Work Text:
Viktor thinks his leg should go without saying. Everyone else seems to disagree.
He is a cripple, not deaf or blind. He is perfectly capable of hearing the whispers over the thud of his cane as he passes by, not so focused on walking that he cannot see the way their gazes track him as he shuffles down the Academy’s high-ceilinged, many-windowed halls.
There are too many stairs in the Academy, he is finding as he winds through its passages of stone and stained glass. Every time he encounters another set, he grits his teeth, hefts his bag a little higher on his left shoulder, and climbs, despite the growing ache in his right leg and the inordinate weight of the tomes he carries.
There is only the work, he reminds himself.
The number of people does not shrink as he climbs up to the fourth floor. They eye him in a way he cannot easily describe. It is not… hate, that is in their eyes. It is not quite suspicion, though Viktor is sure it would be were it not for the too-loose, too-stiff, too-fine Academy uniform he is wearing. It was a courtesy of Professor Heimerdinger, who had sent it along with the books and a map of the Academy, annotated with Viktor’s class schedule.
Heimerdinger has worse handwriting than the “doctors” Viktor is well acquainted with in the Undercity. Hence the early-morning visit to his office, where he is the apparent entertainment for the other early Academy students. The ones who are more assured of their belonging here, if he can judge by their golden jewelry and shined shoes.
(He wears no jewelry, has never owned any, and he stapled the outsole of his right shoe back together this morning.)
The other students, congregated around classroom doorways in their impenetrable social groups, stare at him in the same way he used to look at strays back home. They were a good source of amusement, given the absence of human company that plagued his childhood. He liked those animals. He fed them when he could, pet them when he could not, and learned early how to tell when one would bite.
He comes to this realization as he spots the plaque outside of Heimderdinger’s office. They smirk with bemusement or avoid his gaze altogether. They hide their remarks poorly behind their hands.
They regard Viktor as a stray. Something to pity. Something to be cautious of. Something to be nice to, if he can prove himself by rolling over enough times.
Viktor supposes he is a stray, with how Heimerdinger plucked him off the streets of the Undercity less than a week ago and gave him a new “home.” What, does he now need a bell around his neck? Perform tricks?
He breathes and takes a moment to unclench his right hand from around his cane before it cramps too much to be useful. He resolves to do what he has done all his life: ignore the way they make him a spectacle, though they are worse up here, like they have never seen a cripple before.
Maybe topsiders have not. Viktor cannot recall seeing anyone like him so far.
He knocks on the office door before his brain can take him too far down that path. Unproductive.
Heimerdinger answers promptly. It is odd for Viktor, at his modest height, to have a superior he must look down at. He supposes it is something else he must get used to.
He supposes there will be many of these… “culture shocks” topside. Heimerdinger mentioned their possibility but never elaborated on their details.
“Viktor,” the professor says, surprised, though he does let him in. “It’s early. Very early, my boy. Classes don’t begin for another half an hour.”
Viktor stands in front of the massive, dark wood desk and waits for Heimerdinger to sit back in his leather chair before he says, “Your map is illegible, and there are too many stairs.”
Undercity habits beget speaking quickly and directly; in an environment in which nothing is wasted, words are no exception. Topsiders, however, can afford waste.
“Professor,” Viktor tacks on in a too-late attempt to adhere to topside standards of respectability.
Heimerdinger, thankfully, chuckles. “Terribly sorry. You’d think that after enough decades of scribbling on blackboards, I could use a pen well enough.”
Well, no. After seeing this map, Viktor began to fear for this man’s students, himself included. Professor Heimerdinger teaches his introductory engineering course.
He draws up a new map, humming as he works. With nothing else to occupy himself, Viktor leans his cane against the desk, placing both hands on top of the furniture to take some weight off his hip, and surveys the office.
A bookshelf, matching the dark wood of the desk, stands along the far wall. Its shelves are bowed under the weight of the tomes it contains. Most of the spines are in languages he can read, some are not, and his fingers twitch toward them all the same. He stands on a plush, patterned rug - that explains the instability of his cane, and of his leg, he should rest a little more weight on this immovable desk - that would be better used as a blanket down below. Trinkets and baubles clutter the desk, the biggest of which is a globe. It spins of its own accord, illuminated by… something.
Viktor wants to take it apart. See how it works.
He takes his weight off the desk to kill that temptation and barely muffles a hiss at the flare of pain that shoots up his right leg from ankle to hip. He stretches his right hand surreptitiously behind his back, preparing to grab his cane once again.
This office looks exactly as he had expected it to from his one previous meeting with Professor Heimerdinger. It is… practical, by topside standards; it is as large as his kitchen and bedroom back home put together, and any one of the items on the desk could pay three months’ rent, though that is… “low-balling” it, as he has heard some people say.
“Here you are,” Heimerdinger says, handing him the new, blessedly legible map.
Viktor takes it and scans it quickly. His first course is on this floor, thank goodness, but the rest…
“Professor, these are,” he pauses, trying to think of how to phrase his concern. He cannot seem ungrateful, not when Heimerdinger has already helped him and when he has him later for class, and he cannot be annoying, not when he was already ignored when he brought up the stairs the first time.
But his leg screams at him, and to prevent the pain from giving him a sympathetic headache, as sometimes happens, he grabs his cane. To hell with the hand cramps.
“Is there any way to have all my classes on the first floor?” he finally says.
Heimerdinger glances at his cane, and his furry eyebrows raise. This is not the first time he has seen it, but Viktor thinks it is the first time the professor remembered it was there, or that it meant something besides… well, he does not know. A fashion statement, maybe?
Perhaps topsiders haven’t seen a cripple before. Well, they would see plenty if they ever went down.
“We can’t move classes this late, I’m afraid,” Heimerdinger says sympathetically.
Viktor hears the unspoken “but if you had asked earlier” and bites his tongue against excuses.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I will manage.” And Viktor will, because Undercity habits mean that opportunities are not wasted either. A little pain is worth it. It will be no more difficult than anything he has already done.
Heimerdinger hops down from behind his desk and totters toward the door. As he passes Viktor, he pauses and makes an aborted movement to reach out to him before correcting course.
At least he stopped himself, but that was probably only for practical reasons. Unless Heimerdinger wished to replace his cane altogether - and what a shoddy replacement his bouncing steps would be for solid wood - there is nothing he can do.
And Viktor can walk on his own just fine. It is why he has the cane in the first place.
He grips the map a little tighter, hefts his bag onto his shoulder, and turns toward the door.
He makes it one step (on his injured leg, cane in his right hand) before Heimerdinger asks, “Viktor, which one of your legs is the bad one?”
He grits his teeth. There is no moral attribution to his body. It is neither good nor bad. It just has parts that work and parts that do not. He has one leg that works and one that does not. If he could chastise it into functioning by calling it “bad,” it would have been fixed when he was a child. But that is not how it works, and it is wasted energy.
“My right leg, Professor,” he says because he always wishes that any and all conversations about his leg be redirected to important matters as soon as possible.
Heimerdinger hums. “You’re using your cane incorrectly. You should hold it in your left hand, not your right.”
He mimes the motion, and Viktor tries not to feel… insulted? Ashamed? Coddled? Belittled? He cannot quite put a finger on it.
But there is no time for him to articulate it. Heimerdinger checks his pocket watch, squeaks, and runs faster than Viktor estimated his legs could carry him, leaving him alone in the threshold of the hallway.
He tries Heimerdinger’s suggestion, out of curiosity. The class is on this floor, and he has more than enough time to get there.
