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There was a shudder in the night, like a needle slipping through the fabric of the universe, or stepping out from under a shadow.
Jayce felt it on a subconscious level -- a molecular level; and when there was a thud outside the lab doors, he'd almost been expecting it.
Anticipation had become common in Piltover, and interruptions were common, too, especially in science. And in war. They’re a natural part of any process. Sometimes they're a thought. An error. A voice that pulls one away from what they were meant to be doing. A person that pulls one away from the life they should have lived -- the end they should have met.
Interruptions occur. Jayce, of all people, knew that.
He was reading progress reports when it happened; a process that technically wasn't unfamiliar to him, even if the progress hadn’t involved Hextech for a long time. Instead it was weapon production, the enforcers’ progression into the Undercity, Zaun’s progression -- meaning every step they took -- according to Piltover's ring of underground spies, who Jayce still didn’t trust. He didn’t trust most things these days. People knew this about him. Their Golden Boy had rusted, they said. It should have been impossible, given gold’s nature, but if anyone could do the impossible, it was Jayce Talis. And he’d rusted all over.
But the progress reports. He was reading progress reports, which had become unfortunately familiar to him the longer the war went on, when that shudder in the night turned into a whole explosion, as shudders often do. One second there is nothing, and the next there is a whole lot of something coming hard and fast at you, and Jayce had learned you just had to take it in strides.
Which is what he planned to do when the door to the lab slammed opened and a body fell through. But the shape of the body was familiar, and in the split second he had before something would be forced to happen, Jayce couldn’t determine if the familiarity made it harder or easier.
When armor hits drywall, it makes a distinctive sound; like kicking a big sheet of metal. Though, he knew the sound of that, too -- and he’d heard the sound of armor hitting drywall enough times to know there was definitely a dent in his wall. Probably even several, if he had to guess.
Would this get added to the progress report, he wondered, and it really allowed him to accept the absurdity of this whole situation. Whatever their relationship had been before, now it was… ridiculous. That was how it felt. Ridiculous and tiring.
“You sure have gotten overconfident. I must not be doing my job right if you think you can break in through the front door.”
There was a whirring like the miniature version of an airship taking off; in theory, a completely neutral sound, but Jayce couldn’t help assigning annoyance to it. Knowing Viktor, Jayce was probably on the nose about that -- which, knowing Viktor, would piss him off even more.
Or, no, sorry -- he didn’t get pissed off these days.
Jayce could still try. He’d spent the last few years trying. It seemed the only thing he could do.
“Or maybe you’ve just gotten lazy.” He tilted his pen, tapped it boredly on the desk, watched little drips of black ink sully the paper. “This is kind of a downgrade from last time, though, don’t you think?”
Predictably, there was no answer. They’d both gotten predictable. Everything about them had.
“I mean, I’m not even going to have to fix the door.” He leaned against the back of the chair, stretching his legs out until the muscles released their tension from sitting too long.
Predictable, yes, but… normally he would have said something by now, because no matter how adamantly he claimed to not feel anymore, Jayce knew how to push all his buttons; make him recite his lines and clack forward like a child’s toy.
All he was doing now was… wheezing. Which wasn't one of his programmed responses.
Jayce tossed the pen onto the desk, sending a spray of ink fanning across his progress report. In the darkness, it could have been blood. Blood always looked black in light like this. The pen rolled back and forth a few times, and Jayce’s chair made a thin dragging noise as, for the first time since the door had swung shut, he turned and looked.
Jayce might not know Viktor anymore, but he knew machines -- knew when one was broken beyond function. Could recognize when a broken one was slumped on the floor of his lab.
Viktor’s chest had been split open, his armor trying to shed him like an old shell. Raw wires touched air, a few of them damaged enough to spark. Surrounding them were the bones that Viktor had built for himself, and they shifted frantically. It was the only way to describe it; frantic like an animal trying to breathe through death. But that seemed to be just the problem, breathing.
Jayce wondered if Viktor would ever escape lungs that betrayed him, even metal ones.
He sat limp while the shattered insides of his chest heaved, pieces clicking together, a sound that turned distorted and distinctly wetter where it clicked against the still-fleshy parts of him. It was odd -- it was monstrous, really -- all those sounds accompanied by the human rasp of air coming up his throat -- not enough to circulate the blood and oil through his systems. Jayce couldn’t see through his mask, hadn’t seen through it for three long years, but he could hear the unsteady suck of air down a throat, the necessary counter of it coming up, and the whoosh of it as it was lost to his gaping chest cavity.
If Jayce was younger, maybe he could have even imagined a face contorted in pain, a bottom lip trembling as it tried and failed to usher in oxygen.
But he felt old, and he was tired of imagining. So he focused on what he could see with his eyes and not his mind, or worse, his heart.
A few sparks jumped into the air, reflecting off dark walls. Tectonic plates of metal tilted in a gruesome dance, half-hidden just beneath the curve of Viktor's body. Their edges had cut the skin of his chest. Jayce couldn’t see the damage, but he could see blood wetting the mechanics. Blood might look black in this light, but it was still a different shade than oil.
Maybe he imagined the way, when the Herald shifted to push himself up, a few more rivulets of that shade lighter than oil joined the sparking wires. Made the machine parts slip when they should have caught and ground together. But before Jayce could really focus on it, a sound emanated from the Herald that was eerily similar to the Mercury Hammer charging up.
“I--” The single syllable crackled with static. Jayce squinted for signs his mask had been damaged too, but then-- “Had…” Another whirring. “Nowhere else was… o-o-o-optimal.”
Jayce blinked. “You mean after doing whatever the hell it was that put you in this state, you couldn’t find anywhere else to break into?”
It was almost a surprise that Viktor shook his head. The Hexclaw slid a few inches down the wall, its silvery arm cocked at an unnatural angle.
