Work Text:
“In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”
- Pablo Neruda, Cien Sonetos de Amor (Soneto LXVI)
Jayce kept the transmitter with which he’d intercepted Viktor’s communications.
He was no fool: he knew that Viktor knew he’d been listening. The beep-silence-beep of the binary code had died out pretty soon—not soon enough for Jayce not to figure out the next attack, but pretty much directly after that. If Viktor was any smart, and Jayce knew for a fact that he was, he’d have changed the frequency of the emitter. Or the method of communication with his automata altogether: the man had always been drastic like that.
Yet he kept, still, the little metal box on his desk, long after its beeping had dissolved into radio static. It had been a fun side-project, a refreshing change of pace from what he was usually working on, and he wanted to honor one of the last times his work had seemed…exciting. Also, he’d found, the numb static noise helped him focus, in a way: a white noise of sorts, the buzz constant enough to be easy to drown out yet loud enough to drown out other sounds that might’ve startled him out of the mental zone.
And perhaps, if he was disgustingly honest with himself—and it was rare, but he sometimes did get disgustingly honest with himself, especially late into the night—, perhaps it also had to do a little bit with nostalgia. Because that had been the last time he’d seen his old friend. Even if it had been an attack, on Viktor’s part, and even if the few words they’d exchanged had barely had room between the blows they traded, it still was the last time they’d talked.
After it, there had only been silence, and a gaping wound that never seemed to heal completely, if only because he kept pulling at the scab to make it bleed again.
And if he allowed himself a little moment of weakness, now and then, and rejected a social gathering to nurse a drink by his desk, hoping the radio static would morph into something else, then that was a secret kept between him and his whiskey glass.
So he kept it turned on, that day, same as the rest of days that preceded and the days that would follow, and the numb noise lulled him into a focused state as he tinkered with his next prototype.
Had he not kept it broadcasting, he’d never have noticed. Had he not found the static relaxing, and thus had he not been attuned to the chaotic rhythm, he probably wouldn’t have noticed either, as he tended to drown out everything else that happened around him while he worked. Had he been doing anything else but working, although a far less likely scenario, he wouldn’t have been there to witness the change of tune.
And so, it was nothing but a far-fetched string of unlikely coincidences that allowed him to pick up on Viktor’s distress signal.
The beeping pulled him back from his focused state like a splash of cold water. In the fraction of a second it took him to snap out of it, he had the gut-wrenching feeling that a bomb was detonating—old memories tend to creep back when you least expect them. Then he strained his ears, located the source of the noise, and his heart lurched for another reason entirely.
The sounds coming out of the transmitter were fast, almost frantic. He paid attention to the tune, soon finding a repeating pattern: whatever it was, it must’ve been the same message, relayed over and over, a frenzy that needed not be translated.
That, more than anything else, raised alarms. Viktor’s automata were as efficient as the man himself: there would’ve been no need for him to repeat anything, as the machines were constructed well enough to pick up the message on the first try. Jayce knew that Viktor knew he’d been listening to his transmissions, and had changed the frequency when he’d wanted the Defender of Tomorrow not to hear. That must’ve meant that this, whatever it was, was for Jayce’s ears only. Which was a terrifying thought.
It was the first he’d heard from the Machine Herald in months, and it sounded eerily like a call for help.
He picked up a pencil and paper, jotting down the pattern of the sounds as they came out. The first time, it had taken him quite a bit to decipher Viktor’s code—it was not the standard binary most Piltovan robots used, but a rather convoluted encryption of the original that was as much fun as it had been brain-melting to recover. That, fortunately, meant that he’d studied it almost to the point of obsession, enough for it to be burnt into his memory, and it did not take him long to translate it into common language.
It was a distress call. Jayce’s blood ran cold. He stared at his own handwriting, frozen. Nothing but a single word—help—and some numbers, likely coordinates for his location. A single line on paper, repeated to infinity. Or until Viktor’s transmitter’s batteries gave out. He didn’t want to think of that, of the batteries keeping the message alive even after, even when Viktor had— and then their power would fade out too, submerging the room into static—
He couldn’t breathe.
Time stood still, for a few agonizing seconds, and then everything stepped into motion again.
