Chapter Text
How many times does the world have to end for you to stop caring?
The question never really occurred to him, not once in all the years of chasing impossible dreams, forcing them to bend to their will until they came within reach, grasped with quick fingers, ready to be molded into something usable.
After all, they were scientists, not philosophers. Perhaps that’s where the fault lies.
Now it’s far too late for hypotheticals, but they’re not needed when the blatant evidence of their biggest mistake — Viktor’s biggest mistake — is right in front of him..
Force of habit and a dozen timelines hasn’t made it any easier for Viktor to watch the light leave Jayce’s lovely, lively face. It hardly matters that it’s not his Jayce, or that he has seen this exact scene play out a million times, delivered by his own hand with the kind of bitter irony that makes him have to look away after those fingers — his fingers — scar the soft skin permanently.
Jayce’s expression freezes over into a mask of reflexive surprise and shock, perhaps even pain, although he wouldn’t be able to tell if that’s the truth. Familiar as he’s been with pain, this particular affliction is one he cannot impose upon himself.
The first couple of times, he could only stand in horror, watching another version of himself make the same mistakes he did, oblivious to how much he would come to regret it. Now, his gaze is resigned, already expecting what he had hoped wouldn’t happen, and already preparing to accept the truth that only seems to be confirmed in each and every timeline he has taken careful watch over.
The weight on Viktor’s chest never gets any lighter, but be as it may, it would feel even more wrong to feel nothing at all. Pain and grief are far from his favorite companions, but they’re the only reminders of what separates him from becoming a pitless void of senseless consumption, a simple reflection of the magic that was infused into his body.
Even as Viktor cuts his connection to the other timeline, sparing one last glance to the ill-fortune that has overtaken them once again, he cannot bring himself to regret it.
If he were a philosopher, perhaps he would wonder if this is some kind of punishment from the universe, wondering if there was ever any point in attempting to defy fate and change destiny at all, or if he was just trapped in an unending cycle of pain to atone for all the suffering he inflicted, from the very first moment he came into the world, oblivious to anything other than the warm arms of his mother. If, perhaps, it would have been easier for everybody had he not survived his turbulent childhood, if his fragile constitution or the Grey had taken him before he had tried to build himself wings.
If that was something he could afford to think about, perhaps Viktor would consider that this isn’t a punishment toward him, but that he’s simply the hand fate had dealt the world, a vessel for the retribution the world deserved for getting too greedy in its pursuits.
But that would require to assume a modicum of conscience to a higher power that he simply cannot believe exists, not after everything he’s seen, after everything his own hands have done.
If there was such a being with the power to stop him, clearly they have no interest in interfering in the destruction of humanity.
And if that’s the case, they’re not worthy of any thoughts at all.
So no, Viktor is not a philosopher, nor does he wish to be.
What Viktor is, instead, is a scientist.
He has never stopped considering himself as one; his mistakes made him what he is, and while his ambitions weren’t exactly the issue, he cannot deny that it’s his drive that led him to this exact unfixable point.
His hunger for knowledge is what made him try to unearth all the secrets of the world and its inner workings in the first place. His curiosity is what led him to his first mentor’s tutelage. His desire for something better drove him away from the doctor and up all the way to Piltover. Every single step he has taken has been built by the very same brain that would become enamored with the idea of a scientist, that worked hard to become one until the opportunity to do what he had always dreamed landed on his lap in the most unexpected of days.
Quite the admirable story, some used to think, to come so far from the bottom to end up at the top. Except Viktor was never truly at the top, not when he still had the chance to do the right thing, at least, and once he took matters into his own hands? He was far away from the path of righteousness, too far to be able to look back and realize he had taken the wrong turn at least fifteen steps earlier.
But he still can look back and examine his missteps. See where the mistake lies and rewrite the equation until the problem has no other alternative but to give way. It’s dangerous to continue thinking that toying with forces that don’t come naturally to him still yields a chance for the outcome he desires, but alone in his pursuits, there’s nothing else he can do.
Viktor is a scientist, and scientists seek solutions to the problems that are set right in front of them, after all.
He takes a step back, his shaky breath lost to the gentle breeze that seldom disturbs the forceful peace that has settled over the landscape.
“That’s another failure,” he finally says, a touch of finality in his voice that no one but himself can read anything into.
But he’s not talking to himself, not really.
Even beyond salvation, after all the strife, and pain, and errors, Jayce is still here with him, at the end of it all.
