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Viktor felt grateful that no one had said his name in weeks. It felt stupid now, like a joke was being played on him.

His mother had chosen it—Viktor, "the winner,"—when he was born purple and gasping, his spine already warping, shifting his little pelvis and crooking his thin leg inwards. My champion , his father told him she whispered, pressing her cracked lips to his forehead. Her little miracle.

He had won, hadn’t he? Outlived the bleeding womb, the feverish nights, the healers who’d hissed he’d been not worth the medicine . Lived on even now that his mother was gone. And Iveta, too, the baby sister he’d waited 9 months to meet—tiny and stillborn, curled like a comma in the blood-soaked sheets. A half clause where a life should’ve continued on from.

Now, hunched over a knife and a half-rotten potato, he wondered if he had instead been a curse. He carved the sprouts out and pulled the grater out of the cupboard.

It wasn’t the first time Viktor had thought so, despite his parents trying their best to pacify his worries. He felt his mother’s calloused hands tremble from overuse as she combed his hair, watched his father cough blood into the bathroom sink, lungs protesting against the smog of the mines. He wasn’t oblivious to how hard they worked, extra hard even, to provide for him. Viktor seemed to be always sick, always needing something, and though they never said it, the toll it took on his parents was clear. 

Was it my fault, in a way? Was it his fault that his mother had to work deep into her pregnancy to afford medicine for him? His fault that he couldn’t walk far enough to reach the markets and contribute to the family too? Was it Viktor’s fault that he had been born first and born wrong and changed his mother’s body forever?

The grater slipped. A slice of skin peeled back from his thumb. He watched the blood well up lazily, not registering the pain of it quite yet, and thought of the last time he looked at his mother. His hand was smeared with blood then too, as he gripped her palm as firmly as his frail wrist could manage. There was a lot of blood, Viktor thought. There must have been. But he was struggling to remember it. He thinks he might not have looked, couldn’t really conceptualise the thought of looking away from his mamka’s face at that moment. He thinks he wasn’t quite sure how much blood was normal for a birth. She was pale, paler than usual even, her thick eyebrows pulled together so tightly that the crease between them looked as deep as a cut. Her eyes were squeezed shut for most of it, but they flashed open right at the end; burnt persimmon.

She looked at his father and their neighbour, the nurse, between her legs and Viktor didn’t follow her gaze. He had been staring at the thick mole on the swell of her cheek, plotting on pressing a kiss there after it was all over, before he’d plant one on his new sister's head. He’d been mentally preparing himself for how gross the texture of that would be all week. Were babies slimy? That made the most sense to Viktor, and it made him a little queasy, but he wanted to push through it, for her. Then his mother started shaking her head—frantically, Viktor realised —even though her movements were sluggish and sloppy. Fresh tears flooded her cheeks and she was begging, praying, crying, and then she looked right at Viktor again. 

Outside, Zaun groaned. A pipe burst somewhere, vomiting rust into the alley, startling Viktor out of his memory. He wiped his bloody hand on his shirt and shoved the shredded potatoes aside so forcefully that he knocked the pot off the bench. 

Winner , he thought bitterly. A joke indeed.

The kitchen was cold enough that Viktor could see his breath when he sighed. Maybe if his name was a more apt descriptor he wouldn’t have to shakily drop to each knee one at a time, grip tight on the edge of the bench, before dropping back onto his butt heavily to pick the pot off the floor, then reach up high above his head to shove it back to its place and then scramble up to standing again. He hated how out of breath he got doing small things like that. Viktor watched his breath for a few beats before continuing the recipe.

From memory, he’d never made this one alone before.

He hunched over the grater, swapping sides to not mix in the shredded potato with the chunk of his finger, scraping down in careful, jerking motions. The potato piled up unevenly, a much smaller heap than he’d expected. He supposed he’d cut out more sprouts than he thought. 

It needed something else. Potatoes alone wouldn’t stretch far enough, not for both him and his father. Not after weeks of Viktor practically scavenging from inside and around his own home. His father laid flat on his back in the bedroom, eyes permanently glazed over, was in no condition to help. He hobbled to the other side of the small kitchen, the floor cold against his bare toes. There wasn’t much left in the larder, but– he spotted it, wobbling gently where it was tucked against the wall: a soft, bruised persimmon. A flash of memory. He swallowed thickly.

