Chapter Text
“Tell me again, Jayce. Just one more time.”
“Mama-”
“No. You need to have it memorized. This is important.
“My name is… Jayce, of the House Talis. My father is Edmund Talis. Mama, do I really have to know it all?”
The woman pulls a thick cap over the boy’s head. Floppy brown leather lined with warm fleece covers his ears, muffling the sound of her words when she speaks again. “Yes, silly boy. Just in case we get separated.”
The boy looks up with hazel eyes. There is a look in his eyes that only a son could have for his mother. A desire to make her proud. “My name is Jayce of the House Talis. My father is Edmund Talis. I’ve come to claim my birthright as heir to my House.”
And through his stumbling words, his mother thinks- yes. You will make me proud.
The Undercity is a dark place. The only places that true, unfabricated sunlight touches it are the highest points, where the tall spires of ancient buildings climb the caverns of the underground. Piltover is bright. Shiny and white and gold, all hung up in the sky like Heaven when Jayce’s mama takes him up one of the towers of the Undercity. He can see it far off in the distance when she lifts him, and he waves to it, as if greeting a friend.
It’s not so dark now, though, as they find their way to one of the exits. They live at the very outskirts of the Undercity, populated by little more than plague-rats and chem-addicts. It’s a long, dreary trek to the surface if they go through Zaun. So she brings them up the sewer pipes at the base of one deep cavern and begins to climb, her son on her back. Before they enter, though, they see the world lit up white with the beginnings of falling snow.
When they exit at the top, many hours later, the world is white. For as far as the eye could possibly see there is only white, flecks of the powder pouring down from the sky above them. Jayce spins as he stands there, eyes wide and shiny as snow pours down onto him. Ximena scolds him, and tells him to pull his hat back on properly lest he catch a cold.
They walk. For hours and hours, they walk, and the beautiful snow is just that, for a while. Beautiful. It paints the unfamiliar landscape in drifts, warping their surroundings until they’re huge, swollen with snow. Trees already tower above them. Today, though, in the bright white of snow, the world seems all that much bigger.
The snow comes down in waves. It only gets heavier as time goes on, as they slowly make their way through the blizzard. Two Zaunite pilgrims tucking their scarves higher up on wind-bitten cheeks, pulling their hoods up and cinching them tight. They carry on.
And then—
“Mom!” shouts the boy, as the woman falls to the ground. Her twitching fingertips no longer have the strength to cling to his hand. They are stiff where they lie on the ground, ungloved and purple, a stark contrast to the snow falling all around. The boy does not cry- he cannot, futile tears freezing immediately in the sockets of his eyes, stinging as they are. He slumps over the woman’s body as he shakes her. “Someone. Please. Help! Help us!”
His prayer rings out and is drowned almost immediately in the snow and howling wind.
The closest to Piltover that any Undercity child will ever reach are the caves at the edge of Zaun. Where pretty golden light flows down in waves like the water from the aqueducts above, and the spindly silver light that flows off of purple flowers is as bright as any boy’s dream of freedom.
Viktor comes here often. It’s a good place to isolate yourself, when you are weak in a world of weakness. When even in the place where they all suffer, people raise a hand to him. He trudges over the riverbank and scuffs his uneven shoes in the mud, cane dragging little patterns. It’s a little too short for him, causing him to stumble often. Yet still, he goes, with a small metal boat tucked under his shoulder and the light burning his eyes.
Sometimes there are others. Today, a group, and a girl who hovers at the edge of the cavern, high above. Her skin is a delicate brown color, her cheeks plump and her eyes sparkling with mirth when she looks down at him. She tips her head to the side, her hands in the water interrupting the flow, causing some of it to splash down irregularly into the cave below. It’s cleaner water than most of what can be found in Zaun.
But then the girl is called away by her friends, and Viktor is left blinking up into startling sunlight. He hums thoughtfully as he catalogs her face away in his memory, then bends over to place his machine in the water. The little boat shudders when he triggers the mechanism hidden on the side. The cogs twitch, then roll. Viktor watches, eyes widening, as the wheel on the side begins to spin, treading water.
One foot, then another. He shuffles, cane dragging over mud mingling with the dust. Viktor begins to wander after the boat. It picks up speed as he moves, as he takes step after step, one foot emaciated and turned inward while the other attempts to pull its brother along. Step after step. He chases, crutch under his arm as a low sound builds in his throat. A giggle, then a laugh.
