Chapter Text
— Give it a decade of careful research, Professor Heimerdinger said about their new direction of Hextech. It zips past you in the blink of an eye.
A decade. A decade. How much would he be sacrificing in that time? “We can improve lives with Hextech now!” —
— “We’ve created something new for you. Something that...that we will share with you. When the time is right” —
— It was bad enough they’d voted his partner into the Council. Now they were spending hours inspecting inventory reports, Hexgate use logs, the smuggling shipment case. “This is a poor use of our time” —
— “There’s always tomorrow, right?” but Miss Young couldn't know. She didn't know how few tomorrows Viktor had left, how could she, when he didn't either —
— Despite only just waking up at the hospital, Viktor closed his eyes in exhaustion. Every bone in his ribcage ached. “How much time do I have?” —
— A caring hand landed on his shoulder. “We’ll solve this.”
“There may not be time. We’re in uncharted waters here and... I can feel my body...eroding” —
— The Doctor Reveck held the vial of Shimmer back for a valuable moment. “I must warn you. If you take this path, they will despise you. Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress.”
He made mention of Heimerdinger, but that was not who came to mind, at the sacrifice warned. “Jayce will understand” —
— “Sky...? Sky? No! That can’t,” It hadn’t even occurred to him, “that can’t, that can’t...” that someone else’s life might be sacrificed for his to be saved —
— I could end it. The fear, the hopelessness, the anger. He took a deep breath. It would all go away, into oblivion, with a single step—
“Am I interrupting?” —
— What is this? “What... am I?” What’s happened to me?
“You’re...alive. You’re alive!”
Then why does your embrace feel...cold? No, not cold. Absence of stimuli. Recursive impulse. Distantly, he knew he should feel horrified. Distantly. “ I was supposed to die. ” I was ready to die —
— They called him Herald. A herald of second chances, second lives —
— With this new body, he still didn't have enough time. He was declining. The Doctor voiced the crux of his dilemma plainly. “The regenerative qualities of his blood will stabilize you.”
Another sacrifice, for the absolute solution to the affliction that all organisms suffered. Death —
— “Do you believe in fate, doctor?” —
— Time passed in increments. The people of the commune became Part of the Whole. Creation was a field of galaxies. The juvenile warmongering of humans below would make do, to expand the Whole.
The Herald allowed them to lead, for Evolution to seize the day.
Time passed in blinks. He sought Jayce. “Jayce will understand,” he told the Doctor, but it was Jayce who stood against him. Jayce, attempting to change the Herald's mind. Jayce, who the Herald heeded to but for a moment, to listen. Jayce, who the Herald could not yield change to. Under his palm. The last piece of the puzzle.
“You always wanted to cure what you thought were weaknesses. Your leg. Your disease. But you were never broken” —
All this tiresome waiting. Time spent, time wasted, time given, time sacrificed. Time that never once seemed to belong to him, always others, always sliced into halves of halves of halves, until—
Time—
Stopped.
Finally stopped. Finally, stopped. Finally, imperfections, wiped clean, eradicated, coalesced into metal-gold-homogeneity, countless Parts of the Whole extending across the world, in a field of hundreds, thousands, millions of nodes, all one, all relieved of pain, of suffering, of death, of the necessity of rest, finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finally. Finality. Finality of evolution. Evolution.
Perfection.
Perfection.
Perfection was a field of dreamless solitude. Solitude. One of us. Part of the Whole. Absence of flaws. All was finally perfect. Everything, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, was perfect—
You’re still there, aren't you Viktor? Please, tell me. Tell me you’re here. Please.
How could someone harbor so much love, for him?
It’s all that I am.
Viktor ripped through the fabric of the world with a scream.
In the frozen gap between seconds, a body formed. The resplendent shell of wild magic hardened, cracked, and spilled his light out. He had eyes, ears, heart — all aching in the molten fire of rushing blood. He had limbs, a face, skin that pearled with new humanness, and shone the bronze of shed machinery. Muscles jumped with tension. Everything seemed to shake. Violently. His vision, his legs, his breath. His breathing.
