#viktor and powder as Zaun's resident mad scientists

[tophat-69]

Bonus Chapter: it's the good, defining itself

So, it turns out that even after spending 22 days churning out a chapter a day, I wasn't entirely done with this world. I don't know if I'll keep posting periodic chapters to this AU, but I did want to share something with Tumblr in honor of my joining you all here during this story!

So here's a bonus chapter of "it's the good, defining itself" as Viktor begins to outlive himself in their previous timeline.

The air of Viktor’s office smells of ocean and ozone, blown in ahead of an evening storm that will lash these upper floors of the College of Techmaturgy but will disperse by the time it reaches the sumps of Zaun. Previously it would have ended up in runoff ditches, catching in the mud of the Promenade and eroding the natural fissures, but moving little further. In the city above it would have become runoff, picking up the pollution of Piltover’s factories and following their own elaborate drainage to spill into the feeders for the river far below. 

He’s been working on that--a water capture system that will help to bring fresh, untainted water to their citizens, and that will then trickle down from their gray water to Claggor’s garden and struggling orchard. Instituting city-wide changes in infrastructure is a slow process though, no matter how quickly he can redesign it in his mind. 

Still, he can do all of this because the people who care entirely too much for him have given him this perch in the sky, an eagle’s nest above the city he loves. He can barely see the city, though--instead, his windows face the risen tower of the Academy and the glistening spires of Piltover across the river.

He should have insisted on being down among his own people instead. He always thinks that in the rare times that he uses his office. Usually for meetings, or to do paperwork while his children commandeer his workshops and labs on the floors just below him, or when they’re too rambunctious in the unofficial teacher’s lounge that makes up the floor beneath, where the haze of the Entresol begins to grey the sky before it disappears entirely the further down the tower one gets. 

He doesn’t like the elevated position they’ve given him. An irony, since he gravitated towards heights in his past life, teetering on the edge and looking down from Piltover. That was when he was still apart from them, though. Before he became ‘of Zaun’ again, somehow emblematic of a people he left behind for a life on the topside.

From here, he can stare at the council building as well. But he’s not at the exact right angle to face the window that his death came crashing through.

This week, and a lifetime ago.

The fact that it’s Powder who finds him shouldn’t really surprise him.

The universe does enjoy its ironies.

A locked door means absolutely nothing to fissure folk, but she doesn’t try the knob first anyway. No, she comes in before the rain can slick the roof or the leaded glass, as the line of clouds approaches from the west. Her boots make a truly grating squeal as they slide down the glass, before landing with a thump on the iron ledge that circles the entire upper floor. She grabs the opened shutter and uses it to slip herself inside before closing it behind her so that the rain doesn’t find him. 

Viktor sighs and presses the palms of his hands over his eyes, gathering himself so that he can try to be ‘on.’

“You are aware that there is in fact a door.”

Powder bounces up and makes herself comfortable on Viktor’s desk, perched above him there in a way that completely disregards the piles of paper he’s let build up, legs folding beneath her as she blows an errant strand of her bangs out of her eyes, looking a little windswept from her escapades outside. “Uh-huh. But somehow that door is locked, the lights are off, and you’re sitting on the floor behind your desk. Weird, isn’t it?” 

“One might be led to believe that I was avoiding company.” 

“Wow, don’t be too subtle, there, Prof. I might miss the hint.” Powder, of course, has even worse ideas of boundaries than any of the rest of his intrusive little family in Zaun. Because she can see a boundary and still slips right past it because they don’t apply to her, her voice cheerful and completely irreverent. He’s blaming Vander for this behavior. Or Silco. Or Violet. He obviously would never have raised such a disrespectful child, and Jayce has proper manners so he’s clearly not responsible. Though Viktor did hire her on for his College as soon as she graduated despite basically everything about her being an invitation to bring chaos into their lives, so he supposes that he has himself to blame for that much. 

