Chapter Text
Viktor has never asked for pity from the people of the upper city, but he remembers the moment he began learning to accept it.
It's his first day living in Piltover, working through the reams of paperwork that will give him formal residence privileges at the academy. The bursar's clerk watches him with open curiosity, and when he hands the forms back she gives him a smile that's oddly wide, as though she's greeting a child.
“Is that all of them?”
Viktor nods wordlessly. The academy accepts Zaunite students at the guidance of a ranking scholar, and he still has trouble believing that there hasn't been a mistake – he's had nightmares where he shows up and learns there's some other Viktor from the undercity who Professor Heimerdinger meant to recommend admitting instead. Better not to say anything that might expose how lost he feels.
“You've got excellent penmanship, you know.”
Viktor looks at the woman and wonders if this is some kind of test. He's got atrocious handwriting – life feels too short to waste on tracing pretty letters when it's the ideas they form that matter.
“Thank you, ma'am.”
He waits for her to give him the receipts for his dormitory and his stipend. Instead she looks at his scrawl again and up at him.
“It must have been awfully hard to learn. They don't exactly value brains down there.”
“I – I don't know.”
The clerk thumbs through the papers and pulls a stamp from a side drawer. She doesn't seem to pick up the confusion in Viktor's voice.
“Anyway, I'm sure you'll love it here. Glad some of you would rather read books than shoot chems.”
She hands his copies back, and Viktor is officially a student. The whole thing is over so quickly that he wonders afterward if he misunderstood – maybe he didn't start his life at the city's most prestigious academy being praised for knowing how to read and write. Later he'll think back and simply figure it could have been much worse.
Viktor is the only student in his cohort or his year who's actually from Zaun, but everyone he meets seems like a self-appointed expert in undercity culture. By the time classes start, he'll have been informed a dozen times how happy he must have been to leave and how lucky he was to get out before being enslaved by a chembaron or carved up by a street gang.
And Viktor can't say all of it is wrong, exactly. He can't truthfully say there weren't streets he'd avoid after dark or streets he'd avoid in broad daylight or days he'd stay inside without food because he'd rather not be reminded how vulnerable he was. That he hadn't come home relieved of his purse and any research equipment that might sell at pawnshops. That he hadn't been left bruised and bleeding in an alley because it amused a few teenagers to beat someone who couldn't fight back – forced to ask a stranger for help when he drifted back from unconsciousness, cane snapped beyond repair.
Viktor just wishes they could understand that Zaun holds more than that. The undercity is a kind of great and mysterious machine. Full of bits, yes, that could grind him up and swallow his remains. But also pieces he could navigate as deftly as the inner workings of a well-oiled pocketwatch. Or endless crevices promising fresh secrets: a pocket of sandy beach as gleaming as any overcity marble, an unmarked curiosity shop selling remarkable trinkets from some unsung master of mechanics.
There are few such delightful discoveries in Piltover. The City of Progress likes to catalog and trumpet its achievements before they've even left the drawing board. Every shop is ranked in some visitor's guide or trade magazine he can't afford. Every classmate has a line of accolades in the Who's Who of Guilds and Patronage, which he also can't afford, but which he thumbs through at an awkward orientation cocktail party.
So when someone graciously reminds Viktor how hard he must have had it living underneath them, Viktor learns to take it with a smile. He looks down at his newly polished boots and mumbles something about Heimerdinger's university outreach and Piltover's amazing opportunities. If they won't get off the topic then he lies earnestly about how he knows so many young Zaunite scholars-in-waiting would love the chance to come upcity like him. Because if he weren't such a loner he would probably have met some, and maybe one of them would be articulate enough to put his thinking into words.
Piltover is a machine just as much as Zaun is – but it's one where the piece Viktor is will never fit.