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There is very little left of Viktor that Jayce remembers knowing.
Once, he had every crevice memorised - the spots where his skin was softest, the hiding place of every mole, the shallow divots of his hips. Jayce had committed himself to every single intricacy, understands to a frankly embarrassing degree the meanings of all the micro-expressions he used to fawn over, used to draw in his science journal and write down notes as if he were observing an experiment, and all of Viktor's little noises, too. He's far too familiar with the rasping coughs, how it feels to have his head pressed up against Viktor's chest whilst it happens and feel his ribs rattle beneath the thin veneer of skin, with how his accent plays havoc with harder consonants. Whilst he spent almost a decade dedicating himself to the research of Hex Tech, he also spent that time dedicating himself to the research of his partner.
But now, Viktor - no, the Machine Herald - is metal, foreign and impersonal, completely undecipherable with no margin for error. There are no charming imperfections to trace, nothing to discover except for the sparse gaps in the plating where the tangles of CNS wire can just be sighted, and the mystery he keeps under the mask. Honestly, it's not something he allows himself to think about all that often, unless it's very late at night and he's several bottles deep, whether or not the Machine Herald still has Viktor's face or something else entirely, if Jayce has forever lost access to those liquid golden irises, the cupids bow lips, sunken jawbones, except in his dreams. His hands, tricky and elegant and addictive, now click with clockwork whenever he makes a fist around Jayce's neck in a fight.
But there will always be - no matter what the Machine Herald claims, no matter what the Machine Herald wants - one inch of Jayce's Viktor that persists; his kindness; his almost self-destructive need to help others.
"Sheriff Kiramman, there are children present here!"
That is the first thing Jayce hears after the ringing from the explosion that decimated the outer wall of the laboratory has slipped away from his ears, a mechanical-tinged begging. In his periphery, through the fissure fog and falling rubble, Caitlyn's rifle snaps upwards, and with a kind of manic speed and utterly no concern for himself, Jayce takes one hand off of the handle of the Mercury Hammer and fastens his palm over the end of the barrel. She had burst into his flat not three hours ago with the paperwork, the proof, of where his nemesis had been hiding, and so it only felt right in the moment to let her follow him down to Zaun, into the deepest, most impoverished corner of the fissures, though now, as he squints against the clearing smoke, he wishes he'd come alone. Naked bulbs hang low from the ceiling, swaying gently side to side with the aftershocks, and silhouetted in their low light is the Machine Herald, sans the majority of his armour, absolutely doused in crimson, enough to slick most of his hair to the side of his mask, and one hand extended outwards in what Jayce feels all of a sudden sick to admit might be a plea for ceasefire. Clinging to his metal thigh, just as he'd promised, is a boy, no older than ten, similarly dirtied with blood, struggling to balance on what looks to be a very fresh prosthetic leg.
"What the fuck ..." She hisses beside him, tries once, twice, to wrench the end of the gun away from him, but Jayce refuses to relent, terrified in that moment by how unsure he was that she'd lower it.
"I repeat," the Machine Herald runs his ungloved - fuck - flesh hand reassuringly through the matted hair of the little boy, the familiar whirring of the Hex Claw over his shoulder fading neatly in and out of the background, synced with the cadence of the Herald's uneven breathing, "children are present. Lower the rifle, Kiramman."
"This is ..." She's gone dangerously pale, the finger positioned over the weapon's trigger twitching despite the barrier of Jayce's palm.
"A surgery."
"Experimentation!"
"A - now compromised - medical environment," he yells, gesturing with the Hex Claw to the equipment behind him, then levels those unnatural glowing eyes at Jayce, pinning him in place like an insect under a microscope. "Anything to say, Defender?"
