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"How long?"
"Less than a year until the facial damage is permanent. Perhaps five more before your death is a certainty." Singed delivers his prognosis with characteristic lack of emotion, not bothering to look up from his work. There is no affection lost between the two of them, but Silco's gold keeps the good doctor's lights on, and Silco's work keeps a steady stream of test subjects on Singed's table. That's enough to ensure his loyalty.
Silco's mouth thins to a grim line at the confirmation of what he'd already suspected, what he'd felt. Every day, the injection seems to lose potency, the period of relief from the trembling, from the lightheadedness, from the bone-deep cold growing shorter. "Find me something else."
Singed turns in his chair, regarding Silco with the clinical detachment of a man who has already marked a patient inoperable. "There is nothing else. You must feed. Or surrender to a starving vampire's catatonic state. A coma from which it is unlikely you will wake."
The left side of Silco's head throbs with an oncoming migraine, a shaft of pain nailing him behind his blackened eye. "Do you know what happens to orphans in Zaun?" Silco runs a shaking finger around the rim of an empty beaker, one in a row of several still waiting to be used. "Sickness and starvation claim so many. Early on, if they're lucky. If they dodge that, it's a lifetime of breaking their backs and clogging their lungs in the mines, or selling their veins in blood parlors until they have nothing left to give." He tips the beaker, watching it shatter on the hard ground below, shards of glass dotting his boots like crystals of ice. "I suggest you use every minute of this time to find a solution, doctor. For your daughter's sake."
The flood of alarm in Singed's beady eyes puts a curl of vicious satisfaction in Silco's cold chest. He turns and leaves without another word, the crunch of broken glass and Singed's eyes on his back following him out.
Back in his office, Silco sits in the dark, nursing his migraine. The painful throb has grown to a pounding behind his eye that turns every sound into a hammer and every glimmer of light into a blade. Experience has taught him there's nothing he can do but wait it out. None of Singed's glowing cocktails of mystery fluid have ever put a dent in the misery, and the sickening after effects are never worth it. How ironic to make such a realization now, as he hides in the dark suffering the after effects of Singed's crude chemical solution to his feeding problem.
Staring down a lifetime of these horrible migraines, a lifetime of cold numbness in his body, a lifetime of hunger that will spin slowly out into eternity, Silco can only blame his ambition. If he'd known how things would end up, would he have made a different choice? Even now, he can't say for sure. The power to change the world, a shortcut to bucking Piltover's boot from Zaun's back, was a tempting lure indeed. With Vander at his side, everything had seemed so possible. Like the dream they shared was at their fingertips, theirs for the taking if they would only reach out.
If he could simply drink, his pain would end. Silco swallows just to test the reflex, just to prove to himself he can. The dry clicking of his throat makes his stomach ache with hunger, as if in protest of nothing but air moving down his throat. He can swallow. Working his jaw, Silco snaps a few empty bites, the sharp click of his teeth closing on nothing sending another pulse of pain rocketing through his skull.
The reflexes are there. Nothing is wrong with him. Nothing is stopping Silco from filling his belly with fresh, hot blood, enough to drown in. So much that he can pull that warmth into himself forever and never be hungry again. He can do this. He has to.
He has to feed from someone other than Vander.
The snap of his teeth involuntarily locking together cracks through the quiet darkness of his office. His back teeth grind, muscles in his jaw standing out in sharp relief as he struggles to open his mouth. One fist slams down on the desk, splintering a chunk out of the dark wood. Harsh, panting breaths through his nose and choked off grunts of effort are the only sounds he makes for agonizing minutes as he fights instincts that do not respond to rationality, to his will.
Please, he begs in his mind, let him go. Let ME go.
But as every time before, it's no use. It's infuriating, how helpless he really is against primal, animal reflexes. Silco sits paralyzed from jaw to throat, the rebellion in his body inseparably tied to the rebellion of his heart. It's Vander, or no one. While that man walks the earth, Silco will have no other.
Surrendering again to that unshakable truth, Silco feels his jaw relax all at once, like a pressure seal suddenly popping free. He bites the air, easy as anything. The dry swallow is automatic, all his systems working just as they should. Perfectly functional. Perfectly useless.