The beeping was still ringing in his ears when he jumped from the chair and grabbed the hammer, ready to step out. His hand was on the handle of the door when the incessant thought on the back of his mind finally reached the surface.
It could be a trap.
It could very well be a trap. Viktor saw emotions with nothing but the utmost contempt and disdain. For him, they were nothing but dead weight. But he could surely see the potential in using them as an easy, dirty tool, by manipulating Jayce’s own. Above all, the Machine Herald was nothing but a pragmatic, and if he could tug at Jayce’s old feelings for the man he’d once been to cloud his judgement and make him discard rationality, he definitely would. He could picture him perfectly, awaiting to ambush him. Jayce didn’t want to kill his old friend, not really, but he couldn’t say for certain that the feeling was mutual. That was, truly, the scary part.
But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t a trap, and in mistrusting him he would be giving up on the last—potentially the only—chance for Viktor to be saved. He couldn’t fathom a scenario in which Viktor would be so desperate so as to call him for help, of all people. He was faced with the grim reality that the Machine Herald could very well be on the verge of death.
So, either it was a trap, or it wasn’t. Either he went, or he didn’t go.
A two-by-two decision matrix.
If it was a trap, and he went, he’d have to fight. Probably at a disadvantage, given that Viktor would seize the opportunity to ambush him. If it was a trap, and he didn’t go, he’d get to spend a beautiful Sunday morning holed up in his office, tinkering with a project. If it wasn’t a trap, and he went, he would very likely save a life. And if it wasn’t a trap, and he didn’t go, he’d have to live with the fact that he’d killed his old friend by inaction.
Risk assessment was so damn hard when it was Viktor on the line.
And the fucking machine was still beeping, hammering in the urgency of it all. Beep-beep-pause-beep. Beep-beep-pause-beep.
He took a deep breath and opened the door.
And then collapsed against a wall of metal.
“Father unit requires immediate aid.”
No time for formalities, it seemed. “Blitzcrank.” The huge automaton stepped out of the way so Jayce could leave the door. “What do you know?”
“Father unit requires immediate aid,” he repeated, as if that made any more sense the second time around. Then, almost as if sensing Jayce was not at peak rational capacity, he repeated: “I came to retrieve you.”
That was…weird. Either Viktor was, in fact, quite literally dying, or he was making sure to tug on all his heartstrings to maximize the chances he’d fall into the trap. He didn’t want to think about the likelihood ratio of each, given that he’d already taken the fall. “Why me?”
“You are listed as his emergency contact.” If Blitz had the ability to shrug, Jayce was sure he would’ve. “Father unit requires immediate aid,” he repeated, a third time. Jayce was sure he hadn’t imagined the inflex on the ‘immediate’ part.
Urgent, yes.
“I have the coordinates,” he supplied.
There went nothing.
“I will lead you there.”
The walk was silent. Jayce had to struggle to maintain the automaton’s pace. He’d have expected Viktor to program some manners into him, at least. Then again, as far as he knew Blitzcrank had evolved beyond his creator’s expectations and developed an intelligence of his own. Perhaps this was nothing more than the machine having evolved a protocol to override politeness in the face of urgency. An interesting theory, one he’d like to develop when his heart wasn’t attempting to leap out of his throat.
They reached an empty warehouse. Jayce barely had the time to glance at his surroundings before the automaton rushed him in. If it was a trap—and he wasn’t entirely on the clear on that one—he was falling right in. He grabbed the handle of the hammer tighter, just in case.
Then he saw Viktor, and all the strength left his body.
“Ah, Jayce. You came,” he said, like he’d expected him not to.
There was blood. There was so much blood, a big pool of crimson-red liquid below Viktor’s sat-up silhouette. Entirely too much to belong to one body, too much for Viktor to be—it had to be the augments keeping him alive, there was no way it—so much blood. He’d never seen that much. Nausea overtook him, constricting his windpipe, and he had to swallow more than a couple of times before he was sure he wouldn’t puke his last ten meals out.
Breathe. Swallow.
Breathe. Swallow.
He spared another glance, careful not to focus too much on the—glistening, wet, steadily increasing in size—pool of blood.
