Work Text:
The house on Emberflit Alley is haunted.
That is, at the very least, what the locals claim, in dirty little whispers passed from mouth directly to ear, hands shielding lips. Sometimes the resident, his silhouette occasionally seen by passers by through the cracked window glass, barely illuminated by soft orange candlelight, is the ghost of a scientist; other times he is a bogeyman. He stalks through the foggy, cobbled streets of Zaun, steel shining silver in the moonlight and slick with blood from his visits across the bridge to Piltover. Only the most desperate dare seek out his help, and out of the few that manage to return with their lives, none of them are the same.
But Naph knows better.
Emberflit Alley is where his friend Viktor lives. Viktor is a scientist, the rumour mill does, at least, have that right, and a brilliant one at that - Viktor got very sick in his lungs and his legs but then replaced them with metal pieces so he could feel better. Augmentation, he calls it, and he’s done the same for others, building and fitting prosthetics for people who have had horrible accidents in the mines and can’t work and their families are struggling for it. The house on Emberflit is therefore less of a house and more of a laboratory-cum-hospital, decorated with rusted engineering tools and blood-stained gurneys as well as silly, ordinary things like a patchwork couch and a chipped ‘Man of Progress’ mug that Viktor always drinks sweet milk out of. Naph goes there when he doesn’t want to go home, which is the majority of the time nowadays, because home is an overpopulated fissure orphanage where everyone exists in their own filth and anarchy is king and the few adults wandering around the place don’t give a rats arse if a group of older boys band together to consistently beat a younger one bloody. Naph isn’t frightened of them anymore, though. Viktor did something ticklish to his brain - at request, of course - and now he isn’t scared of anything.
Viktor lets Naph hang around as long as he a) is quiet; b) doesn’t bring anyone trailing back to the house after him; and c) doesn’t mind passing him a tool or two when he’s become absorbed by a project. He taught Naph how to properly make a fist so he doesn’t injure his thumb when throwing a punch, and he didn’t get angry the day Naph stumbled out of a side cupboard waving an old crutch around stamped with a piltie house sigil like it was a toy. He calls Naph his ‘bothersome little ward’ and always answers courteously when he asks a stupid question.
Viktor is soft with Naph. He’s never said as such, but despite what the kids at the orphanage used to say, Naph isn’t dense. He knows affection when he sees it, even if Viktor claims he can’t feel it anymore.
“Naph, if you don’t cease with all that racket, I’m going to lobotomise you.”
Naph pauses mid desk drum solo, spanner in one hand and viciously chewed pencil in the other, and looks over his shoulder at Viktor. He's opened his wrist casually onto his work desk, tangled messes of crimson wires spilling out from the faux wound like blood, the usual mask cast aside in favour of a pair of welding goggles with a magnifying lens attached, torch in one hand and the Hex Claw bright and alive over his shoulder, the laser primed to spark any second now. The first time he ever met Viktor he was performing some kind of self surgery like this, always obsessing over possible upgrades, and so Naph has become semi-immune to wandering sleepless into the laboratory in the early morning time to find that his unofficial guardian has pulled part of himself apart. The walls of the lab are lined with jars, snippets of human anatomy suspended in some kind of foggy green liquid. Naph often finds himself privately wondering which lungs used to be Viktor's, which chipped and yellowed vertebrae made up his old spine.
”And wouldn’t that look good in the piltie papers -," he hops off of his chair, and dramatically waves his hands, "- Machine Herald Exposed for Experimenting on Innocent Children!”
”You’re hardly innocent," Viktor huffs. The laser fires, and the smell of burning meat momentarily floods Naph's senses. Viktor haphazardly shovels the wires back into place, and then seals himself back up. The Hex Claw chirps and whirrs over his shoulder. "And like I care what piltie papers have to say about me.”
”You collect them. I’ve seen the stash in your room.” It's in a sad looking cardboard box in Viktor's even sadder wardrobe, only hosting a few items of clothing - one wine coloured, moth eaten jumper; several suit shirts and jackets; a tie with that same piltie house stamp as his crutch. Without Viktor even looking, the Hex Claw snaps forward, fastening its pincers tightly but casually around the frayed collar of Naph’s shirt. He bats at it, giggling. “Okay, okay! - You only collect the ones that have the Defender on the front page.”
"I could still have your head sawed off and replaced with brass, you know?" Viktor sneers not unkindly. It's an inside joke at this point - the first time Naph had come here, bullied over the threshold by 'friends' to go and steal something under the threat of yet another bloodied nose, that was the story they'd spooked him with. He remembers how Viktor had responded when he'd told him this, face tight with what Naph now fondly recognises as the closest Viktor can get to allowing himself to express sadness - 'ah, is that what they think of me now?'.
"You know all too well I'm not afraid of that threat anymore." Naph hits the Hex Claw again and it retreats back to Viktor's side like an animal who has been slapped on the muzzle. "Plus, I think you'd miss my wonderful company."
Viktor makes a noise approximating a laugh. "My work is too good."
Naph hops back up onto his stool. The Hex Claw's laser fires up one last time to seal the metal plating back over the opening in Viktor's wrist, leaving in its wake an ugly but imperviously tight seam. He produces a rag from somewhere and, spitting on it, begins to polish off any marks left on the silvery chrome of his false skin, goggles shoved up his forehead and nose scrunched in concentration. This goes on in silence for quite some time, only interrupted by the sound of Viktor hacking up more spit into the cloth. Feet hanging a few inches off of the ground, Naph swings them back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
" ... It's progress day today," he finally breaks.
