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The last spark of the supernova burns and imbues into his skin with so much heat that for a second it almost feels like it’s rearranging the cells of his very being, eating away at his skin and muscles and turning him into something other . A sensation he’s much too familiar with. 

He itches to take a step back, but his feet refuse to move, his hands still on his sole companion’s shoulders, as if he needed his company to remain calm. It’s been decades since he’s last heard his voice, his , and not that of another version of him, desperate and pained and eager to do whatever it takes to bring him the peace he’s been yearning for through all of his years of solitude. Even so, he wonders if Jayce is able to feel what he feels, to see what he sees through the improbably transparent mirror that the sheer ferocity of the energy burst from the arcane has provided them with. A window into a possibility so absurd, so unlikely, that Viktor hadn’t fully believed that it would be possible. 

And yet there’s no mistaking what he sees. The echoes under his skin reflecting the victory of improbability and making him almost feel it in his own flesh, his own tired eyes looking into the ones of the one person who could always make him lower his defenses and yield, his own hands trying to soothe, to shield from the most terrifying act he’s yet to commit. The bravest, and without a doubt, the most foolish.

He closes his eyes, and like an echo of what it could have been, he feels it; fear, acceptance, trust… 

Love.

So much love that it seems to burn through the fabric of the universe. 

But soon the star is aflame no more, and as he takes a deep breath, he allows himself the solace of a small smile. There’s nobody there to witness it and reproach him, after all. 

“It is not the end for them,” He assures, despite the notion being unlikely to bring relief to anybody who truly needs it. His companion is silent as ever, perhaps uninterested in the whole affair by now, or cognizant enough to hate it. Viktor wouldn’t know either way. 

And as for himself… he can’t deny the longing that the scene fills him with. Maybe if he were less of a coward, he would keep an eye on them, see their disbelief and relief once they find each other alive and together once again, their doubts and their hope as they build a new life for themselves. A future full of uncertain promises that he’s sure they’ll make work. 

They did always work best when they were a team. 

He lets an exhalation escape from his lungs, heavy and unencumbered. It’s over. It’s out of his hands now, it has been ever since he allowed Jayce one last chance to make things right. There are only so many concessions he can give himself, when he knows what acting like a puppeteer can do to the world. 

“Whatever they do now, it’s only for them to know.” 

Though it’s second nature for him to sit back to back to Jayce these days, he walks slowly around him until he reaches his front, knowing what he will find and yet wary of it after all these years. “But a second chance is a precious gift, and I’m certain that you of all people wouldn’t waste it.”

He purses his lips as he looks at what’s left of his Jayce’s lovely face. There’s no need for him to hide his sorrow, no reason for him to hide anymore when hiding his flaws is what led him here, to lose everything he held dear one by one. Until he had nothing left anymore.

His own hand made it so. 

The same hand that now sets down his staff with little care. Magic, he’s come to find, is hardly permanent and perfect like he once believed under the unforgiving influence of the arcane; there are limitations for everything, and anything that’s created must have come from somewhere else first, nothing comes without a cost, much less miracles. Even so, he’s not worried about the instrument, as it is merely a tool for the power that lies ever so present in the itch under his skin. 

Yet another discomfort he’s learned to live with. It almost seems childish that he thought he would ever be immune to it, when even under the haven of metal and wires, he could never do away with his humanity, no matter how hard he tried. 

At the end of the day, he cannot escape his own nature more than the world can stop turning. In spite of everything he’s done to it. 

He gets on his knees slowly, as if not to spook his companion, and he carefully arranges his body so it doesn’t disturb the eternal vigil Jayce has been forced into while he finds a way to fit himself between the still raised arms of the statue. 

This, too, is something he has taken from him. He has no doubt that if he had asked, years and years ago, so many that he can’t even recall them with the same clarity he used to, Jayce would have been all too happy to welcome him into his arms. Always eager to please, and always so quick to show his care with a warm hand and steadier arms.

Once Viktor thought that it had to be because Jayce never had a reason to fear that his touch would be unwelcome. The golden boy of Piltover, the Man of Progress. But all of that had come after, hadn’t it? When Viktor met him, he had been nothing more than a man in disgrace, left devoid of his dreams and goals, all alone against the sky and determined to see through his fall from grace until all that was left of him were mere words on paper, the record of a blaze extinguished too fast. 

He hadn’t been nearly as confident back then, and yet he had touched him like he couldn’t help it; as if he couldn’t find another way to express the profundity of his feelings, even when they were just two men playing with forces they couldn’t hope to understand. Like schoolboys putting their hands in the fire to see if it burned. 

It’s only now that he understands that Jayce never touched him like it was second nature because he was confident that he could, or because he didn’t even question if he was allowed to. He did because he needed to feel him there, to know that Viktor was something tangible that he wouldn’t lose, something to stave off the loneliness that had been plaguing through the first couple of decades of his life. 

Rather unfortunate that he could only understand it when it’s too late.

“You must be awfully bored with only me for company,” He murmurs, unable to stop himself from nuzzling slightly on Jayce’s neck. He closes his eyes; if he allows his mind to wander enough, he can imagine the warmth he feels over the fabric of his cloak comes from him rather than his own body. “I hope you don’t resent me too much for giving someone else the chance that was denied to you. But you were never selfish like that, were you? Egoistic, yes, but you wouldn’t resent someone else’s happiness.”

It’s thoughtless, almost insensitive to grab his hand in a poor imitation of the tender gesture that caused ripples beyond their universe, and even more so when he dares to feel disappointed at the feeling of cold metal against his skin. As if he hadn’t been the one that turned warm veins into spidery brass cords. 

But it’s all he’s allowed to have anymore. And perhaps, deep down, it brings Jayce a twisted sort of comfort as well; he cared for him once after all.  

He lets the illusion of his own body heat make him feel like the cold fingers are grasping his own right back, basking on the sensation until he feels a slight tickle under the palm of his hand that can’t be mistaken by a product of his own need for deception. 

Years ago, when the fog the arcane had casted over his mind allowed him enough freedom to realize the extent of what he had done, the graveyard he surrounded himself with rather than the harmony he long sought, he thought that nothing more could shatter him as terribly; for what could break him further than the utter stillness of his perfect, unmoving, dead world? It’s hard to be surprised by anything anymore when you’re the only person alive left to inflict any sort of damage. 

Far be it from the last time Viktor has been wrong, however, as it turns out.

Despite all his years of loneliness, all the power shimmering beneath his veins, all the things he has witnessed across multiple timelines, Viktor freezes the very second he opens his eyes to see Jayce’s hand crumble like ashes in his. The only reason his arm doesn’t drop is because he feels physically incapable of moving from his spot, as if someone had cast a spell upon him. 

He doesn’t turn to look as the support around his back disappears. Magic has its limitations, no matter how deeply intertwined it is with the very fabric of your soul. Although he would like to claim that such knowledge is the reason he stays as still as a statue –if the circumstances were different, perhaps he would find amusing the morbid irony in that–, his incredulity is the only thing that makes him feel as helpless as he was once, watching the Hexcore bring vegetation to life only to take it away in mere seconds. 

Soon enough, he’s surrounded by the ashes of where his partner used to be.

The seconds tick by. 

He sits still.

Maybe he’ll replace Jayce in his eternal vigil. 

Maybe this means he’s finally free from the abhorrent existence imposed upon him. 

Shadows dance across the flowers that now guard nothing but the reminder of what once was there. The sky darkens, and a butterfly flies past, fluttering around him as if checking for signs of life before flying away. 

And Viktor continues sitting amongst the ashes. 

Slowly, ever so slowly, he closes his eyes again. 

His connection to the astral plane is flimsier than it used to be, but finding the threads that tie the world to him is barely a strain. Perhaps a bit harder than it should be, but whether that is shock, lack of habit, or the sheer amount of energy spent to send a person to the correct timeline, it’s hard to tell. These days he’s not much for scientific curiosity either. 

Finding the golden ribbon that will lead him to the one person he’s always aware of has never been a challenge before either, and it still shouldn’t be, if the connection remained. 

As it is, there’s a void where Jayce used to be. 

Except… It's not emptiness that he feels. 

Has he grown so uncaring now that he no longer minds the loss of his only companion? He could hardly be the best judge in that case. But no, that cannot be it either, not when there’s something taking shape inside of his chest, something he dares not name after it being so long since he last experienced it. 

Before his body was torn apart and rebuilt into what it is today, into the person that would make sure to share what he dared think of as a gift and instead was damnation. 

