Chapter Text
As devastating as it was to navigate life without Jayce, there were other ways he could atone for overstepping the natural order in his previous life. Sky Young was still alive and Viktor remembered the innovative ideas she’d had about natural air filtration and lowering soil toxicity. It was quite a bit to expect that she had fully fleshed out her research by age sixteen but she had mentioned in her notebook that her ideas and her love of botany had started early. Hopefully with his knowledge of her future research and her natural talent, they would be able to make further improvements.
She was delighted to see him when he found her working in one of the undercity glass factories. Dangerous, blistering work, the heated interior of the factory reminded Viktor of Jayce’s forge. “Mis—Sky,” he corrected himself from using the formal address he’d adopted with her so that his Pilover colleagues would regard her with some respect.
“Viktor! What brings you here?”
He remembered his pitch from when he and Jayce had started hextech in earnest and had needed an assistant. “Are you exceedingly fond of working in this refinery?”
She shot him a wry grin. They had been two of the luckier ones, having been able to finish their schooling up through age thirteen; most families could not afford to have a teenager in school when money was tight and dangerous jobs willing to pay for cheap, manual workers were plentiful. “I assume you have something more exciting in mind?”
“If you’ll hear me out.”
It was a much harder prospect to sell this time around. He did not have a cushy, well-paid Piltover academic job for her this time around. This time it was a risk that could plunge Sky and her family even deeper into poverty. Bless Sky, she heard him out even though her expression gave her away at times. At the end of his explanation, she paused and looked over all the notes he’d handed her: her research, copied and placed on her lap around fifteen years early.
“You’re crazy!” She barked a quick laugh before reading through again. “How did you come up with this, Viktor? I always had an idea that the Fissure Tears had some kind of filtration—the air where they grow is always a little lighter—but I never had the materials to test it or the time to do any experiments with cross-pollination.”
“More than that, I think there may be other plants in the undercity that can do more: purifying water, detoxing the soil, medicines.” Viktor knew it as a certainty, having worked through the deep knowledge of the undercity people who’d been touched by the herald’s strings. “I want to run tests, make some medicines I can sell to fund the research but I need help.” He glanced down at his leg—always his leg.
“What did you have in mind?” There was an innate hunger in just about everyone who lived in the undercity, most of the time for wealth or stability, but occasionally there were outliers. He and Sky were driven by a similar type of hunger. It was the same thing that had driven him to feed the hexcore his blood, carving into his skin, pushing the boundaries.
Viktor had already designed breathing masks that were more efficient and lightweight. With his foresight of the shipping processes in Piltover, it would be no issue at all to steal a few of the old versions of the masks to make the necessary corrections and start their venture off in the black. Sky’s sole job would be plant propagation and pollination so that they could begin to experiment with medicines and filtration. It would be long hours and potentially put them in contact with some incredibly dangerous people but it would give them both what they wanted. “I understand…if it’s too much to ask. But you’re the only one I’d trust with this.”
It took her a little longer to review the research a third time but when she looked up at him again, she was smiling. “I’ll help you, Viktor. Anything to get me out of that sweatshop.” The curiosity won out in the end.
Viktor leaned forward to embrace her, delighted that she was alive and breathing and willing to work with him in this life as well. “Thank you.” He breathed as he tried to keep tears from welling up. “I won’t let you down.” Not this time.
“Just promise me that you’ll be the one to deal with any glassware. At least for the first year or two.” She pulled back and squinted through glasses that Viktor knew were the wrong prescription. He couldn’t wait to offer her Piltover on a golden platter. “How have you been, Viktor? How’s your mother?”
“Ah…” It was a difficult question to answer.
His mother could still stand, still work, but the grief and the lifetime of exposure to gases had taken its toll on her thin body. She and Viktor wore the masks he’d created day and night but it was nothing but a light painkiller for her. Every day the effort to rise from her bed was greater and Viktor knew by the time he turned eighteen she would have used her final paycheck and the last bit of her strength to walk to a pawn shop in the Lanes and buy him a Piltover Academy uniform.
