Chapter Text
There was a steady rhythm to the work, a percussive, constant beat that thrummed through Viktor’s veins and always walked him home. Everyone sang, especially in the last hours of the day, as the sun was setting on the harbor and most of Viktor’s work was finished by the light of a blowtorch. The men in the shipyard sang old songs, or things piped in from Piltover and beyond. They sang songs they’d made up, songs only a few of them know, songs only one of them knew. Viktor’s work was more detailed, and kept him apart from the men hanging on cables and climbing the thick metal smokestacks, but he always sang along with them, and, over the years, even taught them a few tunes of his own.
When the final whistle blew, it was hammers down. The shipyard didn’t pay overtime, and if you got hurt after hours, they’d pretend you were never there. Viktor closed one last panel, flicked one pressure gauge on his way out for good luck, and hung his gear on his hook. He gripped his crutch and swung his lunch bag over the other shoulder before joining the line of workers making their way out.
“Eh, Viktor—” Viktor turned. His foreman put a heavy hand on his shoulder, nearly knocking him to his knees. “Have a drink with us, won’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s been ages! Don’t leave us hanging.”
Viktor smiled. Usually he said no — he wasn’t a very big drinker, and the bar food wasn’t his favorite — but tonight, his nerves still humming with that day long beat, it seemed like the right idea.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not.”
“There we go.” Someone put an arm around his shoulder and he was swept into the little crowd headed to the Last Drop.
Viktor didn’t know the owner of the Last Drop well. Vander was broad shouldered and a pillar of the community in Zaun. His past was deeply connected to the past of their city, but it wasn’t something Viktor had been so privileged to know. He was drawn into the bar by the momentum of the group and deposited in a chair. A drink appeared on the table in front of him in a matter of minutes. He took a sip and noted that either the beer had either improved since he was here last, maybe a year or so ago, or his standards had dropped. Either way, he drank.
Vander came by to check on them. He was smart, Viktor thought. He knew his patrons well, and knew who to reach out to, who to treat to a free round, and who to cut off. He shook a few hands before moving on to another table.
Viktor had two drinks, listened to some music, and announced loudly he needed to be getting home.
“So soon?” His foreman drained his tankard. “Feels like we just got here.”
“Some of us would like to enjoy our day off tomorrow.”
“Ah, that’s right. Well, enjoy. Cheers, thanks for coming out.”
A little shout went up from a few others as Viktor smiled and picked up his crutch from its spot against the table. He slipped past a few other groups as he made his way toward the door.
“Viktor.” Viktor turned toward Vander, who was messing with the jukebox by the door. He didn’t know Vander knew his name, but he knew when to stop and listen. “It’s good to see you in here. Your old man and your uncle used to come in all the time.”
Viktor nodded. It had often been a source of contention between his parents growing up, that his father spent a bit too much coin at the Last Drop, and his uncle was a bit of an enabler. Not enough to cause a rift, but enough that his mother worried.
“You know if you ever need anything, this door is open.”
“I…thank you. I appreciate that.”
Vander put a hand on Viktor’s shoulder before moving on.
Odd, Viktor thought, before stepping onto the street.
He took the long way home. It required a small bit of meandering past the docks and down another side street that led past one of the public gardens. Overgrown and unkempt, it still bore fruit and vegetables and a rare rose that only grew in Zaun. Viktor actually preferred this walk after dark, and he’d been accosted by enough young people to know how to defend himself. More than a few young men learned that Viktor’s crutch was sturdier than it looked.
He was walking past one of those familiar alley ways when he heard what could only be the sound of someone being mugged. The dull thump of fists on a body echoed around the alley, but Viktor didn’t hear anyone in pain really. He just heard the repeated beat, beat, beat of the attackers.
“What’s going on?” Viktor called out, hooking down the road and immediately moving toward them. “What are you doing?”
“Oh shit.” One of them looked up, and Viktor recognized him, by a pale scar that seemed to glow under the light of the streetlamp, arcing over his brow and down his cheek. “It’s him!”
“It’s who?”
“The cane guy, fuck—”
They dropped their victim, and Viktor saw three figures fleeing into the night, looking for their next thrill.
He sighed and moved closer. It seemed to be a man, dressed in tattered clothes and a large cloak, the hood of it bunched around his neck and collecting the blood that slowly dripped from his nose and brow. It slicked his lips and pooled on the ground beneath him. When Viktor finally saw his hands, they were cut and swollen from defending himself.
“Damn,” he muttered, and knelt as best he could at the man’s side. “Look at me,” he said. “Are you alright?”
