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I like to visit when there’s no one around. Not even Professor Heimerdinger. Too far away in time, too far removed from our former present for memories to hurt. But I dig up the remains of our lives to figure out how we turned out to be. In every timeline.
When I ask the librarian about you, sometimes they point to a whole section of your work and their legacy. Other times, they shake their heads about an author they’ve never heard of before. When I ask the archivist about you, they either show me the newspapers about a young promise who fell to his death; or your handwritten notebooks greet me, with their pages signed; with the blueprints, and the sketches, and the prototypes we created. Sometimes there are some inventions I’ve never heard of in any other timeline.
If you lived long enough to publish your work, you always made sure my name was beside yours, even when I wasn’t there to see it. As if we were married. In some timelines, we actually were. If you didn’t live to see your work published, and it was done posthumously, my existence usually was erased – a memory faded away about a taciturn assistant, a nameless Zaunite. Never a partner, never equal.
If we didn’t fall into disgrace and corruption but shone in progress and innovation never seen before in Piltover’s history, they'd raise a statue in Academy Square about it. Sometimes it’s just you, sometimes it’s both of us. A bit egotistical, don’t you think? Anyway, they always forget my cane, our leg braces, and your scars.
After all these times, I know what keywords to look for. Either Hextech or runes, either mages or scientists. Sometimes both, sometimes neither. Experiments, discoveries, explosions, accidents. I always look for your name first. I wonder for those versions of you who show up here, in our dreamless field, and for those who never get to. Occasionally I look for my name afterwards. If something ever shows up, it’s always tied to you. Who would care about a Zaunite otherwise?
Sometimes we never met, which is jarring to think about. On those occasions, our lives are always way too short. Maybe I succumbed to my illness in my teenaged years, and you succumbed to your suicidal ideation that night. Maybe I died when my experiment exploded, and you had a fatal accident in the forge. I promise I will always try to save you from that blizzard, but sometimes I fail that too, for which I am sorry.
Sometimes I never made it to Piltover, but your exile leads you to Zaun. There we meet once and again – under Singed’s protection, or under Silco’s. The possibilities multiply tenfold. We usually invent Hextech or discover something different out of shimmer. Nonetheless, we make progress for the people of Zaun. We help to build a different community; a new world has a chance to shine anew. Sometimes all of this saves my life without consuming me. Other times it doesn’t, and you must stop me from destroying it all.
That’s when you show up here, climbing all the way up this flowery hill from the depths of my home. Like I did one day when I was too young. I know I could help, but no-one ever really helped me, and I need you to understand what that does to a person. You always do, as brilliant and resilient as I know you to be. It’s always you, but never actually you. It’s your voice, but never from your lips. I am sorry I doomed you. I think you doomed me too.
Because when you leave after promising me to kill me, you don’t always succeed. The first time around, I was already dead on your arms. But when you meet the version of me in that timeline once again, sometimes you can’t blast a hole in my chest. You reach for me and fall into my arms. As I doom you, you doom me, and both of us doom the world. I still try, in the next timeline over, to get you into the right path.
Sometimes I must interfere in the lives of the people around us to get us to the point where the world isn’t destroyed like this one. Sometimes it all failed anyway. In some of these timelines, I am a monster; in others a dark mage; or something more machine than man. And you, either the lone hero who tried to stop it all or my most loyal companion in destroying the world.
As the years pass by, I like to prod the timelines where I never had to save you from a blizzard. I never visit our lifetimes, but I dig up the remains. Even when I didn’t show you magic, even when I didn’t gift you a rune, we still crossed paths. And magic still gets into our hands, or maybe it doesn’t exist at all. There are lives where I modified with machinery what I thought were the failures of my body, of my humanity. There are lives where you were forever the golden boy of Piltover, its defender. There are lives where we met in the Academy and then our partnership falls apart; sometimes, we get back together, other times we don’t. There are lives where it all happens at once.
There are timelines where the future isn’t doomed at all, and we can live a normal, quiet life together, along the seasons till our hair turns gray, and our minds get fuzzy. In these lives, we might be famous inventors, or revered professors. Our fields of knowledge are all over the branches of science. Quantum physics, bioengineering, robotics, geology, chemistry. You name it. Or sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with science or magic at all.
There are timelines where a boy shatters time before it all gets doomed, and we can begin again in a new world. Sometimes we rebuild our lives in Piltover or begin anew in Zaun. Other times, we go so far away where no-one has ever heard of our languages. We invent new pasts and create new identities. And we build a cottage by the stream. Sometimes we have four kids; other times, we don’t. You work as a smith, and I tend the garden. Or I am a healer, and you’re a jeweller. We are barkeepers, or we teach at the town school; or we’re just hermits in our little cottage, with our science and our magic. Together.
I don’t know exactly where I’m getting with any of this, Jayce. I just hope it brings you comfort, if you can hear me, to know that it doesn’t always end up like this, right here. Me, ageing alone; you, time-moored in stone. So, now you know what I do when I briefly leave your side, and you too know that I’ll always come back to you. Because we’re always choosing each other.
In all timelines, in all possibilities.