#vintagehellfire

His first oath was taken in a small building near the engineering wing of the Academy, his hand clammy while holding yours. Your fingers, gently intertwined with his, were the anchor in the tumultuous sea of feeling; his nerves caused slight tremors to rhythmically rattle his hand, but your grip stilled them as best you could. You’d never seen your partner wracked with nerves like this, and you’d once witnessed the brilliant man diffuse potential explosives under the strenuous pressures that father time refused to grant. It was foreign and welcome to see a man so calculated, undone by the twist in his gut over achieving something he had for so long dreamt of. Something that you one day dreamed of being good enough for. 

Inadequate. You sometimes felt inadequate in comparison to your boyfriend. How could you compete with such a sharp mind and an even sharper tongue? So you didn’t, and that was okay, because he would tell you over and over that without your heart loving his, he would not be the man he was. He would be incapable of such contributions if not for your love and support. He never deterred you from taking your oath, no, he encouraged it in fact, but it was you who stopped yourself. 

“Are you sure it’s okay for me to attend?” You asked Viktor, doubt wrapping its tendrils around each spoken word, like a kraken wrapping its tentacles around a ship, sinking it deep below the surface. You dared not overstep, nor did you dare make any part of this about yourself. 

“Don’t be absurd, one person of consequence to me amongst many others should not make a difference to The Order… and they approved your invitation.” He assured you, his accented voice smooth and assertive, affirming you of your place next to him. “Besides, you are more deserving of being there than some of the other students… Dmitri, for example.” A smirk tugged at his lips in hopes of easing your anxiety, and it worked. It always did. The asymmetry of it, the lopsided tug that creased his smooth cheek with a dimple, one you so wished to kiss, was a comfort to you. 

So you walked with him hand in hand to the ceremony, presented your invitation cards at the entrance, heavy cardstock exchanged hands, and you both slipped past the heavy wooden doors and down the decorated halls to the ceremony. You took your seat next to your lover, but not before he gave you a squeeze of the hand, warm, thankful, and kissed your cheek. You both sat through the introduction, the droning of Heimerdinger presenting the invocation, reminding the graduates of their duties and why they will swear the oath. The monotonous recounting of the long history of The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer and the impressive accomplishments that followed his speech achieved as part of the field. 

This was followed by calling the students up to the podium to receive their ring. When Viktor stepped up, Heimerdinger whispered something to him before the ring was slid onto his pinky finger. It was iron and solid, having been forged from the bridge between Piltover and the Undercity that collapsed many decades ago, a harsh reminder that an ounce of negligence could lead to the deaths of many, that it was a solemn duty to make sure that engineers bettered the lives of those around, and that their work was meticulous and thought out. It was no surprise to you that your partner would voluntarily take an oath that would bind him to the promise of bringing safety, security, and betterment to the lives of others. It was even less surprising, knowing his Zaunite origins and how much pain he kept locked away in his chest in the face of injustice. 

You couldn’t help but watch with pride as he took his oath amongst his other graduated peers, as he raised his right hand, his left over his heart, as he recited his oath. His eyes were fixed on you as he spoke, his nerves subsiding as you watched. You were struck by how breathtaking and honest a man he was. This was his moment, one which was not done out of obligation but of pure love for his work. The oath he swore was sacred, one he willingly gave himself to, a promise forged in iron. His pain was, however, constantly under lock and key, stored away in the safe deposit box of his heart. Heavy was the reminder of hardship, and heavy he kept it to propel forward and avoid stagnation. What use was the brilliant mind of a scientist if the coggs rusted away, shrieking to a halt? What use was his mind if the gears weren’t well-maintained enough to better the lives of his people? What was his purpose if he gave himself easily to inertia? “I, in the presence of these my betters and my equals in my calling, bind myself upon my honour and cold iron, that, to the best of my knowledge and power, I will not henceforward suffer or pass, or be privy to the passing of, bad workmanship or faulty material in aught that concerns my works before mankind as an engineer, or in my dealings with my own soul before my Maker.” He began, his voice rattling from deep within his chest, drowning in emotions you’d seldom heard from the man. As expressive as he was, so few things shook Viktor to his core, one of which was his life’s work, and the second was the love he was so undeserving of, or so he thought. 

“My time I will not refuse; my thought I will not grudge; my care I will not deny towards the honour, use, stability and perfection of any works to which I may be called to set my hand. My fair wages for that work, I will openly take. My reputation in my calling I will honourably guard; but, I will in no way go about to compass or wrest judgment or gratification from anyone with whom I may deal. And further, I will early and warily strive my utmost against professional jealousy or the belittling of my working colleagues, in any field of their labour. For my assured failures and derelictions, I ask pardon beforehand, of my betters and my equals in my calling here assembled; praying, that in the hour of my temptations, weakness and weariness, the memory of this my obligation and of the company before whom it was entered into, may return to me to aid, comfort, and restrain.” And with that pledge concluded, a congratulatory speech was given, long-winded as Heimerdinger tended to make them when it came to his star pupils. Applause came in like a stampede of horses, waves of it that would die down in practised diminuendo, hands that have gotten used to working alongside each other, helping instead of hindering. 

They closed off the ceremony by reciting the Hymn of Breaking Strain. A poem you’d heard many times and read many more than that. It was a poem that hung by your bedside, one that Viktor teased you about when you had first started dating, but once you had explained that it reminded you of why you began your studies in the first place, an understanding settled in. Heresy, you had called it – the fact that he didn’t know it yet. He didn’t tease you thereafter, but he did come back to you the next time with a small cognisant remark of ‘I understand now the importance of the poem’. [...] But in our daily dealing 

With stone and steel, we find

The Gods have no such feeling

Of justice toward mankind. 

To no set gauge they make us- 

For no laid course prepare-

And presently o'ertake us

With loads we cannot bear: 

Too merciless to bear. 

You followed along, mouthing the words, having them etched into the very ridges of your brain, hoping that one day you would be up by the podium, having them recited directly to you instead of inadvertently to you. Praying that one day you would live up to the genius of your partner, that one day you’d be brave enough to step up in the same way he did. What you didn’t see was that Viktor already thought you were ready long before he was, that you were more deserving of this than he was. Hell, you had shown him the poem, you had made him open his eyes to the importance of the reminder it served. 

The prudent text-books give it 

In tables at the end

'The stress that shears a rivet 

Or makes a tie-bar bend-

'What traffic wrecks macadam-

What concrete should endure-

but we, poor Sons of Adam

Have no such literature,

To warn us or make sure! [...]

While the ceremony concluded with a short lecture on ethics, the moment it ended, you moved across the convocation hall, your feet led the way before your mind, the red string of fate pulled you towards your lover, and likewise, he was being drawn to you, unwilling to celebrate his happiness with anyone else for the time being. It was private, just as he wanted it to be, a secret sworn between himself, you, and his own god. A secret so well kept that he dared not utter it to anyone else, a secret that until he met you, he swore he would keep locked away in his heart. His oath was a sacred one, and while Jayce might have known about Viktor’s drive to better the lives of those in the Undercity, he would never grasp the extent to which the rotten roots of privileged corruption had dug themselves into Viktor’s mind, tortured him with false acceptance and candy-coated smiles with teeth so putrescent that he cringed. 

“Thank you, lásko.” Warm hands cupped yours between them, a forehead pressed to yours. I love you spoken through silence, I adore you spoken through tentative touches, this means everything to me through noses slotted together. Viktor was not a man of many words, and some even found him cold, but such devotion was often overlooked in Piltover – the quiet kind, the kind that plants a small seed and tends to grow into something extravagant, something so painfully loved that anything less might kill it. It was a rare kind of understated affection that you learned – a new language that at first felt clunky to speak, didn’t roll off the tongue easily, but soon became your favourite. 

“Whatever for?” You asked him, voice carrying a soft cadence, reserved only for him. 

“You already know what for, I do not need to say it.” He smiled fondly at you, his touch calling you home every time. “But if you insist, I must thank you for being here. It means more than you could imagine.” He admits to you, a confidence now shared. 

Verbal affirmations seldom fell off the tongue with Viktor – at first, it was painfully frustrating, a cavern of loneliness and insecurity carving itself into your chest the longer he held his praises –  but they were spoken when they mattered, when he felt them. It had taken conversations and months of work to untangle the mess that had stemmed from your need for spoken assurances clashing with the deeply rooted influences of Viktor’s upbringing – one third genetic, one third environmental, and one third his upbringing – all that should have made the conversation moot. Still, he tried, and he loved, and he tore at his roots when he couldn’t convey his point with the scalpel's sharp precision a scientist should have been able to, but you did find a middle ground in a no man’s land where tears and blood hit unsettled soil, and that was more than enough.

The most essential communications were whispered under the blanket of darkness, words for only your ears, secrets that were never really secrets at all. Still, they meant more when moments gave way to such strong sentimentality that they could no longer be kept in. There was something so beautiful about the dam breaking, especially with him, maybe because it seldom did. The man worked tirelessly to conceal the cracks from others, but you learned to tell where the fissures began and how long it would take until they gave way — things only an engineer would foresee. Viktor was not an indifferent man, nor was he shy, and he made sure to prove that to you every morning when you woke up and every evening before your bodies would fall into one another’s, seeking comforts of the flesh – tentative touches and longing breaths against bare skin. It wasn’t always sexual; most nights, it was simply allowing one another to indulge in the other’s space. 

It had started with a press of nose to jugular, inhaling the musky, earthen scent that had built up after hours of tinkering away in the lab, the way it clung to skin in the same way sweat-soaked clothes would. Whispered promises into the crook of your neck would follow, trailing down to your chest as if he were trying to speak them directly to your heart. His warm hand would seek yours out and cling to it like a lifeline, a salvation, and maybe in those moments, you were such a thing to him. For such an overworked man who had for so long refused the comfortable embrace of another, he pleaded for it when confined to the four walls of your bedroom, clinging to your form like he needed to pry your ribcage open and crawl inside it, and little did he know that you’d let him. Gods, you’d let him make a home inside your lungs if he asked you, even if it meant suffocating more and more each day. You’d do anything for him, even if it came at your expense and it scared you, but not enough to stay away from such a wondrous man. Staying away would prove futile anyway.