Viktor reached for the fruit, standing on the tips of his good foot to snatch it down from where it sat. His ribs pressed painfully against the edge of the lower shelf, but he gritted his teeth and ignored it. There was no one else to get it for him. He shoved the persimmon under his arm with his not-bleeding hand, snagging the tiny net bag of shallots he’d been saving on the way back out. The skin of the persimmon was thin and sticky under his fingers, but it would have to do. He hacked into it with a kitchen knife that felt too heavy for his wrist, cutting it into crooked slices before grating it into the same bowl as the potato, and again with the shallots. Viktor thinks his mother used onions instead, but he reasoned to himself that shallots can’t be too different from onions, right? 

The smell that rose up from the bowl was sweeter than anything he remembered — sharp and bright, almost cruel against the stale air of the house.

Viktor squeezed the grated mess in a scrap of cloth until the juices ran out, staining the water in the basin a murky gold. If his mother’s eyes were persimmon then the turbid mix of yellows in the sink were the colour of his. He shook his head to dislodge the thought from the front of his mind.

He breathed in deep, trying to prepare his body for its next grand stunt. He limped over to the chair he’d shoved against the cupboards earlier this week . It took three separate tries to haul his body onto it so he could reach the tin of flour and the shaker of salt on the top shelf. He stretched up, fingertips just barely brushing the flour. His stomach lurched as he almost lost his balance, but he caught himself against the cabinet, breathing hard. All of a sudden he was hit with the feeling that everything about this was wrong, a feeling he believed was waiting to slam into him for weeks. Viktor liked to believe he was about as capable of self-sufficiency as a twelve year old should be, even more so, but at this moment, clambering onto the back of the chair to find balance as he reached for the shelf, he felt incredibly juvenile.

Suddenly, he was too small.

Suddenly, he was too young.

Suddenly, he ached to cry for his maminka.

He blinked away the stinging in his eyes and reached again, this time catching on the tin. Viktor slumped down into the chair, gangly legs folding uncomfortably beneath him. He felt too hungry to cry , and so he started back over to the bench. 

After dusting his grated mixture with flour and salt, he reached into the egg basket without looking, feeling around with his hand when it met nothing initially until he grabbed the last egg left. 

The egg cracked unevenly, yolk dribbling over his fingers. He grimaced and picked out the pieces of shell with slow, shaking hands, then stirred the mixture together in the bowl with the wooden spoon his father had carved before Viktor himself was even born. Then he heated the pan that had been on the stove all week another time, watching the oil shimmer and pop as he poured it in, before dropping small spoonfuls of his pitiful mixture into it.

The latkes sizzled as they were born, edges curling up and crisping, the kitchen filling with the rich, warm smell of frying potato and the faint, caramel sweetness of persimmon. Oil popped and spat onto his hand. He yelped, jerking back so quickly he almost slipped, but caught himself again, breathing fast through his nose.

Even still, Viktor hovered close to the stove, standing awkwardly on one foot to spare his twisted leg, his good ankle going numb supporting his weight. Usually his father would scold him gently for that , but the only sound in the house was the crackle of oil and Viktor’s embarrassingly heavy breathing. He flipped the latkes with a bent fork when the undersides turned golden brown. A few burned. Most didn’t.

When they were done, he lifted them onto a battered tin-plate lined with a rag to soak up the oil. The latkes sagged a little in the middle but held their shape well enough. He doubted his father would notice anyway . He stared at them for a moment, the heat flushing his face, oil stinging his cut thumb. They looked almost right, though, he didn’t have any hope he’d ever get them like his mother’s.

He lingered by the stove long after the food was done, picking at nothing, pretending there was still something to fix. Anything to stay here in the warmth of the kitchen. But he couldn't hide from it, from him , forever. His father was waiting, like he was always now, and it tore something open in Viktor just to think of it. To see him like that, small and broken where once he'd been so solid. It would be easier not to look. But easier wasn’t an option, not when his father was all he had left. Viktor shifted the plate in his hands, clumsy, like it weighed more than it should. It did. It carried all the things he didn’t know how to say anymore. Carefully, carefully, he breathed out and made himself move. He pushed open the creaky bedroom door.