For the first time since the possibility of peace between the cities seemed like an imminence, Viktor feels hope .

Jayce isn’t gone. 

He can still feel him. 

For a moment, it’s as if he’s the puppet here, as he feels his hands push his weight off the floor, uncaring about the ashes sticking to his cloak and skin and leaving its dusty mark behind, and his legs walk to the edge of the structure that he has made his refuge all these years. 

Just recently, he waited here, trusting that Jayce would find his way to him like he always does. Now he finally has a chance to show his own devotion right back. 

He’s no stranger to the devastation he caused, but where he could only perceive a ghost city, now he sees new possibilities. 

Jayce is somewhere in there. 

It’s not a delusion, although he can’t explain to himself how he knows that. 

Perhaps it’s magic, once again dictating the course of his life. Or perhaps, as usual, it’s simply Jayce defying everything he knows to be true. 

Either way, there’s no time to lose. 

He takes in a deep breath, feeling his limbs straining with contained energy that has nothing to do with the arcane. That too is quite fitting, isn’t it? The last time he experienced such emotions before a new venture.

If he had known back then the lengths he would go for him, the lengths they would go for each other, would he have still done the same? 

He knows the answer by heart. 

And so with that in mind, he grabs his staff and starts his slow descent through the tower of the Hexgates. 

Admittedly, climbing down such a high structure as soon as dusk has fallen perhaps hasn’t been one of his brightest ideas.

Even with the aid of magic for the steepest parts, he’s not quite used to travelling such distances anymore without the ease that teleportation has brought to him, and even though he isn’t immune to the effects of the environment, the arcane is gracious enough to allow him the humanity of being blinded at night. 

All in all, it’s an inconvenience, but one he feels sorely grateful for. 

It was not his Jayce that took on such a journey for him, but it still would feel wrong not to repay the favor somehow. 

Or, perhaps, he’s just desperate to feel human again. 

Either way, he finds refuge in the first stable nook he can find. The anomaly attached to every surface of this world isn’t hostile to him, and in normal circumstances maybe he would have allowed himself to be supported by one of the pieces of the structure floating around until daylight came back. At the moment, that doesn’t feel right. 

It’s not only about his determination not to fail Jayce again, no. But it is a start, the start of a change that he can feel beneath his fingertips. 

Soon enough the world will no longer be submerged under his spell, whether he wants that or not. There’s no certainty in it, and there are no benefits to hope anymore, but if it’s all the same to let himself believe that something can undo the damage he waged on the world, then surely it will do no harm regardless of the chances of it coming true. 

But first, he has to come down. 

He sighs, resting his leg carefully on the ground. The pain pulsating through it is hardly as encompassing as it used to be, but it’s there nonetheless. Uncomfortable and inconvenient and real . Pain is the price there is to pay in order to live. 

At least he doesn’t need to eat or sleep, not like Jayce, who’s probably down there trying to find supplies amongst all the chaos left. 

He frowns at the pang he feels on his chest. Surely there has to be something, though he never had the need to go looking for it, with his own inhumanity, so he doesn’t have to regret yet another injustice done to someone who should have never had to suffer through it. 

But this isn’t about making himself better. Looking down the side of the Hexgates, he can see the entire city and even beyond it; the bridge, and the upper levels of the undercity. It would have been beautiful, if it had been allowed to grow as a nation. Now they’re as equal as they’ll ever be, pulled together into the same misery. 

Viktor isn’t a politician, he never had the chance to be, although he knows himself enough to know that he wouldn’t have chosen it if he had. 

He still remembers the time Jayce spent as a Councilor, short as it was, and how he used to grumble to himself about how the man, too, wasn’t a good fit for the job. Not out of lack of belief in him, no; Jayce was always brilliant, quick to adapt and learn. It was always one of his most charming qualities. 

It was his heart that betrayed him, not one fit for the games of wit that politics demanded of him. 

Viktor once thought that was because there wasn’t anything more to it than trickery and falsehood, but wasn’t it his own narrow mind that didn’t let him see any other path than the one he set his eyes on? Wasn’t it his own desire for control that drove him to subject the entire world to an eternity of oblivion? 

He could point to the Hexcore, to the arcane itself, and blame them for his own actions, but there’s no hiding from his own mind. Perhaps he was used as a mere vessel for plans bigger than himself, but he was only fit for that because the willingness to exert such control was already alight within him. Where he criticized the methods of others, he didn’t do any better himself. 

It’s another oversight in his life work, one that cost him everything. 

There’s hardly any peace in the acknowledgement, after so many years of solitude to reflect on every single action of his that led him to where he is now, but there’s hardly anything else that he can do while he waits for his path to be clear again.

Other than focus on the soft flutter of wings around him, that’s it. 

“And what are you doing here?” He murmurs, a small smile pulling at his lips as he raises a hand for the dragonfly to land on. “I doubt my company is worth braving this darkness.”

The insect, of course, does not reply, but it’s been so long since anything he says receives an answer that it doesn’t bother him. 

“Come on now, we must continue on this journey.”

It’s a pleasant surprise when Viktor stands up, dropping his hand so he can support himself on his staff, that the dragonfly doesn’t leave, instead flying in circles around him as if it was truly waiting for him. 

“Are you to be my guide, then?” He inquires, before shaking his head and squinting his eyes at the next piece of debris he can safely get to without having to rely completely on his magic. “I have no complaints there, but you must know that there’s still quite the way to go. We didn’t really imagine we would one day have to climb down from here when we designed it.”

And what a design it is. The numerous ornaments were never necessary for functionality; Viktor is all the more grateful for them now that they provide not only a temporary haven, but places to grab onto to avoid a pitiful free fall to the ground. 

Surrounded by his tiny companion and slowly putting one hesitant foot after the other, grasping at corners and crevices wherever he can find them, he finds some comfort in the knowledge that it was human hands that once took the care to carve the patterns over the stone and the metal, with simple tools rather than complex machinery. 

No greed of his can erase that, and even the natural erosion of time seems to be having a hard time doing so.  

Once, getting to the bottom of the Hexgates would have meant searching for one of the multiple boats waiting to deliver cargo from one of the arriving blimps, or, more likely, one of the boats ready to transport people to the shiny city of Piltover.

Commerce certainly suffered a violent shift in the years since their big discovery occurred, but let it not be said that sailors didn’t know how to adapt. Now those same boats lay dead on the water, no longer the impressive vessels they used to be. Merely more than broken toys waiting by the shore for passengers that will never arrive, or stuck in the middle of a journey that will never find its destination. 

It’s hardly a problem, however, for he doesn’t need one of them to get to the city; the web of the arcane made an effective job of paralyzing even that which seemed untouchable. If they had been told, at the beginning, that they were playing with forces able to stop the course of the oceans themselves, perhaps they would have thought twice about what they were truly doing. 

He snorts softly. It’s not really that they lacked the insight, is it? If they had known, they would have simply convinced themselves that they would know how to harbor that power without turning it into something dangerous. They would have believed that they could use it to heal and build instead of destroy. 

The waters are as solid as concrete, but his steps make no noise, and the flutter of his clothes is enough to mute any wind displaced by the small wings of his peculiar companion. If someone were to hear them with their eyes closed, they would probably believe there’s nothing there other than the wind dancing around discolored threads –still hanging in place of the flags that used to adorn the huge transport ships signaling their place of origin or the logo of the Houses that owned them.

He never bothered to pay attention to those details, and now that the decay has done away with that pride, there’s nothing to keep memory of them. 

Ironic, that the first thing to go should be their legacies, and the last thing to stay would be a titleless Zaunite, at home amongst the rubble. 

None of them got what they wanted, he supposes. 

Still, he doubts that Jayce has taken refuge in any of those ships, the silence only providing a small respite for the turmoil of hope and anticipation improvising a waltz inside his chest. No, Jayce never had any particular fondness for those, his eyes always set on the biggest thing they ever created together, blind to the world around him as his gaze never abandoned the sight in front of him. 

Not that Viktor was that much better. But how could he not be proud too, when the Hexgates were the living proof that they had been right? That Jayce wasn’t a fool in pursuit of an impossible dream and Viktor wasn’t a mad man taking a bet on a man just as doomed as he was? They had created magic together and propelled their invention up in the sky until Piltover itself showed it off as its proudest marvel. 