Viktor’s second oath was taken on a quiet and rainy day while you were both working in the lab side by side. Initially, few words were exchanged beyond the occasional request for ‘the hexagonal – yeah, that.’ or Viktor mutely pointing an ink-stained finger in the vague direction of whatever implement he needed from you. The only other words spoken were lingering questions about the efficacy of different alloys, followed by calm, calculated rejections or hums of consideration, all while he was writing his mental research paper on your relationship. Most would deem that cruel and unfeeling, but not you, never you, because Viktor’s mind and his heart were two parts of the same whole to the point he thought them to be intertwined. They certainly made up the man he was, but he was incapable of seeing that his brain made no decisions on behalf of his heart; instead, it served to rationalise the turmoil but not soothe or dampen it. If his heart was a stormy sea, then his mind stood no chance because what is an anchor without a ship but an object sinking deep to the bottom?

You worked like that for hours, side by side, silently handing each other the components you needed, in perfect tandem, the ideal team, in life, in science, in love. It wasn’t easy getting to that point, of fingers lingering just a little too long, skin heating under the touch of the other. In the beginning, there was frustration, the impossible question of where Viktor had put the washer they needed, arguments over having trays to organise components instead of leaving them scattered like the blueprints and cream notes that covered the table. Compromise, Viktor finds, is a difficult thing, too used to his ways, too used to being alone without anyone by his side, and you ruined that. You ruined him. He smiles fondly, eyes flickering to the tray of assorted fasteners as he builds his case. 

It didn’t take long for Viktor to bring his hypothesis to a conclusion. No amount of effort in disproving his findings took; they all fell to pieces as each minute, mundane details of your day-to-day lives hammered themselves into his head and his heart. It created a fissure, small at first, easily repaired, but Viktor ignored it. Often, it is the smallest cracks that lead to the greatest downfalls, and yet these were cracks in the infrastructure of his heart that you wished not to repair, because they made him wholly devoted behind closed doors.

And so it didn’t phase you when he grabbed the heavy spool of copper wire, nor when his eyebrows knit so tight you wanted to kiss the tension away from between them. It didn’t phase you when he started braiding the material together, cutting it rather too short for it to be of any use unless to patch an existing connection, nor when his knee bumped yours and stayed locked in place. It didn’t faze Viktor when your shoulder finally made contact with his, body angled in such a way that you were hunched over your work yet open to his dialogue. It didn’t surprise him when you relaxed a fraction when his hand brushed yours for a fleeting moment, commanding your attention before he cleared his throat gently, his body relying on the support of the sturdy workbench to keep himself even mildly upright for what might be the biggest question that science begged. It was he who truly begged.

As much as Viktor could hypothesise and draw conclusions about what he was to do with himself, with his heart, with your heart even, what he could not predict was the result, the answer, to his question asked aloud. He had easily come to his conclusion about what he wanted, and thus the question weighed heavily on his tongue as he twisted the copper wire into a band, willing it to take a bastardised and crude form of what he so desperately wished to offer you. 

“It is not befitting of you, I’ll admit.” It was a statement, but the unspoken question slid into the lull of mundanity, almost too casual for what Viktor didn’t dare turn into a question. In a world where every action was calculated, every word deliberate, the inquiry he dangled in the air was anything but casual and thrown out; no, it was precise, careful, and studied under a microscope, picked apart with tweezers, if it was even an inquiry at all. He turned his body fully towards you and shifted his weight. “Nor am I capable of getting down on one knee, yet I must ask.” 

Shoulder blades pushed together as you peeled away from your work, your nose no longer inches away from whatever you were tinkering with, the scent of worn paper and fresh India ink faded, your brow furrowed, and your eyes softened as your heart ran a marathon to catch up with your mind. “Viktor,” the name fell honeyed from your lips, eyes trailing down to the object he held between his thin fingers. He held it so delicately that you thought it might break, yet for the scragly mess of tightly wound wire, it was utterly faultless, “you could offer me a paperclip and it would be perfect because it is you who offers it.” Your body turned fully towards him, a step closer, a touch gentler, and he took your hard-working, calloused hand in his shaky one, turning your palm in his. He slid his thumb over the back of your hand, his long fingers coming up to feel your pulse, a confirmation that this was real. 

“We will get you a better one.” He promised, his free hand finding purchase against your cheek, forehead falling to yours with the tenderness and refinement of a fallen flower petal, yet tremors rattled him like an autumn leaf. “I should have liked to do this… properly.” His thick accent coated his words sweetly, his mellow voice assuring you in an almost reverent manner, one that only such a soft-spoken scientist could – a practised elegance, but the quiver in his voice gave him away. One small variable that changed how you would draw your conclusions. Calculated, yes, but not refined… not optimised. You wouldn’t have had it any other way, an unrefined Viktor, one that very few had the privilege to see, because it was a privilege. “I… eh, I had a speech prepared, but… I fear the words have escaped me.” He paused. “Marry me.” It had come out as a decisive plea, a demand more than a question, a stutter instead of something so carefully thought out and analysed, clunky, like rusted cogs. However, the cogs were not rusted; rather, they just required a little grease, unused to sudden use after years of neglect. 

It was these moments that you found most beautiful in Viktor, where his heart won out over mind, sentiment over science. Not that you didn’t love the way his mind raced and the way the gears turned, but there was something so unfiltered and utterly unrefined in the way his mind gave up on him in favour of his heart, the way his tongue dulled behind his teeth as if he lost his bite when it came to you. When the weakened infrastructure of his heart gave way and the dam broke, the flood came pouring out, and you savoured every second. His whiskey eyes pulled you in so deep you got drunk on them. It was undoing. 

“Yes, yes, absolutely.” You spoke, your voice thick with emotions as it surrendered to a tremble, breathless even as you agreed, nose bumping against the sharp angles that made up the man before you, your man. A strangled laugh escaped him, as if he’d been restricting his breath in anticipation of your answer, as if he was holding onto as much air so as not to suffocate should your answer come for his oesophageal plexus and knock every last bit of breath from his lungs, stealing it for yourself. His hand blindly led the ring towards your finger, shaky, off target from nerves, yet still sliding it on with little help, eyes too clouded with emotion to bother looking down. The moment the promise was secured, connecting hand to heart, he found his fingers tracing their way up to your other cheek, cupping your face deliberately and delicately, holding you like you were precious because you were. He wouldn’t admit it out loud, but you’d be more important to him than long nights spent in the lab, any breakthroughs he made, and any warm mug of Sweetmilk. Worst of all, you brought a fresh breakthrough for the scientist – sleeping in a bed with the person whom you love would be much kinder to his body than sleeping in the lab. 

Lips found yours in the heat of desperate longing, his dark eyebrows knitting together as he realised that this might be all he needed – you by his side. And by his side you’d be, confirmed by your lips moving against his lovingly, years of emotion, teenage love turned into adult adoration searing into soft skin, never burning but marking it nonetheless. Nothing would be so perfect as the way your lips slotted together, knowing, remembering, memorising. Lips you’d both been kissing for years, but somehow this felt different, a confirmation of a promise to be devoted to one another in all. Devotion of the purest kind, devotion so raw and holy that the gods would weep to be revered in such a way. They could never be venerated with such fidelity because there is no such way to love the gods with each crevice of your heart, the darkest corners amongst the most devoted, for they never thought the light would privilege them with its warm touch. 

But some months later, the intellectual man broke his cardinal rule once again and allowed his private life to bleed into his professional life, calling upon Jayce, his partner and most trusted friend, to join your matrimonial union. You’d both chosen to get married in a small private ceremony with Jayce and his family in attendance on Viktor’s side, as well as your closest confidants from your childhood. As much as you considered these people your chosen brood, both of you had one painful fact pinned to your shoulders that evening: you were each other’s only family, bound together by tangled hearts and sworn oaths. Perhaps if circumstances were different, and you were both able, you’d have extracted a rib and offered it to the other as some asinine act of devotion. Everyone would have warned you of such stupidity, but you were already so entangled in one another; what little difference did it make to be a part of the other physically?

You had sworn to one another 'v nemoci i ve zdravi,' as long as you both shall live. Viktor’s eyes glazed over with tears as he heard his native tongue slip past your lips, his self-control hanging on by a single thread, threatening to snap. Never would he have asked you to learn such a thing for him, and yet here you were, giving him more than he ever would have dared to dream of.

“You’re full of surprises, miláčku.” He let out a voice thick with emotion before closing the gap, his hands cupping your face as if you were his most precious discovery, his greatest achievement, and you were completely and utterly his, as was he yours in turn. You were never an experiment, nor were you a doubt. Certainly not a distraction either. You worked in tandem with one another, always, and it was part of what made such a beautiful partnership in mind and body. 

And when you both pulled away from the kiss, he rested his forehead against yours, murmuring a small pet name under his breath, pleading, as if it would spare him some mercy, but it wouldn’t. With a heaving breath, he composed himself, a death rattle in his chest as his nerves took hold with such strength he thought he’d suffocate, and he asked you what was probably the most surprising question of the evening.

“May I have the first dance?” It was unsure, unsteady, but your reaction made something bloom in his chest, a feeling he wanted to hold onto until the end of time. With teary eyes, you accepted, slotting your hand into his as he led you to the centre of the small room, shifting his weight before turning to Jayce. The taller man stepped forward, squeezed his shoulder lovingly, and congratulated him before Viktor handed him his cane, steadying himself against you. 

“You-you don’t have to do this.” You whispered, but it was too late; his mind was made up, and, ever the stubborn man he was, he wanted to give you everything. His hand came to your waist, burning with the promise of something far softer than you’d ever seen in the man. His hardened edges were smoothed out by unbridled warmth and adoration that you shared. 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He chastised with love as sweet as honey in his voice before taking your other hand in his, gripping it slightly tighter as he leaned into you more than an able person would. His hand in yours felt warm, reverent even, like nothing could take this away from him, a man so undeserving of your heart. Your eyes shone in the dim light, glazed over with affection that ran so deep that he didn’t know what to do with it. 

“Okay, but if it hurts you too much, tell me, please.” He couldn’t deny you anything, how could he deny you anything when you were looking at him as if he were a whole man, unfragmented, remedied, and if he were, it would be because he’s never known a love so pure. He’s not known that love could be beautiful, used to help, not hurt. So he kissed you in confirmation, nose bumping yours solicitously, and as the slow waltz started, he moved along with you, much more fluid than you would have imagined. The scientist was full of surprises, full of little pockets of wonder that you had yet to discover about him, and it made your heart swell to disproportionate sizes — your Viktor, your engineer, feeling, devoted, and utterly enamoured.

