Work Text:
Nothing new ever reaches the Fissures.
Even the light of the Undercity is inherited. Topside sunshine filters down through grates and stained windows, arriving tired and colored by its journey. Industry, likewise, is discarded above and reimagined below. Pipes and gears, clockwork and copper wire – the Undercity’s economy subsists on these castoffs.
Benzo’s is one such maze of salvage, where light and metal alike find second life in the depths.
Viktor moves through the darkened shop, his pneumatic leg exhaling a soft hiss with each step, his hooded cloak shifting over his shoulders. His hands sort through bins of metal fittings, testing weight and threading, examining for corrosion.
At times, he wonders about the origins of the oddities that make their way into the Fissures. Topside’s leftovers offer only an oblique window into life in the sun – what standards are kept above, in the world which discards perfectly clean brass?
Viktor gathers up a haul of serviceable scrap in his arms and brings it to the countertop, where the pieces settle with a metallic clatter. Light from free-standing candles reflects in the various warm metal edges.
Behind the counter, a small boy climbs up onto a crate to rise to Viktor’s level. With a mousy voice, he says, “All set?”
Viktor hums and drops eight silver coins, an amount well below what would be expected for this volume of brass.
The young boy narrows his eyes and taps a finger hard against the countertop. Viktor drops four more coins and allows a faint smile to lift his lips. The boy taps the counter once more, and Viktor drops one more coin. For a long moment, they stare at each other like duelists. When the front door opens, hitting a bell just inside the frame, neither Viktor nor the boy break eye contact. Heavy footsteps enter the shop behind Viktor.
Finally, the boy shrugs and smiles. “Alright, take care.” He collects the thirteen silver coins.
Viktor says, “Thank you.” He steps aside to find pockets in his layered clothing for his acquisitions, and he catches a peripheral glimpse of the person who approaches the counter after him.
Academy maroon, starched and spotless. Cropped and pomaded hair, a messenger bag over the shoulder, shining shoes. The stranger’s uniform catches the Undercity’s oxidized light like a beacon, announcing his wealth to anyone who passes. Topsiders often venture downward, but few are foolish enough to walk the Fissures dressed so glaringly in their own privilege. This young man stands out like blood in the harbor, blithely unaware of the sanguine trail he leaves.
The Piltie says, “Hey, is Benzo in?” His voice might be butter-smooth, if it were not so earnest.
The boy behind the counter says, “He just stepped out, but I can help you.”
“Alright, well…”
Viktor slows his movements and fiddles with a gear. The boy’s eyes flick between him and the Piltie. Viktor turns his face away and watches silhouettes move outside the shop’s jade glass window, making very little effort to appear distracted.
Behind Viktor, the Piltie rambles, “I’m looking for copper or gold that I can repurpose as framing… that might work…”
The boy says, “No gold here, I’m afraid.”
“That’s fine. Let me take this one. How much for this?”
The boy hesitates for a beat, and then says, “Uh… nine.”
“Nine? You can’t be serious.”
The boy insists, “Hey, I don’t know how it is Topside, but these are rare down here!” It’s a weak lie, but the Piltie will fall for it anyway.
As expected, the Piltie lets out a heavy sigh. “Alright, fine. Let me get this one… and this…”
Surely, the Piltover Academy must provide its students with quality materials. A student should have no reason to trawl the Fissures, unless the channels above were inconvenient – unless the student had a compelling reason to avoid documentation.
Viktor hears the young boy at the counter say, “How about fifty for the lot?”
The Piltie groans, and then obediently counts out coins. Viktor hears only five clicks. The man is paying in gold rather than common silver – not only blood in the water, but healthy shredded flesh. Irresistible.
If the student is eaten today, Viktor will never find out what project of his is worth such trouble.
The bell on the frame is struck as he exits the shop, and the conversation continues behind him. He steps to the side of Benzo's doorway, presses his back against the weathered wall, and allows the door to fall closed.
Outside, passersby flow through the street. Fissure residents make their way north toward the border market, while dockworkers head south to the locks on the lower end of the canal. A child pleads with their mother, a guard dog barks, augmentations whir with movement. Viktor recognizes a particular foot worn by a merchant as his own handiwork.
Through the thick glass of the shop window, Viktor can make out the silhouettes of the boy and the Piltie. He listens to the muffled scrape of items being gathered into a box, the high-pitched pleasantries of a transaction concluding, and he straightens against the wall.
The bell chimes as the door swings open, and the Academy student emerges, blinking in the filtered light. He adjusts his grip on the box of copper scrap and steps toward the street, neglecting to look behind himself even once. Several sets of eyes linger on his Academy uniform – some simply curious, some hungry.
Viktor waits until the shop door falls closed with a soft click, then moves. In three quick, hissing strides, his fingers close around the young man's bicep.
The man stops mid-step and gasps in surprise. “Gods!” From the quick inhalation, he coughs.
Eyeing passersby, Viktor speaks low and soft from just behind the man’s shoulder. “Keep your voice down. If you go home today, you will be robbed.”
The Piltie’s wide eyes search the air in front of them. He speaks haltingly through his strained throat. “I… appreciate your concern, but I’m alright.”
If his pursuit is sufficiently criminal that its materials cannot be sourced Topside, then he is destined to someday join the brass in Viktor’s pockets as Piltovan refuse. By flashing gold in the Fissures, he practically begs to be revealed.
Betting on his own assumption, Viktor insists, “Is there nothing significant in your home? Nothing you’d rather keep to yourself?”
The Piltie stiffens and quiets for three full breaths. Finally, he says, “I can’t trust you, either.”
Luckily for this man, Viktor’s pickpocketing days are long behind him, and the blade under his cloak has only ever been wetted in self-defense; all he wields today is vicious curiosity. Viktor loosens his grip on the man's bicep, feeling assured that he is now less inclined to make a further fool of himself, and steps around, pulling his hood back halfway to allow the Piltie to see his face.
