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It’s important to remember that no one ever gets used to pain. Such a thing is impossible. Pain is the body’s way of letting its host know that something is wrong, that something has gone awry, isn’t as it should be.
A broken bone is a good example of this.
A fall, a collision, a too-severe twisting of a limb, all of these things can result in the sudden, agonizing snap in the body’s framework, a pop sounding from its sturdiest parts. The body responds in kind, sends frightened, frantic messages to its host, informing it of the anomaly, in the hopes that they’ll be able to react, to correct the mistake that has occurred, to resolve it.
These messages are received as pain.
Sometimes, pain occurs despite no injury to the bones, or the softer, more delicate flesh they are housed within.
Such a case is the story of a miner who, after an accident, acquired a metal rod that pierced straight through his boot. He had screamed and writhed for hours as his companions carried him back above ground, certain that he’d lose the offending limb, that his days of walking without assistance were now, abruptly and unfairly, taken from him. He’d been placed on the ground in the tunnel leading to the mine’s entrance. His coworkers had removed the rod, removed his boot, and found… nothing. No injury whatsoever, aside from a small scrap in between his first two toes.
The pain he’d been feeling slowly abated as he looked upon his unwounded appendage. It had faded from a white-hot, searing agony to a warm, dull buzz, then silence. After a quick drink and an even quicker break, he was able to return to work.
This form of pain wasn’t the result of nerves, physically sensing something out of the ordinary and telling his brain as much. This happened due to his body assuming that something had to be wrong, if only from the nature of the situation. This presumption of injury had led his body to fire off those distressed messages, despite not being able to accurately tell, in that moment, whether or not anything truly was amiss. Working with the data it had, it supposed something was wrong, and instructed his host to remedy it.
There’s a phrase someone told Viktor once, regarding pain. He can’t remember who, but the words are stuck with him, as clear and precise as they’d been the day he first heard them.
Pain means alarm, not harm.
He thinks that simple, little phrase was supposed to be something of comfort.
You are hurting, the words implied, but that doesn’t mean you are hurt.
He remembers feeling irritated at the time, utterly dismissed. Now, however, they provide him with the mental fortification necessary to ignore his body’s more redundant signals.
Again, it is important to remember that no one ever gets used to pain. Such a thing is impossible. That being said, Viktor has become familiar enough with pain that he is able to tolerate it to a remarkable degree.
He does not think such a thing is a point of pride, does not do so to privately boast on his own toughness; Viktor would describe himself as a thousand different things before he ever neared the word tough. He also does not think such a thing in order to receive pity. Pity, he has found, is far more difficult to stomach than the chronic, profound ache for which he would receive said pity.
It is simply that, what would register for Viktor as a low-grade muscle spasm, a twinge in his leg and nothing more, for most others would be considered the first toll of the funeral bell, a warning of a premature and certain death. This is not because Viktor is used to pain. Such a thing is impossible. It is because it, like persistent, gnawing hunger, fades to background noise, after an allotted time has passed.
The brain truly is a marvelous machine. It is able to register and process so many different signals at once, from each part of the body, inside and out. The loudest of those signals, as previously discussed, is pain. Though just as a nauseating stench soon vanishes past the point of remarkability, so too does pain. At that point, a much louder signal is required to once again get the brain’s attention, a more poignant pain needed for the brain to again acknowledge that there is an issue that needs dealing with. Such is the way of things.
In recent years, such signals have been far less frequent for Viktor. This is mostly due to the fact that his position at the Academy now allows him to spend many of his hours seated, if he so chooses. Where before, he’d busied himself with following Heimerdinger this way and that has he carried on about his duties, silently but unrelentingly grateful for his mentor’s much shorter legs, now, as soon as he begins to feel unsteady or uncomfortable, there’s a chair only a few feet away from him. Even if it’s a bit embarrassing to have to sit down in the midst of him and Jayce discussing an equation on their larger blackboard, at least it’s an option at his disposal.
It’s a definite improvement to before, when the end of the work day often found him picking his way to his apartment with a much more exaggerated limp, his knee, hip, spine, shoulder, wrist protesting each movement, his skeleton feeling for all the world as though it didn’t fit together quite right, mismatched pieces to an unfinished set, opposing magnets trying to push each other apart. A headache caused by gritted teeth was always soon to follow, and nausea always accompanied that. In those days, it was easy to feel as though he were breaking down, leaving parts of himself behind in Piltover’s lavish streets.
Alarm, not harm, he’d chant to himself as a mantra. Over and over, it rattled around in his skull, until the words stopped sounding like words at all, though their meaning settled into his aching bones, not so much soothing them as turning their persistent screams into a dull, background roar.
This isn’t to say Viktor doesn’t still experience pain. Movement is hardly the only thing to set it off.