They had such ambitions, and they chased them until it felt like they could grasp every dream if they reached out far enough with their fingertips. They changed the city –but not in the way they thought they would, never like they would have wanted it–, and so they thought they could change the world too. It used to feel like they could have done anything if they were together. Even while knowing the limitations the Council were always putting on their work, how much of their projects were chained away by doubts and lack of benefits for the elite, they kept daring to dream that they would get to help their city and their people and change the world. 

If only they had been allowed to.

Changing the world doesn’t feel as good as expected when you do it in the last way you would have wished to, and he doesn’t take any joy in finally touching land when it hardly makes a difference anymore. 

The streets aren’t as silent as the sea, filled as they are by what’s left of its citizens; mere shadows of what they used to be, unable to feel the despair of recognition, but equally as unable to act by their own will, to truly live . They may be everywhere, but their presence is no comfort like he used to think, though it’s neither the torment that the realization brought him. Their presence is no more than a fact of life now, equally as true as the cycle of life and death that he disrupted, as natural now as the buzzing of the dragonfly that refuses to leave his side. 

It’s not soothing, but Viktor walks through the city slowly, as lost in his own mind as he was decades ago, when the rustle of the City of Progress worked as his backnoise instead. If he let himself be blissfully ignorant, he could almost imagine himself holding onto his crutch and not his staff, walking to the lab with the determined gait of someone that has places to be and so many ideas and calculations running in his head that they would be dizzying to watch if they were visible, spinning around and changing as he clicked his tongue and approached the grounds of the Academy.

Walking to their laboratory feels like part of his very nature, written in every drop of blood in his vein and every bone in his body. Their beginning and their end, all at once. Even if centuries more passed, if his body started failing him again and his mind started flickering in a twisted imitation of aging, Viktor is sure that he wouldn’t be able to ever forget the path to it. 

Stepping into the building feels more right than following the whispers of the arcane to the sumps of the undercity, even when he probably belonged more down there than he ever did here, following the lure of dreams of grandeur that never should have been within his reach. 

He hasn’t been here in so long. Not since he gave Jayce his last goodbye. Even with the man keeping his eternal vigil over the Hexgates, he hadn’t dared set foot in the place. 

It’s more than just a building, than a room filled with dust and decay, the sickening color of something that’s not alive, but that will ravish and take from the living until there’s nothing more. 

Copper and rust cover their old worktables, the floors and windows. The true colors of their cursed science, the core of their progress. 

The air is as stale as it is inside every other building in the city. 

And yet… 

He lets his fingers touch the dust covering every inch of the furniture in the room until they land on the old chair Jayce used to sit in. The one he insisted on propelling against his worktable until he was balancing himself on the back legs with such a precarious stance that Viktor was always convinced that one day he would get spooked enough to fall back, the chair at his back doing nothing to cushion the fall and the mug splashing liquid all over the twelfth rework of their blueprints. 

Even after all these years, the image still conjures a fondness that threatens to overtake him. Those last weeks spent at the lab caught him sitting in the other’s chair more than he felt proud of, finding some meager comfort on the traces of his missing companion as if that would be enough to convince himself that the choices he was making were as solid as the decisions they used to take together. 

He knows that he was far from the only one to try and find some kind of solace in the association; he’s sure it was hardly a coincidence that after his… awakening, Jayce was waiting on his stool. It didn’t matter to him back then, but remembering is enough for his breath to catch while he takes away his fingers, relishing strangely on the dull layer of dust covering his fingertips now. 

There are still some blueprints sitting there, forgotten for who knows how long –the day he left to follow the call of something he couldn’t yet understand? Or perhaps later, once enough days had passed for Jayce to be unable to find any comfort in their work anymore? The answer doesn’t feel as important now that the time separating them from that era is so great. Facing the desk, the husk that breathed a new energy into his body still lays there, like the evidence of a crime that should have never been committed. 

It looks lifeless in a way Viktor is sure it didn’t before, but still, he approaches slowly. Not in fear, but in curiosity, keeping an eye on the insect fluttering around him, and letting his fingers twitch uselessly at his side once it decides to land on the unnatural veins of the material. 

But nothing happens. 

He hums, letting his own hand linger in the air until his fingers make contact with the surface, closing his eyes in a mirror of the times he took from the world. 

This is no different, after all, but if he had to excuse himself, he would argue that this was always a part of him anyway, at least ever since his body became irreparably intertwined with the weave of magic pulsating from the alluring shine of the Hexcore. Absorbing it feels easy, simple, and Viktor can almost feel the echoes of whispers murmured to him in what feels like another life, the voice of a dear friend used in the service of a plan he wasn’t privy to. 

But things have changed, he’s in control in a way that he wasn’t before, and wrestling with the powers trying to take a hold of him until he only wields the energy beneath his skin is almost as simple as if he had been born with that ability. 

The dragonfly sits on his shoulder and he allows himself a small smile. 

“You would think you were trained for this,” he murmurs softly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else?”

It’s a moot point to try to argue. He can feel it well enough: this is not something for him to decide, but still the sight of the insect moving its head to look at him, comfortable right where it is, is enough to make his smile widen just a little more. 

“You’re just as stubborn as he is, aren’t you?” He shakes his head. “I suppose you wouldn’t know that… but if you’re intent on following through, then you will find out.”

There is no doubt in his words. It’s not really because he’s omniscient now; even after everything he’s done, there are lines that cannot be crossed, there are a lot of things he doesn’t know. There are a lot of things he does know, however, a lot of things he has learned over the years, with nothing more to do in his solitude other than watch over the world, to try and test his limitations again, to develop patience and figure out the wisdom in the wait. 

It’s what one is bound to, when what’s closer to their grasp is time. 

In an ironic twist of fate, he’s come to understand professor Heimerdinger more and more these days. He wouldn’t have been happy, if he was alive to witness what has come to be of the world, that much is clear, but Viktor almost wishes he was, if only because he would be one companion whose thread of life he wouldn’t have to worry about, not like the small animals and insects that have become the only sparkles of activity surrounding him ever since the end of the world. Maybe that’s what the old professor always felt, even if it didn’t show. 

Sometimes he wonders if the yordle realized what was happening before his puppet strings reached him; if for a split second amongst the horror, the relief of no longer having to live lifetimes alone managed to wash over him. 

What he’s feeling right now is, he suspects, perhaps of that same nature. 

Because no, he’s not an omniscient being. He has magic at the palm of his hands, and he has time. Things he wouldn’t have imagined he would have a lifetime ago. But at the end of the day, he’s still only human. And in his human nature, he can’t get rid of his hopes and dreams, even if he trampled all over them and turned them into nothing more than cinders. 

It’s not an inherent understanding of the meaning of life that gives him the certainty that he’ll see Jayce again. 

Viktor is a man of science, even if science couldn’t save him. His confidence in Jayce isn’t related to solid proof, nor to the capacity of knowing everything that’s going on across the different layers of the weave that shapes the universe. 

If he were a more spiritual man, he would say it’s a calling from his soul, something inside of him singing and telling him that his long wait is over. All the days staying in his spot at the top of their tower of idealism and ambitions finally having a purpose. As if he had known all along that his partner would come back to him. 

Perhaps it’s simply faith. 

Viktor is, after all, just a man. And he’s come to find that, despite it all, the hardest thing to shake is hope. 

His next stop isn’t nearly as certain, even if he knows the way by heart just as well. 

It was never his favorite spot –the opposite of that, really–, but he can hardly deny the relevance it nonetheless has for him, for them . 

Stepping into the Council Chambers feels like entering an old and a new memory all at once. 

In fact, he almost expects to find Jayce right here, even if something about the notion doesn’t feel quite right, his closest friend never quite finding his own place in here despite all his attempts to do so. He looked right at home here, of course, one more of the shiny Councilors that decided the fate of others on the daily, but Viktor knew better. He knew Jayce, after all. 

Jayce, who always seemed so confident, bright and happy delivering reports and speeches, but who would rub the leather of his bracelet until the skin was so worn down that it had lost color all around the edges of the rune he had been gifted. Jayce, whose shoulders would hang just a little lower and defeated on days in which they were due for a visit to the Council, whose shoulders were raised in tension as their permanent state in the following weeks after he was appointed. 

Jayce, who once confronted him here and tried to make him realize the greed that had consumed him and burned his core in the same way the gold shimmering in the cracks of the table had blinded everyone else who had sat before in this room. 

Jayce, who isn’t here. 

