“I’ll take a closer look at the power levels when the device misfires, yes,” Viktor said. “But, Jayce, I meant to ask — how did that meeting go, earlier?”

Sky let out a tiny, false, cough, and quickly turned to busy herself with the half-finished prototype Viktor had left on the work table. “I’ll just…start getting this hooked up to the reader, then…”

“The meeting?” Jayce said, distracted. He had already shucked off his suit jacket, and begun rolling the starched sleeves of his white button down up around his elbows, eyes trained firmly on the board’s worth of equations in front of him. “It was fine, I guess. Salo asked where you were, but don’t worry, I made your excuses. Hey, do you think the issue was with our delta value, or…?”

Viktor pursed his lips. And what about the internships I proposed? He wanted to ask. But the words stuck to the back of his mouth, somewhere between his soft palate and esophagus. It was true that Viktor had a tendency to miss board meetings — there was a reason that Jayce was the face of Hextech, after all, and it had equal parts to do with his innate charisma and charm and Viktor’s fervent desire to stay on the far edges of the limelight — and, Viktor supposed, it made sense that because of that, his own aims and initiatives for the company would not be as stringently advocated for.

But it still tugged queerly at something inside of him.

“I think it might have more to do with the omega value than the delta,” Viktor offered, clearing his throat. “Sky mentioned that the internship outreach program came up. Did anything-”

“It got tabled,” Jayce said. He looked away from the chalkboard, the motion beleaguered, as if pulling himself away was a trial. “Hey — another reason why you’ve gotta check your emails, Vik. I think they’re waiting until they can get your full input on the initiative. I mean, it’s your project, after all.”

Yours, Jayce had said, as if they both had not dreamed, in the very beginning, of Hextech becoming the kind of behemoth that could bring more than just Piltover to new heights.

But Jayce had a point. As much as Hextech was theirs, the internship initiative was Viktor’s. He had been the one to draft it, to carry it from infancy up to what it was now: something ready to be presented to the board.

“You’re right,” Viktor said. “Not about the delta variable, though.” He walked over to the chalkboard, plucking the piece of chalk Jayce had been brandishing, and crossing out the alternative equation beginning to take shape, just underneath the flawed original. “It’s the decimal of the omega variable.”

“Flawed data set?” Jayce asked.

“Not quite,” Viktor said, tapping the chalk underneath a half-month-old equation. “You forgot to carry the three, it seems.”

Jayce stilled, bending down to squint furiously at his own handiwork. Viktor could see the cogs turning in his brain as he ran the math, over and over, until the issue became clear.

“Well, shit,” he said, taking a step back. “You’re right, as usual.” He placed a hand on Viktor’s shoulder. “What would I do without you?”

“Forget to carry the three, evidently,” Viktor replied, dryly. “This is not the first time, you know.”

“Well, it definitely won’t be the last, either.” Jayce squeezed Viktor’s shoulder gently. “Alright. Let’s take a look at how the math shakes out now.”

Viktor began to write, chalk scratching against the blackboard as Jayce hovered, a spot of warmth just over his right shoulder, same as he’d been for hours before, and years before that.

THREE YEARS LATER…

Viktor stormed down the hallway like a man possessed. His crutch clattered loudly with each step he took, the sounds loud and furious against the relatively serene silence the office seemed to be steeped in. He clanged and stomped down the hallway for what could have been an eon, before his crutch slid against the slick, mutton-fat marble tile that had been installed not long after the Hextech offices had first been built.

Viktor cursed, tightly, furiously underneath his breath as he leaned heavily against his crutch, bracing himself with one trembling arm against the wall. He had never had strong feelings about their marbled floors; perhaps a distant sort of bemusement at how Piltovian the whole thing was — marble floors in a workplace, what a waste! — but he could not help the hot rush of hatred that threatened to bubble over as he fought for purchase in the midst of the wide, empty marble hall.