In his old life, he had managed to land his assistant role through a combination of luck and balls, and had sent most of his wages home to set her up with a home nurse while he was chasing gilded dreams. He regretted it all but he’d been desperate.
And scared. So frightened to come home and see his fate on his mother’s body. Standing next to death at eighteen had been too much for him to bear. But he was different now.
This time he’d be ready. He’d have money so she could spend her final days in comfort.
“Not well,” Viktor admitted, “I want her to stop working and breathe easily while she still can. That’s why we can set up the operation and the first set of greenhouses in my bedroom—it will clear up the air even more.”
Sky’s expression had gone from sympathetic to surprised as Viktor glossed over any further conversation of illness in favor of going over logistics. “I-If we’re setting this up in your bedroom…where are you planning to sleep?”
There was still so much to do.
Viktor reached out to gather up all the research papers in Sky’s lap as he felt the inspiration coming in a tidal wave. These strokes of genius had kept him and Jayce up for days on end but the dry exhaustion at the ends of these marathons was well worth the miracles they’d come up with. Like magic.
“I have a few ideas. But it can always wait.”
With their filtration masks selling at a tidy profit and Sky making use of nearly every square inch of free space in Viktor’s neighborhood for their botanical experiments, Viktor became acutely aware that they needed more space for their plants and he needed a separate workshop of his own. Medicine was the next step and he wanted the skills before he turned twenty.
As soon as he had the money, he gently demanded that his mother retire early to spare what was left of her health, paid a visit to a doctor to confirm he’d narrowly avoided a chronic lung disease, and then took ownership of the greenhouse that had been his a lifetime ago in his commune.
He remembered it for its potential: the nacre bubble that had swelled and grown with his powers and had been his meeting place, the sea of flowers and fruiting plants, the soft yellow daylight, and the gentle, happy people who worked together to make things better. He had built it for the undercity but…if he was being very honest with himself, it was also for Jayce. He wanted a utopia where they could invent in peace and make real, honest change for the people who needed it most. He thought Jayce would understand.
Viktor wrapped his arms around his torso, feeling the phantom pain of the blast that had hit him in the chest. You never learn. There was always a part of him that ached to fix his mistakes, to improve and evolve…
Though the locals and Sky thought he was mad for his choice of a second spot for their growing project, no one put up a fierce argument in the face of his complete confidence.
He paid them no mind as they called him an idiot, insisting the poisoned soil couldn’t support life as they bought his medicines and masks. The local thieves and gangsters thought he would be an easy target until he caught a few of them casing his greenhouse, recognized them from his commune, and told them their own darkest secrets. They’d fled in pale fear and the Nautilus Fissure became unique in the undercity for how few crimes were committed. He ignored it as his neighbors and customers jokingly called him a ‘bloomer’ as he paid local children to help him plant the first round of bulbs and seeds. When, against all odds, the shoots began to push through the earth, ‘bloomer’ became more of a fond nickname and his unofficial title.
It was not nearly as grandiose as being known as one of the boys of progress or the Machine Herald but his hubris had gotten him into this mess in the first place.
Fate mostly let him be.
But every so often, there was a sign he could not ignore. The spring before he turned nineteen, it was Sky who delivered him one on a set of glass sample trays while he was doing dissections on their newest round of hybrids. Sky talked steadily as she placed new plant samples on their shared work table. Already their work was having some effect, small as it was.
There were slight signs of decreased toxins in the air and water from their initial tests but Viktor felt the urgency of time breathing down his neck. More tests, more medicines, more cross-pollinations and samples…
“These show some promise with pain relief and boosted strength,” Sky mentioned errantly as she placed some specimens at Viktor’s elbow. “I think if you could find a way to bind the chemicals to some kind of protein, it would have a wide versatility of uses.”