Spending too much time at his desk, with no movement at all, will see his spine protesting – quietly, at first, but soon building and building to such a fierce, demanding screech that it drives all other thought from his head, restricts his breathing, his expanding ribcage pressing violently against his offended vertebrae. But, if ignored, it retracts itself from his skull, slink its way back to his spine, where it simmers petulantly, a vague, numbing heat that pulses and glows, but otherwise keeps itself contained.
Another trigger is the cold, and a particularly powerful one at that.
Muscles bound tight together in an effort to retain warmth result in already stiff, aching muscles becoming stiffer, angrier. On mornings when Piltover’s windows are covered in frost, when his breath billows in front of him as he hobbles towards the Academy, he often arrives feeling as though he’s slowly being turned to stone, his limbs nearly impossible to coordinate, a tingling, gnawing rigidity consuming them.
Today is one such day.
Viktor hunches over his desk, hardly able to breathe around the crescent shape his spine has adopted, though he knows that, if he tried, he wouldn’t be able to correct it beyond a few degrees. His vertebrae are rebelling against him, locking themselves into a curve that goes far beyond uncomfortable. His fingers, which should be trembling from the chill the Academy’s walls seem unable to completely block out, instead hardly move at all as he drags chalk over slate, tries to puzzle out calculations with a mind already overloaded, too busy trying to block out the nearly overwhelming signals of distress his body is sending him.
He pauses for a moment, considering the equation before him. He’d laxed his grip on the numbers but for a second, and already, they’ve slipped free of his mind entirely. He tries to locate them amongst the scribblings on the slate, but instead finds himself glowering at the sloppiness of his handwriting. He’s able to glean enough from it now that it’s not an issue, but he knows he’ll have difficulty trying to comprehend its meaning later on. He also knows that there’s nothing he can do about it.
The sound of the door opening hardly registers in his mind; he’s far too busy frowning at his work. The footsteps, however, he does hear.
He doesn’t need to look up to know it’s Jayce.
On mornings when the two of them actually go home the evening before and don’t simply try to work through the night, inevitably crashing on the lab’s otherwise pointless sofa, Viktor arrives nearly an hour before his partner does. This isn’t because Jayce lacks the passion for their project that Viktor has. It’s because he lacks the time constraints Viktor faces.
Only a few months ago, the coughing started. Viktor had only seen a doctor at the insistence of both Jayce and Heimerdinger, and what he’d been told was exactly what he’d feared, why he hadn’t gone on his own volition.
He, like most other Zaunites, had been steadily and incrementally poisoned by the noxious air dwelling within the Undercity. However, where most would suffer a persistent cough that wouldn’t advance beyond annoyance, Viktor, with his already weak immune system, is slowly being consumed by an infection that has lain dormant in his system ever since his first breath. It’s only now that symptoms are showing, though the condition has always been there.
Aside from the cough increasing the frequency and severity of the ache in his muscles, his whole body responding to it as the sign of death that it is, it also intensifies the fervor with which Viktor throws himself into his and Jayce’s studies.
With the appropriate application, Hextech could cure any ailment plaguing anyone. The hope that they’ll discover and create said application in time to prolong Viktor's life has slowly fizzled out over the years, going from a carefully hidden, yet powerfully burning fire to little more than a matchstick, weak and sputtering and quickly burning out. However, the hope that he’ll be alive to see their objective accomplished, that someone else will be able to benefit from all their hard work, remains as blindingly, unashamedly bright as ever. He is content knowing that this is something he shares with Jayce.
After all, in every other regard, they couldn’t be more different.
Jayce is saying something to him. Viktor can’t be bothered to comprehend his words, but his tone is light enough that he assumes it to be little more than a greeting.
Viktor hums in response, doesn’t want to distract himself with anything more.
“Viktor?” Jayce calls, demanding more of his attention, and Viktor really isn’t in the mood to give it to him.
“What?” he snaps, irritation flowering in his chest. He drops his chalk onto the desk with more aggression than is probably necessary, and turns around in his chair to face Jayce, despite the creaking in his back as he does so, if only so Jayce can see in his expression how much he doesn’t want to be looking up from his calculations.
“What’s wrong?” It isn’t said unkindly, but it makes Viktor bristle all the same.
“Nothing, I am busy,” he says, pointing out the obvious, but Jayce doesn’t act as though anything’s been clarified.
“Are you sure? You just-”
“Yes, I am fine, Jayce,” Viktor interrupts. He’s already wasted enough time with this little dialogue, and it’s starting to get really uncomfortable sitting like this. “Can I get back to work?”
Jayce doesn’t say anything. He stares at him with a look of surprise stretched over his face, one that twists something in Viktor’s gut. Viktor doesn’t have time for any of it.
He elects to take Jayce’s silent as a yes, and turns back around with a huff. He picks up his chalk, lowers it to the slate. He breathes. He sighs.