He’s running. Chasing the boat, even as pain shocks him, spreading up his leg and into his delicate spine, hunched over the cane in his palm. Step after step, the dreams and sunlight of the sky above beginning to fade as he dives into the cave. As determination feeds the boy, and he runs, watching his success as it flies over the water, a perfect recreation of the boats that live on the clean waters above.
And then he falls with a cry, and the boat disappears.
For a moment Viktor lies there in the dirt. The skin of his knee has torn through the shabby leg of his trousers, already in desperate need of patching. His cheek is smeared with dust. His vision blurs, and for a moment, he wonders if he might’ve hit his head. When he raises a hand, though, and his chest hitches, he feels tears stain his fingers as they fill his eyes and carry over. They trail through the dirt on his cheeks. He scowls, then begins to drag himself up, a hiccup spiraling out of control and turning into a soft sob as it leaves his chest.
He cannot run, though. He can hear the boat as it whirrs on in the darkness, his success determined to run away and become someone else’s. Viktor’s heart clenches as he thinks of what cruelty might befall his precious creation. It had taken him an incredibly long time to create, his mother using what little of her pay she could spare to find him parts. Every day, with a smile on her face and a cough in her lungs, she would tell him — Do good, Viktor. Do good and create.
He thinks of her face as the boat fades, as he’s left barely stumbling towards it, using the wall as a support. More sniffles rise inside of him as he wonders what she’ll say, a sad little smile on her face, when she finds out he’s lost the boat.
And then, out of the darkness and around a corner emerges a boy.
He’s slightly taller than Viktor. Thin, but as are all others in the Undercity. He has the promises of a strong jaw beneath baby fat, and large, round, hazel eyes. His shoes are either far too big, or he has yet to grow into his own two feet. His skin is tan, and Viktor thinks for a moment of the girl he’d seen in the river above. But he’s pale, too, in the sort of way only someone who hasn’t seen the sun in a long time could be.
He seems to notice Viktor now. It’s too late to hide, to try and escape before he can be bullied. Viktor is often assaulted for the smallest of crimes, for being alive and for having a cane and for having a mother, no matter how sickly they both may be. He takes a step back with a frightened little gasp, immediately breaking eye contact with the other boy and steeling himself to hear his boat be smashed on the ground.
“Is this… is this yours?”
He looks up when no such shattering sound comes. Instead it is the hopeful voice of the child, sounding not as if he intends to do any harm but as if he instead genuinely wants to see the toy. Viktor shies away when their eyes meet again. The boy's eyes are too expressive, too wide, holding an earnestness that seems to spill over and overflow no matter how much Viktor tries to catch it, to process that look.
“Mmm.” His voice trembles unsteadily. Different parts of the Undercity have different common tongues, and while he knows the boy’s language, he isn’t yet fluent. “Yes.”
He takes another step forward. Viktor shrinks back, eyes squeezing shut and shoulders tense while anticipating a blow. The other boy shrinks too, at that, a perfect mirror as he seems to recognize the fear in Viktor’s expression. When he looks back, that incredibly eager look has faded, replaced by anxiety that rolls off that expressive little face in waves.
“I- I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I just saw it. I thought it looked cool. The motor is really impressive.”
Viktor doesn’t respond. He doesn’t shy away, either, and this seems to steel the other boy’s resolve. He takes another step forward, a gentle hand caressing the motorwork, spinning it in a little circle before he takes it between his ring finger and thumb and stops it. He’s missing two fingers. The pointer and the middle ones, barren stumps there where they once sat. There’s a scar, making Viktor think he wasn’t born like that.
“I bet some of the Jacana flower juices would stop the squeaking. I know where a big patch is. I could show you.”
There’s a choice to make here. Follow the other boy into the cave, into the unknown darkness beyond in passageways Viktor has never ventured down. Or recede to familiar depths, without his boat, pride and knees skinned.
He takes a slow step forward on shambling feet, one of them dragging behind him. The other boy is thin. Sickly so. In the light it’s easy to see that life has been unkind to him, and Viktor would be surprised if he had parents to return to. He still seems eager, though. An almost frightening kindness on his face as he holds the boat lovingly in broad, damaged hands.
The Jacana flowers are a breed of small, trumpet shaped flowers that grow in tufts in the darkest corners of Zaun. They’re usually shades of purple and pink, and exceedingly rare, save for a few well known spots. Known as flowers often used as offerings to the Gods, they’re usually protected by groups of wandering hermits with the intention of keeping the patches safe. Viktor has never seen them before.
