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“Why are you alive?” Jayce slurred from where he lay prone on the laboratory floor, rolling his head toward Viktor’s silhouette. The dark figure sitting next to him leaned over and extricated a bottle of liquor from his outstretched hand.
“I think you've had enough of that.”
Viktor looked at the bottle contemplatively, and took another swig. The liquid was almost gone. Neither of them knew what time it was.
Sprawling out on the floor to create a mirrored image, Viktor stared at the ceiling above them to avoid Jayce’s expectant gaze.
“It's strange. I spent the evening standing in the corner watching you be adored by every rich investor and entrepreneur in the room, and yet you’re the one lying drunk out of his mind on the floor, spouting existential questions.”
Jayce sighed, turned his head away. “I know. I know…”
“I - sorry. Maybe I've had enough as well.” Viktor kicked the bottle away from them with a foot and watched it tip over, clanging on the cool tile of the floor.
“Well, are you going to answer my question?”
Viktor rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand. “I'm alive to learn. I'm here because I want to know it all, and then I want to do something with it. I want to change things, even if it kills me.”
Jayce let out a breath of laughter. “Should’ve guessed. Intense and self-sacrificial through and through.”
“You’re not much better, partner. Why are you alive?”
There was a short silence. Jayce ran his fingers through the short hair at the base of his neck. Viktor sat back up, apparently not finding the floor to be very comfortable.
Finally, Jayce spoke again.
“I… don’t know.”
Viktor pursed his lips, appearing to privately decide something. “Then why are you still here?”
“Because I'm supposed to be, I guess? Because I failed. Because things are finally getting better.” Jayce stopped. Started again.
“Because of you.”
“Me.”
“Come on, Viktor. Don’t play dumb.”
“It wasn’t a question. Just a thought.” Viktor still sat facing away from his friend. He looked down at his fingers, playing with the edge of his vest, and folded them together. “Do you want to know why I stand in the corner?”
Jayce smiled wryly. “Because you’re a secluded monk of a mad scientist?”
“No, I mean why it doesn’t bother me as much as playing it up for a crowd clearly bothers you.”
“Okay. Tell me.”
“There are more important things.”
“Wow. That’s really incredibly helpful, Viktor, thank you.” Jayce said sarcastically.
Viktor pivoted to watch Jayce, who for once didn’t meet his gaze.
“Hear me out. Our experiments might work or they might not. We might change these cities - the world - for the better, or we might fail. I might die tomorrow, or in three months, or never if things really go in my favor. But the opinions of all those people in there don’t change the outcome either way. You realize you have control over who you are, yes?”
Jayce brought up a callused hand to his face, studied it for a bit like he didn’t know who it belonged to. He grinned crookedly.
“Damn, Viktor, you don’t have to put it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like-” Jayce scoffed a little and sat up. “Like I’m this mindless socially programmed sheep or something. It’s not like we can exist totally separate from bureaucracy, from everyone else. We need funding, we need society to hold its structure. ‘Playing it up for a crowd’ is what’s keeping our dreams afloat, believe it or not. Don’t get up on your high horse when I’m the one managing it all.”
Viktor didn’t take the bait. He turned back away from his friend, directed his gaze up to the vented windows that sat just below the ceiling and the handful of stars visible through them.
“I only mean that you don’t need to torture yourself for them. You don’t need to sell your soul to wring out a couple more investments from those people. Of course funding is needed, but the research itself will go on regardless - the people I grew up around never had fancy university grants and they made it work. That’s what I mean when I say I’ll die trying. But you shouldn’t kill yourself to make them all happy with you.”
“Oh, so it’s only okay to kill yourself if you’re being self-righteous about it? Viktor ‘I’ll neglect my basic needs in favor of my passion project because I have noble intentions’ Whatever- your-last-name-is.” Jayce slid himself closer to Viktor, stretching to follow his gaze.
Viktor furrowed his brow.
“It’s not the same for me. It’s - I’m not trying to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t have a choice - I need to use the time I get. You have as much of it as you want. Why would you ever want to throw it away? Waste it on anything?”
Jayce only sighed in response.
They were sitting side by side now, surrounded by scattered remnants of their shared equation sheets and prototypes, watching a little square of stars drift past them.
After a long minute, a flash of blue lit their patch of sky; the release of excess energy from a Hextech-enabled teleportation at the tower nearby. The abandoned bottle they’d been passing between them all night lay on the floor under a desk, emptying the rest of its liquor onto the tile in a slow trickle.
Jayce glanced to his left, gave himself a few seconds to look at Viktor’s ear, the wisps of brown hair curling around it, and the sharp curve of his jaw below. He suddenly felt very sober, and very afraid.
“I think maybe we’re both just running away.”
Jayce watched as Viktor’s head turned, blocking out both him and the stars they’d been watching. His cane stood propped against a nearby desk, now a lone mast sticking up from the shallow sea of alcohol that had formed there. It was the new one Jayce had made for him specifically, after the original had been sacrificed in the attempt to keep Heimerdinger out of the lab years ago. Back when they were just young, naive scientists with exciting plans and hours to revel in their shared intelligence. Back when it was easy to pretend that the cane was merely an inconsequential tool, and that Jayce hadn’t almost done something irreparable minutes before they met. That they weren’t just ignoring the inevitability of it all.
Evidently it was getting harder to push aside.
So, in the absence of something better to do, Jayce stood up and rubbed his eyes. Waited for his head to stop spinning, picked up the dripping bottle and righted it on the table, held out a hand in invitation.
And Viktor, lacking any alternate ideas, took it and left the floor behind. Reclaimed his slightly sticky cane, threw a handful of the lab’s wipes on the pool on the floor, followed Jayce out the door.
The lock clicked behind them, and as they exited the university building the watery, halfhearted moonlight made their hair look white.
Ghosts, or maybe just old men, walking home together.