Like I SAID: NOTHING HURTS AS GOOD AS ARCANE! In other news, big flashback, big feels, some exposition, the lightest dusting of Cosmic Horror. This is probably ultimately going to be the least right point of this entire story, but it's FanFic. That's half the point.
I do not own Arcane or League of Legends. This is purely fan work. Please, feel free to comment, criticize, and above all, enjoy!
Fractured Reunion - Chapter 7 - The Long and Winding Road of the Self, Part 1
Vi roared in pain as she used the concussive force of one Atlas Gauntlet to launch her follow-up punch through the massive, reinforced chemtank on Vander's back. HOW he was still alive with that shit flowing through his veins, as it burned and scorched her cheek, she had NO idea. But a dodge and a gut jab saw his ribs visibly break under the force of the counterpunch. And STAY broken.
Progress.
And she NEEDED it, as his claws dragged their way up the frames of the Gauntlets, up her ARMS. She roared again in pain and used the shields to break free. Fuck, that was BAD. It hurt to even think to move her arms. But move them, she had to.
She punched against his swipe, shattered his hand, then barely managed a double-fisted blow against his chest, hurling him off his feet and into the nearest building. She stumbled through after him. He struggled to rise out of the pile of rubble, the massive damage she could inflict finally sticking. She lumbered towards him, certainly feeling almost as hurt.
His claws of one good hand feebly caught and scraped deeper into the frame of her gauntlets. She didn't care. He couldn't stop her. He...he... he'd WANT this, right? After what he'd been TURNED INTO? What he'd BECOME? What SHE'D... What EVERYONE HAD...
"VVVVVVVIIIIIIIIIOOOOLEEEETTTTT...?"
And the dam burst. She collapsed against the gauntlet on his chest, tears and pain and hate and disappointment pouring forth.
"I can't. I CAN'T. I CAN'T! I CAN'T, I-I COULDN'T! I SHOULDN'T HAVE! I'm SORRY! I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY, I'M SORRY!"
It wasn't just the last few months. Or the impossibly eventful weeks before those. Even the 7 years before THAT. It was a lifetime of pressure and hurt and fear, building in the depths of her soul. And at last, the errent pick strike and open flame to ignite the gasses and blow the mine of her being apart had struck.
"ALL-ALL I DID, CAN DO... HAVE HAPPEN... IT'S JUST HURT! Cou-COULDN'T... PROTECT HER! JUST HURT HER, RIGHT AFTER YOU...! I... I JOINED THEM! TO KILL HER!"
She couldn't stop herself. Every guilt and pain and grievance and mistake and ounce of sorrow poured from her.
"MY...MY 'GOOD HEART,'" She sobbed so very bitterly at that descriptor. She honestly doubted it had EVER been true. "IT'S GONE!"
He looked down at her. His voice couldn't say it, but his eyes asked well enough: 'Have you been carrying all that, all this time?'
She could only sob against his twisted, beaten body in response.
"VVVVVVVIIIIIIIIIII..."
HOW could he still manage to sound so comforting? With his fucked up, growling, chemtech doomrattle?
"YOU'VE... LOST IT? YOU CAN, HRRRRRRRRHG... FIND IT AGAIN. SOMEONE... TOOK IT? TAKE IT BACK. WON'T... BE EASY. BUT-"
"The right thing never is..."
FUCK. It really, TRULY was Vander in there.
"ONE. LAST. THING..."
His one good claw dragged and scratched at his chest, peeling flesh and muscle away.
No. No. No, no, no, no. No. NO. NO! NONONONONONONO-"
It took her a second to realize she'd been thinking, SCREAMING out loud. She couldn't do it, not again, she couldn't HURT SOMEONE SHE LOVED, NOT AGAI-
His blood-soaked hand fell heavily onto her shoulder. Like in the old days, when he had a lesson to try and teach her, and wanted her to really pay attention to what he was saying. Only this felt different. There WAS no lesson: only a plea from the depths of his twisted, malformed being.
"WON'T... HURT. BE... HELPING. THIS... ISN'T... ME. WON'T BE... THIS!"
Janna's Breath, he hated himself maybe more than she did. And she didn't think she could blame him...
"HELP ME, KIDDO. PLEASE..."
