Chapter Text
Nighttime has fallen over the underground, the final few stragglers at The Last Drop having stumbled back home or to find somewhere else to drink. Vander is on the verge of drifting off, splayed out in bed next to his partner in business, revolution, and life. It had been a long day, but a good one. Every day that their fragile treaty with Piltover stands is a good day.
Zaun never truly sleeps, so the hustle and bustle of the city still drifts through the cracked window. It’s comforting in its own way, as are the strips of light from the street lamps falling on the bed. Silco shifts in his sleep and one of them illuminates his face, tranquil in repose.
It’s rare for anyone but Vander to see him like this, his glass eye removed and scars uncovered by makeup. Their absence does nothing to take away from his handsome visage: the sharp angle of his jaw, the proud nose, the arched eyebrows. In many ways, Silco is Vander’s opposite, a man made up of sharp points and jutting bones. It’s just one more way they fit together, Vander’s soft form cushioning all of Silco’s hard edges.
To prove his own point, Vander nudges his way closer to Silco until they’re flush, slipping an arm beneath him and carefully shifting the man into his embrace without waking him. Silco lets out an unconscious sigh, his slight body slotting into Vander’s as easily as his jacket slots into Vander’s on the coat rack.
They stay that way as the minutes tick by. Silco usually falls asleep first (he’d trained himself to do so some time ago, fed up with being kept awake by Vander’s snores), and Vander enjoys the time he gets to spend quietly in bed, just enjoying his partner’s presence.
It’s for this reason that he notices immediately when something changes. Silco’s body, once loose and peaceful, starts to twitch. When Vander sits up to get a better look at him, his eyes are moving rapidly behind his eyelids and his expression is now anything but tranquil. He’s having a dream, and it must not be a good one.
“Silco?”
“No!” The word erupts from Silco’s lips, choked and frantic. He clutches at the bed sheets, gasping for air as though he’s being suffocated.
“Hey!” Vander surges forward and grabs his shoulders, shifting Silco so that they’re face to face. “You’re all right. I’ve got you.”
This has been a routine since they first met. The mines were no place for someone like Silco, who has never had an ounce of fat or muscle on his body (despite Vander’s repeated attempts to change this, usually via extra helpings at the dinner table when it’s his turn to serve the meal). He wasn’t there to lift rocks or wield a pickaxe, he was there as a scout. Someone small and fast who could fit into spaces that the rest of the crew couldn’t, and scope out new areas before they were entered.
“Silco is our canary,” the chargehand had said at the start of one of their expeditions. “If he goes down, we all go down. So it’s everyone else’s job to make certain he doesn’t go down, you hear me?”
Vander had taken that job very seriously. He was twice as broad as Silco, a foot taller than him and three times his weight—and that meant if there were ever any danger, it would have to get through Vander before it got to him. It became second nature to act as Silco’s shield and step in front of him at the first sign of trouble. Pick him up and throw him over his shoulder to escape a collapsing tunnel. Put a hand on his shoulder after a scuffle with a murk wolf and say I’ve got you. Those were their roles, for a while: brawn and brains. Protector and protectee. Vander got used to the look of relief on Silco’s face when he appeared and said those three words, and the way his whole body would relax ever so slightly, knowing that he was safe now.
“I’ve got you,” Vander says again. “You’re okay. You’re with me.”
Silco stops struggling, and Vander waits for recognition to brighten his eye, followed by that familiar look of relief and slump of his shoulders. The recognition comes, and then—
Silco shoves him away and scrambles backwards, his hands clawing into the blankets and his body radiating tension. His remaining eye, already a saucer of fear, has somehow widened even further. He doesn’t look relieved, he looks petrified.
And that’s when Vander realizes that Silco hadn’t been suffocating in his nightmare.
He’d been drowning.
Vander’s presence, meant to be a beacon of calm, is now the opposite. And it isn’t hard to guess why.
If your closest compatriot is someone twice your size and strong enough to break the bones of anyone who threatens you—how terrifying must it be when that same person chooses to turn on you? How traumatizing must it be for them to grab you by the hair and hold you under the water, rendering you utterly helpless? Vander isn’t the protector in this particular nightmare. He’s the monster that Silco is trying to escape from.
Just like he was on that night so many years ago.
He immediately moves away and holds his hands up in the universal gesture of I mean you no harm. Meanwhile the love of his life has backed himself against the headboard, hyperventilating and looking like a cornered animal. Like he’s the prey and Vander is the predator.
“Silco.” Vander keeps his voice low and calm, the opposite of how it had been that night, when he’d been propelled by nothing but blind, senseless rage. “You’re safe. You’re in your room at The Last Drop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Silco’s bare chest heaves a few more times, his eye flickering around the room. Outside the window a group of party-goers stumble by, filling the air with drunken laughter, and then it’s quiet again. Just the two of them face to face in the bed they share every night.
Silco blinks. “Vander.” The word comes out in a rasp.
“Yeah.” Vander stops himself from saying his usual post night terror platitudes: It’s me. I’m here. You’re safe with me. The fact that it’s him and that Silco isn’t always safe with him is the entire problem. “You’re okay.”
Silco goes limp, the tension finally escaping his body as he collapses against the headboard. “I—I don’t know what got into me,” he says with a shaky laugh. “A bad dream, that’s all.”
“Do you need something? Glass of water?”
“No, no.” He reaches out and tugs Vander back into the blankets, encasing them both. “I’m just fine.”
Silco has always been a capable liar, but not a good enough one to fool Vander.