“E-E-Enforcers.”
So his modulator had been damaged. Or maybe his voice box. Jayce didn’t know whether that was flesh or metal anymore. The thought made him scoff.
“Need to… repair my…” Whatever he’d been working towards saying, he exchanged for a weak gesture at the front of him.
Jayce gave an exaggerated frown. “I'm hurt. I thought I was the only one who got to take a bite out of you like that.”
There was a moment of silence. Another whirr.
“Enforcers,” he said again.
“Still. Why come here?”
Viktor’s mask tilted up, and, despite his determination not to imagine things, Jayce could almost picture the roll of his eyes in the shadows that passed across the amber windows.
“D-D-D-D--” He reached up and punched a fist against his sternum. Jayce heard something click into place. “Deduce that yourself, Talis.”
Jayce tilted his head and crossed one leg over the other. His boot bobbed lazily.
Viktor had a lab in the Undercity. Jayce hadn’t been there himself, but everyone knew, because people went there to have things done to them. He also knew that, considering Viktor was still here, and Jayce hadn’t had to dodge any laser beams, and Viktor hadn’t gotten up yet despite finding the lab occupied, he could deduce that his condition was too poor to make it all the way to the Undercity. But the fact that he’d stopped at a lab specifically meant…
“You need tools.”
The Herald was staring at him.
“I ne-eded asylum. Momentarily.”
He scoffed again. “Yeah, well, you look like you need tools.”
“There are not many places in the city for one of my stature to hide,” Viktor said like he was still trying to explain why he was here and not just admit he needed the damn tools.
Jayce could hear the sirens, now, faint on the horizon. He must have come a long way.
“And they will ki-i-i-ill me--” the amber lights in those windows flickered. “If they find me.”
Jayce rolled his eyes, glad that Viktor had no choice but to see it.
“They’d arrest you.”
Jayce tensed at the sound of a surprisingly humorous huff.
“Not everyone is as keen to play with their combatants as you, Talis. I ha-ave always suspected your e-e-e-e -ego to be the cause.” This time, the stutter seemed smug, like Viktor was glad it had dragged out that particular word.
“What makes you think I won’t turn you in?”
For a long moment, the Machine Herald did nothing but spark.
“Then do it.”
It was the clearest his voice had been. Jayce stared at him, foot still but finger tapping on the handle of his chair.
Too much time passed and neither of them moved.
“So,” he broke whatever silence had remained unfractured by Viktor’s labored breathing. “What was the angle here, exactly?”
It wasn’t a jab this time, and Viktor must have realized that.
The next breath he took was distinctly wet sounding and cut itself off halfway through with a sharp gurgle. Viktor coughed, and when that didn't seem to work, he reached up for his mask, fingers digging under the edge like he was trying to pry it off. Only one of his hands remained gloved. In a flash of pale flesh, the naked one scooped stringy, thick blood out from under the mask and let it glop onto his neck. Jayce didn’t realize Viktor had been tense until he watched him collapse against the wall.
It was… strange, to see machinery fall limp and exhausted. It never should have been able to do that. But if anyone could achieve the impossible, it was Viktor.
“If you remain… absolute in your decision not to turn me in--” Jayce was thrown off balance by the sudden exhaustion in his voice. “Then, in a few moments, I will leave.”
“You’ll leave. Like this?” he gestured with his foot, unfolding it to sit forward.
Viktor didn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, he slapped his gloved hand up to his chest and plunged it into the cavity. Perhaps created by something fired from a weapon, though Jayce didn’t know any weapon besides his own that could do damage like that. Probably one he’d made, at the rate things had gone. There wasn't much used by the enforcers that hadn't been created by him, besides their batons.
How Viktor thought he was going to fix something like that with just his hands, Jayce couldn’t guess, but after about a minute, a few screeches of metal, and a spark so big it bounced off his mask and onto the floor before going out, the Hexclaw powered back to life with a jarring amount of vigor.
Jayce jumped up and calculated how far each of the weapons in the lab were. Viktor's mask once again tilted up to follow the movement. Jayce should have been thinking about how many steps it would take him to get to his hammer, but he was looking at the curve of pale throat no longer hidden behind fabric. The dark material was shredded, hanging loosely around his chest plate. His skin was hollowed out in all the same places Jayce remembered, and a dark bruise was already forming around the mole below his jaw.
Jayce stayed where he was. Viktor's head fell back against the wall as if it had abandoned the effort of looking up and landed there by accident. He was wheezing again, breaths labored and suffocating prematurely. If the damage was even half as severe as it looked from the outside, starting his system up had likely cost him his lungs. The state of the inside, Jayce could only imagine, from so many feet away…
He made up his mind.
“Let me fix it.”
The Hexclaw was attempting to boot back up completely, but Jayce had helped build its successor, so when it made a sound like a chain getting caught in a clump of gears, he knew it couldn't be working. At least not at full capacity.
“Suddenly feeling charitable, Defender?”
Similarly, Jayce could recognize a sneer even when he couldn't see it. He hadn't seen Viktor's face in…
That disdain, though -- it would have bit him on the ass had it been a metal creation. Lucky for Jayce, it was just disdain. Just an emotion, and one Viktor couldn't do anything about right now.
Especially without any tools.
“Sure,” he shrugged. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, Herald.”
“I do not– need your help,” he hissed, interrupted by a raw hiccupping sound.
“No? And here I thought you hated being wrong.” He shook his head, glanced out into the empty lab, glowing in grey, unnatural tones like a crypt.
This was somewhere the dead got buried.
“Alright, V. Get up, then.”
The plates of armor fluttered, pulsing up and down like a dying bird's ribcage. Viktor was trying to breathe. He wasn't doing a very good job of it, and the angry sparks from his chest suggested he wouldn't be able to for much longer.
