The hell the Machine Herald would raise if anyone brought harm to Jayce without his knowledge :
The announcement read in a newspaper, almost a day late, the one time he fails to keep an eye on Jayce and-
or perhaps it’s Naph, left to his own devices who comes running to him, panting and devastated and ;
About as nervous and blanched as he was that time 10 years ago when he first stepped foot by dare into Viktor’s abode,
This time, rather than handing him a vial of emotional suppressants, the Herald freezes,
It’s a blur from there, the now teenagers tongue tangled in his own mouth,
The Herald’s impatience fighting against his care ;
Explanations, and shouts, stuttered words and frantic desperation, a stool that clangs to the ground, matching just behind the resounding sound of a screwdriver that had met the floor moments before,
A dismissal of Naph, cold, angry - a call for Blitzcrank and the Herald is gone, door left open behind him.
He marches, marches his way past amberflit valley, through half of Zaun,
Past the people who watch him, mixed in horror and awe,
A rare sight he is out in broad daylight,
Until there he stands, in front of that dreaded door,
Usually knocked on, for the past 20 years, now gets thrown open so hard it meets the wall behind it,
The herald demands, of the woman who from he never does,
fists clenched at his side,
“who- which of your Lackeys dared to lay a hand on him !”
Even with the modulator, his voice is below even, pitched and furious, echoing off of the walls, rising in volume as he spits the words like he’d much rather have his hands around Renata Glasc’s throat than clenched by his sides.
He barks, until he is by her desk, baring his weight on it,
leaning in against her unaffected frame so he can spit the words right in her face where they belong.
His sponsor doesn’t flinch, like she had more than expected his fury and something about that crawls deeper under his skin ;
Simply steeples her fingers by her chin,
“You took too long, Viktor.”
that there would be a day this came.
Their contract was clear ‘eliminate the man of progress.’ the only string attached to her unlimited funding, for his freedom of his vision, of his glorious evolution.
And he had let it go unmet long enough, drawn it out long enough.
He doesn’t know when 10 years had turned to 15, then 20 and-
That Chem-Baroness, Renata Glasc, who led her region of Zaun with an iron fist, would not eventually take matters into her own hands.
Still, he saw red, snarling a repetition straight from his throat.
The words were snarled, like a wild animal off its leash, and then, he felt her orders more than he heard them - chemtech soldiers who came up behind him, reaching to restrain his arms,
He whirled around with it,
cocky was she to think that her inhuman soldiers would be able to perform a sneak attack, something that in all their years not even the man of progress had ever succeeded at.
He was anything but a machine then, a wild, cornered animal, the laser of the hexclaw the equivalent of his teeth bared,
He didn’t dare look back at Renata Glasc, as her smooth even voice continued,
“He was getting in our way, Viktor.”
“And you’re being irrational.”
“Don't tell me what I am, I don’t belong to you.”
He said as evenly as he could,
Of course, that wasn’t the truth,
he did in every sense of the word,
She made him what he was, as she so often liked to remind him.
Still the words felt good to say.
“You promised me better than this”
and she was quite right, again, of course.
When did his emotional suppressants wear off ?
No- when did he last take them, that morning-
No, no, better yet when did his emotions become too grand for them to work, and when did he stop caring, when did he stop upgrading them-
Why did he, the Machine Herald, feel and why was this stinging emotion now carving open his chest and eating the remnants of his heart alive,
why did that make him want to care again-
It was why he stopped feeling in the first place, wasn’t it ?
Because everything had hurt.
He clenched his jaw behind his mask, strong enough to break his teeth had they still been completely human, A slip of his modulator, a tinge of his accent, a hard effort to keep his emotions out of his voice, to keep it as even as Renata had hers.
With that, failing to install any fear but overtaken by his vengeance, the Machine Herald had turned, walked out and vowed to never come back,
to be so pathetic as to give himself over, to be under anyone’s control again.
A two times broken heart was quite enough.
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