Viktor grunts. "I am well aware of the social calendar." As if the world would let him forget. He looks away to put all of his tools back into their rightful places in his box, and when he turns back Naph is practically vibrating on the spot. Viktor sighs, dragging his newly corrected hand down his face. "Ask what you want to ask."
"Can I go topside? I want to have a peek around."
"When have you ever needed my permission to do anything."
"I don't know," Naph shrugs. "It just felt right to ask."
He's not Viktor's in the same way he is absolutely not the orphanages; no one controls him but himself, and that's a wonderfully intoxicating kind of power for a very newly twelve year old boy to possess. However, he is Viktor's - unofficial, he hasn't asked and Viktor hasn't offered but Naph likes to imagine they both know it to be true regardless - apprentice, of sorts, and it would be wrong to just disappear off for the day without any kind of warning. What if Viktor needed him to go down to the market and haggle over some shitty, reject components or steal something? What if today of all days was the day Viktor finally decided that he wanted to sit Naph down and spill all of his deepest, darkest secrets but he couldn't because Naph fucked off to Piltover to go and - what? Look at blimps and steal slightly more expensive things?
"You may do whatever you please." The locking mechanism of the toolbox lid rings sweet and clear throughout the lab. Viktor shucks off his goggles and drops them onto the table with a clatter. Naph wiggles down ever so slightly so one foot just touches the floor, and then kicks the stool and himself over to Viktor's work desk, rusted wheels squeaking out of tune. "Just know that if, for whatever reason, you get detained by enforcers, I am not coming to rescue you."
"Yes you will," Naph replies without any hesitation. "You wouldn't let them cart me off to Stillwater."
Viktor smiles, raises a foot, places it gently against the seat of the stool, and then kicks with all his might. Naph hurtles to the other side of the lab, shrieking with laughter. He smacks into the wall, barely managing to dismount the stool before it topples over and hits the ground. "Maybe if they did that, then I would get some peace and quiet."
"Hardy-har."
Naph stalks his way casually back over to Viktor, whistling something off tune, jumping from tile to broken tile, trying his best not to step on any of the cracks. The house on Emberflit isn't exactly well built - it's foundations are old and slanted and certainly rotting, nothing is ever clean, and it's walls have been half blown to smithereens more times than he or Viktor can count, but even with its faults, its wonderful compared to the orphanage where Naph slept with a patch of mould growing across the ceiling above him. Here, he is warm, he gets the couch to crash on at night with basically no strings attached and as many blankets as his greedy little heart could ever want or need, and here he has Viktor, who is nice to him, who shares his sweetmilk even though Naph hasn't entirely come onto the flavour of anise, who always seems to be so wonderfully surprised whenever Naph comes back, but why wouldn't he? He likes it here. There's room enough for another strange ghost to haunt this big, old house.
"... Well?"
"Yes, fine, go. Enjoy yourself." Naph cheers and immediately begins scrabbling around in the casual debris of the laboratory to find his coat. "Don't get arrested or killed," Viktor calls after him, but Naph is already out of the door.
-
Amaranthine's Jayce - that's what she calls him because that's what he is, he's hers. He can't very well be anyone else's, can he? He doesn't have any other friends, and even though having your only friend be an eleven year old girl is pretty lame and embarrassing, it's objectively better than having no friends at all. He has Caitlyn, she guesses, but Caitlyn has her Vi, and so Jayce can't be Caitlyn's so he has to be hers - paces like a trapped animal backstage, reciting his speech for this years progress day aloud from memory. He does this every year like a dodgy bit of clockwork, always a mess in private, utterly convinced he's going to stumble over his too-long words or accidentally do something horrible like insult the entire council until he gets out on stage, where he's all wide, white-toothed smiles before the adoring crowd. Amaranthine usually stays behind the curtain to watch. This year, however, she's decided, like the little robotic bird she convinced Jayce to purchase for her from a merchants stall, to take flight.
Disappearing into the crowd is remarkably easy once Jayce finally takes to the speakers podium. He’s an entirely different human being when standing on a stage - electric, enigmatic, enchanting, all of the other ‘e’ words that he isn’t at home with her and with his fiddly bits in his lab. She weaves like a snake through the legs of adults until she bursts out onto the main street, still heaving with the excited public but slightly less tight packed, heady sunlight trickling down the back of her neck like water. Holding her copper bird out in front of her, clockwork wings stuttering up and down in the soft wind, mimicking flight, Amaranthine races across the cobbles, laughing loud as her Jayce’s voice fades into the background.
Piltover is at its most gorgeous on progress day. The buildings stand taller, somehow; the people smile wider. Amaranthine supposes they have existed in the past, but she has never known a progress day to bring with it bad weather, the sun always proud amidst a backdrop of blue, only the wispy suggestions of clouds to be seen. She dances through a sea of smart shoes and long, twirling skirts, weaves daintily through the wooden legs of stalls, trying her very best not to get too entranced by the smells of vendor food, the hot pastries and caramelised sugars. Overhead, unseen, a bird sings, and she imagines the copper toys beak moving in time to the tune. If she pokes her pinkie finger out just so, she can nudge it against one of the wings of the bird and make it appear to be flapping, the mechanisms intertwined.
