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He was born on the Entresol. Perhaps that was what gave him the perspective, to see the middle of all things.
His mother was an apprenta horticulturalist at one of the biggest cultivairs in the undercity. The cultivairs were isolated crystal greenhouses that the Barons maintained as a symbol of their power, filled with bioluminescent algae and night-blooming flowers that flourished in the undercity’s perpetual grey twilight. They were a display of conspicuous wealth, a site for botanical experimentation, and a source of clean air, all rolled into one.
“One day you’ll see real forests,” his mother said. “The lush jungles of Ixtal, the old-growth magic of Ionia. Your father always spoke of how beautiful they were.”
Vander never knew his father. He was a Noxian sailor who came through the Sun Gates to trade goods from far-away lands; just one of many thousands of foreigners to flow in and out through the city. That was how he met his mother, when she was just barely out of girlhood. That was how Vander came to be.
The other kids made fun of him. They threw stones and called him a half-breed mutt, as if every other kid in Zaun didn’t have some foreign blood in them. He ran home, cursing his absent father, and his mother stroked his hair to comfort him.
“Oh, child,” she said, “I never regretted meeting your father. It was fate when Janna brought him into the city on her winds. Janna gave me you, and I will love you always.” She wiped his cheeks and kissed his hands, and Vander held her tight.
She died a few years later.
It was the Lung Blight that did her in. There were a lot of ways to die in Zaun: chem fires, factory accidents, street violence, drug overdose. The Lung Blight was the one that no one escaped. If you lived in Zaun, the toxins made a home in your lungs. Breathe the Gray, roll the dice: you could go a lifetime with hardly a cough, or die gasping from the fumes at an early age. It struck unexpectedly, but it always killed slowly.
Please don’t let me die like my mother, Vander begged Janna. Please don’t leave me. Please give me a chance.
There weren’t a lot of chances for a lone whelp on the Entresol. No family, no patron, too young to get an apprenticeship on the Bridgewaltz or in the cultivairs. He was sent to live with his mother’s brother in the slums, becoming just another one of countless forgotten sumpsnipes in the fissures.
Living down there was barely better than being out on the streets. His uncle was a dram-dealer for the Factorywood Fiends who liked to sample his supply. On days when the chem-punks didn’t pay him enough, he got drunk in a rage and threw empty bottles at Vander’s head.
“You useless dog! Just another mouth to feed.”
One day Vander woke up and found his uncle’s cold body hunched over on their doorstep. His watch and shoes had already been stolen. Overdose. Just another chem-burnt corpse that found its final resting place in the Sump.
Every other kid in the Sump wanted to make it up to Piltover. Some talked big about it, bragging about their small wins, their grand plans. Some were quieter about it, keeping their dreams tucked close to their chests. Vander just shrugged when the punks asked him. Even if he did have lofty ambitions, he wasn’t about to offer them up openly. Only marks go through the front door.
Oh, there were slum folk who made it up topside, alright. Plenty more ended up close enough on the Promenade level. Enough that he knew it was possible.
But the thing was, being up in the heights made people different. It wasn’t about the elevation or the clean air. There was just a certain kind of lived-in beauty that didn’t touch Piltover’s gilded towers. Vander knew it the first time he set foot in a cultivair, his hand warm in his mother’s and the air sweet from the smell of glow-pollen. A poor horticulturalist didn’t just stroll into the University of Piltover. The Clans didn’t hand out apprenticeships to sump-rats. And after generations of being bred in the dark, the night-blooming flowers wilted under the sun’s rays.
He could do alright for himself in Piltover, he supposed. Trade his brass knuckles for gloves, his muddy boots for something well-heeled. But then he wouldn’t be Vander anymore. He'd be a different beast entirely. There was a reason the topsiders didn’t pray to Janna, after all.
He got a job working security at the hexdraulic conveyors. He considered himself lucky. Figured he would end up in the fissure mines like most Sump kids, or maybe in Factorywood, but instead he spent his days on Drop Street watching the elevators go up and down on their metal tracks.
He liked to take evening shifts at the Rising Howl. It was the biggest conveyor and it ran well into the night, ferrying tourists and drunk partygoers and late shift workers, up and down and back up again between the two cities. The baroque iron and glass cage rattled as it shot past the embarkation platform, leaving a maelstrom in its wake. Its crowning glory was an ironwork wolf fixed to the top of the structure, its golden head thrown back to the sky in a howl. The statue was what gave the elevator its namesake. Vander had never seen a wolf outside of pictures, but he imagined that the real creatures didn’t sit alone like that, all still and silent. Wolves had packs. Family. Someone to run with, to hunt with.