Stupid question. He’s bleeding out in the street.
The man lifted his head. It was worse than he thought, Viktor realized, but not fatal. He sighed.
“I can’t carry you,” he said. “But I can help you as best I can. Are you able to walk?” Nothing. Then, the man nodded. “Alright. Here, let’s get you to your feet.” He stood and offered a hand. It took some effort, and there was a moment when he was nearly knocked to the ground, but eventually he had his crutch firmly in hand, and the man’s arm around his shoulders. “There we go. It’s not far,” he added, “just around the corner.”
Of course, with a man twice his size hanging off him, it felt quite a bit further, but eventually Viktor got the man inside the house and onto the sofa.
“Your clothes are ruined. Take them off.”
Silence. The man seemed not to hear him.
“Your clothes,” Viktor said, standing in front of him and tugging at the collar of his shirt. “Take them off. I have some things you can wear.”
That seemed to get through to him. When Viktor came back with the clothes he’d managed to scrounge together, the man was shirtless. He had the beginnings of bruises blooming across his chest and abdomen.
“Here,” he said. “If you lie down, I’ll help you. We need to clean these wounds, or they’ll get infected.”
After that, they didn’t talk much.
The man was exhausted, and frankly, after everything that had happened, Viktor was, too, so he gave small instructions.
“Lift your head.”
“Drink this.”
“Stop moving.”
A halo crafted from a bowl of warm water and pieces of cloth slowly formed around the man’s head on the small side table as Viktor tried his best to tend the stranger’s wounds. There were no broken bones that Viktor could see, but he still didn't look good, exactly. His hands were swollen and split, and his busted lower lip was a particularly nasty mess that hurt to look at. The gash across the right side of his brow was worse, predicting a watercolor of bruising that would bloom under the half-dried streaks of blood already painting his cheek and jaw.
Viktor wiped the thick, stubborn layer of blood away from the cuts as gently as he could, cursing in a way that would have made his mother very angry. His hands were made for the welding of his work and sharp charcoal lines of his art: movements fast, determined, and decidedly permanent.
Viktor only hoped the man was too out of it to register much pain. If he did, he didn’t cry out, just like in the alley.
When Viktor pulled the damp cloth around the hollow of the man’s eye, it blinked open. The man watched him with a glassy, unseeing gaze.
Damn.
The man’s eyes were beautiful, even in the dim light of Viktor’s apartment — small deposits of citrine unearthed from the cracked and caking blood on the man’s brown skin.
The man blinked up at Viktor cautiously, experimentally.
Viktor tightened his grip on the cloth.
Wispy scarlet clouds curled into the little bowl of water. “Did you even try to fight back?” The man shut his eyes tight again and rolled away to face the wall, twisting as much as his bruised ribs would allow. It was a fair question, he supposed, but maybe not the best to start with.
Protected. Closed off.
Viktor understood.
The man drifted back to sleep before Viktor could ask him anything else. Viktor soon followed.
Between work at the shipyard and his artwork, it was uncommon for Viktor to get more than a few good hours of sleep every night, but because today was a day off, Viktor rose just as the sun began to bleed golden light through his small bedroom window. He awoke with the whispers of a dock song in his mind— a melancholy tune, with a beat for the laborious hauling of heavy ropes and chains.
I dreamed a dream the other night. (Lowlands, lowlands away) His cheeks were wet, his eyes did weep. (Lowlands away)
He slowly stretched out the muscles in his knee, gathering the energy to enter his living room and see if the injured stranger had been a lonely figment borne from drunken thoughts. It would be easier that way, maybe.
But there he was, tossing and turning on the couch, his brow shining with sweat.
The man spent the next two days coming in and out of consciousness, like water breaking against the yellow cliffs of Zaun. He’d awaken suddenly, gasping, wet, and shaken, only to be dragged slowly back down into the depths of a restless sleep.
Occasionally, Viktor would try to ask him questions— what his name was, where he was from— but he was met with only bleary eyed silence. Viktor let it go for now.
Instead, he organized his unused canvases, washed his sheets, replaced the stranger’s blankets, put his tools back in their proper places (more or less). When the man passed out again later that morning, Viktor went to buy proper ingredients for one of his father’s recipes, which he swore could cure anything. This, of course, was true until it wasn’t, but perhaps a part of Viktor still liked to believe in magic like that.
On the afternoon of the second day, Viktor decided to paint.
Part of him wondered if he should be tending to the stranger more closely, but he didn’t get much time to paint as it was, and the man on his couch was fairly low-maintenance, all things considered. He was currently snoring softly, his long limbs sprawled out and hanging off the edge of the couch as if he hadn’t slept this well in months, which was possible — judging by the state of his clothes.