Tears and blood ran down her face as they reached and broke and carved together. The hydraulics forced the rough metal of the gauntlets through around his claws, through dense layers of muscle and bone like steel. Till at last their hands closed around it. The throbbing, pulsing, poisoned organ at his center. It felt like some mad chemcrafter had taken at least SIX hearts, not all of them even HUMAN, and stitched and melted them together.
His eyes gazed down at her. Pure pain. Pure relief. Pure gratitude. Pure LOVE.
That same weird glitch started running up and down the gauntlets; even without that, they were so damaged that doing anything beyond the light grasp she was already doing was probably a really bad idea. Vi found she didn't care. Together they PULLED, and SQUEEZED, and CRUSHED. Yet for as much of the magically enhanced hydraulic force went outwards to the monstrous heart in their hands, pulping it between their fingers, just as much flowed back into the internal systems, pistons and fasteners snapping and shattering. The pressure flowed back, hitting the HexGems. They cracked, and all Vi saw was BLUE-
"-I?! vvvvvvVvvvVI?Iiii!?"
What...? How...? She was supposed to...?
"-Iss? Miss, OPEN YOUR Eyesssssss-"
"-ON'T HAVE TIMEeeeeeee FffOR THIS!"
"-UCK YOUuuuuuuuU!"
Time... SOUNDED wrong? Time had a SOUND? Was that... Tallis above her? He looked... even WRONGER than time sounded. And... Oh, a, a Yordle, she'd always...
Ekko. Ekko was tying something around her, lifting her up... Oh. She must really be dea-
"AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRHHHHHHGGGGG!"
The SCREAM of PAIN, of POWER, of LIFE, RIPPED ITSELF out of her throat as she jolted up, energy and agony BURNING through her! As she gasped the fire in her veins away, she looked down. A rough, raw Hexgem hovered and twirled over her bare chest as its power sparked and flowed downward, gold and metal and wires and crystal carving a path into her heart.
...She couldn't... feel her hands...
"Vi! Thank Janna, it worked. Vi, listen, you've been through-"
She looked down further, and couldn't contain her scream. At the raw, scorched bone and charred black flesh, similar lines of metal and crystal running to the ruins of her hands and arms as to her chest.
Ekko and the Yordle were trying to calm her, but she couldn't hear them over the confusion and terror rampaging through her mind. A sound hit her ears: screeching. Screeching like the worst sorts of monsters she and Powder used to make up, made REAL. She could vaguely see someone approach from the front. Tallis, the back end of his hammer raised high. Then it fell, towards her. Janna, the hammer looked more fucked up than he di-
WHAM!
When Vi next woke, she could feel... so much MORE. Not simply because she could actually feel her limbs again. She raised a hand into view, not sure if she ought to feel wonder or horror at the amalgamation of crystal and gold and metal and ruined flesh before her.
"What did you do?" She whispered out on reflex.
"Saved you. You're welcome."
Tallis' voice cut out, more bitterness in him than in 20 of the poorest sump rats put together.
"Jayce!" The yordle yelped admonishingly. Ekko leaned in, looking like he wanted to roll his eyes, but also like he actually took whatever they were arguing about too seriously to undercut it in any way.
"Little man?" She reached up disbelievingly to touch him. "Am I... dead, too?"
His face warped to confusion, but before he could answer, Tallis cut in, apparently locked in permanent state of mad desperation and profound bitterness.
"If we keep wasting time, you and everyone alive will wish you were."
"JAYCE!"
"OH, HOW FOOLISH OF ME TO FORGET, THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO WISH THEY WERE DEAD, BECAUSE THEY WON'T EVEN BE ABLE TO THINK THEIR OWN THOUGHTS!"
Ekko did manage to shake his head, in a 'See what I've been dealing with?' way, and helped her to sit up.
Vi's eyes widened as she finally took in just where she was. It was... borderline indescribable. What she'd always pictured hearing stories of bad trips from under or across the bar at The Last Drop. A chaotic, endless swirl of ever-shifting colors and shapes whipped and roared outside... the cave? Shelter? Giant fucking crystal? ALL THREE AT ONCE?
"Ah, yes. Welcome to the Arcane, Miss Violet." The Yordle said. Vi scowled at the use of her full name, but frankly figured they all had bigger things to worry about.