"Gods, Caitlyn, put the fucking gun down," Jayce whispers, half-awed and half-horrified, and smacks the barrel away. She gawps at him, makes this indignant little gesture between himself and the Herald and the little boy, but he's too busy watching Viktor crouch down to the child's height, move the gaunt human hand with the bird-like bones from the boy's hair down to grab almost playfully at his cheek, and then to ghost lightly over where the new metal joins the leg at the knee, all without looking away from himself and Caitlyn once. He says something startlingly quick in that language of his, Jayce only managing to cling to a few familiar words - 'good'; 'safe' - before encouraging the boy to take a step.
He shuffles his new foot about an inch along the floor before stumbling. Caitlyn's rifle appears in Jayce's field of view at a truly inhuman speed, so much so that the only thing Jayce can think of in that short amount of time to prevent her from firing unnecessarily is to throw himself in front of it. Jayce looks over his shoulder to watch the Hex Claw snap out and catch the boy ever so gently by the scruff of his shirt before he comes anywhere close to hitting the floor. Another murmured reassurance echoes throughout the laboratory, followed by, "If you cannot be sensible with that thing, Sheriff Kiramman, I am going to have to ask you to leave."
"Ask me?" Caitlyn scoffs indignantly, tries to storm forwards as if Jayce wasn't standing in front of her. "You're going to 'ask me' to leave?"
Jayce grabs her by the shoulders, which does absolutely nothing to settle her, but he manages, after a moment of squirming, to catch her eye, and say in the most uncomfortable, defeated voice he can muster, "Cait ..."
"I'm about to hate what you're going to say, aren't I?"
"I think so, yeah." She wrestles herself away from him like she can't bare to touch him, like he's burning her, like he's contagious with something. Idiocy, maybe. She drags her hand down her face, pulls harshly on the loose bits of her hair, kicks a piece of rubble and sends it skittering far down the empty street.
"You're not going to bring him back. I know you, Jayce, you'd rather have him rampaging out here so you can come down to Zaun when you're feeling nostalgic and ... play with him instead of bringing him to justice. Any lives lost today, Jayce - they're on you." Caitlyn smacks him none too lightly in the chest with the barrel of her rifle. "And you're going to explain to any councillors who ask why this operation went wrong."
"Fine, sure." She looks like she wants to hit him. 'It's safer for you this way' he tries to say with his eyes, whilst also trying his best to avoid telling her 'it's safer for him this way, too'.
"I'll be ... I'll head to the bridge. If you take too long, I'm coming back to find you."
"Okay, good. Thank you, Cait. I'll be fine, I promise."
She absolutely does not believe him, but she leaves anyway, hands held high in the air and with one last, scathing look shot over Jayce's shoulder. It's kind of ridiculous, the way that he goes tense when the girl he all but grew up with finally leaves him alone with the man who breaks into his home and assaults him regularly on the streets; who has broken Jayce's bones and stolen some of his most valuable research; and who once, just once and unquestionably on accident, no doubt the result of some mechanical malfunction, turned off whatever modulator disguises his voice for half a second during a fight so Jayce got a snippet of his laugh unaltered, as it was before, leaving him solidly at the bottom of several empty bottles for a long week in the aftermath.
"I'm sorry about your wall, V," he says, stepping over the rubble and inside, if inside is still possible with the amount of damage he did. Some of the larger pieces of rubble are still sparking blue. He abandons the Mercury Hammer at the 'entrance', comfortably secure in the knowledge that no petty Zaunite thief would be able to lift the thing, never mind completely make off with it, and gestures out to wards the little boy as he approaches. "Who's this?"
"Alexi." Upon prompting, he gives Jayce a shy little wave. "Lower left leg destroyed in a mining accident," the Machine Herald expands.
"Woah ... so this is really a medical thing, then?"
"You thought I would experiment on children, Defender?" It's meant to be flat, emotionless, Jayce assumes, but it carries an undercurrent stuffed with about a thousand things that Jayce is still able to parse through the vocal fry - insult, nervousness, betrayal.
"Gods - Gods no, V, what the fuck."
