Chapter Text
The arcane gives them exactly two minutes and thirty seven seconds of white distilled silence. It’s blinding. Jayce’s hand splayed across the back of Viktor’s neck grounds him, holding him tethered to consciousness as they both teeter on the edge of a lifeline tightrope.
“Do you regret this?” Viktor asks, squeezing Jayce’s arm, gently.
His heart twists at the trembling he feels under his palm. Jayce has always been scared of dying. But his voice is confident and full of unconcealed affection when he responds.
“Never. I’d do it all again if it meant I was with you in the end.”
“Why?”
Viktor has had the question on the tip of his tongue whenever Jayce said stuff like that. He asks it now for the sake of his own curiosity.
“You saw me when the world looked away. If you didn’t exist, neither would I,” Jayce replies, simply, almost as if he was giving the answer to an equation.
Viktor raises his head and meets Jayce’s ever fond gaze. His entire frame is silhouetted against the whiteness of their waiting room to death. Iridescent, familiar…beautiful. The tightrope stretches as Viktor moves closer. He could call this feeling that takes control now a sort of bewildered wonder but deep down, he knows what it really is.
Jayce, however, takes his movement as just that. Bewilderment. A sign to go on.
”Vik, I followed you through countless timelines with the only intent to bring you…to bring you home,” he says, stumbling over his words when Viktor’s hand presses to his chest.
”I know,” Viktor says, softly.
”I’d do it again. For you.”
”I know.”
The tightrope stretches longer, impossibly thin. The air hums with tension. Viktor’s voice is just a murmur, Jayce’s barely a whisper. Two butterflies dancing side by side.
”I’ll chase your soul through every lifetime until I find you. I promise.”
Jayce’s words are just as searing in Viktor’s mind as his lips are when Viktor presses palms against his cheeks and meets him halfway. The butterflies collide in a shower of color—
—and the tightrope finally snaps.
They fall off into oblivion.
~
Viktor lives through four long torturous lifetimes before he starts to recognize the souls of that very first life he can still remember every detail of. The others have faded into occasional dejavu but that first plane of existence is scrawled, possibly branded into his mind.
I’ll chase your soul…
His name is Andrey Szchovic. He’s a transfer student at Harvard on full scholarship. He’s smarter than half the people there—even his own professors call him ‘above their own knowledge’—and he keeps to himself most days. It’s a rainy Tuesday when he spots the girl in the library. She’s walking past the front desk with an air of confidence similar to that of an ancient council member striding into a lab to inquire about magic. Viktor as Andrey stares as she strolls past. She doesn’t look back, doesn’t face him with those eyes reflecting back the councilwoman’s soul.
Andrey leaves the library later in the day, graduates with a degree in engineering later the next year, and spends the rest of his life in a small lab, working on god-knows-what, to the horror of his family who never get the chance to see him before he’s killed in a train accident at the age of fifty three.
The newspapers call it an accident. The arcane, ever a haunting ghost of time past, calls it a prologue.
…through every lifetime…
He’s a well known socialite, royalty above all and having grown up with the cliche silver spoon in his mouth. The people who admire him call him Prince Cali. The people who hate him call him a Jinx. Strange how the name comes out so familiar; it scratches his mind like a half-remembered joke. He can’t put his finger on why it until he sees the soul of a fellow Zaunite flickering in the stony glance of a young woman, strolling down the commonplace streets with her lover, another soul familiar in the sense that she was only a face appearing now and then and not someone he’d known as well as someone else had.
This revelation alone prompts Viktor as Cali to chase them down and demand to know what he hardly knows himself. But both women are disturbed and unrecognizable except for their eyes holding those traces of familiarity.
“We don’t consort with the royalty,” they say, coldly.
When he insists, they tell him he must be mistaken and Viktor as Cali is forced to apologize for bothering them as they leave, muttering to each other.
Prince Caliope Ramirez Gustav II, second in line to the royal throne, is middle aged when his brother dies, giving him the reign of the kingdom. He refuses to take a queen and is known for going on sprees with willing young men, all of which strangely resemble each other with ruddy beards and long dark hair. His final words on his death bed are those of a regretful man, pleading for relief.
…until I find you.
