Chapter Text
Jayce probably deserves this. Not that he’d be the first to admit it, the Talis household traditionally being a place where you didn’t own your mistakes so much as compress them into a teeny, tiny little box at the bottom of a deep, dark pit, but he’d been the one to organise another raid on the chemtech facilities that seemed to spring up in Zaun like mushrooms. And, well, if you looked beyond that, there was the whole unignorable fact of him, a person everyone seemed to like in theory but who had largely been a disappointment in the flesh. Or rather, in the brain.
So. Yes, he probably deserves this, Jayce reflects, as the poorly-maintained tanks of Shimmer go up in a great gout of pink and purple flame and he’s thrown through a wall, a window, and a couple of load-bearing struts (not necessarily in that order).
Jayce lies there for a long moment, nausea mingling with pain, with the rich, sour edge of blood in his mouth, willing himself to get up, when he tastes the acrid tang of an unfamiliar gas in the air.
“Whuh?” He’s been winded too thoroughly for anything smarter. A figure peers at him through the most. White suit, long, dark hair. Shining metal where their mouth should be.
His last thought, before the world clouds over completely into darkness, is that at least it wasn’t Viktor.
At least he won’t get that satisfaction.
—
Consciousness comes in fleeting bursts, bubbles of light breaking through a void that smells like oil and metal and old, dusty fabric. It’s comforting, somehow, that smell. Jayce turns his face towards it, his body swimming in black unconsciousness.
“Renata.” Each vowel is rigid, metallic. Not him. Not here. Jayce tries to move, to grab at the Mercury Hammer, finds he cannot.
“Viktor.” The name forces itself between his teeth in a trickle of bile and blood. “-hel-dying-”
There’s a roaring in Jayce’s ears, cut by a short, metallictch and a slow exhalation of compressed air as Viktor squats down next to him.
“You’re experiencing a bad reaction to untested chemtech.” Something hard snakes around Jayce’s waist and he experiences a confusing but pleasant moment of excitement before it becomes obvious that this is, in fact, the hex claw levering itself to flip him on his back. “Non-fatal.”
“Oh. Good.”
“An alternate outcome can be arranged.”
The mask swims into focus. Is it him, or does that arrangement of orange lenses and blank face grille look… worried, somehow?
“I miss your moles.” Jayce slurs, reaching to touch the metal. Viktor twitches his head away, seems to come to a decision.
“They’re still there.” Pistons hiss and wires snap tight as he pulls Jayce onto his shoulders. “Most of them.”
“Not for me.” This is spoken largely into Viktor’s cloak, a half asleep mumble he can deny, later.
“No, luchik.” Sunbeam. Pity and condescension and sadness all at once. When Jayce dreams of Viktor, it’s that voice he hears. “Not any more.”
—
Jayce has often let himself wonder about Viktor’s current living situation in much the same way as one might pick at a scab. There have been reports, usually from chemmed-up Zaunites, about nightmare laboratories in dank sewers, rusty metal arteries stinking of mold and shimmer. Jayce himself always pictured somewhere clinical and cold- every surface slick and glassy as ice, the flesh of his former friend discarded in great, bloody gobbets as he remade himself in the same sleek and unforgiving image.
This is… not that. There is a slight dusty smell under the tang of chemicals, like old carpet, and the walls underneath their protective sheets are papered with faded flowers. Pale tidemarks on the walls show where pictures once hung. Newspaper plastered over the large bay window gives the light a yellow quality that waxes sickly or warm, depending on which phase of manic Jayce’s brain is currently cycling through.
The real surprise is the cat. White, fluffy, and with an apparent mechanical eye and cyborg leg, which Jayce honestly thinks he’s hallucinating until it settles down on his chest with typical feline smugness, sticks the aforementioned cyber-limb straight up in the air, and begins to thoroughly clean its own butthole.
“Pspspsps.” Jayce tries, weakly. The cat- which he can see now is male- looks at him with withering contempt.
“Okay, fine. Go fuck yourself.”
“Professor!”
“It’s Councilor, actually.” Jayce mumbles, as Viktor pushes through the sheet on the doorway and picks up the cat, who yowls in brief, impotent rage.
“How did you get in here? This is not what we agreed.”
“You… brought me here?” Jayce starts, but the question is actually for the cat, it appears, who is not forthcoming with any explanation either of them can hear. Instead, it squirms out of Viktor’s grip and kickflips off his chest, leaving a light dusting of white fur on his cloak. Jayce is treated to the sight of the Machine Herald scrubbing uselessly at his clothes with his palms.
“Ah, блин. Wretched animal.”
It’s deeply, profoundly weird to hear Viktor speak so casually. These days, their conversations are more along the lines of operatic monologues on the ethics of life and death, man versus machine, or, rarely, who looked at the burning wreckage of their relationship and blinked first.
“Didn’t take you for a pet guy.”
Something whirrs into gear inside Viktor’s armour as he straightens sharply, tilts his head like a great mechanical bird. His hands fall to his sides, fidget, briefly, then clasp behind his back.
“You’re awake, then.”