Viktor set the plate down slowly, his hands still trembling from the weight of it. He had no words for the quiet dread that crept up his spine as he turned to face his father.

Once, his father had been the loudest part of this house, not quite in volume, but in spirit. Quick with a joke, quicker with a smile. Always working, always fixing something with those worn, deft hands, even after endless hours in the factory. His laughter used to rumble through the floorboards, his hands big and clumsy when he hugged but never anything but gentle. Protective to a fault. Proud, even of the smallest things Viktor did, even when Viktor didn’t see the point in pride.

He had been the kind of man who believed hard work could solve anything, the kind who loved through action; a mended chair, a home-cooked meal after a long shift, a calloused thumb brushing blood from a scraped knee.

His father’s gaze, once so quick to soften, so quick to tease, was now dull and empty. He could hardly even lift his eyes anymore.

“Táta,” Viktor coaxed, trying to make his voice sound light, steady, like it wasn’t always cracking these days. “Come on. We will eat together.”

His father was slumped against the wall, eyes glazed, breath shallow. Viktor watched him, his own stomach heavy with something that wasn’t hunger. The plate sat there. His plate. The food Viktor had made with his own hands the same way his father had once made meals for him after long days. Viktor wasn’t just cooking to survive anymore. He was cooking for the man who had once taught him survival was more than scraping by — it was about living, about finding reasons to laugh even when there weren’t any.

And now Viktor was the one nurturing him. Holding him together the way he once thought only fathers could do.

His father didn’t respond. If he thought about it, he didn’t know if his father even could. Viktor had heard of that sort of thing before, people in the neighbourhood that experienced that made them so sad that they stopped speaking forever, at least that’s how his mother explained it. He hoped that wasn’t the case with his father, he missed his voice. 

Viktor stepped closer, lowering himself down to sit on the bed beside him. He reached for his father’s arm, gingerly, as though he were afraid his touch would break him. He helped him to sit, half-carrying him with the awkward weight of someone half his size. His father’s eyes flickered but didn’t quite focus, and Viktor was almost certain his father had no idea where he was anymore. He didn’t care anymore. His mother was gone, his father leaving with her. Childishly, Viktor hoped he didn’t have a soulmate, wished he’d never be as close to someone as his parents were to each other, if losing them meant losing yourself. 

"Taťka," Viktor murmured, his heart in his throat, "Táta, please look at me."

For a moment, his father’s eyes flickered, as if something — recognition, maybe — tried to break through the haze. But it didn’t last. The silence wrapped itself around him, cold and suffocating, until Viktor took the plate again, picked up one of the latkes — golden, still steaming — and held it carefully to his father's mouth.

He waited. The food hovered in the small space between them. Viktor held his breath, watching his father's eyes.

"Just one bite. Like yesterday."

His father’s lips parted, slow and trembling. Viktor fed him gently, his motions soft and steady, the way his father had once steadied him through scraped knees and nightmares. His father’s fingers were too stiff, too numb to hold anything now, so Viktor did it for him. He shifted closer, close enough that he could feel his father’s fading warmth, desperate to anchor himself to it even as it slipped through his fingers.

He missed him. Janna knows, he missed him, even as he sat right there, breathing, alive. 

Viktor sat perched on the edge of the bed, the half-eaten plate abandoned on the floor. He twisted his hands together, the words knotting in his throat, too heavy to say but too urgent to swallow down. In a way, Viktor felt guilty. He’s sure that’s what he was feeling, though he couldn’t understand why. Something inside him was pounding that troubling his father with this would only make his father feel worse. He breathed in deeply.

“Tatínek,” he whispered. His voice sounded so small, like it was getting lost in the empty spaces of the room, bouncing back at him when it didn’t find anyone else to listen. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. His fingers twitched against the hem of his shirt. He knew how it went, knew the silence that swallowed everything in this apartment now. But still—maybe if he said it clearly enough, maybe if his father met his eyes and truly saw him. He reached one of his tiny, slender hands up to cradle his father’s jaw, trying to encourage his gaze to meet Viktor’s. He stroked over his coarse, long-overgrown beard and tried again, louder, tugging the words out like splinters from his throat. “We are… we are out of food.”

He waited. Imagined his father blinking hard, rubbing his eyes, maybe even smiling the way he used to before he started sleeping through the days. Maybe he’d stand. Maybe he’d reach for his coat. Viktor knew that was a silly thought. He held onto it anyway .