Viktor glanced down and the color caught him.
Do you feel the hand of fate moving? It’s violet. Neon violet.
Viktor saw his hands tremble as he reached over and touched the mushroom caps, feeling a rush of sickening nostalgia as the gills underneath glowed a very faint neon purple. The same as it had in vials and syringes, in the veins of the people who shot it up to power through or numb the pain of existence. Chemicals bound with the animal protein of a waverider, Viktor knew the exhilarating rush personally. He remembered how beautiful and terrible the first pulse of chemicals felt in his bloodstream. He knew the taste of Shimmer.
“Shimmergills,” he spoke in a careful monotone, “we’re branching out from botany to mycology? Where did you find them?” He’d stayed far from mushrooms and fungi for fear of coming into contact with the hateful things but…it had come to him.
There was no surer sign that he had to act. The arcane was moving again and had sent him a message outright.
“It seems a bit of a waste not to explore every resource,” Sky pushed her glasses up higher on her nose, unaware of Viktor’s horror, “One of the locals showed me where he was harvesting them and said we might find them useful specimens for our research.”
Even the words brought the man to mind: narrow in the face and the frame, with his dark hair receding, a low, serene voice that beguiled his listeners and put them at ease so that they didn’t notice his complete and utter lack of morality. Corin Reveck—Singed, as the street kids called him once his skin became shiny and blistered from burns.
“I agree,” Viktor said lightly, “I’d love to study them as well.”
His guilt over the white lie was drowned out by the terrible knowledge that he would have to take a life. He’d been sickened to his core at the thought of making weapons with Jayce. Sky was delighted as she handed him the samples she’d collected and Viktor felt a lump in his throat as he looked at her dear face. By killing one man, he’d save her life.
His mother had not been able to lift a knife in months but she’d been militant about keeping the blades sharp up until cooking had become too much for her. The rockfish from the canal took strength and sharpness to slice through and Viktor selected a medium sized knife that could be easily wrapped in a dish rag and hidden in the folds of his clothes. Luckily Sky hadn’t noticed as she was too busy boiling and filtering water for the plants and for Viktor’s mother.
“Sky? Could I ask you to stay here this evening while I go out?”
“Are you going to the protest?” She asked without taking her eyes off the balances on the filter.
“Prote—no,” Viktor shook his head. He was so caught up in his own plans that he hadn’t even been aware of what was going on in the undercity. Protests were tricky, clogging the streets and setting the enforcers on a violent edge. “Just going out for some materials. But I’ll be careful.” The last bit was added purely as a courtesy.
Word got around in the undercity and people were not subtle at hiding their anxiety around Viktor. He knew they often found him unnerving for his preternatural calm, the way he was able to move through the city with such ease, and the way he seemed to know certain things before they happened.
He was mostly avoided until it became widely known that he sold medicine for cheap. Then there were some desperate and poor enough to seek him out. No one would approach him when there was a protest to worry about.
“I’ll hold down the fort.” Sky said, still focused on her chemical filtration levels. She didn’t notice as he smuggled the half-empty gas canister for the stove alongside the knife and slipped out of the apartment with his hood up.
He was unsurprised to see the footprints on the ground and fitted his feet to them exactly as he set off to his terrible errand.
His brace was working as there was no lingering pain in his ligaments, only a slight ache of the muscles as he picked his way down to the creeks of his childhood and through the cave systems. He would never forget the way. Never.
The air was hot and oppressive from the summer storms that were supposed to roll in. The back of Viktor’s neck was sweating, making his hair damp as he worked over the rocky banks into the cave system where his mentor’s laboratory was built. It was pitch black in the tunnels at that time of night but Viktor whistled to light up the bioluminescent mushrooms and lichen growing along the damp walls.
