Chapter Text
Collapsed on the stone floor next to his near-catatonic literal partner-in-crime, Viktor could finally spare just a second to reflect that, as fleeing Topside with the entirety of the Piltover Enforcers on their heels went, it had been pretty smooth sailing. When the doors burst in on the remains of the lab, Merdada had taken one look at the wreckage and, for reasons that Viktor still did not understand and was not going to question, had met Viktor’s pleading eyes and said “I can buy you ten minutes.”
It wasn’t much, especially considering neither fugitive was much of a sprinter, Viktor for obvious reasons and the Talis boy because… well…
“Hey, Jayce, buddy.” He shook his shoulder enough to get the other man to look up at him with a groan. “Stay with me, okay? Are you still bleeding?”
Jayce grunted and gingerly peeled the wadded-up piece of waistcoat from his forehead. “Not sure. S’it bad?”
Viktor squinted at the gaping slashes across his new charge’s face. The blood wasn’t ideal. The blue, pulsing glow coming from under his skin was much worse. Best not to mention that part. “Let’s keep the pressure on it until we can get you some stitches,” he said noncommittally.
“What is this place?” It was a fair question, and keeping Jayce awake now that the adrenaline was wearing off was going to require conversation. Viktor leaned against the cool, rounded wall and took in the space before answering. It was more or less exactly as he remembered it. Workbenches littered with specimen jars, stone walls covered in suspicious diagrams. The lights were off but nevertheless, the room was lit by a faint bioluminescent green, coming from a few different tanks of liquid. The largest of which, a full ten feet tall and stationed front and center, Viktor was pointedly not examining at all.
“A lab.” he finally replied.
“In the sewers.”
“Not sewers… underground drainage tunnels to carry away industrial waste.”
Jayce smiled faintly and squeezed Viktor’s knee feebly with the hand not keeping his head in one piece. “Viktor. That’s what a sewer is.”
“The danger is less sepsis and more chemical burn.”
“Oh,” Jayce raised an eyebrow, then winced, “Well. In that case.”
“So,” Viktor cast about for something to keep the man awake. Generally you could keep any academy student engaged with some nice pointed questions about their research, but under the circumstances, that felt like it would just make everything worse. “Tell me about… hammers? What’s hot in the industrial hammer scene these days?”
“No.”
Viktor blinked. “No?”
“I won’t do it.”
Hard to tell if that could be classified as a ‘coherent’ sentence in context, but Viktor played along gamely. At least his eyes were staying mostly open. “Why not? Industry secrets?”
“Not until you tell me where you’ve brought me.”
“I told you, a lab in the… sewers.”
“You get, don’t you,” Jayce muttered thickly, “How that raises more questions than it answers.”
“I have a, er, contact here-,”
“Here being sewer lab.” Viktor waited patiently for Jayce to rehammer the point home since he seemed quite proud of himself for having broken Viktor down on it, even if he was talking like his mouth was full of cotton balls. Maybe he had bit his tongue in the explosion, too. Would have to check.
“Yes, here being sewer lab. He’ll help us out. I haven’t seen him in a while…” The green tank bubbled accusingly as Viktor again skipped over it in his glance around the room, “but it shouldn’t matter.”
“Heimerdinger is going to be pissed.”
This was categorically true, thus the sewer lab, but it wouldn’t do anyone any good to dwell on that now. Viktor tried to change the subject. “You know, when I was first starting out, I made a calculation error that took off my advisor’s eyebrows.”
“Did you break into his office that night, steal your work back, and use it to blow the side off a building?”
“Well, no,” Viktor admitted.
Jayce groaned. “I’m going to be exiled.”
“I mean. Yes. If they catch us. No, don’t-,” Jayce lurched backward to slam his head against the wall, and Viktor had a split second to thrust his hand between him and the wall to prevent a second concussion.
It was a relief to hear someone outside fumbling to connect the electric source, not in the least because it made Jayce look up from trying suicide by wall. Oh, he wouldn’t be used to off-the-grid power hook-ups. Well. Let no one say this entire experience wouldn’t be educational.
The lights came on, more stable than your average illegal hook-up, but still barely brighter than the chemical lamps. The ragged man who staggered through the door was therefore lit mostly in green, casting the open wounds over every piece of exposed skin in a disturbing, reflectionless black. He doubled over onto the nearest table, as though the effort of making it past the threshold unassisted had taken all his strength.
