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It’s cold. It always is now. The warm sea breeze of Piltover’s shores hadn’t settled in his bones since the day he lost him.
Only, there was never a definite loss, was there?
Losses are defined by the lack of what was once there, an emptiness where something once rested. When his father died, it was a loss. Quick, simple, gone and done with. What wasn’t as simple was the process of grief, but even that dripped into a dull ache after enough years.
Almost thirty years since this easily defined absence, and it wasn’t exactly a simple wound to heal. His father was never very kind, never particularly sweet and rarely soft. He was a steel pillar, firm and unmoving, but tethering him to something undefined in his youth. Losing him was so unreasonable complicated, and even now he catches glimpses of himself in the mirror and cringes to see his fathers face stare back, just as cruel and tired as he remembered it.
He was never particularly skilled in emotions, so he opted for the scientific approach to this problem. To lose is to let go, to be stripped, defined by its inherit lack.
He felt liquid sunlight kiss his palms once, nearly 15 years ago, now all he feels is cold metal as it bites into his unceremoniously ungloved hands from where they have found themselves wrapped around the Machine Herald’s neck. Cold, empty, dead.
Only not dead.
Something undefined by simple scientific terminology, a force of will that transcended his feeble attempt at compartmentalization. He never truly lost Viktor. Even now, he is just as real and tangible as he was then, only different. Perhaps if he had truly lost him he would have had time to heal, to become something new and better from it.
He can only speculate, of course, because reality is hardly ever simple and rarely tended to comply with his demands. Reality dictated now, that he was kneeling over Viktor, straddling his once lithe body, now reinforced with steel and hatred. His hands shook with nearly twenty years of grief, of putrid, despicable emotions that plagued his mind, his lab, his forge and his bed like a poison, and he watched, detached as his breath bloomed in the cool winter air as he spoke.
“Should I kill you?” He questioned, his own voice a foreign broken prayer to his ears.
Viktor betrayed nothing, not a damn thing from where he was pinned to the floor of a debris-filled-warehouse, only stared in that awful way he did. Jayce was desperate, almost animalistic, he felt like death and forty fucking years of worthless life, for what? He laughed, a angry, broken thing, and only distantly realized he was bleeding from his nose and lips onto the unforgiving silver of the Herald’s mask.
That damn mask. Viktor built himself of harsh and rambling monologues, but he was uncharacteristically silent from where he lay, the hum of his fans the only indication of life, and the birdlike tilt of his head the only proof he was even listening.
“Should I kill you,” he murmured once again, his mind foggy with was was likely a concussion and excess blood loss, rage and grief was his only driving force as he spoke.
“Would you even die?” He questioned, his taunting turning desperate, like a child facing something too great for their mind to comprehend.
“Is there even a windpipe here to crush? Or is your breathing replaced completely by the fans?” He wondered aloud, only now recognizing the true nature of the scene.
Viktor could fight. How awful.
He had not been dealt a fatal blow, nor sustained any great damage, but he lay perfectly still, even the hexclaw powered down and laid demurely against the gravel. These observations only spurred him on though, a great rage bursted from his chest as he roared, ”Maybe I should chop your damn head off. Hide your body somewhere you can’t find and let you bleed fucking motor oil into the earth till what’s left of your flesh rots!”
He was frantic now, his whole body had followed his hands suit, quivering like a tree under a non-existant breeze. Viktor, damn him, was still silent, always fucking silent when all he really wanted was to scream until his lungs gave out on him.
A steady torrent of blood marked up the flawless expanse of emotionless steel, and god wasn’t that something? Blood, worthless, puny blood against the unwavering expanse of perfection? Mortality paling against the face of something that would long outlast him and his worthless rotting body, and Viktor was right wasnt he? Was he ever truly wrong?
He laughed now, sharp and angry, tears joining the puddle of blood from where it pooled on his face. “Fight me, goddamnit!” it sounded pathetic to even his own ears, but he couldn’t dare tear his eyes away from the silver strands buried amongst a sea of soft hazelnut locks that caught the flickering light as they framed Viktor’s face like perfection.
Time had taken them both.
He tore a metal hand from where it lay in the dirt to bring to his own throat, twin stances and an equal exchange of power between the two of them, as it always should be, an balanced potential to destroy. A desperate attempt at equilibrium as his world spun and shattered under his palms, his mouth still flooded with the vodka he stole the night before, the one that always tasted like him.
He felt his own face contort something gruesome, and every inch of his body burned with all the things he could taste but not hold.
“I can’t do this forever,” his voice was a whisper now, airy and lost as his mangled thoughts.
“One of us has to win.”
The epiphany hit him all at once, at the same time he let go of the Machine Herald’s neck and Viktor’s palm cupped his jaw with something akin to reverence. Metal on flesh and pathetic lungs squeezed every drop of air in a desperate attempt to breathe, but no oxygen seemed enough as he sucked in lungful after lungful, hyperventilating as tears wiped the stain of blood nearly clean from the apathetic mask.
“Kill me.”
The command was simple, quiet, and worshipful in the darkness of the night, and for once he not one single doubt in his mind. He was twenty four years old again on the precipice of death, unwavering in his certainty. Only now it was sweet, to be taken by something that would live long past him, hell maybe even meet him when his time came, instead of meeting the smooth pavement of the ground below.
He crumbled like a leaf and wept as Viktor’s hand burned holes into his jaw, cold thumbs absently wiping tears from where they slipped from dull bloodshot eyes. Loss was a hole, not a transformation. Loss would’ve given him time to heal, to grow and live without him.
No, he mused, pulled to the metallic embrace of the man he loved so many years ago, cold and decidedly not uncaring, this wasn’t an absence. This was only a change, but he was never very good at emotions anyway.