Viktor doesn’t like entertaining any thoughts about what could have been, but had he done things differently, realized he was damning everybody in a foolish attempt to save them the pain, maybe things wouldn’t have been easier. At least easier than Jayce kneeling willingly, letting his own mind be overridden as if it was all the same to him.
He’s still there, at some capacity, but the helplessness that has been forced upon him makes any solace that that knowledge could bring to a halt.
It’s not kindness, it's cruelty.
And yet, Viktor is selfish enough to be grateful for his presence on days like this.
“No matter how far we go, how close we are to figuring it out, it seems like there’s no possible outcome in which both of us retain our senses to the end,” he continues, turning around and letting gravity take hold of him until he's gently leaning against the other's back; an useless attempt to feel like he’s still there, warm and alive, and a habit that he cannot get rid of, no matter how much he tells himself there’s no point to it. Some things simply supersede any attempt to override human nature. “Our partnership has turned out to be quite the catastrophe, hasn’t it?”
There’s no humor to the chuckle he lets out, and he doesn’t expect anything when he turns his head toward the other. Not a shared laugh, or a roll of the eyes, or even a reprimand. Jayce continues transfixed to the same spot, eternally keeping vigil over a dead city, just as he was in the moment he was transformed. Such a vivacious man, turned into nothing more than a badly preserved monument of the past.
It’s sheer stubbornness that has Viktor scooting over clumsily, way past the care that anybody could see him as anything other but dignified, until he can look at what’s left of the face that he misses everyday.
A face that only keeps the shape of its owner, but no longer any of the small details that Viktor entertained himself with watching whenever Jayce was too focused in their work to even notice.
The scar in his eyebrow is gone –which is hardly surprising, since he no longer has eyebrows–, the skin is smooth, only corroded by time, but not in the organic, natural way in which Jayce had gotten all the imperfections over it; the cut on his cheek from their first venture together, the faint wrinkles of stress and happiness that got more prominent whenever they had spent more than a week holed up at the lab, racing with time to finish the next step of their innovation before the Council could begin to think they were incompetent enough to need further assistance and started nosing around where they were not wanted. No, this something else. Unnatural in its erasure. Artificial. All wrong.
Seeing the marks of time and effort, even feeling the callouses on Jayce’s hands whenever he got a little too confident in his affectionate gestures, always made Viktor feel more motivated, like his very own balm to deal with the scrutiny the Council had over their work. It made them one and the same.
They might've had the sponsorship of the people in Piltover, but they were not like them; no soft hands or smooth skin in sight, for their preoccupation was never the vanity of the elite, but their work, real work that they were going to use to help people, and make the world a better place, just like they had decided the very first day they became partners.
Both used to work with such zeal, as protective of their projects as parents over their newborn child. So much so, that remembering how quick Jayce had been to extend his dream to him, with welcoming arms and an even more welcoming heart, always made warmth burst in his chest.
All of that is gone now, at least when it comes to the man who had become the signifier for the grandeur of the city. It would almost seem fair, if Viktor didn’t know that beyond the ‘Man of Progress’, Jayce was simply a man who tried too hard to make things better for anybody who crossed his path.
And now, all the marks of his successes and his mistakes, everything that made him him in the same way Viktor’s triumphs and failures make him who he is, are gone, and their disappearance makes him feel like someone has carved a hollow cavity in the middle of his chest.
The only thing that remains is a pair of opaque pupils that seem to follow Viktor’s every movement as he settles himself in front of Jayce, kneeling down in front of him as if that would ever be enough penitence for what he’s done to him. Viktor knows better, of course, and while he has seen more than his fair share of extraordinary events in his lifespan, more than anybody should perhaps be able to witness, his desire for something of Jayce to remain intact is strong enough for him to recognize that the other keeping any semblance of control in the state he’s in is merely wishful thinking.
He sighs, putting his hands over Jayce’s, as if it was that what was keeping his grip anchored on the hammer between them and not the state he was in, frozen in time.
“I’m sorry, Jayce. For everything.”
It’s far from the first time he’s said it, but no matter how much he tells himself it’s useless, as he doesn’t expect any forgiveness to come, nor could it happen anyway since Jayce is little more than a husk of what he used to be, the words find their way to his lips once more.