“Go on. If you don't need my help then get up and fix yourself--”
Viktor's boot hit the ground, the ring of metal tinging through the air. His shoulders rose in a moment of hesitation, and then he braced a hand on his knee – his bad knee – and pushed.
The Hexclaw screamed with the effort of whatever he was trying to get it to do. Jayce glanced at the door. How long before someone thought to make him aware that the Herald had been in Piltover again?
Not long.
He closed the space between them in three strides. Viktor predictably gave his claw new instructions -- shoot-Jayce-in-the-head sort of instructions -- but it was still trying to do the first thing, so before Jayce could even reach him, it had smacked back against the wall and was shuddering.
Jayce held out his hand. Viktor turned his scowl -- and it was a scowl this time, he was sure -- towards Jayce, but he was shuddering just as much as the Hexclaw, and this close, Jayce could see the blood leaking from beneath his mask. It spurted when he coughed, sent splatters onto his neck, and the whole thing was so human that, when Viktor's gloved hand slapped his away, Jayce was relieved to take a step back into their familiar, predictable roles.
Predictable. That's what they were; what they had to be.
So he stood a few feet away and watched Viktor struggle. And if that hadn't been their whole partnership, Jayce didn't know what was.
Viktor’s forearm hit the wall behind him, used it to writhe up an inch. When his torso twisted in the effort, Jayce got a better view of the wiped out mechanics. It looked like pieces were missing entirely, left in a trail of meat and blood and busted parts.
What happened next happened fast. Four seconds, maybe less. Viktor got his feet under him, used desperate momentum to throw himself upright, then claw himself the rest of the way up the wall. And this was the part where he'd disappear -- shoot a few lasers at Jayce and slip away in the smoke. But when Viktor took a step forward, the Hexclaw swayed limply, and his knees buckled.
Jayce did the only thing he could do. He was still human, after all, even if his partner wasn't.
Jayce stepped forward and caught him.
He stood taller than he used to. Jayce would've been looking up at him like this if Viktor hadn't collapsed into his arms. But, like all things Viktor had ever done, he held on with sharp claws and determination, even when he was falling.
He didn't fall this time, and Jayce's skin took his claws like it had been waiting for them.
Three seconds.
The fourth one brought several heavy knocks on the door.
Viktor had only grabbed onto Jayce with his gloved hand, and it tightened -- in fear? Could he still feel it?
A thick drop of Jayce's blood slipped over the spikes.
“General Talis!”
He hated that title. Hadn't had a choice in it.
Viktor's shoulders were heaving. The windows to his eyes flickered, and Jayce ducked down to see if he'd imagined a different shade of amber beneath them.
The drop of blood hit the floor.
“Let go,” Jayce murmured.
Viktor waited until the heaves turned back to shudders, choked on a breath, didn't get it unstuck, and then he let go. Dropped Jayce's arm and took some blood with him.
Jayce kept his eyes on him as he moved for the door, a few steps sideways. The mask gave little away besides the impression that Viktor was watching him, too. When Jayce turned, he knew looking away might mean Viktor blinking out of existence, leaving nothing but the blood and the crack in the wall as proof he'd ever been here again after the first time he'd left, back when he was petty in the ‘I am going to shut this door harder than necessary’ way, not the ‘I will draw the blood from your veins’ way.
But, Jayce turned his back, because one of them had to deal with this, and it wasn't going to be Viktor.
“General Talis,” the enforcer -- young, pale, sweaty -- swallowed like it hurt to do so. “There's been an attack. The Machine Herald, he was here, sir. In Piltover.”
“‘Was’. Where is he now?”
“We-- We--” paler, now. “We lost him, sir.”
Jayce nodded.
“Get all available units on patrol. I want every street, every alley, every corner of this city searched. Understood?”
“Yes sir.” The enforcer bowed stiffly and spun around, taking off down the hallway, and Jayce could remember when he had faced life with that much enthusiasm. That much determination.
The belief that you could change the world tended to die before you did.
He closed the door, locked it. Viktor's modulator had to charge up, the mechanisms clunking over themselves before he could say anything -- and then, the first clear thing… was a laugh.
“The Golden Boy. He is still in there. Comes to the sss-s-sur-surface when you lie.”
Jayce crossed his arms and leaned against the door. “Yeah, well. You're probably the only one who remembers him.”
Viktor was leaning against the wall in a much more fractured parallel of Jayce.
“That is, if you didn't remove those memories along with everything else.”
“You are d-d-d-des-des--” He growled and clawed at his chest. Tipping forward, a gasp interrupted the broken word. The sound was startlingly human.
Maybe that was what made Jayce reach out and brace his shoulders before he could fall.
“I'm what? Come on, V. Desperate? Despicable--”
Viktor grabbed a fistful of his shirt and shook him.
“Despicable,” Jayce decided with a smirk.
Mechanics spun hot enough to burn Jayce's hand, and a shuttering sound filled the air, but it was enough power for Viktor to lift him until he was balanced on the toes of his boots.
“I was going to say disgraceful,” he spit the words, and Jayce swore he was hearing it through the mask, not the modulator this time.
“You always did have a bigger vocabulary than me--” Viktor shoved him away, and he stumbled back into the chair he'd barely gotten up from.
“D-Don't follow me-e-e.”
He was -- yeah, he was going for the window, which was never going to work because Jayce was pretty sure he hadn't taken a full breath in--
Viktor crashed into the workbench. Jayce jumped up, reached him quicker than either of them had expected, because when he yanked Viktor around, Viktor flinched, lifted an arm to block Jayce from doing more damage to his chest.
“Can you stop breaking things,” Jayce grunted as he took most of Viktor's weight.