The heated sweat of exercise co-mingled with the cold sweat of impending horror. He had to kill a man. Singed had created Shimmer and the drug had gutted the power of the Lanes. His creation had led so many to addiction and ruin, Viktor included. And his chemical creations had been directly and indirectly involved with the mass destruction of Piltover and the undercity. The footprints were leading his way and he could not find an easier way to avert disaster.
Viktor had to kill his mentor.
He was winded and his clothes were sticking to his body by the time he’d hiked to the entrance of the first lab he’d ever worked in. He had steeled himself by then. For Jayce. “Jayce…”
The metal canister of kitchen gas he nestled in the sandy dirt just outside the edge of the path before hobbling inside. His heart felt as though it was on his tongue as the stone walls began to take on a watery indigo shade and it felt as though he was in a dream as he rounded the final corner.
As usual the walls were covered with a history of facts and experiments, every flat space was stacked with preserved specimens, and there was an overwhelming chemical smell that would have made Viktor sick if he hadn’t been wearing his filtration mask. Singed was hunched over the stainless steel tabletop where he was dissecting some poor creature. Aside from the bright lamp pointed at the table for a clear view, the only light came from Rio’s tank in the center of the room. She was suspended in some sort of liquid that was keeping her dying flesh alive. Though her large eyes were milky and unseeing, Viktor did feel a little bittersweet at how peaceful she looked. Soon it would be over and she could pass on peacefully, painlessly.
He withdrew the knife and let it hang, half hidden behind the curve of his thigh. It felt so heavy in his hand until he saw the door from the corner of his eyes. Tubes snaked underneath the frame into the glass coffin he knew was behind the door: Orianna, his mentor’s daughter. She was innocent. She didn’t deserve the fate of her father—
He could not stumble now. He timed his breath in unison with the low hum of machinery before he spoke.
“Professor,” Viktor said quietly as he clenched his fingers a little tighter around the handle of his mother’s knife. “I’ve come to see this through.”
Singed glanced back and it seemed to take him a moment to recognize Viktor with the breathing mask covering the bottom half of his face. However he spared a wry smile before turning back to his work. “Viktor. I always had a feeling you’d come to understand my point of view. Tell me: what inspired your change of heart?”
“The same thing that inspires anyone to cross the boundaries they’ve set.” Unbidden, Viktor felt the familiar words rise as he thought on the memories of his mentor. “The same thing that has driven you to this unspeakable madness.” Rio’s cloudy eyes bored into him and Viktor remembered how lively and sweet her liquid eyes had been when she was curled around him. “Love.”
Singed stiffened in the way everyone did when Viktor said things that weren’t meant to be spoken for another decade or so. A small anomaly in the timeline that set them on edge instinctually.
“Something about you has—”
Viktor built up all his resolve by the time Singed turned in his chair. His teeth were rattling but his arm was steady as he swung it in a short arc and buried the business end of his mother’s knife in the side of Singed’s throat. The surprise in his mentor’s eyes, followed by the warm gout of blood was all the reminder Viktor needed of how revolting it was to end the life of another.
“Viktor—” He croaked as his hands scrabbled weakly towards his neck.
Viktor remembered Sky, clinging to him, screaming his name as the arcane peeled her apart at the molecule.
“I can’t—w-we can’t suffer you to live.” Viktor gasped. “What you’re doing with Shimmer,” Singed’s eyes widened at the shock of hearing his research, still in the early stages, named aloud, “with Rio and y-your daughter! Piltover and the undercity can’t suffer you to live.” He thought, selfishly, of Jayce chastising him on the border bridge after he’d gone to see Singed. Jayce had been worried out of his mind because the thought of someone he loved putting themselves in danger was enough to make him want to die from fear. “I cannot let you bring this to bear!”
He pulled the knife free with sickening ease and began to heave as blood spilled onto the smooth floors in pumping bursts. Singed fell to his knees before toppling over completely, his fingers at his throat and his eyes locked on the door embedded in the far wall. Viktor knew what was behind that door and he began to weep for his mentor.