It wasn’t three-four at the speed you expected, no two-step into the movements; instead, they were slowed to a swaying motion to accommodate for Viktor’s leg. His hands were warm on your body, your lower back arching at his touch. You were acutely aware of how intimate a touch this was, how much devotion he showed to you the last time he let his hand linger there, and you were certain it would repeat itself. Despite his disability, Viktor led beautifully, refusing to let it hinder him; his eyes were trained on your face, analysing your reaction, and yet behind the clinical analysis, behind the sharp gaze of a methodical scientist extracting his findings by cutting them with a scalpel, was a honeyed warmth. It meant more than you’d ever admit that he would surprise you with this on your wedding day, and even more that he would try to learn to waltz without the help of his cane. He might come to regret it come morning, but right now, there was nothing that mattered more to him than you. 

“Mám tě ráda.” He whispered to you just loud enough to keep it a secret between the two of you, lovers' words spoken when only the other would hear, words he dared not utter to anyone else. Somehow, it ran deeper than a standard ‘I love you’, one which he would whisper against your skin like a prayer later – it solidified the emotional connection that ran through both your fragile hearts. Lovesick, it’s how you felt as he uttered words that some would consider weaker, but they made your heart soar. His utter devotion made you feel free in circumstances you used to flee. 

“Také tě mám ráda.” You whisper back, eyes twinkling like stars in the night sky. He hung them there himself, or that’s what you told people when they asked about the way you gazed at Viktor. At first, they thought you foolish, falling for the devastatingly handsome scientist who seemed too wrapped up in his own studies and experiments. They said he would never have time for love, that his cold heart had no room for error, except you learned that he didn’t see fault in sentimentality, he saw beauty in it. He wasn’t just a scientist, he was human first and as absorbed in his work as he could be, as many late nights as he pulled, he learned that having someone alongside him through those times would have his heart grow ever fonder, he learned what softened it and yet he kept that close to the chest, until you. 

If anyone were to have asked Viktor, he would say he had been captivated by you from the moment he first laid eyes on you, and he was. You lit a spark in his heart that began with a tiny ember, and instead of putting it out, he abandoned it like a half-lit cigarette in the dry grass. At first, it crackled, flames low, but quickly it got out of control, the kindling so dry that there was no chance of stopping it. Any attempt to put it out only caused it to burn brighter, angrier, even until he couldn’t take it anymore, confessing to you as if his love was a painful sin that he was forced to carry by himself. Instead, you offered him salvation; you didn’t put out the fire that burned, but you tamed it and turned out to be exactly what he needed. He wouldn’t tell anyone but you that you gave him twinkles in his eyes, that when you sarcastically asked him about how he came to such a scientific conclusion, he shot back a very simple ‘I can feel them’ and it shut you up, a blush spreading across your cheeks as you stumbled over your words. 

As the song concluded, you couldn’t help but reach towards the sharp features of your darling, a hand cupping his cheek with such piety, it was unthinking yet deliberate, your emotions influencing your movements. You brought your lips to Viktor’s for the second time that night, eyes fluttering closed as you spoke your thanks through the unspoken, and he reciprocated, hand bracing itself to the small of your back, pulling you into him, slotting together perfectly as if it was where you were meant to be, because it was. Reluctantly, your husband peeled away, a glint in his eyes as he led you towards Jayce, taking back his cane for extra support, and while he did so, his hand never left yours; he refused to let it now that you were joined in a way that surpassed the spiritual. His sheepish smile couldn’t be helped as he tugged you along with pride, introducing you to Jayce’s family, his thumb brushing over your knuckles in a soothing back-and-forth motion, warmth blooming under his touch. 

You wanted to let Viktor have this moment, having heard his meek admission that he never believed there would come a day when he would marry. It wasn’t on the table for him, much less in the cards, citing something about being disabled and how he wouldn’t wish anyone to deal with his complications but himself. You didn’t make it feel like a complication, though; instead, you showed him how whole he was with tender kisses to the inside of his thigh, pillows to prop up his knee with extra support, canes and mobility aids strewn about. When you insisted that he leave at least one at yours for when he needed support while staying the night, he just about melted. When he discarded the pillows in favour of your hip one day, you didn’t complain; you just kneaded your fingers into his thigh, massaging the muscle, and placed a tender kiss on the tip of his nose. He had inadvertently conveyed the fact that he leaned on you for support, despite being unwilling to vocalise it deliberately, and he didn’t need to. Every action was a silent admission of the weakness for you that haunted his heart. 

So you kissed the cheeks of Jayce’s parents and held their hands in yours as they congratulated you, and you listened to them regale tales of Viktor’s early days from before you had met him, holding onto his arm just a little tighter as the stories progressed. Jayve had a few of his own to add, which Viktor scolded him for, stuttering out some poor excuse that you gently laughed at, but when you squeezed his arm and looked at him with such adoration in your eyes, he knew that he had nothing to fear, nothing to worry about. You were his home, his comfort, and he couldn’t help but decide in that moment that he was a selfish man, pathetic and weakened by love most endearingly. Death wouldn’t do you part, he decided, not now, not when it came for him with scythe in hand, cold, bony fingers beckoning his soul forth as the astronomical clock struck the hour. 

Months continued that way, entangled in the folds of each other's hearts, stolen glances, long arduous nights in the lab, noses stuffed deep in parchment while some parts of your bodies touched — ever the same, ever changing, ever in tandem with one another. Your routine was filled with much of the same, and yet it was altogether different, adapting, changing… growing.

By your first year of marriage, you’d both found a bigger apartment to share with one another in the lightly forested area of the University district. You had both wanted to be closer to Zaun initially, but Viktor settled on the fact that he’d rather breathe the cleaner air, his home already being with you. You folded like a poorly put-together card table at the utterance and kissed Viktor, your arms wrapping around his neck before you placed your forehead to his.

“Whatever you want, wherever you want.” You had stated, words dripping with a saccharine foolishness. Neither of you would be prepared for what your lives had planned out, but it would be together, and that is what mattered. 

“There is nowhere I’d rather be, má lásko, than with you.” He promised, his eyes falling shut. It was easy for him to make such a promise to you, after years of being tangled in each other’s lives; it was rather impossible for him to have imagined life without you. He was entirely besotted by you, wanting your lives to be shared in every aspect. If that meant sacrifice, he would give everything up for the chance of having you next to him in every timeline, in every life. 

There were other times where, despite his most valiant efforts, he fell short, your frustration growing. Coffee mugs strewn across the apartment, half drunk and starting to mould, the cold rot of them permeating through the air, coiling itself around your most precious notebooks, sinking into unfinished wood. Yet you stopped, you understood, and you didn’t yell, which is why he felt that sacrifice wasn’t needed when it came to you, for you demanded none. You demanded so little of him that when you did, he was enthused, giving it to you as freely as a feeble man such as himself could; what’s more is that he wanted to give you whatever you so asked of him whether it be a fork from the top drawer in the kitchen or the very fragments of stardust that fused together to create his mortal soul.

Sometimes he forgets, you remind him, and he takes care of it, cleaning the mugs, kissing your cheek, and apologising, doomed to repeat the cycle. 

"You that never finish my coffee and that I leave it to mould, don’t you?" He asks as he washes the fifth mug he abandoned on his desk, the trifecta of drinks growing to a pentafecta, no longer being regarded as a joke and more of a sombre reality that Vitkor was overworking himself, pushing himself past his finite limits. 

"I do hate them, but I don’t hate that they're yours." You shrug – not indifferent, yet less bothered than you used to be – coming up behind your husband, arms circling his waist. He felt thinner, almost as if you could count his ribs and play them like a xylophone. You frown, nose pressing between his shoulder blades as you attempt to hold back the melancholia that looms in the darkest parts of your heart. You inhale his scent and relax, the freshness of it providing some ease to your qualms, but not quite enough to squash the little devils that whispered cruelties in the witching hours. 

"You hate the scattered papers, you always do." He sighs, shaking his head, his voice faltering. You can almost hear his inner dialogue about how he has failed you as a husband, yet it’s far from the truth. He’s not failed you, no matter how much you hate having to organise his scientific notations due to not only their complexity but their disorder. Your only help was that he kept them dated, yet finding pages from February mixed in with papers from July, and those from July mixed with October before last, drove you mad on a good day, and completely broke your spirit on a bad one. A cluttered space is a cluttered mind; whatever you cleaned, hurricane Viktor passed through, calm and adoring as summer rain on a sunny day. You couldn’t be angry with him even if you were seething because the understanding you showed him was always returned tenfold, and his apologies made the mess worth it. He made the mess worth it.

"I do, but it's your handwriting that graces them." Lips to interscapular, lingering, loving. 

"Do you always have to do this? Deflect?" He shoots back, head turning to look over his shoulder. 

"I'm not deflecting, I'm finding things to love even in the things that piss me off.” Simple, effective, and it shuts him right up, a furious blush burning like a forest fire across his pale cheeks.

Which is why, when he received his prognosis with you at his side, his legs weakly dangling off the padded examination table, his heart fell still for a beat, a lump forming in his throat. He felt like he was sucked into the forensic pathology wing, the padded table suddenly feeling harder beneath his bony ischial tuberosity, colder even, as if he were on the steel slab of an embalming table, the nail wedged into his coffin before he had even expired. 

Still, you held his hand through it, warm fingers closing around the cold extremities of your lover’s, your eyebrows knit as your gaze pierced the doctor with such brutality that Viktor was shocked the man hadn’t dropped dead, yet you remained calm on the exterior. Maybe he was simply a false prophet of ill omen, maybe the prognosis handed to Viktor like the black death was simply a miscalculated mistake, but both of you knew better. Whatever happened to the commandment of not slaying the innocent and righteous didn’t apply to whatever false god pulled the strings of fate and it angered you – a deadly sin in its own right, a blasphemous and heretical rage nestled itself deep in the caverns of your left atrium, but the heat of it rose to your optical bone, rendering your jaw tight. 

