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Hour #1
Subject’s breath has steadied. Facial lacerations closed within moments of exposure, but observing lateral bruising proves to be more difficult. Initial colouring of the agent was dark purple, but covered the subject’s body immediately during first contact, hiding all possible wounds from further examination. It might be getting brighter—responding to an outside stimulus, or delusion? Do I have an input? Do I have a choice?
The Hexcore expands by the minute—not entirely separate from a spider’s web, if gone crooked. Shape appears asymmetrical, but unambiguously geometric.
- Potentially related to the isotropic force repeated through every iteration of Hextech, but less radial, more cochlear. An angle for the biological, but in change to the material or the application? Or has it changed as well?
Have I?
No matter. If this is the trap it’s set, then let it have its prize. And let me have mine.
Hour #2
Breath sounds continue. The casing has thickened, layered back on itself like a shroud of cartilage and lace. It’s lighter—colour and luminosity. Visualization of the subject would greatly improve surveillance, but it can’t be helped. Something is changing, I think.
- Reviewing Viktor’s notes on the Hexcore helps
Hour #3
Breath sounds continue, regularly. Shroud has gone iridescent in some spaces on the surface, but the source remains unclear. It almost looks like the Gray, or runoff in Zaun—oil left on water, the slip of a secret—a reflection of the patient subject? The idea of a connection implies a pre-established pattern. Recognition, to our benefit.
The Hexcore is in stasis, frozen but fluid. Moves almost like a heartbeat. Like it’s a living, breathing record of his pulse; like it’s in his heart, his blood, his being. Vital signs are level, and I hope to whatever god even considers listening after today that it keeps putting air in his lungs.
Hour #4
The same for the subject. But it’s starting to spread, growing and spinning around him. A chrysalis for the transformation, maybe, but V would mock the comparison.
- Might need to consider building some bounds on this thing before it keeps going—but that means leaving, even just for the forge.
- Not an option yet.
Hour #6
Continuing to look through old research—there’s so much of it. Too much.
- V signed more pages than me. There’s too much of that too.
Something needs to give. It won’t be me. Not for this, not for him
What good is a man of progress without his own partner?
Hour #7
Breathing. Length and width of the cocoon keep distending, but it does thin the substance some. Not enough to see him, but there’s something under the superficial of the exterior. Almost like patterns, but they’re faint. Hard to track. I wonder if any of the runes match those written in the subject’s skin. Viktor’s skin—no point in trying to get around that fact. Can’t do it, either.
I saw it, saw everything, carved directly into himself. He never got around to fully teaching me his language, but this was one that we did share, once. The dialect to magic, the nomenclature of the universe. Instruction and invention.
They were too fresh to be scars. Done within the week.- I remember when he used to let me see him. It was rare—something to be remembered—but it happened, all those little, tiny, accidental things that he never let anyone else witness.
- Part of me used to hope he’d take a nap in the lab just so I could fix his tie.
Stop napping stop napping stop napping please- Please just wake up
Hour #8
Equations have yet to measure anything accurately—why would they? What would they even predict, when there was no way any of them could have predicted this would happen in the first place? Who would?
You, I guess. But you aren’t here, are you? Instead I get to pick up all the slack I’ve been leaving, and do the work of two while I miss the one who actually made a difference.
Come back and
It should’ve
I w
Hour #9
Still breathing. A couple runes are familiar, and I imagine you’re speaking to me through them. That you know I’m here.
You look more like you’re dreaming now. If I ignored the wrinkle between your eyebrows and the way your eyes don’t flicker, it almost looks like that one time I came back to grab my keys after hours and you were dead asleep at the desk.
- Sometimes or all the time or every moment of my unearned life, I wish I took you home with me.
You need the sleep, but part of me does wish you’d just open those stupid bright eyes and look at me. Just look at me, and I’ll know that everything will be okay.
I imagine you’re sleeping now, and you’re talking to me anyway. I imagine you’re dreaming something good.
Remember when we had those?
Hour #10
Read through everything, including the ones I missed before. I’m a damn fool. Should’ve looked at your notes sooner, and Sky’s work too—the projects, your leg, each idea, every adaptation. All of it. I can see everything I missed like I was looking over your shoulder the entire time. Like I was at your side, the way I should’ve been, the way it used to be before everything went to shit. And that’s my fault.
I’m leaving the Council. The others will understand—and if they don’t, Mel will make them understand—and if she doesn’t, then who gives a shit? This city cries for salvation, but these words are the same thing, and both fall on deaf ears.
Things are different now. I know who I am, and where I should be. I know that saving them can only be done with saving you, which means saving myself too. I know that it always has.
Hour #11
I wish I knew what you did because you told me yourself. I wish I was there with you, anywhere, anytime—I wish it’d been me instead of you.
I wish we’d gone together.
Hour 15(?)
Woke up. Won’t happen again, not until you do it too.
- You’re breathing.
- It feels like I can’t.
Hour #16
The Hexcore evolves still. The forge has been started.
