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Every Thursday there is a garbage collection from Piltover to the abandoned area of Zaun, where there were mines, rich in everything – crystals, coal, salt, and methane. After the mines closed, the Piltover authorities decided to do something more useful with the land – fertilize it with their dirt and waste. What topsiders call “dirt and waste” at the bottom was treated like a gift straight from heaven. Every Thursday is like a birthday, a festival, or the day of the winter solstice. Discarded objects are thoroughly vivisected – in the pocket of an old coat, you can find a rolled-up, forgotten banknote or candy. A mute music box and a watch in their mechanical bodies hide elements that sometimes fetch a high price on the market (but more importantly, thanks to the transplantation of their organs, steamships sail and wind-up frogs jump).
That Thursday, Viktor found a mannequin there. It was the color of bone, and had an elegant, genderless silhouette and an exquisitely carved face. A beautiful, large doll, with a blank stare. Its arms could be bent in any direction and made a thoughtful sage propping himself up with his hand or a coward covering his eyes. In the process, it creaked a bit and stuttered. It was naked and dirty, floating among stale bread, broken bottles, and shoes with the soles peeled off, with an indifferent face. An apple peel covered with fruit flies stuck to his eye.
Perhaps it once stood in the windows of perfumed stores in fancy clothes, draped in jewelry whose shine weighed down on his eyelids. Now it was old, the paint had begun to splash or come off in patches. Its fingers were darkened, from some dirt that had eaten into the paint and was impossible to clean. It probably felt resentful that it had ended up in some Undercity landfill after its vitrine career – but Viktor was happy to take it in. So far, no cog, bolt, or spring has complained.
Viktor dragged it into the room where he lived with his grandmother until recently. For now, he doesn't live on the street, which is inevitable, but he also can't be happy about sleeping here all alone. There’s no comfort in “the air in this neighborhood is rather good quality”, since his grandmother died anyway, turning into a half-woman, half-gray scab. In her last days, her eyes were melting in tears and her mouth didn’t utter a word, only wheezing breathing. He didn't bury his fungus grandmother (Hedvika, her name can't be forgotten) because her body was taken by a veterinarian from a neighborhood, who took it as his goal to invent a cure for diseases caused by gray. He said farewell to her by joining their foreheads, gently (you are bumping me, you little goat, be careful, she said). The last thing the boy saw and heard was the clank and blink of an entire set of blades. She wasn't even his family by blood – she was just old and had always been there for him, so the role of grandmother clung to her naturally.
Exhausted and pleased, he looked at his Thursday prey. He could pour everything into it, every word, name, and story, because there was nothing in it except that it was a perfect shell of a human. The mannequin was devoid of any qualities, even the color of his eyes. This wasn't a problem; Viktor doesn't know what eye colors the people he loves have. His grandmother's eyes were enveloped in cataracts, and he never saw his parents. Rio's big black eyes reflected the world she was looking at, and Viktor didn't like that world at all.
He imagined that his father was a sailor or better: the captain of a pirate ship: he had a mustache, a fiery gaze and a wooden leg. He could easily lift his son with one hand and his wife with the other. His mother had a triple life: she was a prima ballerina and spun in pirouettes for so long that her child was born with one leg weaker than the other; she was a mermaid for whom every step on earth was as if she were walking on broken glass; she was a woman from the Upper City, as delicate as a sea breeze, who was never meant to live in Zaun.
Were they alive or dead? Where are they and why not with him? The grandmother changed her version of the story once in a while – her memory was fading, so Viktor never held a grudge against her about it. He was also tired of getting angry about her treating him like a child, so he kept quiet and absorbed all the tales about his parents that she told him.
All these questions kept him awake at night, although it was really nothing special, having no one and knowing nothing. He could count on the fingers of both hands who in his neighborhood has a full family – the rest of the children and houses with cavities did not fit on the fingers of both hands and feet.
One thing he knew for sure – the fact that he exists is proof that someone wanted him to be born. He is sure of this because he knows where go people who truly don't want a child. And here he was. Someone once loved him, and someone will someday come for him, pull him aboard a ship, and say: you are our child, how could we never come back for you? Then, all he will see is the boundless sea and sky, reflecting in themselves, while Runeterra, Piltover, and Zaun will fade from the horizon. They will sail the seas and oceans and visit islands where star fruit with turquoise flesh grows.