“There must be something that can be done, a treatment!” You tried, body gravitating towards Viktor’s, a heliocentric orbit of a planet to its sun. The tremble in your voice gave away the depth of your fear, but only to your lover. The smog cloud that would fall after the sun expired would surely end all life, or at least that’s what it felt like from the lump in your throat. “We could start him on antibiotics, it’s a treatment that lasts six months and he would have to take four kinds, but with the progression of the disease and how late stage it is, the bacteria may not respond to the drugs.” The man droned off, “Still, the outlook is bleak. We’re giving him a year before it consumes him.” A white hot ringing filled your ears as you heard this, but your darling remained unmoved, unchanged, his facial expression set, carved into chiselled marble, only to crumble when the doctor had left you both with a meek apology. You didn’t want a dastardly apology; you wanted repentance from whatever cruel deity had cursed the softspoken man with such a violent disease. 

Viktor turned to you, his hand tugging at yours, a silent plea to cut through the thick tension that sat as heavily in the room as evening fog sits on the hills. You complied, feet moving on their own accord before you realised that what your lover had wanted wasn’t proximity, but rather to bury himself in the familiarity of you. He wanted something grounding, familiar…

“I have to try.” He whispered, hands tugging you closer, your knees hitting the edge of the examination table with a hollow thunk, his nose pressing into the dip of your clavicle. He inhaled your spiced scent, cracked pepper and sandalwood, hitting his nose as he shook in your hold. “I don’t want to die.” His hands found the small of your back, and his nails dug into it, desperately clawing at something tangible in order to solidify the fact that he was still on this mortal coil. Upon instinct, your arms came around him, his breath stuttering against your skin, a sound you came to recognise more recently as the scientist’s soft cries. Your head burned in anger, the root of it sitting in the back of your head, yet the sting of it found home under your tongue. 

“I know… Shit, I know. I have you. We’ll get through this together.” Lips met tousled chestnut hair, hands came to cup angular features, and thumbs brushed cheekbones before you tilted his head, forcing his eyes to meet yours. “I’m with you always, Vik.” You promised, lowering your forehead to his. No matter the injustice or vexation you were feeling, you had to swallow it down for him.

“I can’t give you the life you wish.” You almost missed it, any untrained ear would have, but not yours. Your eyebrows knit together, forming worry lines first, ones that nearly turned to hysterical anger, your eyes darkening, wrinkles becoming a feature of the expanse of your forehead, seemingly taking up residency on the otherwise smooth face of yours. 

“I have the life I wish.” You grit out, desperate, begging the man to see reason, but where you tried to meet, your paths brusquely diverged. You’ve never felt like you had to beg him to stay, but now it feels impossible to bridge an invisible gap without doing so. “Please, my love, I can’t do this without you, not until…” Your voice broke, and he picked up where your sentence broke off. “I didn’t wish for you to have me with these complications.” He admitted, words hushed, fanning your lips in melancholy, his voice fragmented by sniffles. While Viktor tried to remain composed, when death came knocking, showing you when it would ring the astronomical clock to signal his end, it was most difficult to remain unaffected. In his mind's eye, the heavy black sand from the hourglass of life was pouring slowly into his lungs, suffocating him one day at a time, and there was no escape, no way to funnel it out. 

“How long have we been together?” A challenge, one you hoped Viktor would step up to. He wasn’t the type of man to step down or to give up, you knew that much. “What does that have to do with anything?” His accented confusion peeled him back from you, tired amber eyes accentuated by the heavy purple bags threatening to push his only foot out the door of the mortal realm.

“You didn’t wish these complications upon yourself, nor did you lie to me about them. I made my own choices. You were never any less whole to me, not because of your illness, nor your leg.” You assured him before placing a tender kiss to his forehead. It was then that Viktor cursed himself and his selfish nature – the feeble body of a man is only so capable of holding itself back. While his mind was willing, the flesh was utterly weak. “I knew what I was getting into because I knew you. I analysed the data, I drew my own conclusions, and my conclusions were that you are worth it.”

And he would try; he would take the regiment of carefully picked medications and drugs, trudge to his scheduled appointments as long as you were by his side, and go to work like normal. He didn’t want to shake the cold hand of death while breathing through a nasogastric tube. At least, that’s what you were privy to. It wasn’t that it wasn’t the truth, but an even heavier reality than you could imagine weighed on Viktor. 

Nights were spent awake, staring at the ceiling until his frail body curled around yours as if you were his lifeline, and you reciprocated, half awake, sleep crusting in the corners of your eyes as you cracked them open just for the opportunity to see his face in case it’s the last time. Every time he stirred, you’d place a sloppy and half-tired kiss to the mole above his lip – a tease in most times, affection in the current circumstances – and he’d squeeze you a fraction tighter.

“I love you, Viktor.” You’d croak into the dark, voice heavy with sleep, slow like molasses and just as sweet, and his heart would unravel, his body would shake as he held you tight, trying to fuse the viable parts of himself to you. Little did he know just how much you wanted the ugly parts, too. “Mám tě moc ráda, miláčku.” He’d whisper back like a broken man, held together by nothing but your sheer willpower and your devotional belief in him. 

Daylight hours were spent working his thin fingers to the bone, a slave to his projects to better the world. A slave to be the change he wanted to see. If there was hope for anyone with his ailments, it might just be held in his hands, and yet when the time came, he peeled himself away from his work, chastising himself for it before limping his way to the notary’s office. “Viktor?” The tall thin man called from his wooden door, stepping aside in a fluid motion, one Viktor wished he could emulate, and inviting him into his office. The smell of varnish was ever-present, as if the wood had just been restored. Propriety was of utmost importance, and yet it harshly contrasted with the deteriorating state of the Czech man that limped into the office. 

“Thank you for taking my appointment, Mister…” Voice taut, Viktor took the seat offered to him by the notary, the oak desk separating the scrivener from the man seeking his services. 

“Aubenet. Truly, it is no problem. Now, before we begin, I will be registering an audio recording of this session. Do you agree to the said terms, sir?” He asked, his voice flowing through the room, terse, professional, plummy. It was grating to listen to, and yet Viktor persisted, needing to go through with one pitiful, selfish act of a dying man. In death, one did not have very much; in fact, some would argue that one had nothing left, but if there was anything Viktor wanted, it was one last act of pure indulgence, something to take to the grave with him. 

“Yes, let us continue.” Brusque was Viktor’s reply, the impatience of a man short on time making itself known. It wasn’t that he had wanted to be cantankerous or even tactless, yet he had been eager to bury the ugly part of himself in legalities and leave it to fester until his expiry. He was eager to turn back to work, to lose himself in the progress biomechanical engineering offered him, and to forget about the act he was about to commit. It wasn’t an atrocity, yet it was a betrayal of everything he’d lie to you about in his last moments, that much he was sure of.  

“Alright, in that case, let us begin. I, Valdryk Aubenet, will be witness to this notarisation, in my office, within the city of Piltover. Do you, Viktor, consent to Piltover law when it comes to notarising your last will and testament?” His voice was dry and posh, as if he’d done this many times over. He had been unflinching when reciting the purpose of the appointment, unbothered that someone so young would ask for a document so grim to be signed. 

“I do, yes.” Viktor's voice strained, but his facial expression remained stone, composed. He was unfractured in front of this stranger; he had to keep himself in check for his ego would not be able to take being picked apart over something such as love. 

“Good, now, do you confirm and attest that you are the named person on this document for which your signature is required today?” Nodded in response before the scientist choked out a yes, his throat cleared immediately after. Rare were nerves for the man, and yet instead of legalising a document, he felt as if he was being persecuted for a heinous crime. Maybe he was, maybe his single act of ego was a direct slight against the gods, but when had the gods ever been kind to him? “My understanding, sir, is that you wish to have an amendment to your will notarised.”

“Yes, eh, I fear it… selfish… but it is my dying wish. You see, I do not have much time.” A hum of understanding, the flipping of pages, and the slow, deliberate clicking of a pen answered him. “In death, one breaks only one oath if they find themselves fortunate, and it is of my understanding that I will be breaking two. I wish to make it known that I am not to be buried with my engineering ring, but that my wedding ring is to stay with me.” The slow click of a pen died, plunging the room into silence, save for the breathing of the two men. 

“I see…” The notary hummed, his eyes trailing over the last page of the will, expression so neutral that it unnerved Viktor. He felt as though he might have been making a mistake so grave that the undead would laugh at him from beyond the veil, that whatever gods welcomed him to the afterlife would smite his soul on sight. “It is not uncommon to be buried with one’s possessions,” Mr. Aubenet continued in a contemplative manner, “in fact, if you so wished to take your other ring with you, you could.” He finally looked up, brown eyes meeting the amber of Viktor’s easily. They didn’t pose a challenge, only an echo of understanding. 

“That will not be necessary. My vows are what I intend to take to the grave with me.” As easily as it was decided, so it was written, signed, and sealed, both by Zaunite and Piltovan hands. Unsettling as it was, Viktor thanked the man, bowed his head cordially, and limped his way back out of the office, down the stone stairs, and trudged home to you, his salvation.

Crossing the threshold that day felt heavier, like weights were shackled onto his legs, his heart pounding with the anxiety of being found out as someone reprobate, but the moment his key turned in the lock, the door pushed open, and his heavy-lidded eyes fell on you, that one unprincipled act felt justified. An acrid taste pooled in his mouth, the lump in his throat growing to disproportionate sizes, so much so that he felt nauseated. 

“Vik?” You called out when you saw him, precious as the songbird that perched itself on your windowsill at dawn, or the first brushes of calloused fingers over soft skin in the morning. Your lover said nothing; instead, he filled the silence with soft footsteps to close the distance between you both, his cane forsaken, clattering to the floor, arms wrapping tenderly around your midsection as his nose found your collarbone. On instinct, your arms wrapped themselves around his neck, a hand cradling his head softly, toying with the curls he’d spun into his soft hair. Viktor might not have had much strength, but he mustered up as much as he could just to squeeze you a little tighter that day. 

You pressed your lips to his sun-kissed hair, still warm from his walk back home, the smell of sandalwood, citrus, and musk lingering with undertones of the burnt oil that clung to everything in the lab. It was so oddly Viktor that it made you want to sob, or scream, or even smash every possession of yours to pieces, your heart cracking as he tried to hold you both together. You couldn’t tell whether this was for himself or you, and so you let him take what he needed, gods, you’d let him take everything. You felt them before you saw them, the fissures that threatened to crack along his face into a woebegone expression, the way despondency wrapped its tendrils around every weak breath of his. 