Eventually, the crowds peter out, the crushing tide transforming into gently lapping waves, people strolling about on their lonesome or couples ushering home small, worn out children down the path, but still Amaranthine refuses to slow down. Bird still extended out in her palm, she careens around a tight corner and full-force smacks into someone.
Amaranthine shrieks and falls down onto the cobbles on her ass. The boy she ran into does exactly the same. The toy bird lands with a muted crack in between them, one wing severed from its fragile mechanical body.
"Look at what you've done!" She immediately cries, ignorant for a second of the pain racing up her coccyx as she scrabbles forwards and scoops up the two separate pieces of bird into her palms. The break is ugly and sharp and the ragged seam digs uncomfortably into the soft flesh of her palm. Across from her, head in his hands, the boy groans. "Look!" She yells again, and shoves the wreckage into his face, finally taking a proper look at it. He's rather slim, almost gaunt looking, and with big, copper eyes and a nose wonky from breakage. His clothes are dirty from more than just falling over and they don't seem to fit him very well. All of a sudden she's very uncomfortable in her frills. "You broke my bird," she says rather pathetically, because if she started the train of thought, she might as well finish it.
"No I didn't," he grumbles back, hands still clutching weakly at his temples. "Gravity broke it. You dropped the damn thing."
"I didn't mean to. You frightened me." Amaranthine stands and, scowl on her face but still utterly refusing not to be polite, offers her hand to the boy. He takes it. They both brush themselves off.
"Well then that's your issue. Just don't get frightened by things so easily," the boy says, shrugging, like rounding a corner and suddenly careening into another human being and then hurting yourself isn't something that immediately gets the adrenaline going.
"That's stupid," she scoffs. "You can't not be frightened by things."
"Yes you can. I'm not frightened of anything. I'm biologically incapable of it." He says biologically in pieces, like this - bio-log-ic-ally. She clutches the ruins of the little bird to her chest, petting its cold head with a finger. Distantly, in the very back of her brain, she thinks that Jayce might very well be wrapping up his speech now. It's never very long - ten minutes, tops, fifteen at a push and if the councils budget has been good this year. They get shorter and shorter every year, in fact, and at the afterparty Councillor Medarda, who is very nice to her and has pretty hair, always comes up to Jayce and complains about it in that way that very rich people do where they make it sound sweet and lovely but actually it's not at all. Jayce told her once that he and Councillor Medarda used to be good friends but aren't anymore, now they’re just more like co-workers. The boy is looking at her with those horribly inquisitive eyes. There's something curious about him that she can't quite put her finger on yet, but she's almost there, she's sure of it. She clears her throat.
"My name is Amaranthine."
"That's so long," the boy instantly snaps back. "Who has time to say all of that? Why would your parents do that to you?"
"I have the time, thank you very much, and my parents are dead so I can't ask."
"Piltover has orphans?"
"Everywhere has orphans, stupid."
"Well, my parents are dead, too, so you can't play that card on me."
"What's your name, then?"
"Naph."
"That's stupid. What kind of name is Naph?"
"Is stupid the only insult you know?"
”When you say that something is ‘naff’ it means that thing is shit or useless. Would you prefer being called shit and useless?”
The boy - Naph - opens his mouth to reply, but barely gets a syllable out before he spots something over her shoulder, wide eyes suddenly growing impossible wider, and before Amaranthine really understands what's happening he's grabbed her quite hard around the arm and is pulling her further into the little side alley. His other hand is clamped over her mouth before she can even think about attempting to scream. She bites down hard into the flesh of his palm. Nothing happens. From the shadows, the two of them watch as a pair of enforcers in their beautiful navy blue stroll past, the uniforms golden accents glinting in the sunlight, talking amongst themselves in soft, lilting voices, and then as soon as they were here, they're gone. Amaranthine licks a wet stripe up Naph's palm. He retches into his mouth and pushes her away, and even though she stumbles a little, she laughs.
"What the fuck is wrong with you!" He squeals, wiping his hand desperately on the fabric of his trousers. "That's so gross!"
"I knew it!" She cheers, everything in her head slipping neatly into place, like a puzzle she’s been struggling with for weeks, and she’s finally thought to look under the sofa and there is the missing piece, coated in a layer of lint and dust. She rushes close to him, backing him against the wall, and whispers not very quietly, "You're from the undercity!"
To his credit, Naph doesn't even try to deny it. He clearly thinks about it, but the boy knows when he is beat. He goes to slam his hand over her mouth again, but seemingly remembers better, and simply seizes her arm, though not as tightly this time. A quick learner, too. "You cannot say a word to the enforcers," he hisses, and there's something about his face that is so deathly serious it almost manages to stun Amaranthine into silence - almost. She twists her arm out of Naph's fist and bullies him flush against the brick wall.
"Or what?" Amaranthine replies, knowing damn well she would never say a thing. Undercity kids sneak into Piltover all of the time - it's one of those secrets that aren't really very secret at all and no one bothers to say anything to anyone unless they're causing serious trouble, which, despite what the papers say, is a pretty rare occurrence. It's fun, though, she discovers, to watch Naph squirm.
"Or ... or ... or I'll have the Machine Herald come and steal you away and turn you into one of his minions!"