The marble — or rather, the decorative trappings of the Hextech offices themselves — had been a joint gift from Councilors Medarda and Kiramman, following Viktor and Jayce’s first spate of successful patents. So once, perhaps, the marble had stood for how far Viktor and Jayce had come since that frantic night spent in the blown out remains of Jayce’s lab, mere hours standing between them and the inevitable destruction of a lifetime of research on Jayce’s end. It had felt like a well-earned reward, at the time, a feeling Viktor had been unable to shake, years back, no matter how little he trusted the intent of it.

But now, the marble was like ice underneath Viktor’s feet and cane. It refused to grant him footing; Viktor’s cane slid and squeaked against the stone, dragging cloudy streaks in the once-pristine flooring. The sound was dissonant; destructive for seemingly no other reason than to punctuate the ugly, boiling feeling in the pit of Viktor’s stomach.

Viktor wanted to call it rage. He wanted to call it nothing but rage, but the emotion was too muddied, too shot through with other, softer emotions, to be something so simple. Humiliation numbered amongst them — betrayal too. But, Viktor thought, it was confusion that threatened to overcome the rage.

He closed his eyes. Took a deep, steadying breath, and leveraged himself standing. The crutch knocked unpleasantly against the soft meat of his underarm, jamming itself too close to joint, socket, and bone, but Viktor let the pain jar his mind into a more orderly shape. He took a breath. And then another.

When he opened his eyes, the hallways were still empty. Where the rest of Hextech’s employees had gone, Viktor didn’t know — likely some inane team building exercise that HR insisted on, and Viktor tried his best to stay far away from, out of nothing more than a lack of desire to leave his work behind — but it was, in a way, a boon. He had no audience to contend with, no prying eyes to watch him unravel.

Viktor took another breath. When he had been younger, angrier, and much more ill at ease with the limitations his body offered, his mother had often walked him through ways of quelling his rage. She had given him bits of metal to twist between his hands, which became little broken objects for him to repair, which became projects of his very own, like the wheel-powered toy boat that had brought him to Singed and Sky, less than a year after the fever had taken both his parents and his healthy lungs.

But he had nothing to reshape. All Viktor had was his crutch, a heavy weight in one hand, and his body, which he could reshape, certainly, but for a hefty price.

Viktor chose his crutch. He squeezed it, tucking it flush against his side, and squeezed at the middle bar until he thought his hand might burst, so long as the metal didn’t give way first. He squeezed and squeezed at it until he could no longer feel something vibrating behind his teeth and tongue, and the prospect of looking Jayce in the eye, moments from then, didn’t feel like staring down the barrel of the gun in anticipation of a kill.

He let his vice grip loosen, and continued down the hall. He was still a far cry from calm; calm, which would come once he had more answers than questions, but Viktor was no longer blindly furious. He marched onward, down the hall, clip brisk enough that when the emptiness began to give way, the people loitering in the hallways began to move out of Viktor’s way.

It was the easier of the two options available to them. They couldn’t stare, Viktor reasoned, if staring would lead to them getting run down by one of their two bosses.

If he could even call himself their boss, anymore.

Viktor tried not to entertain that thought. He pushed on, past the main atrium, and off into the wider offices, where other people worked on code and equations that had started in Viktor and Jayce’s notebooks and chalkboards, and eventually made their way into other people’s computers and logbooks.

Councilor Medarda was standing just beyond the threshold, elegant as always with her hair pinned in a flawless updo. She had always looked out of place in Jayce and Viktor’s shared lab, but in the offices she had helped to build, she fit seamlessly into the fixtures and finery.

It was Viktor who didn’t fit. Too odd, too wiry, lanky where lean was more elegant; accented, but not in the right way.

“He’s concentrating,” Councilor Medarda said. Her voice was light — not foreboding, but still a warning.

“Oh, he is, is he?” Viktor replied, equally as blithe. He had spent so many years topside making himself seem harmless; that pretense felt useless now, old rage simmering so close to the skin.

“Viktor,” Councilor Medarda said. “Don’t do anything rash.”

It was her condescension that grated the most — like sandpaper on chafed skin, making every little irritation that much worse.

