#val.writes stuff

Of course, he also remembered the way his lungs would seize up if he got into a room that hadn’t been aired out properly, how his faulty leg would scream in protest at each attempt to move it too far or too harshly. He remembered the burning heat in his nerves when the pain in his spine got too bad, remembered the days when he could barely leave his bed. 

Yet right now, he remembered nothing. Felt nothing. 

The absence of pain, just for a few seconds, was an absolute moment of bliss, so why would he care? He couldn’t remember why he should get up, if there was something of importance to force him to get up, why he shouldn’t just stay right there, for a few moments more. He didn’t remember the burning agony in his lungs the night before, or the sensation of drowning while far removed from a source of water. He could just stay there, blissfully drifting away on his thoughts. 

He was stirred from his trance by the quiet sound of broken sobs. They barely reached his ears, sounding like they came from his dorm neighbors. He stirred from his moment of respite, feeling the ache in his lungs returning to the level he was used to, the faint static of pain in his leg, the discomfort of his spine settling against his muscles. He opened his eyes, and saw his friend Sky weeping at his bedside. 

He frowned. What had happened? Had something happened to her family? 

“Sky? Are you alright?”, he asked. He pulled himself from his bed, sitting up and putting his hand against her shoulder. 

Or, at least tried to. 

His hand moved through her shoulder, as though his hands were but a shadow on the breeze. He didn't feel her warmth, her shoulder, or anything at all. His head started spinning.

Panicked, he looked back at his bed, and saw himself, still and breathless beneath his covers. A thin line of blood streamed from his mouth, and he could see the way his own eyes staring lifeless towards the ceiling.

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Medics came to gather his body an undefined amount of time later. He felt frozen in place, feeling his sense of time slip away from him. He watched Sky holding onto his body, crying for the loss of her friend, unheard and unable to make himself known to her. It frustrated him to no end, but there was nothing he could do. 

He knew what had happened, of course. His lungs had been damaged for as long as he could remember, torn apart by the toxic fissure gasses he was exposed to as a child. The under city already wasn’t kind to children born with disability, but his sensitive immune system had not taken kindly to the toxic fumes. And over the past few weeks, his cough had grown worse and worse. He suspected his alveoli had finally burst, weakened by the toxins and torn from the cough. 

He took a breath, though he wasn’t sure if he even needed to anymore. The dull pressure in his lungs was a bother, but it was a lot better than the pain he had experienced over the lase several months. 

Time passed by. Three breaths. Three minutes. Three hours. 

He stayed in his room, not bothering to follow the medics or Sky. Silence had draped itself across the dorm room. Viktor remembered his relief when he had been promoted to Humdinger's assistant, and didn’t need to share a room with another student. Now, it lay before him empty, cold and deserted. His pile of notes on his desk had been swept away by the wind, laying disorganized on the floor. Sky had picked up his cane, holding onto it as though it would bring him back, as if it would allow her to feel him one last time. His writings on the chalkboards had been messed up by the shuffle of medics moving around to grab his body. 

He stood beside it all, mute and watching, with no ability or desire to reach out and try to stop them.

Three breaths. Three hours. Three days. 

He hardly noticed the passage of time, passing by him so rapidly. And why would he care? There was nothing more for him to wait for, no grand passage to the afterlife, nothing but the silence of his room. 

Someone had started cleaning it up. Gathering his belongings into cardboard boxes, cleaning the chalkboards, changing the sheets and mattress. The room had become barren, lifeless. The only clue that this room had once been his were the faint scoring in the wooden floors his cane had left behind. 

Sky didn’t return to his room. Neither did Heimerdinger. 

He wondered if they held a funeral for him. Was there anyone who would mourn him? Who would attend? He guessed that Heimerdinger would be there, as would Sky, but in Piltover? There was no one who would even notice the death of an Undercity cripple who had somehow managed to work his way into the academy, to the side of the dean. 

He wondered if Corin would ever find out about his death. As much as he hated the man, he was the closest thing he had to a father when he was a child. Would he have done the same things he had forced upon Rio, forcing him to live beyond the time he had been allotted, held together only by machinery and his stubborn will? 

Three breaths. Three days. Three months. 

He made a move to stand up from his bed. Someone had moved into his dorm, though he never took a greater interest in them. New notes were scattered across the room. The furniture had been moved. New handwriting covered the chalkboards. The seasons had started to change. The sweltering summer heat which had put a great toll on his lungs, he remembered, had made room for the colorful bands of autumn. Leaves drying on the trees, turning them from a vibrant green to a darkened brown. 

He remembered when he had first seen the trees in Piltover. He couldn’t believe something could grow so large, so healthily, and mourned the loss of the leaves when they fell in autumn. 

As he stood, his bad knee nearly gave in. Reaching into thin air, a cane manifested in his hand, lending him the stability he needed. The sensation of his leg giving in came without the familiar pain shooting through his nerves, but it seemed that even in death, his body failed him.

Three steps. Three clicks of his cane. Three breaths. 

Life had moved on without him. He watched students mingling in the streets of the City, strolling about from place to place. A couple, walking hand in hand across the street. Two lovers, confessing their love to another. A stubborn child, resisting the pull of their parents. And above it all, Viktor, untouched and unseen, feeling nothing but the ache of his knee, the dull pressure in his lungs, the push of his spine.