Amaranthine knows that name, simultaneously fond and feared on Jayce's lips. It was with them both when she first met him, marched into his lab and demanded he fix her toy soldier and he almost blew her head off thinking that she was him, the metal man that Jayce had pictures of taped to the back of his chalkboard. He has too many journals filled cover to cover in incomprehensible scrawl noting all the details about his augmentations he's managed to glean from various fights and fixes. He bribes the enforcers that regularly patrol the undercity for any and all information they can scrape on him. He has a picture in a broken glass frame shoved under his bed that Amaranthine once found when she wandered into the room, awake from a nightmare, holding an image of a younger Jayce with his arms wrapped around a very thin but bright looking man with a cane, 'J + V' signed on the back.
Sometimes Jayce leaves the house very late at night and only returns after the sun is come up, and he's always bleeding and sometimes his friend Caitlyn has to carry him inside and he never, ever goes to the hospital, no matter how much Amaranthine begs and pleads and uses her big eyes even though that trick usually gets him to do anything and everything she wants. Caitlyn managed it once, if only because he was delirious from the pain and kept crying out sadly for someone who Amaranthine didn't know named Viktor and he was tearing up and that scared her because she'd never seen Jayce cry before. He had three broken ribs. He normally just sits at the table, or, on the occasions when the hurt is very bad, perched on the edge of the bed, and he tells Amaranthine bring him cups of water and clean cloths and bandages from the cupboard that she still has to use a step to get to and makes her promise not to look when he starts stitching himself together.
"How ... How do you know the ... the Machine Herald?" Amaranthine stutters. She crosses her arms over her chest in an attempt to cling onto a shred of her confidence. Naph mimics her movements with a lot more honest self-assurance, now with a wicked grin pulling at the corners of his lips.
"I'm his apprentice."
"Well ..." Amaranthine is, technically, Jayce's secret. Caitlyn and the Council know she exists, as do, in some vague regard, she guesses, the tailors and the toymakers Jayce often commissions for her, but Jayce wants her away from the public, away from the papers. He's very, very open about his distaste for media fanfare, but this time, faced with Naph and his absolute absence of any fear and his surely too sharp to be natural incisor teeth, she buckles under the pressure and falls back onto Jayce, knowing that, even if she disobeyed him, he would still do anything to help her. "I know the Defender of Tomorrow. He will protect me."
"Hey," Naph crumbles, pouting. "That's not fair, you can't say that. This isn't a game where you can just magic up a trump card - I genuinely work under the Herald."
"You're right, it's not a game," Amaranthine doubles down. "The Defender of Tomorrow is my dad."
"I thought you said your parents were dead?"
"I'm adopted ... kind of." She scuffs the toe of her mary janes into the alley dirt. "I live with him."
"Oh ... what's that like?"
Somehow, despite her little 'I live with him' coming off as utterly pathetic, as if she pays half his rent, Naph believes her, his face transforming into something soft and giving, and in that moment, Amaranthine decides she is absolutely enamoured by him. Amaranthine has tutors instead of going to school. She doesn't get to hang out with very many other children her age - sue her for taking the first kid to be vaguely interesting and fun and latching onto him like a starved leech. That's what she did to Jayce, after all, and, from what she's gathered, that's also exactly what Jayce has done to others, too.
"What's working under the Machine Herald like? Does he have you sedate people so he can steal their organs?"
"What? No!" Naph balks, like she's said something utterly absurd. "And I asked first."
"It's lovely, thank you very much. He fixes all of my broken toys."
Naph points at the broken clockwork bird still resting in her palm.
"Will he fix that one?"
"Of course he will." Amaranthine steps back from the onslaught for a moment to take a breath, and to think. Despite being only a child, she knows Jayce, knows that she's the first person to share a living space with him since the exile from Piltover of his scientific partner, 'V', famous for such things as being the co-creator of Hex Tech and starring in that photograph that she found under his bed. Caitlyn told her about that, about the exile, after he brought him home from the hospital, Jayce blissfully unconscious on a truly ridiculous cocktail of painkillers, that he was the deciding vote that sent 'V' - Viktor - away and that he regrets it every single day. She knows that the papers will sometimes rag on Jayce for never seemingly trying to actually kill his arch-nemesis, the Machine Herald.
And she's realising only just now that he broke into their house, once, could hear his distorted voice coming through the thick wood of the door, talking to Jayce. The words shared between them were indecipherable, but there was no violence, and eventually, unsettled, she went back to bed, and afterwards Jayce slept in until past midday and was miserable until bedtime again. She shuffles through her brain, her mind a great big filing cabinet and her memories the papers. "Can I ask a question now?"
"You just did," Naph grins.
"Oh shut up!" Amaranthine slaps Naph weakly on the arm. He flinches, she can't help but notice, but then quickly dissolves into shrieks when he realises the the blow is gentle, giggling manically. "Is the Machine Herald's name Viktor?"
"Yeah it is, actually. Why?"
Bingo.
"Jayce - The Defender - talks about a 'Viktor' a lot. I think they used to be friends, before they started doing all of this fighting, arch-nemesis stuff."
"You think?" Naph scoffs, as if this isn't new information to him, and that makes Amaranthine think. If Jayce still has photographs, research notes - what might Viktor have? What, in the bleak early mornings when the treacherous cogs of the mind refuse to cease their turning, does he pull out of old boxes and sigh over, what memories does he replay behind his eyes like projections whilst desperate to sleep?
"Jayce sometimes gets very upset about it and Caitlyn has to come over to calm him down," Amaranthine explains.
"Who's Caitlyn? His girlfriend?"
"Eww, no, just a family friend."
