Archive of Our Own

He’s always liked bread.

Sometimes, before his parents died, he remembered sneaking out early in the morning, early enough there were still troublemakers and drunks stumbling around through the alleys and main streets of the Undercity who hadn't passed out yet. He never told his parents about these trips, where he learned to dodge and hide in shadows, holding his breath so quiet quiet quiet that the predatory-hungry eyes of gang members skipped over him like he was never there at all. It took a few trips to learn how to duck his head just right so the light wouldn’t hit his white braids and give off his location like a beacon, and he’d learned really quick how to dance out of reach of long arms and slide through holes no one that wasn’t under a decade old could fit into.

He would tiptoe and crawl his way onto the main streets, learning to dodge loose cobble and questionable puddles without his parents there to steer him clear for him, and press his nose up to the windows of the bakeries and pastry shops that began to bake at this time.

Even with the knowledge that he’d passed by a dozen-odd people to make it there, it still felt like he and the bakers were the only people awake in the entire world when he watched the lights flick on inside, employees donning their well-worn aprons and getting ingredients out and preheating ovens. The window of one bakery in particular had a permanent smudge near the bottom of the glass from how often he pressed his fingers onto the cold surface to watch.

He can’t remember now where that one bakery was, but he knew generally what his morning trips there were like. He had to go up a few flights of stairs to reach it (he remembers this because his heart would be pounding and his back would be sweaty even in the winter months) and whenever he arrived his skirt, no matter how careful he tried to be, would have dirt and mud smudged at the ends of it, and smell like stagnant water.

The bakery stood out to him because it had his last name on it, in big lettering with “BAKERY” tacked on at the end. Last names weren’t used much in the Undercity, unlike Piltover where a last name meant status, meant wealth, meant class and riches and privilege and strength.

In the Undercity, you had to prove your merit on your own, or so his mom used to say. He only knows his last name from angry full-naming by his mother whenever he got the house too dirty. But he was smart, and could already spell really good even at age six, so when he saw a bakery with his last name on it, it felt a little bit like fate.

His last name was common, of course, most Undercity names are shared with a hundred other families that you probably aren’t even related to. So he thought nothing of it whenever he stood at the window in the mornings and watched the solitary baker start baking, kneading out dough and adding ingredients that he was too young to know the name of yet.

Then one day, he made his morning trek to the bakery, skirt as ripped and muddy from the trek over as always, when he stood on his tippy toes to press his nose against the glass and was met with two dark eyes staring right back.

He’d squeaked in surprise and tripped back, falling flat on his ass as he stared up at the baker staring back at him.

A moment of silence trickled slowly between the two, thick like molasses, before he scampered up and began to bolt back down the way he came.

He threw himself back inside his house, heart pounding harder than that time he lost a shoe escaping a drunk thug the month prior, and slid down the wall, huffing and puffing like he was going to blow the whole house away. Adrenaline was coursing through him, and he felt like a livewire, electric, sparking.

None of the other bakers ever noticed him before. Shadows became a blanket, draped over him, hiding him, covering him. He’s never been seen before. This was dangerous.

He was scared of being seen.

But he’d been seen, and it didn’t hurt. So what was he still scared of?

…

He went back to the bakery the next day, tiptoeing the entire way as if that’d make his approach any sneakier than last time.

The chipped blue oak of the wooden window sill brushed the top of his head as he took a deep breath in, trying to calm the unsteady jackrabbiting of his heart, before slowly lifting his head to peer into the bakery.

Empty.

Chapped lips twitched into a small confused frown, and he looked closer into the store, squinting his eyes at the light reflecting off the glass from one of the blinking streetlamps on the corner. Still empty. He dropped back down with a sigh, and glanced up at the street - meeting two familiar brown eyes piercing his own.

He recoiled with a shriek, falling once again onto his ass, skirt (which had remained surprisingly clean and unripped during his extra-careful sneaking this time) now covered in dirt and mud. Again. His mother was convinced he was doing this on purpose, but it’s not his fault she keeps buying skirts that are so easy to tear up.

The face attached to those piercing brown eyes began to laugh, dark brown face glowing softly with the waxy yellow light from the streetlamp.

“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” is what he said after he calmed his laugh down, producing a hand to help him up. He had scooted away shyly at first, Stranger Danger warnings blaring like a Grey leak siren in his head, but the stranger just kept his hand out with a soft look on his face, patient. Patient like his dad always was when he scraped his knees or fought some of the neighborhood kids, gentle voice, gentle face, gentle hands. He took the stranger’s gentle hand and let himself get dragged up.