"That is what I thought," he huffs. The Herald hoists Alexi back up onto the makeshift operating table, and then extends his hand out towards Jayce. "Pass me a rag."
Jayce picks a scrap of white-ish fabric from the side table, turns, short circuits. It's the human hand, with all the same palm lines Jayce remembers tracing in the middle of so very many sleepless nights, with the same bitten, torn at fingernails with grime half picked from the beds. He barely suppresses the urge to turn the hand over and study the back, all of a sudden possessed by the need to know if his more prominent veins still blush a bit more violet instead of blue in the cold. Does he, when he hands over the cloth, allow himself to touch? He doesn't get to make the choice - the Machine Herald sighs and snatches the thing from his fist. Jayce is certain he's about to throw up.
The Herald wets the rag in what Jayce assumes to be some kind of sterile solution, most of which seems to have been spilled onto the stone floor during the explosion. At first contact, the kid screeches, recoils, tears immediately welling up in the corners of his eyes. He swaps the hand the cloth is in and offers that coveted flesh one to the boy, who grabs at it eagerly and, when the Machine Herald begins again to clean the blood around where the prosthesis joins skin, squeezes around his fingers with all his might. Jayce mimics the action on his own hand, feeling fucking stupid for being jealous of a ten-year-old. He supposes they could've just knocked on the door.
"How long have you been playing doctor, then?" He asks, and when the Machine Herald hands Jayce the sodden and stained rag he is ready this time, teeth solidly latched onto the inside of his cheeks to stop himself from doing anything stupid. He takes it and hands the Herald a fresh one and wrings it dry into a small pot on the floor whilst his ... never mind, there's blood pooling in Jayce's mouth from how hard he's bitten. Without any other option, he swallows it, the sticky iron somehow familiar and grounding as it goes down the back of his throat.
"Alexi is patient number five. It is difficult with children. I am not classically trained -"
"I know," Jayce interrupts, far too softly.
"- but I know enough from myself." Not for the first time, Jayce tries to imagine what it must've been like for Viktor to operate on himself, knowing from past investigations that shimmer was his only painkiller as he replaced out his own lungs, his own spine, his own central nervous system. Was he scared that the metal would be rejected, that his body would begin attacking itself again, now only in new and interesting ways? What was it like to feel the slippery wet heat of your own internal organs brush and give against your own fingertips? No wonder he got rid of his hands - or so Jayce had thought. "They are wriggly and impertinent and they grow, which means inevitable replacements and readjustments in the future. But it was ... necessary."
"So ... his parents brought him to you?"
"He brought himself to me. He is a smart boy. He understood the risks." He taps Alexi's forehead. He giggles. Right now, Jayce thinks he would give anything in the world to see Viktor's face, the pinch of his brow, the sunken glass cut of his jaw. He turns to over at Jayce, and all there is the reflective metal of the mask, a distorted mirage of Jayce where Viktor should be. "You brought Sheriff Kiramman with you?"
"I'm sorry," he replies automatically but honestly.
"I do not like that word, Defender."
"Sor - S - Yes, I did," Jayce sighs, lifts a hand to rub absently at the back of his neck. "She got the intelligence on where you were hiding out."
"And here I thought you were getting smarter." If the Machine Herald could smile at him, Jayce likes to think he would be, based off of the lovely, easy lilt dragging around the undertone of his corrupted voice. Is it a modulator, he wants to pry, wants to take a peek, or did you do something to your voice box, V. You thought that I would hate what you've done to yourself but all I see is that you're alive, that you're still here, with me, and even if it's not ideal to me, the fighting, the amount of fucking blood of mine I've smeared across your knuckles, I'll take it, I'll take whatever you want to give me. Let me study you, let me understand you, please. If this is how we're going to do the dance now, at least teach me the steps.
"What's the going rate for Machine Herald augmentation now-a-days, then?"