Vander stood there on the platform all night until the steam whistles quieted and the crowds dispersed. Then he walked home, remembering what it was like to be in the middle of all things.
Vander seemed to have the worst combination of bad luck and bad decisions, which is how he ended up running through the Black Lanes while being pursued by Baron Volkage’s men.
It had happened on his way back to the lodging house. He heard screaming in a nearby alley, and when he peered around the wall he saw two men cornering a girl. She was curled up against the dirty wall, clutching something tight to her chest while the men tried to pry it away from her. A vicious kick left her reeling, and one of the men yanked the object away from her. Vander recognized the tubular shape, the glint of the gold seal on the side. What did some Sump gangers want with a pneuma-tube runner?
Caution overrode curiosity. It wasn’t any of his business; he had his own problems to take care of. He started to turn away, but then one of the thugs pulled out a knife and advanced on the collapsed girl.
Vander’s brass knuckles were in his hands in an instant.
The first thug went down with a blow to the ribs. He managed to clip Vander in the jaw as he lost his balance though, and Vander swung his knee into his gut in retaliation. His friend was luckier. He managed to slip out of Vander’s grasp and take off down the alley shouting for the rest of his crew. A second later Vander realized that the pressing problem was that the thugs had backup and he didn’t, and two-against-one weren’t great odds to begin with. The approaching calls in the street behind him said it was time to pack up and make himself scarce before things got uglier.
Sorry, he apologized silently to the girl, who lay motionless on the ground. Wish things were different.
He spat blood and phlegm on the ground and ran. He didn’t imagine himself a hero. He just got restless fists, sometimes, and anger he didn’t know how to displace. The fissures were already the closest thing to hell on Runeterra. Why did they have to make it worse?
He hauled himself over ledges and through latticework pipes and hoped the thugs didn’t know the city as well as he did. His feet slipped in one the toxic runoff puddles that the city seemed to bleed from its cracks, and a gunshot rang out behind him as he scrambled to find his footing.
“Janna’s mercy,” he wheezed.
He had to make it to the main street. He was too big of a man to use the crowd for cover, but the time of day meant that the factory workers would soon be pouring out onto the streets to commute home. It might slow his pursuers down enough for him to duck into Benzo’s shop for safety. Benzo was going to kill him, but he’d worry about that later if he made it that far.
A few seconds later, his bad luck swung him into an alleyway that was a dead end. A breeze seemed to curl around him, whispering for him to look up.
That was how he met Silco.
Silco was the prettiest boy Vander had ever met, and Vander was busy trying very hard not to stare at the sheer amount of bare skin his outfit didn’t cover. Silco handed him a smoke, and that gave Vander something to do with his mouth while waiting for his heart to stop pounding like a pneuma-hammer in his chest.
The cigarettes were some kind of cultivair-grown herbal blend that tasted horrendously bitter and numbed his throat. Silco said they were popular in the parlor. They were pricey, but there were smart folks by the cliffs trying to cultivate their own strain for a cheaper price. The Gray made it hard enough to breathe even without sucking down toxic smoke for recreation, and the herbs helped with that. They cleared his airways a little, and helped calm his nerves. It wouldn’t stop the Lung Blight, but it was just another one of the little comforts undercity folk found to make life a bit easier down here.
They sat on the roof until eight bells, and then Silco had to go start his shift.
“Can I come back to visit you?” Vander asked, as Silco pulled on a sheer robe.
“What do you mean by that?” Silco said.
Vander paused. “Just talk, I guess. On the roof. Or inside, whatever you prefer.”
Silco didn’t smile, but his expression wasn’t unfriendly either. “It’s going to cost you.”
Oh. Vander looked down at the floor.
“You work at the hexdraulic conveyors, don’t you?” Silco said. “I want to know when the Piltover wardens come down. Names, times, locations.”
Vander looked up. That wasn’t what he was expecting. “I… I work crowd control, not intel.”
Silco spared a glance back at him from where he stood at the top of the stairwell. “So don’t use the front door,” he said, and then he was gone.
"Don’t use the front door" turned out to be Silco’s approach to a lot of aspects of life. It was a concept Vander was familiar with, as an undercity native himself. He had to climb the fire escape every time he wanted to see Silco, and then hang under the windowsill to check if he was busy working. It would feel like an invasion of privacy with anyone else, but Silco didn’t seem to care. They didn’t follow the same rules as everybody else when they were together.