Viktor’s own shoulders lower down with a sigh, prompting his little companion to fly away once more, toward what’s left of the shine of the cog table that still can be visible under the corruption. It’s not pretty anymore, but it looks more truthful this way, doesn’t it? He hums. Kind of like him, a messy mixture of humanity and magic, of bone and metal, of whatever he used to be and what he is now. 

He may not have belonged here, but one way or the other, he keeps finding his way between these walls. In the past it was either by the grace and naivety of professor Heimerdinger bringing him along as his trusted assistant, ignorant of how out of place Viktor really was in here, or by the grip Hextech had on the most powerful people in the city. 

It was hardly ever about him though. Most of the time a witness to others’ victories and failures, sometimes a companion to the brilliance of others.

But once, just once, he was by his own volition the front and center of the attention in the room. 

It’s not something he feels particularly proud of now, gaining the kind of selfishness that brought him to ignore the desires and dreams of everyone who crossed his way. There’s no peace to be found in the recollection of his mistakes, but it’s grounding to realize; for all he used to criticize the greed of the Council, in the end he didn’t do better with the power he was given. The circumstances were different, but the outcome doesn’t change because of it.

Back then, Jayce was waiting here for him. To talk, and when that didn’t work, to fight. He had to, he was the Man of Progress, but he was also his friend, and as much as Viktor knew the tells behind every mask, the reasons for every tick on his face, Jayce was much the same when it came to him. 

Jayce had to have known that none of this was something Viktor could have wanted if he had been in all of his senses. Both as the Golden Boy of Piltover, and as Viktor’s partner, it was only natural that he would be here to confront him, both a demonstration of his devotion to the city and to Viktor. 

It was easy to forget, in their separation, how much they used to orbit each other. 

But he’s not here now. 

Viktor lets his feet guide him to the center of the room, the spot in which he would stand if he was put on trial. Certainly, that would have happened eventually if he hadn’t done away with the free will of the entire population of Piltover. 

It wouldn’t have absolved him of his mistakes, but he would have allowed it anyway. If Jayce had wanted to fight again now, he would understand.

It’s here in which Viktor first decided that he was intrigued by the one person who would become the center of his universe, here where the chasm between them grew and festered, where the end of life as he knew it started, and where he tried to tip the balance back in his favor. It was also the biggest tell of the differences between their people. 

That difference doesn’t exist anymore. 

The place has been transformed just the same as it transformed people and relationships since its foundation. There’s no difference now between gold and rust, richness and decay, nobility and the dirt beneath their feet. 

Perhaps that’s why Jayce isn’t here. This isn’t the right place for them to meet again. It cannot be, when all it ever did was highlight a rift that doesn’t exist anymore. 

But it’s not the only place to follow that pattern. It’s only scientific, to follow a trail through the vestiges left behind, and isn’t that what they used to be, so many years ago? Scientists?

Foolish as it is, it feels natural to follow the footprints in his heart.

The quietness in the bridge is unusual for a place that used to see so much strife and chaos. Though that’s a matter of perspective, as silence has been its natural state for longer than it has not by now. 

Even as there are only two living things approaching it this very minute, it’s easy to remember the echo of all it used to be, the mechanical players around its length looking at them only in the measure that Viktor allows them to. He could easily make them stop, as there’s hardly a point of letting them move when they’re merely empty shells of who they used to be, but this has become the closest thing there is to a natural order in a ravaged world. 

It’s fitting anyhow; the remains of a hopeless war standing guard over the bridge that used to contain all of its strains. 

This isn’t the place where it all started, not for Viktor nor for Jayce. But amidst all the memories, all the stepping ladders to the break in their bond, there’s still the faint rumble of the fight they had here, the blockade that was called and that forced them to acknowledge how much they could misunderstand each other, despite reading each other better than anybody else could. 

The first step Viktor takes is welcomed by the whine of corroded metal, startling him to almost trip over his own feet as he clutches to his staff, forcefully slamming it down against the ground with a loud noise drowned by the racket. He turns his head just in time to see a puppet hanging over the pillars of the bridge begin to break down like a piece of paper put over the flame of a candle, each of its pieces breaking down with a hideous wail and clattering with an echo across the bridge as a tristful companion to the cloud of dust that arises with it. 

The silent gasp that leaves his lips is completely involuntary. 

This is the second time, in just one day at that, that something he hadn’t predicted has happened, completely without his input too. 

Almost hypnotized by the lure of the novelty, he walks toward the broken metal on the ground, touching it gently with trembling fingers to confirm what he already knows; he has no more control over the soul that used to take residence in this body than he has over the infinity of timelines that form the cosmos of the universe. 

There’s one less light illuminating the mindscape formed by the souls who got taken against their will to form a mocking version of the night sky. One less will under his control. 

Despite the lack of energy responding, he can feel his own power take shape to illustrate a picture. A caring father, trying to build a better world for the baby in his arms with enough strength to take risks again and again, out of passion and belief and gratitude to the one person that gave him a chance for a new life, deep in the shadows of the undercity, in which receiving such help became less and less frequent with the rise of the Chembarons. 

Scar was his name, once, until he was Scar no longer, and he wasn’t alive anymore, merely an echo of life inside a metal puppet that couldn’t ever try to cut the strings attaching him to Viktor. 

But now… 

Now he’s not free, exactly, not when he couldn’t live the life he fought for, attain the dreams he had for the future, but it’s still a form of peace. 

Viktor feels grief for what he took, but not for what he’s involuntarily released now. Scar’s life was never his to take, and now it belongs once again to its owner, if only in death. 

“You knew this would happen?” He asks the dragonfly quietly, but the volume can’t hide the slight tremble in his voice, shaken with emotions that he’s fallen out of shape for. 

It’s a stupid question, he can admit that. No matter how incredibly intelligent the insect might be, seeking from it the answers to his confusion is hardly the smartest he has done, even with several lifetimes of mistakes behind his back. 

Perhaps he should be grateful for that too, a very human flaw he’s never been able to stop in himself: the need for companionship, the feeling of camaraderie he’s quick to develop with creatures he perceives as kindred souls. 

“It’s time for a change, it seems.” And without wanting to dwell too long in the upheaval of emotions in his chest, he rises again, walking slowly through the long distance of the bridge, a feat of engineering that now sees a new exceptionality happening over it, not a conflict bringing pain and desolation, but the end of an unfair torment, a merciful death now, once and for all. 

He can only assume that the decay brought forth from the arcane, falling down into clouds of ash and dust and leaving behind only rust and broken pieces of concrete and metal in its wake, is yet another indicator of a very necessary change, one that wasn’t initiated by him, but that was indispensable for the world to keep turning. 

It’s better this way. He doesn’t want to have the fate of the world in his hands anymore, so if the moment has come in which he can relinquish that power, he welcomes it with open arms. 

Contrary to the majority of Piltover and the rest of the undercity, his commune almost seems the same as the day he left its shelter. 

In a way, there is logic to that too.

When he was a child, the slums already belonged to all that had been forgotten by Piltover, all that the undercity itself wanted to ignore. The very representation of the chasm that separated the golden city from the dirt under the sole of its shoes. 

It hadn’t been that bad, in truth. Or at least it hadn’t seemed so, for someone who was still young enough to be sheltered by the adults around him, to be grateful by the mended clothes upon his back and by the makeshift cane that left his palm bruised and his fingers stiff, but that still allowed him the independence that he craved and needed. 

But what had once been a little community doing whatever they could to help each other survive had over time turned into a display of the worst qualities of the people on both sides of the bridge. Not for any fault of their own; Viktor knows, perhaps in an exaggeratedly more intimate way than most, what desperation can drive a person to. 

After Silco’s rise as the defacto leader of the undercity, the place had devolved into a community that cannibalized itself, not disconnected to the rest of the undercity, but a direct consequence of it, in such an unique way that made one feel as if they had taken a wrong turn along the city and stepped into a deep alleyway to find themselves in a private world, all encompassed in its own little bubble. 

A community that time both touched and left alone. A paradox all by itself.

By the time the whispers of a friendly voice led him down there again, most people would have considered everyone living there to be beyond salvation. They weren’t, of course, not while they were still alive and could still bear hope beyond all the defensive layers they had to build around themselves to survive; he had been convinced of that too back then, barely hesitating before offering them a reprieve from the pain that had been simmering beneath the surface for far too long. 

It had been a mistake. And he had been as blind to it as they had, seeing himself as their savior instead of their executioner. 

Their relief had come at the cost of their autonomy, and while they had lost all capacity to mourn who they used to be, Viktor very well knows that he had given them a curse disguised as a blessing, a crime that cannot be forgiven even if the wool was placed over his own eyes as well. 