Myron aka The Dirtbag is a legend. He used to live on the streets with his pack of wild child boys, running rampant at night through the hillside towns. His old gang members whisper tales of evenings after a good solid drink where he would ramble on about ‘souls’ and ‘love’ and ‘stupid fucking Hextech’. They all find it a little weird that the top gang leader in the area had a strange obsession with the ancient cities at the front of history books and the rumor that mage magic brought about by mad scientists was their downfall.
One of his followers has told a story in many bars of an incident where The Dirtbag had broken into a house with the intent to steal and had come back to the hideout, dead silent and white faced. This was accurate considering the fact that Viktor as Myron had come across a small old man in stripped pajamas on the upstairs. He’d lit a candle and the ancient light of an eccentric headmaster bursting in on a couple of young men floating midair had sparkled brightly in the old man’s eyes. Viktor as Myron had fled the house promptly.
Myron sheds the name ‘The Dirtbag’ shortly afterwards, gets a proper job, and eventually makes peace with the old man, becoming a sort of assistant to his work as a researcher. When the old man dies, Myron grieves more for him than his small family seems to. He continues the old man’s research, makes some breakthroughs, and passes away, relatively unknown, of old age.
I promise.
“Join me in welcoming the great, the extraordinary, the man of the hour, Kanat Khodok!”
The loudspeaker bellows, roaring out the name as the crowd erupts. The shadow of a legend born among animals floats across the arena. He’s tall, lanky, and resembles a time when he was just so, the only exception being a leg that doesn’t crumple under weight. Grinning more than he ever had in that time, he climbs the ladder, bathing in the adoring screams of the people below, and moves to stand on the platform that rises high in the air. Here is where he’s most comfortable.
The tightrope stretches in front of him, swinging gently. It’s only a log to him, one he’d cross as a child, arms outstretched. One foot in front of the other, he begins his journey. The spotlight burns white-hot against his skin. The crowd’s cheers fade into a distant hum—here, suspended between heaven and earth, there is only the rope, his breath, and the whisper of the wind teasing his balance.
He’s done this a thousand times. The act is muscle memory: one foot gliding forward, arms outstretched like wings, the other foot following with the precision of a pendulum. The rope sways, unsteady, but he doesn’t. He is stillness.
Then—
A flicker of movement in the front row. His ear tunes out all but the wild cheering of one individual. A man, broad-shouldered, bright eyed, cheering with a rhythm too deliberate to be casual. Kanat’s gaze snags on him without meaning to.
Their eyes meet.
Recognition is a lightning strike to the young performer. The arcane sings.
Jayce.
Not Jayce’s face—this man’s features are sharper, his clothes too modern, hair too light and too curly —but his soul is there, blazing behind his eyes. That same stubborn warmth, that unshakable focus, the same look of oh, be careful. It’s dangerous, Viktor. The way he leans forward, as if he alone understands the danger of it all.
Viktor as Kanat’s breath catches. The rope trembles beneath him.
I’ll chase your soul through every lifetime until I find you.
A memory that isn’t his own and yet…it is, floods him: white silence, a hand on his neck, a promise seared into his mind with a kiss that could have been more. The tightrope isn’t just a rope anymore—it’s the edge of a lifeline, the last thread between one world and the next. The man’s gaze falters as does Kanat’s balance. The crowd gasps as he staggers. His arms wheel, instinct fighting gravity, but his body isn’t his own anymore. He’s Viktor, he’s Kanat, he’s every version of himself that’s ever loved Jayce’s soul in the periphery of his memory.
Below, the man’s smile fades. He stands, knocking over his chair, shouting something lost in the roar of the audience. On his face is horror and a mixture of confusion and bewilderment because of it. He doesn’t understand it all but Viktor does. Oh, he understands it all too well. He laughs, giddy with the cruel irony of it all. Of course Jayce would be here, now, watching him fall.
He spreads his arms wide—not to balance, but to embrace the inevitable.
The rope snaps away beneath him.
For a heartbeat, he’s weightless. The man’s face is still a portrait of horror, hand outstretched as if he could catch him across time itself. Viktor wants to tell him it’s okay. That they’ll meet again. This is just another step in the act.
The ground rises to meet him, and—
The man screams. The crowd roars. Somewhere, in another life, a blacksmith’s hammer strikes burning metal like the dull thud of a heartbeat.
I promise.