Viktor’s enhanced leg was smashed to pieces. The frame was barely recognizable as it attached to his thigh, but anything further was a mangled mess of metal and sparkling cables that were threatening to contact the liquid and electrocute him. Looking at the floor to avert the sight, Jayce found a cog at his feet. He was a good ten meters from the man. It—whatever it had been—must’ve been brutal. He shuddered.
His metal arm was in no better state. He had his human one grabbing the hole left behind as a makeshift tourniquet to stop the flow of—oh thank fuck it was refrigerant—from adding into the pool. Then he realized it was not a tourniquet so much as a safety position for the biological arm, which was very likely broken and filled with shrapnel from the torn armor. He saw red dripping from the cracks, and a piece of metal impaled on his side. There was no light coming from behind the mask.
And he just. Broke.
He leapt forward, kneeling beside him. The mask gave in easily, half-broken as it was, and Viktor let out a sigh of relief at being freed from it. If that was not a testament to the urgency of the situation, Jayce didn’t know what it was.
He was met, for the first time in years, with Viktor’s still-very-human eyes. He was pale, even paler than he remembered, except for the patches where bruises had formed and painted his skin a sickly purple, and blood was dripping from his mouth, but his eyes were still him, so undeniably Viktor they wrecked a sob out of him.
He’d half expected Viktor to get rid of them first, with how they betrayed his every emotion, his every thought, with how Jayce had learnt to read them like an open book in the almost ten years of knowing each other, but they were still there¸ a testament to the very humanity Viktor tried so damn hard to get rid of. He couldn’t help but think of the last time they fought, how he’d swung to a masked, faceless Viktor, and how the memories hurt differently knowing Viktor’s eyes had been behind the metal, all along.
Those clever pupils traced Jayce’s movements, and he could cry with relief at Viktor still being conscious enough to do so. He’d half expected the silence to be—
“What happened?” he asked.
“Lab now. Questions later.”
He shot a frantic look at the man’s body. There were so many urgent things he couldn’t focus. His hands were shaking, just hovering over Viktor’s chest, unable to decide where to touch, what to do.
“Jayce,” Viktor urged.
I am not a doctor, he wanted to say. You were the one interested in biological systems. I cannot do anything you need me to do. I don’t know how. You’re going to die, and I cannot do anything but watch. I am terrified.
“Patient’s airways are unobstructed.” Blitzcrank supplied. Jayce had never been happier to hear him. “Tachypnea. Tachycardia. Superficial bleeding suggestive of a broken rib. External bleeding: blood volume has dropped 10% but no major blood vessels are compromised. Wounds treatable with compressive bandage. Stitches probably needed. No active internal bleeding. Patient appears conscious and alert.” His eyes darkened as the light behind them went out before it flickered on again. “No apparent spinal damage. Two broken ribs—right 7 and 8—and a broken left radius. Patient will be safe for transport once the hemorrhage is controlled and broken limbs are immobilized.”
“C-can you do that?”
“I will proceed with the first aid as soon as physical obstacles are removed from the way.”
Jayce kept staring at Viktor’s face, focusing on the way his lips parted to breathe. He was breathing. He was conscious. That had to mean something. He’d soon be safe for transport, and they’d—they’d find help. He’d help.
It took him a few seconds to process the fact that he was the obstacle Blitzcrank was talking about.
“Fuck, sorry,” he got up and stood on the other side of Viktor’s body. Viktor mumbled something inaudible. “What?”
“My leg,” Viktor repeated, through gritted teeth.
Jayce stared at it. His biological one was extended on the floor: at least the armor had withstood most of the damage: there were no cracks that he could see. “Is it..?” he asked, alternating between looking at the limb and at the automaton.
“No injuries requiring immediate care,” Blitzcrank answered as he bandaged Viktor’s side.
“Can you feel it?” he asked, at a loss.
“Not that one, you idiot. The other.”
The other was a mess of bolts and cables that could barely be called a limb anymore. “That one is… compromised.” He felt sort of stupid, lying to Viktor as if he couldn’t see it with his own two eyes, but given the pride the man took in his inventions, it was probably for the best that he didn’t think too hard about the state they’d been rendered in.