They were alive, but they weren’t living. In his eagerness to repair what the world had broken, he hadn’t even noticed that he was no different than them, just lucky enough to be more than an empty puppet carrying someone else’s will. Only because he had been the vessel for a power that had taken an unexplainable liking to him. 

He failed to understand, even through his best efforts to become more than just a loner continuously taking steps over the wrong path. 

Understanding – true understanding– is as painful as it’s blissful. 

It’s almost lucky –though luck has less to do with it than resentment and helplessness– that there are no traces left of his people here, of his commune. Even the decay that has taken over the houses and workshops meshes so seamlessly with the already existing architecture that there is no doubt that it already foreshadowed how things were meant to be. Someone less blind than him would have seen it. 

Jayce saw it. Although not immediately. 

He lets his feet lead him to one of the multiple spherical workshops, one he would know with his eyes closed, for it used to hold a special place in his heart, and the heart of the one that mattered the most to him. His fingers caress the anvil with a reverence that doesn’t atone for the spiderweb of corruption slowly crawling and eating at the stone and metal, able to see the life in it if he closes his eyes and lets his mind take away the pain of all the posterior revelations. 

At first, Jayce had been happy there. In all fairness, there was little he wouldn’t have been happy with back then, desperate to hold onto him after almost losing everything –after losing him for good, even if neither of them were aware of it yet–, devoted enough to follow his footsteps back to the root of all the rot in their city, the direct result of their naive hopes that never quite accounted for a harsh crueler reality than Viktor remembered.

He had helped elevate the community from the rubble and dirt, from the trash and scraps, into something that they both could be proud about, once again working arm in arm to accomplish the impossible. 

It had felt like a dream. Sky’s gentle voice nudging him to use his new abilities in ways he didn’t even know were possible, Jayce keeping him anchored to the little humanity there was left on him. He had been teetering on the edge, dancing with something far more dangerous than death, all disguised behind the vivacious colors in which they had adorned their new home. 

Hadn’t he, once, scoffed at Piltover for hiding all of its ugly edges behind lustrous gold and pristine ivory? 

This is hardly the way in which the undercity wished to make itself Topside’s equal. Vander, Silco, Heimerdinger, Mel… none of them had truly dreamed about seeing their homes gutted and scorched, their entrails spilling out and showing the harrowing truth until there was nothing making them different, not even the people. 

There’s no need for a shiny facade when you’re not trying to deceive anybody anymore. 

Viktor shudders. 

He’s aware by now that the Hexcore had been playing him for a fool, from the very first second his blood made contact with something more ancient than he could have ever predicted, but it doesn’t make any of what transpired afterwards any less sickening. He had been a puppet with torn strings, and yet he had been kept compliant, happy under the illusion that he was bringing light where there was none, up until his peace of mind was no longer a necessary concern. 

It’s hard to adjudicate any real accountability to something that is as inhuman as anything can get, but he can’t help but wonder how things could have been if he hadn’t been such an easy target, if he could have seen the horror of what was happening before it was far too late to fix it. The ruin he was bringing with his own two hands. 

Although… he kneels down, taking a closer look at the leaves popping up between forgotten pieces of steel, the resilience the undercity was always known for showing once more in the most hostile of places, the happy –is that presumptuous, perhaps, to assume that he can understand the feelings of something so far removed from him?– buzzing of his dragonfly making the place look less than a tomb and more like fresh soil, waiting for something new to take seed and flourish. 

The radiant yellow flowers the community worked hard to plant together are dead. But life isn’t absent, and while a couple of butterflies and larvae are hardly that noteworthy, Viktor hasn’t had a choice other than to learn to be patient. 

Along with the small flowerbuds emerging from the ground, he can feel, despite himself, something guarded and stubborn blooming inside of his chest as well. 

This place wasn’t what he was looking for, not when he was a child dreaming with spreading his wings one day to where nobody would be able to bring him down again, not as a blinded tool to a bigger destiny, and not now, as the carrier of the only dream that has taken shape in decades around here, but in what once seemed to be his sanctuary of peace, he has found a different type of resolution. 

Here they tried to build something new, to fix their mistakes and do right by each other without knowing that they were merely sinking further, but what’s left now that there’s barely a world left to fix?

Nothing, one would think. 

Nothing but to see the gentle soar of paper light wings, the nothingness of a single moment of silence; and in that nothingness, there’s everything left, an emptiness that has given them a chance to try and fill it with the utter imperfection that encompasses human nature. 

A reality that feels so close that he can barely wait for it, but it’s in human nature too to have to bear disappointment often, and if that’s the price that he must pay for something real, he’ll gladly take it. 

Each step he takes is accompanied by the quiet whisper of release. 

Gert. A resourceful woman that found purpose amongst her pain through fighting to earn back her autonomy. 

One more soul liberated from the shackles of his naive shelter. 

Margot. Greedy, perhaps, but loyal to her own and willing to do whatever it takes to survive. Not a strange type to encounter around. 

In the end, isn’t that what everyone ends up betraying themselves for? Survival?

He takes another step. 

And another. 

And another. 

And another. 

Babette, and Sevika, and Steb, and Maddie, and Vi, and Caitlyn, countless faces flashing behind his eyes, strangers or people he knew in life, countless souls that got frozen in place, stuck in the palm of his hand, lives that are no longer able to keep ticking alongside the clock, but that have been granted the grace to become something more, once again part of the endless movement of the universe instead of the foundations of the unnatural hunger that calls from the void.

Each step he takes is accompanied by the clatter of metal, the departure of one more soul. The names don’t blur, they can’t; he may not have known most of them personally, recluse as he was, but he can’t never forget a soul that has touched his mind like that. 

And for better or for worse, that now encompasses the entirety of Piltover and Zaun. 

Every single life spinning in his memories like yarn entangling itself in his fingers, as they tense around his staff, his feet never faltering in the same way they did before, but still finding himself in need to stop and take a breath every so often. 

It’s a lot, but not more than he can handle. 

Perhaps that diminishes his human nature a little, but as long as he can continue to feel veneration and respect, loss and grief for all the people that have been connected to him, he doubts that that matters. 

It takes many more steps, many more seconds of quiet reverence to each memory he’s the sole custodian of now, but eventually, he makes it to his goal. 

Deeply familiar, despite its new alienness.

Heimerdinger once called it his steel oasis, though in life it never quite felt like a true respite. From here he could witness how far he rose, from here he can witness how far he fell. 

It always felt like limbo, the most objective place in which he could collect his feelings, and yet one that never allowed him to ignore the stark differences that still plagued the city, the artificial separations that made it so a part of the population would always be fighting for scraps in order to have one meager opportunity to live, while the other organized feasts whenever their whims struck a fancy. 

Here, he felt focused and clear minded, even through the frustration and anger. Here he was given a chance to make something of himself and bring the progress Piltover was always so proud about to the people who needed it the most, here he contemplated his shortcomings, and here was the place in which he could have put an early end to the calamity waiting to take over, if he had been faster, less scared. 

If Jayce hadn’t been there, as steady as the water that now fights to break the sheet of decay that stilled its run so long ago. 

It’s curious. It’s been a long time since Viktor’s been able to see the water running here. 

There are no shifts in the air that give away the recent presence of someone else, but he doesn’t need to feel it to know that this too must be a result of Jayce’s recent metamorphosis. Always bringing change with him, stepping forward in uncharted lands that even courageous people had refused to touch before, again and again. Not fearless, but a bastion of innovation and audacity. 

The moniker he was given once the spotlight of the public’s attention started shining on him didn’t come out of nowhere, after all. 

He’s close now, he can feel it, even if there’s nothing that can confirm that other than a vague feeling of rightness. 

But in order to be able to see him again, to look at him eye to eye and not shrink under the weight of everything he’s done, he has to try and make amends as best as he can. 

Each soul he’s bidding goodbye to is precious, but in the greater scheme of the universe, they’re links from a chain that started long before any of them even came to be as intimately known by him as his own mind. 

This place, always quite aside from the sound of the stream running, a small haven able to hide someone from the harshness of the outside world, is where he had to bid the very first goodbye to a life taken by his hands.

Sky Young. 

She’s not here. Nor is she anywhere else in the city, or even in the dying starry sky that constitutes the other plane he’s been gifted, a disturbingly beautiful graveyard. 

