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The silence of Piltover's blasted-out husk was only ever broken by horrors. Viktor turned one way, and Jayce was stumbling through the snow, screaming for help, looking up at him with wonder while Viktor wrote his doom. When he turned back, Jayce was stumbling again, collapsing before himself, looking up at him with awe while Viktor demanded impossibilities. The constant was Jayce's suffering, beginning and end, and Viktor at the centre, guiding the ouroboros' teeth back to its tail.
There had been so many cycles. Viktor liked to delude himself into thinking there had been too many to count, but he knew and remembered them all: Jayce who'd barely met him, Jayce who'd lost him already, Jayce who'd been exiled to Zaun and died of withdrawals in the ravine, so many Jayces dying in the ravine, Jayce who went to his knees at the commune, Jayce who tried to kill him here — and the boys in the snow, wide-eyed and overflowing with gratitude, upon whom Viktor laid the fate of the world. Piltover's ruin crackled with arcanic fluctuations and echoed with screams Viktor forced himself to ignore, or it was quiet, and Viktor waited.
"They only get close when it's hard for them." Viktor had sat himself before his Jayce some hours — days? — ago, bent close over his knees with his hood drawn up, shutting out the world aside from Jayce's craggy, blooming face. "This one's taken forever to come here. It's a good sign, isn't it? He'll have seen how I changed. He'll know what's at stake."
Wind from the north.
"What is it that makes the difference, do you think? I would have thought a lack of connection might help, but those ones never even get close. I don't want this to be more painful than it has to be, but —"
Somewhere, the scrape of tectonic plates.
"No, it's something in the partnership. The relationship matters more than the physical capability or mental stability. The last one that made it as far as killing me at the commune — he'd already had to watch me die in the hospital. He brought me back, but do you remember what a shell he'd become by then?"
A hand reaching out, brushing debris off of stone eyes.
"Nothing wrong with being a shell, of course. I'm very fond of yours."
Viktor huddled back into himself, frowning slowly, and was quiet for some time — years? — until the crack-thud of an anomaly lashed the atmosphere.
"It has to kill him," he said softly, his head bent a fraction of an inch towards some other Jayce's nascent terror. "And he has to do it anyway. That's the only way this ends, isn't it? He has to love me enough to stop me."
His followers were waking, tracking movement, lighting Jayce's path as he wound towards the fissure in the earth, and Viktor took his Jayce's face in both hands, leaning in to press his forehead to the half-crumbled surface of his partner's. They did better with shepherding. He would have to nudge him soon, once revelation had set in and he'd started to panic.
"I'll be back. We'll wait for him together."
Viktor rose, picked up his staff and shook dust from its surface, turning to face the next in line.