Chapter Text
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VIKTOR
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I was disintegrating. It was a relief.
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“Allergies.” I coughed as if my lung had flipped inside out and was trying to crawl out of my mouth.
Jayce put a hand on my shoulder as I shook. “It snowed yesterday.”
I considered pulling away, but he was making small circles on my back, and it felt nice. My body was doing its business trying to kill me. My mind was seized by the constriction in my chest, the wet rattle that kept catching, and sending me into, eyes watering, trying to stop, doubled over, the calculation on line five was wrong. My ribs, it felt like my ribs, but I knew it was my lungs, cramping like an elastic snapping back at me whenever I tried to take too deep a gasp.
It subsided. I felt stupid, because I wasn’t dying. Not at this moment. Wiping my nose with the back of my wrist, I asked, “Snow?”
Jayce wheeled his stool so he was in front of me. “Allergies?”
I squinted.
“In winter?” he prompted.
There was blood on my wrist. I pushed my hand to my nose again, careful to keep my panic inside. “It’s not pollen.” I wiped my hand on my pants without looking. If I didn’t look, maybe Jayce wouldn’t. “Spores, uh, eh, dust.”
“Do we need to have the lab cleaned?”
“No,” I murmured, looking at the chalkboard, forgetting what I had just said.
Jayce shimmied so he blocked my eye-line to the board. “Your allergies?”
I looked at him blankly.
He was watching me with his chin tilted down, eyebrows up. Reproach. “Viktor?”
I pushed myself so I was standing. “Line five.” Distract him with math.
Jayce followed me, squinting. “No.”
On the chalkboard he was calculating the Hexgate rotation, the numbers larger and messier when he was confident. “Angular velocity?” The latest row was very neat.
“Radians per second,” he confirmed, sounding exhausted.
We were both silent.
Drawing a square in the bottom corner of the board, he began to double check. The chalk made a shushing tap-tap against the slate.
My thumb absently rubbed the calluses on my palm. I looked at my own workstation. Nearly finished prototypes. My notes in a stack. Reference books for runes, neurobiology, anatomy, physics, a mystery novel: alphabetical, untouched. “I took your notebooks home. Last night.”
The tap-tap paused. “But you’ve been working on your Hexclaw.”
“Well,” I said, my voice creeping up.
Jayce smiled. I could hear it more than see it. “Are you stuck?”
“No.” My voice was very high now.
“No,” he echoed.
“The fine motor control is not there,” I said. “You are still signing every page of your journals, for your fans?”
He spoke over me. “It’s my work. Of course I’m putting my name on it.” The chalk began tapping again. “Does it need fine motor control? It’s a tool.”
“Was line five incorrect?” His back was to me, hiding his math.
Jayce Talis crossed his arms at the finished equation.
I crouched to get his notebooks from my bag, mostly balancing on my good leg, two hands on my crutch. “Did you get 5789.78 radians?”
“Yes,” he said, resigned. “I’ll have to redo the RPM as well.” Turned to me, “You’ve already checked it?”
I grunted. “Last night, but I wanted to see if you got the same thing.” I fished out the journals, throwing them up on the desk one at a time.
Jayce’s attention was on me now. Calculating. Recalculating? “Are there any other mistakes?” he asked. He had squared his shoulders, large shoulders, as if he needed to make himself bigger.
The sun was going down over Piltover. I could see the other Academy buildings clustered through our arched windows. The light slanted, catching motes, and carving the side of Jayce’s face. He blinked, but didn’t look away from me.
“No,” I said at last. “I didn’t see any other mistakes.”
He exhaled. Then touched my shoulder. “You scared me. Do you need help?”
“No.” One leg pushing, hand over hand on my crutch, “Not pretty,” I said, standing again. “But I get around.”
“No, it’s not, you’re,” Jayce ran his hand through his hair. “You’re graceful.”
“Economic,” I corrected.
His lips parted, halfway to a thought.