His mannequin was named “mother and father”, and his arms (once the moving parts were tightened and cleaned) embraced him and sealed off the whole world for him: they held the books he read in the evening, they courteously held up his cane or the parts needed for the next models. His father laughed at his jokes, his mother stroked his hair and asked how his day was going. Her hand was as warm as his own if he held it long enough. The mannequin's legs were long and straight, and its knees were narrow and graceful, without any cramps or thickenings – it stood straight and proud. Its skeleton was made of fragile styrofoam, which is why he didn't want to show it to other children, who would chop off its arm or head for fun. Only through gentleness and kindness can creatures like this one survive.
A few years ago, he saw a man with a half-rotten face who stood in one place and was afraid to take even a step. He was convinced that his body was made of glass and would shatter if he moved. He died quickly, but Viktor still remembered how people brought him food, drink and pillows, hiding him when the wind was blowing or when it rained. The man was afraid that the touch would crush his body, but he was afraid to move, so he only screamed and cried. In the process, they cursed him, the gray, enforcers and Piltover, but it is irrelevant. This made him unable to hate Zaun, with all its flaws, holes, and toxins. Through the cracks in the sidewalk or foundations, dandelions and tufts of grass poked through in the spring with grim determination, year after year. Someday it would be a better place.
In the winter, he would hang pieces of lard on the mannequin's fingers, which the tits would peck at. Recently, Singed told him that when these birds don't get enough protein, they start gnawing the brains out of other birds. This knowledge stunned him to the core, so he preferred to eat less than to go through life with the knowledge that he had contributed to bird cannibalism. Observing with envy their yellow bellies, green and cerulean feathers, he decided that in the spring he would make a model of a walking tit with folding wings. He imagined his parents listening carefully to his ideas and eagerly nodding at them.
Spring came: the web of streets, bridges, and pipes melted from the late snow and began to bloom with rust, steel and moss green. In the mother-father object's hands folded as if to draw water, tit made a nest, into which Viktor's hair and a thread from his pillow were undoubtedly woven. As he peeped at the nestlings hatching from the eggs, and then the mother tits feeding them, he felt something burst in his chest, something that flooded him with icy bitterness and that strange sense of injustice telling him that the tits basking under their mother's belly had taken away his parents and everything that they could give him.
After a while, the birds flew elsewhere, the trills quieted, the nest became empty. Viktor never dreamed of having wings; besides, they would have to be big and heavy to carry him (unlike the tits, he didn't have hollow bones), and he would have to have plenty of steam in his arms to flap them. However, he wanted to create shoes that would allow him to walk long distances in a few steps. The kind that would allow him to jump high enough to hang onto clouds. To his loud speculations and calculations about springs and drive trains, the mannequin remained persistently silent.
Rio was silent, as well, occasionally only squawking in contentment or pain, but otherwise, she was a quiet creature. When she no longer had time to play mischief, eat, or was bored with being a test subject, she curled up like a young fern leaf and took a nap. Then, when the professionalism of a researcher evaporated from him, Viktor would sneak up on her torso and snuggle into the warm mucosity of her body. Through her tissue paper-thin skin, the insides could be seen; the intestines, the lungs, the heart. Rio's heart, even calm, was beating unevenly and hard, with strain.
Singed, noticing how he listened to the work of her heart, said he would not let her pulse ever stop. He was the kindest real, living adult he had ever known. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly foolish, he hoped he would say: You are like a son to me, come live with me and let's devote ourselves to science. Singed never touched him and never allowed himself to be touched, he only watched him with the eyes of a shark and avoided him like an ice rock. Viktor enjoyed being with him, but sometimes he felt that while most adults treated him like a kid, Singed took him overly seriously, as if Viktor already had a grey beard and mustache. Sometimes he liked it, sometimes he was tired of it.
Rio accepted him as her own, even though they shared no common language or body. Perhaps she too was comforted by the closeness of his body, the tapping of his heart.
To breathe life into the silent white figure in his room, he decided to give it a heart. The mannequin's heart became the mechanism of an old cuckoo clock, which was attached to the inside of the mannequin's back and winded from the outside. Viktor covered it with the material of a thick, lonely sock to make the strikes seem naturally thudding and to prevent the mechanism from piercing the mannequin's body. Viktor cranked the clock, then put his ear to its chest and listened to the tick-tocking, counting down the seconds: he wanted the clock's heart to beat every half minute. The mechanism did not suck or pump anything but instead filled Viktor's entire room with a constant ticking.