Up close, he can see the young man’s generically attractive features: sharp jawline, prominent cheekbones, plush lips. A slight notch in the right eyebrow. Hazel eyes search Viktor’s face in return; beneath the Piltie’s classically masculine features, he looks stricken, keyed-up, off-balance – a bead of sweat on the temple, a quick breath between parted lips. Teetering on the highwire of Academy standards, desperate to stay aloft.
Viktor tilts his head toward the shop window. “I’m not asking you to trust me. Look.”
The Piltie looks: in the glass of Benzo’s window is the vague silhouette of the boy who worked the counter, pressed to the pane and watching them.
The Piltie turns back to Viktor and deflates. “Shit. Okay, fine.”
Viktor puts on an amicable smile. “Come with me.” He lets his hand drop fully away and begins to stride toward the south, deeper into the fissure.
With new urgency, the Piltie follows a half-pace behind.
The crowd thins as they move further from the border market. Once they are away from prying eyes, Viktor slows and asks, “So, you are an inventor of some sort?”
🛠
The Fissures’ architecture is a hand-wrought maze. Steel bent into impossible shapes, catwalks over bottomless drops, steam vents and refracted light and chemical sting, the air thick with far too many trace materials to identify its flavor. Every step upward seems to lead deeper into the earth, and every direct path leads in circles.
Jayce follows a strange man who moves through the bowels of the fissure with easy confidence, his arms swinging slightly at his sides, his steps at home in the labyrinth. Jayce walks a half-step behind the man’s right shoulder, stealing glances at his asymmetrical gait. His entire right leg is made of brass – all rough planes and tiny pipes and hissing air. Jayce marvels at the ingenuity, wondering who salvages and labors to build such things in the abyss.
The man slows his pace, inviting Jayce to walk beside him. Jayce’s eyes trace over his profile in the gloom – his skin is remarkably pale, even for the lack of sunlight in the fissures. In an accented voice, he asks if Jayce is an inventor.
“I’m just an engineering student,” Jayce explains sheepishly, and then coughs out a vaguely metallic breath. “I’d like to become an inventor.”
The man nods to the box of copper fixtures in Jayce’s arms. “What are you working on at the moment?”
Jayce considers what extent of his project could be explained. An expedition into Shurima, a search for precious gems, an explosion at a mining camp deep in the desert. Jayce had brought back several hexite crystals, the tiny blue stones crackling with explosive potential.
Jayce defaults to the simplest sentiment. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
The man gestures to his own leg, saying, “No one’s ever believed in me.” Even for the soft melody of his accent, the bitterness under the words is unmistakably familiar.
Jayce starts, “Well, I’ve found…” and then, “Sorry, I shouldn’t talk about it.”
The man simply hums. “You believe it’s worth the risk of expulsion?”
Jayce reels for a second, and then realizes that he has just bought equipment from a scrap shop in the south fissure, so his intentions must be evident.
After a hesitant, stuttered breath, Jayce admits, “Yes… I do.”
The man chuckles. “Interesting.”
They cross a street, narrowly avoiding steam jetting from a vent. When they fall into step once more, the man says, “You can call me Viktor.”
“Uh, Jayce.”
The man – Viktor – tests the shape of the name in his mouth. “Jayce…”
Viktor leads on, crossing a catwalk that resounds with an empty, reverberant quality underfoot. Jayce glances over the railing and sees several more street levels jutting from the fissure walls at odd angles below them like a multi-layered spiderweb, each path densely flanked by homes and storefronts. Below all of this is the dense, jade-tinted fog against which all of the Undercity is backdropped. Looking at it makes pressure build in Jayce’s throat, and he narrowly suppresses a cough.
Viktor beckons Jayce onward, saying, “We’re nearly there.”
Jayce allows himself to be led into an apparent dead end – only a narrow alley between two buildings – but there, hidden in shadow, stands an open-cage elevator. It is a revelation in improvised engineering: no visible power source, just pulleys and counterweights, a waist-high railing, and the confidence of a brass-legged fissure resident who has made this journey a hundred times before.
Jayce follows Viktor onto the elevator platform and then watches him pull downward on a lever. The elevator lurches, and Jayce grips the railing, acutely aware of the growing drop beneath them. Viktor counts under his breath as the levels fly by. Near ‘eight,’ he wrenches the lever upward, and the elevator slides to a halt with a rough screech.
They step out onto a walkway carved directly into the bedrock of the fissure wall. Organically, chaotically, the rock face itself has become home to many in the Underground. Doorways emerge at different heights, some sitting flush with the walkway while others require stairs and platforms to reach. Windows of mismatched glass punctuate the stone and steel wherever their inhabitants could carve them, and makeshift balconies extend like irregular teeth.
Viktor leads Jayce to one frontage, a particularly clean extension with a large frosted glass window, and draws out a key. He unlocks the door and ushers Jayce inside.
Once the door is closed and locked behind them, Viktor flicks his hood back, revealing gently-waving coffee-brown hair, and eases off his left shoe, which he tucks under a small stand beside the door.
“Please, take off your shoes. You’re welcome to explore, but put things back where you found them.”
Jayce finds himself in a home and a workshop overlapping into one dense room. Dark wood worktables assert themselves upon most of the living space, and cast iron shelving claims each available wall. Upon nearly every surface rest brass components and technical drawings, tubing and textbooks. A sofa and coffee table are all but swallowed in the machinery.
The words slip out as it dawns on him: “You… build things. Are you an inventor? An engineer?”
Viktor moves through the room, lighting oil lamps upon worktables and shelves, and golden firelight catches on every piece of brass. He grins at Jayce over his shoulder. “Indeed, I ‘build things.’”
“Did… did you build your leg?”
“Of course.”