His nose, pointed, trailed along your neck, forcing your jaw to tilt up before he placed a sloppy kiss to where the body met the ramus, the angle receiving the brunt of his love. Every kiss he gave you lacked surgical precision, contrary to what one might assume of a scientist. Your cheeks flushed, warm beneath your lover's touch before he let out a shuddering breath, screwing his eyes shut. “Miláčku…” A plea so quiet you might have thought it a secret, and to others it would have seemed to be a plea of a man in love, but you, with the codex to decipher Viktor’s very carefully crafted intonation, knew better. His hands had come firmly to your waist, fingers digging into your hip bones so tight that surely you’d be left with bruises, and he stole a moment, as if they were infinite, just to look at you, his darling. “Nechci být bez tebe. Jsi mé srdce, má duše. Nemohu se tě vzdát.” The way he had spoken consumed him, his voice desperately conveyed his adoration for you, desperate to have you understand how utterly horrible and foible he was when it came to you. 

“Vik, I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.” You cooed, masking your anger in tainted honey, acrid, turning to bile on your tongue, yet words landed on deaf ears, his Czech becoming strained, catching in his throat as he attempted to cling to any last shred of humanity he could at this moment. He realised he hadn’t felt guilt, no, just the pressing matter of time slipping through his fingers. So he resolved to cup your face in his hands, thumb sweeping under the thin skin beneath your eye as he pressed desperate kisses to your lips, searing them with a tenderness that bordered on clemency. 

“Jsem sobecký muž.” He decreed, voice constricted by the weight of his emotions, his whiskey eyes delicately shut in fear that his vision would blur with tears if he looked upon you as he bestowed the very love you deserved, but he didn’t believe himself capable of giving. 

“You are no such thing.” Whispered between kisses as you pushed his hair from his face, a hand coming to his cheek, at the ready to wipe away any tears that may spill over his waterline. The anger you felt at the injustice had no place where Viktor needs you. “If loving someone is selfish, then I am guilty of it too, Vik.” Your hand came to his hair and gently tugged him forward, sealing your confession in much the same way you vowed to marry him, but this time with a sprinkle of carefully suppressed anger. His hands press into your face more firmly, his forehead falling to yours, noses slotted together once more, the desperation of a doomed man trying to tether himself to something tangible. He was choosing to savour every second instead of devouring them, trembling as he held himself back. 

His quavering hand claimed yours the way it did first thing in the morning, slow, ardent, his head leaning its weight into the palm of your hand, devoted, and utterly yours. His thick lashes kissed the deep-set purple beneath his tired eyes, his weakness blooming like ink stains that wouldn’t budge, stubborn as gentian violet. His fingers threaded through yours, warm, warm for the first time in what felt like aeons, and he brought the palm of your hand to his lips, placing a warm and tender kiss to it without a second of hesitation, daring to tether himself to you as if he would disappear if he didn’t. His quiet plea for you not to leave him, to be there because he needs you. As if responding to him, you tilt your head upwards, placing a lingering kiss to his forehead before shutting your eyes and returning to the intimate Zaunite gesture you’re both painfully familiar with. Mijuli tě, you’re safe, you’re dear to me.

“V nemoci i ve zdraví.” You were the first to break the silence, a whisper that dared flutter against Viktor’s lips in devotion, a bitterness heavy at the back of your palate. His breath caught before turning into a pathetic whimper, before the dam finally broke and the man with a heart of steel let a tear stream down his face. 

There were times Viktor had believed himself to be a mechanical man, a machine, incapable of such utter love and devotion, incapable of such utter sin, and yet, whatever nights you would allow him the luxury, he would pray to a false idol in the shape of you. To him, you were carved in the shape of divinity, and no matter how jealous any gods were, none would compare to you. If anyone were to ask Viktor to confess his biggest sin, it would be that he runs towards idolatry, incapable of resisting you, not since he met you. The difference, though, between you and all else is that he worships you with his lips, his heart, and his hands… he has fallen to his knees time and time again with his tongue tracing incantations over thine most sacred places, and you, you let him with your hands clasped in his chestnut locks as if holding onto a rosary. 

When his golden eyes flutter open, there’s something raw behind them, not pain, not shame of his sheer egocentrism, but rather a trembling comfort, one that is utterly devoted to you, forsaking any other deity. Your voice pulled him from the wreckage of the war between his mind and his body, allowing him to reclaim a part of himself he kept under lock and key out of fear that he might fall to pieces. 

Whether Viktor admitted it or not, you saw how heavily his diagnosis weighed on him, his body eroding by the hour, and yet his mind remained as sharp as the day you met, his resolve crumbling like temples of old. If you could worship him without pushback, you would, but Viktor didn’t see himself as a man to be worshipped, nor to be pitied, rather, he saw himself as some anomalous in between, unworthy of love and reverence yet in need of both.

He sucked in a low breath, let it whistle behind his teeth, sharp and harsh enough to rattle shutters against a drafty window. There was a tumult brewing within him, a storm raging between the part of him that wanted to be such a pathetically egotistical man and beg you to stay fidel to him even when he departs, and then the other that wanted nothing more than for you to be happy. The hollow settled in his heart heavily as he made the choice to look you in the eyes as he spoke. 

“V nemoci i ve zdraví.” He repeated to you, confirming that he was still abiding by your vows despite his will to protest, to tell you to find someone more able than he. “But promise me that once I am gone, you will find someone who will make you happy. Nechci, abys se utápěl v zármutku.” You open your mouth to protest, anger flashing across your eyes, but his broken plea of the words promise me that followed his request broke you, so you nodded to placate the man, if only temporarily. 

“Okay,” The word felt foreign on your tongue, heavy even, “Is there anything else that you want?” Automatism took over, words no longer your prerogative, you just wished to know how you could appease the man you were in love with, despite the little ticks that gave way to your true emotions; the tight jaw, your teeth embedding themselves into the inside of your cheek, determined to make a perfect mould, and the faintest squint of your eye. 

“Miláčku,” he began, exasperated already, as if every word was slowly stealing breath from him. There was a beat, “You must remember the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer.” He prompted, his honey eyes losing the golden sparkle that you once saw in them. Once so rich that Czarina Elizabeth would be jealous, and yet now they are but copal, unworthy of the namesake that tied them to the warmth of the sun. 

“I remember you straightening your cravat with the sweat of your palms, ironing out the pleats from sheer nerves.” You smiled, a softness returning to you for a moment, like a flicker of Ferrocerium igniting, but as soon as it oxidised, it went out. 

“Yes, well…” Viktor blushed, the light dusting of dead rose painting his colourless cheeks, the spitting image of the Dutch Golden Age, yet there was nothing prosperous about him now. “I remember you soothing my nerves and walking alongside me at every moment it mattered most. My progress would be futile without you. Everything I accomplished was with you by my side… They are not just my achievements, miláčku, they are ours, so when my time comes, take my ring and wear it. You have earned it more than I have, carry me with you through every project, through all your progress, and know that I will always be most proud of you.” 

That night brought you no sleep, only the thin veil of worry that held back poorly concealed anger towards the injustice, yet you dared not move from the bed, Viktor’s cool fingers laced together with yours as he slept. The man had always been drawn to you, for better or worse, a subconscious magnetic pull that refused to let up. He was clingy once you earned his trust, a man so needy that it had nearly driven you mad, but when you started to process where it had come from, an understanding washed over you, calming your frustrations. It was hard to believe you’d ever denied him anything at all. Even in the moments where he had driven you utterly insane, you’d learned to love him, to catalogue the things that became too much, to speak to him gently of them, and yet love him regardless. 

You squeezed his fingers, testing their weight between yours, and his pulse kicked in answer. It proved a reassurance that he was still alive, his heart still beating next to yours, and he squeezed your hand back, his frail body turning towards you with a low groan. His lungs rattled, as if every breath was a piece of loose fabric snagging, each thread unravelling slowly, threatening to create a hole one couldn’t patch up. 

The longer you watched him sleep, the more reality set in, and the less you wished for the first cock’s crow to break. Since his appointment, each call felt like a solemn reminder that the next morning’s caw could be your lover’s death knell, and every one thereafter would be a nail in the coffin used to bury you alive. Low and rolling, anger simmered in your gut as you blinked away hot tears, nose creasing as you tried to fight off the impending tears. The anger tied itself to your heart and lungs like an anchor, drowning them in its stormy sea, setting everything inside your frail ribcage alight. It burned through you, tearing you apart worse than you could have imagined, but at least you still lived cheek by jowl with Viktor, even if time had only granted you this temporary mercy. 

It shouldn’t have surprised you when the doctor informed you both that the efforts for treatment were futile, that Viktor was but a doomed man, cruelly sentenced to death by his own body. His condition was hollowing him from the inside out, and hiding it was of no use. It was etched into the craters in his cheeks, cheekbones pronouncing themselves more and more each day, it showed in his golden eyes, now turning Gamboge. 

When you both crossed the threshold that evening, Viktor stood stock still, eyeing you, unwilling to reach out and touch lest he break the dissociative spell you had both fallen into together. His efforts were futile and short-lived, as he was soon to be. Your movements quickened, erratic, sharp – you grabbed the nearest pillow as hot tears began to stream down your face and with all the air capacity that was left in your lungs, you wrecked them, larynx fraying as you did. The sound was guttural, your diaphragm daring to rival that of an opera singer. 

This was a side of you Viktor had never seen before – not in university, not when you did your masters, not even at work – and it stunned him. Normally, he could lean on you, and you on him, but this was different. He felt as if his pericardium had ceased to function, allowing in a flood of trauma that he hadn’t expected to hit. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, jaw quivering as he could do nothing but observe the scene unfold. You used to be composed; you were supposed to be. One foot forward, cane, foot. The pattern repeated until he was in front of you, bony fingers sinking into the plush of the pillow, weakly peeling it from your face. 

“Lásko.” It wasn’t a warning, nor was it pity; it was some muddled cocktail of sympathy, desperation, and concern, topped with just the right level of distance that the pet name felt cold. The usual honey to his voice was thinned into something more viscous and desperate. “Lásko, please look at me.” 

You did, eyes blurring over with hot tears as you swallowed the lump in your throat, bile threatening to crawl its way up. He was all you wanted to see for the rest of your lives. Lives, plural, not life, singular. The only answer you gave him was a weak whimper that peeled itself away from you involuntarily, compressed with restraint. 

