Chapter Text
They are so close to the dream. And the tension in the upper city has become as palpable as the heavy air Viktor left behind.
The name Zaun tightens voices now. The checkpoints are stricter and the tolls higher and the streets between more dangerous. Viktor's health alone might have prevented him from visiting; all the rest makes it too arduous to consider.
It is not odd, Viktor knows, that he thinks of it more these days. It's human psychology: missing something he barely wanted until it was gone. He shouldn't indulge it. But when he makes the short walk between lab and home, he finds himself leaving the path without ever really deciding to – ending up every time at the cliffs overlooking the undercity. In daytime when he can see the battered buildings cloaked in gray. At night when it is a bouquet of winking lights nestled beneath Piltover's streets.
This time is night: later than Viktor intended, and if he had any clean clothes left at the laboratory, he'd be sleeping there like Jayce is. He walks slowly to the cliffs, shorter of breath than usual, mind still racing with the loose pieces of research he has to put together before Progress Day. He is no good for work tonight, but as usual, he is unsure if he will sleep.
As he reaches the cliff fencing, Viktor hears footsteps. He's too tired to work up the fear he should probably feel at a robber looking for an easy target, a watchman looking for an outsider. He steadies his crutch and turns with a sigh.
“If you're here to take my money – ” Then he recognizes Jayce's white suit and stops. “Jayce, you're... following me?”
Jayce's shoulders contract in something like embarrassment. “I was going to get you something to eat. And then I... I know. I shouldn't have. I just worried, it's so late – ”
Viktor shakes his head. He wants to be irritated, but he's grateful to have someone here to distract him.
“It's all right,” he says. “Stay here with me. If you want.”
Jayce nods. He approaches the wrought-iron fence and puts a hand to it, looking to the lights.
“It's beautiful.”
“It shouldn't be. It's a mess – the streets, the air, the food. None of it worth missing.”
Jayce shrugs. “It was home.”
“Not for a long time.”
He doesn't really realize the truth of that until he says it. If he went back tomorrow he wouldn't know Zaun's streets by heart. He wouldn't understand how far to haggle prices. They'd recognize upper-city mannerisms he doesn't know he's acquired. The air would feel too harsh in his lungs.
Viktor has never belonged above. At some point over the years, he stopped belonging below.
Still he lingers at the lights, trying to recognize the patterns of buildings and intersections around them.
“We'll show Heimerdinger the prototypes,” Jayce says. “We can introduce them in the undercity. We can go together.” He takes Viktor's hand and squeezes it. “That's why we're doing this. To make it better.”
Viktor tries to smile and can't quite manage it. “Sometimes... sometimes I don't know if it will make a difference. Sometimes I think we've already waited too long. That the damage is... irreversible.”
Even from his lab, Viktor knows Zaun is ready to explode. What will anyone care for a more efficient mining glove or metal cutter, when bosses and chembarons will take every coin and hour it saves? It's like pulling a drowning man an inch closer to the surface.
Jayce stands silently beside him for a long time. Finally he takes Viktor's hand and tells him that he's getting cold. They go to Viktor's apartment together and Viktor lies beside Jayce for hours, waiting for sleep that comes far too late.
It's broad daylight when Viktor awakes, and he's alone in bed. As he stumbles through the process of dressing, he curses Jayce for leaving without him. Every hour he's unconscious is one he'll never get back, even if he can't deny how much better he feels, like a layer of something viscous has been stripped off his mind. He can't remember the last time he was outside like this at noon – the hour of students taking cigarette breaks and research assistants eating quietly on streetside benches.
“Darling, you can't let me oversleep like that,” he calls as he opens the lab door. “We have too much to do... ”
Jayce gets up far too quickly and intercepts him.
“We're fine. I came in early and went over the calculations from last night.” His posture is tense, like he's poised for something. “Actually, I thought we could go for a walk.”
“A walk.”
“Just for a little. You probably still haven't eaten.”
“I'll eat later,” Viktor says, trying unsuccessfully to remember his last meal. “If we're going to finish this – ”
Jayce sighs. “Okay. Fine. Look. I got us lunch from the undercity. And it's heatpacked for now, but I don't know how long – ”
“You... what?”