In the light, Jayce can see that the space is, while full, remarkably clean and organized; even jarringly pleasant in places. A row of potted plants in the window offer some reprieve from the stale air outside. His lungs no longer feel constricted – the air here is nearly as clean as it is upon the surface of the world.
Viktor sheds his cloak, a bandolier, a vest, a belt, and then even produces a drop-point knife from somewhere, all which he rests on a worktable. Reduced to a white buttoned shirt and charcoal wool trousers, he now seems much smaller, save for the brass leg, which crests at his hip and which the trousers appear to be tucked into. Without the mass of clothing, the irregularity of Viktor’s gait is starkly obvious – one heavy thunk for every soft sock pat.
Jayce shifts the box of copper parts in his arms. He kicks off his shoes in the doorway and tucks them beside other pairs. He blinks, realizing that he expected to see an array of only left shoes. Before Jayce can consider it, Viktor is pulling a thick, forest-green blanket from under the coffee table. He unfurls it in the air.
“I can’t stay long,” Jayce says.
Viktor drapes the blanket over the back of the sofa, saying, “I do suggest you stay the night. At least until you lose your tail.”
“My tail?”
“That boy from the shop followed us to the base of the elevator. He knows where we are.”
“Wh– are you serious?”
Viktor moves to a kitchenette at the far end of the open room, leg clicking and hissing with each step. In the kitchenette, barstools are positioned oddly – one in front of the sink, one in front of the stovetop. Viktor pushes the stool at the stovetop aside and picks up a kettle. “You didn’t notice?”
Jayce mutters, “Well… no.”
Filling the kettle at the sink, Viktor says, “Might as well make yourself comfortable.” He then turns and gestures inward to the room, toward the worktables. “View my work if you like. Explore.”
Jayce shifts his weight and adjusts his grip on the box in his arms. “It’s still midday. Do I really have to stay through the night?”
Viktor turns on a heavy heel and leans his weight back against the countertop. He crosses his real leg over the ankle of the brass one, and gestures with his hands while he speaks.
“You don’t have to do anything. I will not keep you here. I suggest, however, that you take it on good authority that if you come to the Fissures in an Academy uniform, throw around gold, and then return home, you will be robbed. Or worse. I suggest you wait out the tail.”
Jayce tilts his head back and sucks in a deep breath. It would be convenient if he could attribute this regrettable turn of events to simple poor luck, but the extent of his ignorance is gradually becoming clear. He should have exchanged the gold for silver. He should have worn different clothes.
For the life of him, Jayce cannot remember whether or not he locked the chest of hexite crystals in his bedroom.
He sighs. “Okay, yeah. I’ll stay.” He pointedly sets down the box of copper framing onto the coffee table.
“If you decide you must leave, you may. You are not captive.”
“I understand.”
After a brief moment of scrutinizing Jayce’s expression, Viktor softens and smiles. “We’ll make the most of it. I’ll take you to a deli for dinner.”
Jayce laughs, amused by the sudden shift in tone. “Alright, sounds good.”
While Viktor returns to his kitchenette, Jayce takes off his messenger bag and sets it on the floor beside the sofa. Carefully, he steps through the room, into the amalgam of workshop space, and allows his gaze to flit over brass planes, cast iron fixtures, and copper wire.
🛠
For all of his apparent privilege, Jayce is polite, even amicable. If he thinks of himself as an engineer, even only aspirationally, they might find common ground. Viktor fills a kettle at the sink and switches on a gas burner while musing about how he might tease information out of the man. A trade, perhaps.
Behind him, Jayce asks, “Is that an air compressor?”
Without looking, Viktor says, “Yes. I use pneumatics in most of my designs.” He finds his eclectic assortment of mugs, tankards, and glasses.
Jayce must have discovered recent note pages, because Viktor hears the distinct shuffle of paper. “Is this… a hand? The dimensions are strange.”
“Yes, for a vastaya. They have a longer, narrower palm. I can’t speak to how they lost the hand, but they have commissioned me to create a new one. I am attempting to mirror it to the existing hand.”
“That’s…” Jayce’s voice trails off, and Viktor turns to look across the room at him. He is standing at the furthest workbench, partially obscured by pieces jutting from shelving, head bowed over a handful of papers. Jayce finally asks, “Do people in the Undercity lose limbs often?” His expression is grave, and Viktor finds the concern strangely endearing.
“Yes, quite often. Replacements are something of a commodity here. An art form.”
A shadow eclipses Jayce, and his eyes search the floor. Viktor muses that each new taste of the Undercity’s inherent bitterness will calcify him further, as it had already done to all its residents, including Viktor himself. Even while simply waiting out a tail, no one leaves the Fissures unscathed.
After a moment of processing, Jayce seems to return to his light mood. “Are you an artist, then?”
“I would say so.” Viktor gestures to his leg. “Does it disturb you?”
“No, no. It’s very interesting.” Jayce sets the stack of note pages down, and then his fingers find something else. Viktor can’t make out the small object at distance, but it must have a moving part, because Jayce fiddles with it as he says, “My mother has two metal fingers.”
Viktor hums. “How does she fare with them?”
“Well, I think. She has enough dexterity to sew by hand. Hey, what is this? A piston?”
A kettle begins to whistle, and Viktor turns the stove flame off. “I can’t see from here, but that is likely right. Many of my designs use double-action pneumatic cylinders.” His hands find tea, sugar.
“That’s… it’s tiny.”
“They say size isn’t everything.”
Without reacting to that quip whatsoever, Jayce barrels onward. “Is that a quarter-inch bore? I guess they have to be tiny if they’re for fingers, but this scale is really incredible. Where do you get these?”
“I make them.”
“You… make them,” Jayce repeats slowly, turning the words over in his mouth. He continues to examine the piece, and then observes, “There’s no packing collar. What makes it airtight?”