"Free," he huffs, and then mutters under his voice, though purposefully still loud enough for Jayce to hear, "Spoken like a true piltie." He definitely isn't meant to laugh at that, but he does, and he tries his best to ignore the stuttered rumbling that pours its way out of the Herald's chest in response. Then, a gentle prying, like testing waters, "Curious as to if you can afford it?"
"I think I'm fine with all my soft and malleable bits, thanks, V." Without thinking, Jayce places his hand on the Machine Herald's cool, offensive shoulder, like he used to do to Viktor when he solved an equation, when he made a joke or laughed at one of Jayce’s more undeserving ones, when Viktor did just about anything, and just like Viktor, he stiffens immediately, the sound of his augmented spine clicking as he goes taught echoing loud around the room. How close to the surface of the skin must it be, then, Jayce wanders, if it can be heard under the clothing but not the armour? Unlike Viktor, however, the Machine Herald doesn't settle into the casual affection, staying dead still until Jayce finally gets a hold of himself and steps away. Still on the operating table, swinging his mismatched legs back and forth, Alexi's curious little eyes dart between them.
"If you insist, Defender," he replies, almost disappointed sounding, and if that bit of verbal shrapnel doesn't worm its way through the delicate, interlocking bars of Jayce's ribcage and directly into his heart. He purses his lips, nods, and watches as the Machine Herald finally helps Alexi down from the table. Producing a crudely carved wooden crutch seemingly from out of thin air, he tucks it under Alexi's arm, instructs him in his language, Jayce assumes, where to best rest his hand and distribute his weight, slipping a - name? - into the instructions that Jayce does not recognise.
"What's a 'Blitzcrank'?" He probes. The Machine Herald emits a noise that approximates a laugh. Alexi, for the first time, says something in return to the Herald, a phrase Jayce was taught years ago now but still recognises, remembers with a grey tinted fondness how they felt on his tongue - thank you. He takes one anxious step forwards with the help of the crutch, and then another, and before Jayce can blink, the strange undercity boy has disappeared into the winding, engulfing shadows of the Herald's lair.
"I do not have to tell you everything," the Machine Herald says - Jayce is convinced that, if he could smirk, he would. "Maybe it is better we keep some things to ourselves, hm? It will make this more interesting."
"Ahh, so what we have now is a 'this', then?" Jayce is thoroughly ignored. The Machine Herald picks his way forwards through the rubble and the debris, snatching up that staff that, perhaps due to instinct, perhaps due to something else that Jayce doesn’t really like to think about, he still leans on like a cane. "Where are you going?"
"Escorting you home," he says, like all of a sudden it's five years ago and Viktor has one hand on his crutch and the other solidly intertwined with Jayce's, stumbling through the empty Piltover streets under faint gossamer moonlight, shattered out of their minds from an almost twenty-hour work day and slightly abuzz from some kind of Zaun-made alcohol that Viktor had smuggled into the lab, trying to decide who's flat to return to for a few brief, coveted, wonderful hours of dead respite before they did it all again tomorrow. Jayce blanks, stomach churning. With a truly heroic amount of effort, he looks away from where the Machine Herald is silhouetted in the ruined entrance put into the wall and wipes his sweat slick palms on his thighs.
"I'm pretty sure I know my way around by now, V," Jayce tries to force confidence into the words, but they come out feeling bereft and cloying. The Machine Herald shrugs.
"I am pretty sure you do, also," he says, and then beckons Jayce with a nod of his chin. Being always unable to say no to Viktor was, perhaps, one of Jayce's greatest vices, because Viktor was no coward or stranger when it came to the abuse of that privilege, and it seems, now, as Jayce stumbles through the dark and clambers over the rubble to join the Herald at his side, snatching up the Mercury Hammer, that he hasn't forgotten that that little switch exists, and is still more than happy to press it.
