“You’re right, you caught me. I was in the area and thought I’d see if you wanted to catch up over some lunch. How’d you know?”
Jayce’s words are no longer jovial. Every sound is delivered with stoicism and punctuated by silence.
He’s finally lost his smile.
Viktor will do that to you.
“Look, I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. I was in the area, yes, but not for you. Gods, not for you.” He shakes his head and blinks rather slow.
Jayce doesn’t know why he thought it smart to show up in person. Really, he doesn’t. The scars that mar his body remind him that talking things out didn’t exactly work last time. There isn’t a single logical reason why he should believe this encounter will end differently. He forgets sometimes, most times, that he’s dealing with an actual, literal madman.
Jayce looks to the hand on the staff once more. It has a function, he knows, or Viktor wouldn’t be holding on to it so tightly. The safest guess, ironically, would be to assume that it will summon something capable of killing him in an instant.
Jayce’s hand moves to hold the lever on the mercury hammer. He’s left it in its ranged form since before he approached Emberflit. Though he’s made it this far with that subtle gesture of peace, he can’t rule out the possibility of needing it now.
“I wouldn’t have come if I could have helped it, but I’d rather deal with this topic now than risk another day or two for a letter. That is, if you’ve already got something planned for me when I get back.” ‘When’, he thinks. Because I am going back.
“As much as I’ve tried dissuading her- the girl, she’s still coming around. She’s not the only one that’s taken to shadowing me either.”
Jayce’s eyes shift back up to look for some kind of humanity behind that metal mask. Something that has survived the steel. Anything at all that he can plead his case to.
“If you have a problem with me, if theres some plan to off me in the upcoming week, month, decade- what have you. Deal with it when I’m elsewhere. On the street. Getting groceries. Taking a shit. It doesn’t matter when or where, just not at that workshop. I’m getting too many visitors who don’t deserve to be caught in this.”
A moment, a beat, time of silence; whichever it went by, it’s now.
( “Surely you don’t intend to just let him in, without some plan?”
“Of course not,” Viktor said. “I am not a fool. Neither is Jayce. He would not come here lightly.”
“Then what shall we do?” Zeta’s tail flickered dark metal underneath the yellow light.
“Wait.”
“Wait?”
“Yes, wait. For my cue. Do not show yourselves.” )
They wait, and Viktor sighs.
His thoughts linger on the paths they both took to end here, skirting on each other’s thinning ice just to see themselves in another’s face. Viktor, sitting down on his throne, flanked by pipes and machinery that all hummed and fizzed and dripped with steam and power. Jayce, the least close workbench that’s still in the room.
Viktor wonders, briefly, if it would have been easier to have struck harder with the crystal down on Jayce’s forehead, when he still had it.
It would have been, Viktor answered. He would have not survived to destroy the crystal. Its destruction has set me and the Evolution both back several years.
Taptaptaptap. A clicking noise chitters from a room aside. Impatience. They don’t want to have to wait much longer.
Though Jayce could not see it in Viktor’s visor, his eyes softened.
“You care for that girl, Jayce.” Viktor’s digitizer is quieter. When he speaks like this, it’s almost indistinguishable from his voice without his mask. He knows well to not phrase it as a question. This is what you are, that says. You care for that girl and you know that I know.
Another pause; not as long as before.
“The assault on your workshop ended more severe than I originally intended,” Viktor says, tone unchanged. “For what it was worth, it was supposed to be a scouting mission. For the crystal, any remaining fragments.”
His finger let off the button. No.
“It is unfortunate that my acolytes, so early into their training, interpreted such as a missive to break in and cause havoc. Such sloppy work will not happen again. You have my word.”
The clicking gets louder and Viktor almost sighs again. He stands up, pushing forward down a step from his throne (as if he would admit he had one).
He readies the hand on his scepter and points it at Jayce.
“I do not hate you, Jayce.” The digitizer barely picks it up.
“But you are a variable I cannot stand to let exist.”