“I can’t do this without you.” Your voice was hoarse, wrecked from the scream. You wanted nothing more than to wreck everything, to tear it all to pieces in a blind rage. Who was the doctor to tell you that Viktor was a doomed man since the day he was born? Who was he to decide your husband’s fate? Viktor closed the distance, throwing the pillow down to the ground and taking you in his arms, forehead kissing yours as his eyes closed. 

“I will be with you, vždycky.” A hollow promise that he couldn’t keep, at least in your mind's eye, yet in a few short months, it wouldn’t be the reassurance he hoped it would be, but rather a threat. Neither of you saw it that way as you wrapped your arms right back around him, ear pressed to his heart, the eakened heart beating just for you that night. 

Some months later, after many tears, angry outbursts, and the pseudo-normalcy of work, you woke to Viktor coughing up Hematite liquid into a kerchief, stain spreading through the cloth fibres, impregnating them with fading life force. The thought flitted through your head that it was a morbid irony he would cough up a colour as such – one initially logged in the books of the dead – but the thought was replaced with worry as he hacked again, lungs whistling for mercy. 

Your hand met the sharp protrusions of his spine between shoulder blades, rubbing circles to soothe the assault on his lungs without avail. A glance tossed over his shoulder, the faded look in his eyes, and it told you everything you needed to know: the ghost of your lover seeking Eirene. 

That night, while drowning in tears, choking on the spasms of your diaphragm, you brought him to the hospital. Ivory walls stained with sick Isabelline, washed out with fluorescents, held you together. The slowly corrupting Verdigris tiles scattered between the scuffed off white ones created a sense of sickness in you that you couldn’t shake; life turning to rot right before your eyes. The only stability in any of this provided to either of you was each other, hand in temperate hand. His fingers squeezed yours as if pressing promise into bone; promise that he was here, he was yours. 

“Je mi to tak líto, miláčku.” Viktor breathed, ragged, broken. The words of a weakened man so desperate to hold onto his love that he has nothing else he could possibly say. His voice begged for forgiveness, forgiveness you’d give a hundred times over if it meant you could keep him by your side, but life was as cruel as the cold, unfeeling scalpel that would inevitably cut into him post-mortem.

“Don’t say that… Don’t… It’ll be okay.” You weren’t sure who you were trying to convince more, him or yourself. Who were you without your mad scientist? Who were you without his clumsy crawl into bed well past the agreed-upon hour, or the tumble of his body as he tried to keep you in bed for a while longer? You couldn’t breathe, lungs catching fire with the last remnants of restraint as you forced your body to cease what was only natural for it in this very moment. 

They continued to burn as they called his name, as they rushed him away from you. They burned as you ran to the washroom to retch, bile coming up hot, the green-yellow swimming across porcelain, mocking you as you white knuckled the sink, and even more, they burned at the catastrophic failure to silence the hiccups that assaulted you as you sobbed. 

Hours passed like this, pacing, sobbing, retching. Your knees scuffed, red imprints of the tile floor leaving their mark as if reminding you cruelly of what you were here for, of how poorly you were dealing with the outcome. In part, you blamed yourself. Had you managed to get Viktor to see someone sooner, had you held on a little tighter, had you been more present, maybe the prognosis would have been different. 

None of it would have ever made an ounce of difference, his fate written into his bones from his very first breath, but still you hoped and still you tried to find new ways to place blame on your own head – the sword of Damocles finally coming down on you. Why should the world have granted you happiness? 

“Viktor needs you.” You whispered to yourself, eyes trained on shaky hands. “He needs you.” Eyes screwed shut, you finally pushed yourself up off the bathroom floor and back into the waiting room. You felt like you were drowning, pitiful glances were thrown your way before a doctor called your name, escorting you to your husband’s side. 

A morbid information, a quiet I’m sorry, he doesn’t have long, before you were let into his room, until the end of the night. That was it. A casual cruelty that nobody could have prepared you for - not even Father Time. 

Heavy footsteps lead you through the door and to your lover. You watched him, his pale complexion turned lead white from blood loss, eyes sunken even further into his skull. He was no longer the man you fell in love with, unrecognisable as illness ravaged his body. 

He was a patient waiting for the astronomical clock to strike, for the reaper to bring him home. You ran to his side, impatience gnawing the flesh off your bones. Fingers brushed wrist, wrist turned palm; the man slotted his fingers to yours, bringing your hand to his pale lips, and planted a kiss to your wrist – devoted even in death. 

“Miláčku…” Viktor croaked, head tilting to the side to look at you with half-lidded eyes, Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed with the little strength he could muster. He looked like a fragment of the man you unabashedly fell in love with, his limbs heavy with every movement, slowed, like he was moving through water. “I don’t wish to be without you.” 

Your breath hitched, and eyes stung. You squeezed his hand thrice, I love you. Thumb circled over his purlicue anxiously, Please stay with me. Slender fingers covered your hand, stilling it, I want to. Even as the last essence of life thrummed through his veins, the love held in his touch was impregnable and overwhelming.  

“I’m here.” You choked out, a weight settling under your tongue, the muscle strained. Plush lips wobble as reality sets in, and chair legs screech against the linoleum floor of the sterile room. Ammonia cleanliness filled your nostrils, and your lover’s scent was tainted with the astringency of lingering Cavicide.

“Can we pretend everything is okay, for just a moment?” He asked you, broken. Hand squeezed hand, as loving as on your first date, but warmth died as it bloomed, choosing not to linger like it once had. The hospital bracelets brushed your wrist as much as they brushed his, pale on pale with a shock of purple to complement his veins. Dread pooled in your stomach as your eye caught it. 

“Y-yeah, I’d like that.” You whisper, voice cracking as you catalogued every detail of him: from the imperfect hairs sticking out in odd directions, to the way his eyes seemed to start glossing over, and finally the dark red smudges that lived beneath his tear ducts. You needed to know what had changed and what things remained the same. You wanted to remember your darling not as the sickly man he was now, but the dedicated scientist and warm lover that he was. 

“I left my mug on the coffee table.” He mused, a forced smile on his lips, a little too mechanical to be sincere. It was practised, one he had usually reserved for allums, colleagues, and acquaintances. Being on the receiving end of it, it left you hollow, unworthy of his joy, but what joy was there to be had right now? 

“You'd better put it away when you get home.” You croaked, sobs wrapping around your neck like rough hands, strangling you as you held them down, the cold bitterness of injustice ripping through you like an icepick. “You know how much I hate mess.” 

An empty chuckle tumbles from between your lips, strained, and a tear rolls down your face, hot against your skin. It burned itself into your cheek as a reminder of the heartache, of the suffrage. Fingers untangled from yours before they find home across your cheekbone, thumb wiping away the salty trail. The pad of his thumb lingered just beneath your eye, ready to catch whatever fell. Attentive even in his last moments.

“Mmm, but then I wouldn’t hear your love disguised as annoyance.” He tried diffidently, his voice taking on a softer roll on the consonants. He had found solace in your reprimands, looking upon them fondly instead of with malice or resentment. It choked you up. He should have been upset, but he wasn’t. How could he be when you were with him in his worst moments? How could he resent you for something that made up such a minute fraction of your relationship as a whole?

“You can hear it in other ways, my love.” Your voice breaks, and you swallow the shards, your throat torn from the inside. The back of your head warmed, the dangerous mix of injustice induced anger and looming anxiety. 

“Eh, I prefer it honest.” He voiced. “Besides, it’s my favourite mug,” His favourite had been a stupid mug you’d gotten him the day he took his Oath, Engi-nearing my limit imposed over a graph with a downwards trend. It was a cheap thing that he held onto like a lifeline — true appreciation for even the smallest gestures. 

“I wish I could have gotten you more than just that," you state, sorrow filling your words. It felt heavier now than it did then — the inability to give him what he deserved. The weight of all things falling obsolete pressed hard against your atrium. 

“We were poor students, freshly graduated. Having you with me, lásko, was a gift enough.” His voice warbled, unbidden, fondness brimming into something more raw. ‘Was’ rattled in your head, the certainty of the past reared its ugly head when the future hadn’t yet come to pass. 

You shifted your chair closer to the metal bed, the covers a dirtied Ivory, subject to the cruelties of time and one too many cleaning cycles. You pulled your husband's hand down to your warm lips, as if the breath of your life could offer him anything but false absolution for what was to come. 

“I’m so proud of you.” You murmured against his skin, the hidden ‘I wish I was as sagacious’ pressed its weight behind unspoken words, old insecurities clawing their way back up your throat, but Viktor never let them saturate into your psyche, not even now. 

“You should have been up there with me, lásko.” Viktor hummed, sincerity woven into his gaze. He flipped his hand, fingers grasping at your chin pointedly before palm returned to cheek, claiming its place there. You leaned into it, memorising the feeling of his calluses on soft skin, accepting his silent wish to cradle you as best he could. 

“- I’m not ready.” Acknowledgement that passed over your lover’s head, his mind insisting to stay on topic lest he too crumble under the weight of what was to come. 

“You are. You always have been.” He insisted, a wry smile painting his thin lips, then quieter, with words that were even too quiet for even ghosts to hear, “I want you to take my ring.” 

Shock painted your features at his request. You wanted to refuse, wanted to tell him off for it, but you couldn’t. Not when he was looking at you the way he was, desperation etched into his features, as if this was his dying wish, and just maybe it was. 

“I- N-no it’s your oath.” You tried, downcast. The stutter of your voice cracking didn’t help his resolve, nor your shame, culpable of letting reality seep back into the present. It took the small crack as an opportunity and ripped open the dam, letting itself flood back in ugly ways, drowning reprieve in black despair.

“Not for much longer.” He coughed. One became two, two became four, and the hematite liquid came up again. The contrast stained the Celadon hospital gown, a sombre reminder of the precipice your lover was teetering on — the nail in the coffin.

“Don’t say that. It’s okay, we’ll go home, I’ll make your favourite dish, a-and we’ll put on a film. W-we’ll drink Sweetmilk until…” Desire to claw back to the safety of denial interrupted by the squeeze of a hand on yours, exhaustion meeting desperation as eyes locked. 

You knew, in that moment, that there wasn’t much more that could be said, that this was to be it. A deep sigh heaved from you, out through the nose, burning as you tried to hold yourself together for a moment longer. 

