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Being terminally lonely hadn’t really bothered Viktor for most of his life. It did, at first, when he was but a child and the others would climb the Promenade’s pipework with reckless abandon while he was stuck on the ground, tethered by the cane and medical brace that kept him upright. After enough tearful nights, he learned to find solace in the steady music of machinery, as the rhythmic turning of gears would never forsake him.
The intricate clockwork creatures he crafted did not need to feel emotions nor did they need them; they were functional without them and just as beautiful. And it was his attitude for so long to operate like his machines: To push through what the weight of the world threw at him sans inquiry. Well, there was intellectual inquiry, of course, that was a given, but that of self-preservation he was bereft of. When he was a teenager, when the Fredersen Chem-forge would ask him to work on their equipment, he would always ask ‘How long?’ or if they needed new automatons ‘How many?’
He was not yet an adult but working more hours than his own parents because it was the only thing that continued filling the void there since he was a boy. They all said he’d never amount to much and would never be of use because of his impediment, but it couldn’t be further than the truth: Productivity was his strength. He lived and breathed the word, both in what his mind could put out and what those fruits of his labor could improve for the masses through removing human error from the equation. When he’s busy improving lives without time for respite, there’s no time for progress’s herald to think about what life would be like if he stopped. Besides, nobody could think any less of him when he was an engine running at full force with each step he took and breath inhaled. He had so much to give and society was more than willing to take it, further fueling the fires to burn him out and helping ever-expand the void left by a case of terminal loneliness.
When he wasn’t helping the Undercity, then he was at the University, which was a lot more deadening in retrospect. He would have not been able to succeed as he had without the funding and resources that Piltover provides, but it’s hard to believe the choice was worth it when he can see the benefits his research reaped for the masses it was intended for neither up close nor from afar. And the people at the Academy hated him, aside from a genuine few or the handful of those who only pretended to care for him to get to Jayce or Heimerdinger. Everyone saw him as that Undercity transplant who shouldn’t be marring Piltover’s hallowed Council chambers, so all he could do was work harder, faster, and smarter than all of his counterparts to even catch up, let alone get a leg up.
And burnout from University schooling and research had only numbed him further to it all; never having the time to process he was running on fumes meant he could ignore it even more. But even automatons eventually need another person to lubricate their gears lest they rust in place and the system shuts down entirely. Sky had tried, but the life inside her was caught in between his gears’ teeth and crushed before his very eyes.
He hadn’t realized how much the lab lacked her presence until she was gone from it. Ever since Jayce had been made Councilor, it was far more quiet as few of those who remained genuinely cared about the lab and its innovations; things being always about product and never about process is taxing as it is disheartening. Innovation and ingenuity in the face of adversity is what makes them human, but it’s remiss when politicking and profit are at hand. But Sky? She was one of the few people in his life who made it their purpose to ensure Viktor remembered he was a man and not a machine, yet she was killed in the crossfire of his obsessive machinations.
As her ashes decorate Viktor’s steel oasis, he shakes his head at the through that for the first time, the air is probably filled with particulates of hope and genuine goodness as opposed to the normal pollutants whose effects have spelt early death for Zaunites like him for years, and in the face of the Council’s leanings, would for years to come. Hextech could help, that’s what the runes and rogue doodles amidst the notes in the journal at least believe. Etched into the parchment is that same dream he and Jayce once shared instilled in the hearts of their assistant like it had been in the notebook of his partner’s found all those years ago. But, they failed. Well, he has failed everything but the monster of his own creation.
The Hex Core is alive, yet it wants him to be dead in all senses but physical. He thought it originally a symbiote, but having seen what his obsession has reaped, its true colors are parasitic. It doesn’t need a partner, it instead needs a vessel to automate, which his body is seemingly apt for and his mind has been all but accepting of. He is practically machine made flesh at this point, but Sky’s loss is a reminder of the humanity he is so dangerously close to losing if he hasn’t forsaken it entirely by now. And he hates it, wanting to be rid of the weakness that impedes him but knows it is something he will never be able to. Guilt and regret are the prices of living, so the only way to absolve himself of it is to end it all. When he gets up and falters beneath his weight and almost off of the ledge, he almost doesn’t try to steady himself with this crutch. And when he does fully get to his feet, the abyss that has taken the form of an Undercity ravine beckons him closer.
But the siren’s song is quelled when a familiar voice asks if it’s interrupting. It tries to cheer him with fond memories of simpler times, so that he remembers moments when he was not a metaphorical machine, but a man and tries to find such grounding. He could almost laugh at the situation, if it weren’t so morbid. Their friendship began at the same crossroads, but their positions are reversed and both still just as lost as when they began. But now they aren’t young scientists in pursuit of a dream, they are engineers implicated in what was soon to become mass slaughter without express consent. Saving lives had been his dream, now he’s taking them personally and impersonally and that evidence stains Zaun with blood and pollutes Piltover’s air.
He would do anything for Jayce, at least he had believed that to be true for some time as what little human emotion wells in his chest extends beyond platitudes for his partner. But with Jayce’s position and negligence, more and more lines were drawn in the sand and runes carved into Viktor’s flesh. Each drop of unwashable blood on their hands contributes to the deep wound that even the Hex Core’s restorative cannot heal. Selfishly staying alive for the man he loves is not worth the havoc that his continued existence will reap should the monster they created still live and breathe with him. Viktor is glad at least they can be here together in his special place, mourning their dream together, nay their lives together. He knows he will likely have neither eulogy nor legacy, but this will have to suffice and is more than he deserves to begin with.
With the knowledge of the knife’s edge that their dueling nations stand on the precipice ready to fall, it’s hard to not plummet alongside them. But he cannot fall to his death, that much is clear. Assisted suicide is the answer; the Hex Core’s destruction as his euthanasia. At least then he could do some good in preventing further bloodshed at the hands of the same mania that gnaws at his nerves worse than the Zaun’s toxins ever have. In stabilizing Jayce, and Hextech by proxy, the partners had destabilized Runeterra, Viktor can only pray that the inverse with himself as the subject will produce the desired result or the life he forfeits will truly be in vain.