So Viktor kneaded half-fingernail dollops of paint onto his palette. Paint was expensive in Zaun, so he had learned to mix them well enough to cover the entire spectrum with only a few tubes. Painting was a delicate balance between aesthetics and science, he liked to think.
This painting was a larger one; a partial study of the factory machinery that jutted from Zaun’s cliffs, and, incidentally, Viktor’s favorite view at work. The painting was close-cropped, so the sparse foliage and the delicate metal formed a lacey pattern against the glowing, glittering horizon. It was a mix of the natural and the manufactured, the organic and the engineered.
Again, Viktor felt a work song thrumming in his bones. Sometimes it felt like the music was what pushed him forward each day, the rhythm keeping his body moving and the rests giving him space to create.
He thought, as he painted, that it was a matter of perspective if the machinery on his canvas was a cage or a viewfinder.
A blocky line was slowly transforming into a light reflection when Viktor felt the weight of someone’s gaze on the back of his neck. The man was staring from across the room. He turned away quickly when he saw Viktor looking back. Viktor could have sworn he saw the man’s face flush.
Viktor straightened his shoulders and painted for another few minutes — just long enough to prove he was firmly unbothered by his audience — before washing his brushes. He didn’t realize he was humming until he turned the water off.
By the late evening of the second day, the man was more conscious than unconscious, which Viktor took to be a generally good sign.
He still had not spoken, but he was more upright, watching attentively as Viktor chopped onions and beets, his fingertips staining a vibrant pink. Viktor, to his credit, managed to largely ignore the line of the man’s broad shoulders, as it felt a little odd for them both to silently stare at each other for hours on end.
Viktor was simply used to being the watcher, not the watched.
When the soup smelled just as tangy as it did sweet, Viktor carried a bowl to the man and found the slash on his brow had started bleeding again.
“Der’mo, why didn’t you say something?” Viktor muttered, setting the soup momentarily among the small graveyard of meals on the little table.
The man pressed an injured hand to his eyebrow curiously.
“Here.” Viktor dabbed the wound with another cloth. The man winced, but allowed Viktor to clean him up once more. His eyes didn’t leave Viktor’s face.
Biting his lip, Viktor pushed the stubborn mess of hair back, tucking it behind his ear before washing the cut once more. Again, Viktor tried to be gentle, but the cut was deep, through several layers of skin, and Viktor knew that it would almost certainly scar.
Hopefully the man didn’t care too much about appearances.
He was already handsome, but with the cut on his brow, the unshaven stubble, and the long, twisted tangles of black hair that fell just past his square jaw, he was more…rugged, if you liked that sort of thing.
Which, Viktor definitely didn’t.
Not even a little.
Of course, all of it would be more convincing if Viktor hadn’t seen him get beaten up by teenagers in the alley.
Viktor snipped off a long bandage. “Can you lift your head?”
The man obediently inclined his neck just enough for Viktor to wrap the bandage around once, twice. He tried to ignore how warm and solid the man felt under his hands.
“You should eat more,” Viktor said, and, for a moment, all he could hear was his father’s voice, so he added, “I’ll eat with you.”
The man blew through his nose, a tired, pained sound. His mouth was still a mess of purple and yellow bruises spreading into his stubble, and his lip was likely twice its usual size. It probably still hurt to talk, let alone eat, but — as Viktor’s father would have said — food would help him heal the fastest.
The man looked at the bowl of soup wistfully, inhaling deeply, eyes flashing. Then, cautiously, he pressed his injured fingers to the hot sides of the bowl and carefully raised it to his lips.
He got one good sip before soup began running down his chin and chest.
Viktor quickly steadied the bowl, his hands framing the stranger’s as they lowered it.
“Do you, eh, need help?”
The man glanced between Viktor, the bowl, and his swollen hands. Then slowly, timidly, he nodded, as a burning red blush crept up the sides of his face.
Viktor chewed the inside of his lip. Alright. No big deal.
The man’s lips parted softly for the spoonful. There was a gap between his two front teeth, which seemed like normal information to be reverberating in the back of Viktor’s mind.
The soup was gone in no time at all, and the man had more color in his face.
“This can cure anything.” Viktor raised an eyebrow. “Would you, eh, like more?”
A blush rose up the side of his cheeks again, and he nodded shyly.
Fuck, he was pretty.
“Alright.” Viktor stood up, scooping up the empty bowl and his cane. “One minute.”