I felt the need to talk quickly. “No errors in the mathematics, but I have, ah, concerns.”
“Mmm?”
I pointed to Jayce’s Hexgate drafting on the chalkboard. “Five thousand radians per second. Fast, the torque, it won’t look like it’s moving, but if a screw were to,” I grimaced. “Come loose.”
“I know,” he said. I could tell he had a lot to say on the subject.
I raised a hand. “I leave the engineering to you. Just a note. But also.”
Jayce groaned.
I liked the sound. “Also, hmm, are you eating that sandwich?”
“Huh?” He spun.
“It’s been there for, I think, days, Jayce. The only correct answer is no.” I walked to his workstation. I held up the sandwich. “This is an airship.”
He swayed back on his stool, a little excited to see a show.
“This textbook is a mountain.” I stood it upright on his desk. “You’ve programmed, or designed the runes to give the airships instructions. A starting point, Hexgate A. To an endpoint, Hexgate B.” Two of Jayce’s unfinished cups of coffee. “And the rune you’ve augmented is an acceleration rune.”
Jayce nodded along.
“Do you observe the mountain?” I asked.
“I can see that you are smashing my sandwich into the textbook,” he said. “Hey, hey, alright, can you stop?”
I wiped breadcrumbs off my fingers. “How are the airships going to pass through obstacles between gates?”
Jayce was sitting facing the window. My shadow cut into his chest. “I don’t know,” he said, voice soft. “But the math checks out.”
“Line five did not.”
“Viktor,” he leaned into my name. “It just works.”
“You need to know how.” I pressed my palm into my forehead. “I’m going to sound like the professor. But we have to, we have to know. We can’t take risks that big. Not with people.”
Jayce pushed his stool so he was close. He reached out, folding my fingers into his. “Help me.” Glancing down at my hands, contemplating, he lingered on the smear on my wrist. “You’re bleeding?”
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Jayce’s hand was on the back of my neck. I held his forearm, held him, we were spinning. The acceleration rune burned like frostbite in my palm, his palm, us. My soul was disintegrating from the speed, maybe the rune. Part of me was still in the Machine Herald body, it’s godlike awareness cradling me, holding, telling, calculating for me. 4589.79 radians per second.
My spine had snapped before. The feeling: the drop when you misstep, loss of sensation. I had died, terror, release. More than once. Jayce’s hammer cauterizing the hole in my chest as it ripped through metal, nerves, pain sensors, organics. This. My illness had never killed me, but should have, should have prepared me, if anyone. If anyone, I should be better at closing my eyes. Jayce’s forehead pressed into mine, and I could sense, or feel, maybe it was an emotion: the fingerprints I had left on him. The shape of my fingerprints on his forehead, scarred there.
It was an animal instinct in my gut, like bile running up my throat: survive. I couldn’t say I wanted to live. That wouldn’t be fair. 5276.46 radians. It’s just parts of me couldn’t lie down. Like a groove that had been carved over and over: I couldn’t do anything else. Survive. 5562.89.
I had given Jayce the acceleration rune, over and over. This timeline, others. Since he was a child, I had been leading him here. It was disgusting.
5789.78 and the gate opened.
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I put objects into the cardboard box. Recent lecture notes, quick scribbles; and older lecture notes, painstakingly copied until I had memorized them. A paper I had written as a student, with Heimerdinger’s note at the top: fantastic job, my boy! Presents from students, a gift card from Sky never used, a laser pointer from Jayce when I became a full professor.
My back-brace prototype worried against my ribs, as it had been doing all day. The pads needed adjusting. I grit my teeth. The skin on my back was raw; even with padding, Cold slickness when the brace moved. I hadn’t tested the needles. It would sound terrible to investors: no one wanted needles in their spine. But the final version, the device would dispense local stimulants and pain suppressants, controlled at first by the subject. Then, with Hextech and runic learning, the chemicals would be injected automatically. If I did it right, the brace wouldn’t just assist the subject, it would improve him. I hefted the cardboard box, shoving it under one arm. Everything fit.