Jayce is definitely done with his speech now, and he's gotten far too practiced at gently but forcefully redirecting people who's questions he cannot be bothered to answer. He's noticed she's gone missing. He'll be looking for her. He'll be worried.
"Naph, I have the best idea."
"Okay ..."
"You're going to take me to visit Viktor, so he can fix my broken toy."
"I thought you said the Defender would do that for you? And - wait - take you down to the undercity? Absolutely not! It would eat you and all your frills alive! You're insane!"
"You're going to take me to visit Viktor, and then Jayce will come to find me, and then we can convince them to be friends again!"
"... Never mind, you're a genius. Follow me."
-
Progress day is the fucking worst.
When he was a boy, it was magical - the utter abundance that could be held all in one tiny place, the streets so alive with music and joy that he was convinced that the cobblestones under his feet were breathing in time with all the people, him clinging to his mothers skirt and having money to spend and spending it and eating so much crap he ended up in bed sick for the next few days and memorising the patterns on his ceiling knowing that he would be there, one day, with his inventions, with his magic.
As a graduate, too, working on Hex Tech with Viktor, progress day was wonderful, both of them boasting official invites penned in fancy calligraphy and in the run up Jayce would always loose them. They would spend their days pottering about the official convention, admiring the feats of engineering on display and attending talks and discussing their own works with various investors, and their nights were occupied with not just taking advantage of but downright abusing the open bars, Viktor slurring debasing shit about the piltie elite in between his harsh liquor shots and Jayce dutifully listening as he nursed his whiskey, his stray hand on Viktor's back or shoulder or thigh. He got touchy when he was drunk. Viktor only really let him touch him when he was drunk and it was easier to pretend that the tension between them was the alcohols fault.
It was when he started having to make the speeches that everything changed - the Hex Gates, the civil unrest that leaked out of Zaun like dirty water from a bruised pipe, Viktor's diagnosis and the experiments and the exile ... Next years progress day came with only one invite arriving on his doorstep, and him stumbling back into his lab drunk on the southern side of midnight to his former partner, irrevocably and irreversibly changed but still fucking alive, stealing the Hex Claw they had worked on together right from under his nose. It was the last time he heard Viktor's voice without the modulator, saw Viktor's face without the Machine Herald's mask.
This one, however, might just top the charts for the most awful one of all.
He sweeps Caitlyn up into a hug, and whispers shakily into her ear, "Amaranthine is missing."
"What?" She hisses. They pull apart. The crowds part around them as if they were two rocks breaking the surface of the water.
"Ama is gone," Jayce repeats, fighting every instinct to keep his words low and steady. "I know what you're going to say, and I've looked everywhere, Cait, everywhere I can. She was waiting backstage for me, I leave to go and do my shitty progress day speech, and when I get back she's just ... not there anymore." They both politely ignore the way that Jayce's voice cracks. He drags a hand down his face, but through his fingers catches sight of a young woman whispering violently to her companion, hand raised to point in his direction. He flashes a smile and waves. The girl and her friend both smile and wave back, refusing to restrain their swooning.
"Plenty of kids get separated from their parents on progress day," Cait says, and then turns her head away to nod to two uniformed colleagues who wander past. She does this a lot whenever she wants a rise out of him, calling Amaranthine Jayce's daughter, because she's not, not really - except for the fact that she very much is, because Jayce does her hair in the mornings without fail and cooks her her favourite meals even though he's an average cook at the very best despite his mothers best efforts and he's claimed her for house Talis in all but name just like he did with Viktor, when they were friends, when they were ... whatever they were. The bottom line is that that's his kid, damnit, and he cares about her, and as her guardian, he's supposed to protect her, and, like with most of the things he cares about, he's fucking failed. When he doesn't immediately rebuke her, Caitlyn's perfect composure shatters.
Caitlyn drifts out of arms. She says something to him about Amaranthine most likely stepping outside for air and being swept up in the crowds, something about statistics and that Ama is a smart girl and she knows to stay put and someone will come and get her, something about getting Vi to search and even she will, too, but Jayce doesn't process any of it. He opens his mouth to thank her for offering to expend the effort to help search, but instead what comes out is, "I'm off to the undercity."
"Jayce, be rational," Cait laughs, kind of nervously. "You can't really think that -"
"I don't ... I don't know," he admits. Viktor ... the Machine Herald ... whatever - he would never hurt kids. Jayce knows this about Viktor like he knows the sky is blue and there's oxygen in his lungs, but somehow, somewhere deep in his gut, in the very marrow of his bones, he just knows that if Amaranthine isn't at his side, she's at Viktor's. Call it a father's instinct.
"But why on earth would he ..."
"Maybe he knows she's mine?" It makes sense. Viktor always knew things about Jayce before Jayce even did. Maybe he saw her on one of the hundreds of occasions he broke into Jayce's apartment, asleep in the spare room that used to unofficially be Viktor's, always without jimmying a lock or smashing a window. What Jayce wants more than anything is to know how he gets in without causing a mess. His only pathetic guess is that Viktor hasn't thrown away his copy of the house keys. He should probably move.
"If he knows she's yours, he won't hurt her," Caitlyn says, though she fails to sound entirely convinced.
"I just ... I need to be sure."