But the silence stretched on, longer than it would if a response was coming. His father's face didn’t change. His fathers eyes stayed bleary.

His fingers twisted harder, nails biting tiny, misshapen crescents into his skin . “I cannot–I cannot make it to the markets alone, you know how far they are for me. But… what else can I do?”

He looked at him with wide, pleading eyes, waiting. Waiting for an answer, for a plan, for that familiar firm voice to tell him what to do, to gather him up in his arms and carry the weight like he used to.

But there was nothing.

His father scrunched his eyebrows together, almost like he was trying to think hard, but his mouth stayed screwed shut. 

The silence sat heavier than any answer could have. Viktor looked down at his lap, swallowing around the thick ache crawling up his throat; that’s when he noticed it. His thumb, stark against the trembling white of his hand, still bled sluggishly from where he’d cut it grating potatoes. 

For a moment, he only blinked at it.

The pain, distant before, bloomed. Burning and sharp and real .

It hurt. And somehow, it wasn’t just his thumb. It was everything. He felt like he’d grated his whole body without noticing, like he’d carved at the flesh at his chest, dug in so deep that his heart was grated in chunks too.

The first sob tore free before he could stop it, a ragged sound he barely recognised as his own. He pressed his thumb into his mouth to suck up the blood, to try and take care of himself in some small way, and he felt tiny, the motion of it making him feel much, much younger. It cracked something wide open inside him. The sobs came hard and fast, his whole body folding inward as if he could somehow make himself smaller, safer, if only he could disappear inside his father’s shadow.

He cried. Not neat, quiet tears like he had been trying to shed these last few days. No, this was ugly. Loud. Sobbing so hard his chest heaved , his nose ran and his whole body convulsed. He tipped forward blindly and buried his face against his father’s sleeve, clutching fistfuls of the worn fabric, the smell of it; dust and smoke and something he tried not to recognise as his mother’s perfume, flooding his senses. He keened like he would never stop.

He wanted his mamka to kiss it better. He wanted his taťka to scoop him up and make it all okay. 

Still gasping, Viktor scrambled clumsily into his father's lap, small hands scrabbling for purchase on his father’s knees.

And something shifted beneath him.

An arm, stiff and trembling, hooked under Viktor's knees. Like muscle memory, like instinct. His father rocked him, a broken, jerky motion, but he rocked him, the way he used to when Viktor was just a baby. It wasn’t enough to soothe him, but it was more than he’d had all these weeks.

Viktor clung tighter, crying so hard he could barely breathe, until the sobs began to hollow themselves out into small, hiccuping gasps. His father's body was motionless under him.

His father tipped them back against the wall, sliding down until they sagged together on the mattress, Viktor a shivering bundle pressed to his ribs. He turned his face against the rough fabric of his father's shirt, buried his face against the bones under the thin fabric, rubbed with his cheek desperately for the half of a heart still locked in his father’s chest. 

"Tatínek. Please talk to me. Please. Say something. Please."

For a long moment, there was only breathing. Viktor squeezed his eyes shut. His father really was too sad to ever speak again, wasn’t he? 

And then, barely louder than his own breath, he heard it. Rough, broken.

"You look…so much like your mother."

For a second, Viktor didn’t feel anything at all.

The words floated in the air between them like ash, gray and weightless. To be like her. To look like her… It was always something he’d felt honoured to hear. Something that made him feel close to her, made him feel good. Neighbours said it. Family friends. It wasn’t his first time hearing it from his father either. But now, there was this distinct sensation in his lungs. The feeling of holding your breath underwater until the last second and not making it to the surface in time. It confused his body to feel like it was drowning in the dry, dusty room. He felt himself sinking beyond his own skin, sinking down through his father's chest, sinking past the floor.

He pressed his face harder against his father's chest, as if he could burrow inside and find a different answer hidden somewhere in the hollow spaces. 

Viktor’s hands slackened where they clutched his father’s shirt. His heart was still hammering, desperate for something, a touch, a word, a different set of words than that , but the rest of him was already going still, curling inward like the edges of the latkes.

It wasn’t just that his father didn’t see him . It was that he couldn’t . Wouldn’t be able to, without seeing her. The very essence of his mother was stitched into Viktor’s skin forever.