Rash? Viktor thought. Rash? He had spent years — more than a decade, now — carefully toeing and tiptoeing around the proprietary lines Piltover had drawn around him. Go this far and no further had governed nearly all his actions for so many god awful years that, until the night he and Jayce had broken into Heimerdinger’s office, Viktor had thought the spirit of scientific inquiry had been all but stamped out of him.

Cursing out Mel Medarda would have been rash. Throwing his crutch in her face — her stupid, perfect face — would have been rash. But Viktor was a scientist, and scientists took calculated risks. Not rash ones.

“Thank you for your advice, Councilor,” Viktor said tightly. He moved to walk past her, and did not — no matter how badly he wanted to — knock the metal end of his crutch against her ankle as he went.

Her gaze stayed on him though, probing, as Viktor steadily wove his way through the crowd of interns and Hextech staff. It felt as if the whole office was gathered there in the common room; enough people that Viktor couldn’t even begin to pretend to recognize half of them.

He walked through them like a specter. No one stopped and stared, no one paused to do a double take. Viktor was a stranger in his own hallways; a ghost in his own machine, a fact which only became more and more apparent as he jockeyed his way to the front of the throng.

There, at the front, was Jayce. He was seated, not as a king holding court, but like a mage, working a miracle. On the desk in front of him was a crude, de-shelled approximation of a HexBattery; its luminescent outer casing laid in carefully deconstructed pieces, while the inside was glowing a disconcerting shade of purple. To Jayce’s left, a small monkey toy, cymbals held inches apart, its back panel popped open, presumably to give him access to the very battery he was taking apart.

Viktor stopped at the front of the crowd, standing shoulder to shoulder with two lab techs, themselves held upright in a sort of tense, breathless anticipation. He watched with them as Jayce snipped a decaying power line, releasing a small, noxious puff of exhaust from the crude battery, and then set the pliers aside, picking up a small screwdriver instead, and beginning to piece the little battery back together again.

He stared, numbly, at Jayce’s hands as they worked. Tightening screws, setting the panels of the battery back in their correct places, and then setting the little toy monkey to rights. He had always been so good at small, deft work. It was an unexpected talent, given the general size of Jayce’s hands — large and calloused, meant originally for manning the forge that the Talises were so well-known for — but one Viktor had always held a kernel of appreciation for.

Viktor wasn’t sure what he could call the feeling in his breast now.

“Well done, Jayce,” Viktor said, as soon as the monkey was repaired. The quiet murmuring that had echoed throughout the common room, just moments earlier, gave way to a deafening silence, as Jayce jolted, as if spooked, and turned in his chair to face Viktor where he stood, now wholly set apart.

One lab tech hiccuped, then clapped her hand over her mouth, stepping slowly backward, as if trying to escape.

“Viktor,” Jayce said. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, and then, as if he had somehow thought better of it, closed it.

“May I?” He asked, gesturing at the toy. Before Jayce could respond, Viktor took two steps forward, then picked the monkey up, turning it over in his hands to examine Jayce’s handiwork. “Hm. A pressure-trigger explosive. Are we making weapons now?” His voice stayed unassumingly light.

Jayce stayed silent, looking for all the world like he would be squirming, if he could. Good, Viktor thought, viciously. Squirm. Anger was bubbling up in him again, a familiar, corrosive heat.

“You know,” Viktor held the monkey up to the light. Little flecks of spray paint made themselves apparent against the gunmetal gray of the scrap metal that had been used to construct it — and there, held up against the unforgiving light, all the little flaws in the bomb’s construction became apparent. The screws were too chunky; the metal too thick in places, bent to near breaking in others — all of them mistakes that Jayce would not be caught dead making, not then, nor ten years ago, when he was a wet-behind-the-ears Academy freshman. “I had the most interesting exchange with Councilor Medarda, a few minutes ago.”

Don’t do anything rash.

“Viktor,” Jayce said.

“Is that all you know how to say now, O’ great Man of Progress?” Viktor asked. He kept his voice calm and soft, and reveled in the way Jayce flinched at the title.

He waited a moment. Jayce didn’t speak.