Zaun is allergic to its own gloom - the night shattered by neon electric blues and pinks pulsing out through the dense fog, through the smeared, dirtied, broken glass of windows. Instead of the shadows eating at the glow of the light, the opposite seems to occur, each street lanterns illuminating the cobbles seemingly for miles. It is somehow impossible to find a real spot of darkness here. Still, the Machine Herald tries his best, as he guides Jayce in silence through the alleys of the fissures, to sink into the black as much as possible. As they walk, now free of the convenient conversational excuses of the lab, Jayce struggles for a thread to pick at. He doesn't quite understand why, in the very depths of himself, he's so desperate to talk, to drink in the rumble of the Herald's modulated, butchered voice, except that he absolutely does and he hates himself just a little bit for it. It's a pattern with him - he's never been much good at ever letting anything go.
And for how fucking long has he wanted this, to get the Machine Herald on his own - that's why he's been so desperately searching for the location of his laboratory, not to destroy or to steal from, but because every time they fight in the streets of Zaun or the city square of Piltover it garners an audience, and when Jayce catches him rifling about in their old workspace, it feels almost rude to try and do anything but swing his hammer - and now he has it, he can't think of a single fucking thing to say. What a joke. Scrabbling for something, anything, he looks over to the Machine Herald, finds himself drawn to where the mask covering his face ends and his hair explodes out, just as charmingly, ridiculously gravity defying as ever. There is, if Jayce's eyes aren't deceiving him, the most minor streak of grey interwoven throughout the chestnut brown, and he remembers a night either in the lab or in bed, he can't quite put his finger on it, where Viktor had joked that the only grey hairs he would ever live long enough to develop would be from stress. The Hex Crystal embedded into the Mercury Hammer fizzles softly, harmonising with the sound of their footsteps against the concrete.
The last time he and the Machine Herald came face to face, Jayce barely walked away with a dislocated shoulder and a burn wound from the Hex Claw's laser that cut so deep in his forearm that he could catch glimpses of creamy white bone shining through the viscera, and now they're walking so close to each other that they keep almost bumping shoulders. Jayce looks down, watches some technicolour kind of lizard scuttle its way across the road in front of him, and then takes a self-indulgent second to get lost in the errant twitching being performed by the Herald's fingers on the augmented hand, glitching where they hang at his side like they've been flooded by too much electricity. Without thinking, Jayce reaches his own out to steady them, but before he can touch, they are yanked away.
"Does it not tire you," he says then, the Hex Claw twisting this way and that over his shoulder, "to exist as you do?"
They exit the street into a small square, a defunct water fountain-esc statue of cracked stone positioned in the centre, all of the features and detail worn down over time and by curious hands, the base blackened by charcoal graffiti, names desperate to etch themselves into history one way or another. The lights here gleam with hints of green and violet purple, and the fog steam is thick enough that it hides the toes of Jayce's boots from view.
"Hmm? What do you mean?"
"Human beings ... you are very complicated things. Metal, I have come to learn, is far more simple, clean, efficient."
"You're speaking like you aren't also a human being, V."
"... Am I, though?"
"Umm ...," Jayce opens his mouth, then closes it. The Machine Herald, as far as he is aware, has very little skin, previously thought to be none at all until Jayce had caught sight of the flesh hand earlier that evening, and most of his internal organs, most of his bones, he knows to have been transformed into metal, his nerves into wiring, blood to oil, synapses to systems. Does he eat, and if he does, is he able to take pleasure in it, indulge? Does the Herald sleep, or simply plug himself into a wall for a few hours when the battery begins to drain? Jayce thinks, because that's all he seems to fucking do, now-a-days, about Viktor, about the heavy set and hopeless bags permanently stuck under his eyes, about the nervous tick that made him swallow too much and pull constantly at the collar of his buttoned shirt, about the countless, heart breaking blood-stained tissues he left littered around the lab, around Jayce's apartment. What makes someone human? "You still feel things, V, you still care."
Far too quickly, as if he had it ready, hiding primed behind his teeth, the Herald spits, "Emotions make you sick."
"What does that mean?"