“The Gods have no such feeling of justice toward mankind,” Viktor quoted in murmur, his eyes brimming with unfallen tears, hazy like morning fog. You’d never seen such a distant expression in his brilliant eyes. You’d never see them lose their light like this, “but the one justice they granted me was you, lásko… Mijuli tě.” He managed to croak out, his fingers moved to tangle with yours like you were his lifeline, but even that was wearing out. His heart was slowly coming to a frigid stop, frozen in a moment so fragile. Slowly, the glassy look in his eyes was replaced with a thick, hazy film; the light no longer reached the golden whiskey irises you loved so much, and the strength, however little he had remaining, fled from his body. The moment he abandoned this mortal coil, you felt it. There was a shift in the air, not just his hand becoming limp; no, there was something more spiritual at work, something Viktor would have surely laughed at you for believing.

The silence that befell the room, much like the first snow of the season, was broken by the harsh pitch of the flatline. It caused acrid bile to creep up your throat, but there was no emesis, not yet. Instead, you watched in heartbroken horror as pallor mortis set itself deep in the skin of your lover, draining him of warmth, of love. You wondered if he would come back to you if you gave him CPR hard enough to crack ribs and bruise lungs. It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it repeated itself like a mantra as your eyes burned. Words trapped themselves under your tongue, heavy like a lead weight as you tried to hold yourself together, but how were you supposed to pick yourself up? You weren’t a machine, you weren’t something to be built or fixed. You’d spent so long with Viktor that you’d be responsible for one another’s tune-ups, but now there was just you alone, forced to relearn who you were without him. 

Finally, tears brimmed in your eyes and you let them form a trail down your cheek, a lump so significant in your throat that you were afraid you’d choke on it if you spoke. You might as well have swallowed your tongue – it might have proven easier. You did the only logical thing and let the tears fall as you cupped his cheek in your other hand, bringing your lips to his, the salt of your tears falling between the two of you, falsifying a warmth that was fading. You knew that in about an hour, his basal temperature would have dropped by one or two degrees, that his hand would become a biting cold against yours in a few hours. Could you stand to be around for algor mortis? You weren’t sure; the only certainty was that you weren't ready to be without him, without his groggy morning voice beckoning you awake, without his laugh carrying through your apartment, without the stupid bunny slippers your mother had bought him smacking against the hardwood of your shared space. How were you supposed to come home to a once soft silence turned harsh by the imminent loneliness? How were you supposed to breathe without Viktor?

When you pulled away, you placed one last kiss to his forehead, inhaling the woody smell of his shampoo for the last time, your eyelids falling shut as you let your tears flow freely. Your jaw felt tight, teetering on the verge of excruciating pain from the effort it took to keep your sobs back, effectively burying them deep within your chest, reserved for the privacy of the four walls you used to share with the brilliant scientist. You allowed yourself the luxury of running a hand through his hair one last time before letting out a shaky breath and folding his hands over his chest. 

“Taky tě miluji.” Your voice broke, and the sobs started to find their way to the very surface. You tried to stifle them, unwilling to let yourself cry on your lover and yet your tears baptised him nonetheless, absorbed into the crown of his head. 

The melancholy dug itself into the very marrow of your bones, an excruciating, acute pain that wouldn’t let up. Still, the precise surgical procedure and meticulous exactitudes would prove even worse, and so you left the grief to fester, to infect and rot from the inside out rather than extract it. You’d rather suffer the nausea of loss than the nausea of any surgery because it would mean that you loved even if you no longer wished to be able to. You no longer bore the internal reminders of your lover; the only one that lingered was the small physical reminder that weighed heavily on your finger, one oath that you wished was never broken. You’d forsake every god, cast yourself into exile, strike a deal with any devil you could just to have Viktor by your side again. 

Shaky hands slide down his cheeks, and you press kisses to his moles for the last time, choking back ragged sobs that threaten to tear your vocal cords, yet the tears speak louder than any words or whimpers ever could. Your eyes screwed shut tight, the crows' feet that formed from years of smiles etching themselves into the corners of your eyes out of heartbreak, an emotion they were much less familiar with. 

Slowly, your hand found his warm touch once, twice, thrice. I love you, in your silent language, a stark contrast with the onset of algor mortis. A coolness that would have been welcome once chilling the nerves that found home along your spine. It was time to honour your husband's one wish, the wish he had made with a heavy heart and hands that held yours just a little too tight. You slid his ring off his pinky and onto yours as doctors began to rush in, one of whom gently moved you away, leading you back to your seat so they could check for any vitals. 

They poked and prodded, running analysis like machines, as if he wasn’t human, as if he wasn’t your lover. They called time of death, looks of pity found you. Words were exchanged, ‘Do you want time alone?’, as if you hadn’t had it, ‘Would you like to help wash him?’, as if you could refuse touching your husband for the last time, ‘How do you want him dressed?’, as if you want him dressed in anything but the fragments of your heart. 

The rest was a blur: papers, documents, sign here in definitive blue pen, toe tagged, bag zipped, wheels squeaked. Out of sight but never out of mind. You don’t know how you wound up at home, but you did, footsteps heavy, the weight in your chest dragging you down. 

You were met with silence, eerie yet deafening all the same: aberrant. You had gone through the motions, a spectre in your own home, once familiar walls became strange, the papers strewn across the coffee table mocked you, mugs sat untouched, and they would until you had it in you to wash away the delicate marks your lover's lips from their rims. Papers and photos were left on the fridge, stark reminders of what you no longer had. The pain of it prickled high in your sinuses, tear ducts burning, your throat restricting itself lest you tear into the thick silence. 

Instinct led you to your room, your room, bed unmade just like it had been this morning when you left. The nightstand remained home to books in which bookmarks would mark a page further, to a mug in which coffee would rot – an altar to all he was. The closet door, askew, invited you in, and you lost yourself in the sea of belongings that your lover would never wear again. You drowned yourself in them as your tears chose to wash them, as if it would ever preserve any part of him. 

The smell of musk and old wood permeated your nostrils, borderline burning them with the background bite of vetiver and stagnant air. You clung to it like an anchor in the storm, and when it wasn’t enough, you ripped your closet apart. A nest of his clothes formed on his side of the bed, as if burying yourself in his scent would save some part of him that would get lost to time. If you could press it into incense just to keep him, you would. You’d burn it around the house in a thurible like at Sunday worship. Though you believed in nothing, you believed in him. 

You let yourself sob, muffled, into an old sweater that Viktor once claimed was too scratchy but wore anyway. Fingers dug into the fibres the way spades cut into dirt, merciless and wanting, reaching for something long gone. A whine ripped from your throat as if you were a wounded animal. What difference was there anyway? Had someone been asked to pick apart the two, they wouldn’t be able to tell between human and beast, and maybe that was loss. 

It was ugly, the way life drove its poisoned knife through your heart, the wound blistering as it mocked you for loving. Erratic movements forced you to the laundry bin, and you pulled out the dirtiest garments you could find, bringing them up to your nose to inhale as if they could sustain you, patch you up, maybe even fix you. Finally, you allowed an earth-shattering sob to hit the open air, nobody to console you through the pain. Turning to Jayce would be laughable; you’d watch the prelude to devastation play a broken tune, and you’d be worse off for it. No, you braved this alone. You had to. 

Picked up, dumped out, thrown over, your laundry basket suffered the abuse of your grief. You longed for him, for his arms; you longed to bury yourself in his upper intercostal spaces and never come out. You’d bury yourself in his thoracic cavity and join him six feet under if you had to. That first night, you sobbed until your lungs burned, until you thought they would collapse on themselves and you yourself would pass away – and part of you hoped you would just so you wouldn't have to feel this pain anymore. 

Grief had taken the form of your lover over the following weeks, coaxing you to bed with an open palm. It woke up with you, made coffee with you, and spread itself across your home. It echoed what soft words Viktor offered you in the morning, and it reached down your throat to pull sobs out from your lungs. It kissed you bitterly, and painted your cheeks ugly colours, it wore your lover's clothes until they no longer smelled like him, and that killed you a little more; still, you refused to wash his clothes, and still you clung to his scent wherever you could find it. 

Over the next months, you burned his scent into your nose until it ran thin with your sweat, until the mildew of rotten coffee film clung to the air, and not even open windows could hide the neglect. You followed the same route home, catching yourself turning to reach for Viktor where the sidewalk crumbled, the stumble of a cane no longer following. The same routine was kept, haunting you, sinking its claws into your shoulder where your satchel rested heavy, bruising, bleeding, laden with the weight of unfinished work and notebooks that would remain unopened until your right ear rang. 

The day it did, annoyance filled you. You tilted your head over your right shoulder, gaze shifting upwards, your heart stilling for a moment as your eyes landed on the strong Dogwood tree. Spring had long since sprung, turning buds into blooms in the summer heat and soon after, blooms shrivelled as the cold fronts came in and winds picked up. The leaves had shifted to warmer shades, while the air nipped at you, demanding attention. It was a suffocating comfort, the first you’d had in months. 

A withered smile twitched at your lips as your eyes trained themselves on leaves so crimson they began to veer purple, bleeding from the veins, just like the bags under Viktor’s eyes did during this time of year, and yet, despite the workload that came with it, and the looming threat of winter’s cruelty, it was his favourite. The memory of him limping over to you with tea in hand and a toothy grin squeezed at your heart. 

Viktor had once told you that the harvest season was one he held dear in his heart despite how loudly his leg protested; his lungs felt cleaner, and the amber of his eyes could be found in nearly every leaf. The palette complimented him well, and he harnessed it, weaponised it even, made you weak in the knees with how well he wore the confidence the turn of seasons brought. 

You picked up your pace, leaves crunching beneath your feet to the tune of your hurried pace. With a mind of their own, your legs forced you across the street and past the coffee shop you both loved. You did not enter, not today, but you let the smell of something other than your late husband cling to you for the first time in months, relishing in the way it hugged you: comfort. The rich colours of autumn returned colour to your own life slowly, small reminders of Viktor forcing themselves through your self-abandonement, little love notes in every gust of wind, sweet nothings strewn across the apartment in the form of equations. 

When you crossed the threshold that evening, you didn’t throw yourself into the nest of unwashed clothing; instead, you picked up the last unworn cardigan of his and threw it on, pulling the moulding mugs into the kitchen, ridding yourself of summer’s overripe rot, hoping that next year you could catch it before it all turned sour. You braved it that evening and picked up the phone, dialling a number newly foreign to you, invited Jayce and Mel over, and finally spoke of the hollow that grief carved into your chest. 