Jayce, whose amygdala hadn’t gotten the message that his life was over anyway, scrambled back against the wall like a cornered mouse.
The ghastly apparition looked over at them and rasped out, “Good timing. Viktor, toss me the first aid kit and mix up some Dichromena salve.”
Later, when Jayce was more functional and able to carry on a conversation, Viktor would explain, unasked, that they were in no position to refuse requests, and that it was strategic for him to immediately claw his way to his feet and start grabbing bottles off the shelves. (“I think it’s pretty reasonable to not want your friend to die in front of you, Viktor. You really don’t have to do this whole, uh, tough guy thing.”) He would say this because he really wanted it to be true that he had assessed the situation and done what was best for them, and not because, the minute his old mentor walked through that door, Viktor had immediately reverted back into a twelve year old boy who was pathetically eager to be useful.
In reality, it was only after he had already finished mixing the carrier oil that Viktor remembered he was an adult with a reasonable amount of agency over his life. “What am I doing?” he asked the bottle of dichromena extract.
“I was going to wait to ask,” came the doctor’s cheerful if distracted response as he ripped a roll of bandages into strips. “But if you’re going to bring it up. Your friend looks like hell. What did you do?”
“Nothing!” twelve-year-old Viktor bubbled up to protest, just as Jayce said blearily,
“Blew up a building.”
“Ah,” their host nodded, “We’re having the same night, then. How’s that salve coming? I’m mostly boils at this point.”
Viktor slammed the mixing bowl down harder than he intended on the bench next to the bandage strips, and didn’t even get the satisfaction of startling the doctor. He just smiled ghoulishly at him, said, “Ah, perfect,” and started slathering the stuff on his wounds.
And they were bad wounds. Viktor noticed, fully against his will, the deep burns that still reeked of superheated chemicals instead of flesh, and covered far, far too much of his old mentor’s body. They were almost the same height now, and that felt wrong, too. “Are you sure you are going to be okay? You need medical attention.”
“Heh,” the man wheezed, grabbing a bandage and mummifying his right arm with it, “I am the medical attention around here, you know that. Let’s see your friend, then, make sure he’s stable.”
According to the pocket watch that he was using to time waking Jayce up for a quick evaluation every two hours, it was well into the next morning before his patient woke up on his own and made some feeble attempts at untangling from the moth-eaten blanket he was wrapped in.
“Don’t push yourself,” Viktor warned automatically, startling out of his neck-destroying doze against his crutch.
Jayce, whose eyes were at least focused now, gave up on trying to sit up on the cot and rolled over to face the rickety chair his new friend had set up camp on. “Don’t push yourself, he says. Did you sleep at all?”
“A little.” Viktor had not, and both of them knew it. Rather than just let the lie sit there, he busied himself grabbing the glass he had been instructed to offer the patient if he woke up on his own. “Water?”
“Ugh, not yet. In a second. Where’s your friend?”
“He’s not my-” Viktor inhaled sharply through his nostrils and tried to remember his vow to himself to keep those pesky emotions tamped down until Jayce was out of danger. “He’s out on a housecall.”
“A housecall. Man looks like burnt lasagna. And you tell me not to push myself,” Jayce muttered again, favoring Viktor with a smile that looked more painful than wry. “The nerve.”
“Well, I don’t care if all his skin sloughs off, I care if you get permanent brain damage,” Viktor grinned a little in return, hoping to at least make this feel a little reassuring.
Instead, though, Jayce gave up on the forced smile and turned away, hiding his face as much as his state would allow. “Why?”
“It’s his skin, he can do what he wants with it,” Viktor muttered. It turned out that bitterness, like twelve-year-old Viktor, was impossible to keep repressed down here.
“I meant, why do you care about me? You don’t even know me. I ruined your life.”
“Ruined your-? Jayce, I ruined your life. You were free. You were safe. You would be home in your bed right now if I hadn’t pushed you into this stupid, reckless, insane pipe dream!”
“Hey,” Jayce interrupted this tirade of self-loathing with a feeble hand against Viktor’s shin. “That’s my research you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry. The theory is good. There’s no problem with the theory.”
“Heh. The problem might lie with the theorist,” Jayce said with a rueful smile as he drew his hand back to tap his own chest pointedly.
“No,” Viktor protested immediately. “This wasn’t your fault.”