The place that the boy leads him to is full of them. The massive cavern is lit up in a thousand shades of purple and pink, the glowing flowers seeming to stretch out in their presence, to search for them in the dark. Viktor gasps as he looks upon the marvelous sight. He steps further inside, eyes wide. Shimmering purple lights up the gold in his eyes. He spins in a slow, unsteady circle, the wonder of the place seeping into the cold parts of his heart.
When he makes it through one full circle, he turns to see the other boy again. He’s grinning, boat still cradled gently in his arms. He takes several steps closer, standing right beside Viktor, looking up and around the cavern around them.
“Pretty,” Viktor murmurs.
The other boy giggles. “I know, right? I found them a few weeks ago when I got lost in the caves. Here. Take your boat back. I’ll pick some, and we can crush them up and fix the squeaking.”
To his immediate surprise, the boat, which he had previously considered a hostage in the others’ arms, is deposited back into his own hands. Viktor gasps softly when the weight of it returns. He watches, enraptured by both the flowers and the boy, as he rushes off and begins to take a few of the biggest, oldest flowers off the wall.
In a practiced motion, he reaches deep into the bud and pulls apart the petals. From inside, a shimmering purple fluid drenches his hand, and he runs back over to Viktor’s side, gap-toothed grin eager. He motions for Viktor to hold the boat out, and to his own surprise- he does.
He watches the boy massage the goop into the propeller. His brow furrows in concentration, and the propeller ends up a little dirty in the end, considering the boy’s grimy state, but Viktor can’t bring himself to mind. They head back out into the main caverns, where the river still flows down from the city above. Viktor stays at the start of the stream. The other boy moves to the end of the cavern, right before the next turn, and waits.
Viktor cranks the boat’s mechanism into place. It begins to tick, tick, tick, a soft clicking sound as the propeller starts moving. He sets it down into the water and watches as it begins to move, resisting the urge to continue chasing after it.
At the end of the cavern, the boy catches the boat. The entire time it is soundless on the water.
Jayce has a friend.
A friend with no name, no identity outside of friend, a boy in the caverns with a cave and a twisted leg and a soft smile on the rare occasion that it appears. He doesn’t speak much of Jayce’s own language, but he seems to understand it well enough, responding to him in nods and shakes of his head. They meet where the sunlight of Piltover kisses Zaun, and then retreat into the darkness, together. They spend the rest of that first day testing out the boat on the water over and over and discover that the Jacana root is waterproof, and keeps the boat from squeaking the entire time.
The next time he sees his nameless friend, they’ve brought a small length of hair bundled up in twine. He shyly asks to be led back to the cave, and Jayce brings him there with all the eagerness of a stray dog thrown a bone. They spend the next few hours picking flowers and using the shimmering, glowing plant to paint designs onto the ship. Swirls and stripes and little smiling faces, even managing to tug a laugh out of the boy’s little chest when Jayce draws a cat on one side.
A few more days pass without sight of his friend. Jayce is an orphan. Orphans in Zaun are treated the way that animals are in Piltover. Some are fed and cared for, shared by the community. Some are taunted, rocks and sticks thrown at them rather than food. Jayce likes to think he’s a mixture of both. He has his own little hideout in one of the abandoned mining towns deep in the Undercity, but he ventures out often for food. Some people take pity on the little boy, giving him what they can spare. That’s a good day. The alternative… he has more than enough bruises and bumps to account for those days.
But still, he visits the cave system as often as he can, hoping to see his nameless company again. It doesn’t happen until a few days later. This time, he shows up not with his boat, but with a small leather knapsack. Jayce peers out of the edge of the cavern and watches as the boy smiles, humming an unfamiliar tune as he pulls a few items out of the sack.
“What's that?”
He startles, song turned into a jarring little yelp. Jayce flinches and takes a few steps back, wringing his hands. “I’m sorry, I- I didn’t mean to scare you, I just- just haven’t seen you in a few days, and- and-”
The boy doesn’t appear to be mad, though. He’s giggling quietly, setting his cane down on the ground and patting the dry space beside him. “Sit. It’s food.”
At the thought of food, Jayce perks up, anxiety dissipating. He all but trips over his own feet in his haste to join the boy, scrambling for a place beside him as if the entire cave itself might disappear if he isn’t fast enough. The other boy giggles again, then pulls out a loaf of bread and a small cloth, stained and dirty but full of something.
