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“screaming for me baby, like you’re gonna die”
The old-new hammer should feel heavy. Or, at least, as heavy as his previous one. It doesn’t. He lifts it like a flower plucked from the earth, adjusts it in his palms like a ball about to be pitched. Whether this is the result of arcane forces acting upon him or a product of his survival is no matter now. He is an unstoppable force.
His feet drag and his head pounds out of his skull. The pull of his duty and his loyalty are splitting him into pieces, the uncertainty a boat cutting through the water of his psyche.
The spherical building he was led to makes him uneasy. Tangled roots twist up the walls, and turn into something unrecognisable. It opens up into round, window-like holes in kaleidoscopic colours: a farcical chapel for a false god.
Then he sees him, and he’s young again. In an instant his heart lightens, floats up to push into his throat, pupils becoming wide and receptive to the light bouncing off him. It’s been so long - so many tired nights plagued by gaping hunger and searing pain, the memory of him his only comfort. He is his immovable object.
Still, he raises his instrument, chillingly light in his grip, and aims it squarely at his heart. The fear in Viktor’s eyes doesn’t suit him.
In that microsecond between aiming and firing, Jayce’s mind is focused, convex glass bending sunlight. Focused on Viktor’s body, unremarkably complex and artificially dulled. On the blanket, draped over his lap and cascading down towards the floor, as if reaching out for him to unite them again. On his hair, as untameable as ever, blonde bookmarking the ends. On his eyes, new colour in an old design.
Viktor doesn’t move an inch; petrified, confused. In the absence of defence, Jayce sees chance. It rips a maw, contradicting every puppeteered fibre of muscle in his body to pull his shot to the side. A sonic scream blasts past Viktor’s face, shooting straight through a lock of his hair like nothing. The few blonde strands float gently down, consumed by the foundations when they finally land.
Jayce falls to his knees. It is unchosen, legs collapsing immediately in a relinquishment of obligation. The brace only does so much, spiking aching pain up the root of his leg upon impact. His grip on the hammer falters, and it clatters noisily onto the floor in front of him. He sits, collapsed, and sobs.
He’s failed his city. Failed him.
There are no words to describe Viktor’s expression. When he can bring himself to look at him, Jayce sees maybe pity, maybe fear, maybe relief. It’s impossible to say.
Viktor gathers the cloth upon his lap and drapes it across himself as he descends. In all their years of work, he’d only seen Viktor out of academy uniform a handful of times. Draped across his chest, it is twisted, tucked, and tied around his form with a practised ease. His feet make heavy, resounding sounds across the floor as he walks up to Jayce, whose chest heaves with the effort to breathe. He stops just before him.
“It has been too long,” he says. The words sound like him more than they did from Salo’s mouth, but are still too distant to be comforting. His hand reaches down to him, glides across his cheek and under his chin to lift it up, “and you are tired.”
The fury in him fights, desperately, to maintain the helm. To keep him upright, to tear his face away from his touch, false and conniving. The touch of the Arcane, a ventriloquist and its doll. But It is right, and Jayce cannot stop Viktor’s image from stirring fond memories within him. So he tries, for a time, to stare at him defiantly, tries to shoot back some scathing truth. He can’t. He shuts his eyes. It’s as if he releases the entire weight of the world into the analogue of Viktor’s hand.
“You are safe now. I’ve got you. You needn’t suffer any more.”
If his head wasn’t pounding and his mouth wasn’t dry as sandpaper, he might shed another tear.
***
Jayce is relieved of his weapon almost immediately. Taken by a member of the community Viktor had created, stored alongside their farming equipment.
Viktor had placed a cold, unnaturally weighty hand upon his shoulder, told him that dinner was going to be ready soon, and that he’d be shown to a bath. He hadn’t fought it - had barely said anything, truthfully. His mind was foggy, and his body was easily led to the bathing tent. He couldn’t even recall who had led him there; their name, their face.
The tent itself made a strong impression. It was clean, as one might expect of a place designed for washing, but starkly so. Every surface was absolutely spotless, devoid of even the mildest staining or signs of moisture. The sponges were vibrant and bone-dry. The soaps still bore their powdery film, like babies just born.