In the dark, Silco's vision is sharp, but all the colors are washed out with shades of gray. He takes a compact out of a drawer, patting makeup around the worst of the damage marring his face. There's a broad area to cover- he doesn’t need the precision of a steady hand for this. He can almost ignore the differences between his eyes, in the dark. Though he knows one is the clear, soft green of sea glass, and one is a ring of fire in a bleak, black pool, in the dark they look the same. As long as one ignores the glow.
"Love is your weakness," he reminds himself in a dry rasp. "Everyone betrays you." Snapping the compact shut, he tosses it back in the drawer. "Everyone." If only his treacherous heart could learn that lesson. It’s the one part of him that hasn't run cold.
There's a sharp knock on his office door, one he recognizes. He doesn’t call out. Doesn't need to. Sevika makes herself known as she always has, coming into the room with her typical scowl firmly in place. If he didn't know her better by now, he'd think she had bad news. As she nears the desk, the steady beat of her heart drums faintly in his ear.
"All right?" He prompts when she doesn't speak.
Her frown deepens. "Floor's open. Business is good. Plenty of Piltie fangers down here looking for a quick drink and a bit of company. I'm about to make my rounds and check the other two parlors."
"If that's true, why do you look like someone pissed in your beer?" Silco shoots her a hard look as he hears her heart jump in her chest. "What is it."
"We need you."
"And here I am." He gestures to the office at large. "Where I was last night. Where I will be tomorrow."
"Cut the shit, you know what I mean." She plants a hand on his desk and leans in, looming in a way none but her would dare. "We need you strong. Fed." Something flashes in her eyes, some hardness wavering before her resolve locks down even tighter. "Silco, you need to kill him. You have to kill Vander."
Silco leans back in his chair, regarding Sevika with an impassive stare he knows she sees right through. For just a moment, he hates her for it. "Get out."
"What was the fucking point, Silco?" She spits the words, the rich scent of tobacco on her breath. "You traded your humanity to help the underground. For all of us. But then you bonded with Vander. I don't know what happened between you, but he won't feed you anymore. He left."
His weakness, dragged straight from his chest and into the light, held up and examined, dissected, analyzed. A blade under the ribs would be so much kinder than this. "I know what I promised." As if he could ever forget the burden of having a dream.
"And I know why fangers don't fall in love with their food. It tips the scale too far. Too much power on the wrong side."
"Enough, Sevika." Silco pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to relieve some of the pressure behind his eyes. One handed, Silco fishes an injector out of his desk and holds it out to her. Its belly gleams with viscous red fluid with a familiar purplish hue.
She takes the chem injector, tipping Silco's head to the side to bare the thick artery running up his neck. "I know it's rough, what needs to be done." Her fingers map his vein, providing a guideline for her to place the injector. This is hardly the first time she's had to do this in the dark because he couldn't stand the light. "But there’s only one way out, once a vampire bonds. It's time to free yourself."
The needle breaks skin, and the fire-acid-poison chemical feeling scours through Silco's veins as Singed's remedy floods his body. He doesn't scream. Not anymore. The pain behind his eyes intensifies as the chemicals eat away at more of him, targeting the softest flesh first. Silco dabs away the few stray chemical tears that roll down his cheek. The acrid scent makes his empty stomach knot.
As the burn fades, the chemicals do their job. His focus sharpens, the low-energy wooziness cleared away like dust from a shelf. The fine tremble in Silco's limbs finally stills as the cold numbness in his body gives way to warmth. Sevika's steady heartbeat is louder now, clearer. Almost soothing, as even in tempo as a metronome. The relief from his underfed misery is all the more precious for how quickly it will pass. Half a day, give or take, and he'll be right back here with a gnawing void in his belly and his hands shaking too badly to light his own cigar.
How much longer can he live with the very heart of him torn out and walking the streets of Zaun? Why should he have to endure another day of it? "Perhaps you're right, Sevika," Silco says, locking eyes with his second in command. The closest thing he has left to a friend. "Enough is enough."