When he was a boy, no one taught him how to use a cane. He did what felt natural and what let him move the fastest. It was awkward, sure, but anything that caused him less pain was deemed a success.
It is awkward now, with the cane in his left hand. Slower as he walks down the hallway, because it is new. But it is more stable, he finds. A little less painful, as the pain stays localized to his ankle and knee, rather than his hip.
He could get used to it rather quickly, once he stops feeling so stupid about not knowing.
As he gets to his first class - it is in a room bigger than most “big” Undercity shops - the thump of his cane and his slow pace prompt more students and even his professor to stare at him. Viktor takes the closest open seat and is briefly, ludicrously, tempted to bare his teeth at them.
If they are going to treat him like a stray animal, should he not act like one?
No. He should not. Nothing is wasted, least of all this opportunity. He ducks his head down and opens a book on subjects he knows, matters he gets right, instead of wrong, like how to use his own cane, apparently.
Viktor thought he knew the comprehensive list of all his nonworking parts: the leg, of course, but also the childhood rickets, his lungs, his spine, the calcium deficiency that left his teeth stained slightly more yellow than topsiders’, whatever made him… bendier than the average person, and not always in a good way.
Evidently, topside is intent on adding more to that list. Like the cane.
It does not matter. When he is the only one in the lecture hall who can answer the professor’s question - a leading one that she said they will know by the end of the semester - as a self-taught trencher, he relaxes. He even smiles.
There is only the work.
The food here is so rich it nearly makes him ill. He watches as other students throw away half-full plates and swallows his rage down with his food.
Anything he has left, he saves. If it will spoil before he can eat it, he feeds it to the stray dogs around campus, of which there are shockingly few.
There is something poetic in that, he supposes. Perhaps, if he were not inundated with challenging work for the first time in ages, he could find it.
Heimerdinger’s class is set up… unconventionally. That is how Viktor thinks of it when he is being diplomatic. Ordinarily, he thinks of it as bullshit.
There is no graded homework, which means there is no homework in Viktor’s eyes. The material is trivial for the most part, and he does not see a need to waste time on practice problems he can guess the answers to. The class has two midterms, each worth a quarter of the grade, and one final project.
One project. Worth half the grade. Viktor read the syllabus five times to make sure he was not having a stroke.
To make it worse, the project had one instruction: make something.
When Heimerdinger failed to follow up that statement, Viktor worried the professor was the one having a stroke.
Viktor creates throughout the semester. He makes a semi-permanent cover for the smoke alarm in his dorm, fashions a hydraulic hinge to ease the load of pushing his unduly heavy door open, and copies the keys to the library so he can get to the better study spaces before it opens and someone else can steal the high chairs by the good windows.
He is not secretive about any of this. He is sure his roommate - Viktor does not remember his name, but he does remember how he talked of what the Academy was like when his father and grandfather attended - complained about his endless tinkering after he got his room reassigned. Yet he is only approached once by other students of the Academy.
A few other students on his floor, the kind that his old roommate frequently fraternized with, the kind with soft hands and heavy watches, approach him about building a machine to count money for their “semi-legal” poker matches. They tell him that he can even be in charge of the money for a cut, if he’d like.
The coin would not hurt. It would be nice to have something extra to spend, to be able to go into town with the rest of them and actually buy something instead of keeping his hands in his pockets. It would be nice to get fresh fruit from the market instead of the meals served at school. It would be nice to be able to afford a trip back down. He has some people he would like to visit. Many people he owes for being here.
He tells the other students no, that he cannot do it, but he would like to play if they ever had an open seat.
Viktor has no intention of ever wasting time gambling, nor does he have the money to develop the habit in the first place. He just wants to confirm what he suspects. And the other students do that for him, with tense smiles of whiter than white - strange that they have so many sweets here and yet they do not rot - that fail to reach their eyes.
They are perfectly content to have a trencher count their Piltie coins, but they would never want them sitting at the same table.
Viktor only makes useful things. It has been that way since he was a child, and his first semester at the Academy is no different. Everything he creates, from the window screen he rigged out of layers of wire scraps from the engineering laboratory (copied those keys as well) to the heat/ice pack he fashioned from chemistry lab leftovers, has a use. With the project deadline fast approaching, he figures he should do the same for Heimerdinger’s singular, inane project.
So, he makes a cane.
As the semester progressed, and as he learned from Heimerdinger’s surprisingly engaging lectures, he realized his current cane was insufficient. This should not have been surprising; he had been using it for years. It had cracked along one side, and it was a little too short as a result of his most recent (though less than impressive) growth spurt. In truth, he had probably needed a new cane for some time now, but he often had more pressing matters to attend to. If he had it his way, he would only replace it if it broke, but that would be worse long term.
He knew that. He was not stupid.
The course gave him dedicated time to perfect a design that would, hopefully, last for a time, since he had almost certainly stopped growing. The course, being introductory, did not have a lab, so Viktor made his own. In his dorm.
It is little wonder his roommate leaves halfway through the semester. Viktor supposes maybe he was in the wrong for using his contraband soldering iron (found in the trash, only took a little coaxing to work again) past midnight, but he is of the opinion that his roommate should not have been bringing people back to the dorm to have sex with them. On weeknights. With Viktor there. Trying to sleep.
He thinks it is all fair, in the end.
In total, he makes two dozen canes. He plans every design diligently using the equations and principles copied down from Heimerdinger’s truly atrocious blackboard scrawl. He tries various materials and carves them into different shapes, testing what fits his hand better, what balances better, and what holds the most weight.
(He learns early to test the last factor leaning toward his bed. When a model he fashioned for the express purpose of testing the minimum amount of material necessary to function predictably snapped, Viktor failed to put his other hand out in time and smashed his face on the unforgiving floor.
Once his nose stopped bleeding and he could overcome the screaming pain in his leg to pull himself into his desk chair, he wrote down his observations.)
He pens all his observations, complete with schematics, equations, and graphs of the various factors that make a cane a good cane. It takes up ten sheets of paper, front and back, because why waste perfectly good space?
Viktor finds throughout the process that most canes are not good canes. They are uncomfortable to hold for long, or too weak, or too unstable, or some combination of the three. The more models he makes - and, in many cases, breaks - the more he realizes that most of the canes he has seen in the Undercity are not good canes. They are cobbled from scraps, from old parts torn from metal and wood and whatever else available. They are fragile and jagged, unyielding and practical.
If he can make a good cane quickly and cheaply, that could mean something. That could improve lives for so many people, however little.
Viktor would like to do more, but, as he has done all his life, he recognizes his limitations. He is a first year university student from the Undercity. He is the only university student from the Undercity. As much as his ambition craves doing something grand and good, he is not in a position to accomplish that yet. He must walk the tightrope. Roll over on command. Ask “how high” whenever they tell him to jump, always looking confused if he ever mentions the pain.
He grits his teeth. There is only the work.
All the final projects for all of Heimerdinger’s class sections are presented at an end of semester research symposium, open to the entire Academy. It is… overwhelming, to say the least. Heimerdinger teaches an inordinate amount of sections, judging from the plethora of people Viktor must dodge in order to arrive at his assigned table. He sets up his presentation, which does not take him very long, and looks around to see what he typically sees in Piltover.
Waste.
The other research projects are… Viktor cannot tell what they are. They are loud and flashy. They clack and whirr. Some of them play music, others destroy little block towers. Others still build them up.
Viktor cannot see a practical use for any of them. They are toys.