Soon, the second bowl was gone, too, and the man was stretching out on the couch again, content, casting little glances at Viktor as he did so. Viktor could see the threadbare-wear on his shoulders and the way his collar frayed in the way that it only does when you overwear one piece of clothing. He wondered when the man had last had a proper meal.
“I, eh, have to go to work tomorrow, but—”
Suddenly— pleadingly— the man’s hand was on Viktor’s, holding it lightly. Viktor stared at the way the large, tan fingers wrapped around his own pale ones.
“Don’t…” The man’s hands were broad and strong, yet surprisingly soft. He did have sharp white scars coming up from his palm, like he had been sliced by something metallic. “Don’t steal anything while I’m gone.”
The man furrowed his brow.
“There’s not much of value here, anyway,” Viktor added, “For the record.”
That wasn’t necessarily true. There were some of his inventions, but those would only be worth the scrap metal to the untrained eye. And there were Viktor’s paintings, of course, but their value was perhaps debatable. The paint itself was probably worth more to a resale shop, though Benzo would know they were Viktor’s, and the stranger probably wouldn’t get very far after that.
The man’s mouth shifted in a flash of something that may have been a smile, but before Viktor could say anything, it was gone.
Then he squeezed Viktor’s hand, and it felt like the floor was falling out from beneath them, because he was looking at Viktor with those shining eyes, his brow all drawn up in the middle.
Don’t leave me, his eyes said, as loud as if he had shouted it.
Viktor pulled his hand away
The man’s own hands were too soft to belong to a miner or artificer, but he didn’t have any of the tell-tale tattoos or piercings many of the chem barons and their underlings deeper in Zaun boasted. And he was so… flighty. So easily punched.
So scared to be left alone.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
The man shrugged noncommittally.
“How long have you been here?”
Another shrug.
Viktor laughed— a sharp, cutting sound that he thought matched the rest of him. “Are you, eh, always this talkative?” He leaned back. “Or is it me?”
The man just continued to stare at the mountain of his feet under the blanket. It occurred to Viktor that this felt like a test of some kind.
“What’s your name?”
The man’s eyes, bright and clear against the mottled bruises on the soft skin around them, flicked to Viktor’s nervously before moving away again.
Viktor frowned.
“I’m Viktor.” An olive branch. Because letting the stranger sleep on his couch and eat his father’s famous broth didn’t seem to be enough.
Again, the stranger shook his head.
Bracing his elbows on his knees, Viktor glanced over to the windows by his easel and beyond, where the last periwinkle clouds were turning inky.
“You can trust me,” Viktor muttered. From here, his painting looked like a complicated tangle of light and dark spiderwebbing across the canvas. “You don’t have to. But you can.”
The muscle at the side of the stranger’s jaw clenched and unclenched and the corners of his mouth sank down as something in his expression turned dark and defeated. Then, slowly, he brushed his fingers against the shape of his Adam’s apple, and he shook his head once more.
Viktor furrowed his own brow. What — oh.
Oh.
“You can’t — you can’t speak?”
That dark thing in the man’s beautiful hazel eyes set deeper in, still, and he shook his head once more.
Oh.
Viktor nodded. It made sense now, why he never explained what happened, or called out as he bled. Or called out at all.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
The man didn’t look back at him. He seemed lost in a storm inside himself now, his mind somewhere on the other side of Runeterra. Tension pulled at the corners of his eyes and between his brow. With his long dark hair obscuring part of his face and bruises concealing the others, it was hard to tell exactly how old the man was— late twenties, if Viktor had to guess— but the worry seemed so at home there on his face that Viktor knew whatever noise that lived in the man’s brain must often drown out the rest of the world.
This time, it was Viktor who reached for the man’s hand to pull him back to his warm, dimly lit apartment.
“It’s alright.” He nodded towards the cane resting against the couch. “You think I do not understand?”
A flash of… something, as the man blinked back at Viktor, meeting his gaze a little more comfortably this time.
Viktor smiled a little. “Can you sign?” As he said it, he pointed at the man, then to his own headmind, and then made little wind up motions with his index fingers.
You know how to sign?
The man watched closely as he did it, his mouth ghosting silently over the words as he repeated them to himself. He tilted his head, his face scrunched up. A little, he seemed to say. Then, as if doubting himself, he shook his head. No.
Curious.
“That’s fine. Let me just…”
Grabbing his cane, Viktor made his way across the room to his art supplies. “My, eh, mother was deaf,” Viktor explained as he rummaged around the chest with his sketchbooks. “I learned to sign when I was young.”