He does not linger on these observations for long, his cognition pushed to an absolute halt. He pulls over a wooden chair and fumbles with his brace for longer than he’d care to admit, not having designed it with the forethought of having a mechanism to take it on and off again.
Once he’d disassembled it into several pieces, he methodically undresses himself. The feeling had become almost alien. The fabric sticks to his skin and pulls at it as it’s removed, and he winces. The grime feels invasive, like mould growing invisible roots down, between the fibres of his muscle and around the cream of his bones.
He lifts himself up, grabbing the edge of the bathtub for balance as he sits on it and swivels himself into the bath. He descends into the water, warm and bubbly and mildly fragrant, and props his bad leg up on the edge and away from the bathwater.
Sinking down, resting his head against the tub, he pulls air into his lungs. His eyes fall closed as he exhales, his chest feeling lighter for it. Outside, he hears children chatting and the familiar clank of tools on hot metal. Hears, faintly, pots of boiling water and crackling open fires. Smells what he cannot believe is honeyfruit - familiar and nostalgic. He wonders if it’s coming from the soap, and how they sourced it in the undercity of all places.
Abruptly, he hears a tink from what cannot be more than a spear’s length away, and his peace is torn in half. His eyes fly open, his muscles solidifying like cement. He stares at a slight man in the tent with him. His hair is long and pulled back behind his head, streaked with white-blonde. Silver ovals fan out across his forehead, like fingerprints in the condensation of a mirror. He smiles at him apologetically.
“Apologies, I’ve come to bring you clean clothes. And to take the ones you came in with to be washed.”
He doesn’t move, waiting for a response. Jayce hums discontentedly. There are very few things that remain his. He finds himself protective over what’s left.
“You’ll bring them back to me?”
“Of course. We have no use for them.” Jayce hums again.
“Okay.”
He watches the man disappear with them. Clothes brandished with his house’s colours and emblem. Symbols that are as much a representation of him as he is of them. Perhaps a younger man would call them his legacy.
The water begins to chill his skin, and he takes it as his sign to gently scrub the past from himself. He lifts himself out, sits on the chair as he carefully gives his bad leg a quick, clumsy sponge bath.
He’s grateful that his clean clothes had been left close by. They present a challenge, formless and without any fastenings he’s seen before. Eventually he works out a way to keep them on his body, embarrassed by his amateur knowledge. They fit in perfectly with the other villagers, swathes of breathable, stretchless fabric in whites and off-whites held together by leather straps and rings of golden alloy. He reassembles his leg brace over them and stands to leave.
As soon as he lifts the flap covering the exit of the tent, he is greeted enthusiastically by another man. His hair is cropped short and pushed back in a way that is more than familiar to Jayce, with a single off-centre white streak cutting through like the beam of light pouring through a door left ajar. He greets him as if they’re old friends, relief flooding his voice that he’s well. A cup is pushed towards him, filled with a cloudy yellow liquid. He accepts it uneasily as he’s told it’s pressed shaddock. His eyes become discs - Piltover shaddock requires almost constant sun to produce fruits.
He observes it, swills it around in the cup. On his tongue he remembers the dank, stale taste of stagnant puddle water, how the fungal edge would explode in the back of his throat and make his stomach churn.
He downs the cup’s contents in seconds.
It makes him dizzy, the distant sun striking directly down through the walls of the fissure, through the dark of his eyes, into his head like darts. The humidity becomes suffocating.
“Is... is there somewhere I could lie down?” He asks, directed towards no one in particular: a plea thrown into the wind.
“Deeply sorry, we’re still preparing your tent. Here,” he feels someone lift up his arm and then strong shoulders press into the crook of it. He’s being escorted somewhere, but the lights and sunbeams that bounce off gleaming metal blind him as he goes.
“I’m sorry... for what happened to Salo.” His thoughts are unstuck, liquefied in his head and cascading into his throat to pour from his lips. “I didn’t- there was nothing else-”
“Do not apologise.” Even without his vision, the smile behind the feminine voice is unmistakable. “Salo lived happily. He will continue happily.” His head pounds and he feels bile rise in his throat, pushing it down quickly. He doesn’t get the chance to ask what they mean. They are all called to dinner.