“Each one is, eh, how do you say it?” Viktor curls the fingers of his left hand, and then juts his right index finger into them. A lewd gesture in any other context, but communicative.
Jayce blinks. “Lapping? Are you serious?”
Viktor smiles and nods. “Lapping, yes! Each one individually. They are not interchangeable.”
Jayce lets out an incredulous noise, somewhere between a scoff and a laugh. “That’s insane.”
Viktor’s brow flinches, but then he shrugs. “I’ve been called worse.”
“No, I—”
“It’s alright.”
Jayce insists: “You are a genius. Your precision is insane."
For once, a Piltovan’s recognition of Viktor’s hard-earned skill does not come qualified by his environment, nor by his lack of formal education. Jayce could have amended his praise with ‘–for a Zaunite,’ but he hadn't; he seems sincere. Viktor shrugs. “We use our limbs, our joints, hundreds of times a day. More than we realize. They must be flawless.”
Jayce exhales another disbelieving laugh and shakes his head. To himself, he mutters something about the Academy being unnecessary.
🛠
The pneumatic cylinder, as Viktor had called it, is smaller than Jayce’s pinky finger. A steel rod plunges into a casing, and tiny ports allow air into both sides. On this particular unit, the seal is truly airtight. When Jayce covers a port with his thumb, the rod does not move at all.
Jayce continues to take in the workshop space – furnace, treadle lathe, air compressor, standing reservoir tanks, magnifying lenses, tiny hand tools fit for a clockmaker – all lit in dancing golden oil-light like a kaleidoscopic jigsaw puzzle. He marvels at the craftsmanship of the metal casing in his hand. He asks, “What’s the, uh, maximum PSI on this thing?”
From the kitchenette, Viktor replies, “Due to their size and delicacy, many of them only reach a tolerance of eighty. It’s low, but suitable for pneumatic fingers. The ones on my leg can tolerate more than one hundred pounds each.”
“Whoa, you have more on your leg? Where are they, behind your knee?”
Viktor picks up two mugs, steam unfurling upward, and steps back into the living area, saying, “Come here.” He sets the mugs down on the coffee table – no coasters; myriad ring-stains on the wood – and sits at the left-hand side of the sofa. He motions for Jayce to sit at his right.
Jayce sets down the loose cylinder and joins him. As Jayce watches, Viktor leans forward and flicks at a series of clasps that run down the inner line of his right leg. With a hiss of compressed air, the brass opens like a set of jaws, revealing a full flesh-and-blood limb on the inside, clothed in trousers and a sock that have been wrinkled by compression.
Jayce straightens. “Oh! I thought it was a prosthetic.”
“No, it’s a brace. Here.”
Viktor slides his real leg out of the contraption and leans the brace against the sofa between them, allowing Jayce to examine the pneumatic systems within. Though interested in the workings, Jayce glances at Viktor’s real leg as well. His right leg seems much thinner than his left, muscles possibly atrophied from disuse, and his right foot turns inward substantially.
“Before I get ahead of myself,” Jayce asks, “is there anything on this I shouldn’t touch?”
“Eh, mind the tubing. If you need to lift it—” Viktor presses at some kind of latch on the anterior thigh, and a spring-loaded handle flips forward with a hard click. “There. When you are satisfied, I’d like you to set it beside the sofa, on your side.”
“Sure.”
Jayce looks over the leg brace, taking in the map of it, while Viktor reclines and sips his tea. He finds what looks to be a port on a slim tank which runs down the lateral side of the thigh and glances back toward the workspace, to the air compressor. Under Viktor’s observation, Jayce carefully traces a fingertip over the flow.
He whispers, “Port, reservoir… splitter.”
Viktor nods. “Mhm.”
“This line goes to the knee… three pistons here.”
“Four.” Viktor points a blunt finger at the back of the knee. “It’s a bit buried.”
“Oh, I see it. Okay, and then down to the ankle…”
Viktor points at pistons circling the ankle of the brace. “Lateral, medial, and Achilles. For stabilization.”
“And two on the front?”
“For, eh…” Viktor leans over the sofa arm and produces a full crutch that Jayce had not noticed before. He drags himself upward to stand, and then demonstrates the motion of tilting his weight forward and lifting one heel from the ground while walking. “They assist with this motion.”
“Oh, I see. For pushing off from the ground.”
“Right.”
Viktor carefully lowers himself to sit once more, but continues to hold the crutch upright between his knees. Turning his eyes back to the brace, Jayce muses that the system of Viktor’s mobility extends well beyond the metal in his hands. The pressurized air, the steam-powered compressor, the coal and water used to run it – all of this is Viktor’s life. If he does not have coal, he does not walk.
Jayce looks at the crate of copper on the coffee table, then at his messenger bag beside the sofa. If he could someday access the power he knows rests latent in hexite, it could offer a solution. It could replace the coal in the furnace, or even the air in the brace itself. Hextech energy, hextech pistons.
He steals another glance at Viktor’s profile – the sharp cheekbone, the way his coffee-colored hair catches the golden lamplight, the candor with which he shares his life’s work. There's something almost ethereal about him, like he belongs to this shadowy underworld but also transcends it. The leg brace propped between them is proof of an engineering mind that rivals anyone at the Academy.
Perhaps their work could be complementary, or even combinable. Perhaps every powered brace and prosthetic could operate via hexite. Jayce notices his foot tapping rhythmically on the floor and stills it.
As if reading him, Viktor hums. “Have you thought of something?”
“Um.” Jayce takes a deep breath – in and slowly out. “Yeah, it’s just… I hope I can trust you.”
Jayce feels the sofa bow slightly as Viktor shifts in his seat. Viktor asks, “With something illegal? Immoral?” For a moment, his amber eyes look like those of a jungle cat, but they quickly soften. When Jayce is quiet for another moment, Viktor asserts, “I’m no prude.”