“Where’s your parents, kid?” the stranger asked, and he’d looked away with shame curling like smoke on his tongue, so the stranger just sighed and opened the door to the bakery. There was a bell connected to the door, which he had never known despite having seen the outside of the bakery dozens of times over, and it jingled sweetly as the stranger entered the bakery. “Wait here.”

He only had a second or two of silence before the stranger was back, offering a small loaf of bread. He was never one to turn down free food, especially if it was bread, so he accepted the loaf with no questions and immediately took a small bite.

“What’s your name, kid?”

He just stared at him in silence for a moment, before pointing at the bakery’s sign. The stranger glanced up at it, then back down at him. “That your last name?” He nods. “What’s your first?” He shrugs.

“What, you don’t know it?” The words curled playfully when he said them, the way his dad’s handwriting swooshed playfully when it was his turn to teach him while mom worked. He relaxed even further, even as he rolled his eyes.

“I know my name, sir. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” the stranger agrees, lips twitching. “... So? What is it?”

“I don’t like it,” he muttered, mouth full of bread and shame. The stranger blinked, then lowered himself to a squat so they could be around the same height.

“Don’t like it?”

“It’s too girly,” he admitted. His heart fluttered like a moth in a hurricane, dangerously. He had never admitted that to anyone before. His parents loved his name, called it with love and joy and pride whenever they saw him, so he felt guilty that he had never liked it. It never sat right, like the skirts his mom bought, or the makeup his mom teased him about wearing one day when he was old enough. It felt constricting. Bad. Girly .

“Too girly, hm?” The stranger rocked back on his feet a bit, looking up above at where a small patch of firelights circled in lazy circles. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: my name used to be too girly, too.”

“Really?” he gasped. This was his first time hearing anyone else with a similar experience to him. No one else has ever talked about ill-fitting names before. He always felt alone. “What was it?”

“Ah-ah,” the stranger winked. “I’m not telling. You can have my new name, though. Pete.”

“Pete?” He wrinkled his nose. That was a boring new name to have. If it was up to him, he would’ve chosen something cooler, like Ring, or Reverb. Pete was just so… boring, even if it wasn’t girly.

“You can guess my old name if you want to, though, it was a bit more interesting,” Pete said, seeming to have sensed his disappointment. He looked up with wide eyes, tearing another bite of bread with his teeth. “Here’s a hint: it was long,”

“Long,” he repeated.

“And we already said girly,”

“Girly.”

“And sounded more like a princess from a fairy tale than an actual human name.”

“Fairy tale princess,” he repeated again.

“Is there an echo in here?” Pete asked dryly, lips twitching in amusement again. He just scowled at Pete and put on his thinking cap.

“One guess,” Pete said. He eyed the stranger for a long while, letting his brain chug chug chug until it spat out an answer that sounded about right.

“Did your name used to be Cinderella?”

Pete laughed until he cried and told him no, actually, his name was never Cinderella and to just stick with Pete.

By the time he finished eating his bread, it was his normal time to head home before his parents could wake and find him missing, so he said goodbye to Pete and stole off into the night. Pete had just waved him off and told him to come back anytime for more free bread, which he took him up on the following morning.

This became his new routine. After the first week, he began coming inside to sit on a counter and watch Pete make his bread up close, no longer separated by a pane of glass as he prepped and kneaded dough, measured ingredients, preheated the oven. Pete even let him help sometimes, “as payment for the bread,” or so he said. He didn’t mind. He liked the feel of dough, kneading it longer than was probably necessary just to feel the texture move under his fingers. It felt good in a way that scratched an itch in his brain he didn’t even know he’d had until then.

He also began to learn a bit more about Pete. He wasn’t always in the mood to talk, sometimes entering his “episodes” (what his father would call them) where the thought of speaking made him so overwhelmed he felt like crying and hitting and peeling his skin off instead, so Pete would fill the silence whenever he asked.

Pete used to have a sister. She wasn’t dead, he said, but they’d had a falling out, eight or so years back, when she fell for a man from Piltover who only came around the Undercity for a cheap thrill at being somewhere “dangerous” for a while. Pete hated Pilties, couldn’t stand the sight of them, disgusted by their very existence, and refused to talk to his sister until she came to reason and broke it off with him.