“Well. Regardless. That conversation Councilor Medarda and I had — she told me, do you know what she told me?” Viktor laughed, the sound utterly humorless. The common room had gone well and truly silent, and the sound echoed in its cavernous expanse like a gunshot in the night. “She told me, don’t do anything rash. Funny, isn’t it? Rash.” Viktor rubbed a hand over his mouth, and fought back a hysterical laugh. “I would not call myself the rash one, between us two. Though, eh, I may be biased.” He shrugged.

“Viktor, can we talk about this—”

“Elsewhere?” Viktor interrupted. “No, Jayce, I think not.”

“Viktor, seriously, not here.”

“Not here?” Viktor asked. He looked around the common room. The entire crowd was, again, breathless in anticipation — but the air was tense, as if bracing for a blow. Across the room, Viktor saw Mel Medarda, still standing where she had been when he’d first arrived, watching him knowingly.

Fuck you, he thought. Viktor’s grip tightened around the monkey. Its hinges squealed, the cymbals jangling as they rubbed up against one another.

“Viktor. Please.” Jayce’s voice was soft, pleading — and pitched low, just low enough that he and Viktor were the only ones able to hear it.

“You set me up,” Viktor said, dazed. His head was spinning. He clenched harder around the monkey, letting the rough metal bite into the soft meat of his palm. A faraway feeling of pressure gave way to a wet, popping sensation, and Viktor knew, distantly, that he had begun to bleed.

“Viktor,” Jayce said, alarmed. “You’re bleed—”

Viktor threw the monkey at him, hard enough to hurt. It soared past Jayce’s right ear, shattering with an explosive noise against the white marbled wall just beyond him. Several lab techs shrieked in alarm, and several more ducked and cowered, hands flying up over their heads and faces, as if to shield themselves from the shrapnel.

“YOU SET ME UP!” Viktor howled. He could scarcely remember the last time he’d screamed like this, if ever. It felt like being five again, young and in the Lanes, cowering and hiding from boys and girls twice his size, who could run without limping or wheezing. It felt like having to sell his mother’s locket for a knee brace at eleven, and getting swindled in the process. It felt like every little slight he’d been dealt since coming topside to Piltover.

Don’t do anything rash. Viktor was so far beyond rash. He was hurtling head first into scorched, salted earth territories. He was going to level cities, pillage civilizations. He was going to kill someone, and make it so messy that the enforcers would balk at the sight of the crime. Viktor was so far beyond rash, that rash had begun to feel tame in comparison to what he was feeling; what he was about to do. What he had already done.

Very quietly, Viktor heard Mel Medarda say, “Call security.”

Something was breaking. Something had, maybe, already been well and truly broken, long before this moment.

“You set me up,” Viktor said again. He pitched his voice lower, closer to an approximation of normal.

“It wasn’t like that. Don’t make it sound like — like —”

“Like what? Like what it is? Did you even read that email you sent me?” Viktor clutched his crutch between two hands. It was slick in his palm, the wood soaking up the blood pooling in the creases and crevices of his palm. “It’ll be like I’m not even a part of the company.”

“You’ll still be my partner, Vik,” Jayce said weakly.

“Ah, yes,” Viktor murmured. “Your partner. Your partner, who cannot make any decisions regarding our technology. Your partner, who no longer has a seat at the table that will decide what our inventions will be used for. Your partner, who is not so much a partner, so much as he is an impediment, it seems.”

Viktor wished he were angry again. If he were angry, perhaps the ache in his chest wouldn’t hurt so much.

“Viktor, no, it’s not like that. I mean — you. I — you’ll be able to spend more time in the labs. You won’t have to waste your time at board meetings, haggling with the investors, you —”

“Spare me,” Viktor hissed. “Spare me the empty justifications, Jayce. I am not an idiot. You are cutting me out of the — the picture. Banishing me from the table.”

“You never wanted to be there to begin with!” Jayce protested, pushing himself away from the table. He stood, taller and broader than Viktor had ever been — or would ever be. “Viktor, you’ve always resented playing nice with the board and the Council. You’re always telling me that you’d rather be back at the lab, doing real work.”