Jayce was in the doorway.
“Oh,” I said. “You never come here.”
He ran his hand over the doorframe. “Here, downstairs?”
“It’s a large building,” I wasn’t used to seeing him outside the lab. Clean-shaven, making the corridors look small, his white jacket glowing in the low light. “You’re not missing anything. Probably all the same professors since you were a student,” I said.
“Except,” he gestured to me. “I would have showed up to your classes.”
“Please,” I scoffed.
He hesitated, shifting his weight, reading me. “Can we talk?” he asked.
Frowning, I slid the box back on my desk. “Sure.”
He held onto door for a moment, then closed it.
“Please,” I nodded towards the chair across from my desk. It was hard not to treat him like one of my students while in my office.
Jayce spun the chair so he was sitting on it backwards, arms hugging the backrest.
“And what can I help you with today?” I asked, eyebrow inching up.
His palm made circles on the backrest, catching himself, he looked at me. “Have you looked at the accounts recently?”
“Hmm.” I bit my lip.
He was trying to read the tension in my face, my body. “There’s an amount missing. Over months.”
“I didn’t realize you went over accounting yourself,” I said. “You have time for that?” There was a rip in the arm of my chair, and my fingers toyed with the stuffing.
“You’ve quit your job. I’ve seen your apartment,” Jayce began.
“I’ve quit to spend more time with you. At the lab. And when have you been to my apartment?” I was leaning forward. My voice sounded louder, echo-y, in the bare room.
“After the Distinguished Innovators Competition,” he said softly. “The party, and then we had a drink.”
There was one small window. It looked out to a brick wall in an interior courtyard, but I stared at it anyway. “What are you saying?” I looked back to him, feeling suffocated with the door closed.
“Do you need money?” He sounded gentle. “You could ask me.”
“It’s not personal,” I said. I exhaled. “I didn’t take it for personal use.”
Jayce gripped the backrest. “You did take it.”
“Isn’t that your accusation?”
His hand covered his face. “You were supposed to tell me you didn’t do it, and then I was going to take you out to celebrate your last day. Fuck, Viktor. Really?”
I frowned. “It would have taken too long to get the brace approved for funding. It was interfering with my work. We have more than enough, so much money for Hextech.”
He was standing. The chair tipped over, and he was righting it clumsily. “We could just be paid more. Why didn’t you ask for a raise?”
“It didn’t seem worth it,” I said.
“What do you mean?” The office was too small to pace, and he kept bumping into my desk.
Leaning back, I watched him. “I wasn’t going to beg.”
“You deserve to be paid. I could have given you the money, a gift, or a loan. What brace?”
“Spinal augmentation.”
Jayce licked his lips, finally giving up on pacing. “For you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you mean it was interfering with your work? The Hexgate question, we’re almost done. You did the work on the, you created the new space-time dimension for the Hexgates to bypass obstacles. I couldn’t have done that.”
I sighed. “I didn’t create it.”
He waved his hand. “It was already in the math, and the runes. Sorry, I know. You’ve told me. You found it.”
“I found it,” I repeated. “It was already there, in your calculations, waiting to be found. I just did the additional proofs.”
Jayce’s hand curled into a loose fist, raising it, he rested his hand against the wall. “You’re the best inventor I know. No one thinks like you. I can’t believe you stole that money. Please, look more upset.”
“I should look more upset?” I asked.
“Yes, we could lose our funding.”
I shrugged. “We won’t lose our funding. Piltover needs Hextech.”
“We’re not invulnerable,” he hissed.
I blinked slowly. “I’ll resign.”
“No, you won’t.” He pressed his fist harder into the wall.
I raised my eyebrows. “I can’t?”
“No, you won’t. I don’t know. Don’t. Don’t resign.”