Jayce can feel saliva filling his mouth at the thought of something to eat. He hasn’t had anything other than the scraps of other people’s dinner in a while now. Whenever he’s given anything else, it’s usually taken by children big enough to bully it out of his hands. Now though, he’s patient. The other boy splits the loaf into two proportionate pieces, and then hands it to him.
He waits. Jayce watches as the boy opens the small white napkin and procures a bit of cheese. It crumbles as he starts to pick it apart. He sets it down on top of Jayce’s share of the bread, and then sets the rest of it down on his own. With his thumb, he smushes the cheese into the bread and spreads it around, avoiding getting any under his fingernail.
“Try it. It’s good together.”
Jayce eyeballs the bread and the cheese, then mimics the movement, using his own dusty fingertips to smear it in. He isn’t picky about cleanliness. When he raises the bread to his mouth and gets a mere whiff of the fragrant cheese, he almost drools. And when it finally passes his lips, the cheese and bread touching his tongue—
He moans, loud and gratuitous as he kicks his heels up in excitement. The other boy begins to giggle, clearly pleased by Jayce’s reaction. “Good?”
“Oh, so good!” He responds, before taking another bite, then another. It feels like a feast to a boy who has never had anything for himself, let alone an entire half of a loaf of bread. Too quickly, it’s cleaned up and out of his hands, all that’s left being crumbs in the dust below them.
“My name is Jayce.” He beams, holding his hand out to be shaken. The other boy looks confused for a moment, as if he doesn’t understand what it is that is being said. Then, tentatively, he holds his hand out too, and wraps it around Jayce’s own.
“Viktor.”
Life is a little warmer in the cold of the underground now that he has a friend. Jayce has never had a friend before. Not since his mother, who he can barely remember, barely think about without a throbbing behind his eyes that makes the memories painful in many different ways. Viktor brings him food, sometimes. Little bits of bread or cheese or even some foreign fruit, once. There’s an understanding within them, though, that Jayce is one too many mouths to feed. Neither of them much like it. It’s clear that Viktor would love to bring Jayce home, to take his friend back to where it is warm and safe. But instead they simply continue to meet as they can, seeing one another as much as possible.
When the light hits a forty-five degree perpendicular angle from the wall. When the wind starts smelling like teacakes from the bakery high above the Undercity. When the air starts feeling cooler at the end of the day. Ephemeral descriptions of time, giving them large swaths of existence to occupy in that cave, waiting for each other. It’s why they don’t worry when they’re late, usually. Lateness and earliness don’t exist when they have no concrete metric for time other than the rotation of the sun and the moon and all else.
But one day the rule is - as soon as the sun hits the leftmost edge of the creek, they’ll meet. It hits the left. It hits the middle. And eventually, it hits the right. Jayce has never seen his friend outside of the caves. He has a mom and a home, and Jayce lives in quiet slums and avoids people as best he can. The two don’t exactly have a common ground, outside of being skinny little loners together. But even so, he’s never had a friend before. He’d be hard pressed to be ok with losing this one.
So he leaves. Stops tracing patterns in the mud with his fingertips, stops chewing on his lips, picks himself up off the ground and chews on his thumb instead. He wanders along the edge of the river with a hand running over the wall beside him, letting out childish little woosh noises every time a particularly large bump has his hand leaping over the wall. He stumbles back out of the cave system to no sign of his friend.
The worry hasn’t come in yet. Viktor is probably just late. Really late. That’s no problem, though. Jayce isn’t dependent on his friend, nor his food, nor his company, nor his kindness. He’s dependent on nobody. Has been in the years since his mom died, since he appeared on the opposite end of Zaun’s sprawling underground to Jacana flowers weeping over his frigid form.
But anxiety creeps in eventually, when he gets further and further out of familiar places. When there still is no sign of his friend in the ever-deepening darkness of Zaun, as sunlight and Jacana blossom light give way to humming neon and crackling fires. His first sign of somewhere his friend might’ve gone is his cane. It’s discarded on the ground outside an unfamiliar crag-slum, deep in the earth where Viktor wouldn’t have been able to climb into on his own. Jayce’s heart skips a beat in his fear.