He was alive.
He was alone.
“Ah...” The sound grated unfamiliar to his own hearing. Small, trembling, weak. His voice coughed. It rattled more furiously, raged fully into a rasping sound that burned out of his vocal cords. It kept coming. His own hearing rang from it. Wouldn’t stop.
The clench of his teeth creaked to the bone. He nearly clawed the raw, constant feeling out of his face—
His hands were different.
The markings there gave his senselessness pause.
He knew these symbols. Runes, and focal points. They started at his fingertips. Thin, blue lines thrumming a relieving coolness. Interrupted color ran down to the back of his palms, then further past his sleeves.
Viktor shed his age-old cloak. There were spiral markings, too. White webs of the arcane that clung to his reborn flesh, up to his shoulders. Magic — true magic — unspooled from his skin and coiled over these new rune-etchings.
He touched the lines, mesmerized out of the sheer intense feeling of being alive. Of breathing, feeling the air trap in his lungs and sink into his blood. He focused on the texture of his fingertips scratching up the strange, blue traces.
At the high-center of his chest, there was a stone embedded. A small, teardrop stone. Not quite a rune-mark. And he could pull it free from the flesh without any pain, to hold it in his palm. The magic yielded him to.
It was Jayce’s rune.
Warm-kept, treasured for eons, unique and yet so common. So familiar to Viktor’s eyes.
“Jayce...” He clenched his hand into a tight fist around it. Why? After everything, why did Viktor get to live, when everyone else was lost to time? Why did you leave me with this curse? It wasn’t fair. He knew it was childish to dream, but everything still hurt.
A wild arcane rune rippled white at his feet.
It encircled him. Viktor raised his hands protectively, but the pulse of power didn’t lash out at him. This wildness of magic, it was the same one that had burst around him and Jayce while he’d still been the Machine Herald. The pieces had cracked through the solitude, born out of a beloved man’s cold remains.
“What...?”
Viktor’s voice died out, raw from screaming himself hoarse. He instead studied the expanse of crackling, wordlessly and carefully. He had to. He couldn’t allow himself the full embrace of it — the pain, fear, hopelessness. They weren’t useful, and robbing him of reason.
The pattern on the orb infinitely refracted out of itself. When he moved his hands, the orb seemed to move with it. Responding to the rune, he hypothesized, and tested. The hand with Jayce’s rune stone was raised high, and with it, magic bloomed brighter, stronger, but...soft to his newborn vision.
Alive?
“You are at the center of all this.” Could it hear? Could the arcane understand like an intelligent mind? Viktor had to bet that it did. The stone tucked inside his palm burned hot. “How can I fix this? Guide me. Show me. Show me!”
What was magic worth, if it couldn’t fix his mistakes? If he didn't have Jayce, his partner, his everything—
A spiderweb of green-teal-red leaped from the arcane. It cracked through him. It ran through the rune as well, splitting into fractal directions, to refract where Viktor had been thrice reborn.
He’d hugged the stone in his grip closer to himself, near to his heart. It came from Jayce, so he needed to keep it safe. It was all he had left of him—
The instant the stone touched his skin again, his body began shaking. Tears watered in his eyes. It hurt, his eyes, ears, heart — hurt, so much more than he ever remembered hurting. Was he supposed to live? With all this pain? Am I supposed to live with it, again?
“Please, show me what I have to do. Please.”
No one answered.
“There’s nothing to fix. Is there.” The words came in a quiet rumble. No one was left to answer him. He was alive. He was alone. Irrevocably, it was his own doing.
Time unfroze. It continued to pass within the wild rune. Perhaps he should keep letting it. Let time wither him, the way the machines had rusted to fragments. The way he had let Jayce wear away to a machine.
The arcane glimmer clinging to his body expanded, as if sensing the thought — the grain of a soul. Something pulled at him, a tugging force that urged him to look back.
Viktor did not muster resistance. He looked.