There was a time when he built toys. It was a time before he was confronted with the true magnitude of his own limitations - now that he is aware, constantly, he wonders how that was ever the case - and the cruelty some of humanity was capable of inflicting in the name of “progress.” He built toys for nothing other than the fact that he could, that it was fun to put parts together and have them work, that success delighted him.
(It had delighted him to the point of fruitlessly limping after it. It led him to enter caves and wish he had not discovered them, but he never regretted the important lessons he was forced to look in their undying eyes.)
But things change. Viktor grew up. He lost the time for toys, lost the drive for anything impractical. He became devoted to what mattered: survival and altruism. If it was not necessary, if it did not help, then he could not afford the waste.
The other university students, some who have surely known hardship but clearly never learned to starve, can. They build toys, contraptions that buzz and whirr and shine to the dazzlement of their audiences, who gather around their presentations to ooh and ahh over them.
No such audience gathers near Viktor. They pass him by curiously, eyeing him as the oddity and paying no attention to his work. They whisper behind their hands, and while the other voices in the room and the clack of the other frivolous machines drown them out, they are obviously talking about him.
City of Progress, and yet they refuse to see beyond appearances.
The rage bubbles up in Viktor, but he swallows it down. He smiles politely at passersby and converses pleasantly with those few who ask about his project. He bites his tongue when their gazes wander to the spectacles he is surrounded by. He resists the urge to sit on the edge of the table.
They did not give him a chair. Good that today he experienced next to no pain.
Toward the end of the three hours, Heimerdinger arrives at his table.
He only examines the presentation curiously. He does not comment. He simply writes on his notepad and offers a kind smile. Then he moves on to the next table, where he enthusiastically greets a student who made a glittering music box.
Viktor sees his grade during the next class. Stellar marks, but no comments. Satisfactory, but unremarkable.
The semester ends, and his other classes return the same grades. Perfect, but nothing more to say.
Viktor does not like attention. He is used to lingering eyes on him, whispered remarks as he passes by. He has been examined by doctors and openly judged in public. If he could exist without that clear prying that so many seem entitled to, he would. But with how he is built (wrong, he is built wrong, there is no amount of sickly sweet sugarcoating for it) that will never be a possibility.
But he wants his work to have attention. To be worth something. To be discussed. He wants to be known as an inventor, not a cripple.
So, as he spends the winter holidays between semesters fixing the subpar heating in his dormitory because he cannot afford to return home, he resolves to be done keeping his head down. To cut the tightrope. To fly instead of jump.
If they are going to stare, he will meet their eyes. If they are going to whisper, he will answer. If they are going to make him a spectacle, he will construct a spectacle instead.
There is only the work. And he will outwork them.
On the weekends, he keeps his window open.
The bars in the Undercity are loud places. Not always raunchy, no, but always alive with chatter and lights and noise. They are sites of discussions, fights, and reconciliation. Meetings, both sanctioned and illicit, happen in bars more than anywhere else.
Viktor’s first sip of alcohol came at too young an age for him to remember it. He does recall occasional small, supervised drinks throughout his childhood. Later, when he grew up and learned how to perform repairs and other services to make himself useful, many grateful people would buy him a drink in exchange.
He is not much for drinking, but he is of the proud opinion that most pilties would keel over from even the weakest alcohol in the Undercity.
It was always cheap, too. Up here, the drinks and the venues are prohibitively expensive. The bars are too quiet. Their primary purpose - at least, for the establishments near campus - are to get wealthy students as intoxicated as possible to spend as much as possible. There is far more music and far less talking.
He does not go out on the weekends. He cannot go out on the weekends, not with too little coin and too much to do.
But he keeps his window open on the weekends in the event he hears anything close to home.
Biology is the worst class Viktor takes in his time at the Academy.
It is, respectfully, a stupid requirement for engineers, especially for engineers of his inclination: the ones who would rather their hands smeared in axle grease than blood. It is a frustratingly macroscale discipline, frequently causing Viktor more questions than answers.
He asks these in lecture, of course. He is not obnoxious, at least not any more so than the girl who inquired, as his professor handed out the first exam, as to whether humans were animals.
Lecture is for questions, especially since Viktor would rather work on his projects, both personal and for his engineering courses, than waste the time going to the office hours for a class in which he has earned perfect marks on every weekly quiz.
After lecture one day early in the semester, he is kindly but firmly referred by his professor to the chemistry department so that his questions can be better answered. So, he takes the trip to a nostalgic building, a building with floors so slanted he spots students rolling marbles to calculate the impossible angles by which they slope. There, his questions as to why the biological processes for which he has endured incomplete explanations occur in the ways they do are answered, but his questions regarding how are not.
The physical chemistry professors exchange a glance and tell Viktor that the physics department would be better able to describe those forces to him. So, he takes the trip to a building he has seen closed more often than open, where he has heard other students complain about fire scares repeatedly - something about a faulty boiler.
Viktor wonders why the Academy has not bothered to have it fixed yet. They certainly have the funds, judging from the meticulously cleaned gilded towers and elaborate dinners for important guests.
He has fixed more complex machines with less. Perhaps he could have a crack at it.
He concludes swiftly after his arrival that he rather likes the physics department. There, everything makes sense. It is all motion, with the atoms of the world moving in harmony. And when they are not, disruptions can be calculated and corrected.
Much better than the chaos of a body. There are far more complex ways to fail in a living system and far fewer solutions to correct those failures.
On the rare occasions in which the physics does not make sense, particularly when he has questions regarding certain derivations, he is warmly and excitedly referred further.
The math department is, inexplicably, housed in a building so labyrinthine that one of the illegible maps on the wall has “GOOD LUCK” scribbled across it. It shares the building with at least two other departments. As Viktor walks past offices organized seemingly without rhyme or reason, he finds that one of those other departments is the linguistics department.
He hears snatches of his native language between the soft thuds of his cane on the carpet. The speakers are heavily accented, but his heart clenches nonetheless.
How long has it been since he has had a full conversation in it? The answer is the same number of years it has been since his parents departed, and that is one number that Viktor would rather not think about.
That semester, he becomes as much a fixture within the math and physics departments as he is in his home department of engineering. He talks with professors he will have in later classes, and they offer him friendly smiles when they see him.
No one besides Heimerdinger has done that for him at the Academy. He did not realize how much he missed it until he lost it and got it back.
If that was all Viktor got from biology, he might be inclined to say it was a good course, though not in any traditional sense. But that was not the case.
Instead, it reminded him of everything that was wrong with him.
They… “take it easy” in one lecture the day after an exam. They discuss abnormal physiology for fun , and Viktor wants to throw something.
“Many defects,” his professor explains, “are characterized by lack.”
She changes out her slides, one by one, explaining that while these conditions are no longer as common in Piltover as they used to be, they still occur often enough, and the students on the pre-medical track should be aware that they do.
Every slide has a picture of someone from the Undercity.
They are sad. Empty. Small mouths and wide eyes. Too-large mismatched clothing and hunched postures. Canes. Prosthetics. Wheelchairs. All cobbled together from scraps, from whatever can be deemed suitable at the moment.
If Viktor were not so transfixed on the way these people, these living, breathing, human beings have been transformed into clinical examples in black-and-white, he would steal a look at his new cane and think back to his old one from the Undercity, tucked into a corner of his room.
But he cannot stop looking.
Because he recognizes some of the faces.
Not many. The Undercity is a big place; unless someone is well known, like Vander or Babette, one can remain relatively anonymous. Faces and names tend to blend. Most have their own people to focus on.
