Chapter Text
After the trial—a neat way of describing what's really, in so few words, an execution—Jayce finds he's regressed to the most wretched iteration of himself. The one that doesn't bother with amicable grimaces and small talk. Skips the whole gamut of social niceties broken into him by degrees and goes straight to the scalpel-cut critique and door in the face.
It's a nescessary evil. The alternative is admitting he's started to become the sort of person to care.
The diving suit project is scrapped on paper, but they don't confiscate the blueprints and it's not-so-subtly hinted that should he find a workaround less offensive to human dignity, they'll pay handsomely for his efforts. He gets three job offers and a commendation; he rejects two of them and grinds his teeth over the third until the rent bill comes in. Between Clan Giopara's machining gigs and the cloying, familial oversight of House Ferros, he's got all his expenses covered, but they've given him the leniency of a non-exclusive contract and he plans to milk it for all it's worth.
Three days after the fact he digs the spare key out from the bottom of his dresser and lets himself in to Viktor's apartment, sitting half-furnished through the end of its remaining two-month lease. It'd been sparse to begin with, but the newly-blank walls gape at him like a flayed carcass. He goes digging in corners for scraps and reminders and comes up with three brass screws and the middle page of one of Viktor's rough drafts for a seminar neither of them liked enough to really put in the effort. He's almost disappointed, and then disgusted with himself, because what was he expecting, really? One half of a photograph torn in two? His face cigarette-blotted out; some evidence of sentiment, a fucking crumb of the thing he knew existed underneath all of Viktor's insufferable pragmatism, which was the real enemy here. Pragmatism got you recalibrated amygdalas, courtesy of six cuts with a scalpel and a wire inserted through a hole in the skull. (He'd consider self-trepanation if it meant clearing out the refuse and getting over it all.)
The campus laboratory has been exhumed beyond recognition, scoured of scorch marks and metal shavings. The next occupant's claim is already staked, paperwork tacked to the door—he doesn't recognize the name, probably whatever shiny new Honor's College undergrad is about to get tripped through the gamut. No point lingering. He'd started clearing out his own work weeks ago. The university confiscated the rest (that is, what Viktor hadn't managed to squirrel away).
So he's crossed the easy options off his list. So he's got to admit that what he actually wanted was some sort of clue; anything to make the next part easier, because Viktor disappearing for days at a time isn't anything new, but he's usually considerate enough to leave some sort of note—"Back later. Set gyroscope to 56 degrees." After the fiasco with Pididly he'd gotten cagier about it. (What had he been expecting, honestly? Didn't he know that was how it worked? Jayce's first patent, at fifteen, is credited in the registry to Seneca Ferros. Piltover provides for its best and brightest, and all she expects in return is the blueprint to your soul, reproduction rights in perpetuity.)
The last straw is when Viktor's monthly prescription comes in.
He should bring it (who knows what they're cutting the hormones with down in Zaun). He should bring it (the first time he'd accidentally missed a dose, and then a second, and a third—before he'd met Viktor, when a bad week meant an equivalent reticence to shove a needle under his skin and no one to do it for him, get over yourself you big baby—his body had traitorously regressed, and could you fucking imagine expulsion and then spotting on top of it all). He should bring it (because—it's—a—good—excuse) (the best excuse; no emotional vulnerability required).
So, then:
Jayce isn't operating on the assumption that it'll be a heroic descent. He's never gone lower than the upper layers of the Entresol, past the street markets stuffed with flotsam peddlers and jury-rigged chemtech booths. (That's a lie, but he doesn't like to think about it; buries it with the rest of the memories from when he was twelve-to-fourteen and trailing his knife's edge of an aunt into back alleys and smoggy bars). Better to remember Viktor in his element, haggling in Zaunite pidgin while Jayce stared the neighboring merchant dead in the eye and paid triple for a part he could build himself in a week, given the inclination. The occasional stray peanut shell to the back of the head, flicked from the balcony one level up. The moments when, distracted enough to let his defenses drop, Viktor would let him lace their hands together, palms warm and greasy with sweat.
Well. Maybe not that one.
He buys a two-way ticket on the Rising Howl and rides it four layers, just below the Entresol proper. From there, it's down the tangle of stairs and walkways into the cliffside residential districts. Ten flights of groaning corrugated iron, only a thin bar between him and the fifty-foot drop down into neon-soaked smog. The air thickens as he descends, like a sweaty hand uncurling its fingers in his lungs. He ignores the rising prickle in his chest and holds in a cough until he's nearly choking on it—lord knows he already doesn't look like he belongs here. Should've brought a mask. Too late for it now. A fresh set of respiratory microperforations is a small price to pay for a clean conscience. (Well. Cleaner.)
