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Perhaps, in another world, they would have talked first. Debated the finer points of what, exactly, Jayce was doing as he staggered into the central core of the- community, Viktor called it, delicately locking the syllables in place to guard against that other word, the one that spat from the lips of others who only saw white clothes and blank eyes and the sense of peace he had brought.
As if peace, here in the Undercity, was so rare as to be unnatural.
He sees it on Jayce’s face. His own eyes, or what remains of them, these imperfect bags of jelly that dim a little more every time he slips from the arcane- they haven’t failed yet. Sky hovers at his peripheral vision, anxious. Viktor shakes his head at her, very slightly.
Sky has been… an unexpected redemption. Luminous as she never was in life, a partner who could live in the arcane as fully as he. Viktor still doesn’t trust her fully. He is still enough of a child of Zaun to recognise that the gifts of the Grey Lady are seldom purely good- and besides, he doesn’t have the best luck with partners.
Case in point.
Maybe, here, at the pivot, Jayce could have laid his hammer down. Leaned on it, his leg shaking in its brace in a way that sends a sympathetic spasm through Viktor’s own limbs. Perhaps he would have looked up, the exhaustion on his face stark under the anaemic glow of what Viktor is becoming.
In another life, his voice is a tired whisper when he asks, “What have you done to yourself, V?”
“I believe you were the catalyst.” Viktor does not mean it to hurt him. But the words would make Jayce draw in his breath sharply all the same. “For an evolution, I mean. As for what I am… I do not know. I have theories. I had hoped we would discuss them.”
“I never meant for this to happen to you. Viktor- I only wanted you to live. The rest of this?” Jayce gestures at the walls around him, at the people waiting patiently beyond the door for healing, at Sky, though he doesn’t know it. Viktor doesn’t move from his position high up in the dome.
“The rest of this is necessary. You walked through the Fissures to get here, Jayce. You saw the state of the Undercity. You said we were going to bring Hextech to the people.” Another, smaller gesture, and the cog twirls through Viktor’s fingers. “This, I have done.”
Jayce would shake his head. “This isn’t Hextech.”
“Not… as you knew it.”
“I saw the Fissures, yes.” Another, exhausted sigh: the truth to prove the assertion. “But I also saw the people out there. V, they’re out of their minds. This is- this isn’t you, surely? You never wanted to start a..” Even now, he cannot say it. He hates the word as much as you do.
“This is a community.”
“This is a cult.” And here, the pivot again. Inevitable, perhaps, as the downswing of a pendulum, or the trajectory of a bomb. “I can’t let you do this.”
Viktor would turn his head away, Sky mirroring the action. A susurrus of power would build beneath his skin, and Jayce, well- his hand would tighten on the hammer.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Perhaps, in another life, it would be different.
In this one, it is the same.