But Viktor recognizes a few. The old shoemaker with a smile like broken windows who was so good at making the street children laugh is used as an example of Vitamin C deficiency. His smile for the camera is false. Artificially widened to display all his missing teeth.
The drunk who used to sit on the corner by the square and offer advice - usually pretty sound, all things considered - or sing a song in a shockingly smooth baritone, so long as someone handed him a coin or sip from a flask, is reduced to nothing more than his addiction.
There is no mention of how he would stay up at night to make sure the girls at the brothels made it home safely, or how he would let the children pet his dog. It was a clever mutt, but always well-behaved and clean. It loved children. Viktor had pet that dog many times.
It is not in the picture. The image is only of the man. His half-full bottle is centered.
One of the slides has an image of a young girl with long dark hair and pretty light eyes. This time, Viktor knows her name. It was Ana. She was the only other person Viktor knew his age who used anything like a cane. She had two forearm crutches, as neither of her legs functioned very well.
They did not see each other often, were not nearly close enough to be friends, but there was something shared in the way they smiled and nodded at each other when they passed. A solidarity of sorts.
He stopped seeing Ana when she was young. He always wondered what happened to her.
The caption of the slide says she passed at a single-digit age. The image of her is nothing like how Viktor remembers her.
He stares at a ghost while his classmates take note of her rickets, caused by a Vitamin D deficiency.
He has the same condition, one of his many. The professor mentions that it can cause progressive scoliosis as “the patient” ages. His neck prickles as his classmates stare at him, at his cane.
He bites his tongue. He will not leave. He will not cause a scene. He will do the work. He will sit there and learn while people like him are reduced to nothing but hypotheticals for Pilties, as examples of the have-nots.
“Characterized by lack.”
Viktor half-expects that an image of him as a child will be presented at some point. He does not remember ever having had his picture taken, but there were enough occasions on which he was too… “out of it” to remember things. Times spent at “doctors’” offices. He would not be surprised if any one of the people who had tried (and they did try , to their credit) to treat him had let in a topsider in exchange for an extra, much-needed coin.
But no such image appears. The last slide, blessedly, shows someone Viktor does not know, but unfortunately, it is something that he is familiar with.
A girl in his class raises her hand as soon as she sees the slide, before Viktor can even begin reading the caption. The professor calls on her, and the girl excitedly chatters about how she had that same birth defect, though less severe, and it was fixed promptly with harnesses and braces physical therapy, and now she is normal.
That is the word she uses. “Normal.”
This girl had a leg like Viktor’s, and she is “normal.”
And he is not.
Because no one in the Undercity knew how to fix it. Because no one thought it could be fixed.
He could have been fixed. If only he had been born topside. If only he had been lucky. If only some other person, a generation before, had the opportunity to be plucked out of the fumes of the Undercity by Heimerdinger as a pet project to make himself feel better, only to be seldom acknowledged after being thrust into a strange world in which, baseline, no one goes hungry.
How fucking strange it is that no one goes hungry here. How odd that no one here seems to want anything necessary, only frivolities and uselessness and toys. How abnormal it is that this is the standard up here, when Viktor learned at a young age to ignore his stomach cramping, ignore the shortness in his lungs, ignore the pain in his legs and his spine and his hands and everywhere else, because nothing will make it better, not the drugs or the doctors or anything, because it cannot be fixed.
Except up here it can. Up here, the Undercity is an unfortunate problem to be photographed and pored over. Its people are reduced to imprints and to ghosts. Theories and hypotheticals.
Because heaven forbid anyone goes down, and Viktor is the oddity for daring to pull himself up and act like he deserves it when he has better marks and more study hours than the vast majority of his year.
He stands. Class is almost over, but he walks out anyway. His cane is loud on the floor, and he does not care. He holds his head high and ignores his professor and the whispers of other students as he shoves open the door.
Let them see one of their precious photographs come to life.
After, he only returns to that classroom for exams. There is nothing that the professor can teach him that the textbook cannot. He saves his time for more useful things. Math and physics. A new personal project.
It is probably far too late for it to do any good, but Viktor does nothing if not try. A brace should not be too hard to make.
Viktor does not have many friends at the Academy, but he is rarely alone. Such is the nature of university life. The academic environment is inherently social; he attends class with other students, eats alongside them, and must frequently bang on his wall so as to alert his neighbors that he can, in fact, hear… whatever activities they decide to do on weeknights. Being alone at the Academy is a difficult feat, and it is one that does not go out of his way to accomplish.
He has learned that surprises some of his classmates. They often remark, when they are paired with him for group projects, about their perceptions of him.
“I thought you’d be meaner.”
“I thought you’d be quieter.”
“I always assumed you were just shy.”
Every time, Viktor must refrain from rolling his eyes. Topside politeness is a strange thing, he has learned. It is very performative, with its big smiles and friendly, useless greetings. He finds it difficult to imitate - why, for example, ask someone “how are you?” if neither they nor him truly care for the answer? - and so he sticks to Undercity standards.
Nod politely as a greeting. Give people space unless they require conversation. Offer a chair or a coat or a snack if someone is in need, with the understanding that the debt will be repaid.
Back home, his parents were often praised for raising such a polite boy. Here, at least once a semester, someone comments on his standoffishness.
It does not matter. He is not here to slack off. He is here to learn. He does not need anything more than the pleasant, occasional company of his classmates, who, he is discovering, will offer their smiles but never their coats.
Every once in a while, he does get more. Someone will stay in his room for a night - they always think they are the ones in charge at the beginning, a fact that Viktor finds equally amusing and irritating - and coo sweet words about his appearance and his intellect.
He is lucky if they look at him the next morning. He learns the hard way that they are perfectly content with a trencher in their bed but never on their arm.
When this finally sinks in - it does not take long; he has always been a quick study - Viktor swallows back whatever odd thing it is that rises in his throat and determines that this attitude suits him perfectly well.
The brace is simple in its concept but difficult to perfect. Considering the amount of time spent constructing his current cane a few semesters ago, Viktor is not surprised. Engineering for biological systems is far more complex than, say, pure mechanical engineering. Pain and discomfort, for example, are complicating factors for his leg bug not for air filtration systems.
Viktor would much rather design air filtration systems than leg braces or canes. They are far more interesting and useful on a larger scale. But the truth of the matter is that he cannot trust anyone else to construct these devices for him. Only he knows how they feel for his body, and the effort he would have to undergo to translate the abstract (but very real) sensations of wrongness, in all their varied forms, into words that another person can understand is not worth it. Not when he can just grab a wrench.
What is that saying? “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
Story of Viktor’s life.
He sits on his bed, right leg crossed at an uncomfortable height over his left, and tightens a screw. The previous designs are all documented in his notebook, which he flips through using his unoccupied hand. With every problem he eliminates, a new one arises. It is the worst haggling he has ever partaken in.
The brace must be worn underneath his trousers; he will not wrinkle his only uniform if he can avoid it. Until recently, this meant that the cold, harsh metal of the brace would chill and bite at his skin. He only had so much salve (fresh unopened tin, left in the communal bathroom for a week with no takers) left, and he intended to save it for injuries that mattered.
He tried once, a few days ago, with a long sock on underneath the brace, but it rolled down so often and so severely that in a fit of exasperation, he nearly cut it off with scissors. Then he remembered that his sewing kit did not have enough black thread to repair that level of damage.
