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Viktor did not remember a time before his family lived in the undercity, not that he had been more than an infant when his mother had brought him there. But then again, Viktor did not remember many things from those early years, with his mother working at the mines and himself, spared from the work, roaming the empty daytime undercity until the workers marched out in the evening, full of extenuated joy, into the very places he had explored that day. What he does remember is the kindness of the owners, the thick air that mostly smelled like a gas leak, his first cane. These scraps are enough for him; enough to remember his home before Shimmer, before the careless rule of the Chem-Barons, before the riots that turned his mother into a nameless martyr. The undercity was a kind place that was dealt a shit hand.
“Vitu, have you seen my mask?” Rushed footsteps on the hallway, a soft knock on his bedroom door, bleary eyes meeting a thick Entresol accent.
“Kitchen, Mam, as usual.”
There was familiarity in the exchange. His mother, always rushing, always leaving things by the wayside and him picking up the slack. He didn’t resent her, it was his own way to give back. In the undercity, you didn’t take the food on your table for granted, you didn’t take your caretakers for granted, and you didn’t let your loved ones lose their mask before the yearly appointed renewal was due.
His mother was a kind woman. In her kindness, she showed him their place in the world. In her kindness, she died to change it. Viktor felt privileged, having learnt about Piltover’s treatment of his people through dinner chats and not through the slow death that took the children his age in the mines. He insisted he felt privileged, when it was the tinkerer who had been killed and not himself, even as bile rose up at the sight of enforcers. Privileged, when he found the right scraps to make his own leg brace for a bad leg that no one had the resources to diagnose. The day his mother died, he exchanged privilege for anger when he reminded himself why he kept going.
Asking for permission, for negotiation, was for people who had the privilege to be seen as human. For him, only revolution would suffice.
The moniker “Machine Herald” always felt too grandiose, a suit he would never fit in. He’s grateful for the children, who all call him by his name, and they see through the unflesh into humanity. It’s funny how, after all that time, they saw him as a person when he was the least organic. He thinks of Jayce, who now has his own epithet (“Man of Tomorrow”, they called him; to Viktor he feels like a synonym of times past), and he can’t bring himself to hate him. Still blind to struggle, still believing that true bravery is defeating what you fear, not understanding it.
When they were still at the Academy, Jayce would occasionally use the word cripple to refer to him; having picked it up from Viktor’s own self-deprecation, though much more careless in its use, despite always using it with the best of intentions. Viktor called him out on it once, and the slur turned into avoidance. The elephant in the room, smashing the windows when Viktor asked for help with the stairs on bad days, bellowing when he mentioned that his hip ached that day. Jayce never looked at differences in the eye, because he thought ignorance was always kind. Viktor, who knew kindness in the hands of the barman who put together some pipes and made him his first cane, who knew kindness in botched surgery after botched surgery despite not having the means or the knowledge. When you knew kindness through a stranger that desperately wanted you to thrive beyond mere survival, Viktor just needed one look of discomfort to understand that he was not seen. That all love that may come from Jayce was meant for someone else, sometimes pitiful and sometimes brave, but never human.
His lungs failed, eventually. Jayce, of course, went through the treatment reports, desperate to find any hint at bad praxis, someone to blame, someone to punish for Viktor’s body decaying. Viktor knew it was the fissures, and Viktor told him, and Viktor was the one to suffer the consequences of inhaling gas and choking on pollution, drinking water with traces of oil for years. Jayce was too busy contemplating his own anger. Viktor was too busy dying to care.
Two birds with one stone, he thinks, as they ply him open, his own intricate engineering breathing fire and life back into his body, mechanical lungs that give him the strength to step out of the Academy and into the depths of Zaun.
Vitu to Vitya to Viktor, his own particular growth. It was not his leg that bothered him, at that point, he decided. Though then again, a medical corset and his metabolism that kept him looking emaciated no matter how much he ate helped hide his breasts well enough. The rest didn’t matter, never really did. When he was younger, he briefly considered performing surgery on himself (sawing through bone had always been more daunting than a mere removal of soft tissue.) It would not look prim and proper, with no ointments for the scars, with dirty tools and dirtier consequences. Even when the fissures took its toll, later, almost what felt like a lifetime later, even as the capillaries in his lungs strained and burst, Viktor never resented his body. My body has never betrayed me, he thinks. It’s not a trap nor a cage, it is a tool for liberation.
The undercity’s days were no longer slow and kind, as Hextech and Shimmer fought for dominance in a territory where the only choice for children was submission or rot. Viktor would often look at himself, some parts glistening metallic in the pale light of morning, some organic and old, rusty, and contemplated prayer. He was more faithful in himself than any Goddess, nowadays, so he put on some clothes, and wandered.
Before any cultists, there was Neph. Viktor had found him near the drop to the lanes, searching for bolts in the dusty crevices. He approached the child cautiously, aware that his own voice was a metallic echo, his gaze unreadable behind the mask, and that any child in their right mind would be terrified of the hexclaw rising above his shoulder, glowing softly. Neph does not notice. He asks if his throat is sore, and Viktor laughs. Neph can’t see all that well, so Viktor helps him look for bolts, nails, and other junk. They walk together to the lab. Neph talks about bullies, and Viktor talks about bodies. Neph calls himself a cripple, and Viktor thinks of Jayce.
Neph likes literature more than he does mathematics, but he likes Viktor even more, so he learns his way around the lab, listens to the older man; prototypes of prosthetics for Viktor have his fingerprints all over them, and Viktor finds he doesn’t care.
Neph asks him if he plans to fix his eyes over dinner and Viktor chokes.
“Do you want me to?”
“Not really.”
Viktor bounces his bad leg, one of the few organic remnants in his augmented body. “Then I won’t. There’s nothing to fix if nothing’s broken.” Neph smiles, and so does Viktor.
When Viktor first reads about transhumanism, he is 26 and in love. Jayce’s mother has a beautiful bookshelf, with intricately spined books, that she bought for Jayce when he was younger, though his interest in geology kept him from ever reading the philosophical essays within. She says she can borrow them, and Viktor wishes he was brave enough to tell her about his feelings for her son, but he is not, so he takes what he’s offered and pays back in kindness. He doesn’t miss the prosthetic fingers. She doesn’t miss the leg brace. There’s a kinship in margins.
When Viktor first reads about transhumanism, Jayce suggests they fit him with a prosthetic leg, that they look for a surgeon to correct the malformations, that they find a way to fix him. He thinks about being 16 and trying to amputate his own leg. He thinks about avoiding mirrors. He thinks about resentment, and finds nothing. He wonders when that particular anger stopped. He looks at Jayce, and shrugging, says “It’s not a priority.”
When Viktor first reads about transhumanism, he dreams of bones. He dreams of his body, found beneath the ruins of Piltover years down the line, archaeologists finding a woman’s remains, and he wakes up and tells Jayce that he’s going to replace his hipbones with gears, then promptly falls back asleep. Jayce looks at him. Jayce doesn’t ask.
When Viktor first reads about transhumanism, he looks in the mirror one morning and finds potential, instead of decay.