Chapter 5: Another Type of Scar

Up until now, it had been a quiet evening on Emberflit. Viktor had managed to calm Ren down, having gone so far as to even read the foolish paper for himself so that he could better discredit it. Initially, it had seemed to work. Ren's nerves were eased and he retired to bed early. All the better Viktor had thought. His apprentice needed rest after returning to more physically demanding work and Viktor wanted time alone in his own room to review his notes on how best to protect metals from corrosion. But as the clock downstairs began to ring out the first bell in its jauntier tune used for morning hours, the peace was broken.

The first sound Viktor heard was Ren's augmented arm slamming against the wall. A whine was next. Viktor stopped his reading and listened. Though faint, he could hear Ren thrashing in his bed and whimpering. Then with a gasp, Ren let out a cry and lurched upwards. Viktor heard the sounds of Ren pulling himself from bed, followed by quick, uneven steps as he scrambled to the washroom. The water was turned on and Ren let out a ragged breath as he splashed water on his face. For a minute the water continued to run, then the faucet shut off and the sounds of Ren stumbling back to bed were heard instead. Through it all, Viktor was silent. There was little he could do in this situation.

Ren's nightmares began after they had moved to Emberflit. The first one had been much like tonight. Viktor had been setting up his room when he heard Ren begin to moan in his sleep. He didn't think much of it until the moans became stifled cries and were accompanied by the sound of Ren tossing and turning. Concerned that his apprentice was in pain from his still healing shoulder, Viktor had entered the room. Ren had woken in an instant at the sound of the door, the young man shooting upwards with a shout. His arm had flown instantly to his shoulder.

Viktor remembered clearly how, even in the dark of the room, he could see the fear shinning in Ren's eyes. He remembered how his chest was heaving as though he had been in a fight, how he gripped at the augmentation base at his shoulder, and how he trembled. It had taken Ren minutes to calm down enough to speak with Viktor and several minutes more to actually confess what his nightmare had been about; their fight with Jayce. Viktor offered Ren chems to suppress his emotions to help him sleep through the night, but Ren refused. Even if the suppression would be temporary, he did not want it.

The second time Ren had the nightmare Viktor had offered the suppressant again. Ren refused, as he had the first time. And so the cycle repeated with the third and fourth nightmares. After the fifth nightmare, Viktor stopped asking but he always remained prepared in case Ren asked for his aid. This night's nightmare was Ren's seventh. And the solution, Viktor thought, was close at hand, but if the boy did not want his aid, what could he do?

It distressed Viktor to know his apprentice was suffering, especially since he understood how he was suffering. He had been through it himself years ago, when Jayce had destroyed his first lab. Viktor felt his jaw tense as he recalled the aftermath of the explosion. He still remembered it in vivid detail. He remembered waking up beneath rubble and carefully crawling from beneath it, using the hex-claw's laser to painstakingly cut through the debris, always concerned that it would collapse on top of him, and finally pulling himself from it.

And he remembered his brief search for survivors. When he had crawled through the ruins he saw blood. It had leaked out from under toppled machinery and overturned tables. But the bodies of those Zaunites were doomed to begin with, their organs too badly damaged by toxins to be saved. It was not until Viktor found the smashed golems that had housed the brains of the Zaunites that he knew they were truly dead and gone. Viktor remembered the world spinning and his eyes coming to rest on a single hand poking out from under a collapsed bit of ceiling. It was hanging limply, with a single finger pointing accusingly towards him as though in death it was trying to scream "You led him here! This is your doing!" Even through the fugue of shock and emotion suppressing chems, he had been filled with despair.

He had never felt more alone than he had in that moment. The few acolytes that had been at the lab that day he found no trace of. They had fled, likely fearing that chem-baron or Piltovan enforcers would come to investigate the explosion. It was a concern that Viktor had felt himself. And so, in desperation, he had dragged himself, bloody and broken to the one place he believed he would be safe; his parents' house.