He only had three pairs of socks left, as they had a proclivity for vanishing inexplicably each time he washed his clothes. So, he could not cut it.
This design should, hopefully, “do the trick.” He attached cushioning (A petite Ionian girl he had taken a calculus class with, when she woke up the next morning in his room, asked, with a glance at the sewing kit left on his desk, if he could hem a dress for her. She repaid him by purchasing his next meal - real food, finally, not from the university - and letting him keep the scrap. He never saw her again.) to the parts of the brace most uncomfortable to wear.
All the old problems - tension, pressure, weight, bulk - have been resolved. There will only be new ones.
Viktor tightens the last screw. Time to see what those will be.
The brace is multifunctional. Primarily, its design is intended to correct the abnormal inward rotation of his right leg. Secondarily, it supports his knee and ankle to both allow his muscles to stop carrying that burden and prevent the joints from overextending and subluxating, as they often tend to do.
It will be uncomfortable, compelling his leg away from its natural state. But Viktor can live with discomfort if it is in exchange for improvement.
He has been haggling in this manner for his entire life.
With assistance from his cane, he stands. Then, he divides his weight evenly between his two own feet, holding his cane aloft.
There is the discomfort, as he had expected, but there is no pain.
He paces up and down the length of his dorm without his cane. His joints are relegated to a normal range of motion, which is restrictive but more stable. They do not feel as loose. A dull stretch, induced by the rigidity of the brace fighting against his body, along the side of his leg runs from thigh to calf, but that is all.
No other pain. No true pain, other than the dull ache of adjustment.
He nearly falls over with the realization before he catches himself on the wall. He has had days free of pain before, but they occurred far more often when he was a child. Now, they are so few and far between that he had nearly forgotten what it was like to have the distraction of it removed almost entirely.
He can think more clearly without it whispering-talking-shouting in his ear. He can breathe more easily.
Walking is awkward, what with the new rotation and the added weight, but he conjectures that he will get acclimated to it. He wants to get acclimated to it.
Outside of his window, he has a nearly unobscured view of the Academy clocktower. It takes him one glance to realize he is very nearly late for his systems course.
In his haste, Viktor nearly forgets to bring his cane with him to class. With how his brace reduces the pain, it is merely a failsafe in the event his balance is compromised by the awkwardness of his gait.
He barely uses it. Once he gets used to the new positioning of his leg, walking is a little easier. Slower, but easier. And the whole time, his cane barely makes contact with the ground.
The whispers are loud as always.
“Did he get better?”
“Has he been faking?”
“I knew someone our age couldn’t actually need it.”
He holds his head up and ignores them. When he catches a look, he returns the stares and wins.
He knows he will never be able to run. He could not when he was a child, and the unfortunate fact that the many non-functioning components of his body will only degrade - a fact he greatly prefers not to dwell on - has prohibited the notion for the rest of his life.
For the first time, he wants to run. So badly, in fact, that it is heart that aches instead of his leg.
He walks into class without the assistance of his cane, with the brace hidden underneath his pant leg, and believes, entirely, that this could work. That maybe he can walk like this, with no outward signal that he is different. Non-functional. Built incorrectly in the compounding of each and every failure inflicted upon the Undercity.
Maybe this is something he can overcome with his intellect. He already crawled up. What is stopping him from walking upright?
What is stopping his brilliant mind from allowing him to run?
He spends all day testing this notion, barely using his cane.
Viktor should have known the haggling would not work entirely in his favor. It never has.
When his body comes to collect, he pays in full. With interest.
He had asked, once, when he was quite small, why he was not the same as the other children his age. Why he was slow where they were fast and fast where they were slow.
One of his parents - he remembers it in his father’s voice but it is an answer more characteristic of his mother - replied, “Because you were made this way.”
“Who made me?”
From the haze of early childhood memory, he can recall tired eyes turning skyward. Staring at the moth-eaten curtains and patched plaster. The empty pantry and roughened hands. The Gray-filled sky, nearly starless, and the glint of a light off the gilded Academy roof.
“Everything,” was the answer to his question.
Viktor remembers thinking, for the first time, that everything was so dreadfully unfair.
He learned, soon after, not to complain about it. For, soon after, there was no one to complain to.
In the odd, floating space between dream and reality, Viktor thinks of a wooden spoon.
They only had one in their little house near the fissures, and it had been passed down to his mother from her mother, and her father, and so on back as far as a family line could go. At least, that was the story he was told when he was young enough to sit on their moth-eaten sofa and his feet would fail to reach the ground, swinging above it instead, beating infinite dust into the air. More concrete evidence of its age lay in its staining, in the way it smelled like spices Viktor’s mother had never been able to afford.
He does not know what happened to the spoon when she died. She died second, and the house was sold, and the contents of it became a feast for his neighbors, transfigured into vultures by desperation, hunger, want. Amidst the chaos of clawing hands and the coins too heavy-light in Viktor’s small palm, the spoon was lost.
He wonders if its new owner recognizes the marks in the handle as the work of his baby teeth.
Doctors were difficult to come by in the Undercity, and harder still to pay. Most of the time, they were “doctors,” and not doctors. But before it was determined (he always considers this in the passive, for there truly is no one to curse but nature - no, topside - itself) that any further intervention would be ineffective, his parents had paid many “doctors” to intervene.
And anesthetic had cost extra.
Viktor’s baby teeth scarred the entire length of the spoon’s handle. If he remembers correctly, he lost his first one prematurely when it had lodged in the wood more firmly than in his gums.
So when he stirs as an adult on his Academy bed and the first thing he perceives is the pain arcing up the side of his right leg and burying itself bone-deep, the last vestige of his dream is a shadowy figure - large, vague, always pitying - hovering above him and instructing him sadly to bite down.
Viktor wakes himself by bloodying his own tongue.
The warm, sticky copper startles him alert and upright, which is a mistake. Upright is… less than ideal. The pain crawls up further, to his spine, eliciting a hiss. It is electric, warm. Pulsing in time with his heart.
It is not a good indication for the remainder of his day.
He attempts to swing his legs over and out of bed, determined to grit his teeth and push through. Today, he only has one class. It is an upper-level physics course, taught by Heimerdinger, who is far more passionate about this subject than that introductory engineering course from a few semesters prior.
He would be willing to… cut Viktor some slack, as the saying goes. If anyone on campus would, it would be Professor Heimerdinger. After all, he knows Viktor the best, knows of his circumstances and story before the Academy beyond stereotypes and rumors, even if it is only the barest shred. He offered Viktor open office hours. Years into his studies and he has not gone once for anything beyond his academics.
But Viktor does not want slack. He must do what is required of him. He must learn. He refuses to give any of them ammunition in the firefight to prove that he does not belong here.
Keep his head up. Quit remaining silent. Jump, irregardless of the pain.
And where did that land him? With an immobile, agonizing leg at quite the inconvenient time.
His left leg moves easily enough with no more pain than the usual soreness. However, his right leg is locked from hip to toe, a result of the agony in his joints and the spasming of his muscles. When he attempts to adjust it, to simply rotate his foot, his nerves scream.
Viktor wants to vomit. But he must go to class.
He closes his eyes and gingerly hefts his leg into position. The movement lights his nerves up like live wires from his toes to his lumbar vertebrae. With a distant sense of pride, he notices that he is able to keep himself from crying out.
It is a small victory that is easily overshadowed by his subsequent slip on the sheets.
His feet crash onto the floor.
And then he does cry out.
His left leg buckles as it should to brace for impact. His right fails to do so, and his heel takes the brunt of it, and the pain scrambles up the back of his leg and causes him to swear as his vision goes spotty.