It was different shapes for everyone, you found out, Jayce finding a cold, stagnant air in the lab as he worked, irritating, nipping at him as the academy insisted on sending him potential partners. He considered shutting down his projects and moving onto a different kind of engineering, which Mel encouraged, with a healthy side of caution. You nodded along, understanding yet resenting it all the same because it meant cutting out another part of your lover. Jayce didn’t submerge his memory in formaldehyde to keep it; no, he extracted and removed the diseased parts, mourning them to the point of debilitation. Yet he held onto what was still whole. 

He was not rational under his blanket of grief, but he had his partner, his counterpart, and she was his balance. The scales had unfortunately tipped on your end, no longer having your balance. Your scale swinging dangerously in the void of grief and loss. You’d lost the man who softened your scalpel sharp edges, teaching you to analyse and to savour, rather than cut into and devour. You tried to grasp at the strings desperately, to climb to the safety of the fulcrum now that you were tipping, but you couldn’t pull your own weight, arms weakened under the burden of sorrow. 

Still, you all spoke fondly of the scientist who had taken your heart so tenderly, toasting to him, filling up a wine glass at his usual seat, and including his ghost as if he were still a part of your group. The air turned lighter even for just a moment, and you welcomed it, the weight on your chest lifting a fraction so you could breathe. Somehow, you didn’t feel the suffocating presence of Lady Grief wearing your lover’s spirit, nor that of the Night-Hag that held your dreams hostage; you felt lighter, almost. You knew that the moment Jayce and Mel retired home that you’d once again feel the oppressive presence, and that your scale would slip from its precarious stability. 

“I think I might take my oath.” Both guests froze for a moment, exchanged equal looks of surprise, and offered each other knowing smiles before Mel spoke. 

“You know,” Her dignified pause gave room for reassurance to trickle in, “Viktor wanted you to take that oath.” 

Eyes met her green ones; the colour embodying the calm you searched for, before you turned to Jayce, who simply nodded, picked up his glass and held it up, nudging Mel to do the same. They read each other well, almost as seamlessly as you and Viktor had. A dynamic whose return you longed for from the day it left you. 

“To taking your oath.”

“To taking my oath.” You smile in agreement, though it doesn’t quite reach your eyes, a pit settling into your stomach like the stone of rotting fruit. 

After Jayce and Mel leave, you ingest courage in liquid form, red as your heart bleeds, and you open the door to your joint office for the first time since his passing. 

Notes, like fragments of your heart scattered across the room, a copy of the will left untouched on the table. Part of you was dead and buried in this room, part of you a walking cadaver confined to the four walls of a shared house. A house with two names on the deed, only one who would remain its caretaker.

You wished to feel the heat of his breath whispering those words [pet names] to you, to make you feel alive. You wish you felt the heat of his words spoken into your skin, but instead you read his will, this time without handing it off to lawyers to execute. A particular detail of it caught your eye, one that failed to be mentioned to you time and time again. 

And how you wished you could hold his cool hands in yours, kiss his moles, and cry tears of joy into his exposed collarbone. Instead you stain the paper with fat tears as you read that he deliberately asked to be buried while wearing the one vow that mattered, the one he made to you. At the heart of it, he was a man who loved you unbearable, and still did, even in death. He was a proud man for loving you, and he loved fiercely. Your exegesis of the will brought you a small comfort, he thought himself self-serving, and you thought him all too openhearted. 

You picked up more papers, some small notes sliped out, sweet words pressed in ink. One in particular caught your eye as it flew out and fluttered down to the desk in a fashion akin to a butterfly with a broken wing. It was but a small note in his looped handwriting, the lettering dark as the shadow that loomed over your shoulder, but warm as the summer sun. You could almost hear it in your head, his voice reading the notes out loud, but you hardly remembered the lilt of his accent, the way it was soft around the hard edges. Your fingers traced the relief of the words, quill and ink gaving to a tactile experience.

Another sip of wine, another dash of melancholy, another mouthful of guilt, a red ring stained the paper as if it were a life source. You wanted to laugh at the ruin, but you knew Viktor would smile and drunkenly giggle into your hair, telling you to hang it up and keep the memory, so you did. You held the note to your heart, standing up only to be met with another note pasted to the wall next to some blueprints: encouragement. 

The room spun, the string on your metaphorical balance fraying from under your touch, hands succumbing to violent rope burn as you tried to keep, but ultimately lost equilibrium. It felt like you kept falling without the ground in sight, the impact surely to break something but the impact never came. Instead, a cold chill wrapped itself around you like a comforting hug, the shadows a little less haunting. A sense of peace washed out the culpability you felt in your heart, and so you began searching through papers, reading every note that stuck out of every worn textbook. Possessed, it’s what it felt like you were, as you nursed your wine, pouring some into an old mug — an offering. Frantic, but steady, you studied every loop, every research paper, every equation until your eyes drooped. Until you could barely hold yourself up, your heart opened as violently as a pomegranate, carnage left in the wake.

The sun kissed the horizon, small rays teasing you for how long you’d been sleepless. Every care that you thought you had had flown out the window; a caged bird now free. It was the first time you felt connected to him since that day in the hospital, the first time you felt his presence around you despite having begged the universe for a sign of his ghost.The Gods had long since abandoned you, that much was clear. 

The cool air felt like warm coffee, a tender kiss to the forehead, and the cooing of sweet nothings. It pushed you up to your feet, led you to bed, and allowed you to close your eyes. A dreamless sleep consumed you, and when you woke, your actions turned autopilot, taking the notes and sticking them around the house, little reminders of just how much your lover believed in you. Viktor would have wanted this, you rationalised, a smile spreading across your face, the thought no longer salt in the wound. I can do this echoed in the chambers of your mind. 

You stuck one of the simpler notes to the fridge so that every morning would serve as a reminder to you: ‘I love you, miláčku’

Words that were missing from your life since his departure found their way back in, seeping in through little cracks. They encouraged instead of rubbing salt into the already fragile wounds. It took you all too much time to come around to this, and yet while it pushed you, there was still a hollow in your chest. You couldn’t leave it alone and so over the next weeks you ripped that hole open further and further until you filled it with everything Viktor. You scattered mugs across tables, picked up his scribbled musings and corrected his false equations and improved on them. You were sleepless, grief stricken, yet hopeful and reinvigorated by the simple words of a selfish man. 

Had your late husband seen you like this, he would have laughed at the irony of how you became everything that you chastised him for; a workaholic with the caffeine dependency so severe it should kill a horse. You hated it, he would have loved it. He loved you and he left no room for doubt.

Soon enough, November air instilled its bite into your bones, stripping your skin of any known warmth, forcing you to pull out moth bitten sweaters, refusing to rid yourself of any of Viktor’s. You wore them for the sense of comfort and companionship that you refused to find anywhere else, you slid his ring onto your pinky, allowing some part of his legacy to touch every part of your work and your life. The leaves fell away, the colours changed long before they kissed the ground, but you still called yourself his. 

No matter how the next weeks, months, or seasons panned out, you pushed your body to the point of breaking, spine screaming at you until the fateful day came, shoulders aching from the weight you carried. You had to get the ring resized for the event, a responsibility you wished to put off as long as humanly possible, and you wound up asking Heimerdinger to slide this specific ring onto your pinky instead of any other. It was difficult to part with it even for a few weeks, but you did what you had to, entrusting your heart in the careful hands of strangers, at least for a little while. The calluses on your fingers grew angrier the closer the day drew near, red and raised from handling machinery and building prototypes, distracting yourself from the weight removed on your ulnar digit. 

Taking the oath wasn’t solely about your desires nor about your competence, it became about honouring his legacy, honouring the praises he long sang; praises you let simmer in disbelief. Upon hearing your heartwrenching request, the professor agreed, a solemn look painted on his face as his moustache bristled with poorly concealed pity. The gears were set in motion on a newly oiled machine, and so when the day came, you took your oath, the ceremony almost exactly as you remembered it, but this time you didn’t have Viktor by your side; he was cold and long buried. The lack of his presence made you feel small, anxious to the point of chewing your bottom lip raw, drawing blood that he would tsk you for then wipe away with his thumb. He would even kiss it better just so he would have any excuse at all to kiss you. 

When your name was called, you swore you felt a cold squeeze to your hand, yet you chalked it up to the nerves that bloomed in your gut. They eclipsed in your chest, throat tight as you made your way down to the podium. Memories of the last time you were in this space flashed through your memory, like some sick film montage, replaying happier times. You swallowed down the lump and imagined how proud Viktor would be. 

Time seemed to slow under the fluorescent flicker of the auditorium light, and suddenly it felt washed in shades of sepia, devoid of the pride you should have been feeling. Deep breaths, thick inhalations that lodged themselves against the lining of your lungs, struggling to fall even, all the more acutely accounted for the closer you got to accepting back the one object that helped you together these months, the object that solidified you as one half of a team that was no longer. 

Heimerdinger whispered praises to you, a small “your boy would have been proud of you,” before he slipped the cold iron to its rightful place. The ghost sensation the ring had left was replaced by something much more solid. You carried him with you once again; a symbol of both the cold iron bridging Piltover and Zaun, and the living to the dead. 

Everyone recited the oath together, hand over heart, promising something you yourself had sworn long ago. The ethics were prattled off once again, and the ceremony ended. A sense of hollow pride filled your chest, like a missing piece had been ripped into it, but when Jayce and Mel wrapped you in their arms, congratulating you, the squeeze relented, and you felt lighter yet. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what you had - all things that have come to pass have passed before, same but different, and now you stood with two sacred oaths both in your heart and on your hands. One of which was your oath to him, an undying one, the happiest day of your life, and the other, which started as an oath that wasn’t even yours to keep. Still, you carried it with you to remind yourself of the brilliant man who limped into your life on one of your first days at the Academy, and you would carry it until you too were amongst the maggots and bones, next to him, where you belonged. 

__

'v nemoci i ve zdravi': In sickness and in health

Mám tě ráda: also I love you, but with a deeper meaning, often used with family or those close to you.

"Mám tě moc ráda, miláčku": I love you so much, darling.

"Nechci být bez tebe. Jsi mé srdce, má duše. Nemohu se tě vzdát.": I don't want to be without you. You are my heart, my soul. I can't give you up.

“Jsem sobecký muž.”: I am a selfish man.

Nechci, abys se utápěl v zármutku.”: I don't want you to wallow in grief

vždycky: Always