Vander knows Silco is more affected by what he’d done that night than he lets on. When they first met, Silco used to take the most infuriatingly long, hot showers, driving Vander to insanity by locking him out of the bathroom for hours. Now his showers are short, a quickly handled necessity rather than a luxury.
He’d cut his hair after that night, too. When they’d first reunited, it had been choppy and near-shaved, the long locks he’d once been so proud of now hastily hacked off. That hadn’t surprised Vander—he’d cut his own hair in fits of spontaneous passion before, too. What surprised him was how Silco had kept it short for all the years following.
Less hair to wash means even quicker showers, less time in the water. And less hair for your lover to grab onto if he ever decides to use it to yank you under the surface again.
Maybe that’s just Vander’s guilt talking, searching for reasons to blame himself and read into his lover’s mundane aesthetic choices and lifestyle changes. But what had happened tonight was proof enough that the attack has stuck with Silco more profoundly than he admits.
“I’m sorry,” Vander says quietly.
Silco peers at him, eyebrows drawn together in confusion. Then understanding dawns in his eye and he breathes out a sigh. “You’ve apologized already,” he says.
There’s exasperation in his voice, like they’re on a road trip and Powder has just asked “Are we there yet?” for the fifteenth time. As if this is a topic that has long been resolved and moved on from. But it shouldn’t be.
“An apology is not enough,” Vander says through gritted teeth. “You shouldn’t have forgiven me so easily. You shouldn’t have forgiven me at all.”
He slowly raises a hand to Silco’s face. He half expects him to jerk away, but instead Silco leans readily into his palm, letting it cup his cheek. Like a dog that’s been kicked but still wags its tail any time its master pets it. Vander feels sick.
He strokes his thumb down the scar he’d left, in all its grisly, undisguised glory. He hates it, and he’s also grateful for it. Every time you look at the man you love, you will be reminded of the damage that you did to him. As you should be. You should never forget that night.
No matter how hard he tries, Silco can’t pretend to have forgotten it either.
“You’ve more than made up for any past transgressions by choosing to support my—our cause,” Silco says, his breath warming Vander’s fingers. “When it really mattered, you made the right decision. I was only able to put enough pressure on Piltover to broker a deal because you were at my side.”
“To hell with Zaun,” Vander says, and Silco visibly flinches. “No—no, that’s not what I meant. Zaun is my heart, same as it is yours. But even if my nonviolence and compliance had been the key to protect our people, I never had any right to do that to you.”
Silco always approaches their history from the wrong angle. As if their comradeship in pursuit of Zaun’s well-being overrides everything else. Even despite them becoming intimate years before it happened, he sees the incident as an ideological clash between two revolutionaries, not a man laying hands on his lover. And therefore, by coming around to Silco’s ideology and helping him intimidate Piltover, Vander had absolved himself of any wrong-doing.
As if the blood on Vander’s hands can be washed off so easily.
“We’ve both made mistakes,” Silco says. “I am no saint. In your position, I may have done the same.”
Vander clenches his jaw. “But you didn’t, did you? I’m the one who hurt you. End of story.”
“And I’ve chosen to forgive you. End of story.”
This is getting nowhere. Vander can’t make Silco feel the rage and resentment he deserves to feel; he can’t force him to take back his forgiveness. And a selfish part of him is grateful for that.
But there’s still one loose end that Vander can’t move past. One lie that keeps him up at night.
“We need to tell her,” he says.
Silco’s eye narrows. “No.”
Here they go again, rehashing the same argument they’ve been having for years. Every few months, Vander suggests that they tell Powder the truth about what happened to Silco’s eye, and every time Silco shuts him down.
At first it was because she was too young. “She won’t understand,” Silco had claimed. Then, it was because it was never the right moment for it. She was too happy, so they shouldn’t dampen the mood. Or she was too sad, and they had no right to bring her down further by telling her that the father she idolizes isn’t so flawless, after all.
Vander knows the real reason. Just like he’d once protected Silco, Silco is now protecting him—from his own daughter’s wrath. He’s protecting the image of her family that she has in her head, the one she’s scribbled in crayon on the pictures tacked to their bedroom wall. Of her two perfect fathers and their perfect love.
But it isn’t real. He and Silco love each other more than anything, and they love her more than anything, but that love has ever been perfect or easy.
“I have to,” Vander says. “I can’t keep living with myself otherwise. Please, Silco.”
Silco puts on the pouting face he always pulls when he’s going to agree to something but isn’t happy about it. “Well, it’s not as though I can stop you. Just don’t forget to tell the whole story, yes?”
He moves his hand to Vander’s arm, running his fingers across the scar he’d left there with Vander’s knife. As if the wound he’d given Vander in self defense somehow makes them even. The scar is hardly even visible anymore, healed and hidden by the passage of time.
“I will,” Vander says.
“Excellent. Now can we move on from this subject? I have an early morning tomorrow and I’d like to get some amount of sleep.”
Vander cedes the topic with a kiss on Silco’s forehead, and then they move back into position, pressed against each other with Silco cradled in Vander’s arms. Once again, Vander is struck by his lover’s fragility…and just how effortless it would be to hurt him again.
Silco had only survived because of the knife. If it hadn’t been strapped to Vander’s belt that night, Vander would have murdered him. It would have been so easy, too. Like smashing a wine bottle or snuffing out a cigar with his boot. Silco knows that, and yet he still chooses to share his bed—share his life—with Vander.
How can Vander ever make up for any of it?