Benzo kept asking him why he seemed to get off work later and later each night, and Vander didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends, other than Benzo. But this was different. Silco was something he didn’t want to share with anyone else.
It was funny, because Silco didn’t seem to mind sharing what he had. Not in that sense, necessarily; no, Silco tossed cogs to the beggar children he passed on the street, scraps to stray dogs, and kindness to Vander. He was playing some kind of long game that Vander didn’t quite understand yet, but that was okay. It felt good to be needed. It felt good to not be alone.
“We all breathe the same air down here,” Silco said. “The real parasites are the ones above.”
They lay on the roof together and watched the city’s greenish chemlights flicker above them like firelight bugs until Silco had to go back downstairs and Vander had to go home.
“I have something to tell you,” Vander said, as Silco pulled him over the windowsill. He didn’t really need help climbing in, but it gave him an excuse to take Silco’s hand in his own.
“What is it?” Silco asked.
“I lost my job,” Vander said. He tried to keep his voice neutral, but the words ended up coming out too fast anyway. It was a familiar feeling: trying to tamp down the shame before it could crawl up his throat and choke him.
Silco took out a cigarette and lit it. He turned away from Vander to blow out the smoke.
“Was it because of me?” Silco asked, finally.
Vander looked down at the fire escape and thought about the long climb back down. “No,” he said, and it was the truth. Everyone had their bad days, and sometimes Vander thought he had all the bad luck in the world.
Silco’s mouth curved up. It wasn’t fair, Vander thought. Only aristocrats should have mouths like that.
“You should have said yes,” Silco said. “That way I would owe you a favor.”
“I don’t want you to owe me anything,” Vander said.
“Then you’re a fool,” Silco said.
He sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. Vander went over and settled in and they lay there side-by-side on the bed like they did when the Gray outside was too bad to smoke on the roof, passing the cigarette back and forth until it was gone. Then Vander rolled over to face Silco, keeping enough space between his broad body and Silco’s smaller one so they weren’t quite touching. The luminous pigment dusted around Silco’s eyelids sparkled when he blinked at him. Blue eyes. Blue like the sky they so rarely saw down here.
“You have other ways to track the wardens,” Vander said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
“Mm,” Silco said.
“You didn’t actually need me for anything this whole time, did you?”
“Mmhm,” Silco said.
Vander wasn’t good with words. Not the way Silco was. So he just lay there and stared at the tacky multicolored wallpaper until the other man said something back.
After a while, Silco sighed. “It’s not true that I don’t need you for anything,” he said, and Vander felt something inside him settle. Like a stone sinking to the bottom of the river.
Without a job, Vander had little to do during the day but look for another one. He took the Rising Howl as a passenger for once, not a guard, watching the rocky walls of the cliffs blur together as they rose above Zaun.
It was different, looking down at the canyon like this. He could see past the smoke of Factorywood and over the chempools in the Sump, the chasms glowing bottle-green in the gloom. The rainbow vapors made shimmering halos over the chem-lamps and gave the streets an unearthly appearance. From here the land didn’t look like half-graveyard and half-landfill; it didn’t look like any real place on Runeterra. This must be what the Pilties saw when riding in the hexdraulic conveyers, safe in their bubbles of thick glass and filtered air. They couldn’t hear the skirl of the corroded pipework or the wheeze of children trying to breathe through makeshift esophilters. It wasn’t real to them. None of this was.
All his life Vander thought the best he could do was survive. He was standing in a world that couldn’t keep still, staring at the cobblestones while the city’s spires rose higher and higher. He had to move first or get left behind. He wasn’t a good man, but maybe he could do better. What Zaun needed was someone who cared enough to do something about it, something real. Maybe that was what Silco was planning. Maybe, somehow, that made Silco a better man.
He went to the parlor a little earlier than usual, following the path through the streets that were so familiar to him by now. The rusted fire escape creaked as he hauled himself up to look over the windowsill. What he saw inside made his blood freeze.
Silco was pushed up against the wall, and another man had a fist wrapped around his neck. No—not a fist. A metal augmentation that extended up to the man’s shoulder, ending in claws that were squeezing the air out of Silco. Vander stared in a split moment that felt like a gunshot—Silco’s mouth open in pain, eyelashes fluttering, the man’s other hand tangled in his hair—and then he moved.
He slammed the window open. There wasn’t even time to put on his brass knuckles. He crossed the room in a few strides and then grabbed Metal-Arm by the back of his jacket and shoved him away from Silco as hard as he could.