He's had nightmares about this kind of thing before - waking up and finding her bed empty, window open, sheer white curtains blowing gently in the breeze, the same way he used to have nightmares of waking up and finding Viktor collapsed in the hallway or the lab or on the bathroom floor, blood pooling from his nose and his mouth. When that happens, he goes and sits outside her bedroom door. Once he fell asleep there, and she tripped over him in the morning, and he had to make up some silly lie about staying up too late conducting tests and getting confused as to which room was his so he didn't seem so pathetic and useless. When it was Viktor, sometimes he would open the door an inch or so, stick his eye to the crack, watch the sheets for however long it took until he was convinced he could see them lift and fall with breathing. Caitlyn hugs him far too tightly.
"Then go. Be safe, and be sure."
-
Instead of a toy or a handful of stolen sweets, like he had half been expecting, what Viktor's ward returns from Piltover with is a girl - small, blonde, and probably adorable to anyone who wasn't him. He watches through the window as Naph crouches down into the fog to fiddle with one of the many locks that sit lined on the iron gate, the girl nervously edging around him, looking constantly back over her shoulder until the gate finally swings wide and she can be ushered through it. Then, Naph points a finger up, up, up towards the window, and the little girl looks Viktor dead in the eyes. Instead of screaming or fainting or something suitably similar, she lifts a small hand and shyly waves.
Viktor opens the door for them, and Naph marches the girl across the threshold. The door slams shut behind them. No one jumps at the sound.
"Explain."
Naph wrings his wrists in his hands. "Well, you see, it was really busy upstairs, and she - her name is Amaranthine - and, well, there was this bird, and she fell over, and ... and the Defen - her dad ..."
The girl - Amaranthine, apparently - steps forwards, knocking Naph rather forcefully in the shoulder to shut him up, and, with tears pricking at the corners of her eyes, whimpers, "I got separated from my dad in the crowds, and someone bumped into me and I dropped my bird and my dad bought it for me and he's gonna be so mad if he finds out that it's broken." Viktor could almost applaud her. Her performance of sadness was near perfect. If Viktor were a man less versed on the intricacies of how emotions play out on the face - because to eliminate something, you have to first be disgustingly intimate with it - he might have missed it, the moment the mask fell down. If the children are playing a game with him - fine, he can play along. He looks briefly over the girls shoulder to Naph, who is sheepishly smiling, and giving him a small thumbs up.
He trusts Naph.
Amaranthine holds something up to Viktor, a simple bit of clockwork in the delicate shape of a bird.
"He said you could fix it."
Viktor turns to Naph. "Did he now?" Naph shrugs. Viktor turns back to Amaranthine, then crouches down to her height. She is grinning practically ear to ear, all trace of sadness on her face scrubbed quickly away. He picks up the bird. It sits comfortably in his palm. Amaranthine passes him the broken bit of wing and he holds it up to the body, studying the shattered seam. "If I do this for you, you will go back to Piltover, and you will not speak of this." Amaranthine mimes zipping her lips up and throwing away the key. Naph appears in his peripheral vision, and he mimes picking up the key off of the floor and eating it. "Yes, fine. I will fix it."
The bird is beautifully but simply designed, entirely form over function. The cogs inside aren't for any kind of motion, just for aesthetics, the actual outer body of the creature very sparse and full of holes to see through, and there's a hollow spot at the centre just large enough for, Viktor recons, some kind of twisted coil mechanism. It would take him, what, a few seconds with the Hex Claw, maybe a minute with the soldering iron if he wanted a neater seam in order to reattach the wing. Against his better judgement, he dismantles the thing entirely.
Around him, the ambiance of childhood excitement - Naph drags Amaranthine to every corner of the lab, rambling without pause about things he should absolutely not be telling people who are essentially strangers about, but Viktor doesn't really have the heart in him to tell him off. The rustling of papers as Naph unfolds blueprint sketches; the clattering of tools being tripped over or swept aside as they explore; the tapping of bitten fingernails on glass jars.
Underneath it all, however, a distinct, electric hissing.
Viktor stands from his work desk, cautiously following the sound to the other side of the room. He hisses something under his breath in his mother tongue, and Naph immediately bolts to his side, pulling Amaranthine with him. He stares at the brickwork in front of him with such intensity that, when blue sparks begin to stutter and warp their way through the wall, he's momentarily convinced he's hallucinating. Then, all of the sparks, magnetized, are pulled jolting to a centre spot on the wall.
"Get down!" Viktor yells, and pulls both of the children in towards him.
The wall behind them promptly explodes.
Debris rains sharp around them. The impact has Viktor falling to his knees, bringing the two kids crashing down with him. Amaranthine shrieks, though its muted against the ringing in his ears, burying her little face into Viktor's chest, both hands fisted into the fabric of his shirt. His grip on Naph slips ever so slightly. Smoke billows around them, ever so slightly silver in the leaky, early moonlight, and from the wreckage, a familiar voice shining through - "Where the fuck is she, V? Where is she!?"
Amaranthine squirms free of Viktor's arms. He lets her go - Naph is laid out on the rubble in front of him, whining under his shallow breath, a sizable gash leaking blood levered just above his browbone. Viktor keels forward, hovering over him, and wipes as much of the blood as he can away with his fingers, trying ever so carefully not to pull at the severed skin in the wound, but it doesn't stop coming. Naph's eyes squint open and he raises a hand, buries it tight in Viktor's hair, and then brings him down so their foreheads press uncomfortably against each other, Naph hissing assurances in between pained breaths that he's okay, he's okay, he promises that he's okay. When Viktor pulls back, he has Naph's blood smeared on him, an imitation cut.