He was sucking in quarter breaths, now. Little stutters that whistled through the hole. Now that Jayce was staring at it, he could see where the mechanics were broken. Where the wires were torn. He could see where to fix it.
He reached for a wire. When his wrist brushed metal edges and torn flesh, Viktor groaned through his teeth, grabbing onto Jayce's shoulder and squeezing. New claw marks. Jayce had heard dying enforcers make the same sound.
“I thought you couldn't feel pain?”
“I just need--” his voice was so garbled now, but it was clear in Jayce's memories. More time. More tests. To figure out why it's not working-- “A minute.”
Jayce ran his thumb along one of the cracked metal plates that made up Viktor's chest. It was bent inward from the impact of a great force.
“Another minute and blood is gonna seal your lungs shut. Or, whatever's left of them.”
Viktor gurgled indignantly. Jayce leaned forward until they were almost chest to chest, his head bowing over Viktor’s shoulder.
“I can fix this,” he said lowly. “The question is, how hard are you going to make it?” He turned from staring at the dent in the wall to looking into Viktor’s scorch-marked mask.
Viktor wheezed. And then his legs gave out.
Jayce used the momentum to flip him onto the table. All that machinery hit the surface with a force enough to send tomes and quills and old notes scattering to the floor. A tome thunked open, its pages furling among a puff of dust. A quill rolled towards the metal grate in the floor, which Jayce might need later, to wash the blood away.
Viktor's head rolled limply, and Jayce had to allow himself a second to look at the underside of his chin, where metal was pressing into skin, skin that was washed red.
Only a second. That was the crucial part.
He tore his eyes away and scanned the machine's damage. Several cut wires were throwing sparks. The main compartment was busted. And the metal lungs were in pieces, yes, but they also had something stuck in them.
Jayce shifted and braced an arm on the table.
“Your circuit’s all busted.” Brow furrowing, he slid his hand into the clump of wires to reach under what had to be the main energy box. The heart. Was that flesh there beating underneath it? Jayce pressed along the edge, where one of the ever-shifting pieces allowed a glimpse behind the cold shine of metal to something wetter and redder and--
It was like he had pushed a button; suddenly Viktor sprung into motion, flinching back as much as the table would allow, which was really just more of a thrashing than a retreat.
“Don’t t-t-touch me.” His voice was cogs chewing on gravel.
“I'm not touching you,” Jayce said, moving past what could have been a heart, he didn’t know, and closing his fist around a wad of sparking wires. “I'm touching this.” He yanked. Viktor shuddered and collapsed, metal hand tightening into a fist.
“You'll have to repair those later, if they did anything important.”
The Hexclaw chuffed, its flat fingers twitching. Jayce had planned on smirking at that, but then he caught sight of the new, unobscured view of the sheet of debris lodged in Viktor's lungs. The metal would be fine, the flesh would scar. But more direly, it had severed his right lung in half. Air was hissing out with every desperate roll of the cogs, like legs treading empty water but still looking for land, for something to stand on.
The inside of Viktor looked something like a music box. The state he was in now, it looked like a music box that had been trampled by war.
Jayce hesitated before letting the tips of his fingers go where they wanted -- to touch where the sheet of metal left the machinery and ran into skin, if only to feel Viktor's blood. If only to prove, mostly to himself, that there were human parts of him still left.
“I can't fix this--” he ran his thumb along the torn skin just above Viktor’s sternum. Viktor grunted. It was just as human as his blood. Jayce pulled his hand back to the shard of metal and mangled parts. “But I can fix this. Or, at least put a patch on it.”
“Just con-consider--”
He would not be doing that -- turned away, instead, brow low. He needed tools if he was going to get Viktor up and out of here. Most of them he’d moved out of the forge a long time ago, put them in a corner of the lab to rust and rot.
As he went to dig them up from their graves, Viktor kept talking.
“It would be an insult to your. Already q-questionable character. To kill me like this."
Jayce paused, looked down at the forge tongs in his hand.
“I'm not going to kill you, V,” he whispered, not caring if it was too quiet for Viktor to hear. Viktor, who wouldn't believe it anyway.
It was impossible for him to shift silently -- his armor made so much noise, drew attention to the fact that there must be some pain he was trying to twist away from; which was so contradictory it was almost perfect, that the armor he’d built would be the thing to betray the vulnerability he hadn’t been able to carve out of himself. But, too, it was impossible for Jayce to gather supplies silently -- his old tools made so much noise when they were pulled from dusty coffins, drew attention to the fact that there must be some affection he was leaning into.
Which was so contradictory it was cruel, but in the end he still found himself standing above Viktor with tools to repair what had been broken. He knew what he needed to do, and he knew he would have done it in any version of this moment that didn’t end with Viktor killing him before he had the chance.
That was the trap he was stuck in -- the one thing he couldn’t purge, just like Viktor couldn’t take his heart out, only build around it. Some things stay, even when every other part of you is gone. Some things die but never really leave, only get buried.
“Just…” Jayce didn’t know if he wanted to bury Viktor for good, or keep digging him up. “...hold still.”
He would dig him up once more, at least.
The chest of metal and flesh stuttered, and the way Viktor’s mask was tilted, Jayce knew they were looking right at each other, even if one of them was hiding from it.
He sat his bag of tools down. Viktor’s head rolled to look at the ceiling.
The forge pliers were a recognizable weight in his hands, one that passed through time and circled back around to when he was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six, and spent just as much time in the forge as the lab. When Viktor would visit him, hair pushed back by goggles, beads of sweat on his forehead, the papers in his hands growing damp from the humidity. Jayce had always urged him not to get too close, to be careful, please, but Viktor had always drawn so near to the fire that its light danced across his skin, and Jayce had thought -- or, maybe not thought, but hoped -- he was doing it to stay near to him. Like their constant nearness was so necessary, it stretched outside of the lab; out of their shared space and into Jayce’s.