Viktor is not cynical or cruel enough to believe that her early death was a kindness, but he has to admit that there’s a certain relief in knowing the closest thing he had to a friend in the loneliness of his childhood years didn’t have to suffer through what everyone else did. 

Of course, he had thought she was there with him, for a while. Witnessing what he believed was the change that would finally bring with itself the salvation for humanity. But that had been another lie; a trick from the Hexcore or from his own desire to exempt himself from the guilt of her death? Does that make that much of a difference, for two beings intertwined so deeply that there was no longer a clear mark of where one ended and the other began? When it had the very same result either way? 

For better or for worse, her fate remained completely within the limitations of the human life cycle, untimely as it was. Hardly something to feel grateful about, but directing his words to her feels like a glimpse into a life he’s long since resigned from. 

That, at least, is something he might be able to feel grateful about without shame. 

“I apologized to you before,” He mutters, unable to keep himself from smiling through his melancholy when he sees the dragonfly hovering beside his face until he raises a hand and allows it to land there. It doesn’t feel foolish to talk out loud to himself after so many years of not having a choice, but he won’t reject the ease of looking at a living being in the eyes while he confesses the thoughts trapped deep within his chest, “so I do not think you would appreciate another lament in your name. I’m sorry anyway.”

Carefully, he lets his staff rest on the wall, sitting down at the edge of the hideout with a soft hum. What he sees and hears around him is not the quiet murmur of the faraway hustle of the city, nor the dead silence of a place that reflects the state of its citizens. It’s something in between, just for his senses. 

But not for much longer. 

“You didn’t deserve what happened to you. I thought I could make it up to you if I just shared your dreams with whoever would listen… but in doing so, I just corrupted your dream too, didn’t I?”

He’s grown far more familiar with the frozen city than what it used to be, and the decay falling apart into dust makes the old river look more similar to a ghost town than even the aftermath of the dozens of skirmishes that took place there, but Viktor has witnessed far too much of the unknown to feel any apprehension about that. 

Whatever comes will come, and he will not try to change the natural order of existence once again. 

“At least some of the flowers are still here,” He muses with a small quirk of his lip. “Now that you would have liked.”

Clean air for nobody to breathe other than one solitary man staring at an empty world, and one little insect intent in following through. It feels like the start of a terrible morbid joke, but Viktor smiles anyway. 

To stay is an inconsequential choice from such a small being, senseless and irrational, and yet so precious in its very conception. Science seeks discoveries, but Viktor has learned to be okay with not understanding certain things. 

“I suppose this is it. One last time.”

He spares no words of reassurance, no promises to honor her legacy or what it could have been; it’s useless now, and it would be insulting to pretend it isn’t. 

There are no more people he can save, no injustices to bridge, no kids playing in the river that he could build a better world for, no morality he can cling to to explain what has happened or what he should do now. 

There is change, renovation. A new balance from the disparity of the chaos he waged.

It will be enough. There are no alternatives. 

“Goodbye, Sky.”

The illusion of even one ghostly hand posing over his shoulder, a wordless forgiveness for the mistakes he didn’t mean to commit would be a soothing balm that he would gladly bathe in. But it doesn’t happen; instead, the faithful dragonfly that has accompanied him in his solitary journey finally flaps its wings and takes flight into the air of an old world that fancies itself new.

Or maybe it just looks that way in his eyes. All he knows is that it’s hardly a question of if he can live with that, for that’s all he’s been doing this entire time. 

As he finally abandons the peaceful refuge of his old oasis at the edge of the first sunset he’s deemed worthy of watching in what feels like an eternity, there’s no past he lingers to look back to, nor future he aches to sprint to. 

There’s only a goal he will not rush into. 

He has all the time in the world now. 

His final destination seems almost obvious in retrospect. 

It stands to logic that he should find Jayce here, the true beginning of their long, unending journey. 

And yet when he sees the lonely figure standing at the edge of the opening of the building that was never fully repaired, his feet still under him, his fingers tightening over his staff as the weight of decades of solitude finally falls over him. 

Viktor is so exhausted. 

His muscles ache with the same familiar pain that never abandoned him even as the world changed around him, that seemed not to exist or matter anymore once he became the only one capable of change. His lids are heavy with drowsiness he wasn’t aware he was accumulating, and he feels like his legs are about to give out under his body. 

All of that pales, however, under the wave of deep fear that lunges inside of his ribcage when the inertia of his sudden halt makes the silhouette almost seem closer and closer to the edge. 

He barely dares to breathe or look, but his eyes find brown, golden pupils without his input, making him acutely aware that he’s still a human. A human in need of the oxygen he’s currently depriving his lungs of as his limbs grow stiff with an anticipatory shake. 

Those eyes are too far for him to be able to properly parse the emotions he sees on a face he’s never thought he’d have the right to gaze upon again –he could look at a hundred copies of him and still feel the clench of longing and despair deep inside his chest, but he never forgot that it was not this exact same face, the one he’s ached to hold and caress for longer than the wheel of pain has been spinning for–, all he knows is that Jayce doesn’t move. 

It’s enough for the air to escape him in an involuntary, voiceless huff.

He knew, of course, when he started this ordeal, that Jayce would be at the end of it all. He felt it, in the lack of hollowness in his absence, in every whisper of the air around his face, in each little change done to an unchanging world. This is what he hoped to find, and yet…

Through the looking glass of the echoes of different versions of him, of all his mistakes and the unforgiving pillar of destiny, it almost seems foolish to think that something such as this would be possible.

But he’s alive. Alive . Not as an illusion or a mirage, not as a memory or as a temporary reprieve in his solitude that isn’t him in spite of the similar scars and the shared spark of fire in his eyes.

This is Jayce as he remembers, no skin marred just one millimeter out of place in a way that makes him the same and yet so alien to him, an unconceivable difference that he was never able to overcome through a hundred attempts to do so, that he learned not to wish to overcome because even if he had gotten used to an alternative version of the other half of his soul, it never would have been the same. None of those other versions of his partner were the one he knew. 

But Viktor doesn’t know this Jayce either, does he? This man that stands boldly at the edge of the abyss, as if he had been frozen in time the very first night they met. A man that has spent enough time without control of himself to make any person go mad, and yet chooses to stand still in place, looking down not at the distance he’s about to take, but at the distance that’s left for Viktor to finally see him face to face again.

He shakes his head and decides right here and now that maybe this is the same man that he knew after all, simply a version he hasn’t known for the longest time; a man who exuded passion and life in such a way that it was impossible for anybody to ignore his desperate plea to be understood, a man naive enough to believe power would heed his altruistic desires and listen sincerely to his plea, but also a man desperate and empty enough to discard himself if he wasn’t able to fulfill the one goal he had imposed upon himself.

So beautifully human in all his complexities and contradictions. Mesmerizing and familiar even when he no longer has the spark of youth making the wrinkles in his eyes shine with happiness and the sweat glisten over his skin

Viktor’s fingers twitch again, his staff slipping slightly from his grasp and making him stumble enough to force him to take an extra step to stabilize himself. For a moment he fears that all of his strength has left him and he’s about to collapse in the middle of the road under the watchful eyes of the one person he never wanted to show the worst side of him, but the one who no doubt has the right to see it the most.

He doesn’t dare look up just yet, choosing to wait and see the dust settle over the concrete again, leaving him in what must be a bit of a ridiculous pose under the quickly dissipating rays of the sun. 

There’s still no noise, as if the world was waiting for him to keep moving just as much as Jayce is, far above him in the place in which it all began.

It’s that thought what gets him to push forward in spite of the weariness of his body and the increasing rumble of his heart. 

One foot after the other, his fingers feeling half numb as the temperature drops, until he’s pushing against the rusty door of the building and finding his way up stairs that have seen better days, even after the accident that had been the catalyst to everything that would come to be. The Kirammans, for all their pride, had never seen it a necessity to repair one of many apartments that they surely could afford with their spare change, maybe because doing so would be admitting the temporary shame that their protegee had brought them, or maybe out of some misguided sense of pride for the incident that had made his and their renown skyrocket. 

Viktor himself climbed these stairs many times in the past, whenever a conundrum started to feel far too inconquerable. He never found Jayce in any of those little trips, and he never thought to ask if perhaps the place was as much a source of inspiration and resolution for him or if it just brought him back memories, but it hardly seemed to matter when he would come back and they would be able to breeze past their quandaries with the grace of a well oiled machine. 

Now though, he’s here. And each step –slower than he would like, but just the same as it had been all the previous times– brings him closer to him. 

