[en!fic] Arcane – Viktor – PG | Weightless

[malurette]

Title: Weightless
Author: malurette
Fandom: Arcane
Character: Viktor
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Riot Games & Fortiche

Author’s note: ESL author with no beta-reader – if you spot any mistakes please do correct me.
an idea that floated around for some weeks already, written in a hurry before watching the very last episode and ignoring the few spoilers I already got
set between, say, acts #2&3 for seasons #1, no spoilers for season #2 at all (but might read differently after?)
Word count: 500

**
A late night. Another one. So many of them. So much work to do, so little time.
Viktor is not one to lament uselessly the failings of the flesh—the need to eat and sleep that take away from his precious time, the pains that threaten to cloud his even more precious mind, the stiffness that impairs his movements and yet the failings are great, the impairments are dire.
But better than lament he strives to improve and push past. There’s little he can do about sleep and food—install a cot in the lab for all the late nights he’s too tired to go back home after working so long, have Jayce or Sky bring him take-out; and the pain… there are medications to carefully dose to dull the pain’s edge without clouding his mind, braces and a crutch to support his aching, weakening body.
Not something HexTech can offer a solution to. Not exactly, not yet.

The night he and Jayce cracked magic, the possibilities seemed endless. Weightlessness, light, teleportation, and what else more? According to popular myth, magic could do absolutely any and everything, the limit was one’s imagination… and calculating the right formula.
In the first days they tossed ideas back and forth. The teleportation that saved young Jayce’s and his mother’s lives back then and was replicated in their mad experiment as a child’s toy version with that little cog. Floating transportation—bigger trains, self-supporting loading trolleys, elevators?
(Well we sure got the going-up-fast part down pat, but going-back-down-safely will need tweaking!) hover-chairs for people who can’t walk.
The Council deemed only the teleportation interesting and worth funding, on a bigger scale. Maybe airships too. But teleporting would render other floating freight useless so why bother? and they paid no heed at all to small-scale, for-the-everyday-user devices.

Years later, he’s starting to draw schematics for a HexTech-powered exoskeleton. For people losing bodily autonomy. And of course the Council would only see the industrial applications: for workers to work even harder.
Here he is tonight. Working past his limits.
Their old first prototype is still here in their lab, barely tweaked and improved and made just safe and reliable enough for show.
One of these nights that prove too much.

Sighing, Viktor secures his crutch and all his working notes, undoes his brace—there’s a delicate trade-off; opening the brace removes pressure suddenly, causing pain at first before it can fade off and offer true relief—and turns the device on. Just for a few minutes, for a blessed quarter of hour, he’s weightless, comfortably warm, his aching articulations free from gravity’s harsh pull—not painless, never entirely painless anymore but soothed just so.
He lets the delicate blue light put his mind and worries to rest. Closes his eyes. Breathes.
Even if his eyes were to get misty, no gravity means no tears that could roll down.
Just for a few minutes, a few minutes and he’ll come back down and get back to work.