Viktor’s piercing amber eyes were suddenly set on him. He felt like the gaze was drilling a hole through his skull. “Are you stupid? I know.” Then he let out a string of words in his native language Jayce was very glad he didn’t understand, if the venom in the inflection of the voice was anything to go by, and clutched at his side harder.
“Patient is experiencing the onset of hypovolemic shock, as well as high degrees of pain. Please do not take what he says to heart.”
“I underst—"
“Of course you should take it to heart, I fucking mean it,” Viktor argued. The automaton administered something to him, then—Jayce could barely see it from the corner of his eye, focused as he was on Viktor’s face—and the man tensed before calming down immediately. He felt the release of the tension that had been holding his body taut. “Fuck.”
Jayce couldn’t breathe through the lump in his throat. He thought of the last time they fought. Had Viktor been like this, too? Who had he called, then? Had Jayce left him shaking from the pain as well, in a destroyed lab, crushed by debris? Had he been through all of this completely alone? The thought that he might’ve been the one to cause this, not this time but at any other point—
Jayce caressed Viktor’s hair, wiping off the sweat on his forehead. Distantly, he noticed his own hands were shaking. “I’m here,” he whispered because that was really all that he could do. “What about the leg?”
“You need to fix it.” Jayce caressed him again. It seemed to help evening out Viktor’s breathing, at least. That, or whatever had been administered was taking effect. “A-and the arm. You need to fix them. I can’t like this.”
“I will,” he answered, even if he had no idea how, just because of the sheer relief he saw on Viktor’s face. It was surreal, even beyond the baseline surrealism of being called by his nemesis for help, how expressive Viktor was. He’d been too accustomed to the mask, he’d almost forgotten how emotions were displayed so richly in his face, the way it would light up, the adorable pout when he was deep in thought. Memories once blurry came back in sharp detail, clawing their way out through the flesh.
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“You have to promise,” Viktor repeated. Blitzcrank finished the bandaging and moved on to immobilize his arm. “You’re—” he flinched in pain as his arm was manhandled. “You’re the only one who can.”
“I promise, V.” He looked so fragile then, it was hard to reconcile it with the idea of the Machine Herald that had almost killed him last time they met. He couldn’t believe they were the same person. He couldn’t believe he’d once been the version of Jayce that had so readily smashed a hammer into his face. The two them who fought seemed so distant now.
“Call me that again.” Viktor pleaded. His head dropped to where Jayce’s palm was resting, nuzzling against it. “I like it.”
“V?”
“Yes, V.” He seemed to think, eyes unfocused for a second. “It sounds better when you say it.”
Jayce had no idea what to answer to that. “That must’ve been one hell of a drug they’ve given you.”
“It was. I designed it myself.”
Seeing Viktor’s eyes, so human and open and vulnerable, still there after all this time was doing a number to him. “You’ve scared me to death,” he said, before his mind registered the thought. Panic had torn the layers of him and left him in nothing but raw sincerity.
“In my defense, I didn’t expect it to go this way.”
Jayce wanted to ask. There were so many questions burning in the back of his throat: who, when, why. He was humiliated by the fact that he truly didn’t know what Viktor did, these days, apart from the crystal stealing and the warped rumors that reached Piltover every now and then. Jayce had no enemies but him—at least none who hate him so much so as to beat him up outright—and he’d foolishly expected for it to go both ways. But there was a life to Viktor outside of him, one he wasn’t privy to, and he wanted to know. He so desperately wanted to know.
“Don’t do this to me again.” He didn’t even try to disguise how his voice cracked at the end. “Please don’t do this to me again.”
Viktor made a noncommittal sound, head still against Jayce’s hand. He caressed his cheek in silence: slow, repetitive motions that seemed to pull the man almost into sleep. He didn’t want to ponder about how intimate it felt: least of all, how natural the movements came to him, almost muscle memory. He’d aged a decade in half an hour as it was.
So he stood there, stroking him, trying his best not to think about how the thought of losing him had seemed so unbearable, when he’d thought he’d made peace with Viktor dying by his own hand.
“Patient safe for transport.”