His leg begs him to take a break, but he ignores it. Step by step, he holds onto his staff with gritted teeth and doesn’t let himself stop as he passes the first floor, dark and humid and only navigable by muscle memory alone, his fingers catching the dust on the walls as he guides himself through it to keep climbing up. 

Piltover was never quite fond of making things easy. 

It’s his memory too that allows him to tell when he’s passed the second floor, the light coming from the windows barely enough to not let him stumble as the old wood whines under his foot. For all the power he –unwillingly or not– amassed, he’s hardly immune to the hazards of the environment, at least the ones that threaten to make him trip on the musty structure and take a faceful of dirt. He’s not afraid of the pain that would bring, but he’d rather not face Jayce again looking like he crawled out of the gutter.

Although perhaps that too would be an act of fairness.

Each muscle in his body protests as he keeps climbing each stair, and the thought of stopping and sitting down for even just a moment is tempting, but he finds that he no longer has the patience for it. He’s panting slightly as he passes the third floor, and he thinks fleetingly that he wouldn’t care if he had to crawl his way up, like multiple versions of the person he seeks to find the most have done before, but it doesn’t come to that. 

He barely registers the fourth floor, and he doesn’t hesitate to cross the open doorway of the apartment he knows by heart once he reaches his goal on the next.

Only then he stops his frantic climb, his eyes zeroing in on the one thing he’s wanted to see more than anything else in the world despite the darkness that has taken over the sky in the first natural nightfall that the world has seen in what feels like several lifetimes. 

Jayce .

It’s dark outside, just like it was the night they met. Except there is no longer any light coming from other buildings to illuminate Viktor’s arrival, no moon to kiss the features he longs to bask in, only the solitude of the very first star to populate the night sky, barely enough to make any difference.

But it does. Of course it does. Every small thing does. 

Jayce’s back is to him, but Viktor isn’t naive enough to think that he doesn’t know that he’s here. He’s been waiting , hasn't he? Waiting for him . 

He takes one tentative step forward, unable to bring himself to get any closer than the table in which a final farewell was laid gently a lifetime ago. 

Hard as it is to make out the details, he doesn’t miss the lighter shade of his hair, time taking its toll on him in a way that’s purely unfair to someone who has just become able to live his own life through all this time. His face isn’t visible yet, but even the back of his head is enough to steal the little breath Viktor has been able to bring back to his lungs. 

“Am I interrupting?” The words come out of his mouth almost unbidden, raspy and shaky with the weight of them. It would almost be amusing if the circumstances were different. But Jayce doesn’t laugh, doesn’t even seem to react to the words at all, though the fear of having lost him again to the stagnation of the world breaks apart when he sees the heavy drop of the other’s shoulders. An exhalation freed into the firmament of the sky, a soft human phenomenon that couldn’t possibly cause such a big reaction as to influence the appearance of more distant sparks in the firmament, and yet that’s exactly what it seems to happen. 

Finally, one second, or one year, or one lifetime of time –he wouldn’t be able to tell, if asked, in fact he wouldn’t even care–, Jayce turns around. 

His eyes find Viktor’s just as easily as Viktor found his silhouette earlier and the realization almost knocks him down to his knees right there and then. 

Warm, kind eyes in a weathered face, looking at him as if he was the moon shining its light over them and bathing him in such a gentle hue that lessens the ache of the silver strands of hair upon his head, the rough scars that crawl his way up his arms. His gaze drinks him in with a hunger that Viktor can barely comprehend, from someone that has been unable to do a thing other than to be by his side for each slow year that has happened since the last time they were able to have a conversation face to face –the gaze of someone, however, that hasn’t been able to take on any of the ways time has left its mark on him, stuck in place as he was. 

When his old partner raises a hand towards him, Viktor feels almost stupid for being stumped at the sight of the missing fingers on it, as if out of the both of them he hadn’t had a considerable advantage in seeing every millimetric change Jayce experienced, as if he hadn’t seen his fingers crumble away after fulfilling a request made by himself.

“It’s you,” Jayce breathes out. As if it could have been anyone else. As if he hadn’t wanted it to be anyone else had it been possible.

Viktor, despite all the grief and pain and hurt swirling inside of his head and chest and body, extending to every last one of his fingertips until he feels like he’s more emotion than human, more of a person than he has ever been, smiles. 

“It’s me,” he replies easily, and yet unable to make his feet carry him closer, as if the only realm in which he’s able to have any power in anymore is the realm of speech. 

Naturally, Jayce is the one to bridge the gap and meet him in the middle as he always did, walking toward him as if it was the easiest thing to do. Without doubt or fear or even anger. 

He stops in front of him. 

“I wasn’t sure you would come.”

Viktor could cry. 

“Where else would I go?” He laughs, the sound suspiciously wet even to his own ears. It’s hard to care about that. 

“Anywhere. I don’t know,” Jayce shrugs, looking at some point over Viktor’s head in such a casual manner that it almost feels like it’s just another day more working together, his eyes getting lost in space as he tries to figure out the answer to a difficult problem or to come up with an idea that touches the middle point between feasible and fantastical. “You could be anywhere but here.”

He’s shaking his head before Jayce is done. 

“There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

It’s not guilt that kept him attached to Jayce’s side after he did to him. At least, it’s not that entirely.

The look Jayce gives him couldn’t be more ridiculous. Full of awe, and hope, the anguish almost an afterthought. Viktor stays incredible still as a gentle hand finds its way over his head to grab onto the hood of his cape and bring it down, leaving him bare for Jayce to witness the passage of the years over him.

He barely dares to breathe as the other’s eyes dance over his face and hair all over again, his features softening with thoughts he cannot read, thoughts he doesn’t want to be able to read like he did once, violating and controlling. 

It is true, however, that he never used to be quite so confused by the words coming out of Jayce’s mouth, usually able to predict the end of the other’s train of thought as quickly as lightning, part of what made them so good at working together. 

"You know, I’m not as selfless as you seem to think. But I don’t resent you."

Utterly unable to discern the hidden message behind the words, he blinks. 

"What?" 

Jayce smiles, bright and earnest and so, so beautiful that Viktor’s hands ache again, not with the bite of the cold or the exhaustion of exertion, but with the desire to touch . A touch that has been poisonous and corrosive for the longest time. He clenches his fists, uncaring of the feeling of his nails embedding themselves on the palm of his hands. 

The last thing he wants to do is to ruin Jayce more than he already did once, but it’s hard to hide from the keen eye of a scholar, especially when you have not had a reason to hide your emotions for so long that you have forgotten how to cover yourself up with a mask. 

Jayce easily sees right through him, never taking his eyes away, but taking his staff from him to leave it resting against the nearest wall before grabbing his hands into his and holding them firmly, either ignoring his flinching or not registering under the burning blaze of his singular focus. 

A blessing and a curse. 

"What you said earlier, about the other timeline,” He explains, rubbing the skin on the back of his hands as if Viktor were the one who needed the most comfort here. “I wanted that to be us. More than anything. But I don't resent you for giving them the chance.”

The touch doesn’t help. The warmth of it feels scorching as he struggles to find the lucidity to say something when even such a little gesture has become overwhelming in the wake of its permanent absence. 

“I would have done the same… I guess I did, in a way,” Jayce frees one of his hands to study his own, the missing fingers probably less distressing now that he’s had an entire day on his own to examine them, though it’s still difficult to tell what is going on through his head. “I thought… if he felt any way like I do, then he deserved the chance to try .”

And Viktor knows, oh , he knows exactly what way is that. Asking him to spell it out would be as ridiculous as asking him to turn off the stars in the sky again, to plunge them into darkness like Viktor did. As if Jayce’s hands, the hands of a blacksmith and an inventor, could really do the same his did, take and take and take until there was nothing else left to consume. 

So he doesn’t ask him what he means. Instead, the little sniffle that leaves him in a painful parallel to that of that faraway version of himself leads the way.

“Why?” He asks, unable to help himself, tracing the same footsteps that he could see so clearly before, an overseer standing above the playing board and yet stumbling upon the same pitfalls. 

Jayce’s smile doesn’t turn wider, dimming slightly not with grief or sadness, but with a softness that Viktor is sure he doesn’t deserve. 

He didn’t do any of what he’s dedicated his life to doing after ending the world in hopes of forgiveness. He didn’t give another version of them a chance because he wanted to make up for his mistakes. At his core, he’s selfish. At his core, he’s lonely. At his core, he’s still nothing more than a child chasing a boat and hushing his doubts at the first sign of connection he was able to grasp. 