***
That night, sated by a full stomach and conversation that is pleasant enough, Jayce falls quickly into the deepest sleep he’s ever had. Immediately he feels that something is off. His skin prickles, much like the hairs on the back of a spooked cat. There’s that all-too-familiar smell; the scarce beams of light; the skittering of insects and lizards with large, domed, greyed eyes.
Of course.
Of course he would go back here. The freshest, strongest memory he has.
Quickly, even the grotesque embrace of his unease shifts into something new. A greyish-green mist starts to appear, its origin indeterminable. Its stench is foul, enough to have him coughing immediately. Then, through the smog, a soft light appears. Again, its source unknowable through the thickness and opacity of the air. It is formed of many hues, all washed out and fuzzing together: teal, pink, yellow. He’s sat up against a wall that digs uncomfortably into his back, and as he sees what he thinks are the outlines of visions he pushes himself further against it. It’s unbelievable. Even in dreaming?
He sees what has to be Mel, her face kind and understanding. She’s holding her ghostly hands together, clasped around something that he cannot see. She looks into them, careful not to reveal it, and then seals them shut again. The kindness drains from her as her expression falls, and then twists into a scowl. She speaks to him without parting her lips. There is no message, only a direct sickness deep in his gut. A guilt, an anger, a despair.
He pleads, no the only thing he knows how to say with his consciousness in handcuffs.
Exactly on cue, ghostly Mel manifests into ghostly Viktor, the memory of his two closest confidantes in this life taking turns to haunt him. At least here they can cooperate.
Viktor’s form is not as tangible as Mel’s was. He starts as himself, jubilant locks of hair reaching to the sky around a face that isn’t gaunt yet, in wisps that suggest the shape more than concretely defining it.
Jayce starts to mutter under his breath, so soft and low he doesn’t even recognise it: Viktor.
In the smoke, Viktor’s face loses all life as it floats, as if suspended lifelessly from an invisible ceiling.
His voice grows louder, imbued with worry, Viktor.
The vision of Viktor inhales life back into himself, his hair grown longer and his face schooled into a coldly neutral expression. Jayce hadn’t noticed that he’d stopped coughing. The apparition holds out its arms for a hug. He is no more able to reject its request than an infant is able to wield a sword.
***
Viktor, having been grafted onto the Arcane, now has senses that are, one might say, keen. He has hundreds of pairs of eyes and ears, ready to be worn whenever he should so choose like a sprawling collection of shoes. He reasons that it is kinder on his villagers to visit his sleep tent personally after hearing Jayce cry out his name in the middle of the night.
When he arrives, he sees Jayce’s face stricken by a thick sheen of sweat, reflective in the bright moonlight that bathes him. It casts his form, covered from the waist-down by the commune’s blanket, in a ghostly pale bluish-white light. He seems unreal, like an illustration between the pages of a novel. He is clean and his handsome face is unblemished save for his beard and the dark crease between his eyebrows.
He struggles, unknowingly wrapping himself tighter within the sheets as he huffs and pants and whines in distress. The vision of him, his hair wild, his body encased in Viktor’s cloth, appeals to him. Viktor steps forwards, cloaked by the night with a few stray moonbeams streaking across his face.
He lays his hand gently upon Jayce’s chest, slowly so as not to wake him. His dream is so vivid in Viktor’s mind’s eye that he can taste the mineral-thick air of the ravine. To only have the ability to see the minds of others would have been a blessing. Instead he feels them, in their entirety, as though he were living them himself. He has his old friend back, yes, but his touch has been robbed from him in return. Though the hand on Jayce’s chest should feel warm and full, nothing but an icy fear scrambles up his arm as Jayce’s heart pounds beneath it.
So now, Viktor’s touch is more than just touch. It is communication, ions passing between electrodes. The contact alerts Jayce’s sleeping form to his presence, clearly, because he starts calling for him with more desperation. There is a certainty, a pleading to it. First they come in furtive half-sounds, then syllables between moans, until he’s voicing his name in desperate strings.
