Chapter Text
Silco had to stop thinking about him.
Viktor.
He had so much else to think about. The tower he was building himself, stone by stone, ascending as he went. Gutting and renovating The Last Drop. Finding those who were still loyal to Vander and buying them or burying them. (A surprising number took the latter option- so many had fallen fool to Vander’s ignorant concepts of peace and prosperity, just a farce for giving up and going meekly into the dark to die. Silco didn’t hate them. He’d done the same. Difference was, he’d come back out of the dark.)
Keeping Shimmer flowing to the hungering masses. It did damage. But his people were used to damage, had been bottle fed the stuff since birth. He sought to get it to the upper city, where it would destabilize and poison the frail. Those people’s appetites were spoit, bloated, careless. They would have no tolerance, if Silco could just get a foothold.
Maintaining a heel on the throat of the chembarons. Riposting over and over again. He was just glad they were still fool enough to challenge him at meetings, directly, parading their egos in front of him, wide open for a counterstrike. Eventually one of them would try subterfuge.
Fixing all the bookkeeping and holding up appearances of industry. He had to keep a front of legitimacy, had already been investigated a few times. Some of it was as easy as bribing his new pet sheriff. Most of it was more difficult. Shuffling shipments around, falsifying record trails, sometimes even shipping empty crates or moving items away and then back again. He didn’t trust anyone else to slide the beads of the abacus and layer the house of cards to keep it all looking ship-shape. There weren’t many who had the patience for it, even if they were trustworthy.
Raising a daughter.
Keeping up a facade of legitimacy meant he received an invitation to a demonstration in the upper city. At the Academy.
He didn’t think about Viktor. Didn’t think about their missed meeting, then destroyed meetingplace, then upended life, then all the work and resettling-
(Didn’t think about walking along with the tour and a hand catching his wrist and pulling him into an empty classroom- no, broom closet, cozier, closer, less exposed, tighter - into a closet, and when he puts a knife to his assailant’s throat, his own name is whispered back to him, and then the lips that speak it- he’s only heard them say it once so it takes a moment, the knife stays, but then those lips do something much more familiar, and then they take each other apart in a frantic grasping hush, crowded against each other, breathing the same air, gasping the same air, hot and slick and welcome-)
Didn’t think about Viktor.
It’s made easier when all thoughts of the vanished fucktoy were neatly swept away by crackling blue arcs.
He knows this power.
Sat near the back, having not expected much and wanting to be far enough away from the presentation that he could hold quiet conversations to establish or strengthen connections, no one sees the goosebumps stand up all over his skin as he’s taken back to a night of violence unlike anything else he’d seen in his life, which is an impressive feat indeed. The blue power sending a devastating lash of power out. And then doing it again. Again. Again. A heartbeat even as so many stop around it. A column of light into the sky. Sevika screaming on top of him, smelling like burned flesh, and a lightning storm, and him just lying there silently begging for the explosions to stop. It has to stop. Stop. That has to be it. How is it still happening? Please stop please stop that’s enough stop stop - and when it finally does, both sides are in shambles. It took a long time to find out what did it.
Actually- he never did really figure out what did it. Only who.
Until now.
The story they gave him was that this shiny-toothed youth, yes the one with perfect sunloved skin and broad shoulders that come with a family line of prosperity and health, this man, invented it. This hextech. With the help of the academy.
Silco knew it was a lie. No.
Something in the back of his mind screamed that somewhere, he’d missed an opportunity. He kept his thumb on the pulse of power, all power, including the sciences. He had Singed, who’d turned out to be an excellent investment, what with his fabrication of Shimmer. He had Jinx, who was brilliant and terrifying beyond the usual level of brilliant/terrifying all daughters were to their fathers. He should’ve had this one.
Not the sunkissed smiling man. People like that didn’t do things like this. They rode on the backs of others. Someone else was behind this.
Viktor was a student. Find Viktor. He could know -
He had to stop thinking about Viktor. He’d received his name, but given his own as well (said it first, even, he couldn’t believe his own idiocy,) and to seek him out was also to open himself up.
It was infuriating.
He had to stop thinking about Viktor, but it went even further than that. Viktor wasn’t just stuck on his mind. He was stuck on his lips, like payment had come due for fucking him for so long without knowing his name, and now he had to make up for it, plus interest. Not every time, of course, but frequent enough that his own frustration and shame had kept him from maintaining bedpartners, until finally he’d ceased taking them at all.
(“Just find someone else named Viktor and fuck them,” Sevika said to him, like it was obvious, after they’d smoked a great deal of hash together after pulling off a tricky product switch on a cargo ship that wasn’t even theirs. And he’d said that would make him feel pathetic, and she’d said to just find real Viktor then, and he’d told her that nothing was ever so easy, and then they’d stopped talking for a while and just stared into the fireplace.
And then she suggested using gags, and he told her to stop talking.)
His last fuck had been with a man named Capheus, had picked him not because he was particularly appealing, but because he was built like a door, tall and strong and dark. He’d fucked Silco hard against the wall, easily holding his weight and keeping his knees bent almost to his shoulders, and come so much in him that it was dripping down Silco’s legs when he unfolded and put his feet on the floor. He’d let Silco shove him back and back and put him face down over his desk, kicked his legs together, and fucked his thighs.
And then, full of Capheus’s come, clinging to his broad black back, somehow-
“Vik-k-k-k- kkfuck, ” Silco had snarled through his teeth, his orgasm curdling in his nerves before it was even fully over as he heard himself.
It had been years .
He’d yelled at Capheus to get out, barely giving him his clothes and certainly not giving him any explanation for his sudden fury. He slammed the door shut behind him and promptly split his knuckles on the wall beside it, and then seized the lamp on the table beside it and sent it shattering against the opposite wall, and the sound of breaking glass was so satisfying that he was grabbing for the next thing. By the time he started to feel capable of stillness, his office had looked like it had hosted a hurricane.
Naked, still sticky and sweating, he’d sat hard on the floor and put his face in his hands.
And that was the end of that. He was simply done fucking.
He’d stopped trying to restrain himself, from there. Trading lust for bloodlust. Not trading- upgrading . It was for the better, though he’d not intended for it to be. He gave himself to fits of violence. Sometimes people died. Sometimes people who worked for him. People began to treat him with more deference than ever before, and he felt his position as head of the underground stabilize.
The ironies of life. As he himself felt destabilized- he secured his power.
(The man who’s name he’d never gotten to gasp in ecstasy, now couldn’t stop falling from his lips.)
He began to recognize the mad lights in Jinx’s eyes. Even as he came undone at others more quickly, he found more patience for her.
But. The blue power. The ‘hextech’.
It infuriated him.
More people died.
So when years later, his daughter expressed her frustrations by bringing down a building and a half a dozen enforcers and dropped a hex gemstone in his hand, he couldn’t be that mad.
Frustration changed a person.
It got shit done.