"Was it not our feelings that put us in this ...," struggling, the Herald gestures at the rift of empty space that has appeared between them, and Jayce is sure he feels a tendon in his heart strain and snap, "predicament in the first place?"
"V, that's not fair ..."
"That keep us trapped in this cycle? I overheard Miss Kiramman earlier, Defender - you are playing with me, blinded by nostalgia, by ... affection, it's heedless fist deep in the unfortunate wet messes of your gut. If I am to keep aiding the people of Zaun, and you are to keep ... parading around Piltover doing whatever it is you like to pretend that you are doing, then I don't believe we can keep up this squabbling act." And for one disgustingly simple moment, Jayce thinks he's going to say that he wants to come home, that he wants to be partners again, that he wants to be his. "We need - It would be better for us, perhaps, to remove the attachment entirely. Another surgery on top of many."
"You're going to remove your love for me?"
The Machine Herald, somehow, flinches like he’s been struck. Jayce is consumed with the imagine of them both on the opposite sides of the desk in his laboratory, Jayce pin straight and polite, hands white knuckled on his knees, whilst the Herald lounges, one leg swung up over his chair arm, chest cavity flung open, human heart struggling to beat on the wood, blood being soaked up by all of the paperwork. Take it, he’s telling Jayce, whose hands refuse to move, take it. I don’t want this anymore.
"Not just that ...," he says flatly, "all of it."
"You can't - you can't just decide to throw all of your emotions in the bin because you find that they don't serve you anymore, Viktor!"
"Do not call me that, Defender."
"Don't call me that! This is fucking - not just ridiculous, V, this is fucking insane! You can't just remove your emotions! What are you going to do, brain surgery? Give yourself a lobotomy?"
"I will figure it out. I have figured everything else out. What is one more?"
"No you won't! You can't - I won't let you do this to yourself, V!"
"So this is where you draw the line, then, Defender?"
"Please, V, please, stop calling me that." Jayce surges towards the Machine Herald, so close that Jayce can trick himself into believing he can feel the ghost of a breath flutter across his cheek. He places shaking hands on the Herald's chest, clammy flesh against the thin fabric draped over subtly shifting metal plating, a mimicry of an anxiously heaving chest. "I've never defended anything but Hex Tech and you. Please, Vitya, please ..."
And for the very first time, distorted by the modulation - "Jayce."
He’s never had a chance to admire the work before now, and so he indulges, ghosts his fingertips over the seams of the metal, all screaming under Viktor’s signature shoddy soldering. Jayce puts one hand on the Machine Herald’s shoulder, and this time he relaxes into the touch, the clanking of cogs and pistons smashing against each other coming alive under their uneven, out of sync breathing, and he puts the other one on Viktor’s neck. There’s a modest gap, here, to allow for movement, and Jayce hooks his fingers ever so slightly inside, pulling himself closer, until they’re face to concealed face. He lets his other hand run up, up, caressing, bites his bottom lip severe enough to make it bleed when he notices that the Herald turns his head into Jayce’s cupped palm. The Machine Herald’s hands twitch at his sides, unable to decide where to put themselves, but Jayce doesn’t mind, as long as they’re on him, as long as they’re his. He wants to study every intricate, asinine difference between the flesh and the mechanical. Jayce finds something to fiddle with at the side of the Herald’s face and does so, and what rings out throughout the clearing is the satisfying click of the clasp of the mask.
"Stop!"
The Machine Herald braces his hands on Jayce's chest and, with an absurd amount of force, shoves Jayce backwards. He stumbles, heel catching on a cracked rise in the concrete floor obscured by the fog, and falls onto his ass on the floor. Then, without a seconds delay, blowing through the gloom like a lightning strike, is the ricocheting of a bullet striking metal. The Herald screeches, recoils, both hands flying up to his face, and the mask, unscathed, falls into the smoke at Jayce's feet.