“Your Piltie has been wandering all around campus looking like a kicked puppy all day between classes. I think he’s the only person in Zaun that the ‘no one’s home’ act worked on even though his office is literally next door. Everything okay between you two?” Since she was eleven, Powder’s been torn between teasing Jayce incessantly for being irredeemably Piltovan, and being invested in their relationship as if there was any chance that their arguments might push them apart and leave Viktor hurt and alone. But insultingly enough, for all that her loyalties are inevitably with Viktor, she sides with Jayce in the majority of their disputes.

Because like Jayce, she centers ‘her’ people over any reason or any cause. And for all that Viktor works to keep all of the children out of their arguments, it’s as if Powder lives in the walls. She is an eternally meddlesome teenaged menace who—like literally everyone else in his adoptive family—has decided that she knows better what he needs than he does.  

That part is definitely Vander’s influence.

“We’re fine. It’s nothing like that.” Viktor sighs and straightens slowly, trying to ease the perpetual ache of his spine by forcing his shoulders square against the drawers of his desk even as it strains his back against the brace. Rainy days hurt the worst. It’s fitting, that today should be among them. “The fact that he would be held back by locks on the door of a Dean’s office is slightly insulting, though. I broke into Heimerdinger’s office to rob it for him within a day of meeting him.”

“Hah! I guess you can take the nerd out of the trenches, but not the trencher out of the nerd. That’s some top tier sump rat flirting there, Prof. Who knew you had it in you.” Powder’s voice is merry, teasing, and she reaches down to poke Viktor in the back of the head repeatedly to harass him into movement, getting her hand swatted away before he grabs for his crutch and uses it to leverage himself up reluctantly. If he stays on the floor, she’s going to try and braid his hair again. “Can’t believe that was too subtle for him to catch on to, since it took you guys coming down here to make it all official.”

“Seven years I flirted with that man and he missed it each time. Do not ever let my husband convince you that he is a genius.”

Right now, in another life, he would have been running along a pier as the storm rolled in. Running. For the first time in his life running without pain, the pigeon-toed twist of his leg straightened out into perfect mechanical symmetry. Now it’s the brace that keeps his leg from buckling beneath him given the stiffness of the position and the barometric pressure of the storm, forcing him to put more of his weight on the crutch as he finds his balance. An hour from now and a lifetime ago, he would have been carving runes into his skin in the shifting glow of the Hexcore. Two hours from now and a lifetime ago, he would have watched in horror as Sky Young’s human form dissolved into ash as she clung to him, trying in vain to pull him away from a danger that he created himself. He wonders what Sky’s life has been like without an obsessive madman to try and wrangle into obeying deadlines, stuck organizing his messes and deciphering his notes.

It should be a better life, he hopes.

In this new timeline, her closest counterpart in his life is the traumatized teenager who murdered him, but in this life is a dearly obnoxious gremlin smirking at him as she sits on his desk with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. She waits as he settles into his chair without trying to interfere because for all of her invasiveness, she’s still a trencher and understands that a person should be allowed a little pride to do things for themselves. But only to an extent.

“Yeah, so speaking of stupid geniuses.” Reaching into the pouch on her hip, Powder pulls out a vial and dangles it between her fingertips, waving the glass back and forth in front of Viktor’s face so that the serum inside of it sloshes, just viscous enough to cling to the sides. “You skipped your treatment. You don’t get to skip your treatment.”

And there’s this routine. 

“Someday, I am going to find where the two of you keep your calendar, and I am going to take great pleasure in shredding it into very small pieces, then setting fire to them.”

“Uh-huh. Laser claw, burner in the lab, right into the forge. Heard it all. You’re a very scary crazy criminal mastermind, now drink your disgusting sludge already.”

Viktor sighs and takes the vial from her, popping the top and letting out a deep breath before he downs the entire thing in one shot as if to do so will make it less horrendous. He hates it. It glows poisonously green and tastes like he imagines licking the interior an active power core would—metallic and electric, burning as it coats his throat. The acidic crawl through his veins will stay for a few hours, now, spreading all the way through him. He's still dying. These are treatments for a disease, not a cure for the gift that is mortality. But even as the acid sinks into his blood and leaves him pained and exhausted and nauseous for the rest of the night, he knows that his family has clawed him just that little bit further away from death's door. 

