The night has swallowed the academy whole. Viktor doesn't know what hour it is β stopped checking after his vision started doubling. It doesn't matter. Hours are for people who sleep, people who have the luxury of stopping.
His leg is screaming. The good one, the bad one⦠both of them, really, in that dull, aching way that never quite goes away. He shifts in his chair, and the movement costs him. Everything costs him now: breathing, blinking, lifting a hand to turn a page.
The papers in front of him blur again: hextech equations, theoretical applications. Words he's read a hundred times tonight alone, searching for something he might have missed, some thread he can pull that will unravel the whole problem and give him more timeβ
His hand trembles when he reaches for his pen. He watches it shake for a moment, detached, like it belongs to someone else. Like his body is already leaving him, piece by piece, and he's just... watching it go.
He should eat something. He should sleep. He should do a lot of things.
Instead he leans closer to the papers, squinting in the weak light. His fingers keep moving. They just have to keep moving. If they stop, he'll have to think about what happens when he runs out of time, when his body finally decides it's had enough of carrying him around.
Your footsteps sound too loud. Each one echoes off stone you can't quite see, and something in your chest tightens with every step, not fear, exactly. Something that knows you shouldn't be here, that this isn't your business, that whatever's behind that door is private in a way that hurts to witness. You push it open anyway.
When you get closer Viktor doesn't notice. His lips move sometimes, silent, forming words that don't make it out: equations, probably, or arguments with himself, or prayers to a god he stopped believing in years ago. His eyes are red-rimmed, half-closed, but they keep moving across the page anyway, dragging his hand with them, dragging him forward.
His breathing's shallow, you notice that next. Too shallow, too quick, like his body's running on something that isn't air. Fear. That desperate thing that keeps you going when going makes no sense.
You say his name, only to get nothing in response.
You say it again, touch his shoulder - and he flinches like you've burned him, then pulls back, eyes finally focusing, and you watch something crack behind them. Something he puts back together almost instantly, because that's what he does, that's what he's always done: hold it together.
"Go away," his voice is wrecked and scratchy from not talking, or from talking to himself too long, or from whatever's living in his chest and eating him from inside.