He’s not particularly light-footed, but he is agile and athletic, especially for someone of his size and weight. Jayce leaps down and catches one of the pipes jutting out of the walls of the crag, before he swings and drops, oversized boots landing heavily on a large dumpster. There are no houses here. Tents, yes, and shacks, molding and rotted inside and out. Occasionally he hears voices from the alleyways, but Jayce is small enough that hiding in the darkness isn’t hard. It isn’t until he hears quiet, barely muffled crying does he finally find his friend.
“Viktor,” he says, hardly a breath louder than a whisper as he approaches. His friend is tucked into a tiny ball at the very edge of the cavern. He’s shaking, his floppy brown hair concealing his face where it’s tucked between his knees. Not for long, though. His head jerks up, and he looks at Jayce with a frightened expression, eyes gigantic in his head.
“Jayce. Shh!” Abruptly he looks around him in the empty space, as if anticipating something coming running at him. He beckons for Jayce to get closer, and he does. “I… I fell. And I- got stuck. Could not get out again, and asked for help, b- but—”
It’s Jayce’s turn to shush him now, a more soothing thing than the sharp one Viktor had employed on him before. “It’s ok. I’ll get you out now. Just- stay calm, ok? I found you. I found you now.”
Loading Viktor onto Jayce’s back is a bit of a process. The two of them are a horrible conglomeration of spindly limbs and thin skin, but eventually, Viktor has his arms wound around Jayce’s chest, and Jayce has his hand under his knees in a messy piggy-back carry. Slowly, they creep back through the cavern towards one of the sloping edges that will be least arduous to climb. They’ve got to be quiet, though. Both of them know that the deepest parts of Zaun usually hold what the rest of Zaun wants to hide.
Jayce is heavy-footed at the best of times. Each step he takes here feels like it echoes so much more, though, now that he’s got someone to protect. Viktor’s tiny hands cling to the front of his dusty tunic. Jayce’s shaking arms hitch him a little higher.
And then a hand grips the back of Viktor’s shirt and the two boys fall like dominoes. Jayce squawks, and Viktor shrieks, a sound that immediately has Jayce scrambling to find him. The smaller boy is curled in on his side, breathing shallow as he clutches, near violently, at his leg.
“Viktor!” A hand grabs at Jayce’s leg. He falls to the ground with an umph . His hands claw at the dust beneath him as other hands claw at his legs. Someone gets a hand around his waistband, yanking at the thin belt wrapped around his hips. He shrieks as they undo it, yanking it away from his trousers along with the few possessions he has hanging off of it. “No, no! Give that- give it back!”
He hears his name, a hoarse scream from a few feet away. There are bodies climbing over his friend. Two, three- no, four pairs of hands yanking his rudimentary brace away from his body. Cloaked figures writhe and squirm as Viktor screams in terror, and Jayce begins to kick, throwing himself about as much as he can.
He manages to nail one of the figures in the face. They howl, and he squirms away, his own belongings, the last of his things, going forgotten. Jayce scrambles to his feet, panting as he throws himself down on top of the pile of bodies consuming his friend. He reaches into the fray and manages to grab a fistful of Viktor’s tunic, then yanks.
It isn’t enough. A hand wraps wholly around his wrist and squeezes so hard that he can feel the fragile bone snap. Jayce howls, especially when they don’t let go. So he leans down, opens his mouth, and wraps his crooked, gap-toothed smile around their arm.
Your smile is so perfect, my precious boy, she used to say. She’d cradle his cheek, and tell him the little gap between his two front teeth was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen. Blood sprays as he tears through flesh and muscle with his mouth. A hand fists into his shirt, but the momentum of grabbing Viktor is already enough, and the two of them go tumbling free from the pile with a few panicked shouts.
“Ja- Jayce—” Viktor is panting, his face smeared with blood and dust. His skinny little chest rises and falls at a painful speed, as Jayce grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls him up to his feet. “Jayce- there- there are more.”
When he turns to look, there is a blackened crowd of shrouded figures approaching them. They weave back and forth, serpentine movements as heads cock and dark, blown-out eyes face the two boys. Jayce whimpers. Swallows. Moves.
He throws Viktor to the sound and only allows himself a moment of regret when the boy cries out in pain. He needs to be fast, though. He doesn’t have a moment to spare. Jayce runs forward towards the crowd, and then at the last moment dives down, uninjured arm catching on the dusty ground. He skids several feet, and in their haste not to be knocked over, the group dissipates. Once they’ve realized he’s going to fight, some of them leave. The rest, though, are ravenous, uncaring of who they hurt in their quest to find something of worth on the two boys.