He resentfully offers the empty vial back to Powder, trying not to pull a face even though he knows he’s long since lost any semblance of the “coolness” he had in her eyes when she was young. Oh, Powder and the others still are entirely too fond of him, but apparently the mystique of being a mysteriously appearing unknown mad scientist who stole everything that topside could teach him and started a revolution wears off once he actually becomes family. For Vander’s children, he’s the man their fathers have bullied relentlessly for the past seven years, and now they feel empowered to do so as well behind closed doors. 

And none of them moreso than the girl who was one of his first two students and has now since spent more time in Viktor’s company than anyone but his husband.

Thunder rumbles in the distance and the rain begins. A patter for now, gentle against the glass. It won’t remain that way for long.

Dropping the vial back into her pouch, Powder leans back and kicks her feet up onto the arm of his chair, ankles crossed so she can prod him in the shoulder with the toe of one of her boots. “Now, what are you two being weird about? Because you’re both being weird this week.”

A lifetime ago and hours ago, Jayce came up with the mad idea to go raid a factory in the undercity, enraged by the very girl who sits here in the office with him. Viktor never found out if it was this former factory of Renni’s, specifically. He doubts if Jayce even knows because the undercity was completely unfamiliar to him at the time. Jayce killed a child this week, and yet the boy is one of many that shows up to the library to learn from Viktor in the mornings. Jayce has as much difficulty looking at the child as Viktor does at Vander, but he recognizes that the boy being a part of Viktor’s youngest pupils is something of a balance in the universe: Viktor has helped to improve the life of Renni’s son, and Renni has kept children--including her own--out of her factories.

Viktor murdering Chross and his men for keeping Isha and the others in the mines probably had something to do with that too, though. That is a thought he has to lock down on most days. Today should be one of the days he’s allowed to feel it. If this week is not one for reflection, when is?

“This will be a… difficult week for Jayce and I.” Viktor looks out for a moment as water ripples down the window, flowing down the waves of the surface of the glass that reflect the Zaunite advanced technology and yet how they do not search for perfection in their creations. Architecture is as much an art as a science, and it was one that Viktor left to others. Viktor can feel the different textures and depths of the glass with his fingertips, and in some ways the imperfections are a comfort. Imperfection is human. And in a life where he’s struggled for that, he embraces it when he can. 

“Yeah, no shit mister cryptic. I caught that much. I asked why.” 

Turning his eyes away from the storm, Viktor lets himself look at Powder in the half-light of the dusk sky, the flashing that illuminates storm clouds. He can almost see her in the crack of lightning--the girl who found him in the commune, never knowing that he was one of her victims. He never wanted her to know. It was irrelevant at that point, either way. It’s irrelevant now, too.

But he does owe her answers that aren’t just… fortune cookie. He can’t tell her the full truth, but he can tell her a semblance of it.

“This is the week I was supposed to die.” Powder sucks in a breath, eyes widening, and Viktor tips his head slightly with a faint smile. “Perhaps this is why you shouldn’t ask impertinent questions to your elders that you don’t really want the answer to.”

Seven years, Viktor always says. He and Jayce both do--focusing on the time they spent side by side, as if it was their entire life after they met. But there were eight years. And this week begins the start of that cursed final year, where he died and rose as something no longer human. The year when time and reality fell out from beneath Jayce’s feet, and then Viktor…

This will be a difficult year. And it begins tonight. They both have their demons for this week, but they only really intersect at two points: the ledge where he planned to kill himself and the council room where he actually died. They’d already drifted so far apart by this time, driven from each other by secrets and ambition and grief and pride. 

Now they’re tied inextricably together, mind and soul, but that comes with its own challenges. They’re in a feedback loop again, as happens sometimes on their worst days when Viktor’s turbulent emotions trigger Jayce’s own, building and building, until one of them overloads. 