I gathered myself, no longer slouching back. My brace dragging against my skin, I winced. “If you want to tell the investors, tell them. But, let me pitch the brace when you do.”
His fist slid down the wall. “You’re wearing it.”
“Mmm,” I said, my face tight.
“What version are you on?”
“Three point two. Third full-size prototype.”
“I know how the numbering works. Show me.”
Sometime during the experiments, the prototypes, I had stopped being so self-aware of my body. I didn’t look like Jayce, but I was only a subject, to be improved upon. To test inventions with. I tugged off my cravat. The buttons on my waistcoat. Then, the buttons on my shirt. Jayce watched, the window silhouetting him, his expression hard to read.
Tucking my crutch under my arm, I stood, walking to Jayce’s side of the desk.
He sucked air through his teeth.
“The fit is wrong,” I preempted him. Turning, so he could see my back, brass armatures ran up my spine, pins at every vertebrae, raised and sheathed. I fumbled behind me until I felt one of the needles. “These would deploy, and anchor, so the device would have an exact fit, no friction on the skin.” I stared at my cleared desk, the box in the corner.
Jayce was silent behind me.
Head down, I spoke to the woodgrain, “I have been taking pain medication, but the side effects have been too, uh,” closing my eyes. “Eh, costly. Localized injectors, the medication directly into,” I made a looping motion with my right hand. “Would work better.”
“How long have you been in pain?” Jayce’s voice sounded raw.
I laughed once and turned, leaning back against the table. “Forever, Jayce.”
He looked incredulous.
“At times it’s worse, at times, it’s more like, my brain has filtered it out,” I said, because he looked so sad. My chest tightened. “I’m fixing it.”
He reached out to touch the front of the brace, his finger hooking under the padding, looking at what it had done to my skin.
I inhaled involuntarily.
“Sorry.” He stepped back. “How long have you been wearing it?”
“Four days.”
“Continuously?”
I nodded.
His brow creased. “You’re still on pain meds?” One hand extended, palm cupped. “May I?” he asked.
I nodded again, afraid to interrupt, say something incorrect.
He bent, tracing the construction with his gaze. “Turn.”
Turning, back to him again, listening to his breathing. Waiting, waiting, he was tapping so lightly on the various joints, maybe checking the welds. I swallowed. “What do you think?”
Straightening, he scooted himself so he was sitting on my desk, legs swinging. I had a knee-jerk reaction to tell him to get off. “The investors won’t, unless it has a more,” he trailed off.
“I know,” I said.
“Maybe if it was more enhancement than correctional. Something for the miners?”
“That’s not who it’s for.”
“I know,” he repeated, pulling my cardboard box towards him, one hand thumbing the edge.
I cleared my throat. “When were you thinking of telling them, the investors? That I stole, the, mmm?”
Jayce opened his mouth.
I interrupted, “Because, now that someone knows that I’m working on this. You could, help me. With the deployment.”
He had taken out the laser pointer, clicking it on and off. “Deployment?”
“I can stop taking medication, and the friction issue can be resolved.” Sitting on the chair Jayce had vacated, backwards like he had. “If the needles are deployed.”
“You want me to do it?” Jayce’s legs stopped swinging.
“Yes.”
“Not a doctor?” He gripped the laser pointer, knuckles blanching.
“What doctor would risk their license on experimental technology?”
He was nodding absently, expression dull horror. He put the pointer carefully back in its box. “I’m not going to tell anyone about the money.”
“You can tell them. This isn’t about the expenses.”
Jayce looked at me, very still now. “I can’t do that to you.”
“Please. Who else?”
One hand gripping the edge of the desk, he leaned back and groaned at the ceiling. “Fuck. Would it hurt?”
“Of course.” I waved my hand. “Always. The price of progress.”
“You have anything for the pain?” Look of reproach.
“In the lab. Topical cream.”