There, the shell he emerged from. It was imprinted with the outline of two bodies. His, and Jayce’s. His own outline was sinewy, slim, inhuman. Jayce's could be mistaken for a man. They’d huddled close in the end, with the shadow of Jayce’s arm slung toward the shadow of his head, to touch him closer.
The membranes of the shell suddenly multiplied in his sight, again and again, covering both their bodies until they completely joined with the wild, lazily-spinning rune around and above — “I just want my partner back” —
Viktor blinked.
No such thing had yet happened.
Simultaneously, it already occurred.
He blinked again—
The sky exploded and Viktor emerged to, machines, a field of moss and frightened insects, Jayce being viciously gripped —
No such thing had yet happened.
“A memory.” He surprised himself by the curious touch he gave to the shadowed imprints. When had he reached forward? No, impossible that it was a memory. The barrier between reality and magic thinned here, was all. Time unfroze. It also circled in on itself. But why here? Why, when there wasn’t any Hextech left to wear away the...
Viktor opened his hands where a small stone waited for—
The Machine was different. It knelt here, above the world, watching, waiting, always waiting for—
On and on the prismatic wild rune swirled. Slowly, fast, in flickers of all time.
Of his time.
“This stone, it’s what broke the barrier of our timeline,” Viktor understood. “And you...move through it. No, you react to it. You react to me?”
The wild rune moved in slow, halting rotations that blinked in and out of comprehensible pattern.
“You are trying to speak to me, aren’t you? But our languages are incompatible with each other.” Like the wind, which spoke in pressure, force, temperatures and elemental molecules. He could no better comprehend how an atom saw the world.
But perhaps he didn’t have to. He could feel the wind, after all. He could feel its press, its strength, its chill and its scent. Just as he could feel the magic. Before, with the Hexcore, Viktor had attempted to tame a wild beast to his will. Tame its healing, transformative properties. Now, he knew better.
Viktor opened his arms to the arcane force. He took a deep breath. Let it out. At its own whim and joy, the wild rune expanded to a great sphere, all-encompassing.
He thought only one word, Jayce.
Time was a clenched fist.
Violence and tenderness dug teeth into the magic. They were the cutting and slicing of reality, and the safe guiding touch that sent him whole through.
Into a blizzard.
His leg faltered, his restored knee crumpled—
But the webs of the arcane wrapped tighter on his right, weaker leg. It kept him upright, without pain or physical stress.
No, not the arcane, Viktor thought. These threads came from within the body he’d reawakened to. Clinging to him carefully, cradling him, supporting him.
Compulsively, he touched the spot where that one particular rune marked his chest. He felt—I love you, it whispered, and Viktor, his leg folded again at the overwhelming rush of forgiveness that hit him. Forgiveness he didn’t believe he deserved. Not yet.
"Jayce?"
I love you.
It was there, faint. Constant. Calling to him.
He took a deep breath and followed the whisper.
The blizzard bit cold around his fingers — I love you — until the threads spread pale along his arms. They held him, warmed him better than any fire — I love you — and pushed strength into his muscles, kept him pushing, kept him searching.
The magic that had returned life to him swelled in his heart, so utterly great, that every step he took nearly threw Viktor to the snowy ground. Jayce, are you still there?
A tiny voice broke through the whisper.
“Help! Someone please!”
Viktor steeled his resolve. No time to think on it. There was pain in his lungs and his legs, burning, old and unforgettably infuriating. But that wasn’t all that was there. I’m here. He trekked on. I will make it to you again. He stabbed his staff into the ground and pushed on. Just wait for me, a little longer.
The shadow of a boy was swallowed into snow.
Without thinking, he touched the rune mark at his chest.
There were infinite threads of possibilities in that single touch. Infinite branches of times, of past, present, future, all in a crosshair through the stone. He touched the rune, and the rune came away to his fist. But also—
One possibility just a fraction of a fraction of a second in adjacent spacetime, plucked in his palm. The stone was there, in his chest.
And it was also in his fist.
A singularity. Self-replicating. Self-annihilating.
Time folded in on itself.
He found the boy and his mother. “Take us away from here,” he prayed to the stone to please, please work.