“I do not regret saving you, neither of the times I did, and it was not my intention to take your life back as payment.” Not like this, certainly, although he had been wistful enough once to wish that Jayce would devote his life to him, in a very different context. “There are no apologies I can give you that express how much I regret doing this to you, and you shouldn’t have to be stuck here hearing me offer them even so.”
His apology rings as empty as any cognition he desperately seeks in the other’s eyes. It’s painfully easy to mirror your own emotions onto other beings and things when you have nothing else but yourself to keep you company, he knows that well. He remembers setting a small mechanical boat upon the water, watching it with excitement and pride and thinking it as eager to sail as Viktor was to see him do so, with the amount of naive attachment only a child could muster.
He can read melancholy in the cold rain of Piltover, or apathy in the frozen seas at the shore, regret on the rubble surrounding the Hexgates, hope in the flowers growing at the top, and longing in the vacant eyes of his partner, but in the end that’s yet another of humanity’s more enduring characteristics, not a reflection of reality.
There’s hardly any life left to give in Jayce, and all that he has, he’s still giving to Viktor unwillingly.
“I know you think Hextech was a mistake. I don’t necessarily disagree, we were too hasty in playing with forces way beyond our realm,” it sounds far too much like the lectures the professor used to give them, and perhaps that has its own kind of sense. Age is supposed to come with a certain wisdom, though Viktor hardly feels any wiser than the day he thought he wouldn’t be seeing himself ever turn gray, “but I have tried, Jayce, I really have, and I don’t think there’s anything in this world that could keep you from trying to achieve the impossible.”
He can almost see it, if he closes his eyes, the echo of a little boy with stars in his eyes, already dreaming of saving the world even while frost clings to his clothes and death trails at his heels, the fear dancing inside of his veins with the newly excited pumping of his heart. Innocence and brilliance, ready to morph into obsession, one with a dangerous edge that even now Viktor cannot help but feel charmed by.
Soon he will have to depart and try again.
“I’m not blaming you,” he clarifies, using his fingers to caress the metal as he closes his eyes so the rough texture beneath his fingers can become a mimic of the sooth covering Jayce’s hands when he came back from the forge, rather than the rust that crawls over his limbs threatening to turn him into nothing more but a bunch of scrapped pieces. “You could never help that brilliant mind of yours, or that heart bigger than even you could handle. No, the fault doesn’t lie on you.”
And though he isn’t a philosopher, even he knows that trying to create a different outcome by the same means is a labor of madness, not of love, even if it’s the depth of his feelings what always keeps him from ignoring the call of that little frightened boy in the snow.
But that’s not the only part of the equation that he can change, and it’s long overdue that he accepts that his sentimentality has been the source of his frustrations.
“Something has to change. I have to let you go,” almost as if denying his own words, his fingers tighten ever so slightly over the other’s. “I don’t regret saving you, and I never will, but there’s nothing I can offer you that will not end up poisoning you in the end. Perhaps it would have been better if we had never crossed paths.”
He allows himself a moment to rest his forehead on Jayce’s. Not a goodbye, not for them, but a plea for forgiveness.
He knows the lengths Jayce would go to avoid letting him go, he’s as intimately aware of them as his own refusal to relinquish the other to the cold arms of death, and so he has the feeling that if the other was able to say anything, he would be refuting Viktor’s words with the kind of vehemence that made him conjure his image at night until there was nothing left upon his mind but the passionate force that was Jayce Talis.
When he opens his eyes, slowly separating himself from the other, he almost thinks he sees an edge of frustration in the otherwise immutable face. But that’s of course, also part of his perpetual wishful thinking.
“I have to make things right this time. I’ll let you go, maybe then you will be able to live the kind of life you always deserved, without me weighing you down every step of the way.”
If all Viktor can do now is destroy and take, he can take himself out of the equation so that Jayce never has to feel the kind of pain that brings a man to his knees, completely devoid of any reasons to fear their own destruction.
No need to make himself a liability in Jayce’s life, get him to care about him just to rip himself away and make him sink into desperation. If he was never there in the first place, won’t that solve many problems along the way?
Perhaps they will never crack Hextech together, but they’ll accomplish their goal to help those who need it far better if they never do. Separated, like perhaps they should have been from the beginning.
His new resolution means getting Jayce to give up on his dream without giving up on hope, the image of a man hanging on by a metaphorical thread while standing at the edge of a very literal precipice haunting his worst nightmares even after so many years, but they’ll cross that bridge when they get to it.
This time for good.