“Get out!” Vander bellowed, and the stranger stumbled over furniture, leaving a gash in the wallpaper as his claws looked for purchase.
“What the hell is your pr—”
“Now!” Vander clenched his fists and thought wildly, for a second, that he was going to kill someone in front of Silco if things didn’t de-escalate soon. He was bigger, stronger, even without augmentations. He had the upper hand.
The other man did the smart thing, turned and ran. The door banged shut after him, and Vander let out a shaky breath. He let his shoulders fall.
In the next second, Vander’s back slammed onto the table and there was a hand fisted in his collar and a knife hovering over his eye.
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” Silco hissed. His voice sounded wrecked. Vander looked from the tip of the knife, to Silco’s fingers white-knuckled on the handle, and down to where there were dark marks blooming on Silco’s pale throat.
“He was hurting you,” Vander said.
“I know how to get out of a chokehold,” Silco snapped. “It’s one of the first things anyone learns in this place. If someone gets their hands around my neck, it’s because I let them.”
Vander didn’t say anything. His mouth was suddenly very dry. After a moment, the knife withdrew. Silco got up and stalked to the other side of the room, kicking a fallen chair out of the way. He looked balefully towards the closed door, as if he expected an angry madame to come bursting through it at any moment demanding answers.
“I’m sorry,” Vander said.
Silco closed his eyes, as if he couldn’t stand to see him anymore. He poured himself a drink from the open bottle of wine on the dresser and slowly took a sip. The ripped wallpaper and knocked-over furniture looked worse, somehow, in the stillness.
“There was a robbery,” Silco said measuredly. “The perpetrator escaped through the window.”
Then he picked up the wine bottle and threw it, as hard as he could, against the opposite wall. Vander flinched at the familiar sound of glass shattering.
“Silco,” Vander said.
“You should go,” Silco said. He ran a hand through his messy hair, a tic that betrayed his distress.
Vander got up. The window was still open, and it was letting in the cold and thick air from outside. He slid over the edge, lingering at the threshold.
“Silco,” he said again.
“Lay low,” Silco said, without looking at him. “Don’t come back.”
Vander climbed down the fire escape and Silco waited until he was all the way at the bottom before shutting the window and pulling the curtains closed.
Without his job, without Silco, Vander had a lot of time to contemplate things he tried hard not to think about before. His name day came and went. Nothing much changed.
It was hard, trying to be a better man. When he found himself stuck in the middle of things, he looked for a way to pull himself out. He only had so much time in this world, after all. Slowly but surely, he was getting older. He was already older than his mother had ever been. What would she think, if she saw him down here?
It’s not like he expected to change the world from his place in the pit. Runeterra would forget him when he was gone, like it forgot nearly everyone else. There would be no statues erected in his honor, no great monuments. There were only a handful of people who cared for him, and in time they’d be gone too.
Benzo didn’t put up with his moping. He gave him errands to run, deliveries around the Lanes. Told him to get off his arse and apply for the bartending gig down the street, for Janna’s sake. Vander nodded listlessly.
In his mind he saw the fingers squeezing Silco's throat, the bruises that would take weeks to fade. He blinked, and in his mind's eye the hands were his own, calloused and familiar. He didn't know why he was thinking of this. He wanted to leave his mind, go far away.
He walked along the wharfside docks in the evening, watching the ships come and go. He gave his spare cogs to the children huddled by the warmth of the exhaust vents and fed the stray dogs the last bits of his supper. He tried to be kinder to himself.
A few weeks later, he found himself wandering back to that familiar alleyway, hands stuffed in his pockets against the winter chill. It was a clear night, and that made his feet wander. He always had to urge to roam before the Gray came back and made every breath a battle.
This time the ladder of the fire escape was pulled up to the side of the parlor, retracted so he couldn’t reach it. He stared at it for a moment, considering maybe going for the bottom rung with a running start, but then a whistle from above made him look up.
Silco stood at the edge of the roof, looking down. Their eyes met. “Hello there,” he said.
Vander swallowed. “Hi,” he said.
Silco kicked the ladder down. Vander climbed up, his hands remembering the feel of the rough metal. Silco helped pull him over the ledge, and then they were standing face to face like no time had passed at all.
Silco wasn’t wearing his usual attire. His face was bare and he was bundled in a coat, a scarf wrapped around his neck.
“Too soon?” Vander asked, thinking of the ladder retracted against the building.
“No,” Silco said. “I’m glad you came.”
