Chapter Text
“Thank you for your efforts,” he says, at length. “You have a talented mind, but this- this may be beyond the both of us.” He turns away from the mess of a chalkboard in front of him, defeated, though he is reluctant to set down the chalk.
He turns it over in his fingers idly, thoughts still racing despite his souring mood.
“Why don’t you just ask the other guy?” Jinx doesn’t look up from the messy table beneath her, where she is poking at an incredibly volatile bundle of electrical wiring with her chipped nails.
Viktor turns away from the chalkboard to look at her, a hiss of steam erupting from somewhere on his body. If his faceplate could squint, it would. His tone is slow, the way an exhausted parent might explain some simple concept for the umpteenth time. “There is no one else down here who knows anything of Hextech. This is why I sought you out- were you even listening?”
“I was listening,” Jinx’s voice hangs, exasperated, on the last syllable. She throws herself dramatically back against the chair, the momentum causing the wheels on its base to spin in circles. “You aren’t listening to me.”
Teenagers, Viktor laments in his head. Actually, he doesn’t know how old Jinx is, when he thinks about it- but she certainly acts like one. “Then maybe you should say something that makes any sense at all.”
An abandoned chunk of metal comes flying at his head, though he doesn’t even flinch as the Hexclaw snatches it out of the air.
“I am making sense! The other guy! The counselor, the guy with his face on all the stupid blimps!” She uses her steel-plated heels to stop her spinning abruptly, the screech of metal on stone cutting through the air. Pushing up from the chair, she slinks over to the chalkboard in that too-fluid way she carries herself. She strikes a pose: one fist on a hip, the other hand reaching out towards the sky in a pompously articulated, incredibly proud manner.
“The Defender of Tomorrow,” Her grating voice dips into something low, exaggerated, then snaps back to her normal candor, “the guy who made all this junk in the first place.” She smacks the chalkboard pointedly with her outstretched hand, then, after a moment of curious consideration, drags her hand down the surface and smudges every equation in her path into nothing.
Normally that alone would have sent Viktor into a mood, but in the face of what Jinx is suggesting, he doesn’t even notice. He snaps the piece of chalk in his hand.
“I no longer associate with Jayce Talis.” The name comes out of him like bile, like hot oil spat onto the dirty floor.
“Well it seems like you’re going to be associating with an early grave if you don’t, so.” She singsongs, swinging the end of one braid around in a circle idly.
“I will figure it out myself.”
“Uh, you clearly can’t-”
“I will. Or I will die.” A pause. “I would rather die.”
Jinx rolls her eyes and splays herself lazily on one of the other workbenches. “You don’t want to die, or else you wouldn’t have tracked me halfway through Zaun to look at your weird orb.”
She is not wrong. He lets out a long-suffering sigh, the filtering of it through his mask making it sound more like the whir of a particularly overworked fan. “You are surprisingly hard to find when you want to be,” he concedes. She sticks her tongue out, then flashes a too-sharp grin.
“Well, you found me! And I say- go talk to blimp guy.” She grabs a few stray gears and bolts off the table and goes back to wandering the lab.
Internally, somewhere perhaps not as deep as he’d like to admit, the part of Viktor’s sense of humor that still remains does find it amusing to refer to Jayce Talis, Defender of Tomorrow, by as simple a moniker as ‘blimp guy.’
“I cannot.”
“Scared?” Her eyebrow raises in challenge, her irises shining magenta as she fixes her gaze on him. He makes an indignant noise, the center of the Hexclaw momentarily glowing with energy before he calms himself.
“I am not scared. He is my enemy. He would not help even if I wanted him to, even if I begged. And I will not. I gave up asking him to understand me long ago.” He stalks across the room, pressing his fingers to his temples as if there wasn’t a sheet of metal sculpted to cover the skin below. A near imperceptible flash of his humanity, of his old mannerisms, held at bay by layers of screws and bolts and cauterized metal.
“It would be a waste of time. Clearly, time I cannot afford to spend.”
Jinx thinks about that for a long moment, rolling the edge of the gear across the table with a rhythmic clink-clink-clink. When she regards him again, her eyes seem less pink, less bright. She speaks quieter now, less of her unsettling melodic tones.
“You know, if I was dying, I would still go to Vi.”
Viktor pauses, then scoffs. “That is different. She is your sister.”
“We’re enemies.”
“It is not the same.”
The creak of Viktor’s elbow as he moves his hand away from his face. The clattering and zapping of whatever Jinx is toying with at the table. Nothing else hangs in the air for a long moment.
“Stop touching that.”
“Touching what?”
“Whatever it is that you are touching!”