Some small, vital part of Viktor, the part that still believed his father could come back whole, could gather him up and make everything right, slipped out of reach quietly, and he didn’t have the strength in him to try and get it back before it drifted too far.

He stopped rubbing his cheek against his father’s ribs. He stopped pleading. He breathed.

He breathed and breathed and breathed until breathing was the only thing he was sure he could do.

And somewhere inside the silence, Viktor began to understand, in the way that a body understands a wound long before the mind catches up, that he wasn’t going to be able to fix this.

He stayed there, pressed against the rise and fall of his father's breathing, until the tremors in his body dulled into a restless, empty shiver.

Until he couldn’t tell whether he was comforting his father or clinging to a ghost.

He fumbled weakly for the spare pillows behind him, shoving them into place just so that when he pulled the blanket up and around him, it pressed them tight against his back. Like the weight of someone else’s body. Like how his mother used to sleep tucked against his frail spine.

Viktor’s eyes felt heavy, and he could barely see ahead of him under his heavy lids, but he knew what was there beside the bed, it had been there for months. The bassinet. It had taken weeks to carve, each curve sanded smooth by his father’s hands; hands that now patted weakly at his leg. Viktor had helped with the legs of the crib, or at least he thought he had, holding pieces steady while his father worked, mimicking the angle of the chisel, catching curls of wood in his palms like petals. His mother had spent evenings beside them in the plush chair his father had dragged into the small studio for her, stitching a tiny blanket from scraps of their old clothes, running her fingers over the fabric like she was already holding someone. They had spoken quietly then to her belly, all three of them, including the baby in conversation already. Viktor had imagined reading to her once she was born, teaching her the names of the gears in his machines. He’d never gotten to hear her voice, but sometimes he thought he could guess what it might have sounded like — soft, like their mother’s and his own, or even deeper and fuller like their father’s. Now the bassinet sat hollow in the corner, still listening for a breath that had never come.

He tried to imagine a sleeping baby inside it. Tried to imagine his mother humming softly against his neck, his father's laugh shaking his body.

He pretended it was doing something to comfort him. But he was much too smart and much too old for playing make-believe.

When Viktor woke, the room was dim with the light of a cloudy afternoon. 

His father was no longer beneath him.

The room was much too small for him to not see his father the second he blinked the sleep out of his eyes. He sat at the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped so tightly the knuckles had gone white. His head hung low, shoulders hunched, not with sleepiness, but something quieter. Something that was making his body curl inwards like his chest had been punched in. Something like shame.

Viktor didn’t speak. His body was stiff from the night before, from the week, from all these weeks. He only blinked and dropped his head back down to the pillow, squeezing his eyes shut tightly before letting them flutter open again. Turning his neck to stretch the crick out of it, he froze.

The bassinet was gone.

In its place, leaning against the wall, stood a cane.

It was carved from the same wood; he knew it instantly. Birch. Pale and soft-grained. The very same that once held the shape where his sister was supposed to spend her early months. His fingers twitched at the memory of its curves, the ones he’d steadied under his palms. Now those same lines had been reshaped, whittled down to something much narrower, fitted to his height. There was a slight bow underneath the handle that he didn’t know enough about wood carving to know if it was intentional or not, but he presumed it would help distribute the weight of its user. A straight handle had been fastened to the top, brushed metal, cool and clean, without any cushioning but with forged edges so intricate Viktor wondered if maybe his father had made that part in advance.

Viktor didn’t realise he was holding his breath until it felt like his head was about to pop. He exhaled like it hurt to.

He remembered all the times his father had spoken about this, in the months before, when Viktor had grown too tall for the crutches he’d had since he was seven, knees knocking awkwardly together, elbows out like wings as he struggled to balance. “I’ll make you something better,” his father had promised, with a twinkly sort of look in his eyes. “You’re getting too old and too bright for us to keep you to ourselves.”