The reasonable answer, Viktor knows, would be for the two of them to simply pass the time together--to dampen the way their souls scream at each other by just curling up in bed and weathering out the storm. But some pains need to be felt. And Viktor deserves to feel the pain of tonight.

“Pretty sure doctors don’t go week by week with predictions like that but are you… okay?” Are you going to die, she doesn’t ask. But she’s thinking it. He can see it in her, that fear of losing another loved one. Viktor pats her on the ankle, reassuring. 

“I’m not going to die on you this week, Powder. I’m not…” there yet. He’s still got time, both he and Jayce can feel it. Viktor just hasn’t wanted to admit it because in some ways everything after this is uncharted territory. He can’t prepare for it, can’t brace for it. There’s no definite timeline any longer, he has to just… live in uncertainty. Like every other human, he supposes. “But when you asked me, when you were small, this was the week I was thinking of. And I was right, you’re old enough to…”

“‘Torment the next generation of Zaun scientists.’” Powder finishes from memory, and she’s watching him in so much concern, with an edge of genuine fear and preemptive grief, and oh. The poor girl. He shouldn’t have teased her. Sometimes his ‘not funny’ quips genuinely aren’t, and he knew that she is among the only four people to know for certain that he is dying. It’s why she’s worked alongside Jayce despite her interests in science being aligned elsewhere, like Jayce’s own. For him, they both moonlight as alchemists now. “I didn’t think you were putting me with the little kids because you were trying to fulfil some sort of… of… prophecy you made me about you dying. I’m not that ‘grown’ yet!”

Viktor’s hefting himself to his feet, clutching the edge of his desk as he pushes a stack of papers aside so he can haul himself up to perch on the edge of it with her. His back is going to hate him for this, but he’s never been able to turn away a crying child. She falls into his side as she did that night seven years ago when she was just confronted with the idea of his mortality. This time he’s far more comfortable wrapping an arm around her shoulders to comfort her.

“Hush. I’m not dying yet. You and Jayce and your truly vile serums have seen to that.” He lets his disgust for their medicines color his words, playing into the ongoing tease about how much he hates them, but it just gets him lightly jabbed in the side. So gently, compared to how he knows she could hit him. Her eyes are angry when he looks over to her. 

“Have you been trying to die on deadline? We have to hunt you down to get you to take the stuff, and you knew that it was…”

With a sigh, Viktor tugs at her shoulder again and reels her back in, resting his head on top of hers when she slumps back into him. She and Isha are absolutely going to contribute to him going prematurely gray this time around. Daughters, he is finding, are even more troublesome than husbands. He can at least read and understand and soothe Jayce’s emotions. Powder’s are all over the place, and he can merely guess at them. 

“Ridiculous girl. You try drinking battery acid and tell me if you enjoy it, I am obligated to inconvenience you both for that experience. But do I ever actually miss it?” He doesn’t. And he won’t. Not just because Jayce and Powder force it on him every week, but because he does have so much more he can still do with his life. He still finds it… difficult. To stay in the present and to try and look towards the future. But for them, he grabs hold of his tattered sanity tightly as he’s able in his wavering grip. For them, he tries.

He expected to be buried in the past right now. It’s why he isolated himself, why he hid himself in the office to let himself just feel it. To let himself drown in it. But instead he’s here, present, trying to be what Powder needs from him because that is the man that he should be in this timeline. 

So he presses a kiss against the top of his daughter’s head, just as he would against Isha’s despite how much Powder has grown, and he squeezes her shoulder.  “I told you then and I tell you now, I do what I must to be around for you as long as possible. …And I put you with the children because you are good with them. You have been ever since Isha joined us, and you know that. ‘Prophecy.’ Tch.”

Powder laughs a bit wetly, and that’s good. He can sit here and watch the rain for a while and then let her cajole him into taking better care of himself.

Then he’ll go find his husband, and try to be present for him, as well.

He has three choices: to look at this extra time as a curse, as a fluke, or as a gift. If it is a gift, it is from his family. And it should be for his family, too. 