Jinx throws her hands up in feigned innocence. Viktor tsks, stalking around the lab as his thoughts race. He has not felt the threat of death in years, not since he still lived in Piltover. It’s different, this time, and yet the same. He doesn’t hack up crimson anymore, but his air purification system shorts at random and it makes his chest seize. No more migraines, but the sharp pain of electric energy somewhere behind his eyes, flashing searing purple behind his eyelids until he wakes up on the floor hours later. He overheats when he shouldn’t, his augmented joints spark and lock up at inopportune times. He is not yet fully integrated- if the machines fail, the rest of him won’t be able to keep up.
There has to be some small error he’s overlooking, some crystal not seated correctly in its chassis, some equation not tailored to his new additions. A factor he is missing.
He had hoped that Jinx’s more. . . creative mind might see something he did not. That in her chaos might come some unexpected answer. And she posed good questions, tested certain theories with wild enthusiasm and complete lack of self-preservation that he- secretly- will admit reminded him briefly of a younger version of himself. Well, he was never that loud.
A bolt clinks with surprising force against the metal plating of his shoulder. That he was too preoccupied to catch it worries him.
“What.”
“How is it different?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You said it was different from me and Vi- how?”
“You are sisters. I said this already. Please keep up.”
Another bolt, but this time he catches it and pegs it back at her. She cackles- not the reaction he wanted.
“Yeah, but we still try to kill each other, like, all the time. Enemies- mortal enemies. Just like you and Blimp Guy.” The dramatic flair she infuses her words with does not escape Viktor, but it also does not amuse him.
“Vi will never kill you.” He says, his voice empty of doubt despite knowing next to nothing about the woman in question. “She will always love you too much to do it, in the end.”
Jinx is silent for a long moment, long enough that Viktor thinks he has finally succeeded in putting this particular train of thought neatly into its grave. He moves back to the chalkboard, starts scribbling new equations with a fresh bit of chalk. He is wrong- about the equation and the conversation.
“Do you really think that?” For the first moment since he’d found her, Jinx sounds real. Human. Childlike, even. It unsettles him to be faced with such emotion.
“Yes. And it is precisely the thing I am working to destroy.”
“What is?”
“Attachment.” He scratches out an incorrect equation with force enough to echo. “Emotion. Love.”
Jinx chuckles, but it sounds a little empty. “You sound like someone else I knew.” A beat. “He’s dead now.” She adds, helpfully, before knocking at her temple with a knuckle. Viktor doesn’t ask why.
“Perhaps I will meet him soon, then.” He sneers, frustrated more with his own apparent incompetence than her words.
“Only because you’re so stubborn.” She rolls her eyes, blows her fallen bangs out of her eyes with an indignant huff.
“What, exactly, would you have me do? Walk across the bridge to Piltover, looking like this, and ask for an audience? I would be killed on sight, and meet the same fate as my failure down here- just faster and in a place I detest. I would prefer to die in my lab, if I have to die at all.”
Jinx, for all her strangeness, is apt at noticing the little flaws in the way people speak. She pushes up from the table and swings around the corner of it, humming. She drags her hand along the metal surface, rustling papers, wrapping her fingers around some small object, unnoticed. He didn’t complain about Jayce Talis that time, only the logistics of getting to him.
“So. . . make him come down here. Duh.”
It’s so absurd that Viktor doesn’t even turn from the chalkboard to look at her, which is unfortunate. He lets out an empty, bitter noise that might sound like a laugh if not for the voice modulation his helmet provides.
“How? With a nice little note? Dear Jayce Talis, I know we almost killed each other two weeks ago, but wouldn’t you know, I am dying again-?”
Jinx wanders up to him as if moving to look at the chalkboard, peering over his shoulder. She is intentionally, distractingly close. “Hey, that’s a pretty good start!” In a movement too unnaturally quick to predict, one hand comes from behind her back to pat Viktor square between the shoulder blades. A sarcastic congratulations, a tease. It almost reminds him of-
“But! I think I’ll write the rest.”
Before he can turn and ask what she means, his entire body seizes, arcs of blue light jumping from plate to metal plate. It hurts, the pain is worse than any of the horribly failed experiments he’s put himself through, but more importantly, he cannot move. He cannot move and before he knows it he’s on his back on the ground. The room spins, the colors shifting wildly as his visor shorts- Zaun grey, glowing orange, lightning blue- back and forth over and over and over again.
It feels like looking into the Hexgate all those years ago, except this time Jinx is standing over him, barely more than a blur, her eyes two pink pinpoints in the center of his vision.
“Bye-bye!” She says cheerily.
He should have never let her into his lab, how could he be so brainless.
Then, darkness.