“I pulled a few strings with a courier and picked it up on the bridge.” His posture shrinks a little. “I – sorry, I should have asked if – ”
Viktor cuts him off with a kiss. The mention of food drives home that he really is starving – lightheaded with it. “No. It... it sounds wonderful.”
“You know, it was supposed to be a surprise,” Jayce mutters as he buttons his blazer.
“It was.”
Neither of them suggests the cliffs, but Viktor knows that's where they'll end up. Jayce spreads a blanket on the trimmed grass and disassembles a stack of grease-stained boxes. Viktor watches them reveal their contents one after another.
“A courier picked these?”
“Oh. Um... I asked Sky about it. Very early. Sort of owe her now.”
All the things Viktor would buy when he was lucky enough to have some money for the market stalls and stare at longingly when he wasn't. He's never seen so many of them in one place.
Viktor hesitates as he picks up a piece of fried shrike leg. He hasn't eaten it in years. Maybe he's lost his taste for it. Maybe it was never as good as he remembered.
Then he takes a bite. At the remove of years after countless Piltover meals he can tell it's not precisely good, can taste the gaminess of the cheap meat through its salt and spice. But the flavor fits some long-neglected part of his mind like a key. He can't stop until it's gone.
Jayce follows Viktor's lead through the courses, and to his credit he gets through most of them, although Viktor notices the grayfish go back into its box.
“I told you it was a mess,” he tells Jayce. He can't help smiling as he says it.
“I like it! But...” Jayce glances at the foil packet Viktor's been saving for last. “I'm not even sure what that is.”
“That is the best thing on this blanket. Sluicemeat.”
“That's... I mean, sorry, but that doesn't make it sound more appealing.”
“It's a sweet. They sell it only near the factories. First thing in the morning.”
Jayce eyes the gray, mottled rolls with their seared crusts. “Do I want to know why?”
Viktor gets a pang of the defensiveness he thought he'd long since left behind in Piltover. All these years of letting actual insults to Zaun roll off him, and a piece of street food is the thing he's about to fight for.
“Because it's made from a kind of... artificially designed fungal body. It includes a controlled mutation that cleans the chemicals from factory runoff water and breaks it into sucrose." He pauses to catch his breath. Jayce is staring, silent. "Near the end of their life the fruiting bodies heavily secrete sugar, and when workers drain the wastewater tanks they collect sheets of them and pass them outside the gates. At the end of the night shift only. When the bosses aren't there to see.”
He picks up one of the rolls, charred sweetness sticking to his fingers. Jayce does the same, a little more hesitantly.
“I used to get up before sunrise to go wait for them, you know. And hope there were enough, because I wasn't going to win a fight to get one.”
It strikes him that he's never spent this much time staring at one of them, maybe never seen one in full daylight. The undercity wasn't a place to savor pleasures, only swallow them whole before someone snatched them away.
On the cliff, he admires the deft folds of the roll and the clean lines from the grill. He bites off an edge and feels the crisp fungus give way to the roasted groundnuts inside it. Jayce does the same. And when Jayce devours the rest in an instant, Viktor tells himself how silly it is to feel a rush of relief and satisfaction. That doesn't stop him from sliding over to Jayce and putting an arm around him, staring out over the midday smog.
“What're you thinking?” Jayce asks.
“It's funny. Sometimes even I forget that we from the undercity have ever created anything of value. And the unexpected uses that we find for it.”
Jayce rests his face against Viktor's hair. “Do you ever wish you hadn't left?”
A reflexive no jumps into his mind and then a defiant yes. Neither makes it past his lips.
“I don't know. I'm sure sometimes I have. Sometimes I can't imagine why I ever would.”
“And what you think right now is...”
“Jayce, you are not subtle when you fish for compliments.” He leans into Jayce's touch and closes his eyes. “But you deserve them for this. And the question... no. I would never give up a world where we were together. I would never have wanted to live without our dream.”
The sun reaches Viktor's eyes through closed lids. Soon he'll give it up again for the dim lamps of the lab and the headache of triple-checking equations and calibrating gears. His body was not made for this much light.
Right now, though, he could get used to it.