Jayce is not a fighter. Jayce hardly weighs forty pounds soaking wet, as he flings himself at the crowd. But Jayce has a friend to protect, for the first time in his entire meager life, and protect Viktor he does. He grabs onto a flailing arm and bites down, relishing in the sound of a shriek. He kicks wildly and without any refinement, oversized boots thumping against flesh. His arms flail, and he manages to scratch bloody gouges into skin, to tear at filthy cloaks, to rip at hair with his nails.
Something grabs his broken wrist and pins it to his chest. He shrieks and kicks at them, but the hooded figure is joined by a dozen others. Jayce uses his size to his advantage and rolls to the side, under a writhing mass of emaciated bodies. Panic and pain pound through his chest in equal measure. He hears a frightened scream and looks up to see Viktor being accosted, too. Someone is yanking his tiny little bag away from him. His face is contorted with pain. He’s fighting, too. Kicking out with both legs, ignoring his own disability in an attempt to escape.
Jayce’s vision is cut off far too quickly. A hand winds itself around his dark, shaggy hair and slams him face-first into the dirt. It is too dark in the Undercity for stars, and yet they erupt across his vision now, blood smearing from a gash on his forehead. Again. His little body is thrown into the dirt, crumpled face dashed against the rocks. He can hear voices shouting. His own. Viktor’s. Then, in the distance, someone new. It’s too late. They’re dragging him up again, and his lips are bleeding where they’ve been broken by his teeth, and they’re going to actually cave in his skull—
But then he’s just dropped, a limp little sandbag of skin and bones as he falls to the ground. Jayce groans and sniffles.
“Well. What have we got here, eh? A couple of fighters, I reckon.”
He turns his cheek to the side, shaking hands trying to lift him up. He succeeds for a moment, and catches a glimpse of two faces in the light of a lantern. One big, one small, one smiling, one not. Jayce whines, then coughs, spitting up… a tooth. He reaches forward towards the towering man’s ankle. Grabs a fistful of his trousers, as if that will stop him from hurting Viktor.
“What is it Felicia said you had a bad habit of?” The others’ voice is different. Colder. Jayce drags himself closer. To his surprise, though, no blows come. His world spins in watery circles. Viktor is in the big one’s arms. He’s talking to Jayce. He can’t quite make the words out, though. “Picking up strays?”
The Last Drop isn’t exactly a kid-friendly establishment. But it’s hard to kick kids out, too, when they hide so easily in the nooks and crannies of the place, and when the owner seems to have such a fondness for them. It isn’t rare to see Vander sliding a glass of water to someone well under four feet tall, or handing out little bundles of food to desperate hands that would otherwise be occupied in his patron’s pockets.
That’s why Viktor goes there. That, and one other reason. Not only is it a relatively safe place in the Lanes, but Viktor has a talent. Something he has cultivated all himself, learned through books and through lived experience alike. He is amazing at card games.
Quick-witted and sharp-tongued, he can raise the stakes so high that you don’t even notice he’s winning until he’s beaten you. He excels in high-stress environments, contrary to what his appearance might make people think. He’s well versed in the art of allowing people to underestimate him. It’s why almost every regular at the Last Drop knows to steer clear of him every time he enters.
It’s why he knows Vander, at least vaguely. Because Viktor is good, which most people who don’t frequent the Last Drop assume means he is a cheat. There have been many times people have almost started bar fights over him, his skinny little self scooping up a handful of coins and simply trying to escape alive while others unsheath their knives. Vander is against bar brawls at the best of times. Bar brawls over kids playing good, honest card games? Well- that, he has even more of an issue with.
Vander keeps telling him to quit with it. To go home to his family and quit picking fights. But Viktor just shakes his head, glares, and holds out his palm. Vander always hands over the coins anyways.
So he knows Vander, to some extent. Knows him as the man that runs the Last Drop, and knows him as the man who has, on many occasions, kept Viktor from getting his spine turned inside out. So, when he sees Vander approaching Jayce and him in that awful place, it isn’t fear that fills him, but relief.
Jayce passes out not long after Vander hauls both of their skinny bodies up into his arms. They’re dwarfed by him. He could easily hold them both in one arm, tucked up against his warm, broad chest. Viktor clings to his chest with wide, sightless eyes full of fear. Beside him stands another man. He doesn’t know that one’s name, only his face. Skinny and tall, though not as tall as Vander. They never seem to be too far apart.