"Would you STOP?" Jayce snarled as she tapped a rhythmic nonsense against her knee and belt buckle, her new fingers and limbs sounding off almost like chimes. She sighed, but acquiesced. He, supposedly, had math and rune work and Genuis Hextech Boy shit to do to try and get them out, and she could admit breaking his concentration would be a bad idea. And the sounds she was making could attract more of those... things.
Course, trouble was then her mind would wander. In sleep or wakefulness, the images, the visions, poured in from the madness outside. Or maybe the madness in her, it's fangs given extra bite by the Arcane surrounding her.
Every Bridge crumbled under the weight of the dead as the cities burned and choked. The river run drier than a bone: dam after dam built down its length out of wreckage and corpses as the warring sides tried over and over to cut off or poison the other's water, until the river's very source was choked and stopped up by death and detritus. Waves of blood so high, no one would not drown beneath them. Be they in the deepest pits or highest towers, the blood they'd spilled would consume them all. Caitlyn and Jinx surrounded like the walls of a fighting pit by actual mountains of corpses; scrabbling in the ruins of the cities and over the countless dead like animals, beating and clawing and biting each other to gory pieces; dying with nothing but hate on their lips, poison in their souls.
She didn't know if it was her own half-mad imagination, the Arcane outside trying to fuck with her, or showing her what may be meant to happen, if poetically. She didn't care. It couldn't happen. It WOULDN'T happen, she decided then and there, rubbing her new, strange, bioHexTech hands over her face in a futile calming motion. She wouldn't LET it happen.
"So, how's that... going?" Vi squinted at the massive wall of numbers and runes and she-didn't-have-a-fucking-clue, as Jayce and Heimmerdinger carved and scribbled and Ekko occasionally REVERSED when one of them made an error. She and him had to talk about THAT later.
"Go better if you stopped nagging..." Tallis muttered.
"Fuck you."
"Do you have anything to contribute to our efforts to escape, or are you just wasting air and time?" Heimmerdinger and Ekko gave each other a familiar, weary look and stepped away. Fuck them, too.
"Well, excuse me for not getting a full education on... REALITY-MATH when my parents were getting executed for demanding better conditions in the mines that probably got your family a lot of your metals, and I had to spend the next few years each day figuring out how my sister and I were gonna eat."
She could see his retort on his face, almost in his mind. 'The same sister that blew up the Council?' But he demonstrated honestly commendable restraint, and didn't say it aloud. He simply stepped away, rubbing at the bridge of his nose.
Vi took a second to look over the wall of drawings and diagrams and calculations. She couldn't make heads or tails of all but the most basic numbers, but -
"No fucking way..."
"What is it?" Ekko asked, turning from TIME-ERASING a section Heimmerdinger was working on.
"Whoever did... THAT," Vi pointed at a frankly basic bit of math, projecting a small Arcane barrier like a glowing pointer dot. "Got it wrong."
The three resident geniuses all looked comically scandalized. As if, stuck in a dimension of pure power and madness and shattered time and twisted magic monsters, the most impossible thing to consider was that one of them had gotten basic arithmetic wrong.
"And if that's as early in the thought process as it looks... I may not know all the other shit, but I HAD to know my numbers, my basics, my fractions... and my decimals..."
Tallis looked, his face growing both more impressed and more angry as he realized she was right. The three of them went to work, redid pretty much the entire wall, but when they stepped back, they all saw something in the new work Vi flatly couldn't.
"Oh, well DONE, Miss Violet!"
Vi SCREAMED as she passed through the hole the device had ripped between realities. Or was it back into just the one actual reality from the unhinged chaos of the raw Arcane? She didn't know. What she DID know was that it felt like three of her on her worst nights in the Pits had suddenly appeared and fused into her. She doubled over, puking onto the fine glass beneath her feet. Ekko and Heimmerdinger didn't fare much better, and Tallis...
Where was-
"Jayce! What are you-" The rest of Heimmerdinger's question was stolen by the howling Arcane chaos and shrieks of monsters on the other side of the portal, that Tallis hadn't come through. He looked... purposeful. And sad. Not in the way she could've, had actually, teased him about. No, this was... a terrible purpose. A dreadfully necessary task before him.