Jayce huffs out a weak, defensive laugh. “It’s, uh… I’ve been told it’s insane.”
Viktor smiles. “So have I. Just today, in fact.” Jayce is unamused, so Viktor carries on. “Would it help if we were to trade?”
“Trade what?”
“I have my own contraband. Care for a, eh, trust-building exchange?”
Jayce blinks and considers the offer for a few moments. “I can’t say I’m not curious.”
Viktor nods, “Alright,” and stands with a bit of a groan. The tap of the crutch on the hardwood somewhat mimics the heavy step of the brace. Leaning heavily to one side, he crosses to a door near the kitchenette and disappears into another room.
Jayce stands and lifts the leg brace by its handle. It’s surprisingly lightweight for its size, no less wieldy than a thick winter coat. He reasons that Viktor’s heavy steps while wearing it speak to the weakness of his leg rather than the weight of the metal. He moves the brace to its resting place beside the sofa, where Viktor had directed.
Then, Jayce sits and takes the opportunity to sip from his mug. It’s regular black tea, but with a frankly obscene volume of sugar. He sets it further away on the coffee table. He collects his messenger bag and rifles through a mess of loose Academy coursework for his journal.
Viktor returns, emerging from the other room holding a small metal case – much like a mint tin – and a lighter. He shuts the door behind himself and asks, “Do you smoke?”
“Uh, sometimes. When I drink.”
Viktor hums. “It’s a bit early for that.” He passes the tin to Jayce. “Go ahead and open it.”
While Viktor carefully lowers himself to sit once more, Jayce opens the case. Inside are several hand-rolled cigarettes, their contents dyed vibrant purple.
Viktor sets the crutch in its resting place, and Jayce passes the tin back, asking, “What’s up with that color?”
Viktor gestures open-palmed like a magician at a mysterious box. “This is my contraband. It is called shimmer. I use it for pain, and also for staying awake into the night.” He plucks one cigarette from the case, stows the rest, and strikes the lighter. Jayce watches as Viktor sets the strange cigarette between his lips and cups his hands around a tiny flame. When he inhales, he tenses slightly, as if stuck with a needle. When he exhales, the breath comes out orchid-purple. Its scent is sickly-sweet, like a citrus fruit that has just begun to mold.
Viktor holds the cigarette to him. “Would you like to try? No pressure.”
Jayce watches himself gingerly take the cigarette from Viktor’s fingers, taken by the very spirit of wonder. “What… is it?”
“It originates from a local flower. This is a new version that I’m testing. If you’re open to trying it, I’d like you to tell me about any side effects. I’ll report them back to the doctor.” Viktor scans Jayce’s anxious expression for a moment, and then he continues, “It’s not dangerous in this volume. You would have to smoke the whole case at once for it to pose any threat to you.”
Jayce sits still, hesitating, the cigarette softly burning between his fingers.
Viktor says, “The first breath may be difficult,” but Jayce is already raising the cigarette to his lips. “It will make you–”
Near instantly upon inhale, Jayce feels his blood pressure spike with a sharp wave of adrenaline. His heart thuds in his neck, and he gasps involuntarily. He brings his free hand up to his chest, but then the spell settles as abruptly as it began. He coughs once, and purple smoke blooms in the air.
Jayce extends the cigarette back toward Viktor, saying, “That was weird.”
Viktor smiles, amused. “It takes some getting used to. The second breath will not do that.” To make his point, Viktor takes a second drag, and his body remains calm. There is a flicker of purple in his irises, possibly a reflection from the tip of the cigarette.
Jayce runs a hand over his face, self-soothing. “You said it’s from a flower?”
Viktor nods. His words come out purple. “A cave flower passed through the metabolism of a mutant waverider, then distilled, and…” He trails off, then extends the cigarette back to Jayce, saying, “Biology is not my strong suit.”
As promised, the second drag is relatively normal. Jayce’s heart skips a beat, but it doesn’t spiral into panic. His shoulders relax.
When Jayce looks back to Viktor, Viktor quickly averts his eyes.
Jayce passes the cigarette back. “Okay, I guess it’s my turn.” He opens his leather journal on the coffee table to its most recent bookmarked page, and then turns several pages back. He hesitates for only a brief moment before sliding the journal in front of Viktor.
“Start from here.”
🛠
An immeasurably hot desert in Shurima, an infinite expanse of sand. Sudarian, kumangium, targonite – crystals which each display unique effects, but not what Jayce was searching for. Treasure hunters know of it, but traders do not sell it. Viktor turns the page.
Finally, a “bluish light” that “outshone the stars.” A crystal in the ground, accidentally struck by a pickaxe, exploded with a kinetic wave. An archaeological dig was set back by months, and Jayce was thrilled to have found his quarry. He asserted, in the journal, that his mother would soon be proud of him.
A series of hypotheses related to accessing the power latent in the stone. Viktor turns the page.
An array of runic symbols. The words of a language spoken by the arcane.
Jayce reaches over Viktor’s arm, bumping him slightly. “This is the important part,” he says, pointing a finger at the runes. “I’ve got them mostly figured out.”
Viktor blinks, lays the journal open on the coffee table, and sits back. He sets the cigarette between his lips and drags from it. “I don’t understand.”
Jayce gestures with his hands while he speaks. “The celestial-type arcane energy contained in the stones is accessed and directed by the runes. If you think of the runes as wires leading to different appliances—”
“Sorry.” Viktor pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head. “The logical workings of it are simple, I see that. I just… magic? It’s magic?”
Jayce withdraws. “Ah, yeah. It’s magic.”
“Okay.” Viktor nods, but his fingers still grasp his nose. “Let me sit with that for a moment.”
In Viktor’s periphery, Jayce reclines and moves his hands, fiddling with a wristband.