And sometime during the journey, trusting that they will keep them safe, Viktor falls asleep.
When he wakes back up, he hears music. Soft, entrancing sounds, dancing in the air above him, filtering in through an open door. He is warm. Cradled by something softer than he’s felt in his entire life, and warm, every bone in his body gently wrapped up in tongues of heat. His bleary eyes blink open, and he yawns as vision returns to him, albeit slowly.
Viktor finds himself in a windowless room, a fireplace across from him the only illumination save for the light flooding in from the crack in the door. He’s on a very large bed. The ceiling above him is high, and there’s a large light fixture hung from it that has several burnt out candles strung to it. It is not a place of wealth. But it is not a place that looks entirely derelict, either. It’s nice, even. Warm and cozy. And, when Viktor turns his head to the side, he sees Jayce.
His face is all swollen up and bandaged. His eye is a big black mess, and it looks like some of his hair has been torn out of the back of his head. Viktor doesn’t even try to quell the worried little sound that comes from him. He squirms closer, hesitating only when pain fills his back, his leg. But still, when it begins to fade enough for him to move again, he does, and cups Jayce’s swollen cheek in a trembling hand.
And slowly, the other boy begins to stir. With a groan that sounds anything but happy, and a twitch in his bandaged jaw, he moves, head tilting forward into Viktor’s palm. Slowly, his less swollen eye opens, and their eyes meet.
“Hi.”
Jayce moans petulantly and leans closer to Viktor’s hand, closing his eyes. He shakes his head, a little nuh-uh- uttered through swollen lips when Viktor giggles. “Mh-hmm. Yeah,” he answers to that quiet denial. “Jayce.”
“...Viktor.”
“You’re alive.”
Another little whine. Jayce shakes his head, then winces when his bandages catch on Viktor’s hand. From beneath the blanket, a hand snakes out, and wraps tightly around Viktor’s back. He squirms, putting up a fake fight, before he settles into the touch, appreciating the warmth of Jayce’s palm against his aching spine.
“...Barely,” croaks out his friend’s voice. Viktor can’t help but giggle, at that. “V… Where?”
Viktor shuffles in closer. “Safe. With… Safe,” he offers, when all other explanations fail him.
The shaft of light that sweeps across their faces is gentle and warm. It unfolds when the door swings open, and a man enters. The thin one, whose name Viktor has never learned, with dark hair and dark eyes. He shies away, and Jayce’s fingers twist into a handful of Viktor’s tunic.
“The boy was right. You’re… safe here,” he says, in a languid, slippery sort of voice. The kind of voice that wins card games, that slithers its way out of bar fights. Viktor peaks up from his spot at Jayce’s side. The man is smiling.
He sits, without asking, at the edge of the bed. The great hunk of furniture does not appear to fit him. He’s too small, leaving Viktor to wonder who, instead, must sleep here. “You have questions.” A statement, not a question of his own.
“Who…?”
“My name is Silco,” says the man in answer to Viktor’s utterance. He tilts his head to the side, lips twitching. He doesn’t look kind. He doesn’t look cruel, either, which is hard to come by in the Undercity. “Me and my… Associate, found you in the bottom of a well-trodden drug den. I don’t suppose I need to illustrate why that was a very unfortunate place for two Undercity slum-rats to be?”
He doesn’t speak cruelly, even though his words don’t sound particularly kind. He speaks as if he knows how it feels- to be a slum rat, rejected by all. And Viktor may have a mother, but he resonates with the words regardless. Can feel Jayce lift his head to listen, too.
“Ah. There he is. The boy of the hour. Was beginning to think you were hiding a corpse down there, friend.”
Jayce hides his face away the moment he’s addressed. Silco… laughs. A quiet, kind sound that suggests he is both poking fun at Jayce and trying to be gentle, too. “Come out, boy. It does you no good to hide away from an ally. Thieves and bastards, all of us in this room. Orphans alike.”
Jayce slowly untucks himself from Viktor’s arms. Viktor allows him, and shuffles up on the pillow behind his back, into a seated position. “M’ not an orphan,” he says sullenly.
“Oh? Could’ve fooled me,” says Silco, fingertips drumming over the blanket beneath him. “And you, boy? Have a family? Or a name?”
For a moment Viktor assumes his friend is going to be just as silent and sullen as before. Before Viktor can attempt to coax him out of his shell, though, he pipes up. “Jayce. And… no. No family.”