Metal didn’t sweat, and metal didn’t feel, and Jayce almost understood, standing there holding pliers and memories, why Viktor wanted to extract the things that hurt him. Even if it meant losing humanity, too.
The inside of Viktor's body was unrecognizable beneath Jayce’s hands. To see it as Viktor and not just a machine, a cursed invention of Hextech, was foreign. It was something that should have only been reserved for autopsy tables. This wasn’t a morgue, and Viktor wasn’t dead, but Jayce was still in mourning -- had been for many long years, and maybe even before that, too.
Metal and flesh made a grotesque marriage. The skin around the seams was red and raw. The muscle and bone and body were constantly moving, smooth like the ocean, while the machines rippled stiffly like the trees. It was a landscape of contradictions chugging together as one.
Just like the forge, Jayce had once known his way around the landscape of Viktor; would have been able to find every corner with his eyes closed. Viktor’s body now… he wanted to say he didn’t know what he was looking at, but Jayce knew machines, and he knew machines made by Viktor even more intimately.
Blood had started to pool around the piece of debris, turning the metal slick when he tried to grab hold of it. The nearest cloth had oil on it, but that had to be just as natural as blood to a man like Viktor. A man more machine. So Jayce mopped up the blood like an oil spill. When he dipped between the wad of metal and skin, Viktor's shoulders drew in an almost imperceptible inch, so small Jayce wouldn't have seen it if he hadn't been inside of him to feel the shiver of it.
He almost told him to brace himself, that this was going to hurt, but that seemed insulting to a man like Viktor. A man more machine. So he clamped on the pliers and, with a glance at that painless mask, wrenched the scrap metal out.
Viktor's hips twitched upward and a strangled noise came from his throat, which seemed like a pretty normal -- human -- reaction, but then a second passed and he tried to inhale. This time there wasn't even a gurgle, or a hiccup, there was only the sound of a void, empty wheeze. His palms slapped down on the table, the claws of his glove sinking into wood. The flesh one slid across the surface, flew towards his chest, and dug at it, fingers skimming the edge -- flinching away, then coming back with a determination that could only accompany the realization that one might be dying. Jayce's eyes flashed between that and his mask because he hadn't taken a breath yet, and that wheezing sound was getting more and more pinched off, and something was trying to rotate in Viktor's lungs but there were missing cogs and bent pieces and--
Jayce leaned over Viktor, hands hovering as his eyes raced, his mind raced. And then he plunged them into Viktor's chest, felt around for another long second while Viktor started to twitch, and then he found the right spot and forced the gears to rotate. Viktor's lungs furled open with a woosh, and the empty wheeze hurtled into a gasp; a glaring full breath.
As if he and Viktor were breathing together, Jayce took that breath and exhaled it from his own lungs, wilting heavily over the table. But before he could entertain the idea that they’d made it, they’d figured it out, the Hexclaw slammed to life. It jerked up just as Jayce lifted his head, and the fingers started whirling, and Jayce wouldn't have been able to duck before the beam of light and crackling energy crashed into him, but Viktor twisted his shoulder in just enough time that it flew past Jayce's head and hit the wall behind him.
And, like Viktor had severed the connection between their lungs, Jayce was panting to catch his own solitary breath; eyes wide, mind numbing and thawing in rapid succession, because Viktor was slumping back against the table with a grunt of pain, and the wall behind Jayce was smoldering, and Jayce wasn’t dead.
And Viktor wanted him alive. At least, right now he did.
The Hexclaw didn't power down, but it did fall back. Then the metal lungs groaned again and Viktor’s breath caught, and Jayce knew this wasn't over. Bracing on Viktor’s shoulders, he scanned the writhing machine, combing through equations and mental diagrams to build solutions as quickly as he noticed problems with the system his partner had built.
Viktor wasn't his partner anymore, and he was suffocating on the work bench of what had once been their lab, but still.
Jayce found at least one place to start; he slipped his hand into the mess of broken parts, rotated them, and Viktor sucked in a full breath because of it
“I’m surprised you didn’t equip this thing with a fail-safe.” He pushed a few wires away with the side of his finger.
Viktor made a squeaking noise. Jayce raised his eyebrows and took his lungs in hand, forcing him to -- or maybe helping him -- exhale.
“That is the fail-safe. Look closer Tal--”
Jayce ignored the grunt that cut him off and leaned closer. “Ah,” he hummed. “Hate to say it, but… brilliant.”
He ducked around the table and worked on a few more mechanisms on the other side. He could see, now, exactly how it all functioned. This was helping, because he could also see where it wasn’t functioning, when his fingers didn’t manually move things.
“Ah--” Viktor swallowed. Jayce could see it through the blood on his throat. “As always.”
Cocky bastard.
“Shame someone threw a frisbee at it.”
“Carriage wheel.”
He paused, leaned back a little. “You fought a train car?”
“I-I-I-Id-d-d-d--”
“Idiot, I know.” He smirked. “Don’t hurt yourself.”
Viktor slammed a fist onto the table. It was his ungloved one. That would leave a bruise.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m working on it…” He squinted at the shelves above Viktor, looking for a few spare cogs, a few pieces of metal, and his blowtorch. “Just give me a minute.”
“I can’t breathe, Jayce.” He heard it so clearly it almost pulled him out of the moment, almost pushed him a decade back in time to Viktor’s voice without layers of feedback and hatred. His voice the way it used to be, before he got sick. And sickness could be so many things, couldn’t it?
Jayce felt like it was his chest exposed. Like it was his lungs he was gripping when he placed a new piece of metal in and welded it to the old -- a patchwork of something like hatred, maybe, or worse, something like love.