“She said he was different,” Pete sighed. He was mixing a bowl for way too long, staring distantly into the mixture. “She said he was going to move down here with her, and that he understood it all now, learned from dating her what it’s really like.” He shook his head and closed his eyes. He’d never seen Pete cry before, but a tear gathered and slipped and spilled down his cheek and into the bowl. He didn’t say anything. “I never spoke to her again after that. She moved away, never told me her address, cut me off completely. Last I heard, he was planning on taking her last name, but… well, I don’t know anything about that. Don’t know anything about her anymore. I wish…” Pete sighed and set the bowl down. “I wish I had… done better. Kept in touch. I have regrets, Echo, I really do.”

Echo. It was their inside joke, after he refused to give Pete his first name. He liked to echo words he heard that, sometimes, rolling them over on his tongue like sweets, bending his mouth to over enunciate sometimes, liking the way that r’s rolled his throat or s’s dripped from his mouth like honey. It was… nice. The name.

“I still love her. She’s my baby sister, of course I do, but…” he rubbed a hand down his face with a sigh. “If I knew where she was now, I’d beg for forgiveness. You got any siblings, Echo?” He shook his head. “You might have some one day. You’d be a great big sister.” He made a face at that, and Pete laughed. Tension melted from his shoulders, ice in the sun, and he poked him in the face. “Don’t make a face! That may sound gross or annoying, but having younger siblings… it’s a special kind of magic. You really love them. It’s a whole thing.”

And things proceeded on as normal before he had to sneak back home, waving Pete goodbye over his shoulders.

But here’s the thing. He’s not stupid. He thought about what Pete said the entire way back home, dissecting each bit of it piece by piece. He and Pete shared a last name. That wasn’t uncommon, he knew four unrelated families just on his street that had the same family name weighing down their birth certificates, but he couldn’t help but think about Pete’s sister. And… his own mother. His father never spoke about his past at all, and he thought over his dad’s big swoopy fancy handwriting, so different from his mom’s and his own barely passable scrawls, and the way his dad would clam up whenever his mom would go on about Piltover, and the way his parents would sometimes make eye contact with each other whenever he asked questions about Piltover life that neither of them would know before being told to ask again when he was older…

The chances were slim. Really slim. But it wouldn’t hurt to ask. He’d have to give up the goose and let them know he snuck out every early morning, of course, but if it reunited them with maybe-Uncle Pete, then… it’d be worth it. He’s willing to sacrifice his morning trips to gain an uncle who calls him nicknames, who feeds him bread, who lets him help bake, who taps him on the nose with baking powder and laughs when he smears it across his face trying to get it off.

It’d be worth it. So he climbs into the attic from the hole in the roof he sneaks out of, sneaks down the hall past his parents room into his bed, and resolves to ask them about Pete when he wakes up in a few hours that night when his mom came home from work before he went to bed again.

He never got to ask his parents about Pete, though.

The powder keg city finally exploded that night, and he would never get the chance to ask about Pete again.

—

His parents were dead, and he was living with Benzo now. He knew his parents, or something.

Benzo was nice enough, but he still hated the fact he wasn’t his mom. He wasn’t his dad. He would run away at least once a week, that first month, always found within the hour by the man buried somewhere in his old house. Usually in his parents' old room. It had been emptied out of most things, friends of his parents swooping in and taking what mementos they can of his parents, harvesting the remaining organs of the house even after the hearts were long-dead.

He hated it. He hated how Benzo was able to find him every time, how gentle he was, eyes full of pity. He felt like he was swimming in pity, drowning in it. He was so angry, so frustrated, so…

Sad. It was sadness. It was grief. His dad would never show him how to spell his name in cursive, he’d never hold his mother’s hand when shopping anymore, he’d never have to hear his full name whenever he was in trouble. Benzo called him “Little Lady,” even when he was in trouble, and he hated it, but he hated it less than his stupid girly name that his parents lovingly gave him, and he felt sick and sad and tired and…

The last time he ran away, he didn’t go to his old house.

He went to Pete.

But Pete wasn’t there, either. Muscle memory drove him to the bakery, and he didn’t remember the trip there but he remembered stumbling up the last stair and seeing the building that he’d spent every day watching bread rise and learning how much yeast to put in a sourdough starter and talking with Pete about terrible girly first names being boarded up. The sign was gone. The bakery items in the window were gone. Pete was… gone. He’d died in that fight, too.

He went back to Benzo’s house, crawled into bed, and cried himself to sleep that night. He stopped running away after that.

Benzo was kind, if awkward, and he hated talking about feelings, but always made him feel like he could talk about them with Benzo if he wanted to, of course. Benzo would always listen.