Bite down.
When it clears, he only hopes that his neighbors did not hear.
Braced on the bed, breathing through his teeth, he spots the clock outside his window.
He swears again. This time, he does not care if the neighbors hear.
He scrambles to make himself presentable. Other students, those from major houses with fond, excusable reputations of drunken weekends and foolish trysts, can afford to attend class disheveled. They can wear rumpled clothing and sport messy hair and be laughed off.
Most students would be laughed at. Viktor, doubly so.
He braces himself on the furniture of his dormitory, keeping all the weight he can on his left leg. His cane, resting near the door where he foolishly left it last night, glints mockingly in the morning sun.
Were it not counterproductive and deeply irrational, Viktor would snap it. Instead, he tears his bag from his chair and snatches his cane on his way out. There is no time to put on the brace.
The brace. That stupid, ramshackle contraption. It was the root of this. The device, an easily disguised relief, a facsimile of normalcy, had given him far too much confidence. He neglected his cane. He forgot his limits.
Running. What an idiotic notion.
He cannot help his bitterness. Simply walking in this state is… immensely difficult. His right leg has loosened up enough to bend at the hip, but only a fraction. Neither his knee nor his ankle will yield. Even with the support of his cane, each step sears up his right leg, sparking in blacks and whites behind his eyes.
Twice, he must stop in the hallway and swallow back a flare of nausea. For once, he cannot hear the idle chatter of his fellow students. It has been replaced by a high-pitched whine, twining in perfectly discordant harmony with the pain.
Distantly, he supposes that this must be very bad.
But he makes it to class. That is what is important. He collapses into his front-row chair seconds before it begins and blinks away the spots in his vision.
Heimerdinger frowns at him. He says something, but Viktor’s head is not in this classroom. It is inside his own body, in the pain that refuses to abate, that pulses and sears and spasms in his leg that could have been normal.
Later, he will blame his actions on the delirium of pain. He is, after all, reduced to his basest instincts. An animal, operating on conditioned memory.
Bite down.
Though it is anything but, he knows it could seem rational to his classmates. Viktor steps outside of his body. He watches himself open his bag and take out a piece of jerky he swiped yesterday from the school kitchen. He does not taste it as he places it between his teeth.
He hooks his cane behind his knee.
A sigh through the nose. A tightening of the jaw. An adjustment of his grip. His hearing has dropped out. The jerky tastes like old leather - and he would know; once, when the spoon was dirty, Viktor was instructed to sink his teeth into his father’s worn tool belt.
At the board at the front of the room, Heimerdinger scrawls the homework from the previous lecture in his indecipherable script.
But that does not matter. What matters is making the pain stop in the only way accessible to him.
Bite down.
Viktor wrenches.
Heimerdinger found him for the first time in his steel oasis.
It was simply a dam, when Viktor was not wasting words and sentiment on poetry. It was a dam that supplied power to the part of the Undercity in which he lived, and after three weeks of attempting to cook by candlelight, two of those occurring after the Council promised to send someone down “as soon as they could,” his neighbors appointed him to solve the problem.
Viktor spent more than a full day in the guts of the dam, scratching equations onto every surface the chalk allowed, armed with nothing but a mismatched tool kit, a gifted lunch from his neighbor, and, naturally, his cane.
It was not a simple fix, but he did not think it would be. A failure as catastrophic as this could only have occurred as the result of a cascade of small defects, compounding until the whole machine ground to a halt.
Heimerdinger, with a retinue of no fewer than five Enforcers and a few timid engineers, found him the next morning as he tightened the last bolt and shoved his weight against the piston until it began to move.
Thankfully, it did. And soon after, the noise of the dam operating in all its mechanical screeching became too much for even Heimerdinger to enthusiastically crow over.
Outside, where the rush of the water filled the awkward silences as the engineers glared and the Enforcers’ hands wandered to their weapons, Heimerdinger harped about the virtues of the Academy and offered Viktor a seat immediately.
He accepted, stunned, before Heimerdinger could notice that half his clothes were stolen pieces of an Academy uniform. They were his winter garments, heavy and well made, and his only tangible inheritance.
It comes to him in pieces. The slight scratch of worn cotton sheets. The steady whirrs and drips next to his head. The too-clean smell of too-dry air in a too-cold room.
Viktor opens his eyes to the expected sights of a blank ceiling, a too-narrow window, and a smoldering little fireplace too far from his bed to do much good. He has rarely been in hospitals - only when his health was exceptionally poor were they ever deemed worth it - but the few he has seen have all had the same blank, interchangeable features.
He laughs slightly, a brief exhale through his nose, when he realizes that this, the sterility of hospital rooms, is the only constant he has recognized between the Undercity and Piltover.
“Viktor,” someone says from beside him.
He turns his head. It is a slow process, one that feels like wading through honey. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, gritty as sand.
“Is there anyone you’d want me to send for?” Professor Heimerdinger asks before Viktor can begin to consider forming words. “I would have done so earlier, only… only I didn’t know if you wanted anyone to see you in this state. Or who you wanted. Some people can be sensitive about this sort of thing. I’ve had some students in the past who certainly were. But I can certainly send for your parents-”
“You would be sending for ghosts,” Viktor rasps.
A tool belt and a spoon sold for stale food. Snatches of faded songs in the language most familiar to me. Care in the form of sacrifice, in deprivation for my sake. Holding my hand, pinning me down, propping me up.
And no address to locate any of it.
“Oh.”
Rain begins to patter against the windows.
“I didn’t know,” he follows, after a moment.
Viktor disguises his bitter laugh as a cough.
“Is there anyone-”
“No.” Another beat. “But I appreciate the offer, Professor.”
There are people, back below, that Viktor owes for being here. To say that he is alive completely of his own merit would be a lie. In the years after his parents passed, in the nebulous period before he could completely get his bearings, restaurant cooks gave him meals at the end of the day. Shopkeepers permitted him to sleep in their back rooms. Tailors taught him to mend his clothes, clockmakers taught him more about the intricate workings of their machines, and the women at the brothels taught him how to defend himself against stronger opponents.
It was a lonely existence, no doubt, but to pretend it was a solitary one would deny the fact that Viktor owes a thousand small debts. Most of these, he will never have the opportunity to repay.
A thousand people helped him stay alive long enough to make it here. But none of them ever saw him delirious or incapacitated. To them, he was simply the tenacious, crippled child who required assistance every so often and repaid them by constructing little machines or fixing mechanical problems.
And he has no intention of changing that for them.
Heimerdinger nods distractedly. His nose twitches, and the silence stretches like taffy - distorting the longer it goes.
Viktor knows this feeling. Not well, but enough. It has been confirmed with the slowness of his thoughts, his movements, and his speech.
“They sedated me,” he states.
“Yes,” Heimerdinger says, visibly relaxing at the opportunity to give a certain answer. “You were-”
A mess. A nuisance. A member of the rabble making far too much of a scene for our comfort.
“In a tremendous deal of pain, I’m sure.”
Every conversation with a topsider feels like balancing on ice. The moment Viktor convinces himself that he is confident in the direction, it changes underneath his feet.
“It was bad,” he admits when the silence stretches again. “I could barely walk to class. I was delirious, I suppose, when I finally arrived. I was not in my right mind, and I foolishly thought that I could solve the problem of my knee locking in place if I used my cane for leverage behind it and… yanked it bent.”