Hatred was so easy, and love was so hard to kill.
But there was irony in this; Jayce finally being able to fix Viktor’s lungs. Maybe he wasn’t entirely useless after all, even if it was too late.
“Okay, I don’t know how your system is going to react to this -- I have to move some pretty big things around, so… tap my arm or shoot at me if you think you’re about to die.”
Viktor’s head rolled back and hit the table, and Jayce took that as an eyeroll and a confirmation all in one.
“Great. Here goes…”
There were so many moving parts involved in a mechanical organ. Where nature had evolved a system that was so fragile, it was almost a miracle it existed at all, Viktor had engineered one that was miraculous because it went against the very laws of nature. But Jayce hadn’t been bullshitting when he said Viktor was brilliant, and Viktor wasn't being modest when he’d said it was a regular thing for him. He was the only one Jayce knew who could create something like this. Now, Jayce had to be the only one who could fix it before Viktor choked on his table.
Good thing Jayce was brilliant, too.
The only one who had ever told him that and mattered was Viktor.
It really was so complex, the machine. It was beautiful, if Jayce let himself forget everything that had happened. And, really, it wasn’t the lungs that were the problem, it was the outside, the exoskeleton, the parts with teeth. The insides, they were just… Viktor’s desperation to survive married to his brilliant mind. It made survival possible, but he’d had to pay for it. A lot of people had.
Jayce sometimes worried he hadn’t told Viktor enough, that he was brilliant, and maybe not enough like it mattered.
It was smoke now.
He lifted his hand welder, poised it confidently, thumbed a few pieces of Viktor out of the way, and slipped a small scrap of aluminum into place. He’d held onto a lot of extra pieces over their Hextech years. Something about not being able to let go.
Or maybe it didn’t matter. The point was, it was a nice reminder that occasionally, small things worked out in the end, even if not everything did.
The more complex pieces, he knew he’d have to put back together with what was already there, without an hour or two to make their replacements -- they were too intricate, nothing in his box of scraps would even come close. A nice reminder that usually things didn’t work out the way they could have.
Jayce twisted metal until mechanics caught, wiping blood away when they got too slippery to work with, but every time he tried to start the lungs up on their own, they got stuck and click click clicked, and Viktor was only able to inhale the equivalent of what’s made when a butterfly takes off flying. Just a few papery wingbeats of breath.
He was still digging through the more delicate pieces with no success and an increased urgency when a hand crashed into his wrist. Jayce looked up for any sign that Viktor was dying or mostly dead. What he found was the muscles in Viktor’s neck straining, head thrown back like he was trying to push himself up or away, but what he did instead was move Jayce’s hand a few inches up and to the left and--
“Oh,” he breathed, seeing it now. He’d been working in the wrong place and hadn't even realized it. Because Viktor was-- “Brilliant.”
Viktor had nothing to say to that this time. His neck twisted as his chin tilted down, muscles going slack like he'd hit the off switch -- or maybe the system had overrode his will and hit it for him -- and when his hand slid off of Jayce’s wrist, the sharp points of his gauntlet scraped weakly. The way Jayce's head convinced him it was a gentle touch made him shiver, but then that hand was thunking onto the table, and Viktor wasn’t breathing, and Jayce forced himself to focus.
He closed his grip around the wires Viktor had guided him to and pulled.
The entire Machine Herald powered down. Hexclaw, amber eyes, everything.
It was the closest to dead Jayce had seen him since the first time.
“Viktor?”
Nothing. Except… his chin tilted up again. Just a little.
The switch had been flipped -- not by Viktor or by an override, but by Jayce. It was as if all of the Machine Herald’s energy had funneled out and into him. Charged him. Sent him reeling. He yanked a few more wires, stripping them to bare copper ends and sliding them not into where they belonged, but where they needed to be if Viktor was going to survive long enough to get back to the Undercity. His lungs were completely still while Jayce scrambled to finish putting everything back together. It reminded him, distractingly, of notching gears on their way to the Distinguished Innovators Competition because they’d still had just enough left to do that Jayce was sweating and Viktor looked paler than usual.
He wondered what Viktor looked like now, underneath everything he’d built.
Two more wires, a few more adjustments. Jayce shrugged a bead of sweat off his jaw.
There.
He glanced up, and the mask of the Herald was looking at him, which had to be intentional because it was at an angle that an unconscious man couldn’t hold. The mask tilted slightly, and Jayce knew his own eyes must have been wide because a drop of sweat slipped from his hairline and caught on his eyelashes.
“It would be an insult to your already questionable character, to kill me like this," Viktor had said. And then he’d shown Jayce the exact spot that would shut off all his defenses.
And, “I’m not gonna kill you, V,” but he could. All he had to do was hold his hands up and stand back.
And Viktor knew it.
Jayce grabbed the wires, reaching past sharp pieces of metal, careful not to dislodge what he’d just secured. He got clumsy in other ways; the skin of his hand tore against one of the edges, but he pushed forward, guided two yellow wires out just enough to see clearly, peeled their rubber layer back with his thumb nail, and struck them together.
A drop of Jayce's blood hit the center of Viktor’s lungs. The wires sparked. He ducked behind his arm, so he heard the mechanics groaning into motion before he saw them, the way the cogs tripped once, twice before finally catching. Viktor sucked in a ragged breath, heavy and desperate and wet, just as the windows to his eyes flickered back to life.
“Okay,” Jayce sighed. “If y--” The Hexclaw lunged like a cornered animal, grabbing him by the throat and throwing his balance so it was the only thing holding him up as it leaned him backwards, legs twisting beneath him. The center burned hot, probably charging up.
Jayce held his hands out to the side, palms open, one still leaking blood.
“Easy,” he whispered.