Jayce rubbed his forehead. “Not here.” Pushing himself off the desk, he picked up my cardboard box. “Tonight. Then, you’ll let me be your investor, for the brace.”
I stared at him, suppressing a shiver.
He tossed me my clothes one-handed. “I pay back the funds.”
I caught my shirt.
He threw the waistcoat. “I settle the books.”
Still fumbling with the buttons of my shirt, I let the waistcoat hit the chair.
Jayce picked it up. “Then, you’re my partner, you tell me. You tell me stuff like this. I don’t just find out.”
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NOW
There was no Hexgate B. I thought of the coffee cups, the textbook, sandwich, years ago. The Machine Herald, it’s body me and not-me, was telling me, showing me, so gently, like to a child: Jayce and I had created Hexgate A, by the speed of the rotation of our souls, and the acceleration rune. Sloppily, we had created it. Messy. The Herald didn’t love imperfections, because it was a perfect being. I understood its frustration.
It also tilted my vision, my knowing, again, as if I was teaching one of my students something they should have mastered in first year. There was no Hexgate B. No opposite rune to reverse our acceleration. I tried to reason that friction, air, wind, our bodies would eventually stop. The Machine Herald could withstand this with its metal form. Speed, impact, fire. And the Herald was pleased, because it enjoyed the worship of its design.
But I was not pleased, because I was holding Jayce. And his beautiful, weak body could not withstand accelerating into and through another dimension just to stop only when friction, or gravity, or maybe even a mountain, demanded motion to cease.
The gate was open. Blue, electric, the feeling of seeing the stars the first night I left the Undercity.
If we were on an airship, normal passengers, going through a normal Hexgate, our consciousness would not register how many dimensions we slipped through to create a straight path from point A to B. But I wasn’t a normal passenger anymore. Good.
We were flying. I wished I could see Jayce, but I was holding him so tightly, protectively. Pressing his head into my chest, he smelled like gunpowder, smoke, and the fancy soap he used, vetiver, pine, lavender. I had made fun of him for it. Or, that’s what I thought, or the Herald told me. I couldn’t really smell anything. There were receptors instead.
The Herald needed to, at the moment of impact, harness the kinetic energy of our crash to quickly, discretely, rip a dimensional hole. Then we would grab Jayce a replacement for his body.
Before his soul knew he had died. Maybe he would never know.
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THEN
Sitting on the chair backwards, I understood why Jayce did it. It was a nice way to sit, I felt cocky, almost. I had taken off my shirt again, waiting for him. It was cold and dry in the lab. I flipped through one of my old Hexclaw notebooks as I waited.
Jayce shouldered open the door, holding a bag. “Whiskey,” he took it out. Clink, as he cheers-ed a pot of coffee on his desk. “Painkillers.” A syringe with a small clear bottle to draw from. The liquid was a scour yellow. “Antiseptic.” Alcohol with swabs.
“The topical cream will be sufficient.” The new chair-sitting posture was making me brave.
“Alright.” Jayce rubbed his hands together to warm them. The cream was cold and greasy. His fingers dabbed at my back.
We waited five minutes for it to start to tingle, the first sign of numbing. I tossed the notebook onto the floor. We both took a swig of whiskey. I watched his neck as he swallowed.
He pressed his fingertips together experimentally. “I should have worn gloves.”
“Mmm.” I pushed my forehead into the back of the chair. “Let’s get this over with.”
Jayce crushed the alcohol swab in his palm. “I’ve already messed up. I can barely feel my hands.”
“One,” I said. “Just one injector. Then I know if it works.”
“Why don’t we wait until morning?”
“Now, Jayce.” Cold antiseptic on my back. I closed my eyes. “In the ligament,” I said. “Not the muscle.”
He breathed out shakily.
“Press the button twice and the needle will come out. Redundancies. Easy.”
His thighs pressed against mine as he sat behind me. I could feel his muscles tense, then the needle went in.