Hour #21
The subject’s respiration has surpassed rates measured in multiple previous years. At my most objective, here are the options:
- Putting the subject in a vertical position increases respiratory efficiency. Gravity no longer compresses on the lungs and standing allows the diaphragm to move with full lung expansion, optimizing airflow.
- The subject has been under the influence of the agent for nearly a full cycle. The body can be reasonably visualized with the escalation of total light emitted, in which all extremities appear intact with feasible function. The purpose of the experiment is to heal and restore, to an unknown, uncalculated degree.
The conclusion, regardless: Something is happening. This is not for nothing. And you will wake.
Hour #22
It’s too hard to keep up with the Hexcore by now. You would love I hope you Next time
I need I just
You’re alive. It’s keeping you alive, and that’s what counts.
Hour #23
Vitals are holding consistent.
Hour #24
One full day has gone by. Everything around you glows, and still I see so little of you—even now, when I feel like I’ve seen you clearer than I have in months. The light gets brightest around your face, like a sunburst, or something holy. I don’t know why it hasn’t been covered, if it knows you need the air, if it knows I need to hear your breath, but I’m glad that I still have this part of you.
It’s beautiful.
If you lean in close enough, you can see every colour in the spectrum scattered across your cheeks, like someone took a prism and painted a million points of refraction under your eyes. They look like stars, sometimes, when I’m about to fall asleep and I look at you so I can hope I’ll meet you there. Like they’re charting me a map to wherever you’ve gone, like constellations I’ve never seen before and you managed not to tell me about—like you’ve gone off, all by yourself, and created something brand new because you finally realized you didn’t need me. That you might just be better off.
Mel did ask me how you were doing. I don’t know how much longer this will take, but if it takes forever, so be it. I’ll be here. I’ll be waiting.
Hour #30
It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair, and you should be here. Here. However you wanted to be.
There’s too much happening in this palace, and even if Piltover doesn’t deserve an inch of everything you gave, it’s Cait. And she never even got the chance.
You would want me to go. Whatever the circumstances.
Hour #32
Whispers are terrorizing the streets more than anything from the undercity. People are tired. They’re scared. Mel said the Council’s divided, but tonight they have to present themselves as a force. That we have to present ourselves as united.
I wish they’d seen us in the Council Chamber.
Hour 40
I saw you. When I closed my eyes, I saw you.
It’s not fair.
Hour 41
Another promise, gone. My fault again. Add it to the tally.
I am sorry, V. I just don’t see any other way—neither does Cait, neither does Vi. Not without you. You would find a solution, or maybe you’d just yell at me. But Jinx has haunted everyone long enough, and she’s the reason why you’re haunting me too.
If you were yelling at me instead, it’d be better.
Hour 43
If I came to you and said everything I had to say now, you would laugh. You would laugh, and it would be divine, and then you’d call me a fool and you’d be right. It’s the one thing we should never do again, not after last time, not when it should’ve never been done in the first place. Not even for the right reasons, and now it’s only our best option. There are so many things for you to be angry about, already—under two days, and all our lines redrawn, and our legacy rewritten.
Let it be. Come. Get angry, be angry. Be angry forever, enough for me to never forget, to never forgive. You’d have to be here for that, and at least I’d get to see the furrow in your brows and the twist of your mouth one last time, knowing it’ll be the end. Men have done more for less.
Your design for the rifle would be magnificent, if not for the fact that you’d never make one.
Hour 47
Viktor,
I think the best pieces of me were left behind in the attack, buried under all that rubble and stolen away from the light. For example; the person who brought you into the room to demand peace, the cog in my pocket that you tossed into magic the night everything changed, your cane, your crutch, and you, and you, and you.
Someone collected it and left it outside the lab. They were gone before I opened the door. Elora, maybe.
I need you to wake up and I need you to never know about any of this, even though you will, even though I know you will. Even though you know everything, like how I’ll sit in the shower after every gala until you knock at least five times on the door, like how I only ever wanted to be in the lab and by your side, like how close I came to kissing you on the roof above Piltover, day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year.
Even though you know I love you, because I do. I love you, okay? I didn’t say it before because
because I was scared that you would stop me. But now I’m just scared that you’ll never have the chance—that my work brought me to you, and now it’s taken you away from me. And that terrifies me more than any threat from Noxus, any chainsaw to my throat, any change to me or you or what we have or what we do.
You wanted to save the world, and I want to save you. I love you.
I love you I love you I love you.
Wake up, and I’ll tell you myself.
Hour 48
“When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.”
I haven’t, I won’t, I changed you and I’m not sorry.
I’m not sorry you changed me either. Before I met you, before they gave us a shiny new laboratory in the heart of the Academy, before you took me to the top of the building a minute before the sunrise even if we were supposed to be heading home, I never did appreciate what a new day meant—an early morning, or a later night, whatever you wanted to call time spent with you.
Here’s the secret, Viktor: every time that big ball of fire came up and over the horizon, I would know the second it happened—not because of the view you wanted me to see, but because I was watching you and the angle of your face against the sunlight and the way your eyes turned into molten gold.
I’m sorry for many things. Not a single one of them includes you.
Hour 51
You’re awake. I don’t think I can be sorry, can I?
I just wish you stayed.