"Why is it that when you come stalking down to Zaun, Defender, children always end up getting hurt -"
"Dad!"
Jayce, silhouetted in the sickly lowlight, drops the still-sparking Mercury Hammer at his feet, and Amaranthine runs straight into his arms. With no effort at all, he lifts her into the air. Every last bit of him softens when he holds her. The furrow in his brow disappears, his eyes flutter closed. It's heartachingly familiar. Amaranthine has her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, her face pressed deep into his shoulder. Jayce kisses her lightly on the forehead. Viktor flinches, and turns back to Naph. He removes his glove from his flesh hand and intertwines his fingers with Naph's and with his other hand, he rips off a bit of fabric from his sleeve and begins to properly mop up the blood.
"What on earth are you doing down here? You can't go running off like that, Ama. You had me worried sick."
"I'm sorry," Amaranthine's voice is muffled into his jacket. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just ... Naph!" There's the sound of wriggling, then heels hitting the floor, and then running. Amaranthine skids into Viktor's peripheral vision and folds to her knees, hands over her mouth. More walking, and then Jayce's boots appearing behind her. "Is he okay?" She asks. She pokes Naph's arm very gently. He groans and lifts it to smack her but misses.
"First aid kit is in the bottom drawer of the right-hand cabinet inset into my work desk, if you please, Amaranthine."
Amaranthine nods and takes off into the shadows of the lab, stumbling ever so slightly over the rubble. As soon as she is out of sight, Jayce immediately turns to Viktor.
"V, I am so, so sor -"
"This could've been her, you know?" He spits. Some of Naph's blood that's smeared onto his forehead dribbles down into his eye, and it's only then that he remembers that he isn't wearing the mask, that he's left it abandoned somewhere upstairs. Is this the first time in nearly a decade that Jayce has seen his face, the crows feet pulling at his eyes and grey hairs he was never supposed to live long enough to develop? He's staring straight at Viktor's pursed, chapped lips.
"In my - in my defence, V, I had no idea what the fuck was happening down here. I don't know how on earth you got topside and took her, but -"
"You think I stole her!?" Viktor shrieks. Amaranthine toddles into view with the first aid pack clutched in her hands. Viktor none too kindly snatches it from her, guilt immediately flooding him when she flinches away from him, curling instinctually into Jayce. This is ... it's too much. He shouldn't be acting like this, so - so fucking emotional. The twins of rage and stubbornness have always been his most besetting sins. He pulls rather harshly at his own hair in an attempt to distract himself, to take his mind away from Jayce and the naked yearning plastered onto his face and turn it instead onto anything else, anything else at all.
Viktor cleans and dresses Naph's wound whilst Jayce, utterly silent beside him, checks over Amaranthine. It's oddly comforting in a way he hates, having Jayce constantly peeking over his shoulder as he works because he's never been able to help himself, always so incredibly nosy. 'Two pairs of eyes are better than one' he would say, and whilst Naph isn't an equation that Viktor is having trouble balancing, and he knows he's a far better excuse for a medical doctor than Jayce is, it's ... nice ... to have the assurance. Jayce finds nothing wrong with Amaranthine aside from a lightly grazed knee. On the floor, Naph groans freely as Viktor disinfects the split in his brow with rubbing alcohol, occasionally saying things like 'the pain!' and 'oh, the agony!' for dramatic effect. "If it hurts that bad," Viktor says when he is done, helping the boy to his feet, "I could always knock it off and replace it with a brass one?"
Jayce raises an eyebrow at him. Viktor rolls his eyes.
"We've been over this," Naph sighs, clinging to Viktor's arm for support, "no thank you. I politely decline."
"You don't politely do anything." He brushes some of the rubble dust off of Naph's shoulders and, somehow completely forgetting that Jayce is there, watching, eyes wide with something that might be called hunger, lets the knuckles on his flesh hand graze affectionately against Naph's cheek. "Now, for the second time tonight - explain."
Before the boy can open his mouth, Amaranthine, still holding Jayce's hand, wriggles closer, pulling him with her. "It was my idea! I ran into Naph and we figured out that you knew each other and I thought I could ..." She looks rather helplessly between Viktor and Jayce, distress, this time startlingly genuine, pulling at her features. Horrifyingly, tears begin to prick at the corners of her wide, bright eyes. "I just screwed everything up!"
Jayce immediately crumbles, falling to his knees beside her and sweeping her into a hug. He runs his fingers comfortingly through the loose bits of her blonde hair. "Fuck, Ama, no you didn't, it's okay."
"No it's not!" She wails. "I ran away and I got Naph hurt!" She wails.
Naph staggers over to her, nudging weakly at her arm until she turns her wet eyes to face him, as if to believe what he's about to say she has to see him. "I'm fine, I promise! Head wounds just bleed a shit ton even when they're not that bad because - because, umm ..."
"Because there's a higher concentration of blood vessels closer to the skin because the brain needs more oxygen," Viktor lamely finishes off. He looks down at the scene - Jayce on his knees before Amaranthine, wiping at her tears with his thumb before they can fall down her cheeks, Naph crowding around her, his hands on her goosepimpled arms - and understands acutely that he should not be here, all of a sudden a stranger in his own house. This must be, he thinks, how the ghost in horror novels feels when the new family moves in, decentred and out of place, like a member of an entirely other species and instead of just something that used to be a person. He takes a step backward. At the sound of his shoe scuffing against the debris, Jayce lifts his head up to gaze at Viktor. Their eyes lock, gold against gold, and Jayce flashes him this almost timid, pining smile that makes Viktor want to throw up and then he waves a little. Viktor's face does something indescribable in response.