Even in his last moments, his only thought was for the safety of his daughter. “Forgive me!” Viktor refused to let himself look away. He had to take in the sacrifice. “F-Forgive me…”
It was a mercifully short death, thank the gods.
Singed was dead, his eyes as unseeing as Rio’s long before Viktor’s tears dried. “I’m so sorry.” Viktor apologized once more before turning back to get the container of gas. With all the chemicals and the research materials inside, the place would burn thoroughly and anyone who discovered it wouldn’t ask too many questions. The doors to Orianna’s mausoleum were opened, books were stacked like kindling before being doused, and he knocked vials over at random until the smell of gas and chemicals made his eyes water and itch.
He was almost ready. All he had to do was light the fire but he took one last look around.
Two more deaths to go.
In a moment of madness, Viktor grabbed a metal stool and slammed it into the glass of the tank that held Rio suspended in her tangle of wires and tubes. The thin glass shattered, pouring viscous fluid on the floor up to Viktor’s ankles.
His legs ached as he knelt to cradle Rio’s enormous head in his hands, stroking the skin that had once been as cool and smooth as silk but was now clammy and unresponsive. He could feel the faintest tremor of a heartbeat but Viktor was under no illusions of hope: she wasn’t long for the world. Viktor leaned down to rest his forehead against hers.
“Rio…sweet creature. You should have been allowed a gentler death.”
He made sure she would feel no pain before stepping back and igniting the spark wheel of his lighter. All of it—every scrap of research—had to be burned before someone other than Viktor heard about Shimmer. The flames that licked up the floors soon took on a violet tinge and Viktor stepped away before the heat became too intense.
By the time he’d hobbled to a safe distance, the mouth to the cave was an all-out inferno that sucked in more oxygen from the narrow stone tunnels to feed the flames. Good. Let it burn.
Viktor waited until the lab had burnt out completely. He had to make sure that nothing remained aside from bones and bits of blackened metal. The chemical recipe for Shimmer would die with him and the undercity would never be wracked with the effects of a drug trade. He was not aware he was trembling until the fire had died down and the entrance to his former mentor’s lab mellowed to black laced with veins of fiery red-orange.
It was done. “Forgive me.”
Viktor wasn’t sure if he was asking for the forgiveness of his mentor, of dear, gentle Rio, or to Orianna, the young girl sleeping between life and death, whom he’d only seen through the eyes of others. They had all deserved better. If only he could have saved them.
Although it felt as if a lifetime had passed, Viktor realized it wasn’t even dawn yet. He still had some time before he’d go back to his apartment to relieve Sky but when he stood to stretch, the breath caught in his throat.
The footprints.
Whorling in pearly geometrics to create a perfect imprint of Viktor’s soles, they all but glowed in the dark in a very obvious cue to follow. The ghastly things were imprinted on the rocky ground in front of him, leading a little further upstream to where the current was stronger. He could hear the whispers like a tug in the back of his mind:
Follow, please follow, please save him, save him.
This time the voice had a distinct timbre that seemed to push through a chorus of others: masculine, deep, desperation underneath a thin veneer of professional calm. Viktor had heard it before but he couldn’t quite put his finger on who it was from his past. It would come to him eventually.
The last time he’d ignored the footsteps and the whispers of the arcane, he’d come back to the undercity fatherless and with broken ribs. As a scientist and an engineer, he liked to think he was the type to learn from his mistakes. With a sigh, he fitted his feet directly over top of the imprints and followed them step-by-step upriver until the mouth of the creek had opened up almost into the easternmost part of the bay. To the south, it was so pitch black that the water seemed almost to blend but there was a red-orange light to the northern sky that made Viktor’s heart seize.
It looked as though he wasn’t the only one setting fires that night. He was so transfixed by trying to remember if this night was important, he nearly missed the man who’d washed up on the pebbled shores. It wasn’t until he unsuccessfully tried to raise himself up to his elbows before falling back to the ground that Viktor noticed him.