He wondered if his parents loved or love each other. In his dream fantasies, they are always together, their hands entwined tightly like a knot, and unable to take their eyes off each other, as if they are afraid the other will disappear if one blinks.
Neighborhood kids once told him they had found his parents. They led him to the red-light district and showed him to a woman with a mole painted above her lip, sitting on the steps leading to a brothel. Her stilettos glistened an oily green in the neon light, and a weirdly familiar man pawed at her knees with his hands and his gaze. Viktor was sure he had seen at least ten men like him on the street: mediocre and mousey. That's your mother right there, we've found her! Come to her!, they cackled, and Viktor, blinded by tears and burning shame, accidentally pressed the end of his cane against one child's foot. They later called him a boring freak.
Viktor knew that his parents didn't have to love each other at all, although his grandmother repeated that they did – but she was also a very nice woman and nice people are big liars. Children are sometimes born by coincidence or accident, not necessarily by affection.
(And that's why his grandmother always cut his hair short, close to his skull, just for safety. Now it had grown back, and the males’ dog gaze was fixed on him, clumsily growing up boy.)
Viktor, however, wanted there to be a grain of truth in what she was saying. He wanted them to have a love like that of a fairy tale, one in which everything ends after marriage and childbirth. And although now he looks with disdain at the thick volume of Runeterra's Most Beautiful Tales (and treats the book itself as a table and chair in one), he sometimes thinks about how pleasant it would be to experience something like that. Singed's bookcase was bursting at the seams, and Viktor often looked longingly in its direction, but he was sure that no book from there was that achingly beautiful in such a bottomlessly stupid way as this one.
Viktor was sleeping with this book beside him, hoping that it will bring him good dreams, and when he wakes up he finds that those dreams have always been reality. He would not feel pain, cold, and loneliness, and he didn't have to worry, because there were adults by his side who think for him and shield him with their own bodies.
There was no such thing as night in Zaun – as a result of light pollution, there was no real darkness here, and only a hazy moon could be seen in the barren sky. Stars didn't fall here. The waters glistened with an iridescent greasy film like a peacock's feather. Goldfish did not consider the waters here their kingdom. His grandmother would buy a cake for his name day (February 22) and stick a candle in it, then ask him to think of a wish. The next February 22 will be in six months, but Viktor lit the candle every night. When it flickered up, he squeezed his eyes and enumerated all his wishes in pious concentration, before the flame went out.
He wanted to live a painless life. To help Rio. To go to school. Eat tangerines every day. Build something better than a steamship. Find a friend to help him get out of that basement into the light.
His dream friend radiates a strength that would make him feel at home in a crowd of strangers at night. He has the face of someone always looking into the sun. His eyes has the glow of a star, golden scales, and candle flame in them. Dream friend was as beautiful as a prince, as wise as a centuries-old wizard, and as benevolent as an orphan from a fairy tale. He knows his thoughts well before Viktor voices them.
His dream friend always chooses him, even if he has all the world's riches within reach, everything a person can desire, he will always grasp Viktor’s hand, even if he pushes it away. Because, in his dreams, he is someone worth being truly wanted and seen.
As the candle flame turned into a plume of smoke, Viktor sat in silence, terrified by the greed of his heart.
(His mother, when he sleeps, spins pirouettes all night, her knees – straight, tendons – stretched, joints – oiled, fingertips – reliable as iron. His father looks at him from behind a curtain, a cupboard, giggles under the bed, and calls him a “little land rat.” His grandmother serves science by day, while at night she tells him about the finger-sized girl or the magician who lives on the moon.
He waits for the one who descends into the crack of Runeterra to save him. Viktor likes to think that someone wouldn't want him to be taken from there: so his dream man struggles – he's bruised, dirty, burned by chemtech, his knuckles are scraped to the blood. But in every scenario, even the worst, he comes to Viktor. He climbs to the top of the inverted tower that is his room and says: I'll save you, Viktor. Boy smaller than a finger, I'll take you to the moon, I'll show you magic).
Of course, he didn't show up. Viktor is reconciled with this; he should not set traps and snares for himself in the form of dreams, expectations, and belief in the power of wishes.
Viktor left his window slightly open every night. When a butterfly sit on his windowsill, he considered whether, if he were to catch it and send it a kiss, would it then turn into the one he has been waiting for.