“I would love to hear how I’m not responsible for the explosion I caused trying to manipulate my crystals with my device that I didn’t test at all… with my eyes closed.” He closed his eyes with a groan. “What were we thinking.”
“We were thinking we could change the world,” Viktor supplied. “And we still can. It was too idealistic to think it would work on the first try, let alone with half the council trying to break down the door behind us. We just need more time. You just need more time.” And I’m going to buy you that time no matter what it takes. “Let me go steal some pillows. You should sit up and drink something.”
Jayce muttered something as Viktor was finagling the poorly-hung bedroom door open and refused to repeat himself when Viktor absently “Hmm?”ed at him. It had sounded like “I don’t deserve more second chances.”
He had tried (offered? threatened?) to leave her at home, which was shadowy and dark and still had all their stuff, like everyone was coming home any minute, but also it was full of people who didn’t belong and they kept asking him what to do next and moving stuff around and she couldn’t stay there, it wasn’t… it was too… being there alone made her chest tight and her heart pound in her ears like cymbals and when she had started gasping for breath, he’d come back and taken her by the hand and led her outside. She had clung to him the rest of the way through the Lanes and out past the part of the Undercity that was still ‘city’ and into the part that was just ‘under’.
She knew about the sewers; specifically, that she shouldn’t play in them and there wasn’t anything worth seeing down there anyways. This, apparently, had been a lie. There were things in this strange, half-converted cave of a room that Powder had only read about in tattered, out-of-date magazines. Crystal stills slowly converting murky liquids into bright droplets that were then caught in flasks, real laboratory flasks, not liquor bottles with the labels carefully peeled off. Blow torches with their own fuel tanks and little triggers on the handle to control the flames. Sets of polished magnifying lenses attached to a headset, so you could switch to a higher resolution while you worked. Little Man was going to call her a liar when she told him.
If he didn’t hate her. If he was still alive? Everyone else was dead, how could he possibly still be alive? Had they taken him but not her on the failed rescue mission? He always did things right, learned how to throw a punch, knew how to keep quiet, knew when it was OK to touch things and when to stop fidgeting. His inventions always worked, was that it? He wasn’t a-
She let out an involuntary sob of distress and clung more tightly to Silco’s leg. He wasn’t paying attention to her really, he was busy arguing about something the doctor had said when he was examining Sevika, but he was solid and warm and hadn’t pushed her away once since he had rescued her.
“He’s no less dead for getting a post-mortem, you know,” drawled the doctor, who looked like the sort of monster she expected to find in the sewers, but talked like a posh Academy git and had the coolest hideout Powder had ever seen, “You could have the funeral after.”
“There’s not going to be a funeral!” Silco shouted back. The sudden noise caught her off guard and made her flinch, and he gave her shoulder a quick squeeze of apology almost instantly.
“Please, keep your voice down, I have a patient,” the doctor murmured. She followed his glance back to a drab corner of the room she had been too awe-struck to notice earlier. Two Pilty men in muddied and torn suits, looking like they’d swum the channel to get here, stared back at her. One, propped up on a cheap folding cot with bandages wrapped around his head and chest, was built like a blacksmith but had some house insignia she couldn’t place on the sad limp jacket drooping over his shoulders. He caught her gaze and looked up at the gaunt, knife-thin figure leaning over him on a crutch that cost more than a miner’s entire workers’ comp pittance. He frowned back at his bandaged companion, then at her, and beckoned her over.
“This isn’t about Va- the body, this is about you giving orders to my men when I’m not there-,” Silco was insisting, forcing the venom in the words out into seething sibilance instead of strident outrage. She tentatively released his pant leg, and when he didn’t seem to notice, took a few cautious steps up to the strangers.
The one who had beckoned her over lowered himself onto the edge of the cot to be closer to her eye level, gingerly stretching out a bad leg as she inched closer. When she was near enough to lift his wallet, he glanced up at the doctor and Silco to make sure they weren’t listening, and then whispered, “Did he give you that squid eye?” in an accent straight out of the mid-levels.
The shock of hearing Undercity cant out of a Piltover tourist had not worn off before he reached out to gently brush the stinging spot under her eye, and repeated, more insistently, “Did he hurt you?”
You did this?!