(None of this is his fault. If, in this world where they worked together, Viktor still found himself teetering on the edge of crimes against human decency, how much worse would he be by now if Jayce wasn't there?)
(He ignores the fact that the version of himself who never met Viktor is not a version who would go looking for a missing anybody.)
He asks after him and gets shrugged off until he isn't, and it's down another level to a seedy bar stinking of cigarette smoke and cloves; then five blocks and two stairwells, ducking into a machine shop that settles a layer of engine grease in his lungs with every breath. The answer always the same: Viktor passing through like a dysfunctional phantom, bartering for scrap and information in as few words as possible before fucking off to parts unknown.
A girl from the shop follows him for three blocks before announcing her presence, shouting names at his back that he only recognizes because they're the same ones Viktor would call him, on occasion. She can't be more than ten. Says if he pays her she'll show him the way, zhiroulovitel', and then he's welcome to get himself killed or whatever else he was planning to do. U tvoyego parnya problemy.
Your boyfriend's got problems.
Down in the Factorywood the air stinks of solvent and crisps the hairs right out of his nose. The hum of the markets and creak of carriage lines fades into a foundry clang and the hiss of steam and chemical vents. He skirts the edges of sickly-green sump pools and trips over tangles of pipes heaving out of freshly-cracked fissures. Every wall seems to vibrate. He's crawled into the belly of a horrible beast.
Isn't it lucky he's thoroughly indigestible.
His guide gestures to a door indistinguishable from the last six or seven they've passed, then scuttles back into the fog. Some grimy basement apartment, walls sagging under the weight of the collective urban sprawl. Could just as easily lead to the bolthole of some rebar-wielding maniac, or a gaping pit in the ground. (He's heard the body count statistics; knows they're artificially-inflated bullshit. He's making excuses to hesitate.) The doorknob feels like a keystone in his hand. When he pulls, something's going to topple.
The door isn't locked. That should've been his first warning.
It opens onto a crooked hallway with floorboards that creak underfoot when he crosses the threshold. Somewhere there's a pattern of sweet spots that'd permit an enterprising intruder to advance in complete silence, but Jayce doubts he'll get a chance to solve that particular puzzle. He's expecting—oh, what, a depressive wreck of a bolthole? A suitable environment for any disgraced scientist to nurse their wounds and wallow in resentment. He knows Viktor has a lab, in theory. He's never seen it. (There'd been plans, maybe, to pay a visit, but that had been before The Fucking Thing With Pididly. Jayce was still the one proofreading Viktor's second and third drafts and annotating his blueprints, but everything else—everything not immediately pertinent—retreated back under lock and key.) The anteroom eagerly meets expectations: dank and undecorated, storage crates crammed into gaps between piping and cement support beams; a naked bulb casting a ghastly pallor over it all. The back corner boasts a grimy ceramic splash of kitchen—or is it the toilet?
He follows the tangle of electrical lines choking the ceiling down a claustrophobic set of steps. The light takes on a chemical pallor. There, then: a desk shoved up against every wall, more storage than workspace. (Just one more workbench; finally have room to spread out the pieces of that project. Three days later it's sagging under the weight of half a dozen, because how can anyone be expected to remember anything if it's tucked away in some godforsaken shelf?) Chemtech prosthetics in various states of disassembly; a research library exploded across six workbenches and part of the floor. Something pale and bulbous floating in a jar of fluid that he doesn't even want to guess the origins of.
Tucked in the middle of it all is Viktor, a thin trail of smoke wafting up from the workbench in front of him. Jayce smells hot metal and burning meat.
"You can leave it by the door," says Viktor, not looking up.
"Sorry," says Jayce. "Not your milk delivery."
Viktor stiffens. When he turns, he shoots a glare that all but skewers Jayce in place. His eyes are uncharacteristically bloodshot; the bags underneath precisely as deep as Jayce expects.
"Get out."
"No."
"Your audacity, Giopara—" (Dropping a name he hasn't used for Jayce in years, except in jest after the initial animosity; artificially inflating the distance between them: honey, are you mad at me? Take a wild fucking guess.) "—is staggering."
"You vanished," says Jayce, risking a step forward, and then another. "And your prescription came in. So." He proffers the pharmacy bag like a peace offering.