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NOW
The dimensions peeled the metal of my body, fusing some of my smaller joints. Jayce might have been screaming, but I was trying to draw the Herald’s omniscient focus to anything but him. I didn’t want to know. I pressed his head closer to me. Vetiver, pine, lavender. No, just burning now.
The Hexclaw was whipping back and forth, trying to manipulate runes as we skipped through space-time. Then the heat increased. It was almost like pain. Almost like what heat used to feel like. But instead of feeling it, the Machine Herald told me, like reading me a story, and what I did feel was closer to weight, or grief.
There was a beach. Sand. It would crystallize on impact. The Herald told me our speed. It predicted the sound, heat, deformation the kinetic energy would cause when we landed. The joules released that we would steal to rip a portal. Then it told me to shush, which felt comforting, but what was left of my animal, organic mind shrieked: it wasn’t comforting, it wasn’t comforting at all.
Impact.
It went how the Arcane Herald anticipated, because the Herald was a perfect being, designed without flaw. Jayce’s body didn’t look human anymore, and I wished the Herald had not shown me that. Shielded me. Three of my fingers were sheered off trying to keep Jayce’s neck from snapping. It didn’t matter. I shouldn’t have bothered.
The Hexclaw was gathering energy before we landed. It spoke to the runes in the sand, the ocean, the energy from the fall, in its language. I could know what it was saying if I wanted to. I had tried before, but it was a lot of the natural things: air, wind, rocks calling the Hexclaw an imposter-butcher-traitor until the Hexclaw zapped them into submission. This time I let all the pieces of my being to do their jobs unobstructed. The portal tore open like a knife slicing a stomach.
I walked through, upright, strong, leaving Jayce’s husk in the sand.
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THEN
The needle hit bone. Sharp tap. I yelled through clenched teeth.
Jayce pressed the button twice, the pin withdrew.
“Painkillers,” I breathed, shoving my forehead hard into the back of the chair.
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NOW
The Arcane Herald stepped into the forge, the portal ringing me in blue. There was a man shaping a hammer, repairing it? Sweat plastering his hair. He had the right length, longer. Good.
Jayce turned. Other-Jayce. This dimension.
He had a beard too. Wearing similar clothes, black, short-sleeved, not exact, but maybe my Jayce wouldn’t notice. At least he had a shirt on. That was lucky. The Herald told me how much time I had.
Other-Jayce looked at me in shock, terror? His face crumpled into disgust. He heaved the hammer sideways off the table, swinging towards me. I slapped it into the ground mid-arc. Stepped on it, breaking the shaft.
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THEN
My partner handed me the syringe.
Hand shaking, the hypodermic needle swayed over the vein.
Taking it from me, he gripped my bicep, thumb pressing painfully hard.
I pumped my fist, trying to get the blood running.
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NOW
Took his neck. Muscled him to the ground, hitting the back of his knees so he crumpled. Pushed him to the concrete. My fingers reached over his scalp to his forehead, like I had touched Jayce, before. My fingerprints would be scarred here too.
“Viktor,” my name half-stuck in his throat, coming out in two choked syllables. He was wrestling his head up. Golden strings reached up out of the fingerprints. Finally. Distending my soul from my Machine body, I pushed my hand into his head, grabbed his spirit and twisted. Breaking it from his spine. The feeling of cracking an egg.
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THEN
The hypodermic needle bit into my arm. I stared at Jayce. In the cool lights of the lab, his eyes were closer to greenish-yellow than gold. Lips parted, so I could just see the gap between his front teeth.
Then I was looking at the ceiling. My eyes must have rolled up.
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NOW
Other-Jayce’s body was easy to carry for the Herald. Cradling him to my breast, sweat, vetiver, fear. I had kicked the soul into the forge.
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THEN
Painkillers blissed through my veins. This is what I hoped dying was like.
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NOW
I lay Jayce’s body in the sand. Pressed him into his new home. Then took the husk that was his old body, and began to drag it towards the tree-line.