"I HAVE to know. If there's ANY other way, I have to know, and I have to stay to learn."
"JAYCE, NO!"
Ekko scrambled, but Jayce flicked a switch on the device they'd thrown together, and the hole in reality slammed shut. It was probably a REALLY bad sign they'd put together something that could make reality bleed, as Vi realized just what splattered to the floor as the portal closed. But she'd leave the implications of that to the people actually qualified to do something about it. She'd handle what she was qualified for. She hoped she was, anyway.
She started walking towards the elevator at the far end of the room.
"Vi! Where you going?" Ekko called after her.
"To try and make sure the two most important women in my life don't kill each other, and take the cities with them." That gave both geniuses behind her pause.
'When people look up to you, you don't get to be selfish. You say run, they run. You say swim, they dive in. You say light a fire, they show up with oil. But what happens after, that's on you.'
Shame she'd only really understood what Vander'd been saying after he died twice. But at least she finally got it in the end. And he'd only been telling her how it could go WRONG. Maybe she was as dumb as she'd felt with just three of the four smartest people in two cities for company for... she didn't even know how long, for thinking she could make the sort of difference she knew she NEEDED to. But she could feel it as the rough plan took shape in her head: she was gonna prove how RIGHT it could go.
God, but Act 2 was both such a shot in the arm to this chapter, and almost stopped it dead. I knew how Arcane would use Warwick, and how I used him in Chapter 4 and how I roughly planned to use him here would differ, but DAMN if they are not nigh so diametrically opposed, how Arcane used him was SO GOOD, and I wasn't sure how I felt about that for days after Saturday. Then I remembered how I use Warwick here, reminding Vi that her failures and mistakes don't have to define her, showing that her capacity for violence can also bring peace, that he is how Vi starts to become the woman who leads the protest on Progress Bridge. Seeing that he still has faith in her, even if she at first thinks it's misplaced, even as she's KILLING HIM, she doesn't even yet fully realize how much she needs that kind of affirmation...
Act 2 REALLY helped with the Wild Arcane Dimension section. I knew once I decided on the Explosion and the Arms that that was how Vi would survive, but I had no idea what that would really look like tonally, nor how she'd mesh with the Brilliant Boi Squad. Then Jayce pops out of the Arcane Wild Rune, acting like a reverse-mission Terminator to kill a man to save the world, and I had it locked. Jayce and Vi really always struck me as existing at one of two extremes in regards to each other: they either agree exactly on what to do and how to do it, and get along great. But when the slightest bit of difference, of emotional or idealogical conflict arises, they become so fucking acrimonious because the way they see the world is still so fundamentally similar, but the why's of those conflicts stem from such fundamental differences in their characters and circumstances in life, they can only be just NASTY to each other when they aren't in 100% alignment.
So predispose Jayce towards acrimony, cause they need to LEARN what will happen and figure a way BACK to STOP IT; neither thing Vi is much able to help with being still a little crazy, fundamentally undereducated, and kinda crippled until they spend precious time and resources to fix her arms, so he's just really unnecessarily but kinda-understandably MEAN until the very end, while Ekko and Heimmerdinger are perfectly reasonable the whole time. And it all just clicked together in a way I'm really happy with.
I do hope I was able to properly get the vagueness of time and existence across about the Wild Arcane dimension, by being so vague. Cribbing from the school of Lovecraft; if I say less, does that not then make it more effective as imagery and happenings beyond the grasp of the minds of the characters themselves as the reader's own imagination fills in intentional blanks? I hope it does, anyway. Vi doesn't say how much time has passed exactly cause she CAN'T TELL; the HexCore monsters pouring in from possible futures and the now-surroundings don't need to be described beyond the fact that they EXIST and they TERRIFY her...
Vi was ALSO supposed to get the whole group out by just... punching at the border between realities with the new Wild HexTech Arms. Then the more I thought about it, the more I realized that wouldn't work for a NUMBER of reasons, least of which it would be stupid. But I still wanted her to play some part in getting them out, so, turns out even geniuses can make basic errors when they're working on no sleep, chased by magic monster hiveminds, and have the stress of the future of free life riding on their shoulders. Get a trench girl who only knows her basic math, but KNOWS her basic math cause not getting ripped off was how she and Powder survived, and, well...