His words are slightly slurred. The culprit appears to be his red, swollen lip, protruding awkwardly out from the tiny boy’s jaw. Silco tilts his head as he considers the sight of the two of them. He looks a bit like a cat sizing up its prey, though Viktor doesn’t find himself feeling particularly hunted.
“But you, boy? You have a family?”
There is a part of Viktor that wants to say yes, and include Jayce in the lineup. Wants to say that Jayce is his- in some way that goes beyond brotherhood, goes beyond family, goes beyond any normal bond. He hasn’t got the words to say it.
“My… My mom. She’s probably looking for me.”
“Mh… Yes. She probably is.” Silco’s gaze flicks towards the door, where another figure lingers. Vander- the barkeep. Jayce’s eyes widen in fear. It settles when Viktor places a hand on his trembling shoulder, and shakes his head. Silco nods to Vander. “And your name, boy? We’ll find your mother.”
“Viktor,” he replies after a moment of hesitation. Another nod, and the hulking shadow at the door disappears. “Where… Do you have my cane?”
A moment passes, in which the dark light makes it hard to gauge Silco’s reaction. Then sound reaches Viktor’s ears, and he realizes- the man is chuckling. “That thing is as much a cane as I am a Yordle, boy. But yes. I do, indeed, have it.”
He reaches down onto the ground and procures the object in question. Viktor sees it in the dim light, and sees- alterations. He snatches it out of Silco’s hands. “What did you—” Any protests die in his throat when he takes in the sight of it.
Jayce is roused by the excitement. He runs a reverent hand over the shaft of the cane, now lengthened by several inches. “I fixed it, child. It was too short. If you’d continued to use it you could’ve done considerable damage to your spine.” Silco’s voice is sharp, reprimanding. His presence demands respect, but he doesn’t beg for it. He uncrosses his legs and stands, walking over to the doorway. When he returns the door opens up a little more, and illuminates the prize cupped in his hands. Two bowls of soup, wafting steam.
“Eat.” He offers the bowls to the boys. Each takes one with cautious little looks. Jayce holds his and glares into it as if it’s going to start singing. Viktor, who knows that Vander and Silco know each other and are less than likely to try to poison them, hardly hesitates.
“You should eat,” he murmurs when Jayce’s hesitation continues. “We don’t know when we’ll get to eat like this again.”
As if to punctuate the sentence, Jayce’s stomach grumbles. He stares stoically down at the bowl, but then breaks when he watches Viktor take a slow sip. He brings the bowl to his lips, lets it slither down onto his tongue, and then-
“Slowly, boy, you’re going to hurt yourself,” says Silco. Jayce goes slower specifically so that he can look up and glare at the man.
Both of them are well aware that eating so vivacously after long periods of starvation can be dangerous. Jayce and Viktor both have lost enough meals while falling victim to eating too much. But it’s clear the other boy is ravenous right now, and so Viktor just rolls his eyes and allows his friend to gorge himself.
He does, in the end, keep the food down. Viktor watches him moan and groan for a bit, hunched over in the bed, but both of them survive. And later, when Silco has gone and their bellies are so full it aches, they talk.
“That was… stupid,” Viktor tells him. They’re lying down again. The bed has been established as Vander’s, which is why it’s so big, but it’s more than enough for the two of them and their tiny bodies. Jayce has a leg hitched over Viktor’s waist. Viktor has an arm slung over his back. Their tiny foreheads are pressed together. He jabs his thumb into Jayce side as if to admonish him. “You could’ve died.”
“Vik- Tor!” Jayce whines, squirming in an attempt to escape the fingers prodding at his side. But then they both giggle, settling into their positions again. Amber eyes meet hazel. They watch one another, unspoken understandings being shared. “I’m glad I did it,” he admits, in a hushed voice. “I… don’t regret it. I just wish I could’ve protected you better.”
In a world where their futures are never promised, Jayce has the firmest of beliefs in Viktor. Viktor, holding all of the potential in the world in his wonderful, intelligent mind. If only he was given the tools he needed to grow, he could truly thrive - and Jayce recognizes that, seeks to prove that. Viktor knows it. Knows it when he sees that earnest look in his friend’s eye, demanding that he survive against all odds.
“Learn how to punch with your hands. Not your face.”
This time it’s Jayce’s turn to give Viktor a swift jab to the side. The boys devolve into giggles. And for a while, the world is quiet.