****

Now that she’s not a student herself and has a small dedicated staff apartment above the dorms, Powder sneaks Isha in with her half of the time and has a bunk bed set up for the two of them. She lives where she can look over all of the students and make sure they don’t get into any of the trouble that she would have when she was one of them, but that doesn’t mean she feels that the rules apply to her any more than they ever did. 

Isha will come find her when the bar really starts to pick up, sneaking out in the crowd even though everyone involved knows that Vander is not only aware he allows it to happen and enables it, and that Viktor will just pretend like Isha’s an early riser when she inevitably tackles him in a hug as soon as he walks out of his house just after dawn. 

So Powder stays just long enough for Viktor to turn her mood around into nagging him and bullying him, as teenaged daughters seem to do, and then he sends her off to take care of her little sister. He sneaks her a bit of money for her to grab them something special to eat, knowing that the conversation had a toll on her too and that a night of fun with her little sister will do her good.

Sometimes that companionship is what’s needed. It’s not… always what Viktor wants. It’s rarely what Viktor wants. He prefers to push himself on his own through rough nights. 

So while Powder might be his daughter when it comes to science and genius and creativity and the brush of insanity that comes with all of it, she got her sentimentality from a different role model.

And Vander isn’t the only one who carries that sort of attachment to people.

It’s not hard to find Jayce when he goes looking. Taking the descender all the way down requires him to put his mask back on halfway, clasped on as the drop takes him back into the Entresol and then below the street level, to the depths of the factory that helped contribute to his own eventual death. Jayce has filters and ducts that run through these levels, dispersing the Gray before it can pool on the floors here as it used to in his basement, but that’s not what makes him need the mask any longer.

It’s the heat haze that gets to Viktor down here and makes it hard to breathe. It’s the smoke of the fire, and scorch of molten metal.

Hammer on anvil, Jayce is working his stress out in the way he has through two lifetimes now. Viktor lingers near the descender, watching his husband from behind where he’s outlined by the blaze of fire, how with every swing the light licks across bare shoulders glossed with sweat.

He’s been at it for a while now, if it’s starting to show. Even if the long line of tools he’s forged for his engineering classrooms spread across the workbench to the side wasn’t sign enough of that. 

Jayce is lost enough in his head that he doesn’t hear Viktor coming, doesn’t know that he’s there until Viktor rests his crutch against the workbench and slips his arms around Jayce, one around his waist and his human hand pressed against Jayce’s chest over the heavy beat of his heart. The cool metal of his mask and brush of unruly hair coming to rest against Jayce’s back combined with the sudden soothing of the emotions he’s doubtless been dumping on Jayce all evening make his partner slump immediately, hammer coming to a rest between his feet as he presses his arms over Viktor’s own, holding him there so he can’t pull away.

“I’m sorry,” Viktor offers, the mask making his voice echo mechanically, though he’s barely loud enough to be heard over the heaving of Jayce’s breath anyway. Jayce understands regardless.

“You needed your space.” Ah, his poor sweet Jayce. He sounds wrecked, as if Viktor shredding his sanity has torn into Jayce’s own. They both have their demons, but Jayce ripped his soul in two and shoved half of it right into the worst of his own. Now he deals with the consequences of that selflessness every day. 

“And you needed your husband. So we find a compromise position. Requests?” Heat and smoke be damned, he wants to kiss Jayce’s shoulder. As if he can hear Viktor’s thoughts even like this, Jayce links both of their hands together and refuses to let him reach for the mask. Meddlesome man. They’re going to struggle with Viktor’s self-sufficiency and Jayce’s need to coddle him for the rest of their lives. However long that may be, now. 