He unearthed a small nub of a pencil from his graphite-coated box and brought it back over, along with a large mostly-blank sketchbook. “I can teach you if you’d like. But I, eh, think I should know what to call you first. Can you write?”
The man gave him a glare, somewhere between hurt and amused. Really?
Viktor laughed softly. “It is a fair question. But I don’t mean do you know how, I mean can you, with your hands hurt?”
The man cracked a bit of a sheepish smile at that, and something fluttered in Viktor’s stomach. As much as the man’s face seemed to wear worry comfortably, he was built even more for joy. Even with only one corner tugging back right now, it was like someone turned on a light in the room. Viktor had the strange thought that if the man really grinned, he may be blinded.
The man flexed his hand experimentally, watching the split knuckles and bruised fingers bend and crack.
He looked at Viktor out of the corner of his eye and raised his uncut eyebrow doubtfully.
Viktor nodded, smiling to himself as he turned towards the sketchbook. Now that the man was awake, now that they were talking (more or less), Viktor found he was surprisingly easy to read. Every twitch of his brow and curve of his mouth said more than Viktor usually ever did with words.
Quickly, Viktor sketched out the alphabet on blank paper— big, capital letters with ample white space around each one— and held it out for the man to see.
“Alright, what’s your name?”
The man looked at Viktor, narrowing his eyes, as if he couldn’t quite tell whether Viktor was testing him or not.
Then, hesitantly, he lifted his injured hand to the first letter.
“J,” Viktor read.
The man studied him for a beat longer, as if waiting for something. Viktor just moved the alphabet closer for him, until the man moved his hand to the next letter, and the next, slowly spelling out his name.
“J-A-Y-C-E,” Viktor repeated. “Jayce?”
The man looked back up at him, his hazel eyes wide and glowing.
He nodded.
Jayce.
It fit him— a name strong and broad, but soft around the consonants. Viktor tried to shake off the blush he knew was forming around the tips of his ears as he smirked. “That’s like that, eh, singer, right?”
Something soured in the man’s face, and Viktor watched as his wall was rebuilt in mere seconds. He shrugged, disinterested.
“Too many undue comparisons when you were younger?” Viktor asked. He didn’t know why it was so important to him that this man let him in, but he knew that he didn’t want to be on the other side of that wall. Besides, he knew how… frustrating other kids could be when you were different.
Especially if you shared a name with a famous singer when you couldn’t speak.
The man — Jayce — eyed him again before cracking another small smile.
Viktor nodded to himself. “Alright. Well. I do have to work tomorrow,” he explained once more, “but you’re welcome to keep resting here. I’ll leave food for you. And, eh, this, if you want it…”
Pulling the sketchbook back, Viktor quickly blocked in little hand shapes above each one of the capital letters. They were each different sizes, and some of the fingers were too square, and one of them ended up with six fingers instead of five as he tried to finish quickly. Not his best work, but they got the point across.
“Here.” Viktor passed the sketchbook to Jayce. “That’s each sign for every letter of the alphabet. And this,” Viktor made a sort of salute with his hand, “is hello. This,” he opened his hand and closed it back into a fist, “is goodbye.”
Jayce repeated them carefully, his eyes determined, even as his swollen fist wouldn’t close all the way.
“Good. This is please,” Viktor made a circling motion, “and then this is thank you.”
Jayce tried those, too, and then took the sketchbook from Viktor, his eyes running eagerly over the page.
Viktor stood and took his cane in hand. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Jayce.”
The sky was well past dark now, and Viktor needed to catch a scant few hours of rest if he would make it on time for his shift. There was a shipment coming in tomorrow at dawn, which meant he needed to be there while it was still twilight. He turned back towards his room, but Jayce’s hand caught his wrist once more, stopping him.
Jayce looked up at him, his expression impressively warm and bright under the bandage on his brow. If it weren’t for the deceptive dimness of the lamplight, Viktor would have sworn his eyes were shining.
Jayce moved his free hand to his mouth and then down and away, in a slow, meaningful motion.
Thank you.
Viktor smiled as something warm took root deep in his core.
“You’re welcome.” Then, “Please don’t steal anything while I’m gone.”
Jayce smiled again and nodded, his dark hair falling back into his face.
Viktor nodded, too, before he shut his bedroom door behind himself.
He stood there, back against the door, watching the stars rise in the sky through the small window of his bedroom. Again, the dock song echoed in his mind as he roiled in his blankets, trying to find rest.
He made no sound, no word he said. (Lowlands, lowlands away) And then I knew my love was dead. (Lowlands away)
It was a long while before Viktor fell asleep, and when he did, he thought he could hear Jayce snoring softly from the other room.