—

He didn’t swear skirts anymore. After three were destroyed in three days, Benzo just gave up and bought him nothing but pants and shorts. He hated that. He wanted his mother to be there, sewing up his tears with steady efficient hands while admonishing him about being more careful when climbing, or to stop messing around with gadgets and gizmos he finds in old pawn shops while exploring that cover him in dust and oil. But his mom wasn’t there, she’d never be there again, so he smiled when he threw out the last skirt, hands proud on his hips. His pants-covered hips.

It took another week after that for him to ask Benzo if he could get his hair short, like his, since his long braids kept getting caught in the tools around the shop. He was told he could put them up in a bun or ponytail if he wanted to keep it longer, but he’d been adamant that only an inch of hair would suffice, and Benzo could never say no to him when he got stubborn like this.

He’d grinned at himself in the mirror for hours afterwards. With the pants and the short hair, he looked almost like a boy. For the first time, he thought “ there you are” when he saw himself in the mirror.

—

It’s been years since he’s been with Benzo, and his memory of pre-Benzo times are getting hazier by the day. He’s made new friends, Vander’s kids Vi, Powder, Claggor and Mylo. He’s especially close to Powder, who lets him put short braids in her hair and talks to fill the space whenever he’s in one of his “episodes.” She’s… really nice. Um. Anyways.

It took a while before he could bring it up to Benzo. At first, he hated it because it wasn’t his name, the one his parents chose, the one with meaning that he could almost hear in their voices if he closed his eyes and pretended hard enough. Then he tried to force himself to like it, and almost tricked himself into it. It was a nickname, something cute to contrast Benzo’s “Big Man” nickname, and the way Powder called him it almost made it not suck. Almost. But he still wrinkled his nose and felt like he was doused with water every time they called him “Little Lady,” especially in front of strangers in the shop who took one look at him and decided to call him a boy until they were told otherwise. It irked him. It upset him. And Benzo said to tell him if anything he did upset him, even by accident, so… he had to tell him.

He was just… scared to. In case it messed something up between them.

He loved Benzo, and Vander, and Powder and Vi and Claggor and Mylo. He loved his life as he had it, and he was scared to do anything that would jeopardize that happiness.

But he was ten now, double digits and everything. That means he was practically a teenager, which is basically an adult, so he can talk about things with Benzo like a big boy.

“I don’t like it when you call me that,” is what he ends up blurting out after an entire day of trying to plan the perfect way to approach the topic. But then Benzo had palmed the top of his head, shaking his entire body in that familiar way of his, and he felt warmth and sunshine spark on his tongue, but then Benzo said “Good night, Little Lady,” and the warmth sputtered out and he couldn’t stop himself from speaking.

Benzo reeled back a little, blinking some, before looking a bit hurt. “Ah, sorry,” he chuffed. He was always a little awkward when it came to feelings, but he loved him, and he’d bear through this conversation for as long as he wanted to have it.

“It’s just-” he sputtered, like a dying light, before the spark caught and he could continue his train of thought- “I’m not.”

“Not little?” Benzo raised an eyebrow all the way down at him, several feet between the two of them in height, which, rude , but so not the point right now.

“A lady.” He let that sit for a moment before continuing. “I’m not a lady. Or, um, I don’t think I’m a girl, either, at all. So…” Benzo stared at him for a moment, so he cleared his voice and glanced away from his face. He never knew how to read it correctly anyways. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know why he was apologizing.

“Why are you apologizing?” Benzo asked, and he looked back up at him. He had a furrowed brow, but the kindness in his eyes remained, and he smiled at him. Gentle. Gentle. “Little Man , is it, then?” and he couldn’t help the way his eyes began to leak.

After the hug and the talk and discussions about a change in wardrobe (not that there was much need for a change anyways, since Benzo let him choose all of his clothes now anyways, so it’s really just a matter of tossing out any shirts that were too girly), Benzo picked him up and lifted him off the floor, and he laughed when he was spun, room tilting and turning like a ride at one of the shady moving carnivals Benzo never let him attend because they were borderline death traps.

“So, you got a new name, then?” Benzo asked.

“New name?” He blinked up at Benzo. He hadn’t thought that far ahead yet.

“Is there an echo in here?” Benzo chuckled, and he couldn’t breathe for a minute.

Is there an echo in here? he heard bouncing back and forth within his skull. It’s been so long, he’s almost forgotten the sound of Pete’s voice, but that sentence, the familiar cadence, tilt, handwriting-swoop-playfullness filling out its edges, he would never forget. He felt tense, and relaxed, and happy, and scared, and a million emotions at once.

Is there an echo in here?

Is there an echo in here?

Yes.

“Ekko.”

There’s an Ekko in here.