“Look, Jayce-”
“No, it’s… okay. You don’t have to say anything.” Viktor hates the delicate nature of Jayce’s words, like they’ll rip if they’re handled too harshly. Or, more likely, that they aren’t the thing delicate – that Viktor is.
It nearly makes him snap his chalk in two, but he forces himself to stay calm, to not make more of an ass out of himself.
“It’s just- with the cold, I-” Viktor tries to explain.
“No, Viktor, I… I get it.” Viktor dares to brave a glance over at his partner, and finds himself being offered a small, fragile smile. “I don’t like the cold, either.”
Viktor… supposes he was wrong, before, that he and Jayce have little in common outside their work. He’d forgotten that, while they have very different reasons to do so, both he and Jayce have a strong distaste for the winter. It isn’t something they’ve ever talked about in detail; Jayce has so far been reluctant to discuss the specifics of where his hatred for frost comes from, and Viktor is much the same, in that regard. There’s no sense dwelling on the whys. They just need to understand that they each need a little more grace when the weather turns bleak.
“I know,” Viktor says, an implied apology. Jayce’s smile strengthens, just slightly, and Viktor knows it’s been accepted.
“Are you okay, though?” he presses, brow furrowing slightly. “You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong, but if I can help-”
“I appreciate it, but… no. There is nothing you can do.” Viktor hates the way Jayce frowns at that, hates the look of pity in his eyes. It feels like hot embers sizzling his skin. He does his best not to flinch at it.
But there’s nothing to be done for it.
Viktor turns around, intent to busy himself with figuring out what in the world he’d been writing only a moment prior, when he’s again distracted by Jayce.
Jayce doesn’t say anything as he stands, as he crosses the room. Viktor watches with open curiosity as Jayce kneels in front of the ornate fireplace on the far wall, the one they’ve rarely ever used, the one that Viktor isn’t entirely sure is actually functional, or just something meant to make the oversized room feel more full, more intricately decorated.
The last time he remembers them using it, it had been after a particularly rough set-back. He doesn’t quite remember who first lit the fire using pages of their notes as kindling, but he knows they’d both been nearly manic as they burned everything pertaining to that failed experiment. Their fervid, somewhat delirious shouting and cheering had gotten them a lengthy lecture from Heimerdinger on professionalism, how the manner with which they conducted themselves reflected back on him. But the moments of frenetic glee that had consumed them beforehand had more than been worth it.
“What are you doing?” Viktor calls, intrigue getting the better of him. Jayce doesn’t so much as look over his shoulder as he responds.
“Warming this place up.” Finally, he turns his head, flashing Viktor a grin so dazzling that he’s momentarily dazed by it. “Can’t get much done in such a hostile work environment, can we?”
The chill, or Viktor’s temper? Viktor knows Jayce is alluding to both, and rolls his eyes accordingly.
But Jayce has already turned back around, and as such, fails to see it. He opens a carefully hidden compartment in the wall, one that Viktor is surprised to find still has wood left inside of it. A cloud of dust also spills forth, but Jayce pays it no mind; he makes quick work of starting the fire, and as the flames begin to dance around the kindling bundled underneath the logs, Viktor feels something begin to melt in his chest, despite the heat not yet having reached him.
“There.” Jayce stands, dusting his hands before placing them proudly on his hips. He observes his handiwork for a moment before nodding once, in satisfaction. Turning back around, he catches Viktor’s eye as he heads back towards his desk. “That should do us both some good.”
Viktor’s mouth is dry. Even if it weren’t, no words are forthcoming. So, he simply grunts in vague agreement and turns back to his work, though he can’t even begin to try to get his eyes to focus on the misshapen numbers.
If asked, Viktor wouldn’t be able to say precisely what had gotten him so flustered. Jayce had started a fire – because he was cold, that’s it. It’s for both their benefit, as he said.
Still, in a way he couldn’t articulate, it meant… a lot, for Jayce to have done that. He had seen a problem, something he could fix, and had decided to do so, despite Viktor’s obviously false assertions that he was fine. Additionally, he had done so without applying that dreaded pity Viktor hated so much, made sure he didn’t feel like the lone cause of Jayce’s efforts, like he was burdening his partner by even subtly confirming his suspicions that Viktor was in pain.
The fire won’t fully take away Viktor’s pain – nothing will. It doesn’t matter how much heat he applies, how many artificial supports he wears to take the strain off his own failing frame, how many medications he takes despite their side effects. He’ll always hurt, in one way or another; he’s long since made his peace with it.
But Jayce hasn’t.
He’s shown over and over again that he’s not just willing, but insistent on doing whatever he can to ease Viktor’s burden, wherever he can.
Viktor lets that thought swim freely through his mind for the rest of the day, carefully observing it from afar, slightly too hesitant to get too close to it, to fully understand what it means in its entirety. Though he has his suspicions.