Viktor wonders when it was that magic escaped his field of awareness. His upbringing was a difficult one, sharp-edged and lonely, and taking on a chemtech apprenticeship in adolescence was his sole opportunity to live a life with any agency. He supposes it is natural that, like the sun, so little of the world outside of the ground would reach him; in the Fissures, information has only ever filtered down through pipes and grates and panes of glass, slowed deliberately or by circumstance at every step, pulled downward by the persistence of those rare mentors of the depths.
Jayce interrupts Viktor’s train of thought before it can crystallize into resentment. “Hey, your eyes are turning purple. Are mine?”
Viktor looks, and Jayce’s hazel eyes do indeed flicker with highlights of orchid around the iris. “Yes. It will wear off overnight. Do you feel any other effects?”
“Um…” Jayce outstretches both hands and flexes them in the air – curling his fingers into fists, and then splaying them open again. “I feel stronger. Energetic, like coffee.”
Viktor nods. “I feel that too.”
“My skin is really sensitive. My shirt is a little…” Jayce brings both hands to the top button of his Academy waistcoat. “Sorry, do you mind if I…?”
“Not at all.” Viktor gestures with the half-cigarette toward his own pile of clothes on a worktable across the room. Mistaking the gesture for an invitation, Jayce plucks the cigarette from Viktor’s hand. Viktor presses his lips tightly together and swallows a laugh. While Jayce unbuttons his waistcoat, exhaling violet, Viktor draws out the metal case once more. He selects a second cigarette and lights it.
Jayce peels his waistcoat off, and Viktor’s eyes linger on the stretch of maroon fabric pulled taut across Jayce’s chest. He then wrinkles his nose at the way Jayce haphazardly stuffs the waistcoat into his bag.
Then Jayce’s hands come up to his shirt buttons. To Viktor’s relief or dismay, perhaps both, Jayce stops after two buttons are undone. He fans himself and says, “I think I’m getting hot.”
Viktor hums noncommittally and turns his face away. “I’ll make a note of it. So… magic.”
Jayce leans forward and rolls up his sleeves to the elbows. “Right.”
Viktor says, "If you don’t mind… start from the beginning."
Jayce draws in a deep drag of shimmer, says, “Okay,” and starts from the beginning.
There is a leather band on his left wrist inset with an azure blue stone. Jayce speaks of a mysterious mage, of his mother losing her fingers, of the genesis of a lifelong obsession.
As Jayce speaks, Viktor feels himself drawn in almost helplessly, pitched into orbit around Jayce’s fascination, as though he had been stranded in earthen wilderness for a decade and Jayce has walked into his life with a map. Impossibly, the discovery of magic feels fated, obvious in hindsight, as though Viktor had always known but had since forgotten, having left it beside a toxic river in his childhood, and Jayce is only reintroducing him to it. Jayce speaks of a fabric, a plane, that was and is always present; it is only eclipsed by the material facade that Viktor began building his life from in adolescence, back when he was forced to work too young.
Viktor is of the Fissures. Information, like sunlight, has only ever filtered down to him.
This time, the light has been brought down directly to him, into his home. Viktor sees it in Jayce’s journal and on his wrist, unadulterated, for the first time.
Wonder takes him. Up to this moment, Viktor’s life has been shaded in jade, in orchid, in brass. Following this moment, it will be—
"Bright blue," Jayce says, his fingers spreading in a gesture of an explosion. "It has a thin outer shell. If that's cracked, it explodes kinetically. No heat, but the shock can still travel through solid objects. Like an earthquake."
"So it must stay suspended."
"Right."
"Magnetically?"
"No, it has native buoyancy."
"Incredible."
Jayce explains his latest trials, his working hypotheses, and Viktor follows all of it. The crystal can be suspended within a frame of copper or gold – not silver – and spun at different speeds, whereupon it responds by outputting power. In his journal, Jayce has recorded many graphs displaying approximate power outputs over time measured in seconds.
Jayce has not only shown up with a map, but has walked most of the path himself.
This naive Piltie who would pay with gold and neglect to haggle is, in another realm, a veritable genius. By his work in the journal, Viktor can see that Jayce’s one and only shortcoming is his magnified perspective – mathematically speaking, he fails to see the forest for the trees. Viktor, with fresh eyes, immediately sees what Jayce has missed.
Mid-conversation, the first shimmer cigarette is extinguished in an ashtray, and Viktor asks Jayce to find paper. Jayce stumbles when he stands.
“Are you alright?”
Jayce tugs at his collar while he searches a worktable for loose paper and pens. “I can feel all of my clothes. It’s weird.”
“That’s normal.”
Jayce returns with paper, and Viktor gets to work.
🛠
Jayce’s luck feels binary, like a switch flipping upward. Nearly being robbed has lead him to the home of an adept craftsman, and then to technical insight, and then to academic brilliance. Silently, Jayce thanks whichever god his father used to pray to for leading him here. The overpriced box of copper on the coffee table turned out to be the key to so much more.
Jayce watches Viktor work, bullying a paper with a quick scrawl, forcing his way through a series of graphs. At times, Jayce understands Viktor’s thinking; at others, he doesn’t. Viktor’s fresh perspective allows him to make unanticipated leaps in logic, like taking a sledgehammer to the walls of a maze. Jayce realizes that his formal education may have narrowed his sense of how to use the tools in his hands.
Then, each time Viktor inhales from his second cigarette, Jayce watches those sharp amber eyes transform. It’s hypnotic – a flicker of violet at the edges of his irises, the color spreading like watercolor bleeding through thin paper until his eyes are otherworldly.
Viktor sets the cigarette against the lip of the ashtray on the table, exhaling smoke and words at the same time. “This is truly incredible.”
Transfixed by Viktor’s eyes, Jayce nods. “It is.”