An incredibly fine line of blood wells to the surface of Viktor's cheek, pressing through where his metal fingers pinch awkwardly at the cut, slipping down the faux crafted rivets of where the spidery, narrow bone should be. Viktor's lips are parted ever so slightly in shock, enough to reveal the flat edges of his front teeth, and then the slightly more tapered canines. Above his mouth, one mole, and sitting comfortable under ichor golden eyes, blown wide, is the other, just as Jayce remembers them. It's Viktor, his Viktor, with only the slightest trace of metal creeping up the side of his neck and trespassing onto the higher points of his jaw.
"Hands in the air, Machine Herald!" It's Caitlyn, back to save him, just as she promised. They both turn to her in sync, half-smothered in the smog rolling around in the alleyway they just came out of - was she following them? - and Jayce does not miss the way that her face crumples ever so slightly when she looks over the sight of her rifle and sees Viktor. Jayce looks back to his partner, and watches those familiar chapped and bitten lips contort into a snarl, and the Hex Claw over his shoulder begins to crackle with a brilliant light.
"Vitya, no!"
The lasers carves effortlessly through the wrought, rotted iron arch that sits perched above the entrance to the alleyway, sending it crashing down almost on Caitlyn's head. He whips around and swipes it at Jayce on the floor, the three points joined together and just grazing the stagnant air in front of Jayce's nose.
"Don't ... don't call me that! You have no idea -" Another gunshot. Something pops. Viktor's hands fly to his neck, a torrent of steam pouring out from between his fingers. He staggers back, coughing, and Jayce, still on his ass in the fog, watches in abject horror as he grapples up at the Hex Claw, wrestles it down to his throat, and cauterises whatever wound Caitlyn has made without an inch of hesitation. She calls for him, he thinks, to get up, to grab his hammer, which lays on its side a few feet away, dropped when Viktor pushed him, but he does nothing but search for the smell of cooked, burning flesh under the hissing gas. The Hex Claw whirs, sharp and agitated, lowers itself to what Jayce somehow knows to be Caitlyn's height, and prepares to fire.
Jayce rushes to his feet and, immediately forgetting about the Mercury Hammer, slams himself into Viktor, wraps one hand around the neck of the Hex Claw and the other around his waist. The laser careens off course, slamming into the side of a building Jayce prays is empty and reduces half a wall to rubble, a horrible mirror of his actions earlier. They scrabble at each other like startled animals, like children who don't yet understand the power behind their own fists, utterly pathetic, pushing and shoving, poking and prodding. No further gunshots arrive, Jayce too entirely wrapped up in Viktor for there to be any clean shot, and Caitlyn not confident enough to chance it. He digs his fingers underneath plating, entangles them in wiring, flinches when Viktor spits into his eye and groans when he wraps his metal hand in the hair at the nape of Jayce's neck and pulls but refuses to back away. Caitlyn is yelling again, the current of her voice robbed of its urgency when superimposed underneath the sound of Viktor's heavy, shattered breathing, Viktor's undisguised growls.
Viktor seizes Jayce by the chin, lifts him with ease a few inches off of the cobbles - "I could kill you right now," he hisses, and deep in the darkest recesses of him, Jayce kind of wishes he would. He always knew that, somehow, someway, Viktor would be the end of him, "but I won't, that is exactly what I mean, Defender. These emotions are a weakness." - and then tosses him to the floor. Jayce skids. The rough mixture of torn concrete and uneven stone is quick to tear away at his jacket sleeves and rub off the first few layers of skin off of the arm he lands on, and his cheek. Flecks of gravel immediately sink into the open, stinging wound. His vision swims, tears coming unbidden to the corner of his eyes. He props himself up on his better arm and all of a sudden Viktor is there, inches away from him, face flat and devoid of emotion, his own cut from Caitlyn's bullet still leaking blood. Prepared to blame it all on adrenaline or instinct or late onset insanity, Jayce lifts his battered hand and, with the thumb, wipes some of the mess on Viktor's cheek away. Viktor's expression shifts imperceptibly, and he bites down hard on his tongue to stop him from chasing the touch when Jayce inevitably pulls away.