As he talks, he twists his hands in the coarse sheets of the bed, focusing on their scratch instead of the way that describing it all feels like gargling glass.
Ashamed is not the word. Viktor is not less than due to his ailments. He has never been something to pity, and he has never, of his own volition, wanted to hide. He did not care before crawling up, before Heimerdinger opened this door and beckoned him inside. Only after blinking aside the glaring topside sunlight and taking in the entirely foreign world in which people still want but rarely need did he consider that these people with their gilded smiles and full stomachs might think differently.
They think Viktor is something to pity. They consider him an oddity. They wish he would limp back down to where all the other trenchers go to die, down to a place without family names or clear air.
He is not ashamed. But he is frustrated, embittered, and a hundred other emotions he must swallow back because he is not allowed to be any of them.
Instead, he must be grateful.
“It was foolish of me, and I apologize for disrupting your lecture,” he concludes, swallowing back anger and bile.
Heimerdinger all but gapes at him. Briefly and ridiculously, Viktor wishes the pain medication would lose its efficacy, and he could lose consciousness again. It would rescue him from this conversation.
“My boy, I don’t care about the lecture,” he says slowly. “I care if you’re alright.”
Bullshit, Viktor cannot help but think.
“How much do I owe for this?” he asks instead, gesturing down at his legs, covered by the sheet.
Heimerdinger’s fluffy eyebrows furrow. “Nothing. It’s included in tuition.”
“I do not pay tuition, Professor.”
I am here on your whim. I am here because you offered an opportunity to me, and I grabbed it with both hands like the greedy creature I am. I know you can take all of this away from me if you wanted.
I know this. Why do you not?
“Don’t worry about it,” Heimerdinger dismisses with a small wave. “You have more important things to worry about, like resting.”
“Absolutely not.”
Viktor throws the sheets off his legs. Through the haze of the medication, the pain simply throbs, a dull ache akin to hearing sound underwater. It is manageable and distant. Without the medication, he knows it would be agony. Sharp. Consuming.
He could manage it. He has managed it before, without this cushioning, and he can do it again.
Bite down.
His right knee has been heavily wrapped and splinted, neatly and professionally immobilized.
“Viktor,” Heimerdinger says firmly, “you dislocated your knee and sprained two ligaments. Plenty of students have missed for less.”
“I am not the same as other students.”
Heimerdinger frowns. “Of course you are.”
“I am not,” Viktor snaps. “No other student is from the Undercity, and no other student is a cripple.”
When Heimerdinger’s jaw drops open in shock, he recognizes that he has all but abandoned the rules he has set for himself to be polite and adherent and grateful.
Jump when they ask how high and bite down against the pain. Outwork them for a fraction of the recognition. Be their example, their photograph , their comfortable little abstraction brought to pallid life.
There is only the work until there is not. Until there are unfamiliar rules in a language second to his tongue. Until loneliness wraps its chilled arms around his ribs and squeezes. Until his leg screams in protest of being forced into normalcy. Until his body reels from the adjustment from near starvation to plenty, until the tapping of his cane is all he can fucking hear inside his skull, until it is the only sound they ever associate with him, introduction and trail in every space he will ever occupy.
And they punish him for it, for his habits and his inadequacies, in a thousand small, cutting ways, until he bleeds out and crumples. When he inevitably does, they will step over him like they do every other sump rat.
At least, until he pushes himself to his feet. Again, and again, and again, he stands. Damn the pain. He will hold his chin up and stand on his own two feet, cane firmly planted on the ground. Because fuck this place and what it has done to him.
Viktor knows what he is: a crippled trencher. Simple and absolute. Resilient with rough edges. This glittering, smooth place was not designed for him.
Resultantly, he was not designed for its rules.
“I am not the same as the other students,” he repeats coldly. “None of them have ever starved or slept using trash to keep warm. I highly doubt any of them ever breathed in fumes smelling of hell itself, or that they had to be held down by their parents when they tried, again and again, to fix a leg that simply refused any and all intervention.”
“Viktor-”
“No,” he snaps. “No, Professor. I listened when you met me for the first time and told me of the Academy. You told me it was somewhere perfectly suited for me. The Academy, you said, was somewhere I could flourish. It would be good for me. I was wasted where I was. I deserved to be there. All of that is what you said . So, now you will listen to me.”
Heimerdinger’s face shutters. After a long moment, he asks, “Did I lie to you?”
“What?”
“Was anything that I said untrue?” Heimerdinger inquires. “You were wasted in the Undercity. You have flourished at the Academy, so it’s been good for you. And you absolutely deserve-”
“I know I deserve to be here,” Viktor snaps. “But the Academy is not suited for me.”
Heimerdinger frowns, clearly upset at being interrupted, but Viktor seizes his opening regardless.
“I experience pain, daily, that would send most students to the infirmary in tears. I have missed classes because they are in locations so inaccessible to me that it is better for me to make up the work than risk the pain of attending them. I had to fabricate my own keys to the library and to classrooms so I could arrive early for comfortable seats.”
“You did what?” Heimerdinger says, missing the point. “That’s against the rules.”
Viktor waves him off. “I am from the Undercity, Professor. We are not known for following the rules.”
“You’re more than that.”
“Correct. I am a trencher, and a cripple.”
Heimerdinger freezes, much like he did that first day in his office, when he noticed Viktor’s cane for the first time. His eyes shift side to side, and he swallows uncomfortably.
“If you tell me that I am not a cripple,” Viktor says slowly, “I will lose every ounce of respect I ever had for you.”
This is not an empty threat. He learned early in his life that empty threats were often violently challenged, and so he never makes them.
The professor is… on thin ice already. Viktor is one semester away from graduation. He lays in an infirmary bed, half-sedated. He has already been incredibly rude.
He has very little left to lose.
“You are not only… your leg,” Heimerdinger finally ventures.
Viktor chuckles, a mixture of bitterness and amusement at Heimerdinger’s discomfort. “That is the first thing everyone sees. It will take a miracle to convince them beyond it.”
Heimerdinger quiets again, but this time, his brows furrow in contemplation, not anger.
Outside, it rains harder. The little fireplace still smolders uselessly. Viktor watches it, and in the time it takes for Heimerdinger to speak again, he nearly falls asleep.
But only nearly.
The professor says, “I’ve been teaching for more than two centuries, Viktor. I have never met your equal. If anyone can make a miracle, it’s you.”
He puts his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. Viktor musters all of his will to not shrug it off.
They remain like that for a few seconds. Then, Heimerdinger rises from his chair and totters out of the room with a kind look over his shoulder.
A week later, the staff release Viktor with a set of well-made crutches and strict instructions for care. They would have released him earlier if he had not, immediately after Heimerdinger’s departure, broken two fingers as he punched the stone wall of the infirmary.
He is an in-between creature now, transfigured by knowledge. Not quite Undercity anymore, with an education and the memory of starvation slowly waning. And he will never be topside, not with his accent or the thump of his cane.
His heart aches, pulled apart in two directions. One side for a home long buried six feet deep, and the other for one he will be forced to claw into being until his hands drip blood on gold.
His time at the Academy ends with little fanfare. The vast majority of his professors, including Heimerdinger, congratulate him. A few students give him approving nods and shallow, kind words. Viktor graduates at the top of his class with no job offers.
It is just as well. Post-graduate plans are a networking game, and he was not privy to the rules beyond overhearing the chatter of his classmates. He has no desire to line the pockets of already wealthy topsiders who will treat him like a servant, or, worse, entertainment.