His heart filled with regret. Never again would he feel the light on his skin, the cool breeze on his face, the gleeful looks of young students, the approving nod of the dean. Alone, unseen and unheard, left to fester in a room that was no longer his own. Certainly, he could leave, but where would he go? This place was all he had, all he needed. He needed nothing anymore. 

He moved onto the balcony, curling up his knees in a way he couldn’t when he was alive, burying his face there. Why was he still here? What cruel deity had deemed him to this existence? He let out a sob, knowing that no one would hear it. The tears that left his eyes drifted off into the breeze, becoming little more than a whisper in the wind. 

Three breaths. Three sobs. Three more tears. 

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Winter had moved in. How many winters had passed by him, he couldn’t tell. He was seated on his bed again, staring into nothingness. Someone new had moved into his dorm, but just how many people had lived in this room since his passing evaded him. He decided to pull himself together, just once, since he had nothing more to lose. 

He took a look at the new student inhabiting his room. Broad shoulders, chiseled face. Thick eyebrows framing hazel eyes. A certainty with his notes, his math that defied the usual student. Very few people were willing to follow a calculation like that, with a fervor that felt like he was demanding the math to work. 

Strangely, this student’s presence gave him a feeling of stability, of solidity, that he hasn’t felt for a while. He felt less like he was drifting, and focus came more easily when he was around. He shuffled through his research and notes, marveling at the sensation of paper beneath his fingers, and read. 

From those notes, the first thing he learned was the stranger's name: Jayce Talis. Apparently, he had decided that every page of notes needed his signature, so it wasn’t particularly hard to discern. The second thing he learned was that Jayce Talis was a genius. It sat quietly in the notes, in the efficient calculation, in the conceptualization of ideas on paper, made manifest and realized through calculation. Clumsy in places, in the way a student's attempts often were, stumbling over his own thought process, but sharp and concise in reasoning and application. The tasks assigned to this student were all solved neatly and splendidly, but that wasn’t what caught Viktor’s attention.

There were schematics for machinery that promised to accomplish impossible things, bordering between magic and science. The writing was less neat here, more disorganized and stretched out. Between mathematical symbols and equations, between written out theories, between sketches of those hypothetical machines, there were runes scribbled onto the page. From what Viktor could gather, this Jayce Talis was trying to apply mechanical principles to magic. How curious. The reasoning was flawed in some places, and bordering on the insane, but still an absolutely novel approach. Sharp. Daring. Revolutionary.

He concluded that Jayce was obviously not doing any of his research with the approval of the academy. He knew Heimerdinger’s stance on magic all to well, as well as the element of unreliability and uncertainty that came from the nature of the arcane. So how did this seemingly normal student come into contact with these ideas? What exactly drove him so far into this field, lead to him studying magic to such a great degree? 

He was disturbed by the sound of said person moving through him at that moment. Without any way to know he was there, Jayce had stepped into Viktor’s waist, gathering stray papers on his desk.

Viktor recoiled at the sensation. It felt like being pushed apart from the inside out, like mist shifting to make way for a rock within. This was new. Before, when someone stepped through him like that, he never felt it, like he was a projection of light, broken briefly by a curious hand moving through it. Not like he was being pushed aside. He caught his balance on his cane. 

Looking around, he saw Jayce shiver slightly. He must have felt something too, undoubtedly. What exactly was it that separated this seemingly simple student from anyone else, and allowed him to interact with Viktor, even if it were just these kind of brushing moments of contact?

What a curious man. After such a long time of losing himself to time, Jayce Talis would certainly prove to be a puzzle worth solving. 

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Jayce had never been one to call himself superstitious. With his field of interest, there were definitely many myths and legends interwoven into the many books he had read to learn more about magic, and picked up an unfortunate amount of random knowledge about the supernatural. Still, he was not superstitious by any means. 

If he shattered a mirror? He’d clean it up, there’s no use in cursing yourself over a simple mistake. If a black cat crossed his path? He’d wonder where it was living, not fear the worst for himself over it. 

So, when he moved into the Academy, and his dorm room, he didn’t care about the myths being spun around the death that had supposedly occurred in it. He shoved it to the side, to the same place he shoved their judgment for not being “upper class” enough to fit in at the Academy.  

Caitlin had commented on some weird vibes she picked up while moving around her boxes, about feeling watched while helping him shuffle around his stuff, about a suspicious cold spot around his bed. He’d comforted her, telling her that the stupid rumors around his dorm room were just that, and that if anything were to happen in his room, she’d be the first to know. 

He dismissed it at first, but the longer he lived inside his new room, the more eerie it felt at times. The feeling of a pair of eyes, unseen and unknown to him did follow him around, and there really was a spot at the edge of his bed that never seemed to get warmer, no matter how hard he tried. But, all of that would have reasonable explanations, right? 

His room had a huge balcony, overlooking a busy street. No wonder he felt like he was being watched, half of Piltover could probably stare right through his window! He bought thick curtains to cover his windows when the feeling got too bad, and tried his best to ignore how the feeling didn’t leave afterwards. 

The ventilation was well known for being faulty, and he was placed in an older wing of the dorm. The cold spot was probably just an issue with the ventilation! He bought thicker blankets and ignored how the cold would seep through it most nights. 

What unnerved him most at times was the rhythmic tapping on his floor. Always in a sequence of three. At first he thought it were some of his fellow students, seeking to pull a prank on the outsider, the middle class scum that had decided to invade their sacred halls, but he knew that none of the students who knew him and despised his presence had access to the rooms underneath him.