He stands up, not bothering to brush down the discolored cloak as he sends another sad look in the other’s direction, their eyes no longer making contact now that Viktor has raised higher without him once more.
His eyes wash over the familiar figure, each nook on the rusted metal as familiar as sparkling amber eyes. There is no need to memorize him when he intends not to leave him, but to provide another like him a second chance yet again, and yet turning away from him to leave isn’t easy, not even after having done so many times before. But that has always been his fatal flaw since the very moment they met; his inability to turn a blind eye to the incendiary force that is Jayce Talis.
There is no ritual for the moment he lets the arcane surge through his veins until it bursts from his fingertips, one second he’s standing on the top of his shrine of solitude, and the next he’s surrounded by the very energy he has been given keepership of.
In the last seconds before his body warps into another world, he makes sure to keep his eyes on the sorrowful figure in front of him.
“I know I said I’d let you go, and I promise that is still my intent,” he himself isn’t sure of how he will manage to make that happen when he has witnessed countless versions of them gravitate towards each other as if their encounter was defined by the forces of the universe instead of the meddling of a man who has nothing left to lose is still a puzzle, but he has time to figure that out. These days, he has nothing else but time. “But there are some sacrifices that I simply cannot make.”
He doesn’t ask for forgiveness. He knows Jayce would do the same, if he was in his position. Perhaps there’s a certain irony in him trying to avoid a cataclysmic outcome by keeping Jayce from ever having to make the choice of breaking the rules of the universe in his refusal to let him go, when he can’t make that resolution himself, but with Jayce’s voice all but stolen to time and power, there’s no one left but his conscience to point that out.
It takes a blink for the ruined landscape of Piltover to disappear beneath his eyelids, and when he opens them again, the strength of the wind is such that he has to remind himself to hold on tightly to his staff, lest the thick snow keeps him from reaching his goal.
It wouldn’t be completely inaccurate to say that it’s muscle memory that brings him here, but with magic involved, it feels at times more like a premonition that makes him land in the exact point in space and time in which he’s needed.
As always, he hears him before he sees him.
“Help! Someone, please, help us!”
Even if he had wanted to, how could someone ignore such a plea, when it comes in the heartbreakingly high voice of a desperate child? And how could Viktor, when the mere insinuation of his presence makes him keep his breath held behind his teeth, for far less practical reasons than covering himself from the frigid wind?
He can already see him, like an afterimage in his pupils or like the remnants of a dream. A child covered in winter gear –not completely unprepared, but not ready to face the howling of a blizzard–, clinging to the prone body of his mother, and asking for help with a voice that doesn’t shake despite the fear or the cold.
It’s a beginning… or an end, if he were to stop walking now and watch until there’s nothing left from mother and son than ‘what could be’s and the echoes of a tragedy.
But Viktor already knows that he’s a weak man, when it comes to Jayce.
He raises a hand, the ink over his skin catalyzing his power into a swirl of azure lines that keep their stability far better than the anomaly does –best not to risk any sort of harm to come to the child, or the woman that will always love her kid enough to gift him with one of her layers of clothing to keep him warm–, and then he lets it burst against the ground they stand on, until gravity itself tears apart and the weave of time and space allows them to move freely to their fated destination.
The fields are a familiar place. Not in the sense of a home, like he once had; he has never stayed long enough to grow tired of the flowers in full bloom, or the single butterfly that Jayce opens his eyes to, full of the kind of fascination and wonder befitting of a child his age, washing away the last currents of heartbreak visible in the tears that he blinks away.
Viktor doesn’t smile, although there’s no shortage of warmth inside his chest at the sight. Allowing himself to drown in sentimentalities is a bad idea when he must leave soon. This amount of tampering alone is already dangerous, and if he wants to change anything, he’ll have to keep an eye on this timeline, so it’s better if he doesn’t stay long enough now to make his presence an hostile element to the very fabric of this world.
He waits until Jayce looks back at him, thankfulness and amazement competing with the innocence in his eyes, and then he hums softly –low enough that he’s sure that the child won’t hear, or if he does, he won’t recognize the fading memory in the voice of his future partner. The one he will never get to meet this time if Viktor has his way.
It could end here. He’s past beyond the point of thinking that this encounter will not mark the boy for the rest of his life, setting him on a path to pursue the forbidden until it destroys him. Viktor doesn't have to aid him on the way, giving him a crystal that will fuel his obsession and hurry his progress. But would Jayce give up, if he has no way of figuring out even the most rudimentary principles of magic?