Like a crashing wave, the sound pushes Viktor away - disconnects him from Jayce’s subconscious. He’s had subjects reject his presence within their minds before, but that wasn’t what this was. It was as though the connection between them had cut to static, short-circuited somehow. His hand remains hovering just above where it had been. Viktor pants softly from the shock.
Jayce notices his absence and lethargically reaches a hand up to cover Viktor’s. It is calloused and dry, tanned like bronze. He can barely see his own hand under it. He pushes down, and they make contact again.
It draws Viktor’s attention up to Jayce’s face. His brows are drawn together and he’s panting and the veil between nightmare and sweet dream has been sanded down to the width of a dragonfly’s wing. His head creeps backwards with every breath, baring his long neck made longer by the cut of the sleep shirt he’s been lent. His other hand reaches up to the first, both of them clutching and pushing Viktor’s lithe one impossibly further into his chest. He cannot pull his eyes from him.
Viktor can, in tandem, both feel and see it when Jayce’s hips roll upwards. With eyes fixed on Jayce’s expression, he raises one knee upwards, slowly, onto the bed beside him. He’s careful not to disturb his sleep as he gently transfers his weight onto it, pushing a valley into the softness of the mattress. His hand is trapped, Jayce’s grip not easing for a second, but he manages to raise his other leg too.
Inches away from each other, Jayce pushes his hips up into the air once again. This time, their legs make contact through the thinness of the bedsheet. How long has it been since Viktor was last touched by him? The time passes oddly now. The static thrill he feels from some distant place within him says too long.
Pressing into Jayce’s chest for balance, he lifts a leg at the hip and stretches it over to the other side of him. On the next roll of his hips he chokes off a whine. Viktor doesn’t dare blink.
Jayce keeps rocking, pace faster now that he’s found friction in it, and all Viktor can do is watch as he settles lower. He doesn’t feel what he thinks he would have felt previously - that is a privilege he’s severed from ever having. But his chest burns, as if every touch is a blow of a bellows stoking a fire he’d been neglecting for who knows how long. It is, unmistakably, a rush. He feels himself going mad with it, the flames threading through his limbs, coiling around what’s left of his spinal cord. He is lost to it.
Jayce will not stop pressing Viktor’s hand into his own chest. He’s crazed, untethered from shame or what’s possible and acting purely on an instinct free from fear. It must hurt, he finds it impossible to imagine it feeling otherwise. But his eyebrows are sloped upward in satisfaction and if he feels discomfort it does not show. There is a wetness to his eyelashes, pure desperation hung beautifully, and before he knows what is happening the tips of his fingers push effortlessly past the barrier of his flesh.
Words cannot encompass the feeling. It is as if he were previously viewing Jayce’s mind through a pinhole in a sheet of paper, and the sheet had now been lifted. Or reduced to ash in a sudden, fantastic blaze. Maybe it was like discovering that each rainbow had always been borderless. That there were millions of unimaginable hues flanking each red and each violet this whole time. It’s like he is pushed up against every bit of Jayce, every thought, every memory, every feeling he’s ever had. He hasn’t felt this alive since he died in that council room.
He leans forward, pressing his forehead into Jayce’s collarbone. He does not pant, but his mouth hangs open and his eyes fall shut. The extra space allows Jayce to thrust upwards cyclically, and his endurance is impressive. His moans pitch up and up and up and Viktor can’t stop his curiosity from looking up at him as he crests, his own name choked off as Jayce hits that familiar wall and stills silently. His neck is beaded with sweat and he presses his hips into Viktor and pushes so hard on Viktor’s hand that he swears the entire length of his fingers slide into him.
After a long moment he relaxes, and his grip on Viktor’s hand is finally released. When Viktor lifts his hands from him he leaves behind a white gold print squarely over Jayce’s heart.
He lifts off and rolls to the side next to him. He notices the wetness that has seeped through the sheet and onto the space between his legs. His hand reaches down to it, collecting some onto his fingers and bringing it up to taste on his tongue. It, like all other tastes now, is disappointingly unremarkable.