He’d seen the man in the memories of others, recalled his name and the little details of his life seen in snapshots. Fear and love, loyalty and betrayal, regret and hope. “Silco,” he spoke the man’s name as if they’d known each other for ages.
He was in a state—half-drowned, bruising around his slender throat, half of his face an open chemical burn—and he gasped for air as he clung to the rocks and then Viktor for dear life. Thank the gods Silco was a slender man or Viktor might have had problems pulling him out of the water. He was soaked from the waist down and breathing heavily but Silco was alive and on dry ground for the first time in gods knew how long. Viktor gave him reprieve to catch his breath while he tried to remember all he could, aside from the terrifying rumors and the information Jayce had managed to dredge up when he’d gone to treat with the man.
He couldn’t sit cross-legged like he had in his commune without causing pain in his hips, but he could still meditate. Sitting atop a large, flat rock, Viktor closed his eyes and delved into the memories that weren’t his.
It took a great deal of effort but he saw—
Bitterness. Cunning. Desperate love for his daughter and for Zaun. Viktor saw him inject liquid Shimmer into the humours of his ruined eye. He saw the man sweetly manipulate and coldly threaten everyone from undercity teenagers to his subordinate barons to the enforcers. And in wisps, watercolor snatches of sensation, barely memories at all, there was love, joy, hope that seemed to focus Silco at the center.
Even just this small foray into all the information he’d accumulated after shedding the limitations of his physical form had his head throbbing and nose bleeding. His fingers shook as he wiped away the blood.
“Am I…dead?”
Silco’s voice was a raspy whisper, choked by smoke, the water, or the fingers that had been around his throat. But while his tone was weak, his eyes seemed to burn in their sockets. He was not a man who would surrender easily to death.
“As if the universe would be so kind,” Viktor smoothly adopted the fatalistic humor of the Lanes as he stood. “No, you live to fight another day, Silco.”
There was fear and awe in his narrow face. The same as those who had seen him down in the fissures as he reached out glowing golden fingertips. “H-How do you know my name? Wh-who—were you on the bridge? Were you at the protest?” Viktor dove back into his store of memories, even as the blood flowed freely from his nostrils, and caught little rumors of a protest quashed in blood, a ruinous start to the hopes of independence.
A night where no one would take notice of a fire and a murder in the caverns near the creeks.
“I’m Viktor.” Viktor responded in his most gentle tone. It was Jayce’s opinion, broadcast from the glowing filaments of their bond, that the mellow notes of Viktor’s accent could soothe anyone. “I’ll get you somewhere safe.” Having lived so long brushing shoulders with death and touching any number of diseased souls who came to him for help, Viktor wasn’t at all squeamish when reaching down to run his thumb along the blistering edge of Silco’s facial wound. “Though this looks serious. I don’t know if I’ll be able to save your eye. What happened?”
He had meant the question more to determine what kind of chemicals had burned him so badly but he paused when Silco’s mouth dropped and he keened in pain. Viktor choked on his breath as he recognized the cry.
It was the same noise he wanted to make when Jayce looked at him with no recognition or turned away entirely. It was the sound of a man whose heart had been torn away by someone beloved and crushed in formerly gentle hands. A kindred spirit. The feeling was so terrible that Viktor could quietly admit he preferred the feeling of death. His eyes brimmed over but his hands were steady as he cleared the wet hair from Silco’s face. He didn’t fight it as the man seized his wrist and sobbed into Viktor’s palm.
“I’ll get you somewhere safe.” He promised again, “But we’ll have to wait until you have the strength to stand. I can’t carry you…but I will heal you.” His nose dripped blood steadily onto the rocky banks as he searched for any medicinal memories and waited for Silco to get up.
Viktor had changed something very important. He could feel it in his heart: some movement of fate had been averted.