"Typically," says Viktor, "after ruling out kidnapping or assassination, one must assume that someone who's gone missing doesn't want to be found." He partially unfolds from his chair and snatches the bag from Jayce's outstretched hand; takes a cursory glance at the contents and scowls.
Jayce grimaces. "You know me. Can't take a hint."
Viktor, more to himself: "I asked them to give me the five-milliliter vials." Snorts. "Doesn't matter."
He's close enough to peer over Viktor's shoulder, now, and has to bite his tongue to keep back a curse. Winces anyways, so the damage is done.
Viktor's left arm is splayed out across the workbench, skin peeled back and tendons twitching between a nest of freshly-inserted wires. Wrist mottled with bruises where the graft connects. The hand itself is a clever piece of artifice, steel plating and oxide-blackened iron; amber incandescence leaking out between the joints (though on second look, some of the welding could be neater).
Viktor can do what he wants—it's his body, he's already altered it to his liking with hormone injections and surgery, but Jayce understands that. The chemical whittling, the self-made man hidden in the marble emerging chip by chip. This is—
He could take the time to say the right thing. (Are you okay? Of course the fuck not.) Say it badly, but mean it.
The fucking indignity.
So: "Didn't really take you for the self-harming type."
"You think this is self-harm."
"Fine, enlighten me as to what else it could possibly be—I know you love to wax poetic about 'the biological mechanism' but I thought it was a fucking metaphor—" (Promise you'll stop, for me? Remember: the Jayce-centric model of the universe was disproved sixteen months ago, when you decided that you were in love.)
"No, you didn't," says Viktor. "Now, this—" He twangs an exposed tendon with a finger and only grimaces a little. "—is the chrysalis beginning to form. Self-harm, if you'd like to split hairs about it, is when I smoked sixteen cigarettes in one afternoon, and then when I lost a fingernail to my own poor judgement (unrelated), I considered removing the rest of them to match."
"You're one hand down already," says Jayce dryly. "So why not."
"Clearly you want me to suffer," says Viktor. "Otherwise I can't fathom why else you'd feel compelled to come down here."
"Cursing out my own reflection in the mirror loses its novelty. I thought you'd killed yourself."
"I considered it," says Viktor. "But it'd be unfair to Blitzcrank to orphan it so young."
"When you say considered—"
"Do you know how many people kill themselves in the trenches each month? Half aren't even on purpose. I could've died from slipping on loose shale and it would've come out the same." A thoughtful click of the tongue. "I walked to the edge of the sump every day for a week, counted six separate possible suicides on the way there and eight on the way back, and then realized that if I was going to die I wanted the people I hate to know about it."
"Is this the part where you tell me you've been building a bomb?"
"Don't be so dramatic. That comes later." Viktor scuffles through the pile of ephemera at the head of the workbench and thrusts out a creased sheet of paper. "I wrote a note."
Jayce takes it. There's a splotch of ink halfway down the page where Viktor's pen nib clearly snapped. He crumples up the thing without reading it and tosses it over his shoulder. "Don't care. How were you planning to deliver it, anyways? Posthumous mechanical carrier pigeon?"
"I see how it is," says Viktor.
"I'm not enabling your fucking—wallowing."
"Clearly I've managed just fine so far without your help." He jabs deliberately with the soldering iron. "Better, even."
Viktor bends back over his arm. Jayce watches. It's such delicate work—a command of anatomical intricacies Jayce feels he couldn't master if he tried. His mind sings over alloy composition and centrifugal forces; gear calibration; compression ratios. Not—meat. (Your disinterest, Viktor had quipped, after they'd fumbled their way through the first of a series of Physical Altercations, is noted.)
Back to the easy, obvious questions: "Does it hurt?"
"No more than anything else."
"Viktor—"
"Come back in a week," says Viktor, "and we can have this conversation after I've lobotomized myself."
Maybe they'd been right, about the slippery slope. "Did you work that out before or after the diving suits?"
Viktor seals up the seam of his skin, flexes his wrist, and experimentally drums his freshly-mechanized fingers against the table in a way that reminds Jayce of the family dog scrabbling frantically against the crack beneath the back door. "I can't help but feel," he finally says, "that suffocating to death at the bottom of an oceanic trench is more of an affront to human dignity than anything that might prevent it."
"I was at the trial too, V."
"It's probably for the best," he says. "They would've applied the technology to something actually offensive, and then blamed the inevitable public outcry on me. So it all comes out the same, in the end."
"I'll come back in a week," says Jayce.
He means it, at the time.