“Can we take tomorrow off? Stay in. Put our kids on figuring out who will TA each of our classes.” If Viktor weren’t reliant on the work to keep him moving some days, he would have thought of it already. In this life, their college is his dream, and while Jayce shares it he doesn’t have the single minded obsession that consumes Viktor in every life. But for Jayce… 

“That is… not unreasonable. I can go in tomorrow morning for the children’s class, and see Powder there and ask her?” A compromise. He cannot let down the youngest children, who come to him before the day begins for the university itself. From the ones small enough to literally climb Powder for her dramatically presented storytimes, to the preteens who want to learn so much that they come to Viktor to absorb every bit of mathematics and introductory sciences and then take home the books he recommends to them based on their interests, to the teenagers who show up for food and an assignment before heading to the mines or the factories or the refineries to support their families… they need that consistency from him. 

And Viktor needs the proof that his College doesn’t only benefit those who push “progress” for Zaun. That he doesn’t leave others behind for not being a born scientist. It makes his days exhaustingly long, but Zaun needs so much more from her people than just scientists. If as a teacher he can help their people feel empowered to bring their own dreams into the city… isn’t that what he should do?

He wouldn’t be able to sit through a day off from that any more than he allows himself an “off” day for the children. Jayce understands that. With a squeeze to his hands before releasing them, Jayce turns in Viktor’s arms and coils around him in turn, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. 

“Yeah. I’ll come with you and I’ll take the teens.” Jayce doesn’t normally interfere in the mornings, but tomorrow morning a lifetime ago he found Viktor just as he was going to step off of the ledge and let himself fall, and then by tomorrow night he was left with Viktor’s broken body and a terrible, desperate decision. So. Compromise. “Then we stay in for the weekend, except for…”

Viktor sighs regretfully as Jayce tugs his shirt back on, both at the unfortunate (but thankfully quite temporary) shrouding of such a masterpiece, and because there really is no escaping his weekend obligations. Not anymore.

“Except for Sunday when I am contractually obligated to socialize with the undercity gang who call themselves my family, or I will be dragged unceremoniously from our bed by whichever one of you brutes wins a coin toss.” Jayce is not-so-subtly stealing Viktor’s crutch from him and positioning himself to take its place, but he’s been so good for Viktor all day even when Viktor was literally driving him mad. So he can have that just this once. It’s also pouring rain, so even the short trek from the college to their home is going to be miserable. “Vander and Silco are going to be insufferable. Powder pressed me on our behavior until I admitted that this is the week I’m meant to die.”

“Don’t… don’t say it like that.” Jayce visibly flinches, and Viktor sighs and links his arm through Jayce’s, leaning most of his weight into his husband’s side as he takes the first limping steps towards the descender. 

“You may not have the right, but I am allowed to call them a gang, just as I am allowed to refer to us as sump rats and…”

“Viktor.”

It wasn’t his best piece of redirection, granted, but he really has no other defense against the relentless sincerity and pleading stares Jayce fixes on him. Viktor sighs again and turns to face Jayce as they step inside the car for the hydraulic lift, resting a hand against Jayce’s chest for balance. He’d be tipping his chin up and demanding a kiss if the damned mask weren’t a sticking point. So instead he lets his fingers scratch gently into the soft thatch of Jayce's beard, petting him as he might the kicked puppy that Powder compared him to. “Compromise. Let me be miserable tonight while you decide how I’m allowed to phrase that. And then tomorrow we have incredibly life-affirming sex essentially all afternoon and evening.”

Jayce still flushes at the mention of sex and glances at the descender doors as they open onto the street level like someone is going to be waiting there to judge them. Truly, this man is too sweet for him.

“We’re doing to duke it out on the ‘miserable’ thing.” Of course they are. But Viktor knows that if he keeps Jayce close, his husband will be spared the worst of the second-hand madness. So he’ll crowd into the shower with him when they get back and will curl into the couch with him, aware that Jayce will know why he’s doing it but is incapable of pushing Viktor away. In return Jayce will do his level best to distract Viktor out of the melancholy that’s trying to consume him. 

Compromises are the basis of any healthy marriage. Particularly, it seems, between a bullheaded dreamer and a fanatical madman. 

They’ll make it through the week.

Then through the year.

And then determine what happens from then on.