“I understand,” Jayce says, as if he could read his mind. And he very well might be able to, no need for supernatural powers or any kind of intervention from the divine, just the stubbornness of a man that never learned to let go of the heat of a shooting star before it could burn him, the sincerity of a man that could never be made to be anybody else but who he is, wholeheartedly loving to the point of self-destruction. “And I know you do too. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you see it earlier.”

The choked sound he lets out is barely human, tears gathering in his eyes faster than he can keep up with. 

“That is not -”

“I know,” relentless and unforgiving, Viktor feels his hand being guided to the other’s face. A gentle but firm cue to touch, to feel, to let go of the fear that brought them here in the first place. “But I’m still sorry. Maybe things could have gone another way.”

“Don’t,” Viktor finally finds his voice, fingers trembling over skin he doesn’t want to stain. “None of this was your fault and you are very well aware of that. That isn’t what I meant when-”

“I know that too.”

The huff that leaves him this time has nothing to do with any awed lack of breath or overwhelming emotions. 

“Were you truly so eager to talk all these years that you need to interject every time?” He asks, his voice cracking by the end, and making him unwittingly press on Jayce’s face out of pure frustration. It’s hardly funny, and certainly not something he feels remotely ready to try and joke about, but it leaves his mouth unbidden, his filters lost to a time in which it mattered to even have them. 

He doesn’t get a smile in response either, just an unadulterated look so intense that makes it hard not to look away, but he manages. The least Viktor owes him is not to look away. 

“You have no idea,” Jayce whispers, edging closer to him with misty eyes that don’t falter in their steadiness. Maybe it’s a result of all the time he spent unable to do anything more than stand still and make himself crazy with the possibilities, but he seems unwilling to let even the smallest things go. “I keep telling myself that I would find a way to talk to you, to apologize for everything. To make you apologize.”

There’s a thread of anger in his words that Viktor cannot help but feel relieved by, in spite of the implicit danger it brings to their current closeness. His fingers finally relax and his other hand joins the first to frame Jayce’s face, keeping his touch delicate but grounding in the threshold of the storm of emotions crossing that expression. 

He doesn’t want to be forgiven by what he did. He’s not selfless enough to claim that he can bear to be hated, but he couldn’t take it if Jayce brushed off all the pain he’s brought to him and to the world out of some twisted sense of…

Duty, yes. But dancing around it won’t make the other, more frightening reality behind Jayce’s actions less true. On that account, Jayce is absolutely right. Viktor knows why he’s willing to stand here, waiting for him while basking in the ruins of what once was his home, feeling the anger and the sorrow and yet having enough room within him to host something more unbelievable and impossible. 

“Your mistakes are hardly in the scale of mine,” He argues still. 

At that, Jayce actually has the nerve to lift the corner of his mouth, the stretch of skin highlighting the harsh lines of age and making him look far rougher than Viktor ever thought he’d look once he grew old, whenever he allowed himself to imagine his partner’s life after him, filled with hard work, but a comfortable life. 

Because it was always meant to be like that. Jayce’s life after Viktor. 

And yet… they’re both here right now. Both having lived after each other, and still never able to truly leave each other behind, somehow breaking the barriers of time and space again and again until they can stand face to face again. 

He saw it happen. He just didn’t think it could happen to them as well. 

“Viktor.”

He shudders. 

It’s been so long, too long since he’s heard his name said at all, let alone with such an amount of intense longing and grief and guilt, a world of emotions that he feels barely able to name. 

He has held the world in the palm of his hand, quite literally, he has felt like the secrets that veil the foundations of the universe are at his fingertips, and he has felt the anguish of a thousand caged souls surge through every single vein of his body. 

Somehow, after all of that, after an entire journey chasing the one thing the universe has deemed fair to grant him, this is the one that brings him to his knees. 

“What?”

Jayce shakes his head, his own knees hitting the floor of his dusty apartment as if descending along with Viktor was more of an unconscious impulse than a completely illogical action. As inevitable as the setting of the sun and the distant burning of the stars.

“You must be stupid if you think that makes any difference for me. After everything we’ve seen? You can’t believe that. You don’t believe that.”

“I-” And he’s right, because it’s Jayce and if there’s someone who has ever known him better than he has known himself in his worst moments, it’s him. 

On his side by the very beginning, by his side to the end of all things. 

They both have seen enough strife for several lifetimes over, haven’t they?

“It’s not as easy as that,” He says anyway. Jayce speaks the truth, but that hardly erases all the complexities that come with it. 

But he knows, deep down, that they have never been able to abandon each other, no matter how deep the hurt runs, how vile the offenses are; if his glimpses through different versions of their lives say anything, that’s simply as true as the fact that they’re both alive and breathing, an immutable truth of the universe that cannot seem to change no matter how much Viktor tries to twist the gears of fate. 

It’s a certainty, not a hope, that they won’t be able to change that even now. 

Viktor is not nearly abnegatory enough to even want to. 

“It isn’t,” Jayce agrees, still looking at him like the world could end around them all over again and he wouldn’t even blink to keep the debris away from his eyes, content to keep him in his sight no matter what further harm that could bring him. 

Viktor licks his lips. There’s a quiet rumble murmuring underneath his veins, a foreboding echo of power that still shows its ugly hungry head despite how tamed it has become. But no matter how much his very nature has been changed, he’s never felt more mundanely the same as he has now. 

“But you’re not leaving,” He doesn’t ask, for he already knows the answer. 

Jayce responds anyway. 

“I’m not leaving,” he confirms softly. “All I want is already here.”

It feels natural then, to collapse back into each other, a mirror of another sacrifice of devotion, another life suffered and willingly given. Viktor’s hands stay glued to Jayce’s face as if he had been born to hold him there, caressing rough skin in a futile attempt to clean the tears wetting the skin as Jayce’s hands fly to his hair and his back, never settling for one place but touching as if he were trying to guess the turn of time through how many gray hairs he can find in his head, through the tired curve of his back. 

He wants to hesitate, but once he starts, he cannot keep himself from touching everything his hands find access too, from the gray hairs upon the Jayce’s head –the hair dull and lifeless, the strands messy and dirty, but human and real– to every inch of skin that his clothes don’t cover, even ones that are covered, once he gets emboldened by the tearful kisses he can feel all over his face and hair, each rune permanently inked over his fingers. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

Apologies muttered over frantic lips, the feverish euphoria is enough for oblivion to come after an amount of time neither of them cared to keep track of anymore, never ones to let themselves be tied by the turn of the clock. 

Slumber accompanies them with them none the wiser. 

Viktor didn’t even know he could still sleep. 

Turns out the sensation of turning human anew wasn’t merely in his head. 

Pain is the first time that he’s aware of the second his consciousness catches up to him, slow and sluggish as he would have expected for the first sleep he’s had in years, if he had known this would happen. Once he realizes that’s what he’s feeling, he almost laughs. He isn’t even sure if he feels glad to have an old, cruel friend back, but he cannot deny that it’s better than the coldness of detachment, for it marks him as something able to be touched by life itself once again. 

The second thing he becomes aware of is that the harsh floor underneath his body cushioned by what he managed to turn into his everlasting cloak –washed out by time and still lovingly kept as a memento of times he thought he couldn’t back– is still as unforgiving now as it was in the past, making him let out a soundless groan at the strain he feels in his muscles. 

It’s going to be a pain to get up. 

The third thing he realizes is the warmth that seems to find its way through the tip of every single one of his fingers, not much help for the pain of sleeping on the flat floor, but still comfortable enough to fall asleep on it, to feel no hurry at all to move from the content space he has found in what is easy to determine as Jayce’s arms, once he becomes cognizant enough of his surroundings to remember. 

He cannot help it. 

He chuckles. A slow sound rumbling from the depths of his ribcage until it evolves into a full, breathy laugh, the shake of his body no doubt responsible for the low murmurs now coming from his side. 

From Jayce.

Jayce, who opens his eyes in an incredibly accurate impression of the aftermath of the nap they had after the worst all-nighter they ever pulled, confusion dancing in his irises at the sight in front of him until they start shining again in understanding, light coming to them with such beauty that it makes the sunlight reflecting over the city again seem lackluster in comparison. 

He still looks tired, old, scarred. But he’s smiling, his wrinkles once again folded together in the most simple expression of happiness, and it’s hard to feel like anything will be insurmountable with that sight in front of his eyes. 

It’s a new day. And this time, maybe that means something.