Silco took out a cigar and lit it. He handed it to Vander, who let the smoke fill his lungs like he was trying to drown himself in it. He passed it back to Silco, their fingers brushing.
“They finally figured out how to mass produce these,” Silco said, flicking away the ashes from the cigar. “The horticulturalists by the cliffs. You can get this stuff anywhere now, not just the cultivairs.”
“I see,” Vander said.
The chemlights flickered on above them. Noise from commuting workers drifted up from the street below them.
“Things are changing. I won’t be here for much longer,” Silco said. “I have connections up at the spire, where the merchant clan representatives meet. It’s an opportunity for me to make a real difference for the sons and daughters of Zaun.”
“I’m happy for you,” Vander said.
“Vander,” Silco said. “I want you to come with me.”
“Do you need someone to hold your coat or something?” asked Vander, before he could stop himself.
“I’m serious,” Silco said, and for a moment Vander couldn’t meet the intensity of his eyes, the cold surety of his gaze. It frightened him, sometimes. How Silco could look up and run the calculations and know exactly what he wanted and how he would get there. Surely someone like Vander, a man standing still in a moving world, could only weigh him down.
“I want the same thing you do,” Vander said, and he knew it was true. He thought about his walks by the docks, the view of the canyon from the Rising Howl. Zaun was splitting, endlessly fractured by the squabbling of gangs and merchants and industrialists. The people deserved better.
“Good,” Silco said.
They lay down, shoulders touching, just like they always had.
“Why did you come back, anyway?” Silco asked.
Vander toyed with a loose thread on the edge of his jacket. “It was my name day last week,” he said slowly.
“Congratulations,” Silco said.
“Yeah,” Vander said. “Yeah, and the whole time I was thinking about how I wish I could have spent it with you. I’m not going to be here forever, Silco. You’re not either. One day someone’s going to fuck you up badly enough that I can’t fix you, or I’ll get into a fight I can’t walk off, and that’ll be it. End of the line.”
“Your concern is touching,” Silco said.
“I couldn’t let that be our last conversation. I want to come with you, wherever you go,” Vander said. “That’s all I want, but sometimes I’m worried you’ll realize I’m not the man you thought I was, and then you’ll push me away.”
“I know who you are. And I would never betray you,” Silco said.
"But what if you don't know me?" Vander said. "What if there's a monster inside me?"
"There's a monster inside all of us," Silco said.
Vander exhaled. “Okay,” he said.
They were silent for a while. The hum of traffic down below was quieting, as the streets emptied.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for your name day. You can pick a name day for me, and we can celebrate that instead,” Silco said.
Vander looked at him sideways. “You really don’t know when you were born?” he asked.
Silco shrugged. “Most of the children at Hope House didn’t.”
“What was your earliest memory, then?” Vander asked.
Silco paused. “Most of the memories I had when I was young weren’t very happy. But... I remember there was a captain from Noxus who used to come into the harbor a few times a year to trade foreign goods. He was kind to the orphans. He had a lot of stories about the places he traveled, but he only ever told one story about himself. He said he had a family somewhere in Zaun. A wife and a child. But he couldn’t ever see them again, because he made a deal with a sea demon to save his ship when he ran into a bad storm, and those were the terms they settled on.”
“Seems like a pretty shitty deal to me,” Vander said.
“Maybe,” Silco said. “But I suppose it’s different depending on where you're standing.”
Vander yawned. “Yeah. Doubt it was a real story, anyway."
“Probably not,” Silco agreed.
They lapsed into comfortable silence. The spots where Vander was pressed up against Silco were warm; Vander couldn’t recall feeling this relaxed in months. Silco’s hand came to brush against his wrist where his jacket sleeve ended, sliding lower so the back of their hands were just touching.
Vander must have drifted off at some point, because he had a dream. He was back on the Entresol and his mother was there, welcoming him home. He reached out to embrace her, but then a gust of wind whipped around him, so fast and sharp he had to cover his eyes. It felt like standing in the center of a maelstrom. When he cracked open his eyes, there was a lithe, ethereal figure in front of him. Her feet didn’t touch the ground as she drifted closer towards him, reaching to cup his face with a delicate hand. Her touch was cool. The sharp angles of her face made her look strange and alien, but meeting her sky-blue eyes felt like coming home.
“Janna?” Vander mumbled, still half asleep.
“No,” Silco said, mouth curving. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Vander blinked, and Silco’s blue eyes blinked back at him. The rest of his face swam into view.
“Go back to sleep,” Silco said.
Vander sighed. He tucked his face back against Silco’s arm, and closed his eyes.