Jayce, belatedly remembering that this is the Machine Herald and, you know, his mortal enemy or whatever- tries to jerk away but is brought up short by some kind of restraints, cuffs that crackle blue when he moves and have runes carved into them in a spiky, spidery hand.
It occurs to him that he could die, right here, and nobody would even be surprised. They may even find it fitting.
“You won’t get away with this, Viktor.” It sounds weak, choked a little by the prone position. He struggles again, the cuffs letting off more sparks as Viktor picks up a syringe and screws in a new needle. “People will notice I’m gone.”
Cait might, for example. Eventually. Mel definitely would. She’d look good in mourning- the gold behind the veil would be like clouds over the sun.
“Stay still.” Viktor’s voice echoes dispassionately through the mask, apparently thoroughly occupied with swabbing a spot in Jayce’s arm in preparation for- injecting him? No,the syringe is empty- taking his blood? The smell of antiseptic stings Jayce’s nostrils like smelling salts, and he fixes his eyes on the ceiling as the Machine Herald inserts the needle with a slight scratching sensation and no further warning at all.
“Your veins are terrible.”
Jayce is mildly offended by this, though the feeling is also edged, hazily, with shame, as if his elusive veins are but one more mark on a list Viktor has been compiling since the day they met, a few entries down from wildly insecure, just above buys all his shirts two sizes too small.
“Your bedside manner is worse.” He tries to sit up, only to be forced back down by his restraints and the hex claw’s insistent pressure on his chest.
“People on this bed are usually, eh...”
“Comatose?”
“Dead.” Viktor turns, the mask a thin slice of silver. Is he joking? Jayce laughs, a loopy little half-snicker, just in case. “To begin with.”
Oh, that’s how he taught himself anatomy. Gross. Jayce watches as Viktor primly extracts the needle and flicks the glass with a sound like pins on expensive china.
“Don’t tell me you’re making zombies now.”
“No, that’s a different, ah, what did you call us?” Viktor tilts his head back, as if sloshing the memory to the forefront of his brain. From this angle, Jayce can glimpse a flash of pale jawline between the armour’s gorget piece and the chin of the mask.
“Seditious bio-terrorists?” Jayce suggests, his mouth dry. “I was proud of that one. I knew it’d piss you off.”
Viktor tuts again, the way he used to when studying some particularly tricky blueprint and Jayce was distracting him.
“No, it was something like- Undercity malefactors?”
“That sounds like a band, V.” Jayce watches as Viktor gives up on the thought and turns to do something he can’t see with the vial of blood. Maybe drink it. He doesn’t follow Viktor’s hobbies any more. “Something you listen to late at night building your weird little creatures.”
“I don’t follow be-bop.”
“Yeah. Well. Suppose it’s hard to make time in your busy kidnapping schedule.”
“Please, you were drooling on yourself and talking nonsense. Kidnapping you took barely half an hour, and most of that was because you insist upon being roughly the size and weight of a fully stocked icebox.”
“And now you’re going to keep me?”Jayce waggles his eyebrows. “Do I get a bed next to the cat? I warn you, I think I’m allergic.”
Viktor ignores this, his back hunching, mismatched shoulders flexing to direct the hexclaw into handing him a pencil. He takes a few notes, then lodges the thing under one of his mask straps for easy retrieval later. It’s a gesture at once alien and familiar in a way that makes Jayce’s heart ache.
“Your typically half-baked attempt to tackle the symptoms of Zaun’s ills rather than the cause led you into an ambush, and you inhaled a large quantity of an unknown toxic gas.” He holds up one hand, palm flat, forestalling the next question. “You are not going to die, Talis. And if you try that joke about playing the piano, I will use my bio-terrorist credentials to turn your internal plumbing into a closed system.”
The problem with Viktor’s banter, Jayce reflects, is that he often goes a long way for very limited results. He has no idea what the other man is talking about.
“So I’m here because…?”
“I’ve been trying to get a sample of Renata’s newest toxin for months.” Viktor half turns to look at him again. “You, with your rushing in like a bull in the proverbial china shop, have obliged me in a way she would not.”
“Who?”
Viktor exhales with a sound like a frustrated industrial fan. “Renata Glasc. The chem baron?”
Jayce shakes his head. The chair squeaks as Viktor swivels to fully face him again, hands leaning on his knees.
“She specifically targeted you, Jayce. Lured you to a trap she set in one of her old manufacturing stations-“ the modulator blurs the edges of his voice as Jayce continues to shake his head. “You don’t even know who she is? Renata Glasc? Glasc industries?”
“Sorry.” He tries to shrug, but the restraints don’t really allow it. “Don’t they sell, like, nose hair trimmers and personal enhancements for weird rich people?”
Viktor reaches a hand under his mask and rubs his face. Jayce gets a glimpse, again, of pallid skin spiderwebbed with black veins, hollow cheeks, a mouth tantalizingly familiar to the one he remembers.
“Maybe she wanted to introduce herself to me?” Jayce asks, helpfully.
The mask is back in place, locked in, and the look it gives him is flat and blank as a winter plain, and about as welcoming.
“I cannot imagine why.”