Viktor’s chest was heaving. Both flesh and metal lungs react the same when they’ve been suffocated for long enough -- they try to swallow everything.
They must have been trying so hard, and Viktor must have still been unstable, because the yellow glow from the Hexclaw flickered before it went limp, falling away from Jayce’s throat. He had to catch himself on the table by Viktor’s knees, who he hadn’t looked away from, not once, so he saw when the amber windows dimmed. It was like a flinch, or the fluttering of eyelids before unconsciousness. The Hexclaw had become a still carcass draped over the table, curled at the end like a dead spider.
Jayce took a deep breath. Viktor panted. He'd angled his head away while still keeping Jayce in his sights, fingers flexing weakly, almost like he was trying to reach the Hexclaw through them. But nothing moved.
He needed something to cover the hole in Viktor’s chest. With no threat of being shot in the back, he turned away, running a bloody hand through his hair. The sound of breathing was loud and ragged, but it was constant, and gradually it started to slow. It was… rawer than before, but it wasn’t until Viktor spoke that Jayce realized his modulator had shut down completely.
“If you are-- going to take your victory, Man of Progress--” a weak but steady inhale “--now would be the time.”
Jayce risked a glance over his shoulder. Viktor’s head had fallen limp, metal cheek to the table. He sounded spent. He sounded exhausted and just as raw as his open chest.
Or maybe it was just the lack of filtered edge.
“I’m not going to do that, Viktor. I’m not going to…” he struggled. “You think I could just drag you in when you’re like this? Let them throw you in Stillwater when you can’t even stand?”
He pushed his hair back again, trailing more blood in it. His or Viktor’s, he couldn’t tell anymore.
“We might have our differences, but you meant something to me.”
Viktor took two slow breaths. “There is nothing left of that.”
Jayce blinked. Wanted to chuckle but found he couldn’t manage the energy.
“And yet here you are, laying defenseless on my desk, letting me go wrist deep in your precious machine.”
It was a punctuation. There wasn’t anything else to say.
Jayce turned away, thought about how he could just leave -- thought about how leaving Viktor there like that, the way he was, might not have been the same as turning him in, but would have felt the same. He stared at the dark lab and could pinpoint exactly where each emotion was happening in his body, and he wondered if that was how Viktor had taken his out. If he’d been able to feel it.
But that was where he and Jayce were different. Viktor found those spots inside of him and carved them out; Jayce pushed them so far down he couldn’t reach them.
In that, was there any difference at all?
Near an old workbench sat a curved piece of metal Jayce had tried to use for an upgraded Mercury hammer design. Like many things, he'd abandoned it -- maybe this lab was a morgue, filled with bodies and bodies and Jayce, who belonged just fine among ghosts of the past. Lifting the sheet up, it seemed like it could be a good fit -- at least until Viktor made his own repairs. Nodding, trying to focus on what was real, he headed back to the table, only a little surprised to see that the Herald hadn’t gotten up yet. That he wasn’t gone, now that he could breathe.
Because he could just leave, too.
“Do you seek my thanks?” Viktor asked, voice dry, but it was Viktor’s in a way that it hadn’t been since he’d built his mask. No metallic edge, no crackling boom. Just… late nights whispering over notes of tricky projects, or better futures for Piltover, for the Undercity, for them. It sounded rough like it used to in the mornings, after those nights they had actually slept.
Jayce leaned the piece against the table.
“Only if you’re offering.”
“And if I’m not?” The mocking tone had bled out of him.
Jayce shrugged. “I’d still like to finish this,” he gestured. “If you don’t have anywhere else to be.”
It was Viktor’s turn to shrug, though it was only with one shoulder, and probably half of one at that.
“I… am not yet strong enough. The machine… it needs a moment.”
“How very human of it.”
Jayce picked up the sheet, hovered it over Viktor to see if it would line up. He needed to cut a few pieces. Which was what he was doing when the eyes in the mask flickered and dimmed. Jayce looked up, pulled the goggles off of his face just to be sure.
“V?”
He was still breathing -- Jayce could hear it, without the buzz of the metal cutter -- and it was rhythmic. Normal. But…
“Viktor.” He moved closer, putting his tools aside. “Are you--”
Fingers, flesh ones, tapped twice against the table. “I’m fine.” That’s what two taps had always meant, back when things had gotten worse. The first time they’d gotten worse, when they were still together, not the worse that had broken them apart.
Jayce exhaled, fought the sudden shadow that spread over the valley of worry he’d always had for Viktor. It had been so long since he’d stood in the center of it, but it was striking how everything looked the same.
This wasn’t how things were, anymore. It wasn’t…
But… Viktor remembered the language they’d spoken back when their bodies were soft and their futures were woven together with string and love and a determination to make it no matter what.
It only made it worse, knowing that they’d ended here, with their weapons pointed at each other.
Now, though, Jayce cut metal, and then he sanded the edges down so they wouldn’t be sharp. And when he went to attach it to Viktor’s chest, he remembered cutting himself on a sharp edge inside of him, so he sanded that down, too -- smoothed over all the edges, because it seemed like the only thing he could do when it was something that belonged to Viktor; try to fix it -- cut himself on it when he couldn’t.
The metal plate was an almost perfect fit; almost, because nothing was ever truly perfect.
“I’m going to weld this over the--” he almost said wound. “The opening.”
Viktor said nothing. His lights had gone out entirely, now.
“Hey.” Jayce sighed, reaching out to touch his shoulder. His head rolled limply.
Jayce didn’t want to work on him if he was unstable -- it could fry the fragile technology. The lungs were still working, running through the delicate pattern that was necessary for Viktor to remain alive, but that wasn’t good enough. He needed to know for sure.
Jayce was going to find out if Viktor still had a pulse. Everything he now knew about the machine that ran him would insinuate so, but there was only one way to be sure.