Viktor furrowed his brow as he recalled how his mother had looked at him when she opened the door. All these years later and he could still not figure out the emotions he had seen in her eyes that day. Fear, anger, sorrow, relief? It somehow looked like all four at once. But his focus had not been on her emotions then, it was on getting himself inside their house to recover.

He stayed with his parents for over a month repairing himself and keeping out of the eyes of Piltovans. It was perhaps the worst month of his life. To begin with, there was the physical pain. Tender bruises, abrasions, and a fractured bone kept his productivity low, dragging the pace of his recovery to a crawl. Compounding his frustrations were the damages his augmentations sustained. His body moved with reduced efficiency and with his equipment lost, he had to rely on what was in his parents' workshop to repair himself. They had most of the tools he needed to tend to the mechanical parts of him but had none of the chems he needed to maintain the augments that affected his mind. His shunts ran dry and, unable to refill them, their effectiveness began to dwindle.

Dread was the emotion that plagued him worst in that time. It clung to his mind and coated his insides like an oil spill. It was with him when he imagined seeing things in the corner of his eye. It was with him when he heard knocks on the door; always insure if it was going to be Piltovan enforcers on the other side. It was with him when it had been enforcers once, come to question his parents about his whereabouts. He dreaded that they would turn him over while he could not adequately defend himself, that their sense of self-preservation would supersede sentimentality. They were under no parental obligations to risk themselves for him. But they never turned him over. Even as their workshop, their livelihood, was ransacked in search of him, they kept him safe. And for that, Viktor would always be grateful.

But all of that paled in comparison to the dread he had felt as evening set in. Every night he had worked late, not just to hasten his return to full efficiency but also in hopes of having the dreamless sleep of pure exhaustion. It never worked. His sleep was plagued by nightmares. With neither chems nor his conscious mind to keep them in check, Viktor's emotions would run wild through the nightmares, filling him with rage, terror, and grief. He would relive the fight with Jayce and the explosion, the crawl through the rubble, finding the bodies, the dead hand pointing at him. And when his emotions were through showing him those, they dug back further in his mind to his expulsion, Jayce's betrayal, and the drowned dockworkers. The faces of these he could have saved if people had just listened to him and done what he knew was best had haunted him.

The tension had spread from Viktor's jaw down to his shoulders. He stopped his thoughts for a moment, took a slow, steadying breath, and unclenched his muscles. Then he focused on what he had gained from that time; a renewed sense of purpose.

Viktor recalled the calm that had come over him when he had finally been able to refill his shunts with the proper suppressants. He remembered how all the noise caused by his tumultuous emotions grew quiet and he alone was master of his thoughts. Everything made sense again. He no longer dreaded the night. And when he thought of Jayce, he was not filed with rage or sorrow but cold disappointment and the joyless acceptance that the man who had once been his friend was now a dangerous individual that was a hazard to his own health and safety.

Human error truly was the leading cause of suffering in Zaun and more than ever before, he knew he was doing the right thing by working to eliminate it. Frail bodies, weak minds, distracted thoughts, unreliable emotions; someday he would free people from them!

The sound of Ren letting out a long sigh as he struggled to fall back asleep interrupted Viktor's thoughts.

Yes, the faces of the dead still haunted him from time to time, but his purpose, chems, and time kept them at bay. Renatus had none of these things.

"Stubborn boy. You need not suffer like this. Allow me to help you. Do you not trust me?"

Viktor pushed that question from his mind as soon as he thought it.

"Unnecessary question. Renatus trusts me. He would not remain my apprentice if he did not. He trusts me with his life. He trusts me to respect his autonomy. But Renatus, it is difficult to honor your requests when I see you in such distress. You do not deserve it."

Viktor rubbed his temples, the fatigue of the day beginning to wear on him as well. He needed sleep. Reluctantly, he stood from his desk and began preparing for bed.

"Within constraints, there is another solution I will offer him tomorrow; directed work. Work has always eased my mind. It will be beneficial for him as well."

He placed the hex-claw on its stand and gave his mask its final cleaning.

"The Church of the Glorious Evolved always has need of aid. Tomorrow, after his lessons, we shall go."