Having lined up a sequence of oscillation frequency graphs and developed a ratio comparing their crests, as if the swooping parabolic curves were themselves no more complex than lined notebook paper, Viktor suddenly juts his pen at the last graph in the notebook. “Is this the highest speed you’ve attempted?”
Jayce tears his attention from Viktor’s eyes and wills his mouth to work. “Y-yes, uh, one oscillation per six seconds. Beyond that, it begins to rattle.”
Viktor says, “You’ll need to spin it much faster. One-in-two, or even one-in-one.”
Jayce rubs a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m afraid it’ll explode.”
Viktor sets his pen down and sits upright, deliberation completed, confident in his answer. “It won’t. Not unless you try to touch it while it’s spinning, obviously. But…” Viktor turns, and his eyes meet Jayce’s, falling halfway shut as he smiles. “You’re quite a bit more competent than that.”
Jayce is spellbound, unable to look away. He is distantly aware that he stands at a threshold – that this mysterious Undercity inventor suits his work perfectly, extraordinarily, but that Viktor’s addition to his neat Piltovan life may change his fate in unpredictable ways.
“I, um…” Jayce stutters and blinks, but still cannot look away. “Viktor…”
“Yes?”
“Come try it with me.” The words leave Jayce’s mouth in a cascade. “I-I mean, if you want to.”
Viktor’s brows raise. “What do you mean? Test it?”
“I mean…” Jayce looks to the wood grain of the coffee table, to its layered ring stains. After a deep breath, he asks, “If I feel like I want something, is that the shimmer?”
Viktor purses his lips. “No. The shimmer might, eh, lower your inhibitions, but desires are always your own.”
Before this, every friendship and every connection has fallen away, all soured by Jayce’s singular obsession. Viktor’s interest, in comparison, is inspiringly pinpointed, like the searing light of a magnifying glass. The pit that Jayce has carried in his stomach – the bitterness of going unseen and unheard for a lifetime – is all charred in its heat, reduced to little more than ash and amaranthine smoke.
Jayce nods, resolute. He raises his left hand – the one bearing a hexite shard on the wrist – and brings it down onto Viktor’s shoulder.
“Come be my partner. In hextech.”
Viktor blinks. His expression remains open, interested, but he says, “I… have a job. I have responsibilities.”
Jayce squeezes Viktor’s shoulder while thinking. “Okay… listen. I don’t mean for this to sound strictly transactional, but what if… I were to help you with your job?” Viktor’s brows furrow, so Jayce continues, “My family owns a forge. I’m trained in blacksmithing. I could cast parts for you. Probably not the tiny pneumatics, but just about everything else. I could—”
“You’re what?” Viktor’s eyes alight with a glint of hope, of opportunity, of azure starlight.
“I’m— yeah. I could save you time and money, and then you could…” Jayce trails off. He releases his grip on Viktor’s shoulder to tug at his open shirt collar. Heat rises up his neck. “Sorry, I’m being forward.”
Viktor’s expression softens with sympathy. He extends his hand to Jayce’s knee, then draws it back without making contact. “I see. I…” He hesitates for a long time, and his jaw moves as though he is chewing on his tongue.
Jayce breathes deeply and blinks away the tears forming at the corners of his eyes as a peculiar sense of overwhelm threatens to take him. Fascination, gratitude, sheer fortune; elevated to a crest by the shimmer, certainly, but present all the same. To the air, he murmurs, “I’ve… uh, never connected with someone like this before.”
Immediately, as though he had been waiting for permission, Viktor settles the hand on Jayce’s knee. He says, “I think I feel the same way. If I can find the freedom, I would love to join you Topside.”
Due to the intoxication, or perhaps due to Jayce’s own excitement, the touch is electric. The warmth of it radiates through the fabric of Jayce’s academy slacks, up his thigh. He becomes acutely aware of the weight, the pressure, the geography of Viktor's palm and fingers against him.
Viktor tilts his head, carefully studying Jayce’s expression. Viktor’s gaze is pointed, direct – the kind of stare Jayce might wilt under were it coming from anyone else, as though Viktor could peel back the layers of skin and bone and see inside Jayce’s mind. He might as well take up residence there, mathematical sledgehammer and all.
Jayce blinks as a hand comes up to cup his face. The fingers are long and blunt, cool against his heated skin. A tingling sensation spreads through Jayce’s cheek and jaw, like carbonation or static, and his eyelids flutter.
Viktor says, “Jayce…” and Jayce’s eyes meet his. They both search each other for a moment. Jayce’s eyes flicker across Viktor’s face – the thick brows, the moles, the slightly parted lips. Viktor’s eyes glance down to Jayce’s lips in return.
Close, so close that his breath moves across Jayce’s lips, Viktor whispers, “Do I have the wrong idea?”
Heat curls in Jayce’s belly, and his breaths become shallow. He feels that he holds something precious, like a cut gemstone with uncountably many facets, and he is turning it in sunlight. Unable to see from all of the angles at once, Jayce can only guess at its shape.
It takes Jayce far too long to answer, but Viktor is patient. Jayce finally mutters, “I-I don't know.”
Viktor's expression falls slightly. "Ah, my mistake." His hand slides away.
As if possessed, Jayce catches Viktor's wrist and says, "I—you—we can try. We can see if—"
Viktor’s hand finds the loose collar of Jayce’s shirt and pulls. He quickly closes the space between them, eyes closing, hands drawing Jayce into a deep kiss. Overcome with it, Jayce does his best to match Viktor’s pressure. Their lips slide together, faintly wet and deliriously soft, and Viktor exhales a shimmer-sweet breath into Jayce’s mouth.
Viktor’s tongue is petrichor and overripe fruit, metallic bite and fresh-baked bread, and Jayce finds himself fixated, magnetized, chasing the complex flavor deeper, deeper into the man’s mouth. Under Viktor’s touch, his thoughts become molasses-slow and dreamlike, his sense of propriety drawn into a violet undertow.