“No,” she whispered, shaking the not-Pilty’s hand away, unable to sort the answer out beyond the one word. No, he hadn’t hurt her, he had been the one to grab a fresh dishcloth and a bottle of vodka out of the bar to clean off her scratches. It was the sort of thing Vander had done when she skinned her knees. Comforting. Normal. He’d even tunelessly hummed the same song to stop her from flinching when the alcohol stung. So, no, he hadn’t hurt her. The black eye had been- “She’s gone.”
The man, (the doctor’s guest?) nodded solemnly at her response and hoisted himself to his feet, hobbling past the argument still raging by the workbench. (“I don’t understand the issue, it’s not as though I am proposing to pickle him.”) The doctor barely broke focus as he approached, except to step out of the way and hand him a jar of something before he reached for it. So they knew each other, then. She knew that sort of wordless, effortless bond. It was something her brothers had trained for, trying to anticipate each other’s movements before they happened, trying to learn with drills and games what the adults had learned with blood on the job. She had never gotten the hang of it. Now she never would.
Her mind jerked away from the thought, like she had grabbed an exposed wire, and she looked away from the two doctors doing… whatever it was they were doing… and over to the man on the cot. He was staring into the distance, and she wondered a little if whatever had happened to his head had left him funny. He shifted his weight, winced and drew a hand halfway to his bandaged head with a gasp of pain. And when he raised his head again, she noticed the faint, luminous blue pulsing along his temple, lighting up the veins snaking underneath the bandages.
But that wasn’t possible. She would have seen him, if he had been there. Right? In the moments before, the line-up of bar regulars suddenly and inexplicably turned against her family… he hadn’t been there, wouldn’t he have stood out?
“What happened to you?” she asked, reaching out towards the glow. Just like when she’d first seen those crystals, like something else was controlling her hand, pulling her towards them.
He didn’t stop her; he didn’t seem to be moving or thinking fast enough for the thought to occur to him before she had made contact, fingers tracing over cool, smooth skin. There was nothing… different, just skin. The glow was underneath, part of him.
“I did something stupid,” he said as she withdrew her hand, “Something dangerous. Something I wasn’t supposed to. And I got people hurt. And now…” He shook his head, no longer really speaking to her, gaze elsewhere, “I’ve lost everything.”
The world tilted, the previously-solid objects around overlaid with after-image glow outlines of wreckage, limp bodies twisted and trapped in blue-and-red-tinged rubble, ghostly eyes watching her just out of her range of vision. She squeezed her eyes closed against it, and sucked in her breath, counting to three like she had been taught just last night.
When she opened her eyes again, the man with the glowing veins had not noticed anything was wrong. Maybe he was caught up in his own thoughts, or maybe the ghosts only felt cataclysmic to her. And she had a question now burning on the edge of her tongue. “What are you going to do now?”
His reactions were agonizingly slow, the way she was hanging off his response. His eyes drooped closed, and he started to hang his head as if it was too heavy to keep up but too painful to let fall. “I don’t know. I can’t - there’s no going back. I can’t fix this.”
“Oh.”
The other man, the doctor’s friend, tapped her on the shoulder while she was trying to process that, and held up a mortar filled with a green goop. “May I?”
The stuff he smeared on her cheek was cold, a startling contrast from the steamy lab space. It brought her attention away from the haunted, glowing man next to her. “What is it?”
“It is… a cooling poultice. If you mix certain chemicals together, they get cold, and that will keep your bruise from swelling up. More sanitary than putting a steak on it.”
“Like an endothermic reaction?” she asked, dipping a finger in the mortar with a renewed interest. “Was that just to get it down to temperature, or will the reaction keep going? Is it just a proportion thing, or did you have to add something to slow it down?”
If she had been surprised to find an Undercity boy in a Piltover suit, he looked just as startled to find an engineering student in singed hand-me-downs.
“Do you want to learn how to make it?” he asked her, recovering pretty fast, considering the bags under his eyes.
“Yes, please,” she said immediately, and then remembered that she wasn’t here on her own. She glanced over at the man who had brought her here and found that while she had been distracted with the strangers in the corner, the doctor had poured him a generous glass of something clear and brown and they were drinking together. The argument about what to do with Va- the argument had gotten quieter and more civil and she couldn’t make out what they were saying anymore.
“They will be fine,” her new chemistry friend confided in her, following her gaze. He glanced back at the man on the cot, who was still lost in his own thoughts. “It’s going to be fine.”