At best, he will climb no higher than the status of “one of the good ones.”
He does, however, take comfort in the fact that he has multiple lab offers from within the Academy. The engineering, physics, and math departments have all offered him multiple positions, each attempting to vie for his acceptance with increasingly specific benefits. The offer letters fill his mailbox each day, and he would be lying if he claimed it did not bring him some joy to see the physical difference between his and some of his more… lackadaisical classmates’ academic prospects.
The positions are nothing to covet. Graduate student life is not something to envy; it is, by all accounts, full of scrimping and saving and difficult, thankless work in exchange for a singular, glittering light at the end of the tunnel. They are highly specialized as well. If Viktor selects the engineering department, he will not have the time to study physics or math, and this is the same no matter his selection.
Regardless, one position within the physics department appears particularly promising. The professor, Dr. Karys, investigates fluid motion. It is notoriously difficult work, and the offer letter promises a decent stipend, as well as housing, in exchange for four years (minimum) of Viktor’s time.
It is not a miracle. But it could be the beginning of one, if Viktor goes about this correctly. He could push the research toward something benefitting the Undercity. Filtration, perhaps. Distribution to those further from the river, maybe.
He considers this, lying on his bed, in the midst of a break from packing up his dormitory. He has boxed up most of his more frivolous possessions: old notebooks, a mug he has no memory of acquiring, various trinkets left here from those occasional trysts. His essentials, however, have yet to be packed away.
He must move out by the end of the week; to where, he has no idea. All that he knows is that he cannot remain, and that is all the more reason to take an offer now.
After all, he has nothing to return to down below.
The sound of paper sliding on the hardwood floor startles him out of his thoughts. He sits up, wondering which of his notebooks fell, and quickly spots an unfamiliar envelope lying innocently near his door.
Viktor walks over - he has had startlingly little pain recently and so does not require the cane nor the brace - and crouches down with the support of his desk. The envelope is of a heavy cream stationary. His name is scrawled in a messy half-print, half-cursive. On the back, it is held shut with a gold wax seal in the shape of a gear.
He pushes off the desk to stand and tears it open.
Viktor,
I know I already told you at the ceremony, but congratulations on your graduation! There is, sincerely, no one I have ever taught who has earned that diploma more. I realize, now, after our conversation, that this sentiment is truer than I had originally thought.
I am a scientist, first and foremost, and I have lived a long time. I have built my identity around learning and adjusting to new information. The world has changed a great deal since I was young. A great deal indeed. I thought I had been amenable to these changes and that I understood them quite easily.
It took you telling me off from an infirmary bed to realize I was wrong.
Viktor snorts but continues reading.
I failed to see your struggles as they truly exist. I disregarded the idea that you could need additional support because I was still so blinded by your intelligence and resilience. I refused to consider the idea that your origins and disability could affect your experience at the Academy, which I had always viewed as an impartial, objective institution. I still view it that way, but I have since learned that it is not filled with impartial, objective people.
My dear boy, I am deeply sorry. I hope you can forgive me for my blunder and my ignorance.
But my apology is not the purpose of this letter, though it was necessary for me to give. I’m writing primarily to offer you the position of my assistant.
“You cannot be serious,” Viktor mutters, aloud, to no one.
In response, a crow caws outside his window.
Blindly, he throws an eraser in that direction. It pings off the glass, and he hears wings flap as he continues reading.
Please do not think this was out of pity. I have needed a new assistant for quite some time, and I went through the entire graduating class’s resumes in a blind selection process, choosing the best without looking at their names. Only when I reached an impasse in my decision-making did I take a peek. When I saw your application, I knew yours was the one to choose.
“Out of pity,” Viktor muses. “Though you will not say it, you have surely heard about my lack of job prospects, and because I was your responsibility in the first place, you feel a continued need to ensure my well-being.”
After all, no other student copied the keys to the library.
“What.”
Or fixed their own heating systems.
He never admitted that.
Or repaired a dam faster than Piltover’s top engineers.
Viktor continues reading at a faster pace.
No other student has been willing to do whatever it takes in pursuit of knowledge. That kind of thinking can’t be taught, especially not in a place as regimented as the Academy. True scientists push boundaries and bend rules. I was wrong to criticize you for such a prized trait.
As my assistant, you would have full access to Academy resources…
The rest of the letter details the particulars of the position: housing, the pay, all of the necessary details when it comes to keeping his body alive.
But Viktor fixates on the more important words.
“Full access to Academy resources.”
He could be in charge of his own research.
He could do whatever he wanted.
He would not be boxed in by something so arbitrary and specific as a discipline.
And, what, all in exchange for pushing papers around for Heimerdinger? Administrative work that would not take more than half of his brain power, leaving him largely free to again, do whatever he pleased.
This would be a much faster way toward making a miracle.
He eyes the other letters strewn about his desk. In one sweeping motion, he pushes them all onto the floor, snatches the nearest pen, and scrawls his signature on the printed line.
He nearly forgets his cane on his way to deliver it, in person, to Heimerdinger.
The sooner the better. Now, he will have someplace to move to.
For all of Viktor’s mistakes as a student, he never blew a hole in the wall of his apartment.
He had his fair share of explosions, of course. He was missing his arm hair for a long stretch of his second year. But a true act of destruction, that he was never responsible for.
The walls are still smoking. It does not smell like a normal fire. It smells… colder. Sweeter. But that could be the smell of the city below, visible against the perfect blue sky where the laboratory wall should be.
He makes a note in his report for Heimerdinger. The reports and all of the bureaucratic paperwork of being the professor’s assistant have become perfectly routine over the years.
Having the authority to direct Enforcers is still novel. Viktor takes care not to revel in the slight satisfaction it gives him each time.
The man responsible for this is not dangerous. Determining that from first impressions is a valuable skill Viktor developed very early in his life. This man is big, and fit, but harmless.
Still, it is protocol for him to be brought into custody. And until Viktor has something of worth for himself- he is closer than he ever has been and still miles away - he must follow protocol.
The notebook is what pushes him. The notebook, and the professor.
Heimerdinger is a hypocrite. This, he knows and has known since before he graduated from the Academy. Heimerdinger is full of contradiction, equally likely to praise and denigrate the same action depending on his philosophical outlook of the day.
Heimerdinger took Viktor on for breaking the rules. He allowed this student - one Jayce Talis - to be banished for doing the same.
Viktor takes a look at Talis’s notebook. They are not the ravings of a madman like the trial painted him to be. His findings make sense. The math is coherent. It follows the universal dance that physics taught Viktor years ago.
Or, it will, with some minor edits.
This is the first thing Viktor has ever seen with the potential to be a miracle.
He does not know what it is that pushes him back toward that apartment. He has never believed in fate or some other higher power. If such forces existed, they would have fixed the suffering surrounding him since birth.
Or maybe they are too blinded by the City of Progress to pay any attention to the rot beneath.
Something beckons Viktor toward that apartment. It is a good thing, too. His chance at a miracle stands at the edge of the hole where the wall should be, wet from the rain.
He cannot let this go.
He has spent the last near-decade of his life clawing towards the surface, searching desperately for a breach into fresh air. And he has nothing to show for it but an Academy degree and a position that, while it offers him considerable connections and a certain degree of power, is not enough. It fails to shield him from the traits defining him the instant he staggers into a room or utters a word.
He has nothing tangible. Nothing of worth. Nothing that will last.
This could last. And it could mean something.
He cannot let this go.
So, he utters the only words that come to mind.
“Am I interrupting?”