Blizzard winds blew outwards in a great dome. A wave of blue changing runes danced in the air. It illuminated the desolate wintery white, then reshaped into a circle.
For a second, time stopped. Everything loose upon the ground began to float. A sense of serenity washed through the terror of the blizzard. Somewhere safe, wherever you want, Jayce, Viktor asked, not demanded.
The world spun in Viktor’s hand.
He opened his eyes to a field of flowers.
He lost his breath to how beautiful it was. Full of light. Dotted with the snow, still. The mountains in the distance. All the pain and anger and sorrow knotted inside his chest fell away to that indescribable beauty.
And when he turned, there he was.
The boy who’d saved him, staring at him with wide, sun-tearful eyes.
Viktor almost let out a real laugh. This boy, who couldn’t know the significance of magic yet, had saved him. Will save him. The same boy who looked at him with wonder and curiosity.
“...How?”
Viktor reached out, without a word, as if something in him recognized that the boy who would save him in the future, would always grant him this precious, small gift back. The rune.
(But what rune did he have but the very one Jayce gifted him? A small, fearful, selfish part of him didn’t wish to give it up. It was all he had left of the Jayce-That-Was-Gone.)
The rune pulsed. It spoke, in the pressure of gifted strength and the unstoppable force of time.
Viktor knew what needed to be.
He chose to let the rune go.
Again, and again. He had to choose.
"Guide me," he'd ask.
The magic would respond.
Like fate, the blizzard would greet him, cold and unforgiving. He'd choose to cross it. And then he’d pluck the rune from his reforged living self, the body born out of time, and choose to return it to Jayce. For just a chance, a possibility of their saved future.
"How?" The boy always asked him.
Love, he didn’t say. One day, you’ll see all magic is, is love.
Love that promised they would always find their way to each other.
Perhaps not at a time when both could understand. But Viktor would save Jayce, and Jayce would save him, round and round across all time and all realities. They would find each other, and they would show each other this:
That time was a clenched fist, and a rune stone was held lovingly inside it.
“Have I ever told you how I fear the blizzards, Jayce?”
The husk of organic and machine matter did not reply. It could not. Words no longer belonged to it, only the words given by the Herald. Kneeling above the world, this perfect specimen retained no opinion of its own silent state. It remained uncaring to its company.
There was no recognition in its flawless, spotless, hollow face.
Viktor knelt with it, side by side. He watched the sun rise above gray clouds and grayer landscapes. “Every time I jump to a different universe, I have to find you there, somewhere. You are so small, and so tired from the long trek through the mountains, that your voice barely cuts through the winds. I hear you, still. I always find you in time. The rune guides me, unfailing, to you. And yet I still fear the blizzard.” He turned then, to his partner. What was yet left of his partner. With a smile Viktor couldn't explain, he said, “Isn't that wondrous?”
Because it was so wondrous to feel that again. The fear that pushed him to do the impossible? The urgency behind it, the thrum beating in his chest, to the timeless beat? The irrefutable knowledge that he cared, that he wanted to save Jayce from that fear, too?
I love you, it whispered, in the protected swell of his ribcage.
The Jayce he spoke to now had forgotten it. The face it wore did not move, not even to express inquiry, or confusion. The brilliant, beautiful mind beneath it had died a long time ago.
Viktor still spoke.
“I visited a dozen worlds today. In the last one, I believe, you were traveling with your father, instead of your mother.” He closed his eyes to the light of the sun and gingerly dusted off the moss growing around Jayce’s feet. Jayce wouldn't like being dirty. “You have his sense of curiosity, and his eyes. Did you know?”
It did not matter if Jayce could not understand yet. Viktor made a promise. He promised to come and keep him company. To believe in them. I love you, it whispered, in the strength of his right leg. Viktor would gladly tell him of all he’d seen while living, for just a chance at rescuing his humanity.
“I am glad to meet you there, every time.”
They were the entanglement of time and space. I love you, Always and forever, in all timelines and all possibilities.
“Everywhen.”
He would keep this promise until his last breath.