"If you see me again," he says, looking anywhere but Jayce's eyes, "do not expect me to be so kind."
With one last scathing look shot in the direction of Caitlyn and her rifle, Viktor retreats, disappearing into the fissure backstreets, leaving Jayce on the ground with no evidence except the electric pain up the side of his arm and the sticky, crimson blood dribbling down from the pad of his thumb into the palm of his hand and the refreshed memory of that pretty face. There's the distant clicking of Caitlyn shortening and locking up her rifle, and then the echoing of her footsteps as she runs to him.
"You bloody idiot," she scoffs, though not unkindly, and helps Jayce to his feet, throwing his better arm over her shoulder. Instead of saying thank you, he nudges his bloodied cheek up against hers.
It's started to rain by the time they stagger back to the bridge, though the sky is no lighter. About halfway down the strip, Caitlyn's legs buckle and almost give out from underneath her, and she drops Jayce onto his knees into a puddle. Most of the stars above are disguised by smog and rainclouds, but one or two manage to peek through, desperate to be seen, glimmering spots of light like air holes poked in the lid of a very large box. Jayce refuses to stand, letting the dirty water soak into the white fabric of his trousers, his hunched reflection staring back up at him with the same glassy eyed, vacant stare. He flexes his jaw, watches in the puddle as the layers of his skin separate and then come back together. It’s far from the worst he’s ever looked when emerging from a battle with the Machine Herald, but it’s by far the worst he’s ever felt. If he’d at least been dragged away with a broken rib or too, more coated in blood, he’d feel more like he deserved this melancholy. She tries to rouse him, but to no success.
"Jayce ... I know tonight has been ... well ... we need to get home, now." Caitlyn extends her hand out again, but this time, instead of wordlessly slipping into her grip, Jayce bats it away.
Eyes still stuck to his mottled, rippling reflection in the puddle, he whispers, so terribly softly, "You shot Viktor."
Caitlyn crumples her nose in indignation. "No I didn't. I shot the Machine Herald - and you, from all the stories and first hand accounts I've heard, do worse almost every week."
Jayce has torn wires from underneath Viktor's metal casing, took them back to the lab and stuck them under a microscope to find the copper entangled with wispy nerves and shrivelled blood vessels. He has swung the Mercury Hammer with very little remorse at Viktor's legs, chest, spine, all the weak points he spent countless late nights and early mornings awake in their bed memorising whilst Viktor struggled and seized with bad dreams in his sleep. The better you know someone, the easier it is to hurt them.
"But it's Viktor ... under the mask, it's Viktor," Jayce croaks, voice breaking spectacularly. "My partner, my Vitya." He claws at the skirt of Cait's uniform with a wet, bloodied fist.
"No it wasn't! That thing has never been Viktor!" Caitlyn rips herself away. "And if it were, that means that Viktor is the one beating you senseless every week, sending you to the hospital, calling you all of these awful names and leveraging all of these terrible threats. It means that Viktor wants to hurt you. Have you considered that, Jayce?"
Of course he has. It tastes like the last few sips pulled from the bottom of a bottle. Like two stars caught in an orbit, Jayce will find his way back down into the slums of Zaun and back to Viktor, and Viktor knows this, somewhere deep down, that it is impossible – biologically, chemically, physically – to keep them apart for too long, though it won’t ever be the same again.
Lightning crackles somewhere far away over the water. Jayce counts, trying to calm his breathing – one, two, three, four, fi – until the thunder follows, the skies excuse for an exhale. Most of Viktor’s blood that Jayce had collected on his thumb has been washed away by the rain, now, undoubtedly running through the pipe of some rotted storm drain. On the bridge, caught between Piltover and Zaun, Jayce drops his face into his hands and weeps.