The answer is in his tongue before he has even finished formulating the question.
No, of course that wouldn’t stop him. Seldom anything would stop Jayce when he has his heart set on a goal, and by saving his life –the life of a person who will grow up desperate to show his radiance to the world, to be the hands that bring salvation to others, to never again have to face the helplessness that required bending the forces of the world to undo–, he has done something he cannot take back.
Jayce will chase the dream already taking shape in his golden eyes until he conquers it or it kills him.
And it will kill him first, if he has no way to prove to even himself that what he lived was real. When there is no comfort to take into an old stone gifted out of some desperate sense and need of connection, one that will not be strange to the child in years to come, as he grows into an scholar with an empty wrist and an aching chest. Viktor can feel Ximena’s eyes on him, on them, on her child standing in front of a stranger while she lays on the ground, her fingers stiff and numb and unable to reach out to him to bring him back from the sky he’ll try to reach.
But he’s saved their life. And no matter how much sense is there in the woman’s head, he knows well that it will not be enough to dissuade Jayce when his own mother can’t bear to deceive him and tell him that it was all part of an overactive imagination.
What's done is done.
With a sigh that's lost to the winds, Viktor makes his choice and releases one of the stones tied to his bracelets, grasping it with quick fingers before gravity has the chance to take a hold over it, and extends it with a slow hand towards Jayce and his eyes full of wonder.
Resolve.
He stays long enough to see Jayce admire the stone; he's no doubt unable to feel the slight warmth emanating out of it with the fabric of his gloves in the way, and yet Viktor can see the sparkles shining in his eyes, a million possibilities forming behind his eyes, and a hundred pathways converging in one as his future is set in the same direction.
Resolve is what this child will need to try to make his dreams come true, and what he will need not to crumble once it's clear that said dreams are out of reach.
Resolve is what Viktor doesn't have, because if he did, he wouldn't have given Jayce an impossible goal to dedicate his life to. He wouldn't be, in the deepest part of his mind, glad that they get to be tethered to one another in that way, even while knowing that if he allows Jayce's interest to take its root in magic, it will bloom into an obsession that could take his life.
It's the coward's way out, but Viktor figures he can take care of that when the time comes.
Stepping back into his own timeline isn't a homecoming either, but it's comfortable in its familiarity. At least, when he doesn't focus on the feeling of guilt making his limbs feel heavier as he closes the portal behind him, leaving the comfortable fields full of life behind and hearing the soft thump of his staff on the overgrown moss. It's marginally better than the loud clang of metal, when he first took watch on top of the Hexgates, although it does make the place terribly quiet.
But as he feels a current of magic ripping its way across the dead lands of the Runeterra he inhabits, making him stumble slightly on his feet, he figures it's not quiet enough for Viktor not to project some of his guilt on Jayce.
There are many things about the arcane that he still doesn't understand; the effect that his power, able to reach through the thin sheet separating each timeline from one another, is just one of them, but it doesn't get any less disconcerting every time it happens.
It's not something alive, not in the conventional sense of the world anyway, he knows that. He's far past the first time in which he thought that feeling was recognition of another, perhaps another mage who had survive his unintentional carnage and who was responding in their own way, reshaping the ruin into something different. He had thought that, perhaps, there was someone alive waiting to meet him, to offer deliverance or reprisal.
But if that had been the case, and powerful magic were enough to repel the effects of his own, then Mel Medarda wouldn't have ended up as one of the million shapeless figures down in the city.
Perhaps it's for the best that the only thing that ever responds to his calls is the world itself; he cannot harm that which do not exists. Solitude is his only retribution after everything he's done, and it has to be enough.
But even though he knows that there's not a single soul around to judge him, no eyes to stare him down until he has to give in and admit to his shortcomings,he finds himself avoiding Jayce's silent glare anyway, focusing instead on a caterpillar slowly climbing on the crescent yellow buds surrounding the statue's final resting place. He hums softly, how long has it been there?
He steps closer, reaching out a hand for it to climb onto, and admiring with hitched breath and built patience the slow tickle over his palm as the little creature follows its guide destination.
It's not impressive, not in the big scheme of things, at least, and certainly not compared to the task he has just completed. But it matters. And the fact that Viktor can acknowledge that to himself, raising his hand toward his eyes to take a closer look, feels to him like an omen that he's doing the right thing this time.
One final time.