Jayce untangles himself from his little girl, then ruffles her hair. "It's late," he says. Amaranthine nods, sniffles, wipes her nose on the sleeve of her dress and then makes an amusing look of disgust when she realises what she's done. Jayce chuckles whilst Viktor bites the insides of his cheeks, "and you've had a very long day. We should probably get going, hey, Ama?"
"Wait!" Fuck - why the fuck did he do that? Jayce looks at him with something like hope. Viktor storms over to his work desk and snatches up the bird - a blessed excuse. He wanders back over to Amaranthine and crouches down to her height and offers her the repaired toy, wing effortlessly reattached, but now with a short, fine metal handle protruding out of the side, like the kind you commonly get on a wind up music box. "I, umm, I -" over the girls shoulder, Jayce is watching him, an identical look of awe on his face to the one on Amaranthine's, complete mirrors of each other. If not for the stark difference in hair colour, they could almost be biologically related " - if you twist this little bit here ..."
Amaranthine winds up the bird. When she releases it, the wings flap up and down. The beak even opens and closes, as if in silent song. The motion isn't too smooth, but Amaranthine doesn't seem to really care about that - her eyes are as wide as cup saucers, still shining with the remnants of her tears. "Oh, thank you mister Machine Herald!" Amaranthine barrels into him with enough force to almost knock him over. The hug is gone as fast as it arrived, but the burning imprint of her hands loosely looped around his waist where the skin sits under his shirt remains. "Thank you Viktor!" She holds it out in the palm of her hand and, cautiously at first, begins to skip around the lab with it, dipping it up and down as if it were really flying on the breeze. Naph grabs Viktor's shirt, pulls him down and touches their foreheads very lightly together, and then wipes away at the blood still clinging to Viktor's brow with the palm of his hand before looking over at Jayce, back to Viktor, winking, and then going to chase after Amaranthine. Jayce bumps his shoulder against Viktor's - three out of three.
"That's the first time she's ever called me dad, you know."
"How exciting," Viktor replies flatly. Whilst running, Naph staggers. Viktor immediately goes tense, his heart somehow sinking and racing at once in his chest, and takes a few instinctual steps forwards, ready to dash out and catch him if he falls, but instead he regains his footing quickly, laughing loud as if he never even faltered. When Viktor turns back to Jayce, there's a smug, knowing look plastered across his face, a shit-eating grin on his lips.
"So," Jayce says, crossing his arms over his chest, "mine knocked on my door one day and demanded I fix her soldier toy and then refused to leave. What about yours?"
"... He broke in as a dare and then kept coming back."
"Classic, classic."
Viktor feels as if he should hit him - it's what they do, after all. It feels strange to be in Jayce's vicinity without heady malice burning hot under his skin, without the act of violence against each other as an excuse to disguise the want to put their hands on each other. It's become a rough kind of comfort to have Jayce's blood on his hands, to feel the way his fragile, disappointingly human ribs give way to breaking under his skin. He doesn't know what to do with all the inaction except keep his eyes ahead of him, watching Amaranthine and Naph race around the partially destroyed lab, the bird in the girls hand like a beacon.
Their first moment of calm in over a decade, and Viktor can't think of a single thing to say. He has, mid-fight, delirious on blood loss and adrenaline and wrath, said lots of things to Jayce, most of them very unkind - that Jayce was always the weaker of the two of them, the less intelligent; that his descent into politics was what ruined their Hex Tech dream, their relationship; 'Thank you, Defender, for exiling me from Piltover. If I had stayed loyal at your side, I'd be in a casket by now.' - not all of them entirely untrue. How long, he wonders, has Jayce had Amaranthine under his care? Has she been a room or two over, maybe on the other side of a door, on the nights that Viktor has broken into their apartment, stolen Jayce's projects, beaten him bloody when contested? When the morning came, was she the one to find him?
Well, there is one thing he would like to say, but before he can even really consider it, Jayce leans in and whispers it for him.
"I've missed you, V."
-
"I'd like to hang out with Amaranthine again," Naph says, fastening all the many locks on the door, as if that matters with the giant hole in the wall. Viktor hums, watching out of the window as the Defender lifts his kind-of daughter onto his shoulders, Mercury Hammer dull and disengaged and heavy looking in his hands. There's an unseemly twinge in Viktor's heart as he watches them both disappear into the thick, fissure fog, but Jayce has found his way in and out of Zaun in much, much worse conditions before, all thanks to Viktor's handiwork, so he has no doubt they'll arrive home in Piltover safe. If he get's too worried, which he absolutely will not, he always has a key. "She's really cool."
"I fucking hate repairing this house," Viktor grumbles in reply, kicking his way through the pile of rubble, bringing to life clouds of dust that once upon a time should have sent him into unbearable coughing fits.
"It would be good for me to have some friends my own age, don't you think?"
"If I can use the door, so can he."
"Plus, you'd be able to hang out with the Defender again without trying to blow each other's heads off. Wouldn't that be neat?"
Viktor stops, turns. "... Is that what this was all about!?"
Naph smiles wide with all his crooked teeth. "You didn't hear it from me!" He begins to help shift the bricks, whistling.