Viktor recalled the first time he’d realised just how much desired freedom. A neighbour’s son his age, had biked past the house, yelling something to the clamor of kids behind him about a stream behind one of the factories, and Viktor had looked up from his book on the porch and felt an ache for connection so deep in his bones that it felt like every moment he stayed seated was burning him from the inside out. He’d scrambled for his crutches and moved as fast as he could to follow. In his haste, he hadn’t made it much further than the end of the street, crutches getting stuck in the dirt at separate angles and pitching him all the way over. It stung when his chin smacked down on the ground , but he didn’t feel like crying until he realised he’d lost the direction of the group of kids. He held his chin high as he struggled back up to his feet and breathed the thick air around him so deeply that he almost choked on it. 

His mother fussed over him when he made it back home, and as she dotted the speckle of blood on his chin with a cloth, Viktor met his father’s algae-green eyes over her shoulder. He looked more serious than Viktor had ever seen him, looking at Viktor like he was understanding something clearly for the first time. He nodded resolutely. 

It was time, his father had reasoned with his mother later that night, for them to find a way for Viktor to go farther than their little house with the layered rugs and carefully padded corners. Farther than the quiet streets he already knew by heart.

And Viktor had wanted that too. Independence, real and earned. He’d wanted to know what the world looked like when you weren’t holding someone’s hand the entire time. 

But now…

Now he stared at the cane.

The wood still held the warmth of its first shape. He could almost see it—his sister’s outline in the curves, her absence a ghost embedded in the grain. The quiet places where her breath might have been, the soft dents of a head never laid there. Sitting by his father while he tinkered was one of Viktor’s favourite pastimes , and so he could imagine almost exactly how he’d have looked. Though he wondered if his father had cried while shaving it down. If his hands had trembled. If every stroke of the carving knife had felt a kind of betrayal.

Viktor understood what his father was telling him without saying a word.

This cane should have been a gift for a beginning; a marker of growth, autonomy, of Viktor getting to take up space in the real world. But now it felt like a parting gift. Like an answer to the question he had asked the night before.

You will go to the market without me. You will carry your weight without my hands beneath your arms. You will begin to function as if I am already dead.

It left a bitter taste in his mouth. 

He shifted his gaze back to his father. Broad, thick shoulders rose slightly, almost so subtly that Viktor almost didn’t notice, and then shook. Not with strength. Not with the heaving sobs Viktor had become well accustomed too. Like his body was desperate to cry, but there was nothing left in it. Only the motion remained.

Then, without turning, without lifting his head, his father spoke, the second time this week. Just a whisper.

“I’m sorry.”

Viktor didn’t know what he meant exactly. Sorry for what had happened to his mother, to their family. Sorry for not taking care of him. Sorry for the cane or for the bassinet. Sorry for dying alongside his mother and sister.

He struggled into sitting, shoving off the old mattress and using the momentum to lean over the edge of the bed just enough to grasp the cane in his hand. It was colder than the room, colder than his palm. He breathed in the same way he did when he fell trying to run. He set his jaw and nodded back to the memory of his father from that day. 

Then he tightened his grip and planted the cane against the floor beside him.

It wobbled slightly; awkward in its newness, in his inexperience with supporting himself this way, but he adjusted. He’d always been good at that—adjusting, adapting, pretending his body didn’t burn the way it did. Slowly, with more will than strength, he pushed himself upright. The cane creaked faintly under his weight, as if unsure of its own purpose. Still, it held. His father was always good at building things to last.

His leg ached. His spine throbbed. His lungs burned. A thin ribbon of pain crawled from the base of his skull to the soles of his feet, tight and trembling. The air in the room felt too thin, like he was breathing through a needle. But he stood. It wasn’t graceful, but it counted.

The silence was thick, his father still hunched and unmoving. Viktor had never seen him look small. His father didn’t rise to follow. Just folded back into the quiet like he meant to become part of it. He gripped the cane until his knuckles went pale. There would be no one waiting for him at the market. No hand to steady his elbow. No one to remind him what root was cheapest this week. No one to smile when he came home.

He would go anyway. This was the choice he had decided to make. He was choosing to live. And he knew now what it looked like to choose not to. He didn’t know yet what kind of life he would forge for himself, only that he would keep stepping forward until he was satisfied. Until he found somewhere to belong. Someone to help. A purpose big enough to fill the space his family had left behind.

Maybe that was what his mother had seen when she named him. Not triumph, but tenacity. Not the victory itself, but the refusal to yield. 

The cane held, the gentle thud of it against the rug almost like a murmur of approval, and Viktor, still wobbly and uncertain, took a breath, and started for the door.