“Fuck you,” Viktor said. “Fuck you, Jayce, putting words in my mouth. Real work? You think that advocating for how my work is used is not real work to me?”

“I never said that.”

Viktor scoffed. “So first you say that I do not want my place at the table. And now you claim to have never said that at all. Pick an equation and stick to it, Jayce.” He sneered. “Or can you not even do that?”

Jayce frowned. He pursed his lips, face settling into something harder; something more like the Man of Progress than Viktor’s partner of five years. A stranger’s face, overlaid atop Jayce’s familiar features.

“Well I’m sorry, Viktor,” he said. “But what did you expect? You can’t even remember to check your emails half the time. You’ve missed — Gods, I don’t know how many board meetings over the past however many years. You’ve always said you wanted to spend more time in the lab and less time worrying about the, how do you put it: tedious business side of Hextech, and well — wish fucking granted. Congrats. We’ve got children’s stories that teach you to be careful what you wish for, V. You might want to read them.”

He said the last part so snidely, so matter-of-fact and filled to the brim with Piltovian condescension that Viktor’s pulse jumped a notch higher in response.

“Well, sorry,” Viktor said. “Sorry that we can’t all be the Council’s jumped up little lapdog. Sorry! While you were being paraded around parties full of stuffed shirts and — and debutantes with more air than common sense, some of us were actually trying to make other people’s lives better!”

“That’s quite enough, I think,” Councilor Medarda said. He startled at the sound of her voice, turning ever so slightly to look at her. He wasn’t certain when, but somehow she had managed to make her way to right behind him — a stealthy presence, just behind his right shoulder. “Security has arrived, and I would hate to have to ask them to escort you out, Viktor.” She said it all so sincerely — as if, somehow, it was true that she would hate to have Viktor wrested, likely kicking and screaming, from the offices he had helped to build.

“You would hate to, hm?” Viktor mused bitterly. “Certainly.” He looked at the two enforcers approaching him, batons held at the ready as if, somehow, Viktor were the bigger threat between them. “Let’s not play drag the cripple, eh?”

Jayce inhaled sharply. He had never liked it when Viktor had called himself a cripple. Viktor thought the sentiment was nice, if not useless. There was no harm in stating facts. Viktor was what he had always been: crippled and of the Undercity. Neither were an insult; so to state them could only be the truth.

“I will not be signing those papers,” Viktor said, warningly.

“You may not have a choice,” Councilor Medarda said.

Viktor looked at her. She looked back, unphased, not a single braid out of place, not a bit of eyeshadow unduly smudged. He resented her, wholly and truly, for it.

“You once told me that this was our Hextech dream, Jayce,” Viktor said. “Our dream. To bring Hextech to those who needed it most. I fear, these days, that you have forgotten that.”

Jayce said nothing.

“I see.” Viktor held his crutch tighter. Anger, it seemed, had fled altogether, leaving him tired and aching — from what, he could not put a name to. “Goodbye, Jayce.”

He brushed past the enforcers, still stupidly at the ready with their clubs and weapons. Viktor had spent his first years Topside wondering when the illusion would burst; worrying that he would wake up one day, and the enforcers would be waiting for him, just outside his dorm, to send him back to Zaun.

He stepped closer to them. One tensed, hands tightening around the club. Viktor stopped, stared, and laughed, bitter and low.

“I see,” he said again. “I see. It’s so easy to feel big when I am next to you, officers.” Viktor pressed one hand against the club, pushing it down. When he pulled away, only a handprint remained — half formed and bloody, already oxidizing into an unpleasant, rusty brown.

As he walked, the crowd parted for him, teeming masses before a marked leper. Nobody said a word. Nobody reached out to touch him, to grab his sleeve, to give a parting blow. They simply stood there, silent and watchful, as Viktor made his way, slowly and surely, to the exit.

When the doors shut behind him, they did so quietly. There was no fanfare in Viktor’s exit from Hextech. Just the grand, brass double doors, thudding soundlessly shut behind him as that brilliant, dream-like chapter of his life came to a close.