Chapter Text
Stay close, my love, isn’t exactly a phrase that inspires confusion, yet Jayce, in failing to heed his mother’s caution, now finds himself lost in the Undercity.
It’s his first time in Zaun, finally old enough to accompany his mother for business dealings, though not quite old enough where he’d be free from her insistence to hold her hand. Jayce had been immediately overwhelmed with fascination for everything that Zaun is that Piltover isn’t, and without meaning to, he’d slipped free from her grasp when her attention had been pulled elsewhere.
He never meant to go far. But when he returned to the stall where she’d been when he wandered off to explore, there had been no sign of Ximena.
Jayce had tried asking for help around the marketplace to find her, but between unfriendly faces, wrong directions, and just being ignored, he’s unsuccessful.
Beyond unsuccessful, in fact, because now he’s sitting on the lip of a fountain that’s chugging out sludge rather than water, having no idea what to do. Where to go. And that makes him feel more than a little hopeless.
His mother is never going to let him return to the Undercity. If he ever finds her again, that is.
Jayce sighs resignedly, head hung as he traces the cracks of the fountain’s stone structure. He doesn’t look up when he hears a thunk-shuffle-step, thunk-shuffle-step approaching him—thinks it’s probably just a beggar, as he’d heard a few people call him over the course of his misadventures.
“I don’t think you should be here.”
Jayce’s head snaps up, eyes blowing wide. He doesn’t think it’s a threat—and taking in the appearance of the boy standing in front of him only reassures him of that, between a gaunt face and the reliance on a cane—but he can’t be too sure. If he’s learned anything today, it’s that looks can be very, very deceiving.
“I’m… sorry?”
The boy, unperturbed, merely blinks at him. He can’t be more than a year or two older than Jayce, at most. “You’re not from here. Someone will take advantage of that.”
“They already have,” Jayce mutters. He scuffs his shoe against the ground. “Are you going to?”
The boy shakes his head, though a corner of his mouth curls upward. He shifts his weight, readjusting the grip on his cane—which hardly looks like anything more than a scrap metal handle fastened to a large stick. Jayce bets he could find something sturdier just lying around in his family’s workshop.
“Then…” Jayce frowns. “What is it? I don’t have much, if there’s something you need.”
Another head shake, and a shrug. “I was just curious,” says the boy. He scrutinizes Jayce as if he had just stumbled upon him, like Jayce is a specimen to be studied. “Why are you here?”
“My family comes down to get parts and materials sometimes, for our business. Things you can’t get in Piltover.” Jayce sniffles, his face screwing up when he catches a whiff of something distinctly Undercity. Probably whatever’s sluggishly cycling through the fountain’s rusted pipes. “My mother let me come with her this time, but I—” Jayce thinks about telling the complete truth, but he internally winces at how that would sound to someone he doesn’t know. To someone he weirdly finds himself wanting to impress. “—got separated from her.”
“Hm.” The boy doesn’t seem particularly moved by this, but he does gently nudge Jayce with the end of his cane, a silent prompt to make room. Jayce complies, and the boy plops down next to him. “What’s the business?”
Jayce peers uncertainly in his direction. “We make tools.” He pauses, then sits up straighter. Jayce puffs his chest out, just a little. “Invent tools.”
This, finally, appears to capture the boy’s attention. His amber eyes light up in wonder, and— whether intentional or not—his surge of excitement has him nearly pressed up against Jayce as he begins bombarding him with questions and ideas and suggestions for improvements as if he’s intimately familiar with the world of toolmaking, speaking not like the few investors Jayce has eavesdropped on at home, but rather like his father had before he’d passed.
Passion, is the word that comes to Jayce’s mind. He almost entirely forgets his current predicament, so helplessly enraptured by it. Because admittedly, he had never imagined someone from Zaun might share his interests—to a similar degree, anyway.
Neither of them realize how much time has passed until Jayce is being swept up by a distressed Ximena, a vaguely irritated enforcer at her side. Jayce’s face immediately blossoms a fiery red in embarrassment, particularly as his mother tears into him for not listening, though mercifully in a language he assumes—hopes—his new friend can’t understand. Only, when Jayce chances a glance back at the fountain, said new friend isn’t there.
Instead, he’s being roughly handled by another enforcer that had seemingly materialized, kept just out of reach of the cane left propped up against the fountain’s basin. The boy strains to reach for it, and the enforcer only continues to yank him backwards, spitting accusations that are decidedly untrue.
“Hey, let go of him!” Jayce wriggles out of his mother’s hold for the second time that day, rushing to pry the enforcer off his friend. It’d be no use, of course, but he could try. “He didn’t do anything!”
The boy uses the momentary distraction as an opportunity to turn and bite down on the sliver of exposed flesh between the enforcer’s glove and coat sleeve, stumbling forward as he’s let go, finally able to retrieve his cane. Unthinking, Jayce moves to put himself between his friend and the enforcer when he sees the officer take a step toward the boy, likely intending to grab him again.
“Jayce!” His mother exclaims, but, yet again, he doesn’t listen.
“We were only talking,” Jayce informs the enforcer with every bit of courage he can muster, which really isn’t much at all. “You can’t treat him like that!”
The enforcer sneers at him, leaning close. “You don’t get to decide that, kid.”
Jayce lifts his chin, defiant. Then there’s that thunk-shuffle-step again, soon followed by a hand on his shoulder, thin fingers applying featherlight pressure as if to say don’t bother. When Jayce doesn’t back down, those fingers dig in further, firmer: stop.
He doesn’t get the opportunity to continue standing his ground, anyway, as his mother is sooner taking his arm and coaxing him to step aside—only to replace him instead, calmer, closer to the enforcer’s eye-level. She utters something too low for Jayce to catch, but it’s enough for the enforcer to go pale and withdraw, though not without one last withering look at the boy before slinking away, back to patrol duties.
Jayce turns back to his friend one last time—for at least the next little while, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he says, even though he’s hardly to blame. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened had he listened to his mother, or hadn’t ever engaged in conversation in the first place. But the boy looks irritated more than he does upset, so Jayce gets the awful feeling that this sort of thing might’ve happened regardless.
The boy shrugs. He grabs a fistful of his patchwork shirt and hikes it up his shoulder where it had been tugged astray by the enforcer. “You tried to help,” he says.
“I—” Jayce pauses, glancing back at his mother. While he’s almost certain he’ll receive another earful once they’re home, at the moment she appears content to linger, if it means Jayce is making friends. She gently nudges him, encouraging. Jayce turns back around. “I’m Jayce, by the way. Jayce Talis.”
“Viktor.”
A toothy smile splits Jayce’s face. He likes that name. Viktor.
He would remember it for years to come.
“It was nice meeting you, Viktor,” Jayce tells him, so terribly earnest. Viktor had helped tremendously in transforming Jayce’s unfortunate—although temporary—situation into something pleasant. Into something Jayce would hold onto. “I hope we can invent something together one day.”
Viktor nods, despite the doubtful expression he wears. Jayce doesn’t blame him—they’re basically from different worlds, after all—but so long as he can help it, Jayce knows they’ll see each other again. He isn’t entirely sure how he knows, just yet, but he does.
And that’s good enough for a son of the House of Talis.
Waving goodbye as Ximena leads Jayce away doesn’t feel like much of a farewell.
He and Viktor would cross paths again.