🛠
Viktor flicks his tongue between plush lips, and Jayce’s tongue responds with an eagerness that sends heat spiraling across Viktor’s skin. Jayce is warm, strong and soft, openly thrilled and frightfully sincere. With hardly any awareness of it, Viktor has climbed onto Jayce’s lap, settled his knees on either side of Jayce’s hips, arched his chest forward. Jayce’s body is warm as a furnace, and no amount of contact feels close enough. Viktor wraps his arms around Jayce’s shoulders and presses closer, deeper. Closer still.
Jayce suddenly pulls away, parting their lips with a wet click. He tilts his head back against the sofa and gasps for breath.
Viktor huffs. “Ah, sorry. Got excited.” With a sleeve, he wipes a trail of saliva from his lower lip.
Jayce shakes his head, saying, “Don’t apologize. You feel great.” His chest heaves with breaths, and his hands trail up and down Viktor’s sides. His touch is hot, electric, and his irises are completely purple. His lips curl to a sweet smile, showing a slight gap between his front teeth. “I couldn’t have predicted this, but… it’s good. You feel good.”
Through the orchid-tinged haze, Viktor likewise marvels at the absurdity of it all. He had begun this morning with ambitions no grander than melting scrap brass to cast a new kneecap plate, but Jayce has delivered him theories that could reshape the very foundations of energy technology. Forces harnessed through crystalline matrices, power that defies conventional understanding. Magic. An azure spear splitting and upending his profane life.
Now, this same brilliant man pulls him into more wet, clumsy kisses with the enthusiasm of someone half his age, all pressure and graceless hunger. The mixture is unexpectedly charming – an architect of impossible science reduced to breathlessness by something so simple as Viktor's tongue in his mouth, set alight by Viktor’s fingertips working at the buttons of his shirt.
Jayce releases light, airy whimpers, his large hands exploring Viktor’s back in broad swaths. Heated, impatient, Viktor captures one of Jayce’s wrists and guides the hand between his legs – a clear signal, as Jayce seems unaccustomed to subtlety. Viktor rocks his hips into Jayce’s hand, allowing him to feel the growing thickness there.
Abruptly, Jayce pulls back again. "I'm—" their panted breaths meet in the air "—uh, sorry. This is fast. For me."
Viktor releases the captive wrist and sits back on Jayce's thighs. "Did I…?"
"You're okay." Jayce averts his eyes and struggles to calm his breathing. "It's… you're okay. I'm just overwhelmed."
"If I did something, you can tell me."
Jayce shakes his head, and his eyes meet Viktor's once more. "It's just… I'm in a new place, we've just met, I've never tried shimmer before…"
"Ah, deep end."
"Exactly."
Viktor nods, releases a held breath, and eases himself off of Jayce. He sits down on the sofa and straightens his trousers. If Jayce's earnestness and sincerity are innate, then Viktor reasons that he can take the words at face value. He wonders if Jayce is even capable of deception.
Underneath the reasoning, a desire to collect and keep Jayce has formed already, a surprise even to Viktor himself. He has had many partners, but these gentle eyes and fevered lips unexpectedly spin his cerebral fascination into genuine affection. Perhaps it’s the shimmer. Perhaps it’s the magic.
"So…" Jayce's broad hand falls over Viktor's knee. "Maybe next time?"
Relief washes over Viktor, cooling his anxiety before it can fully ignite. "You want a next time?"
Jayce's confidence begins to slip, and he begins to transform back into the nervous Academy student that Viktor had encountered in the shop. "I mean, if you do. I… I like you. So far."
Hoping to break the tension, Viktor shows a wry smile. “Would you court me?”
The question was meant in jest, but Jayce shrugs and says, “Sure.”
Jayce offers that answer with no pretense. He throws affection around like gold in front of thieves, as though he has nothing to lose if Viktor were to take hold of it.
Viktor hears his own voice say, “I… like you, too.”
"So, uh…" Jayce asks, "even if I'm nervous about this—" He gestures back-and-forth between them. "—would you still want to join me in Piltover?"
Viktor nods emphatically. "Yes, when I can. I hope you understand how important my work is."
"Of course. I'm just... earlier, you said that no one has ever believed in you. It's the same for me. So… I think… based on what I saw you do with my journal, I think I can believe in you."
Viktor watches Jayce’s expression, trying to determine whether this entire day has been a hallucinatory effect of his long-term shimmer use. Whether the warmth in Jayce’s eyes might burn off with the chemical haze by morning.
Before Viktor can respond, Jayce suddenly says, "Oh! I had an idea earlier. What if we were to make hextech prosthetics?" His eyes are alight, his hands gesturing wildly. "You know, like hands or like your leg brace. I think they could run on hextech energy instead of compressed air." He reaches to his journal on the coffee table. "Hexite's power is self-contained. You could skip the compression, you wouldn't rely on coal…"
Viktor watches, a bit dumbstruck, as Jayce flips through the journal. It is as though Jayce's affection bleeds into his work and his work into his affection — a self-referential madness — in a way that mirrors Viktor's own mind. His position with Piltover's Academy seems more and more precarious with each turned page. If Jayce were to fall from Piltover’s grace and tumble down through the grates and vents and tinted glass, perhaps he might let Viktor catch him at the bottom.
"Jayce."
"…have to see which secondary runes would be relevant to movement. If we could find two secondaries that forcefully resist each other and then power them alternately, they could mimic the function of a piston—"
"Jayce."
"Yes?"
"If Topside thinks this is too insane, you can build it here. With me."
"Wait, really?"
Viktor swallows, but the words are inevitable. Even as his heart races, he can't hold fate at bay. "I believe in you, too. No matter what happens — no matter where we end up — I'd love to be your partner."
Jayce beams like the sun, as though the whole world would go dark in the absence of his brilliance.