He reached up for Viktor’s neck, teetering on the line between cowardice and something bolder before pressing the pads of his fingers to Viktor’s skin. He frowned, sliding them up a few inches.
“I can’t tell what your body’s doing with all… this in the way.” The metal, the mechanics, the mask. The distance between them. It numbed all signs of life.
Still frowning, he searched up towards Viktor’s jaw until his fingers caught on a latch just beneath the edge of the mask that had become him -- that had replaced his face in Jayce’s mind; gradually, at first, laying over it like a frost, and then like a heavy snow, until the sun set and everything was a white, cold blur. And just like that, Viktor was gone.
But he was also right here in front of him.
Jayce flipped the latch.
Fingers closed around his wrist. Soft skin; long, cold fingers rough from building a body, building an empire. Covered in soot, cut in a few places from fighting, but there was that mole where his thumb met the back of his hand. There was that scar he’d gotten on his middle finger when a pen laser had slipped and nicked him.
The fingers gripped weakly at his wrist, forming a cuff around it, over it, making a mimic of the bracelet Jayce used to wear.
Viktor tried to tug Jayce’s hand away but couldn’t, mostly just let his arm fall with gravity. Jayce felt the weight pulling him back from his progress, stopping him from slipping the mask off.
“Don’t… P--Please.”
Jayce swallowed the sound of his voice, so… desperate.
It sawed his heartstrings ragged.
“Alright, V,” he murmured, securing the latch again, letting his fingers curl against his palm like a dog rolling over, baring its teeth. And if his fingers brushed Viktor’s where they were holding weakly to his wrist, what of it? And if Viktor let his fingers remain there, warming against Jayce’s -- well there wasn’t anyone around to see, was there?
The warmth it created against Jayce’s skin was real, though. Realer than any dream or nightmare he’d ever had.
Eventually, Viktor’s hand slid away. Jayce guided it, fingers steepling under Viktor’s palm to ease it onto the table. It remained still, and Jayce turned it around, pressed his thumb against the blue vein running through Viktor’s wrist. His heartbeat was steady, gave no impression that the body it was in had been turned into something so unrecognizable.
He wondered if that’s what it was like for Viktor; not so different. Not so foreign.
“You must still be in there, if you’re so determined to hide.”
Viktor’s head turned faintly. “I am not the only one who is hiding, Defender.”
Jayce took a measured breath, then nodded. He leaned back against the table and looked out at the lab and all of its ghosts.
“You never did like to be wrong, V.” His whisper joined the ghosts. Viktor’s head rolled the rest of the way; facing him, but weakly.
Jayce knew there was no returning to the past without passing through death to get there, but he wondered if it would be worth it, letting go of this life for just one day, just one moment of what had once been but was no more. What could not be gotten back.
Sure, it would all end -- but for a few seconds, everything would make sense again. Even if it wasn’t real. It didn’t even need to be real.
A faint shuffling drew his attention, made him uncross his arms and turn to find Viktor unmoving still, but he inhaled another small breath.
“Thank you… Jayce…”
Maybe they had died after all. Maybe this was their few seconds.
As far as fiction went, it was pretty good.
Jayce soldered the new piece of metal over the hole in Viktor’s chest.
He took one last look at those mechanical lungs before he did it. At the wires that covered them, at the work Jayce had done and the blood he’d left. At the pieces that were a part of Viktor as much as his moles, or the wrinkles around his eyes, or the sound of his voice. Jayce looked at them and saw them for what they were; Viktor.
He took one last look, and it spanned more than a second, which felt critical.
And then he covered it up, sealed it away; the closest he’d ever been to Viktor’s heart. It was as unnatural as it made perfect sense.
When the soldering had cooled, Jayce set his tools aside and laid his hands on Viktor’s chest, fingers curling around to where metal met ribs, thumbs pressing into the sternum he had just built. It was crude work compared to Viktor’s, but it held firm. It stopped Jayce from reaching his heart, which was what Viktor had come to want, somewhere along the line.
Not always, though.
Still, it must have counted for something that Jayce had been the one to hold a version of it in his hands. That he was the one to close him back up, too.
He fell into the chair he’d gotten up from hours ago, when things had still been their twisted version of normal. Now there was a wound, a rift, but new colors were bleeding in. Jayce tried to see them through the shadows in the lab, but they ducked away like butterflies. He couldn't identify their hue, but he could feel the breath of their wings beating against his skin, sitting there watching Viktor through half-lidded eyes. Not the machine on his table, but Viktor, who was sleeping. Who was breathing gently. Who lived in Jayce’s memories, elusive like butterfly colors, real like their wings against his skin.
He closed his eyes, but Viktor was still there; maybe in memories, maybe in dreams -- or maybe Jayce was just sleeping fitfully, trudging back into wakefulness to find him in the lab and confusing that with something more. Between blinks, he saw him -- once, metal laying on the table; once, a man with soft hair, smiling, his hand on Jayce’s shoulder.
He would open his eyes hours later and find the lab empty, because Viktor had woken an hour before that and found Jayce asleep, limp in his chair; the defenseless Defender, and the machine who could bleed. He would stand above Jayce’s body and watch his chest rise and fall, let his eyes, hidden behind dim windows, trace the soft edges of Jayce, the lines in his face smooth in sleep.
He would watch long enough to convince himself Jayce would wake, and suddenly everything would be different, different like it used to be.
And then the Machine Herald would turn away, step up onto the table still stained with his blood, and slip through the lab window that he shut behind him, because the night was cold.
Viktor would reach his lab in the Undercity just as Jayce woke to find his lab in Piltover empty -- but there had been a moment, between the falling and the waking, where the Defender and the Herald were asleep together, side-by-side.
It was the closest to peace they’d gotten in a long time.